The Director Interviews

WERNER HERZOG, BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS

2009-11-18T09:52:00.001-05:00

Forty-plus years into a still-vital, ever-proliferating filmmaking career, Werner Herzog has aged gracefully into the role of the sage adventurer, still fearlessly exploring the terrain between documentary and fiction as well as the vanishing point between charismatic eccentricity and full-blown psychosis. Born in Munich, raised in the Bavarian Alps, and lumped early on with other avatars of the New German Cinema, Herzog has ceaselessly chronicled the obsessions of dreamers and renegades both real (God’s Angry Man) and imagined (Stroszek, The Wild Blue Yonder), as well as social outcasts whose quest for ecstatic truth leads to madness, self-destruction, or sometimes, in the case of Grizzly Man’s Timothy Treadwell, both. There are those who find Herzog’s documentaries to be the apotheosis of that singular vision, and those who are partial to the fevered collaborations with Klaus Kinski, when Herzog seemed to be placing his own life at risk in order to realize impossible ambitions, just like the protagonists of his twin monuments to crazed hubris, Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God. In recent years, he has journeyed to a science colony in Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World), ringed the jungle canopy with a high-flying inventor (The White Diamond), and revisited the story of downed airman Dieter Dengler (Little Dieter Needs to Fly), this time in fiction (Rescue Dawn). Regardless of whether it makes sense to divide such effulgently individualistic output into separate genres (in this director’s cinema of extremes, we are forever on the brink of both catastrophe and revelation), one thing is certain: only Herzog is ever Herzogian.

His latest film is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a rogue-cop drama loosely based on Abel Ferrara’s 1992 crime thriller about a drug-deranged, out-of-control New York detective investigating the murder of a nun. (Herzog claims never to have seen Ferrara’s film.) In the new reimagining, Nicholas Cage plays Lieutenant Terence McDonagh, a decorated Crescent City officer who injures his back rescuing an inmate from a flooded cell in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and then spirals downward into pill-popping addiction, boisterous self-abuse, and all manner of depravity (extortion, bad gambling debts, forced fellatio). Under Herzog’s resolutely go-for-broke direction, Cage’s wild-card badge careens between feats of grotesque gutsiness and coarse-tongued slapstick. When his inner demons finally materialize as a pair of iguanas, all he can do is snicker, knowing how screwed he is. It’s a full-bodied, often hoot-worthy performance by the actor, enacted with all the ardently strange facial tics and bizarre vocal mannerisms Cage can muster, as he riffs off Val Kilmer’s blithely amoral cop and Eva Mendes’s easygoing, coke-snorting hooker. Part garish psychodrama, part cable-TV-grade policier gone horribly foul, Bad Lieutenant is one of Herzog’s cheekiest, most offbeat features in years.

Filmmaker spoke to Herzog about the appeal of shooting a modern noir in New Orleans, the viciousness of certain desert lizards, and why aspiring filmmakers should consider working in a sex club.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.

Director Werner Herzog. Courtesy of First Look Studios.

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Filmmaker: What was the challenge for you in taking on the renegade-cop genre?

Herzog: It wasn’t a big deal to take on this story, and of course there’s a sense of being in times of crisis where film noir always has fertile ground to sprout. But it’s so simple: just imagine you were a director and an opportunity arises to work with Nic Cage and to do a film in New Orleans and have Eva Mendes on board, would you say no? [Laughs] You just can’t. It’s a no-brainer.

Filmmaker: Was the idea also to be playful with this as well?

Herzog: It was inherent in the screenplay, in a way. But we emphasized it. Immediately I said to Nicholas, there has to be such a thing as “the bliss of evil.” Enjoy yourself, as vile and as debased as you get. And of course, he’s getting hilarious, but it was not as strongly there. It was some sort of color that the film gained during shooting, and many things were invented en route, like the iguanas and the dancing soul. Hilarious moments.

Filmmaker: Cage’s Terence McDonagh has the manic ferocity of some of the charismatics we’ve seen in your other films. He’s even got some of Kinski’s wild intensity, except Cage is pushing his performance into broad humor at times. What was the guiding principle for his character, or was it sui generis?

Herzog: I would say sui generis. But we should let Kinski rest in peace [laughs] and not burden him with Nic Cage or vice versa. It wouldn’t do justice to either one. They’re both phenomenal actors. You wouldn’t compare Marlon Brando with Humphrey Bogart. It doesn’t get us anywhere. What they have in common is that kind of presence and intensity on the screen. That’s about it.

Filmmaker: I was thinking about something you said to the BFI Southbank audience not long ago when you presented Encounters at the End of the World. You had just finished filming Bad Lieutenant and you said you’d taken Nicholas Cage to places he’d not been before. What did you mean by that?

Herzog: Well, I think he has a platform from where he can depart into the unknown. Nicholas has a very nice phrase for it: he says it was a “designed” role and you cannot [measure] it with a ruler, so you have to give him the liberty and the security to just go for it. I gave him the security for doing that.

Filmmaker: Your touch is definitely in evidence here, and you mentioned the iguanas, so let me ask you about those sequences. Were they a holdover from your South American adventures?

Herzog: Not at all. I saw an iguana in a tree, next to where our camera truck was parked, and it was just sitting there. I thought, man, I need an iguana for one of the next day’s scenes. Actually, [in the film] it wasn’t two iguanas—one was one of these vicious desert lizards that bite like hell! [Laughs] It jumped forward and got my thumb and gripped it like a vise of steel, and I couldn’t shake it off. But these are the pleasures of making a movie.

Filmmaker: You seem to magnetize those experiences in a way.

Herzog: No, that’s just a little arabesque in making a film. I was filming it myself. I was shooting only millimeters away from the skin of the lizard, and getting very close to the eyes only, an inch away or less, and of course, one of them didn’t feel very happy about it. It just bit like hell.

Filmmaker: I understand they have a third eye, a parietal eye.

Herzog: I don’t know, it just went after me! It was a funny moment and everybody in the crew enjoyed it.

Filmmaker: Bad Lieutenant is a little unusual in that you didn’t write the entire screenplay yourself.

Herzog: It was Billy Finkelstein’s screenplay and it still is. However, we had to modify certain elements. The film was originally written for New York City, and it starts in a subway station. New Orleans doesn’t have a subway, so I said let’s start it in a flooded prison cell right after Katrina. And things like that I invented, but I would do that with my own screenplay as well.

Filmmaker: Why was it important for you to contextualize the film in the aftermath of Katrina?

Herzog: I think that’s why it really fits extremely well: it’s a city that was destroyed by a natural disaster which was neglected by the government and where civility had collapsed. That’s the right place for doing something like the Bad Lieutenant.

Filmmaker: You’ve said many times that you’re not a big filmgoer.

Herzog: No, it’s true.

Filmmaker: Do you have any particular fascination with film noir apart from this story?

Herzog: I haven’t seen too many, maybe two or three. I remember there was one with Edward G. Robinson, but I forgot the story and the title. I’m not, for example, like Marty Scorsese, who loves to watch movies, day in and day out. It’s joyous, this kind of life. But I’ve been different in that respect.

Filmmaker: At this point in your working career, having done so many different films, all of which really bear your personal stamp, do you find yourself drawn more toward documentary or drama?

Herzog: It comes as it comes, you see. It’s like burglars in the night. I have to get them out of my home or off my shoulders. No, the next four or five projects that are pushing me already are features, however there’s one or two docs as well. I don’t worry about which form it takes. And many of my docs are feature films in disguise anyway.

Filmmaker: There’s one wacky scene in Bad Lieutenant that I really loved, which is when you cut to the assisted living facility where the nursing assistant is tending to the elderly lady. The door closes, and Cage pops out from behind it, grooming his face with an electric razor.

Herzog: Yes, that was his idea. It’s just wonderful to work with an actor like that. And the scene was scripted only halfway through it. He intimidates them until he has the information about where this young kid is, the 15-year-old boy who was a witness to the crime. But then I said to him, “I think there’s more to it. You should turn the hawk loose.” [Laughs] And man does he do it! And it’s all his own design. Today, for the first time, I heard Nic talking in a roundtable interview about designing [his role], and this is a very well-coined word to describe what he’s doing. It’s not just acting, he’s designing.

Filmmaker: And you respond to that as well.

Herzog: Yes, and I know how to embed him in a texture of supporting cast. Without Eva Mendes or the other very strong members in the cast, it would be a no man’s land.

Filmmaker: There’s certainly plenty of acting talent in this film, like Brad Dourif, who was in the The Wild Blue Yonder, and Michael Shannon, who I really admired in Shotgun Stories, and who also stars in your other new film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.

Herzog: You see with Mikey Shannon, before I started this film, I told him I would love to put the leading character of my new film on his shoulders. And in order to warm up with each other, I said “I have a small role and I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything bigger. But would you like to come for two or three days, to see how I’m working?” And he accepted the invitation. It was healthy and good to learn about each other a little bit, and then more than half a year later, we filmed My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. At that time, when we did Bad Lieutenant, he hadn’t gotten an Academy Award nomination [for Revolutionary Road]. And I was so proud when he did. A phenomenal talent.

Filmmaker: When you make a film like Rescue Dawn or Bad Lieutenant, do you ever feel like you’re beating Hollywood at its own game?

Herzog: No. I don’t have to beat anyone. I make the films that I love to do. I have nothing against Hollywood. For example, The Dark Knight, which I saw because I wanted to see how Christian Bale was doing. How dark and how intense this film was—a total, wonderful surprise, and it can’t be more mainstream. Yet it’s the film with the most substance, probably, of last year.

Filmmaker: Would you ever consider making a film specifically for an online platform, like David Lynch has decided to do recently?

Herzog: No, I think the mother of all battles will be decided in theaters, with a large audience seeing a film and giving you a ripple of laughter coming from the front row and passing through the whole house. My goal is the movie theaters. Everything beyond that is secondary.

Filmmaker: Science seems to be a prevalent theme in many of your films, like Lessons of Darkness and The White Diamond, and your expedition to Antarctica for Encounters yielded what for me is one of your most amazing legacies. Is there any technology that you fear? Is it a source of anxiety at times?

Herzog: It doesn’t really frighten me, but when you look at the explosive evolution of means of communication — cell phones and television and radio and talk shows and blogs and virtual reality and the Internet — I think it does not isolate people, but it does creates a deep existential solitude. It’s very strange because it seems like a contradiction, a paradox. I’m one who, for example, does not have a cell phone. And people find me anyway. I like real conversation among grown-up men, face to face. And I think there’s a value to it, which we cannot ever underestimate.

Filmmaker: And here we are on a phone, talking.

Herzog: Yes, but you see sometimes these instruments and tools are a technical necessity, fine. But I don’t spend my life on the Internet.

Filmmaker: I understand you’re starting a film school. Can you tell me about it?

Herzog: Oh, you have to look at it on the Internet! It’s kind of provocative and it gives everyone who actually will be admitted courage to realize their own dreams — beating bureaucracy, for example. It’s more about a very basic attitude than technical things you can learn. For that, you’d better sign up at your local film school. And of course, I give a reading list, starting with a poet of Roman antiquity, Virgil. We take it seriously. Read read read read, or travel on foot or work as a bouncer in a sex club. [Laughs] I’m doing the first weekend seminar early in January, but applications are coming in great numbers, so I have to reduce those. I study them very carefully. I have to reduce the number to a very small group.

Filmmaker: What’s your greatest unrealized dream, Werner?

Herzog: Well, the funny thing is that in a way I have realized my dreams. I wouldn’t know. Of course, there’s quite a few projects that are pushing me, but it’s not that I have somehow bypassed a great dream and then am longing to fulfill it. I’m not into this kind of life. I’ve been blessed in a way.

Filmmaker: And in terms of cinema?

Herzog: Well, I’m still plowing on, let’s face it. And I’ve done every film I’ve really wanted to do. There’s one or two exceptions, but I’ve always had a nonchalant attitude. There was one project so huge that I knew I could do it eventually if my last film made $300 million domestic box office. Then I would have enough money. But it doesn’t really matter whether out of fifty or sixty films I’ve done, one somehow is still dormant, so what.

Filmmaker: Do you see the direction cinema is headed in, at least in the U.S., as productive for the kind of communal theater experience you were talking about before?

Herzog: Well, it’s a huge question. Let’s make it very short. I’m not worried about cinema. It’s so robust and so vibrant in our culture worldwide that we shouldn’t be worried. And cinema always finds its outlets, its paths. But the theaters, as I said before, are the mother of all battles.

DAVID SIEGEL AND SCOTT MCGEHEE, UNCERTAINTY

2009-11-11T12:01:00.008-05:00

If one had only a single adjective with which to describe the body of work that directing team David Siegel and Scott McGehee have crafted over the past decade and a half, cerebral immediately jumps to mind. Since their debut film Suture (1993), an austere, black and white thriller starring Dennis Haysbert that took Toronto and Sundance by storm, they have often found it difficult to get their peculiar brand of thoughtful, idea driven filmmaking off the ground. Even if it was far from experimental hijinks of a Hollis Frampton or Kenneth Anger, the fact that the original Suture VHS and DVD boxes from MGM were packaged as "Avant-Garde Cinema" surely didn't help the film find the audience it should have.

After The Deep End (2001), a startlingly effective update of Max Ophuls' The Reckless Moment (1949) with Tilda Swinton and Bee Season (2005), a star studded adaptation of Myla Goldberg's celebrated novel, they embarked upon a series of projects that proved difficult to make a reality. In the interim they conceived and quickly made Uncertainty (2008), a film that conjoins the formalistic and genre elements of Suture and The Deep End with the familial drama of Bee Season.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins play a young New York couple who are at a loss as to how to spend their Fourth of July; should they go to her families' Brooklyn enclave, where during the course of a long holiday dinner party various secrets and disappointments may unavoidably be revealed, or should they go to Manhattan to celebrate at a friends apartment? The film allows the couple to indulge in both choices with the help of some metaphysical chicanery; They dash to opposite ends of the bridge separately, only to inexplicably meet the other upon arriving in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The film tracks both pairs of lovers as the Manhattan bound couple find themselves pulled into an elaborate thriller upon finding a phone in the back of a Manhattan cab, while a visit to Kate's family in Brooklyn slowly enmeshes us and our protagonists in the rhythms of domestic drama.

Filmmaker caught up with the directing duo, out for breakfast at a Flat Iron district bakery, to discuss the unorthodox process through which they made the film, the various pros and cons of shooting on HD and how the desire to work with (and against) genres impacts their choices.

Uncertainty opens in Manhattan and on VOD this Friday.

Director Scott McGehee, Courtesy of IFC Films

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Filmmaker: What informed the conceptual quality and look of the film? It has both a formal and a loose quality. You often use composition and color very deliberately, yet you relied on hand held shots more so than your previous films.

McGehee: I think this film more than any we’ve done since Suture started out with a broad concept. We were frustrated with the process of trying to make another film, a bigger film that had reached a dead end. We were really frustrated with the process of making films that were traditionally financed, the cast contingent, foreign money model. We were looking for something to do that we could do quickly and immediately. The whole idea of how things happen or don’t happen and why was really on our minds. We set a task for ourselves to sort of make a film about chance. We came upon the title of Uncertainty very early on and that was the mantra of the entire process of the film, how do we keep an element of Uncertainty and chance in the filmmaking itself? The dialogue was improvised through a long process of rehearsal with them. We’d written a whole script of story beats where the plot of the film was laid out, but we shaped the voices of the characters through a process with the actors.

With the camera style, it was partly a necessity driven by the style in which we were working with the actors. We knew that each take would be a little different and we needed to develop a style that would be loose enough to cut between takes that didn’t match. We also thought it would be interesting to have a different relationship with the camera and the DP.

Filmmaker: When did you settle upon the idea of having a two pronged story involving the same pair of lovers, a thriller set in Chinatown and a familial drama set in Brooklyn? What specifically about those boroughs made them the desired setting for each half of film?

Siegel: Well, the Brooklyn Bridge connections them. [Laughs]

McGehee: The Queensboro Bridge doesn’t seem quite as romantic. [Laughs]

Siegel: It’s a lot longer for Joe and Lynn to run.

McGehee: It's not as photogenic either.

Siegel: The story got built from little nuggets of ideas. Tossing a coin and running in opposite directions on the bridge was an early idea. Part of the idea of chance as Scott was saying. So the Brooklyn Bridge seemed like the obvious bridge for us because it connects what are perhaps the two most iconic boroughs of New York. So the idea of a genre story and a more neo-realist, quotidian story and how those two things might relate to each other, we didn’t go into the process of writing thinking we would know how those two stories relate to each other before making the movie. I’m not even sure after making the movie precisely how those stories relate to each other. We like that they create something else, a third thing resonate in people’s minds about the process of living.

Filmmaker: Throughout your career, the pair of you have been very attracted to the notion of genre. You’ve not so much worked within genres as on top of them. I don’t think either of the strands here function in the typical way we come to expect from the genres you’re indulging in, but the cool formalistic quality of the movie seems to tie them together. Was this a conscious attempt to get back to some of the formal rigor of Suture?

Siegel: That’s very perceptive of you. No one else has quite formulated it like that and I think it’s really true. We thought a lot about Suture when we were thinking about this. We liked the building blocks of Suture a lot when we were making it and writing it. As you were saying, we are very attracted to genre and we consider ourselves American filmmakers who appreciate the old Hollywood methods of storytelling very much. That idea of doing something that was both rigorous and free was something we were thinking about very much when we were writing it.

McGehee: I was saying how we started with the idea of chance and Uncertainty. With Suture we started out with a big, broad concept as well, the idea of identity. The story was generated from conceptual level down, in a way. That’s not a typical way to generate entertainment.

Siegel: You could just write an essay instead. [Laughs]

Director David Siegel, courtesy of IFC Films

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McGehee: Its been a rewarding process for us, to take a big idea like that, a fairly robust idea that can reach into a lot of places and just start thinking about genre, plot, ways to get at that idea from a storytelling place. In both of these films, the process of writing them was similar in that way. It’s the only two times we’ve made films that we’ve written from scratch.

Filmmaker: What is it like directing as a pair? How has it informed your films in a way that would be different if the division of labor was more distinct?

Siegel: We didn’t go to film school. I was a painter. Scott was going to be an academic. We were finishing graduate school when we started working together. It was quite a long time ago. There was no institution to say, maybe one of you should do this and one of you should do that. We were so ignorant and naïve about what filmmaking was, what the process of making movies was.

McGehee: We’re also fans of Powell and Pressberger, so we had one model to think about. [Laughs]

Siegel: So we just did everything together. Things worked out in the way that they did or things remained together in the way they are together simply because that was the process that got worked out. It’s a little bit of a miracle that its lasted this long in that we’re still best friends and yet we’re not a couple and we’re not brothers. I know it’s the luckiest thing for me because I think neither one of us would have probably chosen film. I would have become a painter, Scott would have become an academic. We were both having success at those things. Something clicked between us and that’s continued to work for us.

In terms of what might have been different had we been working individually in film, we both level of ideas with each other, which at times might be a negative thing, but we inspire each other, which is the positive side of it. We made a pact early on that we wouldn’t compromise in terms of ideas. So if one of us did not like something, we wouldn’t say, well you take this one and I’ll take that one. We’d just find another way. That’s served us very well over the years.

McGehee: I agree.

Filmmaker: What was the extensive improvisatory process like? Did it change how you went about directing the film in unforeseen ways?

McGehee: It was interesting. It was a process that really started with auditions. From the first audition on, David and I were learning about the script we wrote, learning how actors would react in certainly situations. We had never directed this way either. It was a very open thing. Actors would come into auditions and we didn’t really know how to help them get to what we needed. Some of them were really good at it and some of them weren’t. Some very good actors aren’t very good at improv, it’s a very different skill. It was kind of self selecting; some people wouldn’t show up to auditions because they got scared. The ones who did, and who were enthusiastic were the ones who were better at it generally. We didn’t end up with anybody on set who was afraid of the process or who wasn’t into it.

Filmmaker: Was it ever unnerving, working without the safety net of a text. With your previous two films, The Deep End and Bee Season, you had a pair of texts, seeing how both films are drawn from other source material…

Siegel: For us at least, filmmaker has to remain a little bit loose. Even with scripts in which we want the actors to say a very specific thing, it’s more about the emotional beat of the scene, than it is about sticking to the book, so to speak. We’ve always allowed a certain amount of freedom with the words. There were times, both of The Deep End and Bee Season, where we’d be like, “no, I want you to say this. Stop saying that.” [Laughs]

We were really lucky with Joe and Lynn, to have actors who are both as talented as they are and committed to the process through which we wanted to make the movie. They didn’t fight us in that regard. That opened up so much trust amongst the four of us. That month rehearsal period we had with Joe and Lynn was mostly spent rehearsing scenes that would never be in the movie. They were scenes from their history, to create a history for them to lean on. That was such a rewarding process for us in a way we had never experienced with actors before. It was so intimate. We would be rehearsing here, right? We’d say, lets do a scene that’s the second time you’d had coffee, after you’d had sex, right? So we’d do it a City Bakery or some other place. We got to be in their private little world in such an intimate way that over the course of a month of that, we really became our own therapy group. [Laughs]

Filmmaker: You shot much of the film on long lenses in very populated, uncontrollable New York City locations. It really comes off quite beautifully.

McGehee: It was really thrilling. We weren’t sure how it would go. Normally you lock off a street and fill it with extras that you can control. When we were shooting, we knew Joe had a bit of notoriety, we weren’t sure if he would attract attention, I think it might be different for him now after 500 Days of Summer, we may not have been so lucky…

Siegel: He’s a regular enough looking guy…

McGehee: He fits into the city, he looks like the other people in Union Square enough except for wearing a yellow T-shirt that made him stand out. New York being New York, people kind of avoided the film shoot, even when we were right there with a camera close by and it was clear what we were doing, people don’t look at the lens, people don’t gather around, it was very comfortable shooting a film right in the middle of New York.

Siegel: It was eye opening in terms of what you could pull off. That rooftop chase, had it been done by a studio, would have cost, all by itself, more than the budget of this entire movie. It was like, we can do this in this way and do something interesting for peanuts compared to what a studio would spend and it has more authenticity. So it was pretty exciting.

Filmmaker: You worked with Rain Li for the first time, Christopher Doyle’s longtime protégé. How did she add to the process of shooting the film in this fashion?

Siegel: She’s a tremendously gifted hand held operator, I’d say that’s Rain’s great skill, as it is with Chris Doyle. Her ability to work in natural light and available light, her ability to operate a camera on sticks in a fluid and open way, she’s a very good operator.

McGehee: She’s the same generation as Joe and Lynn. The camaraderie they had was nice to watch. I think that’s a really important thing. The person behind the camera is someone that the actors can relate to and trust and connect with. They had a nice relationship that way.

Filmmaker: How much of the inter cutting between the stories was in the original writing and how much did you find in the editing room? Was it difficult to find a balance between the two story threads?

Siegel: That was the real challenge in the editing. The way we wrote the script, the blocks of moments in each story were much bigger than they were going to be in the cutting. We couldn’t write a script so cutty or it wouldn’t read. So we had imagined in advance moments that we thought would be very cutty and some moments that we felt would be much longer. Finding balance was the real trick. We thought for a long time in the cutting that it was the Brooklyn story that was giving us more trouble. We had to find a kind of life in it, because the Manhattan story had so much more plot in a way. In the end it was the Manhattan story that was more trying in terms of finding emotionality. To talk about things we find successful and not so successful in the movie, we always wanted more conflict on the Manhattan side between Joe and Lynn in terms of the issue of pregnancy. There are things that we shot that are intended to do that. Yet, they didn’t work in relation to the cutting back and forth. So eventually, we found ourselves pushing to have the cutting replace some of that conflict, or stand in for some of that conflict. We thought it was relatively successful at the end, but that’s an example of the struggle we found ourselves facing as we cut the movie.

Filmmaker: This is the first time you’ve worked in HD. Did you like working in the format? Were the differences concerning the quickness with which you were able to shoot, color saturation, ability to handle darkness, difficult to adjust to?

McGehee: Pluses and minuses.

Siegel: Arriflex makes a camera called the D-20. It’s enormous. We chose it eventually. When we started this process, we thought we were going to make this with a camera that’s the size of my first. There are many of those. We tested them and immediate we were like, that’s not really the look that we want. So as we moved up the HD food chain, we looked at the Viper, the Genesis, and then at the Arri D-20. It’s a big camera, its quite heavy, and it looks like a machine.

McGehee: It looks like the bastard child of a cinder block and a machine. It weighs that much.

Siegel: It’s an easier camera to use in terms of being able to see directly on the monitor what you’re getting. We think we got a great look out of it, but it was big camera, it wasn’t faster to shoot that 35mm camera, we were tethered to a deck, it was quite cumbersome. We were able to run though. It allowed us to shoot many, many more hours of footage than we were accustomed to however. It was much less expensive than film.

McGehee: We abandoned that camera when we went into the subway. We shot Super 16mm on the subway. We shot in the subway on the DL. The first time we went down into the subway with that D-20 camera, we were building the camera, and we’re just watching our AC put the camera together, he’s got a battery belt on his waist, he’s attaching a red cable and then a blue cable to this box, then connecting this other box…

Siegel: You’re a suicide bomber. [Laughs]

McGehee: This is clearly not a stealthy way to get a shot in a subway. [Laughs]

Siegel: Who are all these guys standing around? [Laughs] Why are they whispering? [Laughs] Film shoot? Yeah, sure.

CHRIS SMITH, COLLAPSE

2009-11-04T12:14:00.003-05:00

Ex-LAPD Detective, investigative journalist, 9/11 truther, foreteller of the coming apocalypse --- these are just some of the roles Michael C. Ruppert has inhabited in his fascinating life, one that versatile filmmaker Chris Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) has chosen to examine in his newest film Collapse. It is a return to documentary films for Smith, who has oscillated between disparate narrative and documentary work with a rare deftness. His most recent film The Pool (2007), a naturalistic narrative which Smith photographed himself, tracks a rural teenager working in a Panjim hotel to support his family who becomes obsessed with a swimming pool in the opulent Goan hills and the mysterious family who owns it. His newest picture couldn’t have less in common with that film. Reminiscent if Errol Morris’ work, Collapse is a chilling look at the mind and opinions of a man often labeled a conspiracy theorist and nut job who first came to notice as a whistle blower on the CIA's alleged involvement with drug traffiking in the 1970s and 80s. In Smith's film heoffers lucid and persuasive analysis of the ways in which the realization of time worn concepts like peak oil and climate change and the unquestioned acceptance of fractional reserve banking and fiat currency are pushing our overpopulated world toward unimaginable catastrophes of famine and deindustrialization.

Smith, a native Midwesterner who now lives in London, entered the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Graduate Film Program in 1995 after shooting his feature debut American Job (1996). Chris met Mark Borchardt while editing that film and quickly began filming a documentary about the making of Mark's psychological thriller Coven (2000). Both American Job and American Movie (2000), his sublime chronicle of Borchardt's quixotic filmmaking ambitions, played at the Sundance Film Festival, and American Movie won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, after which Sony Pictures Classics acquired the film and Borchardt became a minor celebrity, with segments of The David Letterman Show and bit parts in myriad B films.

Collapse opens on Friday in Manhattan, November 13th in Los Angeles and on Video on Demand via Cinetic FilmBuff.

Director Chris Smith. Courtesy of 42 West.

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Filmmaker: When did Michael Ruppert first come to your attention? When in the process of making the documentary you set out to make about the CIA’s involvement in drug smuggling did you decide to focus on Ruppert’s opinions and ideas instead?

Smith: We’d heard about him four or five years ago. He was doing some lectures and I had seen the videos of them on YouTube. I knew about him for a long time. I had heard the story about his alleged recruitment by the CIA to get involved in drug trafficking in the 70s. We were finishing our last film The Pool and researching different projects. We had contacted him to talk about that and possibly working on something. We set up a meeting at his house. When we got there he had literally just finished his newest book. Or at least, he was very close to finishing it. This was in February of 2009. He was consumed with this idea of collapse which he saw happening all around him. It was something he had talked about for many years. All the things he thought were going to happen in the near future were starting happen. He was just obsessed with where we were at this point in history. We went over there intending to talk about his personal history and the experiences he had had. He said that he was just focusing on what was happening now. He talked for two or three hours. He hadn’t done any press or interviews for a couple years. He just had so much energy. He was bursting at the seams. We left there scratching our heads. He had so many other things on his mind then going back and delving into what had happened to him in the 1970s.

We went away and two or three weeks later wrote him and email with a proposal for an idea, which was to just do an interview based on this book and what he sees happening around us. It was such a fascinating monologue. That’s really where it started. We were planning on it being a very short, interim project, where we would film for a couple days and cut something together quick, then maybe throw up what we’d done on YouTube or just give it to him. We didn’t really plan to make it the next film we were working on. It’s just one of those things were once we started filming, it just sort of evolved into what it is now. We filmed the bulk of the movie over two days and then we did three additional days of shooting over the few weeks that followed to clarify a few things, but for the most part the movie was shot in March over the course of the first two days.

Filmmaker: Although he’s incredibly persuasive, was there any point in which you thought about expanding the scope of the film outside of Michael’s point of view?

Smith: Ultimately I was interested in making a character study about a guy who’s dedicated his life to these issues. He’s spent thirty years coming up with this theory. To me, the film was about who he is and how he ended up here and the effect that this process has had on his life. I personally wasn’t interested in making a movie about energy or sustainability or food or overpopulation or economics. There are so many of those films that have come out over the last couple of years. I find that they can feel somewhat educational. I find Michael to be an incredibly entertaining person. His philosophy, the way he looks at the world, is more unique than anyone I’ve ever met. That was what we wanted to focus on, on him. We wanted to make a character study as opposed to an issue driven movie. The issues are there and for you to understand him I think you have to understand why he thinks these things are going to happen and what his theory is.

The thing that is fascinating about Michael is that he sort of takes a step back from all these various issues and ties everything together. I think to do a fair and fully informed movie that analyzes every one of those issues from every angle would be impossible. The amount of material necessary could never fit into a feature film. At least how I would want to do it. So what was most intriguing was Michael; he’s whom we wanted to make a movie about.

Filmmaker: How challenging was it to edit Michael’s expansive analysis and find supplemental footage to illustrate his points?

Smith: The amount of information that’s swimming in Michael’s head is incomprehensible. He came into this basement with no notes. He didn’t know any of the questions we were going to ask him. We basically just started talking. For us the challenge became to cull that down. We’d jump from topic to topic and then come back to things. Making something that seemed cohesive was challenging, more so because the way the film was shot than Michael himself. We followed the energy in the conversation to wherever it would lead us as opposed to saying, “let’s talk about each one of these things in a compartmentalized way”. Ultimately, that’s how we had to structure the film, but we let it be a much more loose, organic process while we where shooting. That’s what allowed Michael to be himself, to allow his train of thought to flow and work tangentially through these various topics. I think that’s where he’s the strongest.

Filmmaker: For being such a self-contained film, you worked with two cinematographers, including the great Ed Lachman (Far From Heaven, Lightning Over Water). For a film about one man and his opinions, it had a very dynamic style. How did you come up with the visual design?

Smith: The first three days we shot with a cinematographer named Max Malkin. He’s incredibly talented. I talked to him before we started filming. We talked about a few ideas, weather we should shoot on a stage or somewhere else. Max was talking about some apocalyptic café, playing off the idea of the collapse, but we ultimately decided to go with the basement of an abandoned meat packing plant in downtown Los Angeles. It gave the feeling of an interrogation, the sense of being let in on some secret information about how things really work. It ties into Mike’s history and mystique, the dealings with the CIA and that world. We wanted a look that complemented that feel. It should look and feel like its taking place at four in the morning while everyone else is sleeping. So we set it up with Max and then the last two days of shooting, Ed came in and did those. So it looks very similar. Ed is an incredible cinematographer and he loved the way the first three days were shot, so he basically went in and matched that.

What was nice about both of those DPs is that when you are working with people that are so talented, they’re not just running a camera they’re also thinking about the film’s subject matter and what you’re trying to achieve thematically. They both contributed greatly not just in capturing a look, but in effecting the content of the piece as well.

Filmmaker: You move between the worlds of narrative and documentary, tackling vastly dissimilar topics, with what seems like relative ease.

Smith: When looking at new projects I always work intuitively. I always assume whatever interests me might be interesting to someone else. When this came about, I thought it was interesting because it was so different from anything I had ever done before and I thought it was challenging from a formalistic point of view to see if you could make something interesting from just this guy talking. To be honest, after we did The Yes Men film, I had personally told myself I was going to quit doing documentaries. I had started in narrative filmmaking back in 1996 when my first film American Job went to Sundance. I had never actually planned to make documentary films. I always liked them but it wasn’t something I wanted to do. At the time that I was planning to work of new projects however, the documentary subjects I had at my disposal just seemed more interesting. So that’s how I ended up making American Movie, Home Movie and The Yes Men. After The Yes Men, we went to India and made The Pool. From there I was writing and researching narrative projects when we met with Michael and it was one of those things that, it was too good to pass up. It was right there. You have to follow your instinct at that point, weather you want to do another documentary or narrative or what have you. At a certain point you just look at what’s been presented to you in terms of opportunities and kind of go with it. I’m hoping this is the last one, but you don’t know.

Filmmaker: How have audience responded to the film so far? Has its near apocalyptic message been the catalyst for naysayers?

Smith: I find that the people that stick around and ask you questions are generally the people that like the film. I think the people that don’t like the film you generally don’t hear from. They’re critics and they write about it. Toronto for us was incredibly positive. We expected the film to be more controversial than it was just because of Michael’s nature and his extreme view on certain things. He really has conviction and isn’t afraid to say what he thinks. There was some thought that his opinions would cause more controversy. What surprised us the most was that people who agreed with him wholeheartedly, as well as people who agreed with some of the things he said and people who didn’t agree with him, all really liked the film. I think that made us really happy, that people were able to enjoy the film regardless of how much they align themselves with his views.

Filmmaker: Has Michael seen the film?

Smith: He saw it right before we went to Toronto.

Filmmaker: What did he think of it?

Smith: We didn’t get into many specifics, but he told me he liked it. There are some things he takes issue with. Ultimately we were trying to make a film that was entertaining, that moved, that wasn’t just and educational exercise. So there’s little things, like in the clean coal section, where he wishes we had put in how clean coal doesn’t deal with the sludge or the toxic waste that’s produced, there’s technical things that he wishes could have been included, but ultimately he understood that it’s a movie and if people want to learn more about it they can read his book or they can go to any number of people who have written and talked about these subjects. So I think ultimately he loved the film, that it really captured him and that it was fair. I think he’s smart enough to realize that the stuff that’s critical of him is important to have in there so that people can make up there own mind about him and what they choose to believe about his message and what he’s trying to do. If it was a one sided portrayal of him I think he knows that would be something that wouldn’t be able to reach a wide audience, but beyond that, I think he understands that he’s a complicated person. I think that comes across in the film and he appreciates the work that was put in to make that come across. Its difficult when a film is about you. I’ve dealt with this one American Movie and on The Yes Men where, you become close with the people while making the film so you can see how it weighs on them because they’re so under a microscope. I think if you put any of us in front of a camera for twelve, fourteen hours, there’s going to be things in there you may or may not wish you had said, but they’re all part of what makes that person who they are and I think that’s what comes across.

Filmmaker: Have you noticed any difference in how people of various political persuasions have viewed the film? Has there been any split across ideological lines?

Smith: It wasn’t appealing to people on a partisan level. There have been a lot of Republicans and Democrats we’ve heard from, a lot of financial people who’ve responded to it. I think it appeals to everyone on a certain level who’s interested in any of these issues. Michael comes from a Republican family. His just the facts, straight-forward way of talking appeals to certain people. Yet, I think everyone takes what he says with a grain of salt. I think what we hope people will do is use the film as a catalyst to do some research and come up with there own well-informed opinions. There are many varied opinions on these subject matters. History teaches us that no one knows anything really, no one knows for sure what’s going to happen. I think to have least thought about some of these issues is not harmful. If anything, I think it could be positive. Regardless of your take on the material, I think the film is entertaining and you get to peer into someone’s life. I’ve always thought that’s what the best documentaries do; transport you into someone else’s world and you get to understand and live with them for a period. That’s all you can hope for.

Filmmaker: Are you planning on buying a farm?

Smith: No [Laughs]. I’m fairly optimistic. I don’t know why [Laughs]. Maybe I’ve hit the level of acceptance as a result of working on this project. I feel fairly at ease with everything. I know when we first starting working on this, there were a few nights where we were just staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours thinking about everything, but when you come to the other side you realize that regardless of weather these things will or will not happen, opening up your mind to think about these ideas to this degree and to the degree Michael thinks about them is really fascinating. The amount of time we spent on this film led us to really have to go through the mental process of taking in all this information. It’s been really interesting. The discussions we were having while making the film and the discussions we’ve had with people who’ve seen the film have all been really interesting and useful. I feel so well informed now that I feel like I can at least try to voice my opinion and vote appropriately when and if these issues become something we can have a say in. There are many well-informed, smart, educated people who fall on both sides of several of the issues Michael talks about. There are people that agree with him 100% and people who disagree with him 100%. So I hope we can open up a lot of debate.

TI WEST, THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL

2009-10-30T12:16:00.000-04:00

As a genre that's all about keeping the audience on its toes, the horror movie naturally needs a regular injection of fresh talent, and writer-director Ti West is the latest to give it a shot in the arm. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1980, West spent his adolescence watching as many movies as he could catch on TV or rent from his local video store. Though he made stop motion movies with his G.I. Joe action figures, he didn't give much serious thought to filmmaking until he decided to make a short film to indicate to colleges that he had more to offer than his grades suggested. He ended up at New York's School of the Visual Arts studying film production and was introduced by one of his professors, director Kelly Reichardt, to low budget horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden, who became a champion of West's short films, such as The Wicked (2001). In 2005, Fessenden acted as producer on West's first feature, The Roost, a 1970s throwback horror about a group of friends on their way to a wedding who get stuck on a creepy farm. West also continued his working relationship with Fessenden and his Glass Eye Pix production company on his sophomore feature, Trigger Man, a low-key, pared down thriller about a hunting trip gone wrong. West's next directorial effort, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, is awaiting release, and he has also just completed the web series Dead and Lonely for IFC.

West's latest movie, The House of the Devil, is a lovingly made, 80s-set horror movie that further underlines the writer-director's considerable talent. The plot is simple: impoverished student Sam (Jocelin Donahue), desperately trying to scrape together money to pay the deposit on her new apartment, accepts a babysitting job advertised by the unsettling Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan). It later transpires that it's not a child that Sam will be keeping company in the big, old house, and – as ever – things are much more sinister than they initially seem. As in Trigger Man, West's strategy here is to fashion a film that is normal and even a little mundane in the first half, and then changes gears to become a horror movie for the second half. West's conceit could easily have come across as gimmicky, however it works extremely effectively because all the time the film's overtly horrific events are kept at bay, a tension and sense of dread builds organically. The House of the Devil is a fine horror movie but also transcends its genre limitations thanks to the precision and care of West's less-is-more approach to filmmaking.

Filmmaker spoke to West about rooting his movies in reality, his precise recreation of the 1980s, and why he wishes he'd directed Citizen Kane.

DIRECTOR TI WEST DURING THE FILMING OF HOUSE OF THE DEVIL. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.

Filmmaker: At the start of the movie, there's a caption saying that the film is based on true, unexplained events. I'm presuming that's a little tongue-in-cheek.

West: Preceding that is a statistic that [during the 1980s] 70% of Americans believed in abusive Satantic cults, which is actually an accurate statistic. The “true events” thing has an element of bullshit to it, sure, but the reason it's there is during this time period there was this cultural phenomenon dubbed “Satanic Panic.” From 1979 to 1983-ish, there was this nationwide obsession with Satanic cults and cultural ritual abuse, perpetuated by a lot of daytime TV like “Geraldo,” which put the fear out there that this really bizarre thing would happen: you'd be kidnapped and sacrificed to the devil. It wasn't true, but everyone really believed in it, and I always thought that was kind of amazing. Also, a huge tonal part of the film is realism, and almost a real-time element. So when it says “based on true events,” the cultural event was happening in this time period, and a lot of the film is portrayed in a very realistic, mundane way, so it helped accent that. It really worked like a primer for the film: it put you in a different state of mind. It set the tone of “This is serious,” and I wanted to make a serious horror movie. It helps you not to be there to cheer for people being killed and be there to sit down and say, “I'm going to watch something now.”

Filmmaker: Is it a major aspect of your approach to filmmaking that you want people to believe what they're watching is rooted in reality?

West: It depends, it's a case by case thing. With The Roost, not at all – that's a goofy movie – and not Cabin Fever 2 either. So it depends on the movie, but Trigger Man is steeped in realism and House of the Devil has elements of that as well. The contrast in horror movies is what's most important, the contrast between the really horrific elements and the really mundane other stuff. I think there has to be a strong contrast to make that accessible and make it effective.

Filmmaker: As well as being steeped in realism, this movie is also steeped in the 1980s. Is it more about the films of that period, or your memories of growing up then?

West: I'm an only child and obsessive compulsive. My formative years with pop culture in my youth and when I was most like a sponge was when I was very young, like seven or eight years old. I became very obsessed with pop culture and what was going on around me in television and movies. Being an only child, you tend to obsess over it more because you entertain yourself by it. I had this stuff seeping into my subconscious.

Filmmaker: What kind of stuff got into your subconscious?

West: I have a photographic memory and I kind of take in everything. I can't remember names for shit, but I can remember all kinds of weird little details. I've always been able to perfectly remember what seems to be meaningless stuff to most people, so when it came to this movie I had lists of all the stuff I wanted to be in the movie. Everything from wallpaper to popcorn makers to the Walkman to the kind of TVs. It was important to me that it wasn't an “homage”; I wanted to make a very accurate period piece. I was like, “If we're going to do this, let's do it right.”

Filmmaker: It's very popular to be ironic about the 80s, but you seem very be affectionate instead.

West: I have very find memories of that time and I have a very old-fashioned sensibility. This story is ultimately a very old-fashioned horror movie story with all the classic tropes, but there's something about them that's presented a little bit differently, and that's what I was interested in. I wanted to take the classic horror movie structure and work within that and just put spins on things and do my own thing stuff in that framework. That's what was interesting to me.

Filmmaker: House of the Devil is not quite a movie about movies, but it's clearly the work of a cinephile. For instance, there's the Frightmare late night horror movie that she watches on TV.

West: Movies are a huge part of my life. And the Frightmare thing was a nod to my first film, The Roost, because that's the name of the TV station in that. I'm comfortable with ironies in movies, so I like that she's so scared and she has to listen to her friend's voicemail that's stupid and insulting at this point. I like that she's so scared that she tries to chill out and watch TV and she sees a girl being attacked. All that stuff is funny to me.

Filmmaker: In this and Trigger Man, you really subvert the horror genre by making a normal movie for the first half and a horror movie for the second half.

West: I think it's a horror movie the whole time, but there's that's the moment when we know that all bets are off. I think the whole time it's spooky and weird and we're setting up a horror movie, but that's the moment of no return. Contrast to me is really important, and is what makes art accessible. As far as horror movies, what's interesting to me are the awkward details. If you see real footage of someone getting killed, it's not the blood that you remember, it's the weird way that their face went or how they dropped and something fell out of their hand. It's that stuff that weeks later you're still traumatized by. There's something bizarre and fascinating about that to me. If you had a home invasion and we're murdered, you were probably just watching YouTube before it. I was on a plane here that was really bumpy and I was watching a movie on my laptop; I was totally entertained, and the next minute it was like, “Oh, my God, I could be dead right now.” What a weird contrast that I wasn't doing anything grand, I was just sitting and watching. The focus on the reality stuff in contrast to the horrific stuff interests me.

Filmmaker: House of the Devil is much more subtle and understated than most films in its genre, and I found that waiting for so long for the heroine to be in genuine peril actually ramped up the tension in a really effective way.

West: I think it's subjective because some people might agree with you and some people might say, “This is the most boring movie ever!” But it's my personal taste. I'm the kind of person who goes to see a movie and doesn't have some place to be five minutes after it's over. I'm going to the movie to experience the movie. I like to take my time with things, but I also like movies that are mystery films. This is a horror movie but there's an element to this that's about solving a mystery, and I wanted to let that play out. I also wanted to take everyone who's very familiar with horror movies out of their comfort zone. You go in a room where you think, “Oh, my God, something's going to happen,” and then she just talks to a fish and leaves. And then she goes into another room – and it's just a bathroom. You get to the point where you go, “Yeah, I actually don't know what's going to happen, and I'm just at the mercy of this person.” I think that that's effective and I think that's the way that it should be. I don't think you should have someone open a mirror and you know when they close it there's going to be something behind her, and if it's not there it's going to be there when she turns around. I don't want to be smarter than the movie – that sucks! Then it's not effective anymore.

Filmmaker: You've talked about the more mundane aspects of the movie and the challenge of attracting and keeping an audience given that, so how do you feel about the trailer, which sells the movie as a much more conventional horror?

West: I think there's always a bait-and-switch element to trailers, I think that's what they are. I cut this trailer with Graham Reznick, the sound designer, and I'm very happy with the trailer for this movie. Usually it's some company that cuts it and you're like, “Ugh, this is way off!” I think the bait-and-switch thing is important. I think when you test screen movies, why don't you just test screen the trailers? Why don't you find the trailer the majority of people like and use that trailer, as opposed to fucking with the movie? Maybe I do trick you to get you in there, but maybe you end up liking it. Or maybe you knew better and the trailer didn't fool you, but you wanted to see it anyway.

Filmmaker: Do you feel like if this movie is successful, your next film could be sold more on what it truly is?

West: I hope so. I have this weird renaissance mentality that a few people have. Last year, there's Let the Right One In which everybody likes but there's not a lot of crossover potential to that. It's not like people say, “Yeah, let's make movies like that!” – the first thing they want to do is remake it. I think that the horror genre has so much potential, yet everyone does the same thing over and over because that seems to be successful. As long as we as a paying public continue to go see shitty movies, the same shitty movies will get made. And that's just the way it goes.

Filmmaker: Do you have aspirations to work more in the mainstream?Cabin Fever 2 was obviously an attempt at that...

West: And you're aware of the situation on that. Yeah, that was an attempt that didn't really pan out. I'd like to be able to work with bigger actors and have the money to be able to pay them. If I go make some mainstream movie, it won't be like House of the Devil and there won't be scenes of people walking in and out of shot, because it's a mainstream audience and I'm not trying to make things difficult. It doesn't necessarily have to be as challenging as Trigger Man. I'm not so naive as to go say, “There's going to be an hour of no talking while they're hunting...” – I understand that that's for art house crowds. But films are personal for me and I have very clear ideas of how I want those films to be, so if I go make some big Hollywood movie, as it seems likely may happen, I want to try and maintain that credibility of making it challenging and have that auteur vibe where it better and a little more interesting than most fare.

Filmmaker: What's the worst (or weirdest) job you've ever had?

West: A dishwasher, that was the worst. I was in a restaurant washing dishes – it sucked. I did it for like six months, longer than I wanted to, but then I got upgraded to cook for a while. That was OK, but it was still also kind of a bummer. And any job working in an office. I can't work at a desk, I'm not cut out for it.

Filmmaker: What was your cinematic epiphany?

West: The movies that made me love cinema were The Karate Kid and Back to the Future, and as far as making me want to be a filmmaker it would be maybe The Evil Dead or Bad Taste, one of these movies where I said, “This seems possible.” The time that I really warmed up to movies was when I had more of an interest in potentially making movies. Then I saw these people making movies that I really liked and I'd say, “Oh, I could see how this was done.”

Filmmaker: If you could hand out an Oscar to someone who's never won, who would you give it to?

West: Did Kubrick ever win one? I'd give one to him. And what about Peter Medak? I think The Changeling is really pretty great.

Filmmaker: Finally, which film do you wish you had directed?

West: The movie that I've seen in the last year that I would say is really great was Two Lovers. I really liked that movie a lot and was like, “James Gray, good job on that!” I think Let the Right One In is pretty great also. ...I should have said Citizen Kane. If I'd directed that movie, I'd be like, “Hey now!”

PETER GREENAWAY, REMBRANDT'S J'ACCUSE

2009-10-21T12:12:00.000-04:00

It is not uncommon to describe filmmakers as “true artists,” however in the case of Peter Greenaway it is literally the case that he brings an artist's sensibility to work on the big screen. Born in Newport, Wales, in 1942, Greenaway grew up in London and studied to be a painter at the city's Walthamstow College of Art. In the late 60s, Greenaway began to explore his fascination with cinema, embarking on a series of documentary short films which he continued throughout the 1970s that set out to capture the peculiarities of the world (or the world from a peculiar standpoint). He made his feature debut in 1980 with the faux-documentary The Falls, about the victims of an unspecified disaster, but first made an impact with The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), a 17th Century drama about art, sexuality and class, and how they intersect. Greenaway solidified his reputation as a visually and thematically sophisticated filmmaker with his next two films, A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) and The Belly of an Architect (1987), while two contemporary, more accessible films, Drowning by Numbers (1988) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), established him as a household name. He began the 1990s with the lavish period pieces Prospero's Books – his 1991 riff on Shakespeare's The Tempest – and The Baby of Macon (1993), before making two sexually provocative modern day dramas The Pillow Book (1995) and 8½ Women (1999). Beyond filmmaking, Greenaway has written opera libretti, recently explored multimedia projects, such as The Tulse Luper Suitcases (which includes in it a trilogy of films), has begun VJing, and is currently working on an ongoing installation project called Nine Classical Paintings Revisited.

The first painting Greenaway chose for his Nine Classical Paintings Revisited installation was Rembrandt's iconic 1642 portrait of a group of militia soldiers, The Night Watch. His fixation on the picture, in turn, lead him to make the 2007 feature Nightwatching, about Rembrandt's creation of the masterpiece, and subsequently the documentary Rembrandt's J'Accuse, which goes on release this week. The latter movie is the outlet for his exhaustive research into and close examination of Rembrandt's painting, information which Greenaway weaves together into a vigorous and playful cinematic essay. The central thrust of Rembrandt's J'Accuse is that the visual deconstruction of The Night Watch can unlock a murder mystery, with Greenaway contending that Rembrandt employed iconographic elements of the picture to incriminate two of the soldiers in the portrait in the death of one of their own. Segmenting the film into 30 questions, Greenaway's lively documentary literally puts the picture together piece by piece, allowing even today's “visually illiterate” audiences (as he provocatively calls them) to ultimately see what he sees.

Filmmaker spoke to Greenaway about finding a murder mystery in Rembrandt's picture, why cinema is a “finished” medium, and a life-changing childhood moment at the movies.

DIRECTOR PETER GREENAWAY DURING THE FILMING OF REMBRANDT'S J'ACCUSE. COURTESY CONTENTFILM INTERNATIONAL.

Filmmaker: Tell me about how Rembrandt's J'Accuse came about.

Greenaway: Well, there's a huge amount of information. Rembrandt is an extraordinarily well-documented painter, and I have lived in his city, Amsterdam, for 20 years. We virtually know which streets he walked along and which brothels he went to and where all his children are buried and where his wives died of the plague, so just as Paris is Godard's city and Manhattan is Woody Allen's city, Amsterdam belongs to Rembrandt. Unlike his almost-contemporary Vermeer, who we know almost nothing about, there's an overload of information [on Rembrandt]. When we made Nightwatching, I was very keen to posit this; not only to talk about a painting or a painter, but to talk about the milieu and the emotional and political ripples. [I was] making a very thorough investigation of a singular image, which primarily is of enormous importance to the Dutch but I think is set very squarely in the end period of the 17th Century Baroque and has all sorts of connections to – at least in my subjective understanding – artificial light. (And what is cinema but the manipulation of artificial light?) And the suggestion indeed that cinema did not begin in 1895 with the Lumière brothers but was a manifestation already anticipated by those extraordinary painters who were the first to paint artificial light, those four giants of Caravaggio, Velasquez, Rubens and Rembrandt. These sorts of notions of sharing the ground of 8,000 years of our painting tradition, which belongs to us all and brought us to the pitch where we are now, and the concepts of a remarkably new and, I now think, finished medium called cinema.

Filmmaker: I definitely want to return to the idea of cinema being finished later on, but I'd like to ask first about why you chose Rembrandt and this picture in particular?

Greenaway: Fashions in art change very quickly and very rapidly, and each generation has its take on all these things. We might not have thought about Rembrandt in this light maybe two generations back and we might not think him significant two generations hence, but for the moment he ticks all the right boxes. He comes out of a democratic republic, and we all pretend to be ideal democrat republicans nowadays. I think that he's very anti-misogynist: he never ever paints a degrading image of a female. (He might paint ugly women, but he never paints ugly portraits of women.) To use fashionable contemporary terms, he's definitely post-Freudian and he's certainly post-Modernist. People have painted emotion on people's faces for years and years, but for the first time with Rembrandt, there seems to be a correspondence between the inner and the outer man. And I think he's non-judgmental and he obviously has a non-recidivist attitude towards history which is wry and personal. For those democratic, cultural reasons, I find the man very, very interesting. I don't particularly like Rembrandt very much – I think he's too repetitive, often goes for the cheap effect, often a bit too Hollywood for me – but I don't think you can ignore him. He's a colossus who stands astride a whole series of post-Renaissance, post-Baroque paintings. He can be noted as deeply influential to all the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists, and they are the entry into huge experiments in the 20th Century, so there's a continuity there. If you're really serious about painting, you ignore Rembrandt at your peril.

Filmmaker: How unique and groundbreaking is your interpretation of The Night Watch as such a specific and damning message?

Greenaway: A whole series of extraordinary people, often very articulate, have looked at [the painting], so there's a huge body of information and opinion about it. A lot of the particular characteristics that I examine one by one are part of the Rembrandt art history phenomenon. But I think I have discovered a number of new ones which offer new interpretations, and I have brought forward some of this critique phenomenon with a lot that art history either wishes not to talk about or maybe regards as irrelevant to the actual investigation of the painting itself. All this concern for the homosexual relationship between the two major figures, which seems to be part of the satirical intent to either laugh at these characters or degrade them in the public eye, gives me credence to believe there's much antagonism here between Rembrandt and his subject matter, which ultimately leads for me to make this design and create this scenario where there's both a murder and a conspiracy in the painting. But I think along the way there's sufficient sense of black humor and deliberate exploitation of the critical method within this film to allow for the truth, the half truths, the apocryphal truths and the downright lie. It's really about as much as the critique and the individual examination of the image here as it is to end up with a set of theories of ideas that are provable or unprovable.

Filmmaker: How would you describe the complementary relationship between Rembrandt's J'Accuse and Nightwatching?

Greenaway: I think, initially, I have to come clean: there was so much information and so much that was fascinating, in a sense I couldn't fit it in into the Nightwatching scenario as a drama, where I had to rely on the suspension of disbelief. I began my career as a documentary filmmaker and I'm still fascinated by the metier, especially by the recent in which documentary has made a big comeback all over the place. I think it's very interesting as a form of delivering information.

Filmmaker: The is extremely dynamic and active, both visually and intellectually, and you really invigorate the documentary medium.

Greenaway: I have a great interest in contemporary editing language and I enjoy the quick nature of a visual medium, playing with visual tricks. Some of them are straight tricks, but I hope they are taken sensibly and seriously in order to elucidate a point, to draw your attention. There's something self-reflexive about that: if we're going to talk about images, let's really talk about them in terms of how we understand images can be manipulated post-television in the 21st Century, so that would be part of the game. I think I am also treating my audiences very intelligently as people who can think as quickly as the film surface can think. That should be part and parcel of communication in the information age.

Filmmaker: In the film, you talk about the “visual illiteracy” of the world and “an impoverished cinema.” And at the start of the interview, you called cinema “finished.” Can you explain more fully your thoughts on this?

Greenaway: Well, we have a text-based cinema and I don't think we've seen any “cinema cinema,” or if we have it's very rare. The very best painting is non-narrative and it communicates its meaning by its ability to organize the sense of representation and the image. The big things that happened at the start of the 20th Century (that seem extraordinary in retrospect and that people like Rembrandt would have been astonished by) were things like where harmony could legitimately be seen to disappear from music and figuration could be seen to disappear from painting. In a sense, painting and music were never impoverished by either of these apparently essential revolutionary disturbances. I think cinema is a very poor medium. I think cinema knows this, which is why it always goes back to the bookshop, and this is why we have a text-based cinema. I could not possibly – nor could any other filmmaker – go to a producer or a film studio with four paintings, three lithographs and a book of drawings and say, “Give me the money.” We don't have cultural confidence in the image, strangely enough, and often I think this is as much true in the cinema as it is outside the cinema.

Filmmaker: How do you see cinema moving forward then?

Greenaway: I think the text is, in a sense, at the center of how we all communicate. Umberto Eco has said that we've had 8,000 years of the text masters who've given us our holy books and jurisprudence and told us our moral agenda, and it's all been based on text. But Eco would argue that the digital revolution, which in some senses is incredibly visual in its formatting, is going to suggest that all the text masters have to move aside so all the image masters can come forward. But if people are visually illiterate, if they feel uncomfortable the manufacture and reception of the image, then we're in for a poor time. If civilization is going to be rewrit, reconsidered, refabulated with the primacy of the image when most people are visually illiterate, how are we going to cope with new sophistications? One would have thought that cinema would be the ideal educator to move us into this position, so maybe we should thank the Lumière brothers for laying the ground. Maybe the 114 years we've seen is indeed the prologue, and now we can get in with the real business of making sensible, coherent, sophisticated communication via the image.

Filmmaker: How do you see yourself as functioning as an artist within this “finished” medium?

Greenaway: Well, the two buzzwords are “interactivity” and “multimedia.” Rather facetiously, I give a date for the death of cinema and its the 31st of September, 1983, when the remote control was introduced into the living rooms of the world. Previously, the passive medium of cinema demanded that you sit back in the dark, looking in one direction. The introduction of the remote control, however primitive it might have been in 1983, was the beginning of a cultural democracy. In Athens in about 300 B.C., there was one artist for a million people. By the time you get to the Second World War, there's probably 250,000 artists for a million people and surely the way things are going, soon there will be no difference whatsoever between the notion of the maker and the recipient. I don't think we need to be anxious about notions of quality, but I'm talking about the apparatus of cultural receptivity and creation. I think the greatest thing that's happened in the last 10 years was the invention of YouTube: finally we've got rid of all those middlemen, the elitism whereby someone else has told us what we can show and what we can't show. That means that, I'm sure we all agree, YouTube is 97% crap, but that's always been the case. Whatever period is high cultural activity – Versailles, the Weimar Republic, etc. - it's always been the same: 97% crap and 3% shining, valuable, desperately important substance.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Greenaway: My grandmother was an old age pensioner and she could go to the cinema free on a Thursday afternoon, and she used to take me along with her. We used to watch westerns, and I was always not fully engaged and not prepared to involve myself in the suspension of disbelief, but I remember there were all these characters wandering around with raspberry juice on their heads. It never occurred to me that it was anything other than raspberry juice, and then suddenly one afternoon I realized I was supposed to believe that raspberry juice was blood, and I ran screaming out of the cinema. That was a pretty mind-shocking experience.

Filmmaker: When did you last do it for the money not the love?

Greenaway: Oh, my God, how honest can I get? I've got to put food on the table, I've got children. There's always a financial angle somewhere, but it's certainly never been my major priority, which also means I've never been a very rich man. I live a satisfactory, English-language-spoken, bourgeois life with all the amenities and all the lifestyle that most people in the Western world enjoy, so love of the project, love of the idea, love of the continuity has certainly been the prime effort and it's been the thing that keeps me going.

Filmmaker: If someone gave you $1m dollars that you had to spend it within a week, what would you do?

Greenaway: One of my dreams, a very bourgeois dream, is to build a bedroom with an enormous, beautiful bed inside a library inside a garden, and there are no roofs anywhere so it's open to the sky. I don't know if I could spend the money that quickly to get that, but I'd do my damndest to find one somewhere.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was your dream job as a kid?

Greenaway: I'm going to be very boring, because the dream job turned into a real job. Ever since I was six or seven, I wanted to be a painter. I have no evidence of anything like this in my family, so it really came out of the blue. To be a painter was what I always wanted to do, and I sort of kept that up until I was 28 and then, maybe unfortunately, I discovered cinema.

SEBASTIAN SILVA, THE MAID

2009-10-16T12:37:00.001-04:00

CATALINA SAAVEDRA IN DIRECTOR SEBASTIAN SILVA'S THE MAID. COURTESY ELEPHANT EYE FILMS.

Sebastián Silva could seemingly make a career out of a variety of creative pursuits, however at the moment it is on filmmaking that he is focusing all his attention. Silva was born in Santiago, the capital of Chile, in 1979, and grew up attending a Catholic school in the city. Though from a young age it was clear that he had a talent for art, after finishing high school he went to study film at the Escuela de Cine in Santiago. After a year, however, he quit to move to Montreal to learn animation. Since then, Silva has been constantly busy with a range of projects. He had a gallery show of his drawings while working as a shoe salesman, and later another show in New York City. He started the faux rap group CHC with Gabriel Diaz (also a cinematographer) and musician Pedro Subercaseaux, and the band has now released three albums. He was behind the groups Yaia and Los Mono, and has recorded a solo album. And he spent a period of time in Hollywood working as a gardener and obsessively seeking out Steven Spielberg to pitch him a movie idea. In 2007, Silva made his directorial debut with La Vida Me Mata, a black-and-white comedy with absurdist overtones which won the Best Film award from the Chilean Critics Circle.

While his first film was a success in his home country, the New York-based Silva has made his breakthrough movie with his sophomore effort, The Maid. Set in present day Santiago, the film is centered on the eponymous Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), an abrasive, overworked housekeeper who has been with the same family for over 20 years. When she collapses one day, the family decides to hire another live-in maid to help lighten her excessive workload, however Raquel responds negatively to the idea, seeing it as the first step to her becoming obsolete. One of the great strengths of Silva's film is that is takes a different direction from what we initially suspect, as the potentially predictable set-up involving an increasingly unhinged domestic servant is given an intelligent and humanistic spin. Dark, funny and ultimately touching, The Maid shows Silva's increasing assurance as both writer and director while Saavedra – who is in almost every scene – delivers a complex, nuanced performance that is easily one of the best of 2009.

Filmmaker spoke to Silva about his personal experience with live-in maids, shooting the film in his childhood home, and ending up at a self-help meeting in a Santa hat.

DIRECTOR SEBASTIAN SILVA ON THE SET OF THE MAID. COURTESY ELEPHANT EYE FILMS.

Filmmaker: When did you first think about making this film?

Silva: The film was shot in February in 2008, and about nine months before that I started thinking about the idea. In the beginning, we wanted to make a really cheap film. It's already really cheap – it cost us between $250,000 and $300,000 – but I was thinking more of making a film for $20,000. (You always have those idealistic production scenarios, but they never come true.) The idea was to make a really tiny film at my parents' house, which is where we finally shot it, but it just got bigger. It was 2007 that I started thinking about the film, and that year I released my first film. My sister's boyfriend mentioned something about the maids that worked at my parents' house and this Lucy-Raquel kind of story that took place between two of them. He said, “What do you think about that?” I said, “That sounds like a good film. I could totally write about live-in maids.” That's something that I really knew about, and it's a really striking phenomenon for everybody. I felt like, “I have so much to tell about this!” So I started writing the screenplay, aiming to end up with this story between Lucy and Raquel. Everything that happens before that is a mix of memories and experiences that I went through, together with some fiction that I added to the story with my co-writer, Pedro [Peirano] (who I also co-wrote my first film with).

Filmmaker: What were your own experiences of having a live-in maid?

Silva: The first memory I have of maids that worked in my house has a rebellious feeling to it. It was because they were a third authority – I already had a father and a mother, and they were another authority figure at home that you didn't want to be bossed around by. It was like, “Who are you, lady? Whoa, whoa, whoa! Nobody tells me when to eat!” I started feeling awkward having someone at home 24/7 and feeling that her authority was less than my parents'. Also, they were more illiterate than everybody else in the house, and we were much younger than them and already knew stuff that they didn't know, so you would feel a little superior, in a way. All those factors together either makes you act like a fucking asshole towards them, feel superior, ignore them, or feel a little sympathy. But it wasn't just sympathy, it was guilt, and I didn't like that, because I wasn't responsible: “Man, she's hired here, I didn't do anything.” We didn't really get along, so my experience wasn't exactly negative, but it was confusing and the emotional relationship I had with her was unsolved until now. I think the film has helped me a lot to overcome this, and it's been very therapeutic for myself and my family and also the maids that work st my house.

Filmmaker: Is the Raquel character directly based on the maid you grew up with?

Silva: Yes. She was working with my family until I made the film, then I showed her the film, and she quit after two weeks. Since then, she's been away living with someone that she loves and she has a car and she has her own life. I do see her sometimes on Skype, and say “Hey, how are you?” She liked the film a lot and I think it was great for her too to see herself portrayed in such a fair way. Even though it's sad in a sense, I think the story is of someone who redeems herself so it has a positive attitude and it's based on, it's not her. The character of Raquel is much stronger than the real maid is – it's a cinematic character.

Filmmaker: Is she as an extreme a character as Raquel?

Silva: There are some things that I used that I don't really regret but were a little extreme, like the hairdo. She had the same hairdo when I was growing up. I used a lot of personal things of hers, like I shot the movie at my parents' house and Raquel's room is her real room. I didn't change the bed covers, I used the same TV set and the same picture frames, the same photo album. Everything is the same, I even took some photos that she had in her photo album and retouched the actress' face in on top of her face. I went really deep, and she knew that and agreed with that. I showed that I wasn't exploiting that, just trying to be as real as possible. At some points, I was like, “I don't need to go that far into reality, I could fake that,” and then I would make something up and say, “Why would I make it up?! The real shit is so much better.” It just made sense, it was perfect. I took the risk of creating such an accurate portrait of my family intimacy, but I walked out victoriously.

Filmmaker: What was it like for you to make a film in your childhood home?

Silva: Technically, it was really comfortable because we had the chance with the DP to do some storyboarding beforehand, I had the keys to the location, and 85% of the film takes place in that house. I'd lived there for 10 years, so I knew every single corner, I knew all the dynamics of each room, so that made the writing and the shooting pretty organic.

Filmmaker: What about your emotional response to shooting there?

Silva: It just felt so like home that I don't remember any weird feeling. At the beginning, I guess, having 40 strangers walking around with tripods and lights all over my parents' house and actors sitting on my parents' bed and an actress dressing up as my mother and wearing the same pajamas as my mother was weird, but I got used to it. Then, all of a sudden, on the third day, it was like, “Whoa, I'm at home. And I'm filming my family!” It was stressful, and there were points with the stress that I would go to a bathroom, lock myself in and pant in front of the mirror, like, “Fuck, what's going on, what's going on?” But I think that was because were shooting 12 scenes a day.

Filmmaker: How much were you influenced by things like Jean Genet's The Maids?

Silva: Or Buñuel films. Well, I haven't seen those films and I was told to watch them before I made this film, but I didn't. It's something that I would never do. Every time you make a film about something, people are like “Oh, you have to read The Odyssey, you have to watch this Buñuel film, you have to read this book about a maid written in Slovenia...” That's exactly what I don't want to do; I want to go to my writing desk and write without any influence from things. So what I did was I got more influenced by talking to the maids at my house and doing emotional research about them, how they feel at my parents', how was the first week that they were working at a stranger's house and serving then, how was it to wear a new uniform for the first time. I was more intrigued by that stuff rather than art pieces about maids. And clearly I'm not intrigued now, as I haven't seen them. But at some point I will.

Filmmaker: The film is centered around the performance of Catalina Saavedra, who you wrote the role of Raquel for, but I believe she initially said she didn't want to be in the movie.

Silva: She wasn't really excited. She has played several roles as maids in Chile before this one, but I don't watch any TV and I'm not in Chile that often so I was unaware of that when I offered it to her. But I found out later that she had done, like, seven different maids before this one. When I worked with her on my first film, she had a secondary, comedic role and I was totally in love with her performance and her exceptional talent, so I told her that together with my co-writer I was going to write specially something for her. Then I called her and said, "I have the perfect project for you," and she said, "What is it called?" When I said, "It's called La Nana," she was like, "Fuck you, man, you can do better than that, Sebastian, please! I've done fucking eight maids – what are you talking about?" I said, "No, I promise this will be better. It's a humane character, it has two sides..." And then she read the screenplay and she liked it, because it's nothing like she's played before. Every other maid she's played was a caricature, either really spicy or bitchy, or a thief, or a fat maid who ate all day. She was a human being. She did a great, great job. She's 80% of the film and I seriously wouldn't allow her to refuse my invitation. I don't think I would have done the film without her.

Filmmaker: You're not just a filmmaker, you're an artist and a musician as well, so how do all your creative pursuits fit together? Do the other activities also inform your filmmaking?

Silva: Filmmaking is the main thing, I guess, but I do keep my drawing and painting and illustrating pretty much alive. I have made several music albums and I sing on all of them and I do write lyrics and I'm good at coming up with poppy melodies. But I'm not a musician. You give me a guitar, and I'll give you a sad spectacle. Music is a hobby and I'm planning on keeping it as a hobby, because it's really relieving to create songs. Painting is the thing that I've done the most in my life, so I take that very seriously. I haven't shown my work in many places and I'm not rushing to do it. I'm keeping it for myself until I can show it somewhere nice. I started making films five years ago, and it seems like I've got talent for it. I definitely feel very comfortable directing, and I think drawing and illustrating have given me a sense of composition and picturing scenes beforehand very accurately. I can really close my eyes and see the movie, and that's thanks to my drawing abilities and my abilities to put ideas on paper.

Filmmaker: In your bio, it says that you tried to go down a more mainstream route in Hollywood before you decided to make indie movies.

Silva: [laughs] My experience in Hollywood really has nothing to do with the film industry. It was actually a crazy, schizophrenic quest that I had when I was 21 years old and I went there in search of Steven Spielberg with a crazy project to save humanity. It's another film, and there's actually a screenplay for that story. It's called May I Talk to Steven Spielberg?. I was not trying to make a living as a filmmaker, I was working as a gardener and smoking marijuana every day. I working for this eccentric family in Bel Air and looking for Spielberg. That was my life in Hollywood, and I ended up in a self-help meeting wearing a Santa Claus hat, wearing a name tag and sharing my misery with fat people.

Filmmaker: When you were a teenager, whose pin-up poster did you have on your wall?

Silva: When I was a teenager, I had a poster of Goofy and Bambi. Seriously. And maybe Ren and Stimpy, and probably the Beatles. And then my drawings and stuffed animals. I was never a fan of any filmmaker. Ever. Now that I've been making films, I've been watching more films and there are definitely a lot of filmmakers that I really admire, but I never had a poster of theirs on my wall. If there's a filmmaker I worship in my life, it's Walt Disney. Seriously. He has contributed to my imagination the most, I think.

Filmmaker: What's the most embarrassing film you watched the whole of on a plane?

Silva: Robin Williams is in it. Of course. It's called Death to Smoochy, or something. I think Danny DeVito is in it too. That film is quite embarrassing. And I didn't see it on a plane, but the film where Robin Williams plays a robot [Bicentennial Man] is the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was your cinematic epiphany?

Silva: There are three films: Harold and Maude, Stand by Me, Scenes from a Marriage. Those are the three films that made me go, "Oh, my God, I want to do something like this."

NICOLAS WINDING REFN, BRONSON

2009-10-09T18:32:00.001-04:00

TOM HARDY AS THE EPONYMOUS LEAD IN WRITER_DIRECTOR NICOLAS WINDING REFN'S BRONSON. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.

At a time when Danish cinema boasts a large number of first rate directors, Nicolas Winding Refn stands out among his peers for his raw talent and ambition. The son of filmmaker Anders Refn, Refn was born in Copenhagen in 1970 but spent much of his teenage years living in New York, which had a great impact on his cinematic sensibility. He started film school at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, but was expelled for throwing a desk at a wall, one of a number of incidents that got him the nickname “Enfant Sauvage,” or “wild child.” He was accepted by the Danish Film School but dropped out before his studies had even begun. However, when a producer saw one of his short films and asked him to turn it into a feature, he was able to bypass a conventional cinematic education entirely. That film was Pusher (1996), a violent drug movie set on the streets of Copenhagen which drew rave reviews as well as comparisons with Refn's idol, Martin Scorsese. He followed up the huge success of that film with Bleeder (1999), another unvarnished portrayal of urban Copenhagen that showed a greater depth to his work. In 2003, Refn released Fear X, an unconventional take on the revenge movie, starring John Turturro and written by Hubert Selby Jr., however the financial failure of the film bankrupted him. To pay off his debts, he agreed to complete the Pusher trilogy, making Pusher II (2004) and Pusher III (2005) back-to-back.

According to Refn, making the second and third Pusher movies purely for money transformed his attitude to filmmaking, and we see a reborn director at work in his latest movie, Bronson. The film is based on the story of Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy), a petty criminal infamous for being the most violent prisoner in Britain and who reinvented himself as tough guy “Charles Bronson.” Refn's Bronson, however, is not a biopic but rather a riff on some of the events of Peterson's life and his transformation from an unexceptional nobody to a prison “celebrity” to, ultimately, a much celebrated artist and writer. Bronson is a thrilling, dynamic cinematic experience as a result of Refn's inventive, quasi-operatic way of telling Peterson's tale (which includes a theatrical one-man show by Bronson) and Hardy's powerhouse performance in the lead role make. In their hands, Bronson becomes a classic screen character as his vulnerabilities and tragic qualities – along with his sense of humor – are drawn out to great, and sometimes moving, effect.

Filmmaker spoke to Refn about overcoming his initial resistance to making Bronson, his personal parallels with Michael Peterson, and making movies with James Stewart.

NICOLAS WINDING REFN ON THE SET OF BRONSON. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.

Filmmaker: When did you first hear about Charles Bronson?

Refn: The producer Rupert Preston had acquired the rights to make a movie about his life. Rupert is a good friend of mine and also the distributor of all my films in the U.K. He basically asked if I was interested in making a movie about him, and my first reaction was no. But then when I began to think about it, I said yes, because I saw some potential. I didn't know what the potential was yet, but I needed to find out what it was.

Filmmaker: Was there a script at the time?

Refn: For many years, people had been trying to make a biopic of Michael Peterson so there were some very, very bad scripts written. But one of the conditions was that they were all eliminated and we had to start from scratch, because I didn't have an interest in making a biopic of Michael Peterson, but a movie about the transformation from Michael Peterson into Charlie Bronson.

Filmmaker: So you went and did your own research?

Refn: I didn't do research, I basically just thought, “How would I like to make this movie?” And that's how it began.

Filmmaker: What were your materials for writing the script?

Refn: Well, first I had to come up with the stage performance – that would be kind of how Charlie sees his own life. The second act is when he's released in Luton, when we get to see that Charlie has difficulties living in reality, because he has his own alternative reality. And act three is the audience perceiving as they wish to interpret him: is he crazy or is he not?

Filmmaker: How important was it for you to root this in historical fact?

Refn: Because I was making a movie about a person who does exist, I needed to stay close to a certain degree to what happened to him, but at the same time take artistic license. But I had a gray area because I wasn't making a biopic of Michael Peterson, I was making a movie about my own interpretation of the transformation.

Filmmaker: How did the performance aspects become part of the film?

Refn: Because I wanted to make the film very operatic and very feminine, because it's also very much about the concept of art and art is a feminine medium. So it was having all those elements thrown into it. The painting of the face is more like he's a circus entertainer, like an old-fashioned personality that doesn't exist anymore. And yet there is no face – he's an invisible person, because Charlie Bronson is a made up person, he doesn't exist.

Filmmaker: Did you try to make contact with Charles Bronson at all?

Refn: No, I didn't have an interest in contacting him because I didn't want to make a movie about him. But at one point I needed to speak to him about two things. I wanted him to come up with some ideas for the monologue about what it's like being in prison, and I wanted a little on how he got back into prison, just some factual things that I needed to clarify.

Filmmaker:What was it like speaking to him?

Refn: Interesting to speak to a guy who was in solitary confinement for his whole life, probably. You can't say a lot of things, because you don't know what you'd say. What do you say? "How's life? What are you doing? What are you up to?" That conversation is not there. So I was very specific about what I needed to know, and I passed him back to Tom [Hardy] who was more friendly.

Filmmaker: Did you ask him any questions that probed at the core of personality?

Refn: No, because there was no way I could get to the bottom of it – it was too complex. Plus, I wasn't interested in him. There is no "Rosebud" in Bronson. On the contrary, that's why there are reasons to make a film, because there is no "Rosebud." It's all about interpretation. Great art has to leave a bit of a question mark and a lot of interpretation so people still feel they're getting what they're paying for.

Filmmaker: Has Charles Bronson seen Bronson?

Refn: No, he's not allowed. But he's heard the movie, I'm told, and he thought it's the greatest movie ever made. Obviously.

Filmmaker: Can you tell me about how you worked with Tom Hardy to build the character? Was it a very collaborative process?

Refn: It was a very close partnership. I'm very collaborative in that way because I shoot in chronological order so I leave great responsibility on the cast. So it's always a very collaborative form when I work with anybody, in that it's seeking out all possibilities and finding out which ones work and which ones don't.

Filmmaker: Did you allow him to improvise at all, like for the monologue?

Refn: No, that was very clearly written, but I definitely utilized Tom a lot in terms of phrasing and so forth. He had a friend called Kelly Marshall, a very nice woman, who helped me write some of the wording because, not being English, it was sometimes difficult for me to find the right phrasing.

Filmmaker: You seemed to capture the Britishness very well. How difficult was that coming in as an outsider?

Refn:Well, I didn't have an ambition so I didn't know what to achieve with it, because I'm not British. I can't really identify with that specific thing.

Filmmaker:Was it important to you that you got that aspect right?

Refn: Whatever you do, you have to get it right no matter what, so it's part of the game.

Filmmaker: Tom Hardy went through a miraculous physical transformation to become the character. Given what he previously looked like, what prompted you to cast him?

Refn: I'd never seen him before. He worked out, he did all the things that needed to be done. He got all muscular. Those were the things that I found least interesting, but he was very obsessed with it. I said, "You go do your thing and I'll do mine." [laughs]

Filmmaker: And were there things that you became obsessed about?

Refn: Yeah, that more about how the movie became more and more about my own life, in a way. It's probably the closest I'll get to an autobiography. That was very creepy, in a way, but I didn't know that until after I was editing.

Filmmaker: In what sense did you feel it was about your own life?

Refn: When I was very young, I was very nihilistic and destructive like Charlie was. I wanted to be very famous like he did. I was searching for a stage like he was. I didn't many skills, which he says he didn't either. My second phase started when I completed the Pusher trilogy, seeing that art can be a way to express and not a preconceived notion. Charlie realizes that art is an act of violence and that if he can just let it go, it will just be a natural evolution for him and he can become a complete person. There are many things like that that are very similar in our lives.

Filmmaker: Do you always need to find parallels like that in your work?

Refn: Anything I do is part of me, part of my DNA.

Filmmaker: I was struck by how sympathetic you make Bronson, despite his violent nature.

Refn: You always have to love your character. When you do that, you find vulnerability. Charlie's a very vulnerable man and that's why he reacts the way he does. So is Tom Hardy, so it was very good casting.

Filmmaker: In the second act, when he's a free man, he reminded me of King Kong or Quasimodo, freaks of nature who are out of place in normal existence.

Refn: People that don't belong in the real world. There's an awkwardness to them, almost a childishness, like a fairy tale character. Me and Tom used to refer to Charles Bronson as "The Little Toy Soldier" who marches into the real world, realizes he can't function, so he has to march right back.

Filmmaker: Do you think about your place among your filmmaking peers?

Refn: I don't think like that, and you shouldn't because then you go crazy.

Filmmaker: Did you used to think like that?

Refn: When I was younger, because it was all preconceived. You wanted your art before you made it, you wanted to create your own myth before it was there. Like Charlie Bronson. I was impatient, I wanted to go somewhere. I always wanted to work with James Stewart, but he's no longer around. The filmmakers I would have loved to meet are more obscure, like Andy Milligan. He's a very obscure filmmaker who made films for Times Square in the 60s and 70s.

Filmmaker: Are you ever afraid you'll be disappointed when you meet your idols?

Refn: No, I never think of it like that. When I meet other filmmakers, I try not to talk about film. I talk about things like children and politics, which are much more important.

Filmmaker: Since you became a father, have your priorities as a person changed how you see things as a filmmaker?

Refn: Look, when you die you may be the greatest artist in the world but the only thing that they're going to ask you about when you want to enter heaven is, "Were you good with your children?" I think I make better films than I did before because I know what's more important and I have that easy relationship with my work. I'm more occupied with when I'm going to go to Asia and buy toys, because I collect toys. It's not that I don't love what I do, it's healthier to have more than that.

Filmmaker: Does filmmaking feel like work?

Refn: No, it feels like all fun and games. That's why it's so difficult to prioritize your time. You're forever in a struggle between good and evil because you want to make sure that St Peter lets you into heaven.

Filmmaker: You've shot all your movies in chronological order. Is this a strict principle of yours?

Refn: Yeah, it helps me discover the movie. Why make something if you know what it's going to be like? Now, of course, when you make a movie you make two movies. You make a physical movie, which is a physical journey, and you make the physical movie with the script. Stick to the script and write a very good one, or find a very good one. But shooting it in chronological order, you add a metaphysical part, where the movie takes on a life of its own, and that is what I enjoy more than anything else. I love to travel into the unknown and see what I come up with in the end.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you cried in a film, and which film was it?

Refn: I don't watch that many films anymore. My wife cried in Gran Torino when Clint Eastwood died. I thought that was pretty cool. I was very affected, very affected. I can't remember if I cried; she did, at least. I was very moved by it. I loved the movie, but then I love Clint Eastwood.

Filmmaker: If you had an unlimited budget and could cast whoever you wanted (alive or dead), what film would you make?

Refn: I would love to work with James Stewart, and it would take place in a room in total darkness. It would be about a guy who's trying to find a light switch. There wouldn't be a lot of dialogue.

Filmmaker: It sounds a little like Container, the Lukas Moodysson movie.

Refn: Okay, then I'm not going to make it. That's terrible. Then I would probably make a horror movie with James Stewart.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was the smartest decision you ever made?

Refn: Going bankrupt. Because I needed to crash in order to rebuild my own life and career and I was heading on the wrong course. It was in 2003, because of Fear X. I basically crashed, and then I made Pusher 2 and 3 to pay off my debt.

Filmmaker: So you did them purely to make money?

Refn: And it turned out to restart my career, because I was able to make two films much better than I did the first one. It was like back to basics, but I felt God had given me an opportunity to say, “Look, you're not doing this the right way.” I approached them purely as a commodity, but I was completely at ease doing them, because I didn't care. And that helped me see a way in. I thought, “My God, if I just didn't really care so much about the result and just did what I felt would be fun, I'd make better movies.”

Filmmaker: So you make movies much more instinctively now?

Refn: Sure. Now, it's anything that feels right, that's what you do and that's where the satisfaction comes in. It's not the result – it's over in 20 minutes, who cares? It's about getting there.

ANTONIO CAMPOS, AFTERSCHOOL

2009-10-02T22:16:00.001-04:00

EZRA MILLER IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ANTONIO CAMPOS' AFTERSCHOOL. COURTESY IFC FILMS.

To call Antonio Campos a precocious talent would be to understate his abilities. Amazingly, the 26-year-old writer director, a native of New York City, has already spent half of his young life making films. Campos directed his debut short, Puberty (1997), at the age of 13 as part of a New York Film Academy program, and over the course of his teens made numerous shorts – both fiction and documentary – including First Kiss (2001), Pandora (2002) and Who's Your Daddy? (2004). At 21, he had his short film Buy It Now (2005) play at the Cannes Film Festival Cinefondation (where it won the top prize), and in the process established a longstanding relationship with the festival. He returned to the Croisette two years later with another short, The Last 15, and also in 2007 was selected to take part in the festival's Residence Program. Along with Josh Mond and Sean Durkin, two former classmates from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Campos set up the production company Borderline Films, for whom he has done such work as the pop promo for the Shins' song "Sleeping Lessons."

Afterschool, which premiered at Cannes in 2008, is Antonio Campos' first feature. It tells the story of Rob (Ezra Miller), an introverted teenager at a prep school in upstate New York who witnesses the tragic death of two female classmates one day in a hallway at school. A frequent watcher of internet videos, Rob is a member of the school's A.V. club and is asked to create a video tribute to the deceased girls, however his unconventional approach to the project causes problems. Afterschool is a dark and damning examination of the YouTube generation, with Campos presenting a socially withdrawn protagonist who is more emotionally engaged by the funny, violent or sexual videos he watches online than by real life. The film has a cold, stark quality reminiscent of Michael Haneke's work and is remarkably assured, both stylistically and in its tackling of the themes of voyeurism and violence in a post-Columbine world. Indeed Afterschool is so accomplished and powerful a piece of filmmaking that it stands out not only among recent debut features, but also among all American films of the past few years.

Filmmaker spoke to Campos about the personal experiences that fueled the making of Afterschool, secretly recording people's conversations to plunder for material, and his childhood wish to be a ghostbuster.

ANTONIO CAMPOS, DIRECTOR OF AFTERSCHOOL. COURTESY IFC FILMS.

Filmmaker: When did you first get the idea for Afterschool?

Campos: About eight years ago when I started high school. The first week of high school, 9/11 happened and that day my best friend's father died in the towers. It was just a surreal time in general for anybody who lived in New York, but being connected to it in that way had an effect on me. Then at the end of that year an ex-girlfriend and a good friend of mine died in a freak accident traveling in Europe. In both of those cases, there were no bodies; I was very distant from it, but at the same time it had a very profound effect on me. That summer of 2002, the idea came that there was this boy who witnesses two girls die of a drug overdose. Originally, he happened to be in the bathroom with these two girls who'd never really spoken to, who he'd just seen in the hallways, but now he was witnessing them dying. Then over the years, I did a lot of other things, and my perspective changed on it. When I was 23, I got into the Residence, and that's when it all kind of came together. I had applied once before and got rejected. Bruno Dumont was on the jury, and that was horrible. I didn't even know who he was at the time, I just knew he was the scariest French person I'd seen in my life. And then I came home and saw his films, and now he's one of my favorite filmmakers. I went after that and rewrote the treatment, resubmitted the treatment and got in.

Filmmaker: After 9/11, was filmmaking the way that you were consciously trying to process these events?

Campos: I always wanted to be a filmmaker, I always loved movies. Early on, around the age of 10 or 11, I knew I wanted to make movies. I didn't really know what that entailed, but I just wanted to make them. Then at 13, I saw A Clockwork Orange, and that really made me realize what a director did. I don't know why, but it. That year, I went to the New York Film Academy and I made my first short film at the Cinema Village. At that time, I'd just started at a prep school, Dwight. It was smaller [than my old school], I didn't have a set of friends and I was ostracized because I was the new kid, so all these things were happening and I really didn't have anything else. I became really obsessive about school work, but then I was always writing down ideas of things that I wanted to make. Essentially, I was just writing down the things that were happening to me, but writing them as though they were happening to a character in a film. In that way, it helped me deal with it, and everything that I was dealing with became fodder for film. That was the way that I was processing things.

Filmmaker: Is that now an instinctive process?

Campos: It's become like everything is preproduction for something. I also got in the habit of recording a lot of conversations. From an early age, I was recording lots of family fights and discussions, and whenever my friends came over I recorded hanging out with them. I was always trying to document as much as possible without anybody knowing that I was documenting. I would record a lot in school. I had a tape recorder in my bag and a microphone stuffed in the edge of the bag so no one would notice it. I tried to record as much as possible, then I would listen to it. There's still a bunch of tapes that are sitting around that I haven't listened to in a long time. When I went to France, I brought them all with me in case I needed to listen to them.

Filmmaker: Hearing that stuff about your prep school, it's tempting to conclude that there's a lot of you in the character of Rob in Afterschool.

Campos: The first year at my new school was miserable. I was made fun of, I didn't have any real friends and the friends I did have were the ones that had made fun of me before – it was a strange relationship. But eventually I adapted to the school and I made friends, and by the time high school came around I had been there for a while, so it was slightly different. For me, the character of Rob is a concentration of a lot of my insecurities and my confusion, and in terms of experience there are definitely pieces from my own teenage years. There's also things from other people's experiences that I've taken, but he's essentially a very focused, concentrated amount of a certain aspect of me.

Filmmaker: Were those insecurities and confusions ones you had during your teenage years, or more recent?

Campos: Those things always stay with you. I'm always dealing with that transition I made when I was 11, going to this new school. Somehow I've always been upset about it, but at the same time it's the thing that drove me to make movies, so I can't be too angry about it. Those insecurities are always with you in a way, I think, and they just get processed differently or you're able to be more objective about them. High school is a very strange time because it seems like the end of the world, but when you get to the real world you can deal with these things and move on. I think those things are always with me, it's just that I've grown up and I can deal with them differently. Or if I'm not exactly feeling those things, I can intellectually look at them and understand them and go back to them when I need to.

Filmmaker: Do you still have an outsider's perspective?

Campos: I guess I've always felt more comfortable outside than I did inside. I always felt comfortable being the one just observing. I guess that's why I make movies, because I can be behind the camera. When I'm making a movie about something, I can completely disconnect from it. And, for me, confronting things in films has always been the most therapeutic thing to do, because it forces you not to be emotionally involved necessarily. I guess from my first film, Puberty, which I made when I was 13 and going through puberty, everything has been dealing with something that I'm experiencing or have experienced, or feelings that I've had. It's finally getting them out. It's also the best way for me to have dialogue with people. There are some things that I couldn't say to my family or friends, but in movies I can say it all, and don't have to say anything.

Filmmaker: You mentioned getting emotionally detached in order to make films, and this film itself is about emotionally detached viewers.

Campos: For me, Robert wasn't a character who didn't feel emotion, it was that he was filled with so many emotions he didn't know how to deal with them. Somehow watching these clips fulfilled that experience, but was from a safe distance. I think that this generation more than any other has been overexposed to images, and to get a rise out of them you need to get more disgusting, funnier – you're always waiting, and there's this momentary excitement about it. Robert's an extreme case of someone who I think most teenagers can find some sort of connection to.

Filmmaker: Afterschool seems to also be about both the voyeurism of cinema and the voyeurism of modern life.

Campos: I think so. One of the things that fascinated me about everything on YouTube was that it was just a lot of videos of people filming themselves or filming their friends. There was this obsession with just watching ourselves and then watching it back. How many times do we take a picture and then right there look at the picture as though it's happened a week ago or a year ago: “Whoa, that was amazing!” There's this constant desire to capture and to own, to distribute and to share. The film for me is about this obsession with watching, and it was just as much about the obsession of watching at my end as it was about watching at the boys' end.

Filmmaker: When people talk about the film, they mention Gus Van Sant and Michael Haneke a lot as comparisons. Were those two filmmakers a major influence on Afterschool?

Campos: Gus Van Sant was someone I knew the film would be compared to. He made a high school film, but my goal wasn't to make a Gus Van Sant high school film. I think a lot of the things that Gus Van Sant took from radical European cinema are the things that influenced and inspired me. We both watched Jeanne Dielman a couple of times. Michael Haneke has had a much more profound effect on me as a filmmaker. When I saw Code Unknown, it was like watching A Clockwork Orange: it was something that I'd never seen before, but a language that I could understand somehow and that I wanted to learn. Haneke was using video way before other people started looking at video and media that. I always think that Sex, Lies and Videotape is provocative, but Benny's Video is profound. The restraint and the amount of tension he's able to raise with nothing. And also the performances: Haneke is an actor's director. Before that, Bergman and Fassbinder and Kubrick were the others. Kubrick before anybody else.

Filmmaker: Where do you feel you are right now as a filmmaker?

Campos: The only way you can figure yourself out as filmmaker is to keep making films. At this moment, I've been making films for 13 years. I've been actively making films throughout my teenage years; not all of them were good, probably most of them sucked. I constantly consume as many movies as I can, constantly try to do as many things as I can to try and figure out who I am and what I do like and don't like. And the only way to do that when you're not making movies is by watching movies. There's so many things that you can learn as a filmmaker from watching films, and also watching a filmmaker's back catalogue. Watch everything by Fassbinder: see where he started, see where he went, and then try and work out why all of sudden he went from making Love is Colder Than Death to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. And then go back and watch Douglas Sirk movies. You watch Haneke and you've never seen anything like that before, but then you watch L'Argent by Bresson, and you go “Oh, fuck!” You watch something by Dumont, and then you watch Mouchette. And The White Ribbon seems like Haneke's tribute to Bergman, in a way. It's all connected.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Campos: The most vivid early movie memories were in my room with VHS literally watching Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II three times in a row back-to-back. My mom would be like, “What the hell are you doing? Get out of your room!” “No, it's amazing – I want to be a Ghostbuster!” The next big memory was going to see The Crying Game when I was 10 years old. My father had taken my to see Johnny Stecchino the week before, and I'd loved it, thought it was hilarious. So he said, “So this is it, enough of this Hollywood crap, we're only going to see foreign and independent movies now.” And when [the twist was revealed], I got really excited because I had figured it. I'd said, “There's something wrong with this woman – she is not a woman.”

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Campos: Yeah, I think so. Seriously, what's the point of making a movie if you don't take risks? There are those calculated risks where you think, “This could blow up in my face, but this could also be brilliant.”

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a kid?

Campos: A ghostbuster. Or an archaeologist, because of Indiana Jones. But then someone said, “Archaeology isn't that fun, it's not really like that.” So then I wanted to be a ghostbuster, but that didn't really exist. And then I wanted to be a filmmaker.

MICHAEL ALMEREYDA, PARADISE

2009-09-24T08:01:00.003-04:00

A STILL FROM DIRECTOR MICHAEL ALMEREYDA'S PARADISE. COURTESY POST FACTORY FILMS.

As he himself puts it, writer-director Michael Almereyda loves to make movies like a fighter likes to brawl, and over the course of his directorial career he has sought out an intriguing variety of creative challenges. Born in 1959 in Overland Park, Kansas, Almereyda spent his formative years in the Los Angeles area, where he discovered cinema and became a voracious moviegoer. Almereyda attended Harvard as an art history student, but dropped out in order to pursue his film career. He made his debut with the short film A Hero of Our Time (1985), and in 1989 directed his first feature Twister, a rural comedy about an oddball family in Kansas. Another Girl Another Planet (1992), a relationship drama shot in Pixelvision, was followed by Nadja (1994), an offbeat indie vampire movie starring Elina Löwensohn and produced by David Lynch. Almereyda made a more conventional horror movie, Trance (1998), before making his most high profile film, a modern-day version of Hamlet (2000) starring Ethan Hawke at the head of an all-star cast. He tapped into a similar mix of experimental and mainstream in his Pixelvision-shot drama about modern identity, Happy Here and Now (2002), which was set in New Orleans. Following two arts-based documentaries, This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss (2003) and William Eggleston in the Real World (2005), Almereyda returned to New Orleans for the post-Katrina companion pieces, New Orleans, Mon Amour, a fiction feature, and the documentary Big River Blues (both 2008).

Almereyda's latest effort, Paradise, sees him staying within the realm of non-fiction. The film is comprised of video footage shot by Almereyda over the past decade that captured the world as he saw it, often while traveling abroad. With no narration, captions or music, Paradise provides the audience with no clear context for each of the little episodes presented, yet one can detect recurring themes – the act of watching, children, innocence, the wonders of nature – which loosely tie together these snapshots of life. There are more recognizable episodes (a Sonic Youth concert, a visit to the set of Terrence Malick's The New World), yet the most beguiling moments are simpler: old men going to swim in the Irish Sea, a man in a drunken stupor with dog faithfully sitting by him, a baby suckling his mother's breast for the first time. Almereyda has a great eye for the beauties and idiosyncrasies of life, and while each episode is meaningful or resonant in its own way, the film's different parts chime and resonate with each other to create an almost hypnotic emotional experience.

Filmmaker spoke to Almereyda about the decade spent shooting Paradise, the overlap of life and filmmaking, and the influence on him of the late Manny Farber, to whom this film is dedicated.

MICHAEL ALMEREYDA, DIRECTOR OF PARADISE. COURTESY POST FACTORY FILMS.

Filmmaker: The footage in Paradise was shot over a long period of time, but at what point did you get the idea to make the film?

Almereyda: Well, the film's distilled from about 10 years of shooting. About five years ago, as my Eggleston documentary was almost finished, it occurred to me that this would be worth making into a movie, that it could be sustained and find a form and a shape to link all these fragments. The immediacy of the fragments could be retained, but these episodes might add up to something beyond their fragmentary nature. I applied for a Guggenheim Grant in 2004 and it was hugely helpful to have that. But the film took a long time to sift through, organize and edit. It really came into focus in the last two years.

Filmmaker: When you started filming stuff 10 years ago, how discriminating were you about what you were filming? Were there certain things that you were looking to capture?

Almereyda: I'd have to say no. It was all instinctive. It was truly like keeping a journal. I was interested in keeping track of experiences, people, places. Often as not, I carried a camera when I was traveling, visiting people I cared about. It was a way of holding onto things that I considered worth paying attention to. And over time these images and episodes become surrogate memories. Heightened memories.

Filmmaker: So it was like taking snapshots, but on video.

Almereyda: I guess so. A lot of my “professional” filmmaking would often be suspended -- I couldn’t find money for movies -- but my amateur activities offered a kind of cure. I sometimes feel like an out-of-work boxer who can’t stop getting into bar fights. But anyhow yes, basically, when something interesting was happening, I was glad to have a camera to record it.

Filmmaker: How many hours of footage did you end up with over those 10 years?

Almereyda: I would venture to say “countless.” [laughs] There were hundreds of tapes, and it’s fair to say that the most challenging aspect of this was the process of searching through them. Before I even worked with the editors, I’d have to review the material. It isn’t always easy to face your own messy life and camerawork.

Filmmaker: You said the filming was instinctive. Was it the same with the editing process?

Almereyda: I have a pretty good memory, so I'd be looking for specific things on the tapes - making an association, recognizing contrasts and connections. It grew organically over time. A basic element of editing is that you cherish things that are alive, that stand up to repeated viewing and, as Walter Murch says, you “Throw out the bad bits.” All the same, the film grew into four distinct sections, connected by dissolves to black, framed by a prologue and a coda. It’s meant to feel rough and loose, even slapped together, but there’s a structure.

Filmmaker: Once you'd conceived this as a film, did you find that the way you were documenting things changed? Did your focus widen or narrow?

Almereyda: I think inevitably there was more focus. I became aware of gaps that I wanted to plug. Specifically, there's a scene from Poland in 2008. I realized my life was limited. I don't have much exposure to working class environments or people, and when I was in Poland I specifically went out of my way to shoot people working in a factory, putting together some furniture. It was at Off Camera, a very generous, wacky festival in Kraków. Usually when I go to festivals, I do my best to escape, to experience the surrounding city. That was one of those occasions.

Filmmaker: With the exception of the segment on the set of The New World, the film is notable for the fact that its focus is on life beyond filmmaking, as opposed to your life as a filmmaker.

Almereyda: That's fair to say. But I wouldn't exactly say “beyond filmmaking,” because as you can see from this movie, life and filmmaking can get intimately tangled.

Filmmaker: One of the themes of the film is the act of watching, which somewhat comments on the relationship between filmmaker and audience.

Almereyda: John Berger wrote a line, and Chris Marker, probably independently, wrote something similar, that when you take a picture, part of the act of looking and taking the picture has to do with the response of the person being photographed. Part of what it means to take a picture is tied up with how you respond to people, the exchange, the interaction. At any rate, the film is meant to be about looking as an active part of life, rather than a passive one. It's about consciousness, awareness. If you're awake and alert, a lot of your life is more interesting than if you're not, [laughs] and that for me is a way of defining Paradise. If you can be excited about small details and commonplace events and the people around you, then life isn't so bad.

Filmmaker: One of the great issues of documentary filmmaking is the influence of the camera. Was that something that you gave thought to on this film?

Almereyda: Sure, you can’t really argue with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle – the notion that the observer changes the event. That’s old news. Not really a dynamic debate to me. Of course, the camera changes reality, but it doesn’t necessarily warp it. For all that, I’d say a common flaw in most contemporary documentaries is tangled with the use of music, the score pushing or milking an emotion, revealing an underlying impatience or lack of faith. Reality TV is, of course, a sham, wallpapered with music. So this film makes the most of natural sound – or the illusion of natural sound – with just a bit of music, courtesy of Paul Miller, to bracket the beginning and end.

Filmmaker: The film has a very rich subtext, because we're never given much context for each little scene and so are left to imagine the circumstances surrounding what we see.

Almereyda: In photography books, you're presented with a world of images that are seldom connected directly, but you feel and understand that the person who made these images is expressing a view of the world – reflecting a world of experience, but also organizing it, reshaping it. And the titles of the photographs seldom give you anything more than the place they were recorded. Paradise came out of that model, and the basic impulse to record things like in a journal. Other influences were Jonas Mekas' Walden and Sadie Benning's Pixelvision shorts – they have an immediacy I love and was hoping to emulate. Whether the people recorded are strangers or friends – and Paradise is evenly divided between them – as long as there's that immediacy, a connection, an emotion flares up from it.

Filmmaker: The film is hypnotic and enthralling, but very different from mainstream cinema.

Almereyda: But it’s meant to be accessible. Something about the length of the episodes and the pacing, the constantly re-starting rhythm - it's meant to be fun to watch. And then the layers of meaning and emotion should sneak up on you. Some people are going to be more patient than others. Of course, there’s no story, strictly speaking, but it's the nature of movies: you throw narrative out the door and it comes in through the window or up through the floorboards. There are narrative elements, repeated themes.

Filmmaker: The film's hypnotic quality and its fragmented nature made me think it could also work in a gallery as an installation.

Almereyda: I wouldn't mind straying into that world. It's not completely foreign to me, but I think – like everything else – that it's a bit of a racket, and I don't know the people who might be inspired to smuggle this work into a gallery. But my very first movie had a clip from Bill Viola's early work, and it's not like I'm oblivious to video art. Paradise is a kind of hybrid, and it wouldn't be out of place in a gallery.

Filmmaker: On the subject of its hybrid nature, I find there's a will to explore in your work generally that I think makes you difficult to categorize.

Almereyda: It’s worth talking about Manny Farber here - he died last year, and this film is dedicated to him. I met Manny when I was a teenager and he had a big influence in shaping the rest of my life. Manny, of course, set up an aesthetic standard that's been simplified as the “termite” versus the “white elephant.” He was on the side of the termite, the artist who explores and crosses boundaries, heedless of classification. This was also something of a curse for him as an artist - a writer who was equally invested in painting. I'd like to think that I'm working inside Manny’s tall shadow, guided by his example. When you look at my movies, it's not like they're esoteric, it's not like they're hard to uncode. That is, I hope they're not wilfully complicated but rich, because life is rich.

Filmmaker: Why exactly did you call the film Paradise.

Almereyda: When the title came to me, it seemed that it fit. I'm not convinced that there's much beyond the immediate life that we're living. Paradise is what we're in – this is the best we've got, here and now. It goes back to the idea that if you're awake and aware, life is very rewarding. But it's always vanishing, it's always slipping away, so there's an ache in it, a sense of yearning in the title. Derek Jarman wrote: “All home movies aspire to a vision of paradise.” How’s that for back-up?

Filmmaker: What's your best piece of advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Almereyda: I’d rather, glibly, quote Robert Frank, when he answered that question last year at Lincoln Center: “Keep your eyes open.” Simple, but you can forget to do it.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you wished you had a different job?

Almereyda: I don't think I've ever wished that. It's part of my curse: I like my job and wish I was working more.

Filmmaker: When you were a teenager, whose pin-up poster did you have on your wall?

Almereyda: I think I had the walls blank. I was an odd teenager.

Filmmaker: Did you have idols then?

Almereyda: Yeah, too many of them. One of my biggest was James Agee – that's an unlikely one to have at 14. I would have had a big poster of James Agee. [laughs] Like Manny Farber, he wasn't only a critic, he was a fierce, unclassifiable guy, and something like a recording angel. When I first met Manny, I asked him about Agee – they were good friends – and he invited me to San Diego to talk more. So that was the spark for that life-changing encounter. It all connects back to Agee.

BOB BYINGTON, HARMONY AND ME

2009-09-18T17:05:00.001-04:00

JUSTIN RICE IN WRITER-DIRECTOR BOB BYINGTON'S HARMONY AND ME. COURTESY HARMONY AND ME, LLC.

From Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez to Bryan Poyser and the Zellner brothers, Austin is a hotbed of gifted directors, and Bob Byington now emerges from there as another talent to be reckoned with. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Byington studied at UC-Santa Cruz before going to graduate school at the University of Texas, where he used his American Studies major to indulge his newfound love for the movies. In 1995, he cut his teeth as a production assistant on the indie hit The Last Supper, and the next year wrote and directed his feature debut Shameless, about an Austin-set, Generation X love triangle. His next film, Olympia, the story of a Mexican soap star who dreams of competing in the Olympics, was the opening night movie at the SXSW film festival in 1998. However, Byington then all but dropped off the map for a decade, only reappearing briefly in 2005, when he won the Austin Chronicle's short story contest. In 2008, though, he returned with the edgy comedy RSO [Registered Sex Offender], which premiered at SXSW 2008 before getting a roadshow release as part of Todd Sklar's Range Life Entertainment tour. Byington also had a cameo in Beeswax (2009), the most recent film from Andrew Bujalski, who himself had appeared in a small role in RSO.

Seemingly making up for lost time, Byington has rapidly followed up RSO with Harmony and Me, an offbeat comedy which was aided by an Annenberg Film Fellowship grant from the Sundance Institute. The film revolves around lovelorn Harmony (Justin Rice, the Bishop Allen frontman and Bujalski regular), who is still recovering from being dumped a year previously by his ex-girlfriend Jessica (Kristin Tucker) – and lets everybody know about it. Trying to help him (or not) recover from his heartbreak are a motley cast of friends and co-workers, and the members of his oddball, dysfunctional family, with Alex Karpovsky, Kevin Corrigan, Pat Healy and Byington himself turning in great performances in these roles. Harmony and Me, clocking in at a slim 75 minutes, has a real sweetness and freewheeling charm thanks to Byington's script and Rice's perfectly pitched lead performance. And though its subject matter, indie cast and loose, vérité cinematography are somewhat redolent of a mumblecore movie, its rich humor – sometimes dry, sometimes much more direct – recalls the New Hollywood comedies from the 70s.

Filmmaker spoke to Byington about the inspiration Harmony Korine provided the movie, the film's musical aspects, and his "God-imposed" hiatus.

BOB BYINGTON, WRITER-DIRECTOR OF HARMONY AND ME. COURTESY HARMONY AND ME, LLC.

Filmmaker: Before the interview started, you mentioned Harmony Korine and said that he was an inspiration for the character of Harmony.

Byington: He was in my mind's eye when I started. I had seen him at Telluride in the mid-90s, and his personality had a big impact on me. His demeanor in the world was one of the inspirations for the character. That was blended in with seeing Justin Rice in Mutual Appreciation, and sort of writing it for him in my mind's eye also. And then I was also writing it for the guy who was in Registered Sex Offender, Gabriel McIver. But then Justin basically emerged out of that rubble.

Filmmaker: Did you ever approach Korine about playing the role.

Byington: No. I don't know him. But I think he's a very compelling presence on screen. I know he's in Gummo very briefly, and I wish he'd be more of a presence in his own work.

Filmmaker: Considering you partially wrote it for Justin, how much did you have to adapt it for him once he committed to the role? Were all the musical elements were already there?

Byington: There were musical elements, but it was truly an accident. I had tried to stay away from his music, except for Mutual Appreciation, where he's a musician. I tried to stay away from Bishop Allen while I was writing it, for reasons I'm not super clear on. I just didn't gravitate to it. Maybe I didn't want it to be a like an indie rocker in the lead, But then when he got there, he was really good and really interesting when he'd play instruments. He was doing these piano lessons in the movie, and he was genuinely curious about the piano in a way that really worked for the scene. He genuinely wanted to learn how to play better with his left hand, and he wanted to use the pedals, but he'd never really learned how. So he took those two curiosities and really there was no acting or faking, it was all real. Those scenes have a real documentary quality: he comes in and says, “I want to learn this and this.”

Filmmaker: Was there a lot of improv in the movie? There are not scenes that feel much more improvised than others.

Byington: It depended. For instance, the wedding singer was a friend of mine and I really like him a lot as a performer, but he's not an actor, so we were much better off saying, “OK, we're doing this and this in the scene,” than trying to use a script with him. [The woman playing] Justin's mom is not an actor, so we were going to be much better just describing the scene to her, whereas with Karpovsky, Healy and Corrigan, you want to give them scripted material. They can improvise, but can also make good scripted material great, whereas the wedding singer would make great scripted material very bad.

Filmmaker: There's a moment in the film where Jerm Pollett says to Justin Rice's musical style is "playful and absurd," sometimes desperate but with a lightness to it, and that for me summed up the movie as well to a degree.

Byington: Good, I think that's what we were after, in a way. Playful, for sure. I know that I wanted to make an open-hearted movie, and I felt like I was able to put that idea into Justin playing the lead, extending across these scenes. You always want to try to create a tone for your movie, but you're always leaving a lot up to accidental elements that make their way into the tone.

Filmmaker: What were your tonal influences?

Byington: A tonal influence, no question, would be Stroszek, the Werner Herzog movie. The way he worked on that movie, he was really interested in seeing how things would play out in a scene and he brought a rigorous curiosity to the process. And he cast a non-actor in the lead so he would have that [freshness]. I also talk about this other film, Days of Being Wild, the Wong Kar-wai movie. There's something about the tone of that that really gets me. It's so... [long pause] This interview could come to a screeching halt while I try to figure out the word! It just flows.

Filmmaker: When you mentioned Herzog casting a non-actor in Stroszek, it made me wonder whether Justin Rice can still be considered a non-actor.

Byington: I don't know. Great question, great question. I think he brings a lot of qualities [of the non-actor], but he's very good with scripted material and he was very prepared like an actor. You should ask him – I'd like to hear his answer.

Filmmaker: Do you feel Justin approached the material in a markedly different way from trained actors like Pat Healy or Kevin Corrigan?

Byington: We didn't really talk about character at all. I gave him a Buñuel book, My Last Sigh, and that was really my only explanation for what I was after in the movie. He read the whole thing the next day on a five-hour flight, and once I knew that he'd read it I sort of felt like there wouldn't be any communication issues about the character after that. He also pointed out my favorite paragraph in the book, so I was like, “OK, I don't think we need to worry about this anymore.” And that turned out to be true. We got on really well too. I had made Registered Sex Offender and fought a lot with the guy playing the lead, so I had been bracing myself for fights with Justin, but we never disagreed.

Filmmaker: Is it true that the documentary style you used for RSO led to the way you shot Harmony and Me?

Byington: Yeah, no question. It was learning how to do that on RSO and then applying those lessons on Harmony. I shot RSO myself and then worked with a D.P. on Harmony, but ended up shooting about half of the film. We would hand the camera to the sound guy and let him shoot. People who like cinematography would probably slam the movie by saying, “It looks like the sound guy shot it,” and he did shoot some of it! He directed a couple of scenes too. He plays the little brother. He worked on RSO with me and we knew he was going to work his way into Harmony.

Filmmaker: The whole family were great, and really reminded me of more old school Hollywood comedies.

Byington: I wanted to play the older brother so that I could be mean to Justin without being mean director-to-actor. Instead, I got to be mean as an actor and he got to be mean to me back, so any potential fight we might have had would have been diverted and run off to those scenes. It's a very effective method.

Filmmaker: You're extremely funny in both this film and Beeswax, but in both you play seemingly rather dim characters. Or at least very laconic.

Byington: I really wanted to play the character in Harmony like he's a Republican and give him an obduracy – the way he looks at his brother is very narrow. And doing that was really fun. It was not to make fun of anything or because I hate Republicans, I just wanted to play my idea of a very narrow perspective. It was like, “This is my brother. I think these four things about him, and everything I say is a subset of those four things.” It was fun! Like him asking me for money – I've asked so many people for money that it was so fun to play the guy that was being asked for money. “I get to play that guy?! Awesome, let's go!”

Filmmaker: The subtitle of the movie is “A physical comedy about yearning.” Can you explain that a little more fully? It's not a physical comedy in the traditional sense, but my take is that it refers to the physical manifestations of yearning.

Byington: That's very good – that's way better than I could say. I'm serious! That phrase popped into my head, and I was aware that it's not in the strictest sense a physical comedy, but then I like the notion of wearing your heart on your sleeve in a physical way. I like the physicality of his journey: I wanted to do a wedding scene, I wanted to do a funeral scene, I wanted to do a scene in a hospital. There's a physical element to that, and that's why it's a “physical comedy.” When we want something and we can't hide it, it's awful, in a way. But there's a lot of humor in that too. When you're trying to get over somebody and you're talking to your friend about it for the tenth time and want to rephrase it so that they're interested this time: “OK, I know that I bored your ass off about in this past, but this time I'm going to say this in a way that you'll actually get it, you'll understand everything.”

Filmmaker: Looking at your bio, you made a couple of movies in the 90s and then had a decade-long hiatus.

Byington: You always want to have a story for a hiatus, but I don't know if I have a story for the hiatus. I could make one up, but there's no real story. Should I make one up? Maybe you could make one up!

Filmmaker: Was it a “self-imposed” hiatus? Or was it just things not working out?

Byington: If you believe in God, it was imposed by God. If you don't, I guess it was self-imposed.

Filmmaker: All I have down as happening in between you making Olympia and Registered Sex Offender is you winning a short story contest run by the Austin Chronicle.

Byington: Yeah, I spent all that time working on that short story! I really wanted to win, so I spent seven years on that story. One word per week. That's a great story for the hiatus!

Filmmaker: It suggests a Knut Hamsun-like dedication to your craft.

Byington: Well, winning that contest did give me a little boost of confidence going into RSO. RSO was off the ground already, but out of over 300 entrants it was nice to win. I think I won because it was the shortest story that they had to read. That's my recommendation for a short story contest: keep it really short.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Byington: I don't know what the first one I saw was. I remember seeing Star Wars – everyone remembers seeing Star Wars, right? (I don't want to date myself... I saw it in the womb.) I remember seeing Chinatown when I was a freshman in college and I had never experienced the feeling that there was an intelligence behind a film until I saw that. When I was walking out of the film, I thought, “Somebody made that movie.” I remember seeing Annie Hall again and then thinking, “Yeah, somebody's making this movie.” And that was weird. And cool.

Filmmaker: If you could travel back in time and be able to make movies in a time and place of your choice, where and when would it be?

Byington: Wow, great question. I've romanticized that Dostoevsky was writing in during the late 1800s, and the Russian milieu he was writing in, and I'm very interested in the comedy in his work. He's a very funny writer to me, so I think I would like to make a Dostoevskian comedy in that era. The Idiot is a tremendously funny novel. Everyone talks about how bleak it is – which it is – but it's also hilarious.

Filmmaker: What's the most embarrassing film you watched the whole of on a plane?

Byington: I saw Failure to Launch on an airplane and there's no question that it's hands down the worst I've ever seen.

Filmmaker: I interviewed Rob Siegel recently, and he said that there's a subset of movies that you see on planes that star Matthew McConnaughey, Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson and...

Byington: ...Sarah Jessica Parker! It's a miracle I remembered who's in it, a miracle.

Filmmaker: Finally, which film do you wish you'd directed?

Byington: Chinatown came to mind when you said that. I've now seen it 30 times. I'm in awe of how accomplished that movie is. Oh, and I wish I'd directed the first scene of Inglourious Basterds. You're like, “Holy motherfucking shit, this guy's a motherfucking director!”

JOE BERLINGER, CRUDE

2009-09-09T17:18:00.002-04:00

A STILL FROM DIRECTOR JOE BERLINGER'S CRUDE. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.

Joe Berlinger is a filmmaker who makes documentaries that tell important stories with integrity, while still always entertaining his audiences. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1961, Berlinger studied English and German at Colgate University, and got his first taste of the movie business while working on TV commercials at an advertising agency in Frankfurt. After deciding he wanted to make films, he moved to New York City, where he got a job working for the Maysles brothers. Berlinger’s first foray into directing was the documentary short Outrageous Taxi Stories (1989), and he made his feature debut in 1992 with Brother’s Keeper, a non-fiction film about a man accused of killing his brother, co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky. The film became a self-distributed hit for Berlinger and Sinofsky, and the pair returned to the subject of small town murder in Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), which won huge acclaim and has become a cult classic. (A follow-up film, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, was released in 2000.) Berlinger briefly moved into fiction filmmaking with Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which he co-wrote as well as directed, but returned to portraying real life extremes with Sinofsky on Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004), a documentary about the turbulent genesis of the iconic rock band’s album “St. Anger.” Berlinger is also active in television as the creator of such shows as Iconoclasts, FanClub and The Wrong Man, and the director of TV documentaries like Gray Matter and Judgment Day: Should the Guilty Go Free. Berlinger’s latest film, Crude, is something of a departure for the director as it presents a story on a much bigger scale than his previous documentaries. The film focuses on the horrific damage done to the Ecuadorian rainforest (and the impact on its indigenous inhabitants), and the efforts of oil worker-turned-lawyer Pablo Fajardo to hold the oil behemoth Chevron accountable. Crude has aspects of both the environmental documentary and the David and Goliath tale, but adds up to an even more intriguing film than it might seem on paper. Berlinger uses the case as a way of scrutinizing the inadequacy of the judicial system to handle such an incident, while also addressing other problematic aspects of the lawsuit such as Fajardo’s backing by a large legal firm that is bankrolling him purely for profit. While previous Berlinger movies such as Brother’s Keeper and Paradise Lost have shed light on a situation in the hope of affecting positive change, Crude shows progress being made in the case (Fajardo being backed by the Ecuadorian president and becoming a minor celebrity), but ultimately leaves viewers with the feeling that nothing – not even victory in the courts or a big payout from Chevron – will come close to putting things right. Filmmaker spoke to Berlinger about his decision to make an activist film, the dangers of going up against a corporate giant, and his love of Planet of the Apes.

JOE BERLINGER, DIRECTOR OF CRUDE. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.

Filmmaker: How did you first come across this story?

Berlinger: This was not something I thought was going to be my next film. My aspirations at the beginning were quite humble and in fact I found myself really not thinking I was going to make this film. I had a lot of hesitation about it. Steven Donziger, the plaintiff's attorney, came to my office. Steven started talking about the case and all of my red flags went up because at the time I didn't know there was a Pablo Fajardo, at the time I didn't know there was going to be some present tense inspections – all I knew was that he was telling me about this 13-year struggle.

Filmmaker: Obviously, that was problematic to you because that set-up is hardly very cinematic.

Berlinger: Yeah, I'm a present tense, cinéma vérité filmmaker and it seemed like I'd missed the story. If it's a 13-year legal struggle, how am I going to dramatize it? That was the first red flag, and the second red flag was this was a plaintiff's attorney clearly with an agenda and I am not that kind of a filmmaker. My films are very humanistic. Brother's Keeper and Paradise Lost deal with some very serious social issues, but I consider myself a storyteller first and a journalist second. I make these ambiguous human portraits and this was a guy who had a message and wanted to bang that message over people's heads. I said, “I'm not sure I'm the right filmmaker for you. There's Robert Greenwald, there's Michael Moore – people who make films with a very specific and clear point of view, and I'm not one of those guys. I'm also not sure how to film a story that's 13 years old – maybe this is a 60 Minutes news piece.” It didn't have the right aesthetic criteria for me and the biggest thing was there was no central character. You need a good central character to get your teeth stuck into.

Filmmaker: And yet you got hooked by the story.

Berlinger: Steven's a very charismatic, persuasive guy and he convinced me to take a trip with him. I said, “As long as you know I have lots of reservations, sure I'll go. I've never been to the rainforest and it sounds like an adventure, but I'm dubious that this will be a film.” He just kept saying, “If you only see the pollution...” When I went down, it was 10 times worse than I imagined, it was far worse than he had explained. It was horrifying, I could not believe what I was looking at. Here is a place that's supposed to be a paradise on earth, but there's these noxious pits leaching shit into the environment – it was shocking. I just thought to myself, “This may not have the aesthetic criteria that I usually look for, maybe I won't have a central character and maybe there won't be present tense action, but I'm just going to start documenting this.” I felt like I couldn't turn my back on these people, and that's really why I started the film.

Filmmaker: How much of a factor was funding in your decision?

Berlinger: When Bruce Sinofsky and I made Brother's Keeper, we rolled the dice, we maxed out 10 credit cards, put all of our savings into it, really took a chance – the typical story. Then we got into Sundance, won a prize and our careers were established. But ever since Brother's Keeper, I swore I wasn't going to do it again, so going down to South America, one of my biggest concerns was how I was going to fund it. But when I got home I thought, “Technology is so cheap, I own these little HD cameras, and what's a couple of plane tickets? I'm going to just start making this film and not worry who's going to pay for it, not worry about distribution.” So I threw myself into it and made a commitment that I'd go down there every couple of weeks and see where it went, while doing other things – like Iconoclasts, commercials and myriad other things – which gave me the financial freedom to do it. The funny thing is, once I allowed all my aesthetic and financial criteria to be thrown out the door, things started materializing in a very Zen-like way. On the second trip, I met Pablo Fajardo, a guy who just oozes credibility and authenticity. I was just awestruck by this guy. I knew I had a juicy character and I started feeling, “This could be something...” And then on the third trip, they started talking about these judicial inspections finally being approved. It's only one phase of the trial, but in the movie it stands in as the trial and provides the thing I never thought I'd have, which is this great present tense device. How dramatic to have these lawyers in jungle gear arguing their cases in front of these pollution sites in the middle of the Amazon. During the first inspection, I thought, “This could be a movie.” But I have to be honest, during the entire process I was wondering, “Does an American audience really want to see this?” Even when I was cutting it, I was thinking, “I think this is good and important, but God knows if this is going to see the light of day.”

Filmmaker: How much do you feel your presence as a filmmaker had an impact on what transpired? I suppose it's one of the quintessential questions for a documentarian.

Berlinger: Yeah, it's a fascinating question that I'm endlessly interested in with all of my work, the Heisenberg principle of documentary making: do you change things by observing? As truthful as I think my films are, I'm a firm believer that no film is the objective truth about anything. With Metallica, Lars [Ullrich] has said many times that the cameras were like a truth serum, that had they not been there the therapy would have ended unsuccessfully and early and the band probably would have broken up. In Brother's Keeper, I definitely feel like the making of the film brought more people out to support [Delbert Ward] and increase the level of support. With this film, however, I actually think the presence of the camera was truly invisible, because I didn't make it known that I was a filmmaker. I was fearful for my life throughout the making of most of this film, so I did not announce who I was or what my intentions were, and I certainly didn't let Chevron know I was making this film. We had a small crew and because there were a lot of NGOs (like Amazon Watch) and local media down there observing the trial, so I just kind of fit in.

Filmmaker: You always bring to your films nuance and complexity, and here you very interestingly juxtapose Steven, a toughened lawyer who coaches Amazonian Indians on what to say in front of the Chevron shareholders meeting, with the pure and untarnished Pablo.

Berlinger: What I like about this film is that I think it subverts many of the conventions of normal advocacy filmmaking. It's really not about the lawsuit, it's about a much larger issue. I'm not smart enough – I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a scientist – to tell you that Chevron has not wrapped itself up in enough legal technicalities that it might possibly prevail in the eyes of the law, but from the moral standpoint the culpability lays at their door. It's a portrait of how we see justice in the world and the inadequacy of the legal structure to really handle these kinds of humanitarian and environmental crises, because the thing has gone on for 17 years and it could go on for another 17 years. The other way I think it subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking is that it allows Chevron to have their full say. I worked really hard to get them into the film, I thought it was really important. The reason is you want the audience to be presented with the pros and cons, weigh them, and come to their own conclusion as opposed to being lectured to. The film has all sorts of nuance and observations that you don't usually find in this kind of a film. I think that's why it works as a film.

Filmmaker: You said before that you were fearful for your life for much of filming. Were you afraid of what Chevron could do to you then? And what's your relationship with them now?

Berlinger: I want to be very clear: I don't think the executives in San Ramon would ever order a hit on a filmmaker. I'm not that jaded. Often the home office contracts with a local company that also contracts with local people, and sometimes those local people – in order to protect that chain of employment – take matters into their own hands. So that doesn't mean Chevron said, “Hey, go knock off Joe Berlinger,” but the local people could easily say, “We don't want this being exposed. We've got to take care of this guy.” Even if that just means roughing me up. I was very aware of those stories, and we were also a couple of miles from the Columbian border, where the FARC was very active, where drug runners are very active, where American oil industry executives have been kidnapped for ransom. I just wanted to fly beneath the radar. [laughs]

Filmmaker: You have interviews with Chevron staffers in the film. At what stage did you tell them you were making the film?

Berlinger: I waited until I felt like I had the film in the can. From about August 2007 until August 2008, I pursued Chevron. The jungle part of the film was done. They took it as a bad sign that I hadn't told them, but I told them, “I was filming your lawyers, but now I want you to participate. I have your version of the story via the trial, but it would be much better if U.S. executives explained your position in English.” I sent them all my films, then delay, delay, delay. They missed every deadline I gave them. Finally round August of 2008, I said, “Look, the Sundance Film Festival rough cut deadline that I'm gunning for is mid-September. The movie is 90% edited, and I'm really down to the wire. I'd love to have you in the film, but you've got to make a decision.” So, finally, they said, “Yes, we'll do the interviews.” They bought a hotel room suite, and they gave me the two people. The funny thing is, when we're setting up, another crew walks in. I was like, “Are you guys in the right place?” They said, “Yeah, we're here to do the Chevron shoot. We're here to film you.” Then the Chevron media spokesman came in and said, “Yes, I hope you don't mind but we're going to film this so we have a record of it.” That was their way of putting me on notice. I thought it was very funny. It was kinda smart, it was their semi-intimidation tactic to say, “Don't manipulate the edit, because we have a record of it.” Not that I would. That was joke – I didn't need to manipulate it! [laughs]

Filmmaker: What was your cinematic epiphany?

Berlinger: I started off my career in advertising. I was a language major and because I spoke a bunch of languages I ended up getting this great job when I was 23 producing television commercials in Frankfurt. So I stumbled into being on a film set because of language skills, not because of desire to be a filmmaker. That job in Frankfurt took me to London every two weeks for coordination meetings with clients. One day I walked into a theater to watch a movie in Piccadilly Circus and I saw Birdy. I thought that was the most amazing film. I had been on a shoot and it was one of the first shoots I'd been on, and I thought, “Oh, my God, I want to tell stories!”

Filmmaker: Which phrase best describes your philosophy on life?

Berlinger: I don't know if I have a phrase, but one of the reasons I wanted to make this film – and one of the single most important things I've learned over my lifetime and the thing that I most want to impart to my children – is that the good guys aren't always who you think they are.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Berlinger: There are two early formative films. My earliest filmgoing memory is actually Planet of the Apes, and that was a terrifying experience. It blew me away with its message. Believe it or not, the original Planet of the Apes is on my top 10 list. Maybe it's just because I was a kid, but I'm sorry – and I've been ridiculed for this – one of the greatest moments in cinema for me is when the astronauts are in that field with the mutant humans, and the first time that they realize they're going to get hunted down, and all of a sudden the apes appear on horseback. The original time that happened, that was one of the great moments in cinema. Then the first horror movie I saw, when I was nine, was Tales from the Crypt, which was a compendium. I recently saw it and the blood was so fake, I can't believe it scared me. My father took a bunch of kids to that movie – I think I was probably too young to see it – and he just stopped the car and turned the engine off and turned the lights out in the middle of the road, just to scare the shit out of us. Then he got out of the car and ran around, and we were all scared to death.

ALEXIS DOS SANTOS, UNMADE BEDS

2009-09-02T11:27:00.001-04:00

FERNANDO TIELVE AND DÉBORAH FRANÇOIS IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ALEXIS DOS SANTOS' UNMADE BEDS. COURTESY IFC FILMS.

If there's a restlessness to the filmmaking of Alexis Dos Santos, you only have to look at the background of the young Argentinian writer-director to understand why. Born in Buenos Aires, Dos Santos relocated with his family to a small village in Patagonia when he was eight. He returned to the capital city to study Architecture at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, then moved on to study acting, and finally settled on filmmaking as his vocation. After completing his undergraduate studies at the Universidad del Cine, he moved to Barcelona for a screenwriting course, and then on to London, where he studied under Stephen Frears in the directors' program at the National Film and Television School, getting in on the strength of his black-and-white short Meteoritos (1998). During his time at the NFTS, Dos Santos made more shorts – Watching Planes (1999), Axolotl (2000), Snapshots (2001) and Sand (2001) – which played at festivals worldwide, winning both prizes and acclaim. After an extended period in London, he returned to Argentina to make his debut feature, Glue (2007), the story of three awkward adolescents coming of age in his own hometown in Patagonia.

Dos Santos' latest film ,Unmade Beds is his second feature, though it is a project he has been developing since 2001, when he was still at film school. Set in London, the movie presents a double narrative as it follows two attractive foreigners, messy-haired Spaniard Axl (Fernando Tielve) and pretty but delicate Belgian Vera (Déborah François). They are two lost souls looking for answers: Axl has come to London to track down the father who abandoned him as an infant, while Vera is recovering from a painful break-up. Dos Santos' sophomore effort enthusiastically conveys the energy and vibrancy of London's hipster squats and live music scene while offsetting this with two sensitive, emotionally insightful portraits. Featuring a smart, original script, a great indie soundtrack and strong performances from its cosmopolitan cast Unmade Beds is a charming and idiosyncratic crowd pleaser.

Filmmaker spoke to Dos Santos about the film's long gestation period, his justification for throwing parties on the set of Unmade Beds, and his desire to work with Macaulay Culkin.

WRITER-DIRECTOR ALEXIS DOS SANTOS ON THE SET OF UNMADE BEDS. COURTESY IFC FILMS.

Filmmaker: There was a very long gestation period with Unmade Beds. Didn't you start writing it first in around 2001?

Dos Santos: Yeah, I think I was still at film school when I started writing notes about the film, so it's been a long time. But in between there were probably 20 drafts of the script and hundreds of pages of notes and characters' diaries and things.

Filmmaker: From what I've read, you don't always write a conventional script.

Dos Santos: The thing was, I was working on Unmade Beds for quite a long time, and then I wrote a little story that was Glue. I went to Argentina and shot something, and it ended up being the whole film. It was all based on improvisations, but that came out of being tired of the process of writing and rewriting and just thinking, “You can make a film even if you don't write every single line of it.” Things are going to change anyway with the actors and in the edit, and I like improvising as well. I went back to [Unmade Beds] after I finished Glue and we made a final draft, and that was what we shot.

Filmmaker: How fleshed out was the script? Did you still leave room for improvisation?

Dos Santos: Yeah, because my experience with Glue was very good, very positive: I worked with the actors and basically we wrote and shot a film in three weeks. That gave me the confidence to keep improvising, and I felt that I needed to be not very respectful with material that I'd been working on for very long. With lines of dialogue that I'd written years before, I'd be like, “Whatever, change it. I don't care.”

Filmmaker: How clear a picture of the characters and the story did you have when you went into production?

Dos Santos: It was somehow very clear because they've been with me for such a long time. Character is the thing that I develop the most. I write notes on characters for a very long time usually, and during rewrites I always go back and write characters' diaries; I had hundreds of pages of Axl's diaries and Vera's diaries and their thoughts.

Filmmaker: How much does that picture you have of characters change once you've cast the movie?

Dos Santos: In this case, the nationalities changed, for instance. And then they become real, because suddenly they're a person and it's very different. When I write, I tend to think about someone even if I know that they're not going to be right or they're going to be too old by the time I make it. [laughs] With Unmade Beds, for a while I had different people in mind but then whoever comes brings a lot of their own world as well.

Filmmaker: Almost every single movie with a twentysomething boy and girl is a romance between the two of them, but you changed it up with a parallel narrative about two people who are not, in fact, destined to be together.

Dos Santos: It was always in my head that you were witnessing these two lives and sharing stuff with them. Maybe we're so used to romantic comedies that we think they're probably going to meet at the end, but it doesn't make sense for them to have anything. And then what they have is this night that one of them doesn't remember. I think it was more about the challenge because I didn't have any models to follow. When you look at films, you think “Oh, this is like this other one,” or it's like The Catcher in the Rye. But I didn't have that with Unmade Beds because they are two different stories: one is a love story and the other one is a father-and-son kind of thing.

Filmmaker: Glue was about struggling with growing up, and this feels like a continuation of that sort of narrative.

Dos Santos: Something that I realized when I was doing Glue was that the film was mainly focused on the boys, and the character of the girl grew a lot when we were shooting because of course we were improvising and she was really good. Then I realized that I was almost doing the Unmade Beds thing and going into her point of view. Because it hadn't been planned – it came halfway through the film – I quite liked this idea. Splitting your point of view is something that you can't do in life, but that you can do in fiction. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Axl wears a school blazer and you wear an identical one. Does that mean the character is partly based on you?

Dos Santos: I don't know if Axl is like me. [laughs] You know, I put myself in a lot of the characters somehow and I don't look at them from a distance. I tend to put little personal things inside each one, but then they are their own people and they have their own stories and they're fiction. The first note that I wrote about Axl's character was based on something that happened to me, which was one morning waking up and not remembering [what had happened the night before]. I had in my pocket a book of poetry in German that it was dedicated to me, and I had no idea where it came from. Or why. And I don't even read German, so why would I have that? And I sort of remembered kissing someone but I wasn't sure if I did or not. Or who it was. So then I started writing notes about someone who doesn't remember the night before, and that's how I first thought of the character. That's the only personal trait. [laughs]

Filmmaker: It seems like the vibrant London you portray is something you maybe experienced yourself while a student at the National Film and Television School.

Dos Santos: The world of music is something that I discovered a bit later in London, because I was at film school eight hours a day or watching films at home. Suddenly I saw how all artforms are melting together. The people doing art and music and film and fashion all live in the same area of London and all hang out in the same places. There were people from all around and I tried to do things that were creative and quite fun. And then the other thing was that I was hanging out in a couple of squats, and one of them was where my best friends were living. I shot a music video there, and that's where the idea of the squat [in the movie] came from.

Filmmaker: How much do you feel your identity as a Latin American filmmaker is present in this film?

Dos Santos: The thing about nationality is that I've been living abroad for 12 years so I don't know how I feel about putting [that tag on myself]. I don't even think most Argentinian directors want to see themselves as that. It's weird, if you ask me how I see myself amongst contemporary British filmmakers, I would probably find my place better. I think probably the only other Latin American director that I relate to is Gerardo Naranjo, who is making films in Mexico. But otherwise I don't know. I haven't seen so many films, because living 12 years in Europe you don't get access to everything produced here.

Filmmaker: A lot of people talk about your work and the French New Wave. Was that a big influence for you?

Dos Santos: It was when I was in film school, like early Godard films, and I was watching obsessively Wong Kar-wai for a period. But when I was shooting the film, I was really just trying to do my own thing and make a film that belongs to its own world and try to not really have references [to other films]. I have them anyway in your head because my whole idea of film language is based on films that I've seen, but I don't go back to them before filming and study them.

Filmmaker: What was your set like? It seems like you were surrounded by friends, and I'd imagine it was a fun place to be.

Dos Santos: It was mainly friends, partly because we were working low budget and we had to keep the crew quite young, but also because I quite liked working with people of my generation. It was fun. We were throwing parties in the squat location because we needed the trash from the parties for the art department. That was our excuse. [laughs]

Filmmaker: At film school, you were taught by Stephen Frears and Joachim Trier was one of your classmates. What memories do you have of your time there?

Dos Santos: It was good to have Stephen around when I was editing two of my shorts; he would sit there and watch things with me. He doesn't tell you a lot or come up with stories. When you ask him “How was this film?”, he's always like, “Oh, I just happened to be there. They're just great actors and did a good job.” But when I was editing, he made me go back and forth between rushes and what I had cut and look for new things. That was the one thing that I learned from him. And me and Joachim just talked about film constantly for the three years, basically. He was the only one I had an affinity with in terms of film interests, so we became close friends.

Filmmaker: Before you went to film school you were an architecture student. What did that training teach you that you have managed to use as a writer-director?

Dos Santos: I think it helped me to visualize things and to have an idea for a project and how to work [towards that]. It made me understand scriptwriting and I think because of architecture I've developed an eye for framing. It's weird, they're such different disciplines. I was doing acting at the same time as architecture. It kind of makes sense that acting and architecture would add up to film directing.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you wished you had a different job?

Dos Santos: [laughs] Yesterday. Because I don't know what to do with my life at the moment. Now I have to write a new script, and I see myself painting and playing the guitar and doing things that have nothing to do with writing.

Filmmaker: Which actor would you pay to see in anything?

Dos Santos: Macaulay Culkin. [laughs] I'm looking forward to seeing another film with him, but I don't seem to be able to find him anywhere. I think the last thing I saw him in was Party Monster. That was a while ago. I would love to make a film with him.

Filmmaker: If you had an unlimited budget and could cast whoever you wanted (alive or dead), what film would you make?

Dos Santos: I would do a contemporary interpretation of Ernst Lubitsch's Design For Living with Macaulay Culkin, Michael Cera and probably Soko (I'm betting on Soko although I haven't seen her acting yet). Design For Living is an amazing film, so avant-garde for its time and when you watch it now it still feels incredibly contemporary. At the moment I'm finding Lubitsch films incredibly inspiring.

ROBERT SIEGEL, BIG FAN

2009-08-28T17:14:00.001-04:00

PATTON OSWALT IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ROBERT SIEGEL'S BIG FAN. COURTESY FIRST INDEPENDENT PICTURES.

For someone who says his main creative motivation is boredom, Robert Siegel has done rather well for himself. Born and raised in the Long Island town of Merrick, Siegel graduated from the University of Michigan 1993 with a B.A. in History, after which he followed his then-girlfriend to Madison, Wisconsin, where she was studying for a PhD. In addition to working for the local newspaper and volunteering at Madison's public radio station, Siegel started writing for a small satirical rag that was given away free in the town's coffee shops, The Onion. In 1996, he became editor-in-chief and began masterminding a major expansion of the paper, putting it online, making it a national and then international publication, and conceiving a number of Onion books, including the hugely successful Our Dumb Century (1999). One of the paper's less successful side projects was The Onion Movie, a sketch comedy film which was finally released on DVD in 2008 but was conceived and written long before Siegel left The Onion in 2003. It did, however, introduce Siegel to screenwriting, which he chose as his next career. After writing a number of as-yet-unproduced comedy scripts for studios, Siegel was approached by director Darren Aronofsky, who who'd been impressed by Siegel's screenplay Big Fan. Aronofsky commissioned Siegel to write the script for The Wrestler (2008), the Oscar-nominated movie which would become his first script to make it to the big screen.

There's a pleasing circularity about the fact that Siegel was inspired to direct Big Fan because of The Wrestler, and even began shooting his own movie the day after Aronofsky's wrapped. The movie's eponymous protagonist is 35-year-old Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt), a perpetually single parking garage attendant still living at home with his mother and whose dull existence is made meaningful only by his all-consuming passion for the New York Giants. One night, Paul and his best friend Sal (Kevin Corrigan) spy Giants linebacker Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm), and when they follow him to a club, Paul gets beaten up by his idol. Big Fan is a smart and thoughtful exploration of American sports fandom, a modern religion of sorts, and what happens when allegiance to that guiding force is tested. The film is ultimately something of a surprise, as its humor is slyer and more subtle than we might expect and Siegel interestingly avoids the darker, more obvious direction his script could have taken, instead choosing a nuanced, bittersweet narrative for Oswalt's poignant and lovably pathetic Paul.

Filmmaker spoke to Siegel about the personal nature of Big Fan, his transition from topical satire to movies, and his very unusual introduction to Star Wars.

ROBERT SIEGEL, WRITER-DIRECTOR OF BIG FAN. COURTESY FIRST INDEPENDENT PICTURES.

Filmmaker: How did you transition from an editor at The Onion to a screenwriter, and how long that had been percolating?

Siegel: Well, I left The Onion in 2003 and then I transitioned into screenwriting directly from there. We did a movie at The Onion called The Onion Movie which was this ill-fated, Hollywood-destroyed sketch comedy movie that I was one of the co-writers of. That came along at a time when I was kind of getting tired of doing The Onion. I had been there for 8 or 9 years at that point, so it was really refreshing to have the opportunity to use this other part of my brain. I had that repetitive motion and I had overdeveloped one muscle and needed to use other parts of my body or brain. I really like screenwriting and really responded to the form. There were fewer words per page, which appealed to me.

Filmmaker: Instant gratification.

Siegel: Yeah, you can fill up a page in about 30 seconds, the margins are 3 inches on both sides and it's just that narrow column in the middle which is kind of a breeze when you're used to a full page of text. It clicked and I just liked it. Then I started writing while I was still at The Onion. I messed around and wrote a lot of comedy scripts that weren't very good, just really mediocre comedies. They got progressively more competent, but not more inspired or original. They read like the kinds of things I imagine low-level script readers read, 24-year-olds paying their dues at a big studio who are reading shitty scripts all day long.

Filmmaker: Were you sending these out to people?

Siegel: No, I had the good sense to keep them to myself, although one of them I got an agent off of. He said he saw potential in it. But finally I had this idea for a script that wasn't a comedy, which was Big Fan. It was the first script I ever wrote that, if I may be so bold, is “decent” or “good.” That kind of became my calling card. It served as my escape pod from The Onion because it got me work – rewrite jobs and a couple of original assignments from studios – for three or four years. And then maybe in 2003 or 2004, Darren Aronofsky got in touch with me because he liked Big Fan a lot and wanted to meet with me about possibly directing it himself. He never wound up directing, but then he called me up and said, “Would you be interested in possibly writing a script about a wrestler?” I immediately responded [to that idea].

Filmmaker: How much did movies play a role in your life when you were growing up?

Siegel: Up until about three weeks before I started directing, I never thought about myself as destined to do that. I wasn't a video store clerk, I didn't usher at a movie theater in order to see Kurosawa double features for free. I transitioned into screenwriting out of a desire to [do something different]. I think my main motivation is boredom, because I've made most of these movies less out of a desire to do something than a desire to no longer do the thing I'm doing. I was tired of writing for The Onion. I loved it, but I was ready to try something else. And by the time I was done with The Wrestler, which was many years and many drafts, many gruelling months of years of rewriting, I just couldn't work up the life force necessary to open up a new Final Draft document and start up a script from scratch.

Filmmaker: Had you always thought about coming back to Big Fan?

Siegel: A lot of why I directed it is rooted in pragmatic reasons, meaning it was the only thing I actually owned and controlled. It had spent the better part of four or five years bouncing around from one director to another, and then by the time I got done with The Wrestler and I had to decide what I was going to do next. I didn't want to start from scratch with another screenplay, so I looked at my options and said, “Hey, Big Fan's still there.” It's like in When Harry Met Sally, where you discover that your best friend has been waiting for you all these years and they're the one. The script just was still there. It was my baby, it was very dear to my heart, it was the first thing that I wrote, it was my breakthrough script, it was personal to me. So partly out of strategy, partly out of the itch to try something new, I decided to direct it.

Filmmaker: Tell me about where the world of Big Fan comes from. In your director's notes, you say that it partly derives from your love of sports as a kid.

Siegel: I wasn't a comic book geek as a kid, I was a sports geek. I collected baseball cards and I really loved watching sports constantly and I constantly listened to WFAN, the sports radio station in New York. You'd just hear these callers and they made an impression on me: I didn't think about this at the time, but I connected with the voices I heard the same way I connected with movie characters later in the movies I liked. When I started getting into movies, I always gravitated towards these blue collar, misfit, beautiful loser characters, that Midnight Cowboy, “guy walking through the dirty streets of New York” movie. So I wanted to write the kind of movie that I loved and bring this fresh subject to it. It's a subject that I know and have a great affection for and it hadn't really been done before. There's never been a movie that explored sports fandom in America in a serious way, just like there was never a movie that took wrestling seriously before The Wrestler.

Filmmaker: How did the script change when you knew you were going to shoot it?

Siegel: It got tighter, everything got shorter, and dialogue was cut. The biggest change was I took out a whole relationship subplot involving a woman. It was these two lost, misfit souls, but I felt it just didn't need it. It's just more unusual and original to have a movie that doesn't have a love relationship. But, having said all that, it is ultimately is to me a love story between Paul and the team, between Paul and Quantrell Bishop, the football player. That's his true love. Obviously it's not a traditional romantic love, but it's a love nonetheless. The original poster for the movie had the tagline, “A tale of unrequited love,” and that's how I've always seen the movie. What do you do when the person or thing you love doesn't love you back? How do you deal with that rejection? In this case, the player he loves most, his idol, literally and figuratively punches him in the face and he has to sort through the emotions after this happens.

Filmmaker: How much preparation did you do once you knew you'd be directing this yourself?

Siegel: I didn't go to film school, and I knew I wasn't going to learn how to be an experienced director – there's no crash course in that. But I did feel prepared in that, even in preproduction, I could already tell that directing would call upon a lot of the skills that I had at The Onion. Being a director is very much like being an editor running a newspaper: you're delegating, you're making decisions, you're vetoing things, you're keeping an eye on the big picture. There are directors who micromanage, who need to know how to operate the camera, and there are those who can leave that to their DP, and I was more one of the delegating type. Because I don't know how to run a camera.

Filmmaker: Were you on set during the filming of The Wrestler?

Siegel: Yeah, I was there maybe half the days. I probably should have been studying Darren, but instead I was just going around poaching crew members. I would go up to the sound guy and ask if he had an assistant who could be my sound guy, so a lot of the key positions on Big Fan were filled by apprentices of people who worked on The Wrestler. It was a lot of 24-year-olds, like a really talented costume designer who's never really [had a break before]. Hopefully when you look back a lot of the people in the crew will be famous.

Filmmaker: How long did you spend looking for the actor to play Paul? He is really the whole movie, so obviously getting that right was pivotal.

Siegel: That's where I learned the most from Darren, watching the whole process of casting of Mickey Rourke. He knew right away that was who he wanted for the role, but he had a bitch of a time getting funding with Mickey, which is funny now looking back. People are so full of shit because there are so many of them now saying, “Obviously, it was brilliant to cast Mickey Rourke,” but nobody was saying that at the time. “No, are you crazy?! He's box office poison! He's difficult, he has no value...” Not that it was like that with Patton, but what it taught me was that it's arguably the most important thing in the entire movie – particularly if there's one guy who's carrying it, then you've got to get the perfect person.

Filmmaker: It was brave of you to cast Patton Oswalt, as he's never done anything as heavy or serious as this before.

Siegel: I just thought he could. I wouldn't say it was brave. The whole "comedian as dramatic actor" thing isn't an issue. I think that's only an issue when it comes off as stunt casting, and then that's a little bit of a concern. But just in general, comedians have no problem playing dramatic roles. Going the other way is a problem. Try to make "Mr. Big Star" funny, and it's not going to happen, but comedians are definitely in touch with the dark. Most comedians have a dark side.

Filmmaker: You said before that you get tired of things and then stop. It sounded like you're fed up with screenwriting, so will you be focusing on directing now?

Siegel: I'm now a writer-director or a director. It would be very difficult to go back to writing for someone else, having now written and directed.

Filmmaker: It says on IMDb that you’ve got projects in the works.

Siegel: It's a very rare inaccuracy, one of the few on IMDb. It says there’s an Untitled Robert Siegel Project, which I think sounds cool, very top secret government. But I don't know what that is. I have no idea what they're referring to. [laughs] It could be my plan to babyproof the locks in my apartment for our toddler. I honestly don't know what I'm doing next.

Filmmaker: Talking of your son, how were shoot days when you were coming off sleepless nights?

Siegel: I just hated it. I understand why directors develop coke habits. I didn't because that's not my thing, but I get the appeal of cocaine when you're directing. Coffee was not enough.

Filmmaker: What's the first film you ever saw?

Siegel: It was probably Star Wars. I was six when it came out, and that was awesome! Like everybody else at the time, I was insanely excited to see it. I remember we got to the theater early and I accidentally went in while the previous showing was just still finishing. Some dude was putting an Olympic medal on a big hairy bear. It's like hearing the punchline to a joke before you hear the joke, and you're like "What the fuck could have lead to this medal ceremony with the giant 7-foot tall bear?" And Han and Luke and Leia were all lined up and I didn't know who they were, but they did something medal-worthy. I was like, "Oh my God, I've got to find out!" It was kind of a cool way to be introduced to it.

Filmmaker: When you were a teenager, whose pin-up poster did you have on your wall?

Siegel: Matthew Broderick. It was a Ferris Bueller's Day Off poster. All my friends had Kathy Ireland or Christie Brinkley, and whenever I saw them I was torn because I thought it would be pretty awesome to have hot chick on my wall to stare up at. But I felt really awkward and uncomfortable about having that kind of overt statement of sexuality in the same house that I shared with my parents, even though they weren't in my room. My bedroom wasn't this lair for vice and sex and drug use, it was very chaste and wholesome.

Filmmaker: Finally, what's the most embarrassing film you watched the whole of on a plane?

Siegel: Airplanes are a really good test of your love of movies. I'm one of those people who says "I love movies so much, I'll watch anything," but then you look through the guide of what's going to be playing on your flight and it inevitably involves Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey or Sarah Jessica Parker. I'm sure it was one of those movies like Forces of Nature, Laws of Gravity or The Proposal or The Ugly Truth. Planes are where all the movies that I don't see end up, so the nice thing about flying is that you're never going to get a movie you've seen before.

LUCRECIA MARTEL, THE HEADLESS WOMAN

2009-08-19T10:23:00.002-04:00

MARÍA ONETTO IN DIRECTOR LUCRECIA MARTEL'S THE HEADLESS WOMAN. COURTESY STRAND RELEASING.

Over the course of the past decade, Lucrecia Martel has established herself as one of the most gifted and original filmmakers around. The Argentine auteur was born in Salta, a city in the northwest of Argentina, in 1966, and spent her teenage years capturing much of her family's daily life on film. In 1986, she studied Communication Science and had stints at two film schools, Avellaneda Experimental, studying animation, and the National Experimentation Filmmaking School in Buenos Aires. However because she never finished her film studies (one of those schools shut down due to lack of funds), she ultimately completed her cinematic education on her own and considers herself to be self-taught. In the late 80s and early 90s, she made a string of short films, starting with the animations El 56 (1988) and Piso 24 (1989), and culminating in the award-winning live action Rey Muerto (1995). Martel subsequently made documentaries and children's programs for Argentinian television, and in 2001 she got her breakthrough with her feature debut, La Ciénaga, an unsettling, off-kilter portrait of a family's summer slumming it at their crummy country home. The film premiered at Sundance, won the Alfred Bauer Award at Berlin, and received rave reviews wherever it played. Martel's 2004 follow-up, The Holy Girl, about the sexual and religious passions of two Argentinian teenage girls, premiered at Cannes and consolidated Martel's reputation as one of the finest emerging talents in world cinema.

Martel's third feature as writer-director, The Headless Woman, sees her return once again to her native Salta, where her previous two movies have also been set. The film's protagonist is Verónica (María Onetto), a glamorous middle-aged dentist whose comfortable, untroubled existence is disrupted when she runs over something in the road. She initially thinks she just hit a dog, but over time she grows convinced that it was actually a person. Inspired by nightmares Martel herself had of having killed someone, The Headless Woman has a strange dreamlike quality, existing in a world that feels both palpably real and strangely detached. Martel's movie is not plot-driven, but instead focuses on conveying Verónica's disintegration as she becomes consumed by guilt for what she has – or thinks she has – done. Though complex, challenging and sometimes frustrating, The Headless Woman, with the superb Onetto's underplayed, nuanced performance at its core, is also haunting and mesmerizing, and possibly the purest piece of cinema you will see all year.

Filmmaker spoke to Martel about turning nightmares into films, her fascination with water and the Spinoza quote that encapsulates her worldview.

LUCRECIA MARTEL, DIRECTOR OF THE HEADLESS WOMAN. COURTESY STRAND RELEASING.

Filmmaker: What was your inspiration for this film? In your director’s statement, you say that your nightmares about killing someone led to the idea.

Martel: Nightmares were useful for me even though the film was not at all based on those nightmares. Like many people, I have sometimes dreamt that I have killed. They are not dreams where I am in fact in the middle of killing or about to kill someone, but dreams where I have already killed and there is nothing that can undo that horror. The most anguishing thing in my dreams is that I am being protected by the people who love me to avoid anything coming out. That mechanism of oblivion, of pretending that nothing has happened, is, in its core, the most frequent horror of our society.

Filmmaker: How did you translate the feeling of a dream to the film? And did you try to apply dream logic to the events?

Martel: I don’t know how that is done, I don’t even try to. Maybe that is the consequence of an attitude that I keep during production: when I look through the camera, I feel that there is something about to be revealed and which is actually not what I am seeing. I believe that generates a certain unreal atmosphere.

Filmmaker: How personal is this film to you? How much of yourself and your view of the world is in each of the films you make?

Martel: I believe that making a film is the search or the will to try and transcend the solitude of the body: to make everyone else participate in a certain perception of the world and to put it in check between everyone. It is not possible for me to construct those tricks that are films if I don’t do it based on those experiences and emotions that we have lived.

Filmmaker: The film is set in Salta, where your films always take place. Is that location very important or evocative for you?

Martel: I was born in Salta. It is my native city, and therefore a mythological landscape where one brings together all times and all affections. It is where spaces overlap. It is a fake geography, because I don’t believe it is Salta anymore, but the wish of bringing a sense to things, even if it is just for seconds.

Filmmaker: How do you construct a film? Do you plan out each scene and each shot exactly, or are you much looser?

Martel: The script is very similar to the film. I hardly improvise anything. Of course, there are times when things happen during the shooting and one can incorporate those, but I am always very careful with that. The system that I use to write is very similar to the sound mix. It is like an overlap of different layers that I mix in different proportions in each scene. Those different layers are always present throughout the film. When one works with such system, improvising can unbalance the film completely.

Filmmaker: What are your scripts like? Your films are less about the words spoken by the characters than they are images, sounds, moods, so do you write all of that down?

Martel: They look a lot like the films, I think. There are three things that define for me the way I approach cinema: my mother tongue (Spanish), the oral tradition of storytelling (above all, from my grandmother and my mother), and my ideas for the soundtrack. But they are things that come before the script, and the script is formally the same as any script, I think.

Filmmaker: María Onetto is in almost every scene of The Headless Woman and the amazing performance she gives is at the very center of the film. How closely did you work with her? Did you give her very clear notes on Vero’s thoughts and feelings in each scene, or did you leave it up to her interpretation?

Martel: The only thing that worried Maria and me was not to construct a character around guilt or the amnesia. She is an incredible actress who takes very mysterious paths. Secrets enchants me and Maria can make a sea of secrets out of nothing.

Filmmaker: People have tried to understand The Headless Woman in very literal terms. How do you feel about that? Is there one correct way of interpreting the film?

Martel: Well, a film is an emotional and intellectual process (that to me is almost the same) that only has meaning in the relationship that's established between spectator and the film, but not from itself. Literalness is the desire or the misfortune of not being able to establish that relationship.

Filmmaker: Death (or the shadow of death) is very present in both this film and La Ciénaga. Is it a major theme for you as a filmmaker?

Martel: No, my main preoccupation and diversion concerns perception and all the moral issues that arise from its domestication.

Filmmaker: Water is a motif in all your films, in this case the storm. Do you still live on a boat? And what special significance or meaning does water have to you?

Martel: I believe that you have misinformed. I have a small boat, but never I have lived on it. I am an inexpert sailor but a great lover of boats. It is in the combination of the narrowness and the infiniteness of the landscape where the boats move. And, of course, they float, which fascinates me. Perhaps water fascinates me. I hadn't realized this until they asked me this question to me on each of my three films.

Filmmaker: You describe yourself as self-taught, so do you see yourself as part of any particular cinematic tradition? Who are the filmmakers who you most admire or want to emulate?

Martel: I am in cinema because of the influence of my grandmother, who told stories to me, and because of my parents, who told me films and stories. In the world of the cinema, I feel like an impostor. I belong to the ranks of family conversations, stories at siesta time, long telephone calls, etc. I admire very many film directors, but like distant relatives who you wouldn't invite for Christmas.

Filmmaker: What influence did your training in animation have on you?

Martel: It made me understand that movement defines the characters.

Filmmaker: You said in a previous interview that you were adapting a comic book about the Cold War in the 1950s. Is this an American project? Do you want to make movies in other countries?

Martel: I was working on that. The process of adaptation is fascinating. But now I have returned to a script that I was writing before The Headless Woman which is also in the fantasy genre, and also is about a deadly invasion.

Filmmaker: If the world ended tomorrow, what (if anything) would you be sad about that you hadn't achieved?

Martel: It is the most distressing question you can ask someone who does not have a clear vocation.

Filmmaker: Which phrase best describes your philosophy on life?

Martel: It's from Spinoza: "Nobody knows what a body can do."

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Martel: Well, to have one's own way of seeing the world is a risk. But it is clear that that is not necessary to make a film. Thousands of hit films confirm this.

Filmmaker: Finally, what's the last dream you can remember having?

Martel: I am walking along Loyola Street, in my neighborhood. Everything is exactly like in waking life, except that I suspect that I am dreaming. I try to pay attention to things, front gates, poorly maintained paths, the noise of the cars, the people who I pass, but I do not find anything to confirm my suspicion. Contrary to how it may seem, it is a funny dream. There is a construction site which has a sign on the front that states the characteristics of the building. In dreams, I can never read: if a letter or anything I need to read appears, I wake up. I approach the sign to confirm that I am dreaming, but before I can get there a neighbor asks me something from the front path. I can't hear them well, and they repeat the question, calling me by another name. I look at my hands, and they are not mine. I do not remember any more, but I did not awake up then.

ROBERT STONE, EARTH DAYS

2009-08-14T10:25:00.001-04:00

1970S ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS IN DIRECTOR ROBERT STONE'S EARTH DAYS. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS.

Robert Stone may not be the most famous documentarian, but he is one of the most accomplished and important non-fiction directors working today. The son of eminent British historian Lawrence Stone, Stone was born in England in 1958, but grew up in both the U.S. and Europe after his father left Oxford University to teach at Princeton in 1960. Stone studied history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating in 1980, and thereafter spent seven years turning the subject of his thesis project, the U.S. nuclear tests on the island of Bikini, into the documentary Radio Bikini (1987). The film was Oscar nominated for Best Documentary Feature, and established Stone as a talent to watch. Next he made documentaries on America's response to Sputnik, Satellite Sky (1989), and the 50s obsession with flying saucers, Farewell Good Brothers (1992), and then continued to explore mid-20th century American history with a massive installation on John F. Kennedy for the JFK Library in Boston. After the faux documentary World War Three (1998), he returned to non-fiction filmmaking with a portrait of Atlantic City, American Babylon (2000). In 2004, he directed the acclaimed Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst and revisited the subject of JFK with Oswald's Ghost (2007), a thoughtful examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy's death.

Movies about green issues are very much in vogue at the moment, but Stone's latest film, Earth Days, is a distinctly different kind of environmental documentary. Instead of focusing on a particular aspect of the planet which is under threat, Earth Days takes a step back to examine the first wave of the environmental movement which, despite being somewhat forgotten now, enjoyed great popularity and achieved much in the late 60s and early 70s. Stone uses the principal figures who first championed green issues – such as politician Stewart Udall, Earth Day organizer Dennis Hayes and Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand – to focus the narrative. By providing this historical perspective, Earth Days puts the current environmental movement in context and in doing so strikes a cautious note of hope, with the on-camera subjects underlining the achievements of the past as well as the challenges of the future. Stone's film is also ultimately celebratory, as the expansive cinematography shows the beauty of a planet that is not yet lost, but must be fought for.

Filmmaker spoke to Stone about returning to his cinematic roots, the aesthetics of non-fiction filmmaking, and why he will never work for Court TV again.

DIRECTOR ROBERT STONE DURING THE FILMING OF EARTH DAYS. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS.

Filmmaker: Earth Days begins with a speech on the environment by JFK, which seems to be a nod to your previous film, Oswald's Ghost.

Stone: It kind of just turned out that way. I was trying to figure out how to introduce the movie without setting the whole thing up and introducing all our characters in the traditional way. I remembered the ending of The Marriage of Maria Braun, the Fassbinder film. It's a whole movie about this woman in post-war Germany and at the end he flashes photographs of all the chancellors of Germany from World War Two to when he made the movie, and it totally makes you think about what the movie's about in a completely different way. I always thought that was amazing, so I kind of cribbed that. With Kennedy, it was just a fluke. It turned out that, by virtue of the influence that Stewart Udall had on Kennedy, he was the first president to really address the environmental crisis and population and warn that bad things were coming.

Filmmaker: I sense that the film is very personal to you, although you don't place yourself in it at all or present anything but an objective view.

Stone: Yeah, it is deeply personal to me. As a small kid, I was profoundly impressed by Earth Day. It really changed my thinking and everybody of my generation that I've spoken to all had a similar experience. Take something as simple as littering: before Earth Day, you would take the candy out of the store and throw the wrapper on the ground; after Earth Day, that was taboo. It seems like a small thing, but it was quite a big deal – you just start to think about things differently. As a kid, I was very interested in the space program and watching the men land on the moon and seeing the earth from space. In so many ways, the movie is the story of my life in seeing the environment deteriorate, seeing farmland near where I grew up become housing developments. But at the same time, seeing things get a lot better: I've got two small kids, and we go swimming in the Hudson river – when I was kid, that was unthinkable. Air pollution in New York City was just incredibly bad when I was a kid, and now it's not anywhere near as bad as it was. People forget that this movement arose and actually did succeed in really improving things dramatically. I think there's this impression that everything's gotten progressively, but some things have and some things haven't.

Filmmaker: Earth Day in 1970 was also the starting point for you as a filmmaker.

Stone: Yeah, it the first documentary I made – though you can't really call it a documentary. It was one roll of Super 8 film that I made with my friends around the time of the first Earth Day, it was about pollution in my little town and it was called Pollution. I still have a copy of it. We just had one roll of film, we edited in camera, and we actually had this crude way of doing sound. We had a tape recorder going and we had this idea we were going to sync it up, but I don't think we ever actually did. That was my first film. I showed it in class and got a big applause, and I was like, “Ahh, being a filmmaker – this could be kind of cool...” I don't think my view of the world has changed very much, I've just been able to articulate it better over the years. Looking at that film now, it's surprising how similar my ideas are about the film. So it is kind of ironic that I've come back to this all these years later. There's certainly a direct line from doing that to Earth Days.

Filmmaker: And what did make you come back to this, to explore the roots of the environmental movement?

Stone: Around the time An Inconvenient Truth came out, there weren't a whole lot of docs like there are now on the environment, but it was certainly in the air that this was a renewed topic of conversation. The whole issue of climate changed was universally agreed upon as a problem, and we were just waiting for Bush to leave. Everybody seemed pretty bummed out about the war, bummed out about Bush, bummed out about 9/11, bummed out about everything. It seemed everybody was making movies about Iraq at that moment and I felt that with the environment there was a sense that a wholly new movement that was arising, a wholly new awakening to the crisis. Remembering back to my childhood, I thought, “Wait, this isn't true, this is just a rebirth of something that's been dormant for a long, long time.” I felt that putting all of this in context would be a really good and interesting thing. It just seemed like a completely forgotten story. When most people think about the '60s and '70s, they think about Watergate, they think about Vietnam, they think about civil rights, they think about the hippie movement. The whole environmental movement got lost even though it was most profound thing to come out of that period, long term, and it crystallized a lot of the questioning about some very fundamental things about how we organize society. As time's gone on, with all these environmental documentaries and all these books and television specials, I think people are so overwhelmed. I personally feel overwhelmed with bad about one shocking disaster after the other. I think it's important to put this all into some kind of larger context – these are all symptoms of a bigger issue.

Filmmaker: I want to talk about the stylistic approach you took with the film, for instance the lack of a narrator.

Stone: Well, I've never used narration. I feel as a filmmaker that it's cheating and I think it puts a distance between you and the audience, like you're lecturing at them rather than them discovering something themselves. My basic approach to documentary filmmaking is that I think all films basically function the same way, whether they're documentaries or dramatic feature films, in how they work on an audience. A film succeeds and is at its most satisfying when there's a process of discovery or a feeling that you've watched something and put two and two together and come up with a new way of thinking about something. Rather than been lectured to. With a subject as vast as this, I felt it was vital that it was firmly grounded in personal narrative so finding characters whose personal life journeys mirrored the journey of the film was step one. We set out to follow their trajectory from being kids and understanding the motivation that generation had coming out of the 50s to go out and remake the world, explaining the psychology behind it and then showing what happened and how it all fell apart.

Filmmaker: What about the visual aspects?

Stone: Stewart Brand said that our problem with the environment is one of perception, and if we perceive the problem better then we'll be more motivated to take action. His whole thing is that technology allows human beings to see the world in a way that we're not biologically capable of doing. We can go into space, and no other animals can do that. We can go up in an airplane and fly like a bird. We can use film to speed up things, like you can you see a smokestack from a factory spewing smoke. It might look rather benign, but you set up a strop-motion camera for a day and reduce that to a minute and you say, “Oh my God, there's a huge amount of pollution going into the air.” It's not faking it, it's real, it's just taking out of our human timeframe. The whole thing of technology allows us to see things different became a running theme in the film and really helped us establish a visual palette. A lot of what's being said is essentially unfilmable – they're ideas. Also, being able to do CGI was great, like the thing with the tablecloth. Exponential growth is such an inherently unfathomable thing to understand, so I asked Dennis Meadows, “How do you explain this when you're talking to students?” He told me this thing about the tablecloth, I took it to our effects house and they were actually able to do it. It's great that you can do that sort of thing now as a documentary filmmaker, which you couldn't 10 years ago.

Filmmaker: It seems as if you place a lot more emphasis on the beauty of the image and being cinematic than a lot of documentarians these days, which works really well for the subject matter.

Stone: I don't want this to sound pretentious at all, but my filmmaking hero is Stanley Kubrick. I don't compare myself to him in any way at all whatsoever, but 2001 is the reason I became a filmmaker. That movie made a huge impression on me as a kid, and I drew on my impressions of it in making this movie, with those long takes with a meditative aspect to them and dealing with these really, really heavy ideas and having a shot that lets you sort of think about an idea. Instead of using 10 shots, use one shot and really linger on it and let an idea unfold – he was really fantastic at that. I was really worried while making this film that young people wouldn't like it because so many films now are all hyped up and you have to cut every five seconds and it's like whoosh, bang, boom! This is very not that. We showed 40 minutes of it at the Sundance Institute six months before we finished to a bunch of young filmmakers all in their 20s, and they loved it, they totally got it. That was a huge relief to me. And they liked it because it wasn't like everything else that they were seeing, because it wasn't fast and hyped up.

Filmmaker: How do you view yourself as a filmmaker? You're a history grad, so are you a historian working in film? Or a documentary maker with social and political preoccupations?

Stone: It's a good question. I'm a filmmaker first, I'm not a political activist who's using film as a soapbox. When I was younger, I wanted to go off to Hollywood and I've long wanted to make dramatic films. I thought I'd end up in Hollywood or making independent feature films, but I ended up doing documentaries. My father was a history professor at Oxford and later at Princeton, so I grew up with that, it's in my blood. It just seems very natural to me to combine my interest in film, my interest in history, my interest in politics and also my interest in exploring this crazy world that I grew up in. My dad was a social historian who’d written about the English Civil War and he was really fascinated with the 60s when it was happening. He took me around as a little kid: we flew to Paris in May '68, we sat and watched the entire Watergate hearings together when I was 12 years old. And my mother read me Silent Spring when I was about eight, so I was exposed to all this stuff and I think I spent the rest of my life trying to make sense of it. Fortunately a lot of my generation are also trying to make sense of it, and also so much of it is coming around again.

Filmmaker: How do you choose your subjects? Are you always aware of the balance between your personal interest in a topic and how commercial it will be?

Stone: Well, if you've seen Oswald's Ghost you'll know that I don't really care about the commerciality of my projects. Obviously I want to reach as wide an audience as possible, but I also know that I am who I am and I have to make a film that satisfies me. If I start thinking about what an audience is going to think about too much, I'm never going to able to function. Fortunately, I've got a niche of people who go to see my films and that's cool. I'd love to have a hit like Michael Moore, but I don't think I'm Michael Moore. I don't have that populist thing in me. I like the gray areas too much. I think in some ways my films are sort of similar. I don’t do this consciously, but I've made a bunch of films and looking back, the films that are most me that I've made, that are closest to my heart, are about this intersection between fantasy and reality and how we perceive the world. That fascinates me. Being able to work with film, which is such a visual medium, you can really probe that. We all live in our own little fantasy worlds and perceive reality in a different way, and we're all convinced that our way of seeing reality is “the true way.”

Filmmaker: Talking of the mix of fantasy and reality, you made a faux documentary about World War III which used real archival footage in a fictional context.

Stone: I think anybody who makes documentaries, particularly using archival footage, at a certain point realizes, “Wow, I can do anything with this! I don't have to tell the truth. I can manipulate things and tell something that's completely untrue.” It could be as simple as interviewing somebody and then recutting the interview so that they say something that's the exact opposite of what they actually said. Or doing what I did with World War Three, which is just using real characters and real footage but putting them in a completely fictitious context. Part of it was just poking fun at the medium itself and how easy it is to manipulate people.

Filmmaker: You got an Oscar nomination for Radio Bikini. What was it like to have that level of success so early on?

Stone: It was weird. In one way it was really great, because I sort of got it off my chest. I came from a very high-achieving family so there was a lot of pressure to succeed, and I think if I hadn't succeeded with that first film, I would have probably done something else with my life. But, it did come very early and I made a lot of bad career decisions. [laughs] You know, I got a little cocky, and it took me a while to regain my stride. But it certainly has been incredibly helpful in raising money: every time I'm introduced anywhere, it's always as an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and that's just a wonderful thing. So it was a blessing to have that at such an early age. And I had a lot of girls. It was definitely good for meeting girls. [laughs]

Filmmaker: What's the strangest thing you've seen, or had to do yourself, during your time in the film industry?

Stone: Jesus, there have been so many... The whole business is strange, it's strange that I'm even making films, it's strange that I'm, like, alive and making a living.

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a kid?

Stone: My dream job as a kid was a Formula 1 race car driver, but I'm partially blind in one eye so it wasn't an option. But I cherished that idea into sixth or seventh grade, and then I wanted to be an architect and then I wanted to be a filmmaker. And everyone wanted to be Mick Jagger.

Filmmaker: When did you last do it for the money not the love?

Stone: Ah, that's a good one! The last time I did it for the money was in 1998. I did a television documentary for Court TV. It made me feel like I should get out of this business or start making independent films again. I went and made Guerrilla. I'll never work for Court TV again, but that's OK, I don't want to. [laughs]

ANDREW BUJALSKI, BEESWAX

2009-08-07T22:14:00.001-04:00

MAGGIE HATCHER, TILLY HATCHER AND ALEX KARPOVSKY IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ANDREW BUJALSKI'S BEESWAX. COURTESY CINEMA GUILD.

Every film movement has its (sometimes reluctant) leader or trendsetter, and in the case of mumblecore, that person is Andrew Bujalski. The soft-spoken writer-director and sometime actor was born in 1977 in Boston, where both his parents worked in business. His mother had previously been an artist, and Bujalski seemed to inherit her more creative inclinations, which lead him to study film at Harvard's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. Bujalski was particularly fortunate to have the legendary Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman as his thesis adviser, who helped him find the lead actress for his thesis film, Maggie Hatcher. In 2002, Bujalski made his feature debut with Funny Ha Ha, a 16mm movie about a twentysomething woman fresh out of college trying to find her place in the world. The film, which Bujalski self-distributed, was critically lauded and is now considered the first mumblecore movie. He followed it up shortly after with Mutual Appreciation, another low-budget tale of arty twentysomethings, this one centered around an aspiring indie musician played by Bishop Allen frontman Justin Rice, self-releasing it in 2005 to more great reviews. Subsequently, Bujalski went on hiatus from writing and directing, taking time out to act in friends' movies, such as Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), the Zellner brothers' Goliath (2008) and Dia Sokol's Sorry, Thanks, and to work on an adaptation of Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision for Paramount.

Bujalski's third feature, Beeswax feels somewhat distinct from his previous films, not least because Mutual Appreciation was shot way back in 2003. Moreover, Beeswax is about a more grown-up world than Bujalski has shown us before, depicting the lives of a pair of twins, wheelchair-bound Jeannie (Tilly Hatcher) and her sister Lauren (Maggie Hatcher). Both are in flux, as Jeannie's business partner in her vintage clothing store is (maybe) threatening to sue her, which prompts Jeannie to reestablish ties with her law grad ex Merrill (Alex Karpovsky), and Lauren is between jobs and weighing whether she should accept a position in Kenya. The film's main preoccupations are family (sometimes in a broader sense) and communication, and the intersection of the two. Though the threat of the lawsuit seems as if it will be the driving force of the movie, Bujalski doesn't take a conventional approach with this narrative device and keeps an all-important sense of naturalism and believability. Beeswax is blessed with two great performances from its lead actresses, and the Hatcher twins' charm and energy is perfectly showcased within the structure of Bujalski's tighter but still very organic film.

Filmmaker spoke to Bujalski about working exclusively with non-professional actors, the indie auteur as small business owner, and looking for film critic David Edelstein in a fake graveyard in Virginia.

WRITER-DIRECTOR ANDREW BUJALSKI HAS A CLOSE SHAVE DURING THE FILMING OF BEESWAX. COURTESY CINEMA GUILD.

Filmmaker: I'm interested in how you feel looking back on mumblecore, and how much you perceive it as a help or a hindrance to where you are now.

Bujalski: Well, I guess I'm not sure where I am now. [laughs] I don't know how much the blogosphere affects reality per se. [laughs] When that movie After Last Season came out, I went and saw it with some people and I loved it and had a great time. But going there, I wondered, “Who is going to be in the theater? Because the blogs are ablaze with this!” And, of course, there was just me and the group of friends I went with. I thought, “OK, maybe a thousand blogs doesn't actually mean one viewer...” So I actually have no idea. The fact that mumblecore has been hotly debated on the internet may or may not have anything to do with anybody coming to see the films. I don't think it hurts – in terms of the concept that there's no such thing as bad publicity – but it certainly has nothing to do with what I was trying to do as a filmmaker and a storyteller.

Filmmaker: Was Beeswax a conscious decision to try and move on from mumblecore?

Bujalski: When you make small films that get some attention, a lot of people whisper in your ear that you should try to take it to the next level. Which means make more commercial work. That's certainly something that I do have an interest in, but on this film if anything I had a perverse desire to try to stay in a similar realm to where we'd been, because I felt like there were more stories that I wanted to tell coming out of that way of filmmaking and, in some weird way, stay the course of the thing that people least wanted from me, which kind of made want to do it.

Filmmaker: What kind of progression do you feel you've made since Mutual Appreciation?

Bujalski: I don't know. I can tell you that my life feels very different and I can tell you that anytime an artist is lucky enough to survive making something, of course you're going to look at that thing and take some positive lessons and some negative lessons and also a desire to try out new things from it. It's hard to quantify what those are exactly. I don't think that much in terms of logical progressions, I think those are structures that we impose after the fact.

Filmmaker: This feels like a more adult and responsible world than the ones in your previous movies.

Bujalski: I'm sure it is. I'm sure that has something to do with my thoughts going into it. At the risk of tying things up too neatly, I think in the first film I did, the Marnie character is a wandering soul, which is more or less how I felt when I was in my early twenties and writing it. And in Mutual Appreciation, the Alan character is a struggling artist on the make, which is kind of how I felt then. [laughs] In this film, the character is a small business owner, which certainly has something to do with a couple of years spent self-distributing my films.

Filmmaker: Is the small business owner a pertinent analogy for the contemporary indie filmmaker?

Bujalski: I've certainly known people who did work that I thought was really terrific but that, because they didn't have that small business owner mentality, didn't want to put in the miserable hustle it took to get people to see their work. So a lot of good work goes unseen, and I admire those people because ultimately they have a real artist's soul: they only care about making the thing. But I have this nagging sense of obligation – I feel like if we've put so much into this then I can't really tear myself away from getting people to see it. Certainly most of the people who do the festival circuit have that hustle, and I think that's a lot like being a small business owner.

Filmmaker: In the film, Jeannie's vintage clothing store is described as a good little business that will always make a small profit. Is that an allusion to your self-distribution experiences as well?

Bujalski: It's funny because I think a couple of people thought that that line was an external meta-reference to the films themselves. I wish that the films were a reliable small profit generator – that would be great! I've never come anywhere near making a living off these films. It's an uphill battle for sure.

Filmmaker: How much did your move to Austin inform Beeswax?

Bujalski: The shoot occurred before I moved back here, and moving back was an indirect result of shooting here. I've done three features now: all of them I've written in a different place than I ended up shooting them, and none of them did I think I'd end up shooting them where we did. On this film, there was no obvious place to do it. I was living in Boston and I was working with the same team of people I'd worked with in the past in New York and L.A., and Tilly was living in Atlanta and Maggie was living in New Haven. So nothing was particularly central for anybody – though I guess Austin is kind of central geographically. I was leaning more toward doing it in Boston because I was lazy and it was going to be easy for me. We talked about doing it other places and the only city that made sense besides Boston was Austin, because I had lived here in the past and I did know people and that there was a community that was going to be not that difficult to plug into.

Filmmaker: You mentioned your lead actresses, the Hatcher twins. Their performances are so central to the film's success.

Bujalski: Absolutely, and I wouldn't have written a word of this film if I didn't know them and weren't thinking of them for it. I met Maggie in college. I was doing my college thesis film and Chantal Akerman was my thesis advisor, which was an amazing experience. Chantal discovered Maggie walking down the hall. [laughs] She was a rugby player and I think she had just torn her ACL and had surgery, so she was walking on crutches. I don't know why, but Chantal stopped her and said, “My student needs you for his film,” and so I ended up meeting Maggie and putting her in my college thesis film. Shortly after that, I met her sister Tilly. I find them immensely charming individually, but together as a duo there was a kind of magic there that for many years I fantasized about trying to harness in a movie.

Filmmaker: So they were the initial spark for the movie?

Bujalski: Yes, and from there I was thinking about family – it seems like the thing to think about when you're doing a movie about twins. And I think this whole lawsuit aspect came from anxieties in my own life, but also it seemed like it was at the opposite end of a spectrum from the way that problems are resolved in a family. This is a story about two people whose personal relationship has broken down and now have to turn to this legalese. I wanted to pit that against family coming together to try to take care of each other.

Filmmaker: You've always worked with non-professional actors. Why are they so important to you?

Bujalski: I think that they communicate differently. I think actors are trained to communicate very clearly, and I didn't want that clarity for these films because the films are, on some level, about people trying to find their way through these situations in our lives. I wanted to get it to a place of unpredictability from second to second, and a kind of freshness. And also freshness for the audience. I love as a moviegoer discovering a new performer who I don't know, and there's something remarkable and amazing about how that never goes away. Even if you've seen a hundred Robert De Niro movies, you can still watch Mean Streets and feel like you're discovering him. So I like trying to get that from people, and obviously a non-professional is better equipped than anybody to give you that real freshness.

Filmmaker: The film feels very spontaneous and naturalistic. Did you stick closely to the script or give your actors a lot of leeway?

Bujalski: There's always leeway, and it depends somewhat on the actor. Every actor has a different comfort zone. Some people are at their best or happiest when they're making it up as they go along, and other people really want to get something just right. This film has generally shorter scenes than the last ones did and a lot more specific exposition that has to be thrown out. There was a ton of exposition and that was the real challenge to keep it feeling alive amidst all of these points that the actors had to hit. So there was less room for goofing off and generally the actors were less inclined to goof off than in previous films.

Filmmaker: The way that you use the lawsuit is very interesting, because you introduce it as a conventional narrative device but don't execute it in the way we might expect.

Bujalski: The film is ultimately about anxiety and fear. Who knows what it's about, but that's what's driving a lot of the characters' actions. This relationship between Jeannie and Amanda has been recontextualized through this threat of a lawsuit as Jeannie's rushing back to this document, saying “I thought our relationship was what we've developed together as people and friends, but now I have to go back to this document we wrote years ago that we don't necessarily understand to find out what our new relationship is.” In our first press kit, we were calling the film a legal thriller and getting into a little trouble for that, but when I was writing it I did think about borrowing some of the structure of a legal thriller for completely other purposes and deviating from that structure with it. I feel like anybody who's been involved in a legal conflict would not feel like it was “thrilling,” and I was trying to get to some of how these things actually impact our lives.

Filmmaker: I wanted to ask you about the title. It seems like people have been very keen to derive their interpretations of what the film is about directly from the title.

Bujalski: It's interesting. I was surprised at how enigmatic the title seemed to be for a lot of people. I wasn't necessarily trying to make a tease out of it, but having done that now, I want to stick with the enigma. I feel like when you've got something like that that is engaging people on that level and they're looking for meaning, that may or may not be a dead end to unlock the secrets of the film through the title but I'm happy that people are taking the time and engaging with it and trying to make sense of what they see, because that's part of what the film is there for.

Filmmaker: I was thinking of asking about the meaning of the title, but I guess, as the saying goes, it's really none of my beeswax.

Bujalski: In fact, that was the joke that Tilly made in Berlin when we were asked that in Q&As. It's a joke, but it's right on the money and it also does answer your question.

Filmmaker: What's the strangest thing you've experienced during your time in the film industry?

Bujalski: There was one night at the Virginia Film Festival where we piled into a car with the guy from the Mekons and the critic David Edelstein to go see a Kiss cover band play in an abandoned potato chip factory on Halloween. Edelstein wanted to come along because he loved the Mekons, but then he didn't really want to go to the show so he walked away, and then I felt bad and tried to find him. There was a tombstone showcase factory across the street – a place where they made tombstones that hadn't been inscribed yet – and I was walking around in this kind of fake cemetery looking for David Edelstein, across the street from the Kiss cover band show at the abandoned potato chip factory.

Filmmaker: Is Hollywood going in the right direction?

Bujalski: No.

Filmmaker: Finally, What's your best piece of advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Bujalski: Don't think about your career ever.

Filmmaker: What should be your focus then?

Bujalski: Making good movies.

JEAN-PIERRE AND LUC DARDENNE, LORNA'S SILENCE

2009-07-31T15:17:00.001-04:00

ARTA DOBROSHI IN LUC AND JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE'S LORNA'S SILENCE. COURTESY SONY PICTURES CLASSICS.

From Auguste and Louis Lumière onwards, filmmaking partnerships with last names like Coen, Duplass, Hughes, Maysles, Polish, Quay, Wachowski, Taviani, Zellner and Zucker – just to name a few – have been proving that siblings and cinema go well together, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are certainly no exceptions. The Belgian filmmakers, born in Liège in 1951 and 1954 respectively, have been making films as a duo since 1975, when they formed the production company Dérives. After a decade of making documentaries, they shifted to doc-style fiction filmmaking with Falsch (1986), but it was not until La Promesse, about a slum landlord, his son and an illegal immigrant tenant, that they became widely known. The film, starring Dardenne regulars Olivier Gourmet and Jérémie Renier, won prizes worldwide and established the brothers as gifted social realists. Their 1999 follow-up about a struggling teen, Rosetta, consolidated their standing within world cinema when it won the Palme D'Or, as well as Best Actress for its lead Emilie Dequenne. Since then, they have regularly appeared every three years at Cannes with a new film: The Son played there in 2002, winning Best Actor for Gourmet, and in 2005 L'Enfant won them their second Palme D'Or, putting them in an elite group of auteurs who have been awarded Cannes' main prize twice.

Their 2008 Cannes entry Lorna's Silence, which is released this week, is a return to their preferred territory, stories of young outsiders, crime and poverty in contemporary Belgium. The movie's central character is Albanian immigrant Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), who is in a fraudulent marriage to junkie Claudy (Jérémie Renier) that has gained her Belgian citizenship. Her ultimate aim is to start a snack bar with her boyfriend Sokol (Alban Ukaj), however the men who paid Claudy to marry her now want her to marry a Russian gangster to grant him citizenship – which means getting Claudy out of the picture. Lorna's Silence shows the Dardennes at their best, creating realistic situations with true dramatic and emotional intensity. Lorna and Claudy's relationship provides the dramatic core of the film, and the performances from Dobroshi and Renier are poignant and painfully honest. While with this film the Dardennes have stepped away from their usual documentary-style handheld photography, this does nothing to lessen the power they wield as dramatic storytellers and or their ability to bring the best out of their actors.

Filmmaker sat down with the Dardennes during their recent visit to New York for a career retrospective and spoke to them about how they find their subjects, their long working relationship, and punishing young offenders by showing them La Promesse.

LUC AND JEAN-PIERRE DARDENNE, THE WRITER-DIRECTORS OF LORNA'S SILENCE. COURTESY SONY PICTURES CLASSICS.

Filmmaker: What was your starting point for this movie?

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: It's a story we were told in the early part of the year 2000. There was a woman who told us the story of her brother, and in fact that's Claudy's story. Except in reality, the brother does not marry and does not get killed. Our intention was to make a film with a woman as a main character. We wanted to have a woman immigrant as the central character of the film and see if she would be an accomplice upfront to a plan that would lead to the death of a man, and as the film unfolded we wanted to see if she would continue to be an accomplice. Or not.

Filmmaker: Is there a process of how you find the stories that inform your movies?

Luc Dardenne: We don't really have a set way or process. Sometimes we go from reality and sometimes we invent everything, but because our stories come from reality we trust reality as much as our imagination. For example, in Lorna's Silence we know exactly what the police look for when they're checking up on people who they suspect of being a fake couple, so we set up the whole apartment accordingly because we had that information. We thought about it all. There's a scene that was cut out of the film where the police comes to check up on all this, and we knew exactly what kinds of things they look for, like the double mattress.

Filmmaker: How much of what you write is based on research and how much on emotional instinct?

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: 50-50. [laughs] No, it's difficult to answer. Even if part of what we do is based on reality and part of it is based on what or who we are, the division is not very clear. Things sort of move back and forth.

Filmmaker: You often use young and relatively inexperienced actors, but always get really incredible performances from them. What do you put these successes down to?

Luc Dardenne: This is general, this is with all actors. We watch them, we film them walking or sitting. Not talking. Gestures are important. She'll sit on a bench and we'll film for a long time. And then afterwards when we look at the footage, we were are able to see if the camera likes her or not, if she's there, if there's a presence on the images. After that, we do some small scenes. We act out a small scene with him or her, depending on who it is, and generally it's always the same scene: it revolves around a lie. I know the truth and we tell them, “You have to resist my questions. You don't necessarily have to talk, but we have to feel in the scene that you don't want to tell us the truth.” What we find is that if the actor or actress is able to resist by doing very little and sort of prevent us from going in and staying opaque, then we say, “Ah, there's something there.” And then, of course, we work a lot more after that.

Filmmaker: You used to be documentary filmmakers and there's a great sense of realism in your films, so how much freedom do you give your actors?

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: No freedom. Freedom doesn't exist for the actors. We rehearse for something like two and a half months with the actors before we start working, and we explore a whole number of different, concrete things. For instance, in the case of Lorna, when she comes into the apartment she has the errands that she just bought and she puts the stuff on the bed near Claudy and then she comes back to where the coats are hanging and then she takes her bag and wallet in her bag... All these gestures, we spent almost a day on rehearsing this and it's really about the rhythm and the succession of the gestures, and that's really the key of how we work. In terms of freedom, I'm not really sure what that means. If the question is “Is there improvisation?,” that doesn't exist. The dialogue may evolve in the rehearsals, but there's no improvisation. But when the shots are set up and we're actually starting to shoot, because we work with very long takes, the rhythm of the movement and trajectory from one place to the other within the shot may change a little bit from the rehearsal to the shot and even between takes. It's almost like the shot will be inhabited differently because of the present time and how things unfold.

Filmmaker: I want to ask you about your working process, because you've been making films together for a very long time.

Luc Dardenne: 34 years... [They both laugh] We've always worked together. We've never worked alone in film, so I'm incapable of comparing what it would mean to work alone. I think when you're two and when you don't work in a narcissistic way obviously – you don't have one or the other saying, “You're great!” or always agreeing – when you have the two of us on a shoot, we're really ruthless with each other. If we're not happy, if we're not satisfied, it's like a machine that allows us to go much, much further. On a set, for instance, with the crew or the actors, when one of us isn't satisfied with the result, we do it again. We do it again and again and again. And it's a little bit like madness going back and doing it differently and just pushing it further, but the fact that we're two allows us to go this much further.

Filmmaker: You have a core group of people you work with regularly, like the actors Olivier Gourmet and Jérémie Renier, plus your cinematographer Alain Marcoen and editor Marie-Hélène Dozo. Is it now something like a family unit? Can you work with them as easily as you do with each other?

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: I want to make a distinction, and I want to talk first about the technical crew. The people we've been working with we started working with on La Promesse, and for the most part it was their first feature. Some of them had done documentaries and shorts before. All the key people on the crew are friends and still are friends. It's true, there could have been problems, but nobody is there to do just their job. The sound person doesn't just do sound, the DP doesn't just do image, they're all really there for the same reason, which is to make characters come to life. Nobody is there to do their part on their own. As for the actors, it's true that you find them coming back through several films, but the only time that we knew who we were going to work with was with Olivier Gourmet in The Son. But it's true that Jérémie comes back, a little but like a ghost.

Luc Dardenne: He comes to beg for his role. [laughs] So this time we killed him – maybe he'll leave us alone. [laughs] But precisely because we killed him he's going to come back!

Filmmaker: You're in town now for a retrospective at Lincoln Center. Looking back on your work, what progressions and shifts do you see from La Promesse to the present moment? How do you view the arc of those films? And where do you see yourselves going as filmmakers?

Luc Dardenne: I don't have much to say to this. What we've done, what we do, where we're going to – I don't really have an answer. There's some mistakes. We watched a film recently and there were some things we thought were not so great, but I can't really tell you which way we're going. The only thing I know that I can say is that I know when we felt that we were free, that we weren't trying to copy something we'd done before or obey certain rules. We felt free, we felt like we had the daring to invent and find new things and that's the sense I've had since La Promesse: we've been free. Every time. I don't think there's anything that could be sadder than to come to a set and work like a contractor, building the same wall with the same concrete every time.

Filmmaker: So do you look at those “old walls,” do you watch your previous films?

Luc Dardenne: No, generally we don't watch our films. We just did, but we haven't done it before. We just did it with La Promesse because we went to show it in a juvenile delinquents' facility – the worst punishment you can give them is to watch this film. We watched it with them before having the discussion.

Filmmaker: Some people have said that there's a religious bent to your recent films, that they deal with redemption, are increasingly spiritual, etc. I don't personally see this, but I wanted to ask you if such a reading is correct.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: Oh, that's a question for you...

Luc Dardenne: No, it's for you!

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: Why do you say that? No, it doesn't interest me. It's interesting – in fact, it's a little bizarre – because we're telling stories of people who are eventually at some point find themselves guilty, and it's like you can't tell a story in our society where you imagine that someone is guilty without immediately thinking about God. I do ask why this question comes back over and over again. And then you start talking about redemption. What we're telling is stories of people who, little by little – even almost without realizing it – start feeling guilty. And, as a result, become more human. And I think it tells a lot more about the people who ask this question than about us.

Luc Dardenne: Amen!

Filmmaker: What's your best piece of advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Luc Dardenne: My advice is, if one cannot find outside financing, make a film with one’s available means, e.g. a small digital camera and friends. Another piece of advice is never to complain about being unappreciated or misunderstood.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: It is difficult to give advice. To me the most important thing is to discover one’s own working method, and luckily, and one can only discover it through the work. However, here are two small pieces of advice: first, come up with a working plan which has to do with the nature of the film itself and not from the availability of the technicians or actors who very often have other things scheduled. The second small piece of advice is simply to be present in the moment in order to let life reveal itself.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Luc Dardenne: The 10 Commandments (1956). I saw it in 1959 or 1960, I was 5 years old. My memory of it is that it scared me.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: I must have been about 8 years old. A friend of my parents, an amateur filmmaker, had gone to the US for his work on construction sites of factories. A few days after his return, he organized a screening in his home of images of the sites and landscapes he had filmed, along with slapstick short films for the kids. One of those shorts is my first movie memory. It’s the story of a guy who crashes a posh party, refuses to leave when asked to and gets chased around. He hides in a closet behinds the coats.. Of course, a moment later, he gets discovered and the chase goes on... Unlike this protagonist, I was very afraid to get locked in in a closet, afraid of the dark and of suffocating... It is also my first memory of a nightmare. After such fear, my night was very agitated.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you cried in a film, and which film was it?

Luc Dardenne: It was about a year ago. I saw Splendor in the Grass again (with my students). It was the final scene, Kazan’s most beautiful one, and one of the most beautiful scenes in the history of cinema, which made me cry.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: It was a while ago. It was at the Churchill in Liege, a theater run by my friends, at a screening of Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby. It’s impossible to explain why one cries at the movies. The emotion is too strong, that’s it... And it feels good.

ARMANDO IANNUCCI, IN THE LOOP

2009-07-24T15:16:00.001-04:00

PETER CAPALDI AND JAMES GANDOLFINI IN DIRECTOR ARMANDO IANNUCCI'S IN THE LOOP. COURTESY IFC FILMS.

Scottish writer-director Armando Iannucci has made a slow and steady progression toward becoming a film director. The Glasgow-born Italian Scot originally was planning to become a priest (like Martin Scorsese) but the lure of the entertainment world won out over the less glamorous prospect of a life of piety and celibacy. Iannucci attended the University of Glasgow then studied English at Oxford University, where he discovered his passion for comedy. He next got a job as a radio producer on comedy shows for the BBC, and by the early 90s he was working on the iconic sketch show Week Ending and had created both the edgy faux newscast On the Hour (with Chris Morris) and Knowing Me, Knowing You... with Alan Partridge, starring Steve Coogan. The latter two shows then graduated to television (On The Hour became The Day Today), where they were highly acclaimed by both viewers and critics. In the late 90s, Iannucci progressed from writer and producer to director also, helming a segment of the movie Tube Tales (1999) as well as his first longer form political satire, Clinton: His Struggle with Dirt (1998). In 2001, he wrote, directed and starred in the series The Armando Iannucci Shows, and the following year he teamed up with Coogan again to co-write and direct episodes of I'm Alan Partridge. In 2005, he created The Thick of It, a vérité mockumentary series that depicted the farcical goings on in the lower echelons of the British government. After getting rave reviews for its first series, the show returned two years later with three one-hour specials.

Iannucci's first feature, In the Loop, sees him adapting The Thick of It for the big screen, though only one character - the merciless, insult-hurling spin doctor Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi) - makes through the transition intact. Fittingly, the scope is much greater here, as it swaps the idiocies of small government for the farce of international politics and global warfare. The film's central figure is hapless government minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander), who becomes a political pawn as the US and the UK ponder invading a certain Middle Eastern country. After making the comment that war is "unforseeable," he goes to Washington, D.C., where everyone (including James Gandolfini's anti-war general and Mimi Kennedy's minister) is jostling to get on the all-important war committee. Fast-paced, smart, and very, very funny, In the Loop is easily the best political satire in recent memory, its acidic, dry take recalling Dr. Strangelove. Iannucci and his writing team brilliantly capture the power dynamics of politics in a way that is hilarious but also resonantly realistic. It's a particular pleasure to see The Thick of It's boogieman Malcolm Tucker (played with virtuousic venom by Capaldi) transplanted from Whitehall to Washington, where his no-nonsense "problem-solving" techniques are somewhat culturally alien, if no less effective. On the basis of In the Loop, it's clear that Iannucci's comedic talents are as well-suited to features as they are to television, and we can but hope that he will have the opportunity to make more films as cutting and unrelentingly funny in the future.

Filmmaker spoke to Iannucci about making the jump from TV to film, accurately depicting the ridiculousness of politics, and his plans to make a sci-fi movie he describes as "Ken Loach in space."

DIRECTOR ARMANDO IANNUCCI TALKS WITH ACTORS TOM HOLLANDER AND CHRIS ADDISON ON THE SET OF IN THE LOOP. COURTESY IFC FILMS.

Filmmaker: How long had you been thinking of doing this as a movie? Was it in your head when you created the series that you wanted to do this?

Iannucci: No, I had absolutely no intention of doing a film [of this], but I've always wanted to do a funny film. Fast, sparky, like a screwball comedy. I've been attached to various projects, but I wanted to wait until I found the right story. Then when I read more and more about the stupid sort of "office politics" that went on in the lead up to the Iraq War, I thought, "That's the story!" And then, "Well, I've got this model here of how The Thick of It works, so why don't we take that but not have the same minister and staff, because this is international and that's domestic?" And I knew the "special relationship" meant we were going to have a U.S. cast of characters and a U.K. cast of characters, but I wanted Malcolm [Tucker] to be there.

Filmmaker: Stylistically there's a shift between this and The Thick of It, as the shaky camera is replaced by much glossier visuals. What was the rationale behind that?

Iannucci: I thought the shaky thing on a big screen would just be intolerable. I don't know if I could watch that. What we do now - and it's just subliminal and surreptitious - is more zooms to get the fluidity. I still wanted a raw feel to it rather than the glossed, package sheen of other moviemakers, I still wanted it to feel raw and energetic and a bit messy and unfinished in a way. I found myself trying to resist the temptation to play with the big box of tricks. If a shot looked quite nicely composed, I'd not go for it and try to mess it up so that there's no sense of someone telling you the story.

Filmmaker: So did you have instructions for your D.P. about what kind of look and feel you wanted for the film?

Iannucci: For a start, I wanted to keep the fluidity. Also, the technique is just a function of how we go about the performances, because the performances are always [fluid too]. We always shoot what's in the script, but then I ask them to put it to one side and do it again. There's nothing worse than someone who improvises some great thing and then you say, "Can you do it one more time? This time we'll do it in a tight shot." What we do is have two cameras at all times because I want the actors to feel they can wander anywhere. There are no marks. So that actually then dictates the style, and because we keep moving it just allows you to cut in the edit. For some reason we don't notice the jump cuts because there's just that rhythm in the cut anyway that your mind gets used to.

Filmmaker: Is that how you've always directed? Have you always let actors improvise after they've got a take from the script in the can?

Iannucci: Yes, and sometimes I'll say to both cameras, "Don't show me anyone speaking, just show me people listening this time." Or I'll do a "drifting two," which is basically four or five people in a room and you're just catching two people in a shot. So we just build up all those components so in the edit we have the flexibility to go anywhere and not worry about continuity.

Filmmaker: There's always a big deal made about a director who moves from TV to the big screen. Did it feel like a step up for you? Were you at all daunted?

Iannucci: The biggest challenge for me was keeping the whole story in my head, keeping the rhythm, the pace at which the story was told as new elements and new characters were introduced into it. In an episode, you really have to have all your balls in the air in the first five minutes because you've not got much time, whereas in the film I knew I wanted to hold people back. So trying to hold all that in your head logistically - because of the bigger spread of characters and locations - was more difficult because we didn't get to shoot things in story order.

Filmmaker: As a writer, you've mostly done half-hour television, so did you find yourself having to switch gears to write a feature length comedy? How did it feel to have that change of pace?

Iannucci: Well, it was great because it means you're not having to do everything in shorthand all the time. And also that relentless pace can get [draining]. I also had in my head a duration, and I felt it couldn't be longer than an hour and three quarters. The worst bit was in the last stages of the edit, trying to get it down from two hours. I just felt that's as much as you can take. There's too many comedies where you've felt, "It's two and a half hours!" - because they need half an hour to wrap up the love interest or learn their lesson. [laughs] The films I like are all quite punchy and don't outstay their welcome. But, interestingly, with The Thick of It, for the last couple of years we've done these hour-long specials, which allowed me start playing with pacing and so on. It was after the second of the hour-long specials that I thought, "Maybe there's something here. We've seen that this can sustain an hour, let's try and think of a way of doing something [longer]."

Filmmaker: I remember an interview you gave a few years previously where you said that people in UK government said The Thick of It got it absolutely right - even though you were just trying to be funny, rather than accurate, about the idiocies of politics.

Iannucci: And that's actually been happening with this film in the UK, in that Gordon Brown's spin doctor resigned the week of the release. That was just perfect timing. Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair's spin doctor, watched the film and said, "It's boring. None of that happens." He said, "In America, the scene where the committee goes out of control and they have to shut it down, that's just caricature." And that was actually based on something that Cheney did: he set up a committee called something like Neutral Strategy. It was basically all about looking into whether they could invade Iran and Syria, and then 50 senators wanted on it so it got too big and he had to shut it down. Then he opened it up a few corridors down. So that happened, the spin doctor resigned, the Home Secretary's husband listed on her expenses some adult movies that he'd watched, and then reports came out about Gordon Brown smashing up a laser printer in his office. [laughs] I don't think there's any mystique to it. If you meet enough of these people, you can sort of work out what they must be like to work for.

Filmmaker: With this film, how much of it was research and how much was instinct?

Iannucci: Part of the research is to get the authenticity right just in the detail. From all that research we established that a lot of Washington is run by 23-year-olds. They do spend a lot of time hanging around more senior people offices in the hope of being spotted, which means they do all their work at night. And there's that thing about if you leave the meeting, you leave the power, so you must never leave a meeting. Madeleine Albright used to teach her staff "bladder diplomacy," which was how to last up to 6 hours without going to the toilet. You sip. It's interesting that maybe some wars were decided because somebody had to go the bathroom and couldn't wait any longer. [laughs] You know, Colin Powell left the room to go to the toilet and that's when they decided to invade Iraq.

Filmmaker: Your work always has a sense of the absurb and this does too, but that absurdity seems to be grounded in events and situations that actually happened. What was the balance between your created absurdity and reality?

Iannucci: I don't know because sometimes I dismiss certain storylines as being too silly - only to find that they happened. And that's a sort of strange thing, because you think in the world of politics that you can't be too absurd.

Filmmaker: So are you always trying to raise the level of ridiculousness just a little bit?

Iannucci: Just a little bit, but not to the extent that it becomes a raised eyebrow situation. Also, there is an element of knowing there is an artificiality about it. I mentioned screwball comedy, and I knew for the last 20 minutes there was going to be [a lot of that]. The scene in the meditation room is really the Marx brothers, but you sublimate it all under realism and detail. The detail is there as a distraction: it lulls you into thinking it's all real when it's highly, highly artificial.

Filmmaker: You worked with Peter Capaldi and Chris Addison on the TV series, but how did the new additions to the cast take to your improvisation process? Was it a very new way of working for them?

Iannucci: Well, I think it was for Tom [Hollander]. I'm not sure about James [Gandolfini]. I always think the American style is very naturalistic anyway so I think they're used to the notion of seeing a script and just dirtying it up slightly to make it feel more real and conversational. But James did his own research, went off to the Pentagon for two days. He got his haircut at the barbers with four-star generals, so he was able to bring back all that to us.

Filmmaker: You also filmed at No. 10 Downing Street. How did that happen?

Iannucci: Well, we wrote to them, fully expecting them to say, "No, we just don't do that sort of thing. Go away." But they wrote back saying, "Yeah, why not?" It coincided with a week when it was quiet because the Prime Minister was up in Blackpool for some party conference. They were really quite excited when Peter turned up. All the Malcolms [i.e. spin doctors] in No. 10 had brought their cameras and we had to do a big group shot. We had tea with the Chancellor's wife in their flat upstairs, and we were taken on a tour. It was like the full works - it was great!

Filmmaker: So I assume that the people at No. 10 are fans of The Thick of It.

Iannucci: I don't know if Gordon Brown is, but "the machine" is well aware of it. It's strange, isn't it? You think, "That's quite interesting." Then you think, "But don't they see how it shows them?" But I think that it's such a contained, inward-looking world that they're just relieved that anyone from the outside world cares. I remember when we were doing research and I met Joe Biden's chief of staff. He was youngish, mid-30s, good-looking, clearly a powerful job. He said "It's always exciting to have people from the media here. Last week I was at a reception and Bradley Whitford (Josh from The West Wing) was there!" I was thinking, "But you're him, you're the real one!" But you don't say that. Also, because they can't impress other people in politics by saying, "Oh yeah, I had tea with the Foreign Secretary," they like to be able to say that to people from the outside.

Filmmaker: You talked about the Marx brothers and screwball as being influences here. Was that your taste in movies growing up?

Iannucci: I loved Woody Allen - Bananas, Love and Death. I'm a big Woody Allen fan. Airplane. Films with lots of gags in them. I really like Buster Keaton. And then things like Brazil and Dr. Strangelove, The Great Dictator by Chaplin. I like those comedies that actually have big subjects attached to them but somehow don't belittle the subject by being a comedy, they give you the chance to really come at it from all angles. I mean, The Great Dictator, made in the middle of the Second World War, is a satire on Hitler and the Jews. I can't believe what that must have been like watching that.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Iannucci: I remember my mum taking me to the strange double bill of The Student Prince and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I think it was because she wanted to see them. I thought it was terrible. It was just lots of singing. But fortunately the cinema was only two blocks from our house, so I just left. Went home. I thought it was just pointless.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you cried in a film and which film was it?

Iannucci: I think it was The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. At the very end. It's very sad.

Filmmaker: Finally, if you had an unlimited budget and could cast whoever you wanted (alive or dead), what film would you make?

Iannucci: I'd want to make a big sci-fi movie that was terrifying. I don't really think about the cast until I've got the story. I kind of like the idea of a sci-fi movie that's very naturalistic, like Ken Loach in space.

EILEEN YAGHOOBIAN, DIED YOUNG, STAYED PRETTY

2009-07-17T15:54:00.001-04:00

POSTER ARTIST ROB JONES IN DIRECTOR EILEEN YAGHOOBIAN'S DIED YOUNG, STAYED PRETTY. COURTESY NOROTOMO PRODUCTIONS INC.

Eileen Yaghoobian, as she puts it, loves making pictures, and over the years, the Iranian-born, Canadian-based artist and filmmaker has put her energies into doing that in a number of different ways. She first discovered her creative impulse as a fresh-faced teenager when she saw Antonioni's Blow Up and was inspired to take up photography. She then earned an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where she gained experience in filmmaking, 3D animation and theatre as well as photography. For many years, she was best known for her photography, particularly her grid pieces which composited thematically linked images, and had her work in the permanent collections of such esteemed institutions as George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Paris' Bibliothèque Nationale. Parallel with her career as a still photographer, she worked in U.S. and Canadian films in roles such as costume designer on Rock 'n' Roll Frankenstein (1999) and set decorator on Boricua's Bond. Not long ago, Yaghoobian also began working in theater: she recently directed a Boston production of Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana and in 2008 participated in the Lincoln Center Director's Lab.

Yaghoobian's first feature, the documentary Died Young, Stayed Pretty, arose out of tragedy, as she began making it after the death of one of her brothers. The film is about the indie rock poster community that exists around gigposters.com (a website that Yaghoobian discovered during her period of mourning), a group of artists who make inspired, idiosyncratic work for one-off gigs, for little or no money. What's most distinctive about Died Young, Stayed Pretty is the way in which it completely eschews traditional documentary conventions: there is no narrator, no introduction or exposition, no clear form. The film is a work of art similar to the posters it features, impressionistic rather than formal, with Yaghoobian placing images and interview footage together to create an overall ambience rather than an informative narrative thread. Its looseness is starkly in contrast to a film like last year's Beautiful Losers - a doc which also portrayed rock-influenced art movement - yet the poster art, and stories told by its makers (such as Art Chantry and Brian Chippendale), render this a strange but strangely compelling viewing experience.

Filmmaker spoke to Yaghoobian about the trauma behind her film's genesis, the unusual approach she took in arranging her footage, and her desire to go back in time in order to learn to surf.

EILEEN YAGHOOBIAN, DIRECTOR OF DIED YOUNG, STAYED PRETTY. COURTESY NOROTOMO PRODUCTIONS INC.

Filmmaker: What initially prompted the decision to make this film?

Yaghoobian: This is my first feature film, but I've been a shooter for 20 years. I've been a photographer, I've been making shorts, I've done 3D animation, I've worked in theatre, so I've done many different things. My base was photography – I've had shows and I'm known as a photographer – but meanwhile I was also making films, like short video art projects or Super 8 films. I had this grant to live in my van for eight months and travel the States, and I made 20 short films out of that with my Super 8 camera. They were about this alien that had landed on earth that was this useless superhero. [laughs] This is the first time I went for it and made a feature. The transition for me was in 2004, when I had two things happen to me. First, that Yippi Yaghoooooo alien piece got into the Phoenix Film Festival, which was crazy and ridiculous at the same time. I went to a screening there and I just loved the immediacy of the audience and the response they had. It was like a comic piece, a hurrah to the silent movie era, so people were responding to it. Secondly, I had a solo show in Tribeca at the same time, so I flew from Phoenix to New York for my show. I just decided that my audience is the film people because I related more to them than to the art community. At that point, I decided that I wanted to be making films.

Filmmaker: There's a pullquote that describes the film as an outlaw movie about outlaw artists. Did you feel very much outside of the filmmaking community?

Yaghoobian: Outsider, yes. I made this without any kind of rules that I was supposed to follow as far as waiting for financing, [laughs] which is what most people do. I did this out of my pocket and I traveled solo: I was completely alone shooting for three years on location. I did the sound, I did the filming, and the deal was that I would show up to the artists' towns if they'd put me up. I slept on their floors, I slept on their couches, sometimes I was drunk when I was shooting, and basically I was there all the time at all times. With some people, I spent 10 days with them and I was there 24/7, some people I was there for 20 days. It wasn't like I went to the town and showed up at the studio and talked to them for three hours, I was actually living with them in their house. It was a more personal film for me in that way. I didn't want to make a film where I said, "Here are these artists and they're just pimping themselves." I wanted to really be transparent. It's a representation of you as a director, and you can tell when someone's bullshitting on the screen – it's called bad acting! [laughs] And it's the same with real people exactly the same as it does with actors.

Filmmaker: Were you able to devote your time fully to the film, or did you have to take breaks to make money to keep yourself going?

Yaghoobian: It was a back and forth, but it was a back and forth with no breaks. It's not like I went away and wasn't on the project; I went away and was dealing with the footage. [laughs] It was like 250 hours of footage, I went to 20 or 30 states – it was the real deal. It wasn't like I went on vacation or anything, I didn't have a single break. I didn't have a Christmas or a holiday for four years. I was constantly on location filming, and I was alone, which made it harder. It makes it fully harder when you're on your own.

Filmmaker: With so many hours of footage, and with the unconventional approach you took to presenting the material, it must have almost felt like there was more than just one movie you could have made from what you had.

Yaghoobian: Oh, yeah, oh God, yeah. There were five movies I could have made out of this film, because I covered my ass. I covered myself while I was filming so I could have the film that is the history of rock posters, so that I could have the film that has that battle between two big rock poster dudes. [laughs] I covered all of those angles, but this is the film I wanted to make. What connected me on a deep, gut, instinctual level was the dialogue that lives in the posters and the posters themselves. I did this all very planned and clear, knowing exactly what I wanted. I was very well prepared. I had a shot list of every person I interviewed and I knew exactly what they made and what they said. I really did a lot of my research on gigposters.com, I'd read pretty much everything each one of them had said and written and I knew the conversation within that community. So when I went to talk to each person in their locations, I was very prepared for them and what I wanted from them.

Filmmaker: What would you say your conception of the film was going in? Did you have any specific structural ideas about how you wanted to approach the material?

Yaghoobian: When you talk about "outlaw," I really did cut this to the antithesis of that pace and tone that most documentaries have. Most documentaries, they ease you in, they prepare you, they teach you. [laughs] I wasn't interested in that. Maybe because I come from a heavily art-oriented background, I really felt like I had to serve the material and give up to it. At the time I started filming, my second brother had died and my friend had sent me a link to gigposters.com. I instantly related to the imagery, the twisted irony and the satire and the dark humor, and on a gut level that was what drove my craziness to do what I did. It has been five years of my life, but that's what drove my interest. Structurally, I wanted to cut it like a rock poster, I wanted to make it like I was cutting and pasting a rock poster.

Filmmaker: When people ask you what your movie's about what do you tell them? To me, it's a lot more complex than just being about rock posters.

Yaghoobian: I say it's about the community of rock posters, about the cultural dialogue that lives in the posters and the community. Of course, these documentary people watch the movie and say, "Where's the narration?" And then people are like, "How come we didn't see more process?" I'm not making a movie to teach you how to make a silkscreen poster – go pick up a book. That's not what I'm interested in. Sometimes people get irritated when artists are telling their views, saying they're blabbering on about what they think. It's like, "Why shouldn't they? Isn't that the whole point that they're supposed to be doing that?" They come from this punk angst background, so of course punk is anti-narrative. It's supposed to deconstruct narrative, so my movie has to serve that. I had to serve it. How could I make a movie about punk and about that feeling of music and then create a narrative around it? It would have just been not truthful.

Filmmaker: Did you ever have pressure from anybody to take a conventional approach? To have a voiceover, to guide the viewer gently into the movie?

Yaghoobian: Oh yeah, I've had that. One guy was like, "Yaghoobian couldn't organize her material into a viable structure." [laughs] I'm like, "What are you talking about?! I edited for an entire year. I definitely knew what I was going for." "Viable structure" means what? The movies that person liked would have bored the hell out of me, but they think it's a "mess." It's a conversation: you either follow it or you don't, you're either with it or you're not.

Filmmaker: Some of your photographic art is all about grids of images, so rigid structure and form is something that you actually know very well in your work. Except that here you chose to go for an organic, punk feel.

Yaghoobian: It looks organic, but that thing is cut to a T. [laughs] I cut this movie to the most I could cut it. Oh my God. I think as a photographer and as a director – I've worked in theatre as well – I've come to really trust my gut. Being an artist (I've never liked calling myself that...), you really have to trust yourself in your choices. When I was making this film, there were some amazing things that happened that are just the gifts of documentary filmmaking, and that's just what happens when you do location filming. I know that from photography, that certain things just happen and it's about that moment. It's those little moments that drive you to make a movie for five years.

Filmmaker: You talked about the death of your second brother occurring just prior to you starting this movie. Did that event prompt you to make Died Young, Stayed Pretty? And to give it that title?

Yaghoobian: OK, the title means three different things. And that's another criticism: "The title has nothing to do with the movie..." I'm like, "What is rock 'n' roll?" The whole idea of stars like Elvis dying young is a cliché of rock, but the title in fact comes from me reading Julie Lasky's book called Some People Can't Surf about Art Chantry. When I was reading that book researching Chantry five years ago, there was a part where Chantry had made a poster of Marilyn Monroe that read "Marilyn Monroe: She died young, stayed pretty." Of course, I instantly connected on many levels to the title, and I was like "That's it, that's the title of my movie," so I actually had the title before I shot it. Also, at the time I was in my brother's apartment, I was grieving and it was my second brother who had died. He was 26, and my first brother, my oldest brother, was 28 when he died. It was like a double blow and I was really not very happy, [laughs] I was grieving in my brother's apartment. I dedicate the film to my brothers, mainly because of the craziness of my state of mind was the only reason I had no life for five years, and three years of filming alone.

Filmmaker: Did you feel this was particularly challenging for a first feature?

Yaghoobian: Making a film like this, you can easily screw it up. It can maybe sustain itself in a short, but really to make a feature film like this without narration, without teaching people anything, is really difficult. To keep it entertaining and moving from one thing to another, the pace needed to be at a certain level. It was really hard to do that. I sweated over this thing, I really did. I had scientists and aerospace engineer guys come into my apartment – I'd find them on the beach or the street and I'd bring them back. I'd get them to watch the movie – you know, the unlikely audience – and I was happily surprised at how the unexpected audience actually related to the film. A lot of them thought the guys in my movie were actors, they thought they were funny characters. It was wonderful to have that, because that was a big test for me. Now I'm distributing the film, people are saying it's niche and that only art people will like it, but I think it can transcend that.

Filmmaker: What's the worst (or weirdest) job you've ever had?

Yaghoobian: That's a bad question! [laughs] I don't like that question. Making movies. [laughs] No. Actually, honestly, cutting this film. It was horrible. [laughs] It was so hard! Cutting the 250 hours was hell, and doing it all alone was hell. With no help.

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a kid?

Yaghoobian: I'm so bad with pointed questions! [laughs] I guess I always wanted to make films, because when I was 15 I saw Antonioni's Blow-Up. I'd miss school because the good movies were at 1 or 2 in the morning. I'd show up late and get my parents to write me a note, or just watch movies all night. I saw Blow-Up and I was fascinated by that whole detective thing. The next day I picked up a camera, and I haven't stopped since then. That film was awe-inspiring to me, but it wasn't just me. When that film came out in the 60s, all these guys who wanted to be photographers because they thought that they'd be like photographing these hot girls and having orgies with them.

Filmmaker: Finally, if you could do it all over again, what would you change?

Yaghoobian: I would like to get into surfing. I played soccer for 12 years and was really athletic as a soccer player when I was younger, but I wish I was a surfer. [laughs] I think they've got it made. They're happy and they're on the water. I just don't know how to surf. So if I could, I would change it all that way. I missed out before, but now if I could go back that would be the first thing I'd take up.

FERNANDO EIMBCKE, LAKE TAHOE

2009-07-10T20:41:00.001-04:00

DIEGO CATAÑO IN DIRECTOR FERNANDO EIMBCKE'S LAKE TAHOE. COURTESY FILM MOVEMENT.

You only have to look at the work of a director like Fernando Eimbcke to see that there is a lot more to get excited about in Mexican cinema than just the so-called “Three Amigos,” Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu & Alfonso Cuarón. Born in Mexico City in 1970, Eimbcke studied film direction at the University Centre of Cinematographic Studies at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico). During his time there, he made a handful of shorts, including the fiction films Sorry for the Inconvenience and Excuse Me? (both 1994) and two non-fiction titles, Reaching a Star (1993) and Not everything is Permanent (1996), the latter of which was nominated for Best Documentary Short at the Ariels, the Mexican Academy Awards. Following his graduation, he began directing music videos, as well as more shorts, such as Weightwatch (2002) and The Look of Love (2003). In 2004, he co-wrote and directed his feature debut, Duck Season, a black-and-white comedy drama about two teenage boys left alone for the day who must entertain themselves after the power cuts out. The movie premiered at Cannes in the Critics Week sidebar, was programmed at numerous film festivals worldwide, and won no less than 11 Ariels, including Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay.

With his sophomore effort, Lake Tahoe, Eimbcke reunites with his co-writer on Duck Season, as well as one of the lead actors from that film, Diego Cataño, however in tone and texture the two films could not be more different. The movie begins with the downbeat Juan (Cataño) crashing his car into a lamppost – how and why this happened is unclear – and the film chronicles his efforts to get it back on the road. Helping him (or not) are a distrustful old man (Hector Herrera), a kung-fu obsessed mechanic (Juan Carlos Lara II), and the pretty girl who works with him in the repair shop (Daniela Valentine). As Lake Tahoe progresses, we become aware that driving the minimal narrative of Juan's quest is a much more profound event, hinted at from the very start by Eimbcke's empty and quietly mournful shots of the movie's deserted town. A slow, ethereal piece of filmmaking, Lake Tahoe uses cinematic means – its expansive 35mm frame and frequent cuts to black – to convey a pervasive sense of loss and absence. Occupying a space between the real and the absurdly surreal, Eimbcke's movie pointedly downplays its emotional aspects, keeping them as subtext until its poignant climax.

Filmmaker interviewed Eimbcke over email and asked him about the personal nature of his new film, the influence of Jim Jarmusch on his work, and his first movie memories.

FERNANDO EIMBCKE, DIRECTOR OF LAKE TAHOE. COURTESY FILM MOVEMENT.

Filmmaker: How did you get the idea for the film? What was your initial inspiration?

Eimbcke: I crashed my family’s car a few months after the death of my father. I told this story to Paula Markovitch, the co-author of the script, who also lost her father and we began to construct the story. Both of us needed to tell this story. I’m the director of the film but the story is a Paula’s and Fernando’s personal story.

Filmmaker: What was your reason behind making the film so sparse and minimal?

Eimbcke: When I finish the script, the shooting, the editing, every process of the film, I like to think, "Can I make it more simple? Can I express what the character needs in one sentence? Or without dialogue?" I’m obsessed with the simplest way.

Filmmaker: The film uses many cuts to black, which is relatively unusual in contemporary films. Why were you drawn to use this approach?

Eimbcke: Cut to black is a transition tool but is also a narrative tool. In cinema when you put two images together you have a new meaning. It is the same with cuts to black. Following a scene or preceding a scene, a black frame is not anymore a black frame. There’s a lot of people who only see a black frame, an empty frame, I don’t.

Filmmaker: Stranger Than Paradise is probably the most famous film of recent times to use cuts to black as an editorial method. Was it a specific inspiration in this instance?

Eimbcke: Of course. When I saw Stranger Than Paradise I fell in love with the film. Something caught me. Maybe in the cuts to black I found that certain meaning I talked about in the previous answer.

Filmmaker: Duck Season was also a film which was compared to the work of Jim Jarmusch. Has he been a big influence on you?

Eimbcke: Yes, I fell in love with the simplicity and complexity of Jarmusch’s films, particularly with Stranger Than Paradise. Thanks to Jarmsuch and Kaurismäki, who also is a big influence, I discovered Ozu. And Ozu’s work influenced and will continue to influence a lot of filmmakers. Ozu is the Master.

Filmmaker: The film's narrative is very linear, but all the relationships are broken up and staccato, stopping and then starting up again later. Can you talk about why it is like that.

Eimbcke: The character wants to escape. He spends all the story trying to avoid all possible relations, but at the same time he needs all those relations. I remember Paula Markovitch laughing about the idea of a frustrated road movie.

Filmmaker: The film feels very natural and spontaneous. Did you allow your actors to improvise?

Eimbcke: It depended on the scene. Sometimes I felt the scene needed improvisation and sometimes I didn’t.

Filmmaker: Both Duck Season and Lake Tahoe are about young people dealing with situations where things they take for granted (electrical power, a car) stop working. Was this a conscious exploration of similar territory?

Eimbcke: It wasn’t a conscious decision. What happened is that Paula and I enjoy a lot to work with simple and absurd situations.

Filmmaker: Both of your films are also about a world where parents are absent, most poignantly so in Lake Tahoe. Is this another theme that continues to interest you?

Eimbcke: Yes, I’m sure I’ll continue exploring the same theme but with different angles. If someday I make a love story, I’m sure the theme of parents' absence will be there.

Filmmaker: Can you explain the significance of the film's title? It reminded me a little of Chinatown.

Eimbcke: Juan's brother spends all the film collecting memories. Some of them are real, some of them are fantasies. He needs to believe that all of them went to Lake Tahoe. At the end of the film when Juan returns to his home, he finally accepts the fact that his father died. When he says to his brother “We never went to Lake Tahoe” he’s saying “Our father is dead, that’s the reality”.

Filmmaker: Lake Tahoe is beautifully shot in 35mm. How important was it for you to shoot on film rather than digital? (Are you interested in shooting on digital in the future?)

Eimbcke: There’s one reason I want to shot in 35mm. It is beautiful. I’m sure one day I must shoot on digital, but I’ll be very sad looking at the image.

Filmmaker: Mexican cinema is going through a golden period at the moment. What do you think are the reasons for this happening?

Eimbcke: All the Mexican directors I admire the most have in common a profound love to cinema.

Filmmaker: Is there a sense of community among Mexican directors? Who of your contemporaries are you friends with and discuss your work with?

Eimbcke: Carlos Cuarón works very near my workplace so we talk a lot about our work, and I learned a lot from him. Alfonso Cuarón distributed Duck Season, read Lake Tahoe and saw the film in the editing room. I sent the work print of Lake Tahoe to Alejandro González Iñárritu and he gave me very good advice. I have a very good relationship with Rodrigo Plá, Gerardo Naranjo, Julián Hernández, etc. There’s a sense of community.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Eimbcke: It was Laurel and Hardy’s short films on television.

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Eimbcke: Yes, always. Shooting with no risks is boring.

Filmmaker: What's your best piece of advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Eimbcke: Don’t aspire, be.

Filmmaker: Finally, if the world ended tomorrow, what (if anything) would you be sad about that you hadn't achieved?

Eimbcke: I would be very sad about not having shot the story I’m writing right now.

AGNÈS VARDA, THE BEACHES OF AGNES

2009-07-01T15:13:00.004-04:00

DIRECTOR AGNÈS VARDA IN HER DOCUMENTARY THE BEACHES OF AGNES. COURTESY CINEMA GUILD.

A member of the Nouvelle Vague as well as the Rive Gauche, iconic filmmaker Agnès Varda has built a 50-year career on her refusal to repeat herself or to be pigeon-holed. Born in 1928 of Greek and French parents in Brussels, Belgium, Varda was an Art History student at the Ecole de Louvre before becoming the official photographer for the prestigious Parisian theatre company Théâtre National Populaire. In 1954, she transitioned from photography into cinema with her first feature, La Pointe-courte, which placed Faulkner’s The Wild Palms in the context of a French fishing village, and consciously blurred the line between documentary and fiction. Varda married fellow French New Wave director Jacques Demy in 1962, and the same year had a breakthrough hit with Cleo From 5 to 7, a groundbreaking real-time drama about a singer waiting for medical results. Varda would return to explore the different ways in which fiction and documentary can be combined in Le Bonheur (1965), a romantic drama which starred actor Jean-Claude Druout and his real family, the US-made hippie movie Lions Love (1968) which featured a raft of 60s icons playing themselves, the semi-autobiographical Documenteur (1981), and the vérité-style narrative Vagabond (1985), with Sandrine Bonnaire as a young homeless woman. In 1990, Varda paid tribute to the late Demy in a film depicting his childhood, Jacquot de Nantes, and a decade later had an unexpected hit with her personal documentary The Gleaners and I, an example of cinécriture (or “writing with film”), Varda’s particular take on the cinematic essay.

Varda’s latest film sees the veteran writer-director marking her 80th birthday by looking back over her long and eventful life. The Beaches of Agnes is so titled because beaches have a special emotional resonance for Varda, and here she takes an unconventional and decidedly non-linear approach to revisiting – both literally and figuratively – places in her past. This subjective, contemplative film uses Varda’s patented cinécriture technique as she examines her life principally through her relationships with friends, family and creative contemporaries, while bringing her body of work into focus at the same time. The diminutive Varda is charming and self-effacing as an on-camera subject, but this sweet-looking grandmother nevertheless is unflinchingly honest as she discusses such topics as her rocky relationship with the late Demy. Inventive, sprightly and delightful, The Beaches of Agnes is the kind of coda to a career most filmmakers would dream of making, except that – judging by the energy she still displays both in front of and behind the camera – Varda is far from finished as a creative force.

During Varda’s visit to New York in March, Filmmaker talked to the legendary autrice about turning the camera on herself, her continuing drive to make films, and her fascination with Film Forum’s restroom patrons.

DIRECTOR AGNÈS VARDA ON THE SET OF THE BEACHES OF AGNES. COURTESY CINEMA GUILD.

Filmmaker: How did you come up with the idea for the film? Were you on a beach?

Varda: Have you got the press notes? In there I tell how it happened, so I can't say anything... I wasn't on a beach. I'm on beaches very often; it's more related to my age. I was 79, and maybe the zero was very strong, you now? Maybe you'll be very soon 20? Or 30? 29 is not so much more than 30. And then 31, no matter. But 30, 40 50... When I was about to be 80, I thought I should do a film to have my 80th marked by something. Did you see the birthday with the brooms? In France, you don't say that you're 80 years old, you say that you're 80 brooms old. Remember that? When I do that scene with the brooms, I said something I really believe, I said, "I remember while I'm alive." The whole thing is about bringing memories into the today life. This is not going back so much with nostalgia or good or bad memories, it's more how can these memories, these stories, these things that happen in my memory be integrated into my day? This is how the film is built. I go back and forth when the opportunity [arises], [with] things that happen,with what my mood brings me to also. I hope you appreciated that. It was not very organized, but keeping a lot of freedom to go back and forth in my own little history that crosses a lot of the history of the second half of the 20th Century.

Filmmaker: How fluid was your idea for the film? How much room did you leave yourself to be surprised? How tightly scripted was it?

Varda: I was ready for all surprises. Like this one with my emotions was a surprise. I gave an example: I go to the flea market. I find a plate of a Belgian city and I say, "I'll give it to the Dardenne brothers." Then I go and see these film files; they exist in France. So I was not set up, but there is a file of Jacques Demy, Jean Cocteau and me. I don't think we are in the right place, but I think we are about there. And so, I throw Jean Cocteau and I end up with Jacques. This is at that precise moment, I think "My God, is that how people see us? A couple of pieces of paper?" That gave me the idea that there should be something more sexual about our relationship, and I made up the scene in the old remade courtyard: the couple goes back and the man has a hat on and she is naked. She is in a fabric like a Magritte painting – did you notice? Remember the scene? While I was editing, sometimes I would have these free associations, so maybe I would not have had that shot of the naked people if I had not found the files. I allowed myself that things would happen in the film, even though I had organized my trip in the boat and to rebuild the courtyard, and all this. Sometimes some things would come out of my mind and I would suddenly feel something. Here, all my memories are like flies surrounding me, sometimes disturbing me, sometimes nice flies.

Filmmaker: Did you go through photos and look at old letters, or did you only want to put things in the film that were in the forefront of your memory?

Varda: I had to go through some photos, childhood photos, which I had not looked at for years. Although my childhood is not that important, I had to have some of my family, had to find one where I could say that I was the smallest of the three first ones, and the biggest of the three last ones. I could make a film of six hours, but my aim is to make a real film which has a shape, which has a style, which has what I call cinécriture. Always choose the cinematic set-up to tell something, not just to tell. When I made tests for La Pointe-courte with a couple of my friends, [one of the actors] died after the tests. So I made the film with Philippe Noiret – you know who is Philippe Noiret? – and I copied the tests that I had done: arriving into the village, the fishermen watching them going into an alley. But I realized that the children of that man and that woman, grown-up now, 50 years old, had never seen these tests. I could just show them the whole movie and say, "This is your father," but I thought, "I have to make something, I have to make cinema in cinema." I've been telling that scene very often because for me it's very important. [We got] that carriage from La Pointe-courte: we put that screen and the 16mm projector and the real film and even the electricity, and then we did the traveling shots, very complicated shots, and they pushed the carriage with images of their father. For me, this is cinema in cinema, and memory into an action. It's like a funeral, like any other funeral, to push memory like a corpse itself into the night. I don't know if you saw that scene the way I see it. It's a very strong scene in terms of cinema because it's like showing that cinema was moving, the man was moving, and the carriage was moving and the traveling was moving. It's like, "How can we investigate what is movement, what is cinema?" So in many places of that film, I did try to invent a cinematic language for these memories.

Filmmaker: You say at the start of the film that you want to focus on other people, not yourself...

Varda: And I do. You don't see me that much... You see me a lot, but there is much more of other stories, other people, other names. You know, there is that famous book of Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Everybody. Remember that title? Everybody has been me, which is not true, but yes and no.

Filmmaker: How was it for you to be so much in the focus of the film? Was it easy to be yourself, or did you end up playing a version of yourself, a persona?

Varda: I started very honestly, saying "I'm too short, I'm different of the rest. I'm on the beach. I'm very plump and I want to tell my story." But I think that other people intrigue me more, and it ended up being about the landscape we all have inside us. It allows me to be the one telling the story. You see me a lot in the film, but I think I'm [focusing on] so many other people that I can't see it as a narcissistic self-portrait at all, because otherwise I wouldn't have waited until I was so old. I would have done it when I was in better shape. ...I cannot believe the number of people who go to the toilet [at Film Forum]. Incredible! You should calculate this – three per minute!

Filmmaker: You have invented this idea of cinécriture, the film essay. Was there a conflict between that and the very personal, intimate aspect of the movie?

Varda: There was no conflict, because I think the parts that were intimate were needed because... You know, being here is very interesting because I can calculate the rhythm of people going to the toilet. ...No, I was feeling that I had to show myself. Not too much, though. Talking about other people, naming them. They're around me – they're me, you know? The figure of Jacques Demy is really at the center, since I met him years ago and had so many years with him, with some ups and downs. We came together wishing to age together – and then he died! But life is not finished and I'm still working, and all this is mixed in a way that I hope makes sense. He has been very important in my life, is still very important, but making film has also been very important, before him and after him. I don't hide that. As much as I'm alive, I'm a filmmaker.

Filmmaker: You seem to be driven to still be constantly creating, and there's a real diversity in the kind of projects you take on. Do you have a constant hunger or need to challenge yourself?

Varda: It's not a hunger to challenge myself, it's more an artistic desire. I try not to repeat myself, which means challenging myself. I remember after Le Bonheur, I was offered at least five films with the same kind of story. And after Cléo, somebody else wanted me to make a film about a singer where something should happen to her... I mean, I hate to repeat myself, I hate it! So all of my films have been different. When I did The Gleaners, I was investigating the new cameras and how we can handle that to approach people who are so socially fragile. I was really trying to push the aim further. I've never made a career, I've made films. It was almost a mistake that Vagabond did so well, and the others did well. Like The Gleaners did well in the States, but it was discreet. I'm not complaining, it was seen by people who love it, and this one may be the same story. That's where I feel good, where I make films in total freedom that are appreciated as free. You would believe that this film is only seen by old people – not true! Because the young people love freedom. They love the idea that a film can be whatever you feel, and it gives them a lot of energy to believe that an old lady can be so free, so we have a new audience of young people.

Filmmaker: I'm interested in the process you went through on this film, where you filmed in two or three week periods over the course of two years. What was it like to revisit all these places and, as you say, to remember while you lived?

Varda: What do you mean "all" these places? I told you, at the house of my childhood I found a girl and was very touched by the girl and then I bumped into all these people and became a documentarist again. I forgot about that. Many things happened that I had not expected and sometimes I had a tale I needed to tell, sometimes I went back in the middle of editing to shoot because something was missing, feeling very free to film what I needed. [Varda wanders off to look at the popcorn machine in action in the Film Forum lobby] Come with me – we are going to the popcorn area! We are together traveling, you know? Oh, I feel good here – much better!

Filmmaker: When was the last time you wished you had a different job?

Varda: It never happened. It's just a more beautiful way of living, it's not a job for me. It's way of leading a life in which artistic desire becomes the way you feel.

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a child?

Varda: I have to make connection with my childhood... Did I have a dream job? I'm not sure. I remember making a little, two-page magazine like kids do, but I never intended to do that as a job, I just thought it was a way having a parallel life to school, doing something different. But I never had that in mind. I remember that my mother would say that the most beautiful job for a woman was to be a mother, and I thought "Bullshit! It's certainly not enough." I thought, "How could she say that? This is not a job. This is work, but this is not a job to desire." I remember I was shocked, but I didn't have an answer to that. As for myself, I don't think I had a desire to become something specific. All my life I've been very much here and now.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Varda: I think it was Snow White [and the Seven Dwarves] in a huge cinema called the Metropole in Brussels. Our family never took us to the movies, but they took us kids to see this. I didn't like the film. Everybody thought it was wonderful, but I reacted badly to it. The witch was totally scary and I found the prince so stupid and ugly, ugly, ugly! Bizarre to say it of a child, but I didn't like the design of it. I hated it, even though the midgets were interesting characters. This I remember. In a way, I thought it was ridiculous that she served them but they were nice. In a way I liked them, the small ones.

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Varda: Sure. How could the film be interesting if the director doesn't put himself or herself at risk? That's the only interesting challenge of being a filmmaker. The Beaches of Agnes is a risk. The risk was, "Can I find fluidity in a bunch of puzzle-like pieces?" The risk was that people would say, "Oh, my God, this is a flea market..." So it took me nine months of editing and a lot of good thoughts to really find what I needed. It came from the freedom I gave myself to bring a Picasso painting, to show something that I liked, to exploit the fact that when it started to rain, we'd use the rain. When I met crazy people, I grabbed the people. I was always enjoying what I was doing in the moment.

HAVANA MARKING, AFGHAN STAR

2009-06-26T15:12:00.001-04:00

TALENT SHOW CONTESTANT LIMA SAHAR IN DIRECTOR HAVANA MARKING'S AFGHAN STAR. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS.

Following in the footsteps of such filmmakers as James Marsh (Man on Wire), Stephen Walker (Young@Heart) and Parvez Sharma (A Jihad For Love), Havana Marking is the latest director of a British TV-funded documentary to find her film in the theatrical spotlight Stateside. The intrepid director went to school in Dorset, England, before studying Anthropology at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Subsequently, she began working in documentary television, progressing from researcher through to producer, on shows as disparate as Himalaya with Michael Palin, the Gordon Ramsay studio cooking show The F Word, and the environmental investigation What Would Jesus Drive?. She made her debut as a director in 2005 with The Great Relativity Show, a series of animated shorts explaining the Theory of Relativity which won a Pirelli Science Award. In 2007, she directed a half-hour documentary about disabled strippers, The Crippendales, which was made as part of Channel 4's New Talent program. Marking currently runs the Redstart Media production company, and has also worked as a freelance journalist for the British newspapers The Guardian and The Observer.

Marking's feature debut sees her capitalizing on her first-hand knowledge of the documentary genre's populist offshoot, reality TV. Afghan Star focuses on the TV series of the same name, a talent show along the lines of American Idol which aims to find the newest and best singer in a country where - until the Taliban's rule ended in 2001 - music, dancing and television were all banned. Marking's movie follows four hopefuls from the final 10: handsome Rafi, a 19-year-old with real pop star charisma; gifted 20-year-old Hameed, a classically trained Hazara musician; Lima, a 25-year-old woman from ultra-conservative Kandahar who has to practice her music in secret; and rebellious 21-year-old Setara, who sees music as a vital part of her self-expression. Afghan Star, which won Best Director and the Audience Award in the World Documentary section at Sundance this year, is a refreshingly different look at the shifting social and cultural landscape of the Middle East which uses the familiar TV talent show format to underline the differences and similarities between Afghanistan and the West. Marking depicts a much more complex and progressive Afghanistan than we are used to seeing, though the film dramatically and compellingly underlines the genuine dangers the contestants face by so forcefully leaving behind the restrictive religious traditions of the past.

Filmmaker spoke to Marking about the experience of shooting in Afghanistan, her Sundance success, and her memories of watching Bambi and Gandhi as a child.

DIRECTOR HAVANA MARKING DURING THE FILMING OF AFGHAN STAR. COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS.

Filmmaker: How did the project originate?

Marking: I really wanted to go to Afghanistan, and I was looking for a film that I could make that would be different. You risk your life out there, so you don't want to make just another film about an orphanage or something. I don't want to sound flippant, but you want something different that's also logistically possible and safe and doesn't involve some kind of frontline craziness. In that research, I spoke to a brilliant journalist called Rachel Reid, who's now actually a Human Rights Watch officer out there. She told me about Afghan Star, so we developed the project together and she introduced me to the people who own Tolo TV. It's one of those things where you sit up immediately and know that this is an extraordinary way in. Just from my own personal experience, you try to read a book about Afghan history and by the third paragraph you're confused, because it's just so epic, [laughs] there are just so many chapters in its history, in its ethnic diversity, in its attitude to women, all the different warlords. There's so many names and it's very complicated. Not only was this an interesting look at media in general, but it was a clear and easy to understand structure and way into what is otherwise a very complicated society.

Filmmaker: Because we're so familiar with shows like this, it's a perfect vehicle to underline the differences between what's culturally familiar to us and what's not.

Marking: Exactly, and also the familiarities. That's what's lovely about it: you can see so many things that we take for granted here that are really magnified through this format that we all know.

Filmmaker: How familiar with that format of show, because the prototypical show, Pop Idol, comes from the UK?

Marking: When Pop Idol started, I really liked it. That was one of the things that really made me fight for it as a project in terms of getting funding, because I just knew that I was the right person to make it. Now I'm bored of those shows and I think they've pushed it to extremes to keep their ratings up, which I don't like, but at the very beginning I used to cry at Pop Idol every single episode. It is the rawest form of people's hopes and dreams and this idea that everyone's got a chance, wherever you are, whatever your background, and people are generally amazing.

Filmmaker: I was looking at your credits and, as you say, the range of documentary formats you've worked in seemed like ideal preparation for this.

Marking: In Britain, there's a very established factual TV industry and I have deliberately worked – as a researcher, as an assistant producer, as a producer – on serious one-hour polemics or documentaries but also on factual entertainment and studio shows as well. So I know what creates the tension, what works, what doesn't work. But having said how brilliant that training is, I actually made the decision about three years ago that I was no longer going to work on certain shows. The TV industry in Britain has become very corrosive and I made the decision not to work on that kind of popular TV anymore because I was finding it difficult to balance my moral and ethical stances with the way that people were being treated – either people on the show or the audience.

Filmmaker: Was that part of the reason behind your move from producing to directing?

Marking: I did always want to become a director and this was a brilliant way into it, but getting funding for your film as a relative unknown is very difficult. I've been in situations before where I've had ideas commissioned and funded, and then they say, “Actually, we think someone more experienced should direct it,” which is just heartbreaking. But, at the same time, they're giving you the money so you sort of go, “Alright...” On this one, I really worked to make sure that it was me that directed it. I've also got a background in traveling, working and living in Asia, the developing world and Islamic countries, so I just knew that it was my project.

Filmmaker: What was your comfort level in Afghanistan? How much experience had you had specifically in the Middle East?

Marking: Not the Middle East exactly, but I've both lived and worked in Egypt, and also India, which is not Islamic but you've also got developing world issues there. I'm absolutely fine about roughing it. I don't require hairdryers... I suppose that's not true, I go to salon's for blow dries. But I'm completely fine being somewhere a bit scary and different, where there's no central heating, no running water. I'm fine with that – I love it, in fact. I thrive on that.

Filmmaker: You were in Kabul for about four months. Did you feel out of place there as a Western woman?

Marking: Kabul's so international that people are not called Westerners, they're more called “internationals” because there's a community of non-Afghans that includes people from India and Japan and wherever. But as an international there, yes, you're outside of [the norm]. In the evenings, Afghan families are very interior, they stay inside because it's very dangerous for them, so there is a separate world – the international world – and then there's the Afghan world. But it was such an honor to live and work every single day in an Afghan company with Afghans, hanging out in Afghan houses. On those terms, on a day-to-day basis I was completely felt at home there. In terms of the filmmaking, people were so glad and happy that you were talking about something that wasn't fundamentalist Islam, terrorism, or mad, crazy, bearded people (without meaning to sound tabloid...). It was such a relief to everyone to talk about music and culture and art and freedom and exciting things. People loved that.

Filmmaker: How much did you have to adapt your lifestyle while you were there?

Marking: You have to cover up with a headscarf, and depending on where you are the size of your headscarf changes. There are all these subtle nuances in terms of dressing based on who you're going to be meeting. I would wear salwar kameez, Indian long shirts and trousers underneath – nothing figure-hugging. “Kabul chic” is actually great, and headscarfs, if they're done in the right way, can be very glamorous, [laughs] and we all quite enjoyed that. That's a key thing, but more importantly in Afghanistan they have key and very strong etiquette, respect, and ways of doing things. If you go into someone's house as a guest, it's not just how you say hello, who you say hello to first, how you greet people, it's where you sit, how you sit, who gets the food first. It's very structured and you have to absolutely be sensitive to those cultural things. If you treat people with that kind of respect in terms of understanding their culture and working that way – and also understanding your role as a woman, because you do subserve to the man of the house – you then get absolute respect back. Working there as a woman, as a director, actually I found that people were very willing to do what I asked and take direction, because I had proved myself to be respectful of Afghan culture.

Filmmaker: It seems like a lot hangs on choosing the right subjects to follow when you're doing a documentary about competitors, because if the film's protagonists get knocked out too early then you have no story. How did you deal with this problem?

Marking: The brilliant thing about a talent show is that the reason why someone's going to be good in my film is the reason they might get to the top three. The main thing I was really keen on doing was finding characters that absolutely highlighted different issues, and I think we were really lucky to do that. The two women in the top ten, we knew we were going to follow them from the word go, and again we were incredibly fortunate that both women we so different and had different reasons and came from different areas and had completely different attitudes. With the two guys, Rafi does have a pop star charisma and he's interesting because he really shows you the similarities in the world. And we were completely lucky that Hameed did so well. We did follow other people who didn't make it, but they were left on the editing room floor. We were luckily there for such a long time and with such free rein that we could follow whoever or whatever.

Filmmaker: There's an amazing moment where Setara dances, which is completely taboo. Were you at all prepared for that to happen?

Marking: I completely had absolutely no idea that was going to happen. We were backstage, and it was an electric moment for everyone. Thank God, my cameraman was on the ball because I burst into tears, actually. There's that one shot where her headscarf's off and she's pointing at the camera and it's just such a defiant image, such a moment of liberation. She's not saying “Fuck you” or anything like that, [laughs] she's just doing it because she just has to express herself. It was so very, very powerful to be there at that moment. It was always going to be a nice film that gave you insight into the youth of Afghanistan was thinking, but that moment – and the effects of that moment – turned it into a political thriller with a fiction drama tension. That was just one of those things that happens. It was an astounding thing.

Filmmaker: You only shot this last year, so you had a very rapid post-production period.

Marking: We finished in March 2008, and then finished editing three months later. It was a quick turnaround, but that's something I've learned on the international documentary circuit is that people seen to take years editing their films. Because I come from a TV background, we had deadlines and you just stick to them. Obviously it's a huge luxury to have time, but at the same time if you have a deadline, you finish. If it could stretch on and on, we'd never finish. Technically our film may not be perfect, but what it has is an energy and a spontaneity and a heart to it, and I think that comes from a combination of [the speed of editing and] the liberation of filming under those conditions. We just had to follow action: the kidnap threat meant you couldn't plan anything in advance, you couldn't tell people to be somewhere at some time, you just had to wait for them, so the conditions enforced cinéma vérité on the film.

Filmmaker: How significant was your success at Sundance, where the film won the directing and audience prizes in the World Documentary section?

Marking: Phenomenal. Just being at Sundance is fantastic; to win two awards is just stunning, and took us completely by surprise. The lovely thing was that we had our Afghan co-producers with us. This was the first film partly produced in Afghanistan that has ever got to Sundance, and it's an exciting thing. For our Afghan co-producers, and indeed the presenter of the show who was there, it was wonderful for them to see the impact of what they were doing. They're brave, they're risking their lives as well, so for them to know that what they're doing can have this impact is fantastic.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Marking: Gandhi. It made a huge impact. In fact, it wasn't the first film I ever saw – that was probably Bambi – but it was first film that had a proper impact on me. I was about seven, and I cried and cried and cried and everyone started thinking they'd taken me to the cinema too young. It had an impact both in terms of the effect that the screen can have on you, but also how important messages of peace and hope are.

Filmmaker: If you had an unlimited budget and could cast whoever you wanted (alive or dead), what film would you make?

Marking: Well, I make documentaries so, hell, I'm going to stick to the same theme: Gandhi. Imagine filming that march, a longitudinal film about him going from a lawyer to the one of the most inspirational figures on earth. It would be incredible.

Filmmaker: Finally, will the current interest in documentaries last, or is it just a fad?

Marking: As long as the documentaries are good enough, it'll last. There are a lot of boring documentaries out there as well, so I'm hoping that there are going to be pressures now on funds due to the recession and that quality will come to the top.

TATIA ROSENTHAL, $9.99

2009-06-19T17:53:00.001-04:00

ALBERT (VOICED BY BARRY OTTO) AND THE ANGEL (VOICED BY GEOFFREY RUSH) IN DIRECTOR TATIA ROSENTHAL'S $9.99. COURTESY STRAND RELEASING.

Being an independent filmmaker is difficult enough without adding the further challenges of animation, so it's always a pleasure to see the emergence of a visionary talent like Tatia Rosenthal. The Israeli writer-director and stop motion animator was born in Tel Aviv in 1971 and explored some very diverse avenues before deciding on her current profession: Rosenthal was in the Israeli Defense Force for two years, spent a period of time at medical school and then studied photography in Paris for a year. She finally found her niche while studying for a BFA in Film & Television at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts when she discovered an aptitude for stop motion, and particularly for claymation. During her time as a student she made Breaking the Pig, based on the short story of the same name by Etgar Keret, and in 1998 she directed Crazy Glue, also based on a Keret short story. Between 2000 and 2005, she worked as an animator for Nickleodeon on shows such as Blue's Clues, Wonder Pets and Piper O'Possum. In 2005, she made A Buck's Worth, a 6-minute animation voiced by Philip Baker Hall and Tom Noonan.

A Buck's Worth was, in fact, made as a proof of concept short for Rosenthal’s now completed first feature, $9.99. The claymation stop motion film is, like all of Rosenthal’s previous work, derived from tales by Etgar Keret, with this production synthesizing six of the short story specialist's literary thumbnails into a cohesive panoramic narrative. The title comes from the price of a book promising the secret of happiness which is bought by Dave Peck, a man in Sydney, Australia, who feels that his neighbors – including an elderly man with an angel as a house guest, a man who neglects his fiancée in favor of two-inch-tall party animals, and a dent-ridden magician plagued by repo men – could benefit from the volume's wisdom. The first Israeli-Australian co-production, Rosenthal's film features the voice talents of such antipodean actors as Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia, and loses nothing from the transposition of the action from the Middle East to Down Under. Keret and Rosenthal's sprightly script stays true to the spirit of its source material despite the change in medium and location, while Rosenthal's animation creates a cinematic look, bridging the realistic and the fantastic, that brings the world of the film colorfully and vividly to life.

Filmmaker interviewed Rosenthal over email and discussed with her the slow and painstaking process of making an animated indie, how she came to make $9.99 in Australia, and her discovering the existence of oral sex thanks to The World According to Garp.

TATIA ROSENTHAL, DIRECTOR OF $9.99. COURTESY STRAND RELEASING.

Filmmaker: Can you tell me about your formative years in Israel and how you first became interested in animation?

Rosenthal: Like most kids, I loved animation since I can remember and it was through a piece of animation that I was first inspired to become a filmmaker. I was eleven or twelve and I watched The World According to Garp, which was amazing (and the way I found out that oral sex existed). But that one moment when Garp's drawing of his hero pilot dad comes to life in animation was the moment that I fell in love with film. Later, on my first day of film school at NYU, they showed us some of the professors' show reels. The scene from The World According to Garp was screened because its creator, John Canemaker, was the head of the animation program. I was truly elated, it was one of those moments when you feel that you're where you're "supposed" to be. Mr. Canemaker later became my thesis advisor and a continuing source of inspiration.

Filmmaker: Were you always drawn to stop motion? What in particular makes you like it? What makes you well-suited to it?

Rosenthal: To be completely honest, once I'd started to take animation classes and realized one has to draw thousands of minutely different drawings in order to make even the shortest of shorts, I started doubting I would have the patience to do it. Then I took Dean Lennert's wonderfully diverse stop motion class and fell in love with the various techniques and their richness of textures. We tried our hands in coffee grain/sand animation, cut-out paper animation, oil paint under the camera and finally puppet animation. I was hooked. There is something very emotional and beautiful in puppet animation and I think it has to do partly with its invitation to project the audience’s emotion onto its own touching yet limited expression.

Filmmaker: What effect did your experiences in the Israeli Defense Force, in medical school and studying photography have on you? Did they help you realize the direction you wanted to take in life?

Rosenthal: My military service was quite miserable, which in retrospect was a great gift. When the going got tough on $9.99 – and the going got tough on $9.99 – away from home, making a film on a shoe string budget for a two year stretch... I would think back on how it felt to be in the army for two years, and knew I could survive it. There's a lot that can be said for discipline. Medical school was a really short stint, and there I learned that I need to have passion in order to be voluntarily disciplined... I didn't have the passion for it. However, I was quite serious about photography. My portfolio for film school consisted mainly of photos and paintings. Film is really the ultimate art form for those who can't or don't want to chose between their artistic inclinations.

Filmmaker: What impact did your time working at Nickleodeon have on you?

Rosenthal: It was a great experience, I learned a lot about animation but also editing, and indirectly about directing. Dave Palmer, Blue's Clues's director and my first boss in the industry, is a real role model. I feel very lucky to have worked for him for as long as I did.

Filmmaker: Do you see yourself as an “adult-oriented” animator? And do other people see you this way? Do you feel you have been marginalized at all because your work is not aimed primarily at children?

Rosenthal: Marginalized is a strong word... But yes, animation for grown ups is still a start-up of sorts. I wasn’t aware of the extent to which it was considered a risky venture when we started pitching it ten years ago. Now I really think it’s starting to shift with films like Persepolis, Waltz with Bashir, Sita Sings the Blues, $9.99, and Mary and Max, which will keep getting made, I believe.

Filmmaker: Your films so far have all been inspired by Etgar Keret’s short stories. Do you share a special affinity with his work? What makes you keep returning it?

Rosenthal: I really admire his writing – it's funny, imaginative, utterly original and most of all he describes the world in ways I recognize as true – albeit a fragmented truth. He expresses his ambivalence toward "greater truths" without being indifferent, which I find deeply moving.

Filmmaker: Independent animated films are rare, especially ones that are truly independent such as yours. How much thought did you give it before embarking on such a daunting and difficult task?

Rosenthal: I had no idea what I was taking on. Not in the slightest, nor will I want to make another film in the same way for such a long stretch of time, but having said that, I'm really glad I did. After finishing the film, I went back and re-read The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (I've always wanted to remake that film...) and was tickled to realize that one of its themes was that in order to achieve the impossible, one has to be ignorant of the obstacle along the way. It was very true in my case.

Filmmaker: How did you go about taking short stories, which are all by the same author but otherwise unconnected and create a single film out of them? How closely was Etgar Keret involved at this stage?

Rosenthal: It was a wonderful process and I've learned a lot from Etgar while we were adapting it. First I picked ten of my favorite stories, and we pared them down to six, based on the fact that they all dealt with yearning in one way or another. Then we started uniting characters, i.e making the love interest of story A become the newly invented brother of the protagonist of story B etc... We wrote drafts two and three, which were the most significant drafts of the script, while together in the same country (in Israel and at Sundance where we workshopped the screenplay between those two drafts.)

Filmmaker: What was it like going to the Sundance Writers Lab as an animator?

Rosenthal: I always felt and the directors of the Filmmakers Labs Michelle Satter and the late Lynn Auerbach agreed that because puppet animation engages real space (albeit in 1/6 scale) and $9.99's screenplay was a fully realized dramatic/comic screenplay, Etgar and I would benefit from the labs as much as live action writers and directors. It turned out to be very true.

Filmmaker: How clear in your mind was the vision of the physical world these characters lived in?

Rosenthal: The overall visual tone and color scheme was quite clear, I also knew who the puppets should look like and how they should be painted. But the full visual world came from collaborating with Melinda Doring our production designer and Philip Beadsmoore our puppet master and their great teams.

Filmmaker: How did the film come to be set in Australia and have an Australian cast?

Rosenthal: Emile Sherman, our Australian producer, was interested in being the first to use the Israeli-Australian co-production agreement, which was in place for more than a decade. He heard about Etgar from two writers he had previously worked with. Etgar pitched him our screenplay, which Emile loved immediately, but he was apprehensive about producing an animated project. I flew to meet Emile right after showing A Buck’s Worth – our $9.99's proof of concept short – at the Annecy Animation Festival. It had had a successful run. The timing couldn’t have been better. Once Emile was on board, Etgar recruited Amir Harel who was producing Etgar and Shira Geffen's Jellyfish, and the co production was on its way.

Filmmaker: After spending 10 years on this film, do you feel able to make another in this manner? Do you have ways to make the next film a quicker process?

Rosenthal: I would love to make another stop motion feature, if only to implement all that I have learned on $9.99. But as I mentioned, I wouldn't want to make another film on such a tight budget for such a long time.

Filmmaker: Do you view your animation work as a bridge to other things? If someone were to offer you live action directing work, would you be interested?

Rosenthal: Bring it on!

Filmmaker: Do you feel as if there will be any impact from the release in a brief period of time of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and your movie? Do you think or hope that there will be a wave of yet more innovative Israeli animators who will be inspired by these films?

Rosenthal: Our two films are as different as two animated films for grown ups could be... and I think the fact that they came out roughly at the same time is coincidental as far as the Israeli animation industry is concerned. However I do think and hope that the fact that they both got made is probably quite inspirational for Israeli animators.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you cried in a film, and which film was it?

Rosenthal: Does laughing so hard I cried during The Hangover count? If not, then the last time before that was during most episodes of John from Cincinnati to which I'm currently catching up with as a part of my latest obsession with David Milch's work.

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Rosenthal: Only if the risks are in the service of their true vision, not just for the hell of it.

Filmmaker: Which actor would you pay to see in anything?

Rosenthal: Ian McShane.

Filmmaker: Finally, which classic film are you most ashamed to admit you've never seen?

Rosenthal: There's a big Ingmar Bergman shaped hole in my cinematic education.

DARYL WEIN, SEX POSITIVE

2009-06-12T15:12:00.002-04:00

RICHARD BERKOWITZ IN DIRECTOR DARYL WEIN'S SEX POSITIVE. COURTESY REGENT RELEASING.

Most young filmmakers quickly define themselves in terms of both their creative roles and genre specialties, however Daryl Wein has so far benefited from doing exactly the opposite. Born in Santa Monica in 1983, Wein grew up in Connecticut and commuted to auditions in New York City as he pursued a career as a child actor, mostly in commercials. At the same time, Wein's father's interest in chronicling their family life on home video lead the young thespian to become fascinated with being on the other side of the camera. At the age of 16, he made Life is a Train, a short film which won him an award at the International Young Filmmaker's Festival in New York, as well as the inaugural You Belong in Connecticut Young Media Maker Award. He went to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts to study drama and film, and also appeared in small roles in the films Magic Rock (2001) and The Hebrew Hammer (2003) as well as the Comedy Central TV movie Porn 'n Chicken (2002). In 2007, he co-wrote, directed and edited the short film Unlocked, starring Olivia Thirlby and executive produced by director Stephen Daldry, which played at the Tribeca Film Festival. Wein's first narrative feature, Breaking Upwards, which is based on Wein's relationship with actress Zoe Lister-Jones and features the pair playing versions of themselves, premiered at SXSW earlier this year.

It is demonstrative of Daryl Wein's openness as a filmmaker that, despite his strong acting background, his first feature length film is, in fact, a documentary. Sex Positive is a portrait of Richard Berkowitz, a figure now penniless and forgotten, who was a fearless and controversial AIDS activist in the 1980s and, along with Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and actor Michael Callen, one of the architects of the safe sex movement. Berkowitz was hugely unpopular for his contention that the AIDS epidemic was exacerbated by the gay community's promiscuous lifestyle, however, he responded to accusations of being “sex negative” by proposing that responsible actions, such as condom use, should not inhibit sexual activity. Sex Positive has the virtue of not only telling an important story but having, in Richard Berkowitz, a fascinating subject truly worthy of scrutiny. Berkowitz is a compelling presence who talks candidly about not only his activism and his own battle with AIDS but also his time as an S&M hustler and drug addict. Wein ably balances historical background and his focus on Berkowitz, while the handsome work by DP Alex Bergman adds further character to the piece.

Filmmaker spoke to Wein about his discovery of Berkowitz's story, the blurring of documentary and fiction, and why he was recently sitting naked on a unicorn.

DARYL WEIN, DIRECTOR OF SEX POSITIVE. COURTESY REGENT RELEASING.

Filmmaker: Tell me about the starting point for this film.

Wein: I met Richard Berkowitz at a Passover Seder in 2007. He is really good friends with my girlfriend's mother; they've known each for 20 years. It was a gathering of lots of progressive types at this thing and at the time I'd just graduated from NYU a year before and I was looking for my next project. (Before I'd done a short film that was at the Tribeca Film Festival.) I was happy to do documentary or fiction, I just wanted something that I felt passionate about. Zoe, my girlfriend, said, “You should really meet Richard because he has an incredible life story – he used to be a sex worker and he was a controversial AIDS activist.” I said, “OK, that sounds interesting,” and then I spoke with him and he was very sweet, and I could tell he had a lot to say. [laughs] Then I read his book, Staying Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex, and I think that's what really did it for me. Reading that, I realized “This is such an important story, and such a fascinating slice of history that I don't know anything about.”

Filmmaker: Did you become friends with Richard before you had asked to make a film about him?

Wein: Not really – we kind of started right away. He had an implicit trust in me because he knew I wasn't a complete stranger who was going to exploit him and his story, because his lifelong friend's daughter was my girlfriend. That allowed him to trust me, and I think also Richard had been waiting for someone to give him the opportunity to share his story again. He's had so much trouble getting his writing out there and so this was a really good chance for him to just rehash a lot of the old ideas. I just wanted to start right away anyway. Of course, at first I thought I probably should get to know him and be familiar, but the second he started talking, everything that came out of his mouth was so brilliant. It was amazing sound bites from the first interview, which was five hours long and actually is the interview I ended up using as the basis for the story.

Filmmaker: What was your motivation for the film? Did you see it as a character study? Were you more focused on the LGBT angle? Or were you trying to make a case for Richard Berkowitz's historical significance?

Wein: I would say that first and foremost it's a portrait of Richard's life, but I think from that it opens up a door to a lot of other areas. I was interested in exploring all of the early history surrounding the controversy around HIV and AIDS theory. I was kind of enraptured by all of it, I thought was really interesting.

Filmmaker: Were you already aware of or interested in LGBT issues?

Wein: No, I didn't have any specific interest in the LGBT community, it wasn't an area I had done any film work in the past. It was totally new to me. I'm a straight young filmmaker and Richard's in his fifties and gay, so everyone wonders how we come together. It's funny, Richard always says it had to take a straight guy to make this story, because he doesn't know why a gay man hasn't made this yet.

Filmmaker: The film is very personal and you get a real sense of the trust that developed between you and Richard, but there are also times when you push him to be more revelatory, specifically to do with his hustling and more sexual aspects. How easy was that for you?

Wein: I guess he was pretty open with everything. I think what was difficult was he didn't want to feel like parts of his life were being taken out of context, like I was doing an Enquirer version. His sex work was an extremely touchy subject, and there was a point in time when I felt like I could make this whole movie about Richard as a sex worker. It really is its own story. And there was also another point at which I felt like I could probably just cut this altogether. But I think it's so important to show that he was deeply immersed in that world, and it's that world that lead him to meet Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and begin to take action as an activist and really understand what was happening medically and scientifically. He was experiencing all that firsthand, he had thousands of gay men coming into his apartment while working as an S&M top, and so I think that's what really set him apart.

Filmmaker: How does he feel about those aspects of the film, and also the bits that deal with his drug use?

Wein: I think it's hard for him to see them, but I think Richard prefers to be portrayed as a complex person. He doesn't want to leave anything out. He doesn't want to be portrayed as a total saint, so he understands that showing some of the dark patches is important. I mean, he says in the movie that the reason he was doing all those drugs was to numb all the pain and there were times when it became so hard he just couldn't resist.

Filmmaker: How did Richard view this film? Did he see this as his chance for redemption, or is that too melodramatic an interpretation?

Wein: I think he definitely saw this as a chance to redeem himself and receive some credit that was due. I think it was also another chance to try and promote the cause that he was originally espousing with Michael about safe sex. It's such a convoluted history: even if you go online and type in “the invention of safe sex,” the chances are you're not going to find any kind of concise story or version of it. I think now, with this film and his book (which he's written a new forward to), and all the film festivals he's going to and the people he's talking to, he can get back to what he originally was professing about importance of safe sex, which a new generation might not know about. I think we both feel that's a crucial part of history that may be lost if we don't work hard to really try and clarify aspects of it.

Filmmaker: Documentaries, particularly first features, often do not put a high priority on good visuals, but Sex Positive looks really great. How important was that to your vision of the film?

Wein: Well, I have to mention my director of photography, Alex Bergman, who shot it for me on the Panasonic HVX200. It's an HD camera but we used 35mm lenses so it gave it that depth of field to make it feel a bit more filmic, because I can't stand that sharp video look. We did the best job we could to make it cinematic feeling. The decision to be handheld and not like completely locked down was just to give it an extra sense of rawness and authenticity, and we did color correct it, which I think helped bring out the richness of the different interviews.

Filmmaker: This is a documentary, you're an actor as well, you've now made a fiction film also, so how do you describe yourself to people?

Wein: I would say I'm first and foremost a filmmaker. I went to NYU for acting and I used to act more, but I'm not really interested in acting. I acted in Breaking Upwards because that was about my relationship with Zoe in real life and it made sense because of our chemistry together and I thought it would be more interesting if we played ourselves as opposed to hired two actors. But I just really want to focus on directing.

Filmmaker: You said Breaking Upwards is about your relationship with Zoe Lister-Jones, but it's a fiction film in which you two play characters called Daryl and Zoe. It seems as if you're playing with the divide between documentary and fiction filmmaking.

Wein: There's a lot of elements in that film that are based in reality, but we fictionalized all of it, for the most part. Zoe and I really did experience an open relationship similar to that, we did sit down and strategize and come up with rules to try and eventually break up or take a break or whatever. There are some people in the film, friends of ours, who are our real friends who are not actors, but we didn't really want to call attention to what was real or wasn't real, we just wanted to leave that up to the audience's imagination to try and deduce. I think it helped give the film a sense of authenticity. But it's all kind of a blur, that fact-fiction thing.

Filmmaker: So after these two films do you feel like there's a logical next step for you as a filmmaker?

Wein: Zoe and I just finished writing a political thriller about the future of genetically modified food in America. We're just now trying to put that together. I don't want to do one thing, I just want to tell stories that seem relevant and important now to me and it's fun to jump into different genres and different forms. If there was another amazing documentary story that just fell into my lap, like this one did, I would probably pursue it.

Filmmaker: I saw your short film, Unlocked, which I noticed was produced by Stephen Daldry. How did he get involved with that project?

Wein: I worked for Stephen Daldry as his assistant when he was putting together Billy Elliott [on Broadway]. I showed him Unlocked and we became friends, and he said, “Anything I can do to help...” So he came on as an executive producer, and that was just really cool of him, because I admire his work.

Filmmaker: Do you aspire to be making films in Hollywood like Daldry?

Wein: I just aspire to be able to make films that I want to make. If I can have the luxury to be able to make something that I'm passionate about, whether it be in Hollywood or independent, that's all that matters. Obviously my roots are independent and all my films have been made that way; I've had to scrounge together people and money and I have been a producer on all of my films. I've worn many hats, which I like doing because it helps to have that control, it's very liberating. But I also don't like to wear all the hats all the time. [laughs] If I could have a big crew and other people to be able to help and be able to pay them, it would be absolutely great. So I would love to work in Hollywood.

Filmmaker: What's the biggest compliment you've ever received?

Wein: Someone after one of the screenings at SXSW said that Sex Positive saved her life. I think she had two people in her life, very close family members, who had died of AIDS and the film and Richard's story were such an inspiration to her that she felt like she could continue living. That was a pretty remarkable moment to realize that a film that I was making was actually making a difference in people's lives.

Filmmaker: What's your best piece of advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Wein: The best advice I have is just to do it yourself and just don't be lazy. Get out there and try to make it work. And if you fail, great, you'll learn along the way. Don't be afraid to just do it. Don't take no for an answer. If people don't want to give you money or people don't want to give you the opportunity, then say “Fuck it, I'm just going to get a camera and friends together and make it.”

Filmmaker: What's the most embarrassing film you watched the whole of on a plane?

Wein: [laughs] Oh, God! It might have been Sex and the City. [laughs] It also may have been a rough cut of my own film, Sex Positive. There's so much graphic material in it that I think the person sitting next to me was so weirded out. So one of those two.

Filmmaker: The Sex double bill – Sex and the City and Sex Positive. Soon to be available on double DVD.

Wein: [laughs] Sex Positive and Sex and the City, they go naturally together. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Finally, when was the last time you burst out laughing on set?

Wein: I think when we were shooting the rap video for the Breaking Upwards viral campaign. I had to pretend that I was sitting naked on a unicorn and we were laughing so hard when we were doing that. I was holding my privates, and trying to be serious, but we couldn't really hold it together.

VEIKO ÕUNPUU, SÜGISBALL

2009-06-03T23:12:00.002-04:00

RAIN TOLK IN DIRECTOR VEIKO ÕUNPUU'S SÜGISBALL. COURTESY STRAND RELEASING.

Artists' creativity is sometimes directly proportional to their life experience, and Estonian writer-director Veiko Õunpuu has more than enough to draw on. Õunpuu was born in 1972 on Saaremaa, the biggest island belonging to Estonia, and graduated from high school in 1990 just as the country was glimpsing independence due to the dissolution of the USSR. Over the next 10 years, Õunpuu had numerous identities: a tyre repair worker, an asylum seeker in Finland, a student at the Estonian Business School, a failed carpet salesman in Sweden, a driver on Hardi Volmer's Estonian movie All My Lenins, an advertising agency employee, a backpacker in Asia, and finally a Literary Theory and Semiotics student at the University of Tallinn. In 2000, he began to focus his energies on film, starting his own production company, Sugar Films, which made Marko Raat's Agent Wild Duck before going under. After a hiatus as a painter and a social-critical essayist, he returned to filmmaking in 2006 by writing and directing the 40-minute film Tuhirand (Empty), starring Rain Tolk, based on a short story by Estonian writer and theater director Mati Unt.

Õunpuu once again draws on the work of Mati Unt for his first feature, Sügisball, adapted from Unt's 1979 novel of the same name, and has Rain Tolk reprising his role from Tuhirand of Unt's literary alter ego, Mati. Sügisball is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Tallinn, the Estonian capital, and the disillusioned, alienated residents of one highrise apartment building. It focuses on a disparate group of characters: writer Mati, who has just been left by his wife; lonely single mom Laura and her young daughter; elderly barber August; self-involved architect Maurer and his long-suffering wife; and coatroom attendant (and unlikely ladykiller) Theo. Unusually for a film like this, these understated stories of quiet desperation only occasionally overlap, instead sitting side by side, the emotional resonances playing off each other. Stunningly shot and with a brooding soundtrack featuring post rock outfit Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Sügisball looks, feels and sounds dark, and Õunpuu employs an absurdist sense of humor reminiscent of his near-neighbor, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki, though somewhat bleaker. Though just at the beginning of his career, Õunpuu is a filmmaker who already has a distinct and original vision, and Sügisball is as exciting and promising a debut as you will see all year.

Filmmaker interviewed Õunpuu over email, and talked to him about the cinema of urban alienation, the production company he named after his cat, and gluing studs on rally car tyres while in a giant spacesuit.

VEIKO ÕUNPUU, DIRECTOR OF SÜGISBALL. COURTESY STRAND RELEASING.

Filmmaker: You’ve done a lot of different things so far in your life, from selling floor materials in Sweden to backpacking in Thailand and India. How important were those experiences in making you ready to be a filmmaker?

Õunpuu: I just wasn’t able to hold a job or set into anything for a longer period. So I was sort of drifting, and becoming more and more desperate until me and some of my friends decided to make a small film.

Filmmaker: Now that you are directing, do you feel like this is the job you were meant to do?

Õunpuu: It works out surprisingly well, but I’m not sure if I was meant to be a film director. If your question means whether I’m happy to be able to make films then answer is yes. My life makes a lot more sense now.

Filmmaker: How much of an impact did your painting experience have on your artistic style as a filmmaker?

Õunpuu: Painting experience was for me pretty much the only thing to cling on to when I started out – the first film I made was just a series of compositions. I’ve just barely began to grasp the other aspects of filmmaking.

Filmmaker: Your production company is called Homeless Bob Production. Where did that name come from?

Õunpuu: Some years ago I took in a stray cat that I gave the name Bob. I set up the company around that time and the name was there, walking around in my apartment, demanding to be fed.

Filmmaker: Do you see an overlap between the work you did as a social critical essayist and in how you portray the world in Sügisball?

Õunpuu: To my mind there is very little social criticism in Sügisball. It is just a bit of poetry, or rather an attempt at a bit of poetical generalization on some basic problems in our lives. I actually tried out a very “anti-Marxist” idea that the quality of our existence is not conditioned by our social status and a position in the hierarchies of the world.

Filmmaker: This film and your previous movie are both based on stories by Mati Unt. What especially attracts you to his work? In your opinion, what makes him such a good writer?

Õunpuu: I like the way Mati Unt wrote, how he constructed the sentences, the text being of a high quality but always fluid. And I like his mixture of existentialism and irony. The man was a genius. He was also a very good theatre director.

Filmmaker: Your comic style has been compared to Aki Kaurismäki, but is darker and less obviously funny. Are you directly influenced by him, or is your sense of humor more of a regional thing?

Õunpuu: I love Aki Kaurismäki’s films and I’m very flattered to be compared to him. What comes to my sense of humor... Some things make you laugh but bring tears in your eyes at the same time… I guess this is the kind of humor that I enjoy the most in films.

Filmmaker: Do you see Sügisball as being part of a tradition of kaleidoscopic films portraying alienated people in a specific city, like Altman’s Short Cuts or Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland? Did any of these films influence you?

Õunpuu: I haven’t seen these films that you mentioned. Only after making Sügisball did I come to an embarrassing realization that so many of films like this have been made before. I just used the characters of Mati Unt’s book and generated my own events around them, hoping to achieve some sort of generalization on the subject of solitude. As I was heavily into Cassavetes at the time, I stole a scene from Love Streams but never had anything to do with Altman or Winterbottom. I guess it is very hard to come up with something truly original.

Filmmaker: In Sügisball, Theo brutally beats a famous actor-director known for his relationship comedies. Is that a personal comment on your feelings on that genre?

Õunpuu: You bet. The whole genre is a massive bullshit generator and the pushers of this vile junk, the directors and screenwriters of this kind of cinema; they should all be jailed in my opinion.

Filmmaker: In your director’s note, you quote Beckett saying “When you are up to your neck in shit the only thing to do is sing.” Is it just the characters in the movie that are up to their necks in shit, or do you think it is all of us?

Õunpuu: In some sense it’s all of us. But you know I shot the film almost three years ago. A lot can change in a man’s life during three years. I still love Beckett though: “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”

Filmmaker: You say that the film is “quite simple… but not outright stupid.” When you are dealing with emotions, as you do in this film, are ideas of intelligence and stupidity important?

Õunpuu: They are important to me personally, yes. I’m striving to be as intelligent as I can be even when dealing with emotions.

Filmmaker: How difficult has it been to start a film career in Estonia? I believe your previous production company Sugar Films went bankrupt, so did you have to risk a lot to return to filmmaking?

Õunpuu: I don’t particularly like the word “career,” it sounds too pragmatic and way too ambitious for my taste. Even the sound of the word is ugly, like something has stuck in your mouth. I’d rather call what I’m doing just making films. Which in Estonia can be a struggle sometimes, but I’m not complaining and I haven’t really had to take any risks worth mentioning.

Filmmaker: How important has the success of Sügisball been to the kind of isolated, alienated Estonians it portrays?

Õunpuu: To my mind the film is not only about Estonians, or not even about isolated or alienated people. It’s a film about this kind of solitude that we all share but what is emphasized to the extreme in the cases of the film characters.

Filmmaker: The film seems to be a period piece seemingly set in the late 80s or early 90s, but it still feels very reminiscent of life today. Did you intentionally try to stress how little had changed?

Õunpuu: I’m greatly surprised that you perceived it as a period piece. My hope was to generate a sort of timeless space by mixing different decades. The time of the film could maybe called “Eastern Europe during the turn of the century”.

Filmmaker: Fernando Pessoa, John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman are all referenced in the film in one way or another. Have all of these artists been an influence on you? If so, in what way?

Õunpuu: These are some fine artists I admire greatly. Reading Pessoa has somewhat improved my sense of poetry, the example of John Cassavetes has been good for the soul, and, even though the reference to him in the film is almost ironic, Bergman has shown us the great altitudes the cinematic art can achieve.

Filmmaker: You worked with a number of the same people on Sügisball as in Tuhirand. How important is it to you to keep working with the same creative group?

Õunpuu: They’re my friends. It is good to work with the people you know and can trust. I also worked with them on a new film (The Temptation of St.Tony) that I just finished and I guess I’ll work with them on the next one should the capricious God of cinema funding still favor us.

Filmmaker: What's the worst (or weirdest) job you've ever had?

Õunpuu: At the beginning of the nineties I managed to go through a whole year being a carpet salesman without selling a single square meter of carpet. That was pretty weird. But I have also lived for a while in a trailer in Finland, putting studs in the winter tires of rally cars. The studs went in with glue which was very toxic, so I had to wear a suit which looked like a giant spacesuit and it was thickly covered with glue. I was sitting behind this machine and I had to push two pedals with my feet – left one raised the tire and the right one inserted a stud. I’ve had better jobs since then.

Filmmaker: What was your cinematic epiphany?

Õunpuu: There’s so many of these films that I really love. To choose just one would mean to do injustice to others… I was greatly impressed by the early films of Kaurismäki and Jarmusch, when I was a teenager. Later in life there came Bergman, but also Tarkovsky who has not made a single dodgy film. Real epiphanies have been Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence and Love Streams. I also love filmmakers like Ozu, Bresson. Herzog, Bunuel etc. etc. At the moment I’m very much into older films that were made before or right after the Second World War. The very recent discoveries were Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying. Also Jean Renoir’s La Bete Humaine and La Chienne. I was greatly impressed by King Vidor’s The Crowd that was shown at the Sodankylä Film Festival last year.

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Õunpuu: The greatest risk of all is surrendering to the Almighty Dollar. We need to strive to find fresh approaches to the image and to the way we depict our world as everything that is fresh is instantly taken from us and put to the service of commerce and only by always inventing new can we hope to survive as species capable of thinking and feeling. If that means taking some risks now and then, then we should take the risks.

Filmmaker: Finally, if the world ended tomorrow, what (if anything) would you be sad about that you hadn't achieved?

Õunpuu: If the world ended tomorrow I would be sad about all of us who hadn’t achieved our very best.