The Director Interviews

MARTINA EGI, BAREFOOT TO TIMBUKTU

2010-02-03T13:30:00.002-05:00

Ernst Aebi, the subject of Martina Egi's keenly observed new documentary Barefoot to Timbuktu, is something of a renaissance man. Artist, SoHo real estate pioneer and social activist, he is full of paradoxes: easy going yet driven, humble yet self-assured, a man of much wealth who nonetheless spends his leisure time among the dispossessed. Egi profiles Ernst with affection, but she doesn't shy away from examining the effects of his restless nature on his family and friends. His often rocky family life, along as his many guises and activities, are only the preamble to Egi's portrait of the subjects very real and lasting manifestations of his humanitarian commitment,

While on a trip to the Sahara in the late 80s, Aebi came across the destitute settlement of Araouane, a barren collection of buildings that is a long camelback ride away from Timbuktu in central Mali. Without any infrastructure, agricultural tradition or reliable source of water, this was an endangered community. Aebi dropped everything and settled there, using his expertise to help the town's people make their settlement a viable one. A new vegetable garden, school and hotel rose from the barren Sahara sands in the three years Aebi spent there. As Egi's film deftly explains, a civil war broke out in the country that forced Aebi to leavea place that had truly become a second home. When she picks up his story, he's on the verge of returning for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Barefoot to Timbuktu opens at Manhattan's Quad Cinema on February 12th.

Director Martina Egi and Ernst Aebi. Courtesy of A Mesch and Ugge productions.

Filmmaker: When did you first encounter the work of Ernst Aebi?

Egi: I was first struck by Ernst's work when I notced an attractive book cover. It was an image of a village drowning in sand. I picked up Seasons of Sand. It a book by Ernst Aebi that Simon & Schuster put out in 1993. I was in a Greenwich Village second hand bookstore when I found it. While reading it, and with my old fascination for the Sahara, it became almost an obsession trying to bring the story to film.

I contacted the author, Ernst Aebi, in New York. Already from that first conversation on it seemed filming his story would be made easy by his gung ho attitude. “Can’t be done” is missing from his vocabulary. Beat Hirt, my boss at Mesch & Ugge AG, the film production company I work for in Zurich, Switzerland, liked the idea of creating Barefoot to Timbuktu. Off we went.

Among many other things, Ernst Aebi told me how in the early nineties an American film company, MPI, had filmed extensive footage about his Sahara project. Apparently that footage had never been used. Once I knew that, I was even more convinced that his story was a perfect match for the needs of a documentary. Aebi's biography reads like a filmscript. The difficult thing was to find the right focus.mSo I decided to zoom in on the Sahara aspect.

Filmmaker: What are the primary means of financing projects such as this in Switzerland?

Egi: Switzerland is small. 7.7 Million people, four different languages - German, French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romanic. Films are usually financed with the support of the National Broadcasting Enterprise and also with some help from cultural institutions. The road of financing is long and rocky. Fortunately documentaries are very popular. I think, Switzerland is the country where you can see more documentaries in the cinemas than anywhere else in the world. So I was in an advantageous position to complete this project, being a Swiss documentarian making about a Swiss personality.

Filmmaker: Do you think you discovered what informs Ernst's impulse to selflessly serve the people of Araouane?

Egi: I think, the film shows Aebi's character quite well. There are things I never understood. For exemple, his impatience. His restlessness was quite a challenge for the whole film crew. His children and also his friends describe his character better than he does. There's an essential lack of self-consciousness. There is one part in his personality, that I couldn't reveal and which only apears in the things he does.

At first it's difficult to understand, why he spent tree years in the middle of the Sahara in a village, whith no vegetation, no shade, just sand and rubber and swarms of black flies. Even the governor of Timbuktu said that there was no hope for that place. They had given up on the village because it's so far away from anything. This is probably exactly the reason why Aebi did it. He's like that. Nobody believed, that anything could be done in Araouane and nobody really cared, so he took up the cause and made it his mission. Aebi was looking for a challenge in his life. I think he needed a project like this. He wanted to do something "impossible". It's not only some "selfless" impulse. Each moviegoer should discover for himself, who the real Ernst Aebi is, but I this is at the heart of what I discovered about him. I think different answers are possible and that makes his personality so interesting.

Filmmaker: There's archival footage from Ernst's first trip to the area, but had anyone ever made a film before in Araouane before your arrival?

Egi: I don't know if there is any other footage of Araouane prior to Aebi's arrival. I don't think that the place ever looked different or had any other history of development in the immediate period before he arrived. However, we know from the history of the region that Araouane once was an important meeting place for the salt-caravans and even bigger than Timbuktu. When Aebi arrived, there were only a few people and houses left. After 40 years of drought, most of the wells had dried out and the caravans had taken different routes. The inhabitants were about to abandon the place. Aebi took some pictures with his videocamera at the very beginning of the project. We could use very few of them. They were too shaky. Although he is many things, he isn't a cinematographer! The footage that was provided by Bob Marty, who visited Araouane after Aebi had been working there for three years, is the primary archival footage source. Without that footage, we would never know how the garden in Araouane looked like and it would be very hard to imagine.

Filmmaker: How did the local people react to your presence as a filmmaker?

Egi: The poeple in Araouane didn't know, that Aebi would visit their village after 20 years. So they were just surprised to see Aebi and also our guides from Timbuktu, who grew up in Araouane and are rarley able to visite their hometown and families.The local people in Araouane were very friendly. It took a while, until the women dared to come out of their houses. Conversation was nearly impossible. The people in Araouane have their own language. The men brought us tea and the children followed us in groups to all the places where we were filming. For me, arriving in Araouane was quite a shock. I had studied the footage and had heard a lot of stories beforehand, but as Araouane emerged out of the dunes after 2 days driving in the sand, I probably had similar feelings to what Ernst had 22 years ago. He wrote then in his diary: This is hell on earth. I'm glad that this was only the first impression and things have improved since he left.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult aspect of your journeys with Ernst?

Egi: Ernst is probably the easiest protagonist I ever worked with. He made everything possible, even certain things he was not very happy about. For example was he totally against a military troop, who accompanied us from Timbuktu to Araouane. The armed troop for the protection of the film crew was a set term by the governor of Timbuktu. Ernst had some bad experiences with those troops who "prefer to shoot befor they think" as he said. So we had to persuade him on that point. I'm very happy that I had the chance to meet Ernst. He is a very creative person and his view of life gave me new inputs and power for further projects.

JUDITH EHRLICH AND RICK GOLDSMITH, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA

2010-01-27T08:21:00.007-05:00

As a history lesson, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s enthralling new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, is as solid as a textbook, stitching together old broadcast footage, first-person testimony, tart excerpts from the Nixon White House tapes, and noirish recreations into riveting, revelatory political drama. The name “Daniel Ellsberg” probably doesn’t trigger the same flurry of associations as Deep Throat, the shadowy antihero of the Watergate scandal, but it should: An ex-Marine, former assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and highly respected analyst at the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg leaked a 7,000-page study detailing the top-secret Southeast Asia policies of five presidential administrations to the New York Times, resulting in a landmark court case, attempted cover-ups, and a nasty smear campaign, all culminating in the ignominious resignation of President Nixon. To be sure, the spy-grade story of the Pentagon Papers controversy has a lot of rich angles, including government secrecy, first-amendment rights versus executive privilege, and the rise of the national security state. But it’s also a conversion tale deeply concerned with the burden of conscience that Ellsberg felt as a government insider to tell the public what he believed they had a right to know, and his desire as a newly minted dove to change the course of the Vietnam War.

Part journalistic exposé, part overdue homage to one of the last century’s most notorious whistleblowers, Most Dangerous Man is a pressurized piece of filmmaking, resonating with issues (civil rights, the press, the conduct of war) still worrying the national conscience. With considerable flair backed by exhaustive research, Ehrlich (The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It, 2001) and Goldsmith (Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press, 1996) guide us through the corridors of power where the Vietnam war was seeded and then bloomed, often against the private advice of military analysts. Ellsberg himself provided McNamara with evidence of “atrocities” that helped push the war along, then reversed course after a two-year stint in Saigon with the State Department convinced him it was not only a lost cause, but a moral travesty based on years of prevarication. Seen then and now, he emerges as a man of principle, sincere and articulate. His fascinating chronicle of that time is augmented by a carousel of outspoken interviewees, including old colleagues like Anthony Russo (the Rand associate who persuaded him to Xerox the papers), Nixon officials John Dean and Bud Krogh (who authorized the break-in at Ellsberg’s doctor’s office), and general counsel James Goodale, who soothed the nerves of the Times’ top brass. Winner of the Special Jury Award at IDFA, and recently shortlisted for the Oscar, Most Dangerous Man is able-bodied and slyly entertaining, and has plenty to teach us, especially in these times, about the power of dissent.

Filmmaker spoke with Ehrlich and Goldsmith about crises of conscience, fair-use issues, and why you won’t be seeing Dan Ellsberg on any talking-head news programs.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers opens Friday at Cinema Village.

DIRECTORS JUDITH EHRLICH AND RICK GOLDSMITH. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.

Filmmaker: How and why did you decide to anchor the film around Daniel Ellsberg’s narrative and personal voice as opposed to approaching the story of the Pentagon Papers leak from a more general point of view?

Ehrlich: It was something we struggled with a lot. I always wanted it to be more character-driven and more biographical, not just a generic story about the events. The idea of whether it would be Dan’s voice or not was still up in the air until very late. I think Rick wanted it to be more journalistic and objective, but we compromised. I always felt [his voice] would make it a stronger narrative. For one thing, Dan lives right near us, he’s extremely articulate, his writing is wonderful, and most of the narration is adapted from his [book]. To me it seemed a no-brainer not to use him—it would give it that much more authenticity. But I think Rick’s points were legitimate, so that was a complicated decision.

Goldsmith: I’d actually approached him with a film about the Pentagon Papers and it didn’t get off the ground. Then Judy came to me about a year later with a film about Dan Ellsberg. Some of the initial questions were, Do we have a film about him or do we zero in on the Pentagon Papers? The personal transformation story, obviously, was the kickoff for the whole event, and we spent over a third of the film on that, and then got into the event itself. I don’t know if “morality play” is the right word, but it triggers questions of conscience, not only in Dan Ellsberg, but in so many of the characters that we have onscreen, starting with Randy Kehler and then leading to the newspapersmen, Hedrick Smith and Max Frankel, the Times lawyer, and the congressman. They all had crises of conscience. The Nixon administration, people like John Dean and Egil Krogh, all had to face very big questions that hopefully we all face on some level.

Filmmaker: Was Ellsberg amenable to participating when you first presented the idea, or were there negotiating points in terms of how his story would be told?

Goldsmith: It was a process. We approached Dan when he appeared onstage before a local high school in Oakland with his wife Patricia, where they talked about their remembrances of that time. That was the first time we talked face to face with him about it. He had had other filmmakers approach him about the subject matter, [but] he had not wanted to do anything until he wrote his own account [Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers], which he did in 2002. This was late 2004, when we spoke. He was protective of his story, for sure, and wanted to know what we would do with it, so it was not a slam dunk that he was going to go with us.

Ehrlich: Also, I think there was an intervention by some mutual friends too, who made them feel like we would do a fair job. But I think they had reason to be nervous, because Dan had had a hatchet job done on him by an author. F/X had done a made-for-TV version of the Pentagon Papers, with James Spader playing Dan, except [the producers] never talked to them, they cut them entirely out of the process. I don’t think they felt burned by that, but they certainly were cautious. We were lucky they chose us.

Filmmaker: There’s a confessional aspect to the film that calls to mind The Fog of War. Was this another opportunity for Ellsberg to set the record straight in a different medium?

Ehrlich: Dan’s very quick to accept guilt. That was his motivation for doing what he did. There were moments when we had to be sure we didn’t look too much like Fog of War, because it was the same period, with similar characters. There’s a lot of resonance here between the two films, and we wanted it to feel different.

Goldsmith: I don’t think Dan needed to unburden himself. I think he felt deeply about what he had done, planning the war and helping it along, and he felt very passionately [that leaking the papers] was the right thing. I think he was intrigued with the idea of somebody other than himself telling the story, and was ultimately convinced we would do it justice.

Filmmaker: How long did it take you to gather all the archival footage, as well as selections from the Nixon tapes that were used in the film? Did you have issues with clearances?

Goldsmith: It took four years. The archival stuff started with articles from the time period, and then we went to D.C. to do some filming in 2007. All that broadcast material of Howard K. Smith and Walter Cronkite is in the National Archives, because somebody in the Nixon administration was given the job to tape the nightly news and every public-affairs program. The Nixon tapes were also there, and it took a lot of digging and research by our team to get them. Those were free, but with a lot of the broadcast material, it was kind of an unknown whether we could claim fair use. Often we did, and used that as a way to not break our budget. We also spent a lot for CBS News, which was probably our biggest check, for their footage on the war and everything else.

Ehrlich: We had a very interesting experience with the fair-use issue. I don’t know how much you’re familiar with Pat Aufderheide and that whole movement, to make that more clear and get filmmakers the right to do it legally. We used a lawyer, Lisa Callif, and she went through every single clip a number of times and confirmed that each one of them was within the “safe harbor” of fair use, as she called it. And the quality was good enough we could go straight into DV-cam. I think that’s a great opportunity for anyone who’s looking at this period, to be able to access that material.

Filmmaker: In terms of visuals, the graphics, animations, and cloak-and-dagger-style recreations add another layer of tension and moody suspense. Were those part of your original plan for the film, or did they come later in the process?

Ehrlich: I think we were a year into editing by the time our assistant editor, Lawrence Lerew, came up with the recreation idea. I jumped on the bandwagon immediately and worked with him. It took a long time for Rick to decide it was going to work. So we did a bunch of rough versions and eventually we all got on board.

Goldsmith: The recreations and animation were the last productions we did. For obvious reasons, you want to to have every piece in place and know what part of the story you can [illustrate]. It’s true, Judy was pushing more on that. I like the idea of recreations, but the extent to which we ended up with them, I was skeptical at the beginning. I was concerned with losing a little bit of credibility [if we made it] too first-person. It was a process. But because there were a lot of creative minds on it, it worked.

Filmmaker: You’ve corralled quite a roster of talking heads in this film. John Dean and Bud Krogh’s participation seems essential, given their role in the Fielding break-in. Were there other key players you sought to interview who didn’t make it onto film?

Goldsmith: The idea from the beginning was to get as many people [as possible] who were really there. You’ll notice there are very few people onscreen who didn’t actually participate in this story. Robert Ellsberg, Daniel’s son, was Xeroxing the Pentagon Papers so we went after him. Mort Halperin was head of the study so we went after him. We wanted to get Kissinger and couldn’t get a call back, and we wanted to get Alexander Haig, who was peripherally involved.

Filmmaker: You did get Kissinger virtually.

Ehrlich: We actually made him look good! [Laughs] That’s the one thing I kind of regretted about the film. He’s the voice of reason compared to his boss.

Goldsmith: One of the people we tried hard on, and I had at least four or five conversations with on the phone, was Harry Rowen, who would have been a very interesting interview. That was Dan’s boss at the Rand Corporation. He got the shit when the leak happened. I’m sorry that we couldn’t win Harry over to agree to be on camera. But we tried really hard.

Filmmaker: Considering that both of you come from television, what was different for you about the experience of making a feature for theatrical release?

Ehrlich: We were funded by ITVS, German and French television, so we always were making a film for [that medium]. When we saw the animal we had, we hoped it might be theatrical, but we certainly didn’t make it primarily for theatrical release. It had to be public television because we had their money.

Goldmsith: What happened along the way was that among ourselves, through Lawrence, we started to branch out and see more of the creative [elements] that could elevate it beyond the standard documentary. In May or June, even though we were very close to a final cut, we learned that Karen Cooper at Film Forum was interested in the film—we had sent her a rough cut—and also the Toronto Film Festival. However, we had already fashioned it as a more dramatic, dynamic show. We sensed down the home stretch that, hey, this thing is bigger than a TV or educational thing, and we need to make the most of it.

Ehrlich: What surprised me is the interest we’ve had with the film internationally. It won the Special Jury Award at IDFA in Amsterdam, which was really exciting and a huge surprise, since that’s the biggest documentary festival in the world. And we also have had amazing sales around the world. We didn’t think this film would really play that well outside the U.S., but it’s really striking a chord.

Filmmaker: What do you think is registering with people internationally?

Ehrlich: I think people want to hear a positive story about American conscience. [Laughs] We get so much bad press and people in Europe at least are crazy about Obama, they aren’t feeling the negative feelings that we’re having here as progressives at the moment.

Goldsmith: It has a universality to it. The crisis of conscience and the historical stage — it’s the Vietnam War, leading up to Watergate. I like to believe that the film’s pretty well made, too, but the story resonates on a lot of levels that transcend borders.

Filmmaker: Another part of the film deals with the power of the press and the conflict with executive privilege that Nixon invoked in trying to halt the Times’ reporting. It seems to have an extraordinarily urgent resonance today, with the folding of so many papers and news organizations struggling to develop new business models to stay alive.

Goldsmith: I think it points to a time when news organizations defied the government and that, too, I think gives people a sense of what can be done. To me, [it’s amazing] that young people don’t know this type of story, when citizens rise up and do something, when newspapers defy their government and print stories that their government not only doesn’t want them to print, but then goes to court to stop them.

Filmmaker: What were the biggest discoveries that you made in researching this film and interviewing the participants?

Ehrlich: For me, it’s the Watergate period, because I thought I knew that. One of the gifts of this film is that we have reinterpreted the history of Watergate in a more accurate way because of John Dean’s testimony, if we’re to believe his interpretation that it was the break-in to Dr. Fielding’s office, rather than the events of Watergate, that really brought down the Nixon administration. When we first started I thought, “Oh yeah, and it kind of has something to with Watergate, too, because the Plumbers started there and then they did the real thing nine months later.” But in fact the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was what brought [Nixon down], because that could be tracked back to the White House.

Goldsmith: For me, it was the extent that Daniel Ellsberg was not only inside the government, but actually took part at the top levels. He has incredible knowledge about how the government works, how the secrecy system works, how organizations like RAND work, and he has an incredible amount to add to the public debate about issues of war. We don’t hear [his voice], we don’t see him on the TV shows. Every time we’re about to go to war, from the first Gulf War to the Iraq war to Afghanistan, you see all these retired admirals and generals, but you don’t see the Daniel Ellsbergs who have as much information about government because they’ve been there. To me, learning that, learning how much he knows, was one revelation, and the other was how much he’s been shut out from public debate. And that’s a loss for all of us.

Filmmaker: So who’s the most dangerous man in America today? Is it still Dan Ellsberg?

Ehrlich: It could be. What he has to say is still pretty scary to the government.

Goldsmith: I think at that time, Dan did do this incredible act, but let’s face it, there was an entire anti-war movement that should not be forgotten. He didn’t exist in a vacuum.

JON AMIEL, CREATION

2010-01-20T10:15:00.008-05:00

The first non-Canadian film to open the Toronto film festival in quite some time, Jon Amiel's Creation seems to both embrace and shun the duties and limitations of the historical biopic. Paul Bettany stars as middle age naturalist Charles Darwin, well past his explorations on the HMS Beagle, who having settled into English country life with his children and wife Emma (Bettany's real life spouse Jennifer Connelly), decides to finally tackle writing a book on his nascent theory of Evolution. Haunted by visions of his recently deceased daughter and the notion that he may permanently alter man's conception of the divine, Darwin struggles through the completion of the text, sidetracked by tremors and sickliness. Containing a sophisticated and quietly engrossing look at a scientist's relationship to faith and family, Creation is that rare story of an important historical figure that seems intimate.

The film marks a return to indie filmmaking for Amiel. The director of Tune in Tomorrow (1990) and Queen of Hearts (1989) cut his teeth in the 80's directing the laudable British television mini-series The Singing Detective before a sustained run of star laden, Hollywood work in the 1990's such as Summersby (1993), Copycat (1995) and Entrapment (1999). His most recent feature was 2003's The Core.

Creation opens on Friday.

Creation director Jon Amiel. Courtesy of Apparition.

Filmmaker: You've made a historical biopic about Charles Darwin that in many ways resembles a horror film with its uses of nightmarish dreams and the haunting of a grown man by a dead child as a principle narrative device.

Amiel: Yes. When I approached this whole idea of making a film about Darwin, I started off with all the things I didn't want to do. Didn't want to make a biopic. Didn't want to make a dramatic documentary. Didn't really want to make a "period" film. Didn't really want to make a reverential portrait of a great man. I've seen films like that and they're dull. They don't really belong on a feature film screen. They're more the purview of documentaries, dramatized documentaries and the sort of thing you'd see on PBS.

What I discovered about Darwin excited me a great deal, much more than I ever expected. Reading about him, reading his letters to Emma and from Emma, his journals and the recollections of his children, this whole different human being emerged for me. He embodied many paradoxes. He was a great pillar of rational thought who was haunted by tremendously irrational fears, doubts and anxieties. He was married to a woman who was his best friend and yet with whom he held diametrically opposed ideas. He was writing a book that would change the world. The act of writing this so perturbed him that he became physically ill, vomiting, shaking, fainting. He had a number of other systems that we don't go into in the film. All of these things and then he was dealing with the most difficult thing a parent can ever deal with, the loss of a totally beloved child.

So what I set out to do with [screenwriter] John Collee was to get inside the mind of this man to understand what it must feel like to be a naturalist who sees the young of various species parish on a daily basis and observes them dispassionately as a simple fact of life. You're now looking a fledging baby rabbit being eaten, but now through the prism of having lost your own beloved child. You're looking at a decaying, decomposing baby bird and thinking about your own child decomposing in her grave. What were the thoughts and ideas rushing through his mind when he was working on this book that made him physically ill. So the film and the visual sequences that you're referring to are an attempt to get inside the mind of a great man. Some of the ways in which a great pillar of rational thought, The Origins of Species, may have come from processes that prove to be anything but rational at the time. We think of scientists as these cool, rational people in white coats dispassionately jotting ideas down, The fact is, weather you're talking about the story of Francis Crick or Galileo or John [Forbes Nash Jr.] from a Beautiful Mind, the product of science might be a rational thought, but the process of science is for the individuals themselves is frequently anything but rational.

Those are the things we sought to explore in the film to escape from the tyranny of the BBC costume drama set in the beautiful rolling hills of Kent. [Laughs]

Filmmaker: So it was very early on that you and John Collee decided to focus on the writing of The Origin of Species as opposed to the controversy that it set off or Darwin's travels on the Beagle.

Amiel: Feature films don't do abstract ideas so well. It deals with them best when it embeds those ideas in character conflicts. I think any great film that's produced any ideological change, weather it's Inherit the Wind or Z or Salvador, any film that makes a controversial, world changing statement, they all succeed primarily because they are great drama first. They're about people you care about. We started very much from that place with this film. We didn't want to make a tract; we wanted to make a film that shows the science that conceals science and the art that conceals art. We wanted to embed Darwin's ideas within the drama that was his daily life. A lot of those ideas are embedded in the dream sequences you mentioned for example, where you might have a young female Orangatang juxtaposed with images of his young child, who may also appear while poshing around the skeletonizing shed, killing pidgeons and analyzing there wing structures. So I believe a great deal of his thinking is there in the film.

As for the controversy, I really didn't want to see those awful scenes set in oak paneled room with a bunch of guys in black frock coats and big side whiskers standing up and going "No! Outrageous! Shocking! Scandalous!" [Laughs]. It seemed unnecessary to do that. We made the choice very early on to focus on the family and the process of writing Origin to allow the fact that the book is still as controversial now as it was then to take care of its self in effect. In other words we end with this great, world changing masterpiece trundling off toward London precariously perched on the back of a cart-

Filmmaker: I kept hoping he'd made a copy.

Amiel: Yes, one does feel that and actually I believe he did. What I found so alluring about this world changing masterpiece trundling off on the back of a cart, was, oh my God, what if it had fallen off? How fragile a thing that was at that moment, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

Filmmaker: Did it make it any easier to craft the intimacies and painful conflicts of a married couple by having a pair of leads who themselves are married to each other?

Amiel: Working with this particular married couple definitely made it easier, yes. As well as having fifty years of camera experience between them, they were brave enough and smart enough and willing enough to explore painful, difficult aspects of themselves and their relationship in front of the camera. My job by and large was to get out of the way. It could have gone horribly wrong as a decision. If they had decided to gang up against me or if one of them comes in with a bad mood you know that the other one is going to come in with a bad mood, all of those things could have been pretty woeful, but they weren't. Partly because of their sheer professionalism and experience, partly because they are incredibly courageous actors and they're willing to go places that many actors are just scared to go to.

Filmmaker: When constructing the non-linear narrative in the editing room were there challenges you faced that you and John Collee hadn't anticipated in the script?

Amiel: I was enormously strengthened and embolded in both conceiving of the film this way and cutting it by the experience I'd had with The Singing Detective, the mini-series for the BBC I did many years ago which told a story in a very similar way. The cutting room is the last and most important rewrite you do and in a non-linear film the editing presents really particular challenges. Scenes can go together in many different ways, both the material in the scene itself and the order in which the scenes are presented. We had hundreds of post it notes all over the editing room wall, each one with a scene on it. Blue ones for past sequences and red one for present tense sequences. The order changed many, many, many times, despite all the wonderful work that John Collee and I and done on the script. All kinds of things reveal themselves once you've shot a movie. We were working right up until the last minute, polishing the way in which the scenes were presented to make the story as clear and strong and rich as we possibly could. It was a tremendous challenge to get that right, to tell a story that was non-linear chronologically, but had a powerful, persuasive emotional trajectory in it that would carry and audience through the story.

Filmmaker: What's the financing environment for a film like this right now where it's increasingly difficult for specialty films to get much traction in the market place? I imagine the financing was contingent upon the participation of you're two leads?

Amiel: You're right that the film itself is an endangered species. It's the kind of film that America almost didn't get to see and in coming years may very well not get to see. Partly because films of this sort can't find distribution, partly because they can no longer find financing. The way this came about was very simple for me. [Producer] Jeremy Thomas was the first person I pitched the idea too. I went to him with my research and a few key ideas John Collee and I had put together: that the spirit of his daughter would be a character in the story, that it would be non-linear, that we'd see Jenny the ape as anecdotes that are visualized, that this would be an emotional portrait of the man as opposed to a homilectic portrait of a saint. It was a five-minute pitch and Jeremy went "I like this very much, I think it could be very exciting!" Within a remarkably short time he had signed up and John Collee and I went off to write the script. Jeremy found the financing rather quickly. He confided in me last week that he believed if he tried to finance this film now instead of two years ago, he probably wouldn't be able to do it. The landscape has changed that much in just a few years. It's become a very difficult time to finance films for grownups. I'm extremely happy that I was able to slip under the wire so to speak and make this movie.

Filmmaker: You've made movies on broad canvases before, with large budgets in the studio system. This film was independently financed. How different was the process from the making of a Copycat or Entrapment?

Amiel: It's not nearly as different as one might imagine. The basic truth, weather you're making a studio movie or an indie movie, is that there is never enough time and never enough money. Somehow, miraculously, that always seems to be the case when you're making movies. Generally there's an equation, big money means big interference, less money means less interference. What one hopes for in an independent movie is the fact that you're spending less of other people's money means that you have less ambient anxiety to deal with and thus less interference. Sadly even that isn't always true. You can find even on a small independent movie, that you put together your financing from six different sources, all of whom wish to have a voice in how the film is edited, marketed and distributed. So I don't think the difference is really between studio movie versus indie movie. A lot more differences appear in the marketing and distribution stage of the film. That's when you really notice a studio's clout and marketing capabilities as opposed to independent distributors. It's all about with whom and for whom you're making the film. I got pretty lucky with Entrapment, Copycat, Summersby. I made those films with producers and for studios that essentially allowed me to make the movies that I wanted to make. I can look at all those movies and say, for better or worse, those are the movies I intended to make. I had relatively little interference and relatively substantial levels of support. That's as true of those bigger studio movies as it was of Queen of Hearts and Tune in Tomorrow, my first feature films and this one.

ANDREA ARNOLD, FISH TANK

2010-01-13T00:26:00.010-05:00

Long before she became an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Dartford native Andrea Arnold settled on a path that was anything but conventional. After moving to London in the late ’70s, she worked as a dancer on Top of the Pops, and later became a TV presenter in Britain for Saturday-morning kids’ programs like No. 73, Motormouth, and the enviro-awareness series A Beetle Called Derek. Never entirely comfortable in front of the cameras, Arnold was always writing, logging story ideas and character sketches. She left television in the early ’90s, went to film school, and made two shorts that screened at Cannes. In 2003, her 26-minute short Wasp, about a chronically stressed, emotionally desperate single mother living in a Dartford housing project, nabbed an Academy Award for best live-action short. Then came Arnold’s Cannes Jury Prize winner Red Road (2006), a raw, suspenseful, ingeniously constructed personal drama set mostly in a dark CCTV surveillance office in Glasgow. It was the kind of film—moody, absorbing, nerve-jarring, expressionistic—that made you sit up and take notice of this remarkably assured new filmmaker, and wonder where she would direct her energies next.

With Fish Tank, Arnold revisits the distressed, working-class locales of her earlier work, telling the story of Mia (Katie Jarvis in a confident and steadfastly believable performance), a 15-year-old girl growing up in a nondescript council estate in Kent. Angry, alienated from her female peers, and frustrated with life at home—she’s always at odds with curvy-cougar mom Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and petulant younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), the three of them continually trading obscenities and cutting remarks—Mia finds peace in solitary self-expression, dancing freestyle to hip-hop tunes in an abandoned flat. Things change when Joanne brings home new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender), a strapping presence in the all-female household who wins hostile Mia over with his easygoing, paternal airs, giving her the respectful attention and flattery she craves, but also stirring the volatile teen's first exhilarating pangs of desire. Arnold stays skin-close to Mia as the story develops, DP Robbie Ryan's camera tracking her every fitful movement, whether she's head-butting a rival, fleeing a menacing pack of boys, or woozily regarding Connor as he tucks her in. Even when their rapport takes on a troubling cast, Arnold never hits an obvious beat, which makes Fish Tank's mix of hard-knock realism and tenderly observed adolescent portraiture even more impressive (it won the Cannes Jury Prize last May), evoking the kitchen-sink-style Brit dramas of yesteryear as well as an angstier, often dizzyingly sensual spin on the coming-of-age tale that feels utterly fresh and contemporary.

Filmmaker spoke with Arnold about her faith in cinema, the simple act of observing everyday life, and why her New Year's resolution is to dance every day.

IFC Films releases Fish Tank on Friday.

FISH TANK WRITER-DIRECTOR ANDREA ARNOLD. COURTESY IFC FILMS.

Filmmaker: Do you consider yourself a watcher, an obsever?

Arnold: I think I must be. Because when people ask me where does your inspiration come from, I would say absolutely my first answer is life. You know, by sitting on the bus and looking at people or just walking around. I am always seeing things that kickstart my thinking. And that definitely seems to be what I get most excited about. So I’d say that I’m somebody who’s a watcher, an observer. I think we’re all a bit like that to some degree. People who know me well say I notice things they don’t notice.

Filmmaker: Does that mainly concern people and faces or do you think you’re noticing elements in an environment as well that other people might ignore? For instance, do you single out details in settings that are perhaps banal but that speak to you in some way?

Arnold: How something gets going is a mystery, really, isn’t it? For example, the other day I saw a woman walking up to the station. It was very cold, it had been snowing, and she had not enough clothes on for the weather. She had a load of kids and she was pushing a pram up the hill, and she was kind of shouting at the kids, I don’t know what they were doing. I could tell she was trying to hurry for a train. She had some track-suit bottoms on and they’d kind of slipped down, and you could see this expansive flesh at the back. It seemed such an intimate thing to me. I was behind her, and I just started imagining her whole life and a house and what it was like. And that is the kind of thing that I will go and write down and think about. And it grows. I’m always saying that my films have all started with images, so I would consider that potentially a starting place for a whole story. Sometimes the images are not things I see, but they come to my mind out of nowhere. But there’s probably made-up things too, and they’re stored somehow. That’s how I work. When people say “Where do ideas for films come from?,” I think, well, just walk down the street! There’s a thousand faces and you can imagine a thousand lives. Everybody’s life has got drama.

Filmmaker: How does that act of note-taking play more specifically into the craft of your filmmaking?

Arnold: Ever since I was very small I’ve kept notebooks and written down things I’ve seen. I can’t remember the first time I started doing it, but I was probably at primary school, I’d have been about eight or nine. Sometimes I’ll expand on an idea, I’ll write about it and see where it leads, and just write some notes down. I often find when I start writing a script, I don’t go back to those books. I might flip through and refresh my mind, but to be honest, I think it goes on and stays there, you don’t need a ntoebook. Your brain is the notebook. I don’t really use a lot of what I’ve written down. And if I’m writing, when I’ve got an image that I’ve decided I want to explore, I usually write around it and try and work out its context. I’ll let my brain be quite free and see what happens. Then it will take more shape.

Filmmaker: It plays out in the actual aesthetic of your films, too, in the sense that we have such a strong point of view, and perspective. In Red Road, for instance, there’s the surveillance aspect, but the information we receive is all through one character’s point of view. In Fish Tank, Mia’s point of view dominates the film. What is it about that approach that you think works best for the stories that you want to tell?

Arnold: I always make a decision based on what feels right. I really do trust my instincts. It’s not like I’ve made a plan to do that. I don’t work that way. Probably the script is written from one person’s point of view, and it just feels right to me. When you’re watching, if you’re going to get very involved with someone, it feels right to be with them all the time. In an earlier draft of Fish Tank, I experimented with having scenes with the mom by herself because I knew that, seen through Mia’s point of view, she was going to be hard to empathize with. I had a scene that got cut where Mia goes into [Joanne’s] room and she goes through a bag next to the bed and in it is all the things to do with her kids that she saved, little pictures and photos and certificates, all crumpled in the carrier bag. I think that would have said quite a lot about her mom, that underneath she does care about them. But when we put the edit together, it was one of those things that didn’t sit easily, so it didn’t get used, which I was always a little bit sad about but think was the right decision. So it does bring challenges doing it from one person’s perspective, but I think it also brings an intimacy. Sometimes people say to me, I feel like I’m in your film or I feel like I’m really experiencing it, it’s uncomfortable. I think that’s probably because of that very intimate perspective.

Filmmaker: On the other side of things, because you portray characters so honestly, warts and all, and because we get to see them in all their complexity—they’re not romanticized, idealized people—that brings us closer too. How do you get actors to embody these people in the way that you’ve imagined?

Arnold: I don’t know [Laughs]. I have this real faith in cinema. I’m always amazed when you finish filming and then you put an assembly together. I know this sounds really silly, but whenever I see it, I think wow, that’s a whole world that now exists! And it’s always a surprise to me, because making a film is so complicated. Every day is full of stops and starts, and it’s not a very fluid thing. It’s quite brutal and clumsy, the whole machinery of it. Then when you put it together and [see] this world that you’ve created, I’m amazed every time. Wow, look at that! I never sort of believe it’s going to happen.

Filmmaker: And the authenticity comes from ...

Arnold: One of the main things is casting. If you cast close to what you’ve written, then you’re almost there. For Fish Tank, I was always looking for a real authentic girl that was close to what I’d written. Although Katie isn’t Mia, she’s got the vulnerability and also the spirit of her. I didn’t ask her to really be anything other than herself. And that’s often what my main note is to the actors. If I’ve cast close, then I’m not really wanting them to be anything other than themselves. When I saw the assembly, I thought Oh, she’s not Katie, she’s Mia! Because I’ve written her lines and I’ve decided what she’s wearing and I’ve given her a place to live, all these decisions add up to this world being believeable. So it’s a combination of all those decisions that you make. Nothing gets put in front of the camera that you haven’t thought about. I didn’t know if it was going to feel like a performance or not, but I was really pleased and surprised to think, She is the girl that I wrote, because I wasn’t sure.

Filmmaker: Personally, I like films that are daring and bold and visceral and challenging, especially when they examine the lives of people we rarely see, people who are invisible and generally ignored by society. And I think there’s a great tradition of this kind of filmmaking in Britain, especially, beginning with the kitchen-sink dramas and Ken Loach, all the way up to the present, with Lynne Ramsay and Michael Winterbottom and many others, including you. What keeps you invested in working in that one milieu?

Arnold: I don’t have a choice, it just seems to pick me. I don’t think I have any say over what stories I seem. I told you about that woman I saw. I wanted to go back and write about her straight away. That’s how it works. I don’t have an intellectual thought about oh, I’m going to make a film about this world or these people or this subject or theme. It’s not like I have a plan, really.

Filmmaker: But location is very important to you, isn’t it?

Arnold: Because to some degree, with the stories I’ve been telling as well, where you’re born and where you grew up has a huge impact on how your life is. Your circumstances and the things you’re born into are everything, especially when you’re young. I think maybe that’s why I get wrapped up with the environment and location when I’m filming. It matters and it says something about people—who they are and how they live. All my films have had that element. When I think about the next thing I’ll do, I know I’ll do it again because it’s almost like a character, the location.

Filmmaker: I think it’s easy for people to describe these settings around the council estates as bleak because I see you as approaching it from a completely different place.

Arnold: Oh, thank you for saying that, because I hate it when people say “grim.” Somebody the other day said “Did you pick the grimmest places in Essex to film?” And I said, you know, I don’t see that place as grim. It’s brutal, it’s maybe difficult, it’s got a sadness to it, that particular place where they live in the film. There used to be a lot of industry and it’s all closed down. There’s a lot of unemployment. There used to be a big Ford factory, and great huge car parks. All those car lots are empty now and the grass is growing up in the tarmac. But it’s got a wilderness, and huge, great skies. It’s a mixed thing. I don’t want to see it as grim. I’m fed up with that word. I think people are always looking for simplistic ways for summing things up. So I’m really happy you said that.

Filmmaker: One of the things I notice about the atmosphere we find ourselves immersed in, as viewers of your films, is that there is a fairly constant and palpable tension, certainly in Red Road. And in Fish Tank, it erupts at a certain moment. There is a turn in the story where it becomes a different kind of film.

Arnold: People have asked me about this tension before. And I’ve been trying to work it out. When I first wrote Red Road and I gave it to some people to read, they said “It’s a thriller.” And I went, Oh, really? I don’t think it is. Someone said to me, in a thriller, the audience is supposed to know as much as the protagonist. That’s what they told me, from some school of filmmaking. Obviously, we don’t know as much as Jackie does. I was always trying to explore with us just watching her and not always having everything explained. I like to push that as far as I can. I wonder if it’s something to do with point of view, because if you’re living with someone that intensely, and if things are dramatic in their lives, I think you feel it with them more. I wonder if that’s where the tension comes from. You know as much as they do, and it’s a bit more visceral.

Filmmaker: In Mia’s case, there’s an emotional intensity she’s experiencing that we feel while we’re on this journey with her. The stress of her immediate domestic environment, the conflict she has with Joanne, which is masking all these competitive tensions between mother and daughter, and also the desire that’s she’s beginning to feel for Connor. Dance is an outlet for her, and becomes even a form of communication at one point.

Arnold: For me, the dancing in the film is about her having something that’s her own. She has to be quite defensive in her life and she seems to have nowhere she can be at home. Everywhere she’s got her guard up. So this is a place where she can let that down a bit. I wanted her to have something that was her own, so dancing seemed like a good thing. It’s one of life’s real pleasures. Apparently, there was a Cambridge professor who did a study on happiness—it took him five years—and he came back and said dancing made people happy. I could have told him that in ten seconds! [Laughs] You know, I’ve always loved dancing, but my New Year’s resolution is to dance every day. I just put on some music and dance. I don’t dance as much as I used to and I miss it, and I was thinking, why do you have to go anywhere? Just dance in your room. Maybe it was Mia who gave me the idea. [Laughs]

Filmmaker: What an amazing resolution. Reintroducing that in your life must also be a way of you connecting with somebody you used to be long ago.

Arnold: Yeah. What I love about filmmaking is that everything I’ve ever done in my life, it all seems to come into the filmmaking. Anything I’ve done. Dancing is something I used to do and when you’re working with cameras and actors, it is a bit like putting movement together and it reminds me of dancing, the choreography between actors and cameras. So that’s what I loved about it when I started. Everything I’ve ever done now makes sense. It isn’t redundant anymore.

LUCIEN CASTAING-TAYLOR & ILISA BARBASH, SWEETGRASS

2010-01-06T14:12:00.011-05:00

An observational documentary that utterly transports you to a forgotten corner of the American West, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash's Sweetgrass is billed as a glimpse at the final sheep drive the state of Montana ever hosted. Shot in muddy, early aughts DV, this often funny, occasionally terrifying and almost always beautifully composed film follows a pair of modern shepherds who travel mostly on foot with three thousand sheep over a two hundred mile Montana expanse that cuts across the seemingly unending Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains. Without the use of voiceover narration or title cards, the film allows you to soak in the grandeur of the setting while taking stock of the physically torturous work of sheep ranching and herding. While the emphasis is put on the physical execution of the drive as opposed to the forces of modern life that are rendering such practices extinct, one can't help but feel twinges of regret at the spectre of this aspect of American life and history slipping away so unceremoniously. These cowboys shine through as men of hard won integrity and unshakable spirit, who's anxieties about predators and the physical toll of their work stay lodged in your brain long after the film's credits unfurl.

Castaing-Taylor and Barbash, academics who had recently started a family when the project began, spent most of the previous decade making Sweetgrass, which has also led to several installation works drawn from unused footage shot during their several years of following sheep drives in Montana. Both are currently affiliated with Harvard University; Castaing-Taylor is director of Harvard's new Sensory Ethnography Lab and a professor of Visual & Environmental Studies and Anthropology, while Barbash is an associate curator of Visual Anthropology at the University's Peabody Museum. There previous doc credits include 1990's Made in U.S.A. and 1992's In and Out of Africa.

Sweetgrass opens today at Film Forum in Manhattan.

Filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash. Courtesy of the Filmmakers.

Filmmaker: How did you come across these particular Montana shepherds as subjects?

Barbash: We were working as professors in at the University of Colorado at Boulder. We were in the Film Studies program and the Anthropology department. We heard through various contacts that there was a rancher who had been ranching all of his life, he was the fourth generation of his family to become a rancher, and he was the last person in the county he was working in to go up and trail a band of sheep into the Beartooth-Absaroka range near Yellowstone Park.

Castaing-Taylor: He was the last in any county in the area.

Barbash: He happened to mention to an east coaster from whom he was leasing the land that he was the last guy and somebody ought to make a film about him. That guy knew someone at NYU, contacted the NYU people and said, “hey, someone should make a film about this guy!” and then our friends at NYU contacted us-

Castaing-Taylor: Thinking our students might want-

Barbash: to make a film-

Castaing-Taylor: [Laughing] No, we’re greedy, we wanted to do it-

Barbash: about this last rancher in Montana and we jumped on it. We were looking for a topic to make a film about the American West. We were living there, we had small children, so we weren’t willing tocouldn’t go very far and the idea was very intriguing to us.

Castaing-Taylor: We were already interested in an idea but we hadn’t found good subjects for it. There’s a single street in Boulder, Colorado called Arapahoe Avenue that houses, among other things, two institutions. One is called the Naropa Institute, and it’s this post Beat, new agey, Buddhist, left leaning, find yourself sort of University where lots of rich people send there kids to study creative writing and stuff. Then, a mile east, is the international publishing and editorial headquarters of Soldier of Fortune, this racist international mercenary magazine that sponsors coup d’etat’s in Angola and around the world. How could these two institutions cohabitate on that one street? Then I realized that the West is the epicenter of the far left, new agers trying to find themselves devoid of any sociocultural constraints, transcendent, the real me, the inner me, and the far right, the libertarians that want to get off the grid, fuck the government, never want to pay taxes, etc, etc. These two communities don’t talk to each other but they are actually quite similar. They’re flipped, structural inversions of the other. We were looking for one community to represent each and do some sort of parallel action going back and forth between these two communities. Before we found the two ideal communities that we wanted, we heard about these shepherds. We weren’t sure that it would work. I went up there during 2001. We decided to invest one summer in it together as a family. That summer was unbelievable, it changed both of our lives, so much so that we stuck with it for three years straight of filming. Then we moved to the east coast, to Boston.

Filmmaker: How long did it take to complete the film from start to finish and at what point did you conceive of making gallery installations out of the footage you’d culled for the film?

Barbash: Initially we conceived of this film as a straight documentary project. We started in March of 2001 doing a little bit of filming and scouting. Then we packed up the kids, our babysitter, dog and cat all into our cars and drove up to Montana for the summer of 2001 to film. We filmed that summer, we filmed the next summer and in 2003 we filmed a little bit more. We had thought initially that we were going to make a film about this last sheep drive but also segue into a kind of debate about land rights issues in Montana. What happened was during the first summer we thought we’d take the whole family up into the mountains. It turned out that thereir were too many predators and bears to send a three year old and a five year old up there. So I stayed down in the flatlands filming what was still going to be this land rights debate, filming alternative ranchers, filming these town meetings about a platinum mine that was polluting the village nearby, all the while Lucien was filming this sheep herders up in the mountains. Then he came down and we compared footage and we found that his was much more compelling so we then started editing the feature length documentary. As we progressed in the editing, which ended up taking five years, we realized that there was all this really striking, compelling footage that he had shot up in the mountains that had takes that were too long to fit into a conventional documentary. Takes and scenes that were quite beautiful and interesting in their own right and needed some kind of different form. That’s how the installation pieces formed, they grew out of the larger project.

Castaing-Taylor: Conceptually, what became Sweetgrass preceded what became the installation pieces. They were born, in rough cut form, while Sweetgrass was finished.

Filmmaker: What were the particular challenges raised by shooting and cutting over such a long period of time? Were you aware ahead of time that you were shooting the last Montana shepherds?

Barbash: We finished shooting the footage that went into the film in 2003. When we went up in 2001 we thought we were shooting the last sheep drive, which you can see in the film is an unbelievably grueling expedition for everyone involved. What happened was, for various reasons, they did it the next summer and then they did it again the next summer. So we started joking that we should call the film “A penultimate sheep drive”. [Laughs]. We thought they might go again, but finally, at a certain point, it just proved to be too much.

Castaing-Taylor: We weren’t invested in it being the last. This tag line that’s on the poster isn’t really a part of the film.

Barbash: Because we had training in Anthropology and Ethnography, we were aware of the ethnographic film trope of going to a community and filming the last people that were doing some kind of traditional ritual…

Filmmaker: From Nanook of the North on its been a trope of a certain kind of doc framework…

Barbash: Yes, Exactly.

Castaing-Taylor: It’s an embarrassing trope.

Barbash: It’s an embarrassing trope, but we when went and filmed with that in mind, being very self-conscious of the ironies of filming the last of something within a culture that to a large extent is our own, the American West, and then to a large extent different from that of a New Yorker and a…

Castaing-Taylor: Liverpudlian.

Filmmaker: How did that self-consciousness designing the film and representing their daily lives?

Castaing-Taylor: It affected us consciously and unconsciously. This weariness of the trope of the disappearing other and yet our willingness to engage with it, I think there are two things you can take from it. One is, whilst the super sensitive viewer might as they go along realize that there is something that suggests this is something that might not happen anymore, you’re never told that until the final title card, where as the conventional documentary would tell you that up front, which would then cast the hundred and one minutes with that emphasis. You don’t get that. Also, the way we recorded the film soundwise, with the wireless lav mics, where you might have two sources that are miles away from each other and all the spoken sound is sync sound, there is no voiceover, they way they cuss, they way they snore, the way they pee, the way they live their lives is super real. The way all of our lives are, the way George Bush and Barack Obama’s lives are, but typically documentary subjects when they are in front of the camera want to put on their Sunday best and dress up, act up. They are performing in away an idealized version of themselves. We were interested in the nitty gritty, the difficulty of life as it’s lived, and the difficulty of these peoples’s lives, of cowboys lives, of shepherds lives. When we look at the whole history of the pastoral, the poetry from the classics onward, of painting, of the pastoral as a genre within mythology and literature, within cinema too, such as Nanook of the North for example, you get so little sense of what immense amount of labor is involved in a day of a shepherd’s life, what its actually like to inhabit the body of a shepherd rather than the bourgeois consumer representation of some idealized relationship to nature.

Filmmaker: What kind of relationships did you foster with these men over half a decade and how did that affect how you chose to depict them in film and installations?

Castaing-Taylor: Two things. For a European, I couldn’t believe there was anything that remote. It’s a long way away. I couldn’t believe there was anything that remote in the lower forty-eight states. You think that in the lower forty-eight there’s no way you’d get more than twenty-five or thirty miles from a road, but it’s not true. There are places in those mountains that take five weeks to get up there with the sheep and the sheep bog down and its at least another three weeks to get down. When your stuck at 11,000 feet for two months with two guys you don’t know, you become very intimate and you share things with each other in a way you probably wouldn’t with people you know better, because you have less to lose and you probably won’t see each other again and so on. Two months in New York City when you’re busy can go by in a flash. Two months at 11,000 feet in the Absaroka-Beartooths is an eternity, so it’s amazing how close you become. There were three of us; there’s Pat, the young guy, John, the older guy, and me. Pat and I are about the same age; John is older than us both. John is a Vietnam vet. He’s had a tough time in life, they’re both super hard scrabble hired hand sorts, they’ll break horses, put up fences, sheer sheep, any type of job they can get. Then here I am, I could barely speak English, at least a kind that they could understand, being from Liverpool. I was a city boy. I had never ridden a horse in my life. I was a total greenhorn. So I was their apprentice really.

Two other things that are relevant for how we got along are that stereotypically Western culture fetishizes and places a value on athleticism, strength and fortitude, the ability to to undergo tough circumstances and never complain and so on. The camera equipment was super heavy and grueling. They were, for some reason, struck and amazed that I was able to hold the entire camera apparatus and climb the whole time without having a heart attack. They were impressed that I was doing as much work as they were with the sheep. When I wasn’t filming, I was still wearing this bizarre harness that was suspending the camera. I would wear it from dawn to dusk. I had extremely powerful, long lasting batteries so I wouldn’t have to replace them and risk making them self-conscious. So they weren’t really aware. Even at lunch, I would set the camera on my shoulder. That weren’t conscious of being filmed or not being filmed. Initially, there was, but after a couple weeks they just forgot about it; there was no me without the camera except when I had just had enough. So just the three of us stuck up there with three thousand sheep and a few dogs, its a lot of work. Its twenty-four seven you’re on. You have a lot of shared experience, an elevated sense of danger, a sense of the stakes involved, its almost like a biblical mission.

Filmmaker: How have your subjects responded to the film?

Castaing-Taylor: They’ve all seen this and they’ve all seen rough cuts of the installation pieces. They all have different reactions. They all say they liked it. They all want more copies. I think there is a sense of vulnerability, of rawness, combined with a sense of “well, here’s fifteen minutes of fame”. They’re really happy to get represented. They see themselves as a very marginalized community that never gets represented normally and is often scapegoated. Ranching used to be king, and now it’s almost impossible to get by as a family rancher.

It was interesting having not been familiar with Montana, how massively important these rural ethnicities were, to be Irish or to be Norwegian. One county is seventy percent Scottish, while another is eighty perent Norwegian. It’s phenomenal, it’s such a part of their identities. All the jokes are about stubborn Norwegians, or stubborn Irish people. The two main characters in the film are of Irish descent. The ranch is owned by people of Norwegian descent. Most of our time was spent with the ranch owners and their families and extended families and the ‘Wegians as they call themselves. There is a sense that the ‘Wegians are oppressed; some ‘Wegian kids even think that ‘Wegians are not allowed to go to college, that there is some federal law prohibiting Norwegian Americans from going to college, that they’re all stupid and not educatible. Any subjugated minority internalizes the majority’s perception of itself, but this is something else entirely.

Filmmaker: You show us in very visceral terms how demanding physically and emotionally herding is. While you were filming them, did these men see themselves doing anything else after shepherding was no longer an option? Why did they keep coming back?

Barbash: John, the Vietnam Vet, is cousins with Pat, which is something we don’t make clear in the film. We couldn’t figure out how to do that. They’ve both grown up in not very wealthy circumstances. Everyday they’ve got to work. They are not landowners. The land owners work everyday as well, but these guys are descended from hired hands and they’re hired hands. They take what comes up. The opportunity to go into the mountain is a few months of work where they are not spending any money at all. The amount they get paid is not very much. They are never going to get rich off something like that. This is what they are comfortable with. I think you can tell at a certain point that these guys weren’t going to keep going up there. It’s just too hard. They’re working against these predators, the wolves and the bears, which are federally protected, but also against the various kinds of protections that are not instilled in the West. If you were to defend your flock against a bear or a wolf, you are not allowed to kill that bear or wolf or you go to prison and get an enormous fine. So you’re not only seeing the rancher doing his last sheep drive, but you’re seeing the hired hands doing their last sheep drive.

Castaing-Taylor: I would say that there is a very prevalent sense of anger. Not at their lot in life, because the whole history of the colonization of the west and the homesteaders and onwards was Scandinavians and Europeans being lured here by great lies from railroad ads, you go out west and get your 40, 160, or 600 acres, you get rich and it’s all green and sunny and so on. It might be for a few years, but then you have a drought that will last five years and then they end up penniless. Its always been super hard, its more than in recent years, no one respects ranching, no one respects family ranching, everything is being sold out to agro-business. Americans don’t eat lamb, the only Americans who eat significant amounts of lamb statistically are diasporic middle-easterners, Arab, Iranians, Greeks, etc. The annual American consumption of lamb has dropped precipitously since the second World War. We don’t wear wool anymore. We wear synthetic clothes. Most of the wool worn shorn in this country is shipped out to in from China, who have more heads of sheep than any other country in the world, so they hardly need our wool.

When you are part of a tradition that you thought had some value, some centrality in your world and the universe, then you feel it suddenly becoming marginalized and there is this sense that you’re being demeaned, that things are ending in a sad way, it’s devastating. Then of course, there’s Californians and Eeast coasters and other people of means and considerable wealth that has been amassed through finance or banking or… certainly not through working the land, city folks basically, dotcomers, etcetera, they want to become gentleman ranchers. They want to buy a ranch out west and live the whole Ted Turner dream. The land prices have skyrocketed. There is no way that a rancher, someone who actually wanted to make a living off of the land, could actually afford the land and make a living from working it.

Barbash: Its not as if you work your way up then make enough money to buy the farm.

Filmmaker: Which is of course a central part of the mythology of the American West to begin with…

Castaing-Taylor: Yes yes, that you work for enough time as a hired hand and then you buy your own land, like in Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

Filmmaker: As the Scandinavian settlers in John Ford movies do.

Castaing-Taylor: Yes.

Filmmaker: Is there any sort of burgeoning political consciousness, be it about America’s absurdly pro agro-business farm subsidies or broken tariff system, that these ranchers channel any of that anger into? Can it make any difference?

Castaing-Taylor: There is definitely a political consciousness, or political consciousnesses, but I was struck when making this film how little disassociation there is between agro-businesses and small family farming and family ranching and the extent to which the few family ranchers left still identify with agriculture as a whole without realizing the extent to which the subsidies from Washington go almost exclusively, 99 percent, to giant Agro-businesses and not to support family ranchers or farmers. So they would be for various things that wouldn’t benefit them at all. They wouldn’t realize what is actually happening. There’s also a deep political consciousness about the role of environmentalists, which is often the inverse of what you might expect. The whole Erin Brockovich thing, that movie with Julia Roberts in it where she’s a working class girl standing up to depradation of some corporate capitalist takeover ruining the environment somewhere. In Montana, it’s the exact opposite. It’s the middle class, hyper educated, urban college kids, fleeing their cities, who have a rarified view of authentic, "pristine" nature in their minds, wanting to get these few hard scrabble family farmers off the land because nominally they are over-fertilizing it, polluting it or they land because they supposedly don’t know how to be good, custodial, sustainable, managers of the land or because they are trailing domesticated animals, which is “unnatural,” into a natural grizzly bear habitat in these mountains. So these people, with immense wealth and education are trying to come in and disenfranchise the local population. In that regard the resentment that the local ranching community and hired hands have towards those people is pretty understandable I would say, but their there isn’t much disassociation between the poor family farmers who are struggling to survive, to eke out a living one year to the next, and the realization that agriculture now in the states is controlled by just a handful of these massive companies.

Barbash: There is also resentment that over Australian lamb and New Zealand wool and the protections that those countries give their farmers that we don’t.

Castaing-Taylor: There is a resentment that New Zealand lamb is eaten in Montana and why are more people eating locally.

Barbash: Or when tariffs get removed.

Castaing-Taylor: I think they feel not unlike how American artists feel. You go on the film festival circuit and every other country has some protections and representation and support from their own countries from arts administrations and ministries, etcetera, and American artists have nothing. If they’re working in Hollywood they have the studio system to support them, but otherwise, independent films, low budget films, nothing. So they have a feeling that New Zealanders, with all their protections and tariffs are better off, but for brute economic reasons, we don’t hardly eat lamb anymore, we don’t hardly wear wool anymore, there just isn’t much of a livelihood in it, and the whole economy has shifted over the last fifty years from a production based economy to this whole massive, mushrooming tertiary sector – the service industry and finance. There’s no money in production anyway, at least industrial production, when compared to what there was in past days, when compared to plastic and currency speculation and derivatives.

Filmmaker: Oil speculation.

Castaing-Taylor: Exactly.

Barbash: There are some alternative ranchers who are embracing some new ideas about ranching. I met a woman who is marketing her wool under something called a creditor friendly label and marketing her meat only that way. The idea is that they don’t use guard dogs, they are using llamas actually; llamas are really tall and they can kick pretty hard, so they can protect you to some extent, not up in the mountains, but in the flatlands they can protect sheep to some extent against wolves and cayotes. So I think that we’re talking about the demise of the traditional rancher, and then you’ve got new little alternative pockets springing up who maybe more political active and against things like subsidies for agro-business and the like.

Filmmaker: The film has an overwhelmingly elegiac quality to it and yet I sense this might be something that you’re ambivalent about.

Barbash: That is what this the Western film in cinema has always been, in a way. The western film has always been that. It harkens back to a place and a way of life that took place a hundred years earlier.

Castaing-Taylor: Even at the time of the original classic Westerns it was always recreating this mentality world that had long since elapsed. It was deliberate on our part. Within ethnographic film, the notion of being nostalgic was in a way some retro, so passé that nobody would go there. Everyone is supposed to embrace novel, socraticsyncretic, emergent forms of being, various forms of cosmopolitanism, etcetera, which is all true and all important, but the fact of the matter is that these ways of life are disappearing the whole time too and we shouldn’t just ignore that because otherwise there will be not requiem, there will be no elegy, there will be no mourning, no historical consciousness. We just didn’t want the nostalgia to be the principle aesthetic sensibility as you were watching the piece. We wanted it to be part of it, but for it to come right at the end, as a shock. You have the two guys going away in the truck, off into nowhere, into a very uncertain future, representing the whole community and all its uncertainty, deliberately hinting at an immense melancholy and sentimental attachment for all these guys going off into the unknown, and then you have a title card saying that this is never going to happen anymore. It’s the end of something, of a whole way of being in the world, and of relating to the land. Then right at the end of this interminable credit sequence that lasts almost as long as the movie itself, you have an In Memoriam, not of a person, but of a ranch. Usually it’s always of a person, but here its of a ranch, all of that was totally deliberate. There is an immense amount of sadness that we wanted to communicate about how this is a livelihood, this is a way of being in the world, a way of cohabitation between humans and animals that has been hugely important throughout human history for the last 10,000 years since the Neolithic revolution, and it has ended in the American West.

LEE CHUNG-RYOUL, OLD PARTNER

2009-12-29T18:30:00.004-05:00

Topping the Korean box office is no small feat for a first-time filmmaker, given the perennial offerings of sassy romantic comedies and vivid, attention-grabbing genre flicks from this nation’s impressive stable of film artists. It’s even more improbable when you’ve made a no-frills documentary (not so popular in South Korea) for less than $150,000 about the relationship between an elderly farmer and his aged ox. But a few months after it hit the market at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival, where it won the best documentary award, Lee Chung-ryoul’s Old Partner became one of the most successful indies in Korean film history, playing on more than 150 local screens and drawing 1 million viewers on word-of-mouth buzz alone. It went on to jostle for the Grand Jury Prize in world documentary at Sundance last January, the first time a Korean documentary has been entered in the Park City competition. No one must have been more surprised than Lee, a veteran TV producer whose humble maiden feature—a human-bovine buddy film—has captured the imagination of audiences from Seoul to Vienna.

Shot on HD over the course of a year, Old Partner is a real-life fable of earthy, heartbreaking simplicity. Choi Won-kyun is an 80-year-old farmer in poor health still toiling in the rice fields of Bongwha without benefit of modern machinery. Instead, he relies solely on his bony, barely thriving female ox, perhaps the oldest in Korea, which he treats like a member of the family, caressing it tenderly (“this ox is better than any person to me”) and swatting at it with his cane when he’s annoyed at the animal’s sluggish pace. Choi’s wife, Lee Sam-soon, works alongside her husband, berating him for indulging the beast of burden with specially gathered feed, clearly jealous of their unusual, cross-species bond. (Betrothed at age 16, in an arranged marriage, she feels her life was ruined by marrying “the wrong man.”) Lee observes the trio in their rustic labors, often capturing plaintive glimpses of Choi and his ox in gracefully composed long shots, emphasizing the dignity of toil as well as the pitiable conditions of their existence. A story of friendship and a wistful ode to agrarian lifestyles that have all but vanished in the industrial age, Old Partner wrings a poignant beauty from its timeless themes of aging, illness, loss, and loyalty.

Filmmaker spoke with Lee about Korean folk paintings, the demise of Old World agricultural traditions, and why he owes Choi’s nameless ox (now deceased) an apology.

Old Partner opens today at Film Forum in New York.

Old Partner director Lee Chung-ryoul. Courtesy Schcalo Media Group.

Filmmaker: You work as a television producer in Korea. Did you first develop Old Partner for that medium?

Lee: My 15-year career as a TV producer started in 1998 when Korea was in the midst of the Asian financial crisis. Korea was receiving aid from the International Monetary Fund to resurrect its fallen economy. During this difficult time, I produced shows about the lives of unemployed Korean men, who reminded me of my own father and his struggles; that’s where I derived inspiration for Old Partner.

Filmmaker: How did you find Mr. Choi and his wife? Did you someone approach you with an angle on the oldest ox in Korea?

Lee: Initially, I wanted to feature my own parents in Old Partner. My father has been a struggling small farmer all his life. Starting in the late 1980s, around the time of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, the farming industry in Korea became rapidly modernized. To adapt and survive the trend, my father had to sell his cow—which up to that point was his only tool to cultivate the land in lieu of modern equipment—and start a pig farm. As the film’s pivotal themes were the traditional farming culture of Korea and the friendship between the farmer and his cow, it meant that I had to find characters who were still farming the old-fashioned way. In addition, I wanted to capture the old Korean family dynamic in the film that I saw in my parents. My father is a typical paternal figure in a traditional Korean household: Dominant, stoic, and unable to express his emotions. My mother, as a result, was hardened over the years and learned to express her long-harbored discontentment in incessant nagging. I had spent five years in search of people to film. I ultimately met and chose Mr. and Mrs. Choi in Bongwha, a small farming town in the southeastern part of Korea, based on their similarity to my parents’ lifestyle and relationship to one another.

Filmmaker: Were they baffled by your interest in their story, or resistant to your presence at all?

Lee: We had a lot of difficulties filming the couple. Mr. Choi was reticent and inarticulate. He didn’t understand the concept of filming. When a camera came near to capture him in action, he would stop what he was doing, awkwardly pose for the shots, and anticipate photographs to be taken on cue. Mr. Choi hated closeups, as he felt the crew was interrupting his work. Whenever he felt we got too close to him during filming, he would strike us down with his cane in anger. Mrs. Choi, on the other hand, was overly eager to be in front of the camera. She tried too hard to look pretty by putting on a ton of makeup and acting unnaturally. Therefore, I decided that the optimal way to minimize disturbance to Mr. Choi and deemphasize the unnatural looks of the characters was to mainly use long shots.

Filmmaker: It must have taken you a while to integrate and find an unintrusive approach.

Lee: The Choi’s daily life was very simple and repetitious with their strenuous work schedule from the crack of dawn to late night. So one camera was used in a stationary position to mirror and capture their monotonous life, focusing on the sounds of their life. During filming, we began to focus more on the relationship between Mr. Choi, Mrs. Choi, and the old cow. This is how the film evolved into a melodrama among the three characters: a love triangle with two females, Mrs. Choi and the old cow, competing for Mr. Choi’s affection.

Filmmaker: The very tender, almost symbiotic relationship between Choi and his ox contrasts sharply with the relationship between Choi and his wife, who airs her grievances and feels her life has been spoiled by marrying “the wrong man.”

Lee: Mrs. Choi was married to Mr. Choi at the age of 16. Following the old Korean tradition, the couple’s nuptial was arranged by the parents and they didn’t get to meet until the day of the wedding. Mrs. Choi had high expectations of the groom as her parents said that he was a handsome young man. Much to her dismay, however, when she met her husband for the first time, she didn’t find this to be true.

Filmmaker: How do these two central relationships—the ox and the man, the man and his wife—reflect traditional notions of love and community, to your mind?

Lee: I believe that Korean culture still remains heavily influenced by Confucianism, where the hierarchy and order of the household and community is established by men. This is especially true in farming towns. The women take a backseat, often sacrificing themselves to uphold their men. It’s almost inevitable that most Korean women become constant naggers as a way to cope with and express their suppressed voice. I wanted Old Partner to capture the nuances of traditional gender roles in Korean society.

Filmmaker: Is there a general nostalgia in Korea for the traditional rustic lifeways that your film depicts?

Lee: The Korean farming tradition is dying because its core elements are vanishing. It’s gotten to the point where the current young generation doesn’t have any recollection of the old farming culture, as they have not been exposed to it. In recent days, the sons and daughters of farming towns often move out to the cities for a better education and life, while their aging parents remain behind to continue farming to support their children. What these young people often forget is that they are, and always will be, joined to their roots in the country, their farm, parents, and cattle which have nurtured them through the years. You are forever connected to your roots in the circle of life. In Old Partner, I tried to capture the sadness of the lost traditions and also the strength and beauty of the farmers’ dedication to their livelihood.

Filmmaker: Old Partner deals with the dignity of old age, too.

Lee: This film has a strong undercurrent of Confucian philosophy. Filial piety is one of the main principles of Confucianism, and I tried to reflect the guilt I’ve been feeling toward my father for the sacrifices he’s made for his family. Watching the old farmer and his cow work strenuously in the field made me think in depth about life, work, aging, and death. Also, it made me think about all the countless sacrifices parents make for their children. My desire to express the guilt I feel for not being able to repay all the debt I owe to my parents definitely has been one of the primary motivations for making this film.

Filmmaker: Why do you think Old Partner resonated so deeply with Korean audiences?

Lee: Maybe it’s because there are so many selfish children in Korea like me who feel guilty toward their parents? [Laughs] I think the film’s success might be partly due to the depressed economy in Korea when it was released. By watching this film, people perhaps were able to escape momentarily from their hard life by reminiscing about their forgotten roots and past.

Filmmaker: Could you tell me more about the Korean folk paintings you mention in your director’s notes as a source of inspiration?

Lee: My film was inspired from the core concept of the Korean folk-painting tradition: Emphasis on the beauty of moderation, simplicity, and emptiness. A Korean traditional painting would not have layers of paint, but rather simple strokes and minimal colors. It also would not have its subject fill the whole canvas but allow it to be surrounded by abundant blank space. The film was made in a similar style. The documentary is without narration and with minimal music.

Filmmaker: You worked in a number of cinematic effects here: there’s a high-angle shot at the cattle market, for instance, and a slow-motion sequence when the calf knocks over Mr. Choi. Is this common in Korean television documentaries, or did you think the film required these additional flourishes?

Lee: I believe that creating a documentary film isn’t about merely recording but also creatively interpreting the story I’m capturing. As long as the essence of truth is preserved, I believe it’s up to the filmmaker to use his creativity and imagination to decide how to tell the story to his audience. I was inspired by a famous Korean painting from the Chosun Dynasty. The painting portrays a cat grabbing a chick from a hen house and running away from a man who chases after it with a cane. Behind the man is his wife, following him closely in worry that he’ll fall. From this painting you could read into each character’s emotions. Similarly, in some scenes of Old Partner, slow-motion techniques were used to emphasize the emotions of the characters at crucial junctures.

Filmmaker: What was the biggest challenge for you in making your first documentary feature?

Lee: Everything was difficult about making this film. But the single most difficult thing was trying really hard to not become personally attached to Mr. and Mrs. Choi. In order to maintain my professional distance, I didn’t even share a meal with them. Mr. and Mrs. Choi actually became angry with me at one point asking why I would befriend all other elders in the neighborhood but not them. I believe that emotional restraint was the key to success of this documentary.

Filmmaker: Were there any other surprises?

Lee: There was another major setback which I never shared with anyone publicly until now. It was established from the beginning that the end point of shooting would be when the old cow dies. When budgeting for the cost of filming, we had predicted that the cow would die within three to six months. Under this assumption, the production company was willing to finance the film. To everyone’s surprise, she actually lived for more than a year. This caused the film to go over budget significantly and created tension between me and the production company as they started to have suspicions that I might have deceived them about the life expectancy of the cow. Toward the end of the project, every time we went down to Bonghwa to shoot, I would secretly pray that the cow would die so we could wrap up. Now, I feel truly awful about the way I felt and want to express my sincere regret and appreciation for the financial success the cow has brought to us. Coincidentally, this is the year of the ox in the Asian calendar.

CORNELIU PORUMBOIU, POLICE ADJECTIVE

2009-12-23T12:35:00.002-05:00

Cornelieu Porumboiu’s absurd anti-policier Police, Adjective, a hit at last fall's New York Film Festival, has pushed the Romanian director into the forefront of a young group of Romanian filmmakers who have in the past four years taken the world of International Art Cinema by storm. Along with Cristian Mungiu (2008 Palme D'Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days), Cristian Nemescu (California Dreamin') and Cristi Puiu (The Death of Mr. Lăzărescu), Porumboiu has found success at the highest levels of the international festival circuit while still trying to carve out audiences at home. In his latest film, the follow up to his outrageous and insightful 2006 debut 12:08 East of Bucharest, he turns the police procedural on its head in order to meditate on the disconnect one cop has between his thankless duties and his unformulated ideals while examining its resonance to the larger societal woes of this former Communistic bloc country. Featuring a haggard Dragos Bucur in a performance that gets to the bottom of a crushed young spirit, this droll and highly comic movie paints a portrait of bureaucracies' most malignant manifestations.

Centering on a cop charged with the thankless task of doing surveillance on high school kids smoking pot near a local kindergarten, it slows the dynamics of the film investigation to an all too verisimilitudinous crawl, showing how such a small and pointless task can grow into an administrative nightmare in which local law enforcement will ruin lives just to save face. Just as capable of being infuriating as it is laugh out loud funny, it suggests the ways Totalitarianism is an ethic informed mainly by an abuse of language and procedure.

Police, Adjective opens in New York and Los Angeles today.

Director Corneliu Porumboiu, Courtesy of IFC Films

Filmmaker: In the New Romanian Cinema one of the major themes is the way bureaucracy, be it in a police station or a hospital or wherever else, is a cancer that eats away at everyone's best intentions. Is this something that you and the other filmmakers of your generations especially attuned to?

Porumboiu: When I'm making a movie I don't realize it. I'm more interested in particular cases. For me this case with the police guy. While you make the movie, you follow this guy, you try to decide what he's supposed to do. I have things in the movie that remind you of Kafka, but this is not the point in the end. Its a sub theme, a second theme.

Filmmaker: What was the initially thematic spark that pushed you toward telling this story?

Porumboiu: I had two stories that touched me. This was one, with two brothers. The other one was told to me by a friend who is a police officer who told me a small case like that. He didn't want to solve it because of his conscience. These two stories I stuck with because I started to ask myself, if you have a law that can give birth to this kind of story, asking what is the law now, what is religion, this is what I started me.

Filmmaker: So you initially planned to focus on the two brothers although the film now focuses mostly on the cop who is observing them?

Porumboiu: I heard about this story. A small case of conscience, this one. I follow this, what it is for him to do this. He's applying the law you see, he could be God. So I start with this, following him, to see where it takes me.

Filmmaker: Language is a very important aspect of the film. The resolution of the film involves one of the police lieutenant who uses a dictionary to point out the ostensibly flawed logic of the conscience stricken cop. He uses language as a weapon against the cop in order subvert his own internal sense of justice.

Porumboiu: When I started gathering all the facts for the movie, learning the various procedures for a case like that, I found these records which they write, for which they have their own rules. At the end you see a day and a date represented on a form which has some strict rules about how its written. Very objective, very cold. I asked myself, mainly for the actor, to help them compose their roles, I was thinking of the way that doing this kind of writing would change your perception of reality. That if you are writing this perverse reports everyday your perception of reality and the way you represent it on the page is becoming more and more abstract. So this was the first point when I began to think about language, when I saw that in this bureaucracy there is alot of report writing and so on. Also, if I'm writing, I'm obsessed about words and structures. I have that problem with myself [Laughs]. After that, when I was arriving at the conscience section, I asked ten friends of mine how they would define conscience. Each one had a different response. Like that, I started to build the scene around that idea, started to develop this theme which is the most important in the movie: the representation of words and what is in the back of the words? Even the dialogues, they are very constructed. How we use words, change them to communicate better, but the real meaning is in the subtext behind the words.

Filmmaker: What kind of research did you do with policeman in Romania?

Porumboiu: Yes. The protocols for following, watching. Never follow them on the same side of the street. Stay obstructed, keep a proper distance, the way of walking. There all people who don't want to be noticed, so he stalks them like a predator. I made alot of research like that. Day in the life. How you start a case. What are the reports you do. Opening of a case and closing of a case. If you're writing these reports everyday, using much the same language everyday, eventually these phrases start to lose meaning, they become abstracted. They become a preformance. They become defined by these structure of language. In the end, the character is defined by the structures that are confining him and the language that's used to keep those structures in place.

Filmmaker: It seems that everyone in the film is so concerned with their place in the system that they can't see the spirit of the law, they can only act upon the letter of the law. So much of the New Romanian Cinema suggests this is a society wide concern.

Porumboiu: I think its about the society. We didn't reach this common point. I think my characters are living in an intermediate world. They don't have things to grab on to. They don't have something stable. They may not have the bible, but they have the dictionary. This is the problem all my characters have, even in my first feature.

Filmmaker: Do you feel like you've grown as a filmmaker since 12:08 East of Bucharest was such a success a few years back?

Porumboiu: I think this one is more visual. I think the rhythm is more compact. Its a step forward for myself. It has these sequences of loneliness, especially when he's at work, that are absurd. They're something I want to visit again in the future.

Filmmaker: What were some of the biggest challenges in putting together the film. What is the financing situation like in Romania? Did the success of your first film open up opportunities for you that led to this one?

Porumboiu: I earned some money on the first one. I put it into this one. At the same time, it was made with the help of the National Center of Cinematografica Romania, who put up half of the budget. Because I had some money from 12:08 and I didn't want to be interfered with in terms of making the movie that I want, I didn't apply to other funds or anything like that. So with the success from my first, I did my second. I don't know what I'll do after.

Filmmaker: What was the reaction among the Romanian public to the film?

Porumboiu: It was a very good response. The press and so on. We had 12,000 people see it, which is a good number.

Filmmaker: Would a film like this be considered popular in Romania or does the American pop cinema dominate the local screens and audience consciousness?

Porumboiu: Yes, it is the dominate cinema in our country. We are like, as you say, art house.

Filmmaker: What position does that put Romanian audiences in? It seems like a film like your own and some by your contemporaries most closely resembles or speaks to the daily existence of many Romanians and yet this kind of filmmaking must seem exotic to anyone reared on American studio films.

Porumboiu: They expect to go to the cinema and spend two hours laughing and being entertained. They don't want to see what they are dealing with in normal life! For most of them, cinema is just an entertainment art. So they don't know the codes. Cinema has one hundred years. They don't know that it has its own codes, its own language, that its developing in one way or the other. If someone doesn't have a sense of the history of cinema, its kind of hard to see these kinds of movies because they're conditioned to just go for two hours and laugh and giggle. So they don't like these kinds of movies.

At the same time I feel this new wave is forming an audience which you didn't have five or six years ago. If I made this movie five or six years ago I wouldn't have had as much success as I've had.

Filmmaker: Has Romanian cinema from the past been much of an influence on you?

Porumboiu: We've had very good directors in the past who were making films in the 70s, 80s, 90s, so yes, but these are individuals cases and they were never part of a compact wave of filmmakers all coming of age at the same time.

Filmmaker: You've called this film an anti-policier. Talk to me about some of the ways you went about subverting that genre.

Porumboiu: When I was writing the script, the first draft was more like a classical policier. After I did some research, I realized that a policier tries falsely to involve the audience in some sort of puzzle. I could do this, but I realized that I would lose my character, what he's searching for. So after that, I realized I would choose to do a movie in which the character becomes central. I prefer to be detached from the character to better observe him and his world. To try to involve the audience in the classical way would be to arrive in another type of thinking and structure. If I do it that way, I couldn't arrive at what I wrote.

Filmmaker: It seems like you intentionally eliminated the moments we're accustomed to getting from this kind of film and put in there place an accumulation of representations detailing actual, tedious work to get at what its actually like to be a lowly street level cop who has to do this thankless type of snooping.

Porumboiu: Yes! In a traditional policier you have all the time, action. Action, cutting on action, action involving the case that very specific, so that the spectator has to follow just this part. What I found when I did the research was that in actual police work, there is alot of waiting. And waiting and waiting. For me, this was good, because it fit with this guy who is trying to find sense and his meaning in this world. So I focus on the waiting, not the action. So I go and keep this in the whole movie, the waiting. He walks, he's going somewhere, no he's going nowhere. When he's watching the house of the kid and when the girl is going out who is the housekeeper and he follows her because he has to see where she's going, you see it in real time, just as the police actually would. So I put in these kind of dead moments, which in daily life far outnumber the action. Conceptually, this fit with what I wanted. I leave it open to the audience, because for me its all about timing, time of being, time of leaving, for this character, who is trying to define himself. These are my main points.

STEPHANE AUBIER AND VINCENT PATAR, A TOWN CALLED PANIC

2009-12-16T00:00:00.010-05:00

Absurdists at heart, Belgian animators Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar have spent two decades perfecting their hilariously antic brand of fantastic, faux-naïve humor. After graduating from La Cambre, the School of Visual Arts in Brussels, the duo created a popular hand-animated series entitled Pic Pic Andre Shoow, about the adventures of a magic pig and an evil, beer-swilling horse, which first debuted as an award-winning short film in 1988, and was then expanded into a three-part festival fave. In 2000, the pair decided to revisit a stop-motion short Aubier had made as his graduation film, using the most rudimentary materials at hand: papier-mâché sets and generic, mass-produced plastic figurines (cowboys, Indians, farm animals). The pair set to work on “The Cake,” the pilot episode in their much-beloved TV series, A Town Called Panic, produced and co-written by Vincent Tavier (Calvaire). Originally aired on Canal Plus, the zany five-minute shorts engendered a cult following across Francophone Europe, finding a new audience on Nickelodeon U.K. when Wallace and Gromit distributor Aardman stepped up to dub them into English. The entire series was released on DVD in 2005.

Even those familiar with the manic style of those early episodes (which enjoy a robust afterlife on the Internet) may be astonished at the witty, lightning-flash brilliance and endearingly nutty genius of Aubier and Patar’s surreal new feature film, A Town Called Panic (Panique au Village). Hoping to surprise their buddy Horse on his birthday with a homemade barbecue, dense pals Cowboy and Indian mistakenly place an order for 50 million bricks with an online vendor. When the load is delivered by an armada of Peugeot-size trucks, the pile crushes their quaint farmhouse and sends high-strung neighbor Stephen (Man Bites Dog lead Benoit Poelvoorde) into an apoplectic fit. Further hysteria ensues when a mischievous gang of gilled aquamen (one named Gérard) emerges from a watering hole and begins to pilfer entire sections of the newly rebuilt home. The hapless trio pursues them into a chasm, find themselves trapped in an Atlantis-like parallel universe, get coughed up onto a glacier, and have a memorable run-in with a giant mechanical-penguin war machine, a raucous trek that brings to mind Terry Gilliam's Dada-esque Monty Python sketches. It’s sophisticated and funny and incredibly energetic, right down to the goofy, South Park–grade voicings of Aubier, Patar, and French starlet Jeanne Balibar, as a sultry equine piano teacher with eyes for Monsieur Horse. A Town Called Panic debuted in May at the Cannes Film Festival (the only stop-motion feature ever to receive an invite) and was recently added to the Oscar shortlist for Best Animation Feature.

Aubier and Patar spoke to Filmmaker about their collaborative method, the challenge of making expressionless plastic toys Chaplinesque, and why babies with deep voices are funny.

A Town Called Panic opens today at Film Forum in New York.

Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar on the set of A Town Called Panic. Courtesy of Zeitgeist Films.

Filmmaker: When interviewers ask, How did you create such a wacky, fantastical world?, I wonder if what they’re really asking is, How come your imagination is so much more vivid than mine?

Patar: [Laughs] It’s a wacky and absurd world, however there’s something quite logical about it as well. And that’s the daily routine of the characters: they get up in the morning, they have their shower and drink their coffee. So there’s this groundwork established from beginning to end which puts these characters in completely off-the-wall stories within a very realistic environment, which probably reinforces the wackiness to a certain extent. The soundtrack is also very realistic—there’s nothing cartoony about it. And these are things that I think show even more the contrast and bring to light the absurdity of the story.

Aubier: We’re standing right now in our workshop, and it’s filled with all sorts of old magazines and books and things we buy from flea markets, basically. What gives us a lot of inspiration is to flick through scientific magazines of the 1950s and read what their approach to science was back then, which to our eyes today looks completely bizarre. These also feed our imagination.

Filmmaker: When the TV series began in 2000, did you start with a storyline or just the idea that you wanted to use plastic-toy figurines to create a self-enclosed universe like this?

Aubier: At animation school, we saw these little figurines that we found really funny and that reminded us of our childhood. And we wanted to put these little plastic toys in action within a story. There’s a very old version of Panique au Village that I made, the first go at this type of animation. Then it came back to life about ten years ago, when producer Vincent Tavier came across it and said, “This is a great concept. Let’s make it into a TV series.” So we started again, using the same toys, the same farm environment. We were irritated by the time [constraints]—five minutes per episode—and towards the end, in the last few episodes, we were finding very interesting concepts and didn’t get to dig any further to develop them. This is why we decided to try making a feature. A lot of the groundwork—like the underwater world from “The Card Thieves” episode—was already laid.

Filmmaker: So much of the humor depends on the crazed, frenetic pace you’ve established. Do the ideas happen along the way or is there a script that is fairly well fleshed out?

Patar: Everything begins with the storyboards and those are transformed into a script. Then the script feeds back again into the storyboards. We actually do an animatic as well for the preparation, to give an idea of what the film will look like. What’s special with our animation as opposed to all others is that it’s a quite simple technique, which gives us a lot of freedom during the shoot to improvise and come up with new ideas. We can’t revolutionize the story completely, but it gives us a lot of leeway as we go along. For example, in most animation you need to record the voices before shooting. There’s a lip sync that you need to respect. In the case of Panique au Village, because the characters have no facial expressions, we shoot imagining the dialogue in our minds and according to what’s written in the script. Once the pictures are shot, if suddenly we think that a certain dialogue needs to be changed, we still have the opportunity, all the way in postproduction.

Filmmaker: So much short-form animation goes for instant shock effects—violence and potty humor—but there’s a real tenderness underneath all the madness in A Town Called Panic.

Patar: We were both brought up in the countryside, and this is where we get all our inspiration—the little people living in villages. I’m not saying people living in the countryside are all good, but there’s a certain simplicity to life there which I think transpires in the characters’ psychologies. For both of us, these characters are really alive, they’re not fabrications. We love our characters, and we let them develop, although they’re all slightly stupid. They don’t have the highest IQs. They’re loveable because they’re loved by their creators.

Aubier: Certain celebrity characters, if you like, are also inspirations, such as Mr. Bean, Peter Sellers in the Blake Edwards film The Party, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. They’re all a bit dumb and do stupid things, but they’re very humane and this is what makes them touching. This is what makes you so attached to these characters, and it’s that kind of psychological trait which also exists in Panique au Village.

Filmmaker: How do you orient yourselves in relation to the stop-motion tradition that extends from, say, Ptushko to George Pal and Ray Harryhausen, all the way down to the Quay brothers?

Aubier: We never really thought about how to situate themselves within what’s been done so far in stop motion. Actually, we come from a very varied background, in terms of technique. We work in 2D, with paper cut-outs, and for us, this is just a means to an end. The most important thing is the concept, the story we want to work on, and from that point on, we decide which is the best technique that will allow us to concretize what we have in mind. We’ve elaborated that according to our storytelling needs and not in reflecting what stop motion means and how it can be performed.

Filmmaker: So certain strains of that tradition don’t speak to you as artists, then? What about Belgian comics?

Aubier: Things like Pingu [a claymation series by German animator Otmar Gutmann], for instance, we love that type of animation.

Patar: We get our inspiration from absolutely everything around us—people we encounter in the street, books, music, and of course, the Belgian comics we were both fed on as kids. Animation as such and the people who’ve been involved in that world are not per se sources of inspiration. They’re just annexes to our creation.

Filmmaker: The sense of play is so strong in A Town Called Panic. Did you model the anxious, high-pitched voices of Cowboy, Horse, and other characters after the imaginative romps you had as children?

Aubier: When we were younger, we used to fool around a lot and we’d record voices on top of TV series such as Wonder Woman, or renowned programs, and very quickly I saw that my high-pitched, little-old-lady-type voice had comical effects. Vincent, on the other hand, had a really good low, deep voice. So these are the voices we discovered in each other. A long time ago, I remember being in an airport, and there was this box where you could put coins in and watch a little animation. In this particular film was a tiny baby, and it had a really deep, husky voice. That really marked me, because the juxtaposition was really funny. Likewise, in Roger Rabbit and those kinds of films, the voice is maybe not always in sync with what one would expect of the character.

Filmmaker: Jeanne Balibar was a nice, sultry addition to the voiceover mix. Are you friends with her or did she get involved because she was familiar with the series?

Aubier: She’s got a couple of kids who are absolutely addicted to the series, apparently. Furthermore, we had the chance of meeting her a few times, [all of us at] the production company, so one thing led to another and she very gladly lent her voice to the character of Madame Longrée.

Filmmaker: For stop-motion animation it makes sense that you work as a duo, collaboratively, at least from a practical point of view. How do you divide the work, and decide who moves which pieces?

Patar: We’re very complementary in our work. We do everything together all the way from the development to the final stages of postproduction. We both have our part to play. If there are certain areas that are within our strengths, Stéphane’s would be more in the development process, doing the storyboard frames and that kind of thing, whereas for me it’s in front of the camera, the actual animation. Those are our respective strengths, if you like. The rest is absolute collaboration from A to Z. It comes naturally, we don’t need to set boundaries or allocate specific duties to each other. Coming back to the special stop-motion technique of Panique au Village, it’s so easy and allows us the freedom to move around and do things without limiting ourselves.

Filmmaker: Did you grow up together? Did you know each other as children?

Patar: We were about 17 or 18 years old when we met. We first went to school at Liège, a town in the south of Belgium. Then we moved at the same time up to Brussels to go the animation school there. We were sharing a flat when we were at university. We were always friends, but workwise, we were working separately at school. Finally, we saw that maybe our work could be conjoined, and naturally our partnership grew from there. The first time we really worked together as a team was on the TV series. Previous to that, we made a number of short films, but we each had our own sections to manage, and then those sections were assembled together. Panique au Village was the first time we worked together beginning to end.

Filmmaker: What is it about animation, do you think, that lures people who might otherwise become illustrators, cartoonists, or draughtsmen? What attracts them to such rewarding but also painstaking work?

Patar: First of all, in terms of the difficulty of work, animation has really improved over the last few years. We remember at school we had to go to a studio with a 35mm camera and so on. Now we can animate [anywhere]. Technology has really made things much easier. It does remain slightly laborious as a means to an end, but for us the fact that you get a chance to put sound in, that you get to create movement, makes the final result much more magical than a still with a bit of text next to it, if one wants to compare it to comic-book illustration. The end result is so all-encompassing and complete. There’s nothing missing in this medium. Everything we want to say is there and that’s what we love about it.

Filmmaker: I wonder if you could speak a bit about the postproduction process, what it involves, even how you collect the sounds you want to use, since you mentioned steering clear of cartoony elements.

Aubier: The team who worked on the feature have been working with us ever since our first short film. We know each other inside out. Each project we achieved made us improve our techniques, and when we came together on the feature, the sound editors, the sound mixers, all these people already knew what was expected of them and it just naturally came together. A lot of the sound design was actually created by Bertrand Blouvier, who is an incredibly energetic, dynamic guy, full of resources and ideas. It’s really entertaining to watch him work. He has worked with us ever since our first short film, years ago. So this teamwork, this evolution all makes the whole thing fit well.

Filmmaker: It must have been a real honor to have the film debut at Cannes. Has that translated into any new work prospects for the team?

Patar: Obviously, it was a great honor for us to go to Cannes. We’d never have imagined in our wildest dreams that we’d go there or actually step onto the red carpet. What Cannes has allowed is for the film to be seen and put under the spotlight. As a result, the film has been invited to a whole variety of very good and important festivals throughout the world. There’s been articles and press, so it mainly helped the career of the film, if you like. But our own personal careers haven’t been affected necessarily.

Filmmaker: So what’s next? What would you like to put your resources behind?

Aubier: We’re currently working as co-directors, together with Benjamin Renner, on a new animation feature film called Ernest et Célestine. It’s a 2D, hand-drawn animation film inspired by a series of childen’s books by Gabrielle Vincent, the story of a bear and a little elf. We’ve also been working on a series of commercial campaigns for Cravendale Milk in the U.K., directly inspired by the Panique world. We never stop working, basically. [Laughs] We’ve been hired by Belgian TV to elaborate credits for a show, we have a regular feature in the local paper here where we draw little comics, and we have the intention at some point in the future, hopefully sooner, to pick up Panique again in its TV series form, and to come up with a few new episodes, but with a slightly longer duration. So it won’t be five minutes. We don’t exactly what length yet. We want to allow ourselves more time to tell a story.

LEE TOLAND KRIEGER, THE VICIOUS KIND

2009-12-09T13:05:00.005-05:00

Opening with a blistering, misogynistic monologue by Caleb (a terrific Adam Scott), a newly unemployed construction worker who's recent breakup has left him with an unquenchable hate for all things feminine, The Vicious Kind seems to announce its intentions very quickly: dramatizing the bitterness of a young, damaged man and the toll his misanthropy exacts on his small, middle class New England family over one long holiday weekend as his virginal brother (Peter Frost) and his gothy, bright eyed girlfriend (Brittany Snow) also return for Thanksgiving. However, as it slowly unwinds, The Vicious Kind reveals a family torn apart by long buried secrets and recriminations that can only be papered over with more deceit and subterfuge in ways that resonate long after its surprising final passages. This Sundance 09' laureate is a throwback of sorts; shot in cinemascope 35mm, it has a widescreen expressiveness that is rare in low budget work, yet tells an intimate, four character story that is the stuff of Kammerspiel.

A bread and butter indie that focuses on a small cadres of terrific performances, Lee Toland Krieger's second film, following his debut feature December Ends, gets great mileage out of its a terrific cast and quietly stunning lensing. Krieger, a 2005 graduate of USC's School of Cinema and Television, inspired by the indies of yesteryear, began writing the film when he was just 22. We caught up with the young director to discuss his working methods, getting back to the type of adventurous indies that the mid 90s offered and just how much he gained from working at Executive Producer Neil LaBute's production company.

The Vicious Kind opens in Los Angeles this friday.

Director Lee Toland Krieger. Courtesy of 72nd Street Productions.

Filmmaker: Its increasingly rare to see smaller to midlevel indies shoot in such well executed widescreen 35mm. Did you always conceive of the film in that format? What informed that choice and how were you able to persuade your producers to take on the expense?

Krieger: I’d like to think it’s coming from some of the influences my DP and I talked about when making the film. We were going for a Terrence Malick style of shooting, or to cite a more contemporary example, David Gordon Green, who was working in a similar style, at least before Pineapple Express anyway. [Laughs]. There’s a photographer and DP working right now named Adam Kimmel who shot Capote and Lars and the Real Girl. All of these directors and DPs, the three of them, have this quiet way of taking coverage. There tends to be an economy to the way these guys shoot. So when they decide to move the camera or they decide to come in for a close up or an extreme close up, it counts for something because of that economy. To cite the 180 of that, they are not working in a kinetic, all over the place, Michael Bay style of shooting, and nothing against that, it suits certain films, but its hard for any piece of coverage to stick with you or sink in. I think that for a film like this, which is really four talking heads in a sleepy town, we wanted to pick a style that would open up our actors to be able to work within the space, do anything, and not let the mechanics of the filmmaking get in the way. You see it in a lot of Woody Allen films, where he acknowledges that the films are about his writing and the performances, not about showing off what he can do with a camera. It doesn’t fit the world he’s trying to create.

Filmmaker: The genre in which you’re working here, the holiday family reunion rife with conflict, is a well worn indie mode. What drew you to it and how did you go about reinvigorating it?

Krieger: I was trying to write a tough little character piece about a small family. A lot of it comes from my own father, son experiences. I fortunately have a very good relationship with my father but that’s not to say there haven’t been times when it’s been tough to be a son and tough to be a first born. Any guy who’s had any sort of relationship with their father can understand and relate to that. So it sprouted from writing this Caleb character, I had this character in my mind and the story developed around him. The Robert McKee’s of the world probably have curdling blood when they hear something like that, because it doesn’t involve coming up with a concept and a great hook and being able to describe the story in twenty five words or less, but that was the genesis. What would make a guy like Caleb, who is so righteous in his ways, more vulnerable than anything would be returning home to a place that in so many ways made him who he is. So trying to pull back the psyche, layer by layer, that was the idea, what can we really do to make a guy like this squirm? Bring him back home and put him in a situation where a guy like that is a vulnerable as he can be. I didn’t want to do the veteran returning home. I’ve seen on some message boards that people compare the film to Dan in Real Life. I think the majority of those people see the two brothers in love with the same girl sort of thing and I get that but to me the story is as much about a father son relationship as it is about two brothers and the girl that they’re both drawn to.

Filmmaker: Your cast includes Adam Scott and J.K. Simmons, both of whom you get terrific work from while playing roles that are outside of the more broad and comedic stuff they’re known for. Simmons father in this film bears little resemblance to the one he played in Juno. How did you go about casting and working with them?

Krieger: I wasn’t super familiar with Adam’s work when we started the casting process. I knew of him from his really nice supporting part in The Aviator, where he plays Howard Hughes’ publicist, but I really didn’t know what his story was. My casting director and I were going through lists and she brought him up and I said “yeah, I know him, I like him, but I need to do my homework”. His agent sent over some stuff and I was really blow away by the wide variety of stuff he’s done. He’s a relatively well-kept secret at this point. We decided to make and offer and I think Adam responded to it, and like the rest of the cast, he found the humor in it. So we sat down and the first thing he said to me was “this seems funny to me, is it supposed to be funny?” I said, “absolutely”. That was a big sigh of relief. I knew we had seen him do dramatic stuff, like in Tell Me You Love Me, and of course the comedic stuff, such as in Stepbrothers or Party Down, but to see him do a blend of the two seemed like a nice opportunity. I’d seen him do both, but not both at the same time.

J.K. is one of those guys who I think everybody knows his face because he works so much. He was one of the guys we thought of right away. He was hot coming off of Juno, but he’s such a wonderful actor and we’d heard from everyone that he was the most delightful person to work with. J.K.’s MO is I do material that I like, weather it’s a big movie, small movie, TV, payday, not a payday, and fortunately for us we sent it to him and he liked The Vicious Kind. We met, got along great.

He and Adam are both highly trained actors. Beyond bringing those tools that they have everyday, they both have great respect for the material. I say that less about preserving my ego on set, but about how they both come in and know exactly what they want to do with the material. They have everything down, they’ve made some choices, but they’re willing to loosen the screws and try different stuff, even if its wildly different from what’s on the page. Not that its about coming in a trying to change everything on the day. There is, especially for Adam, a lot of tough material for the actor. We just cast the roles really well. I think both were waiting for really meaty roles that combine their comedic and dramatic skills.

The last scene J.K. is in really illustrates his professionalism. He’s talking to Peter at the train station and gets a little choked up. For any actor in that role, it would be the toughest scene. We shot that on our very first day of photography. It wasn’t by choice mind you. J.K.’s schedule was such that we had to shoot him out at the top of the schedule and we had to shoot that scene first. A lot of actors would have made a stink about having to come out first day and knock that out. But J.K. is one of these extremely talented, trained guys who just comes in and knocks it out. For me to watch a pro like that work was such a learning experience everyday. As a young director, to have actors like J.K. and Adam respect what’s on the page and come in and not try and fuck with this young director was really nice. They brought what they were going to bring to it, we worked on it a little bit and that was sort of that. Maybe it was too easy of an experience on me because I know if I’m fortunate to direct more movies, there may be actors out there who will rake you over the coals and run you through the ringer. I might not be prepared for that because my previous experience with Adam, J.K., Brittany [Snow] and Alex [Frost] was so positive.

Filmmaker: What did you glean from your first experience as a director with December Ends, which was made for significantly less, that you were able to apply to this film? What knowledge did the process of making The Vicious Kind give you that you’ll apply going forward?

Krieger: You’ve got to cast your film right. You have to crew up properly. Especially when you don’t have a ton of money and you’re offering both your cast and crew less than they are used to be paid and less than they probably ought to be paid. You’ve got to find people who really want to do the job. In my first experience doing a film for $80,000, I wasn’t relentless in finding people who wanted to do it just to do it. The work suffered and my experience suffered a bit because of it. With The Vicious Kind, I think my casting director and I were relentless in finding the right people. Not just the right kind of person for the role, but also the kind of person who was not going to make the experience shitty because they’re doing a little million dollar movie and they don’t have the kind of things that they’re used to.

What I learned on The Vicious Kind was that, and perhaps this is obvious, but actors like to be directed. In my experience and talking to directors who’ve worked a lot longer than I have, actors want you to give them direction. Its something I fell a bit short on with this film and would like to improve upon the next time around should there be one, to really not be afraid to direct the actors. A lot of times, especially early on in the shoot, I had this feeling of, “well, J.K. Simmons has been acting for thirty-five years, I’ve not been living that long, why the fuck should he have to listen to me. What do I have to tell him?” The bottom line is J.K. and Adam and even Brittany and Alex have more experience working that I have. Yet being the writer, I have an advantage, in that I’ve spent more time with this material than anyone. I do have an opinion about it. That doesn’t mean I have to go all Otto Preminger on them, [Laughs], but it does mean I shouldn’t withhold thoughts on it simply because I feel they have to be right because they’ve been doing it longer. I think next time I’ll be even more relentless in getting every beat exactly as I have it in my head, as long as the actors are comfortable and taking it there. I not disappointed in any of the performances they gave, I think they’re all quite good, but the actors are putting their faith in me and I owe it to them to be relentless to finding the very best beats in every moment of the film.

Filmmaker: Neil Lebute (In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, Nurse Betty) is listed as one of your executive producers and one can’t help, when watching your film, but associate the interest your film has with the various manifestations of misogyny and masculine cruelty with the themes he frequently explores in his films and plays.

Krieger: When I was at USC studying film I interned for Pretty Pictures, which is Neil’ production company. I didn’t get to know Neil at all in that period because he wasn’t in the office, he was out making films and spending time in London and all over the world with his plays. What I did get to do was spend a lot of time with his material. The first thing I did when I started interning there was read all of his plays and screenplays. I spent a lot of time with his stuff, trying to figure out what’s worked for him, because he’s got a voice and he’s been able to find a niche with that voice and he’s been very successful because of it. I was draw to his work for the same reasons a lot of people are. It’s got an edge, it’s got a bite. I like that it made me feel uncomfortable at times. I don’t think everybody should be writing Kate Hudson romcoms. I like those films as much as the next guy but sometimes I need something to make my stomach churn a little bit. That was the beginning of getting to consider how I wanted to approach my writing.

When I wrote The Vicious Kind it was kind of out of this attempt to do something that… it was an attempt to write something that had a bite in the same way that films in the early to mid 90s did. I’m talking specifically about American movies. You had this nice little window where you had films like In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Buffalo 66’, they all felt like a rebirth of that John Cassavetes sort of filmmaking where American filmmakers were looking around and saying, “you know what, the Europeans kind of have us beat here and we got to change the game a little bit.” The films of that era, before we got into the indiewood movement, were so interesting, you had so many voices emerge out of that era. They were trying to make films that were going to get bought by specialty divisions for huge numbers. They were films that were saying we want to create different characters and stories than the studios are, that’s how we’re going to separate ourselves. We’ve all seen the Little Miss Sunshine’s of the world take over the festival circuit. They become platforms for studio jobs for the filmmakers. I like those films, I’d like to maybe make a studio movie one day, with The Vicious Kind I really wanted to do something that wasn’t necessarily accessible to everyone and had a bite and didn’t have a story structure that every studio exec would love.

Watch Ben Kingsley’s performance in Sexybeast. That is a terrifying performance. I wanted to do something like that. Neil’s work had a huge influence in my desire to do something like those earlier films. In terms of getting the film made, he read it, responded to it. We had given to him really in the hopes of just getting some notes and he came back to us and said, “I really like this. If you think it would help get it made, I’ll attach myself as an executive producer.” Of course we loved that idea. That helped us run it up the flagpole at ICM where Neil is a client and that was really the genesis of getting it started. Having ICM come aboard as our packaging agent and having Neil’s name lent enough legitimacy to it that we could get actors to read it and get financiers to take it seriously. Neil really kick started getting it made for us.

JOHN MARINGOUIN, BIG RIVER MAN

2009-11-30T00:36:00.005-05:00

Interview by Alicia Van Couvering

Filmmaker selected John Maringouin as one of our "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in 2006 after seeing Running Stumbled, the filmmaker's hilarious and disturbing film documenting his own reconciliation with his estranged father. This year he brought his remarkable film Big River Man to Sundance, a film several years in the making that documents the Amazon River expedition of Slovenian endurance swimmer Martin Strel.

Strel’s stated mission is to bring environmental awareness to the rivers he swims, which have included some of the most polluted on Earth. Maringouin sets out to follow Strel’s expedition and to paint a portrait of this main, combining shots of Strel swimming by dead bodies and tales of the near-fatal infections he has endured, with his commitment to drinking two bottles of wine every day, his proclivity for waterslides, compulsive gambling, excess weight and advanced age. He is wildly famous in his native Slovenia, his face plastered upon billboards, but is so poor that he barks at his son to steal the breadbasket from a formal luncheon. The man is truly larger than life, and the adventure he is preparing for will probably kill him.

What follows is not your average redemptive sports film. Strel genuinely loses his mind, and comes very, very close to death. His crew goes completely insane. All the while his 24-year-old son and manager Borut keeps him going, devoting his life to Strel’s quixotic, masochistic addiction to the swim. Of course, Maringouin (with partners like Molly Lynch, his producer and wife) was on that boat too, and talked to us after Sundance about losing your mind with priest puppeteers along with everything else he wishes he could have kept in the movie.

Big River Man will be playing in New York City this weekend. Alicia Van Couvering spoke to John Maringouin at this year's Sundance Film Festival.

Filmmaker: How has it been having Martin with you at Sundance? He recovered?

Maringouin: People just couldn’t get enough of him. Standing ovations at every screening. When Martin did Q&A’s, I think it was really cathartic for the audience to hear from this guy. It almost had the vibe of a resurrection, almost religious, you know. It would be like if you showed Grizzly Man and then Werner Herzog came on stage and said “OK, Ladies and Gentlemen, Timothy Treadwell! He’s fine, he didn’t die!” People are just in tears, and overjoyed – it was incredible. It didn’t matter what he said.

Filmmaker: How far has he recovered?

Maringouin: Somebody asked him that at a Q&A, how long did it take for you to get back to his full mental capacity, and he said [in Slovenian accent] “I think… one year.” It’s funny, even when he was in his fourth dimension in the hotel room, he was still drinking beer.

Filmmaker: Speaking of fourth dimension… How did you get access to him in the hotel room (where he spends several days recuperating in silence after the 70 days of Amazon swimming, and is visited by many disturbing and surreal individuals.) He let you in to film, but not others?

Maringouin: Well, there was a certain point where the barrier between the filmmaker and subject was gone. I was very much there with him. People have criticized me because they think [those scenes are] staged. There was media from all over the world waiting outside, and a lot of guys with baseball caps and golf shirts hanging around too, but they didn’t belong.

Filmmaker: What did they want?

Maringouin: Well they wanted to be around the fish man too. But they just didn’t belong in that space. It was amazing because it was like, after all that, thse just… freaks, hanging around, they were the people who like belonged to that psychic space. It was like, OK, there’s a Brazilian puppeteer priest waiting for him in the hallway? Bring him in. There’s a band? Bring them in.

Filmmaker: I think my favorite moment of the whole film is when you land in Brazil, and get into the ambulance with Martin and Borut, and the EMT saying in Portugese,“What is your name, Fish Man?. It’s OK Fish Man.” How did you get into that ambulance?

Maringouin: I had to fist fight. There was a huge mob of media, journalists from every country, and a huge Brazilian band. But it was the end of my movie. I felt like I had suffered as much as he did, trying to get the movie made, and I was like ‘I’m not gonna have an ending unless I somehow get this camera in the most privileged position that anyone has in this mob of people.’ They didn’t want me in and I was screaming and cursing, “If you don’t let me into this ambulance he IS gonna be dead, because I’m gonna kill him!” It was really on that level, because I knew it was gonna be the most important moment of the film and if it wasn’t really intimate there wouldn’t be a film.

Filmmaker: What was the crew size, who did you have with you on the boat?

Maringouin: We had two other camera men, rotating a B-Roll camera and an A-Camera. It was frustrating to the camera guys because I ended up shooting things that they wanted to shoot because I felt like I had a relationship to the subject. I was with Martin and Borut, I really focused on them, and then the other camera focused on the rest of Martin’s crew, who were great but didn’t make the cut. The film just focuses on Martin, Borut and Matt as if it was just the three of them alone. The [other crew members] were great characters, and they had their own storylines… you know, to me, the movie feels like Cliffsnotes, like a kid’s book about this big old event that you could have taken a team of story editors and turned into a four part series. But this was sort of my version of what happened.

Filmmaker: So how did you land on this version, of all versions?

Maringouin: I mean everything is so subjective, a different filmmaker would have had a completely different interpretation to what happened. The thing I was most interested in was his reaction to what the thing I felt he was looking for, which was to be loved. I got a sense that he was this abused child who, like a lot of celebrities, needs all this love and adulation. But when he started getting it, especially in Brazil [when the team was met by crowds numbering in the thousands, marching bands and dancing girls], his reaction to the crowd was almost… terror. He was terrorized by it. And I started to see this really broad thematic thing develop, that he does want to be loved, but the problem is people.

Filmmaker: The environmental theme is interesting, because while Martin says he’s swimming to save the Amazon, it’s never quite clear what his motives are.

Maringouin: Well, I kind of always questioned it. I thought he was doing it as a job, and to prove something to himself. I know a guy who used to be a crackhead, a really intelligent guy, and I asked him, ‘Why did you do all this crack?’ He said, “I didn’t do it for the high, I did it for the hallucinations. When I got to that hallucinatory state I was in another dimension; I had dominion over things in the spirit world that I didn’t when I was sober.” And I think it’s something like that [with Martin.]

Filmmaker: That makes sense given his physical and pathological need to get back into the water, even when he’s extremely deteriorated and can barely speak or walk.

Maringouin: There’s a great book about Endurance Swimming called Haunts of the Black Masseur, [by Charles Sprawson.] It’s all about endurance swimmers being this special breed because they spend so much time immersed in this water underworld, until they’re not like other humans. They’re like fish. The hallucinations are part of what they do. They call it Hypnagogic hallucinations, when you’re in a waking state, and you’re not on any drugs, but you are actively seeing and hearing things in the room that aren’t there. Martin was in that state for about half of the trip.

Filmmaker: What level is his awareness of these non-political motivations to get back in the water?

Maringouin: He really [focuses] on the environmental stuff. Which is also the typical endurance swimmer thing. They have to have a motive greater than themselves to do it, to push them. I tried to paralleling his deterioration with the destruction of the rainforest, but I didn’t want to make the rainforest messages too heavy or preachy -- I just wanted to get them across and get you back into the film, I didn’t want it to be an issue film.

Filmmaker: What was the hardest thing to cut?

Maringouin: Slovenia – I could have made a 90 minute film of just these guys preparing to go. That stuff is so much better than you could possibly imagine. [Martin] would be on the psychadelic waterslide, and then he’d go meet the president, and then he’d go to the casino. Unreal. My most missed scene… Well, one is where Borut says “Being the most famous person in Slovenia, Martin has a very special responsibility. Because whoever he endorses to be president usually wins.” So there’s this thing where he’s trying to figure out who to endorse for President, and he’s with his friend Lojze Peterle, who was then the front-runner presidential candidate. They were in a big hallway and they go, “Hey, check it out, it really echoes in here.” So I had a scene of the guy who’s running for President with Martin, and they’re just going ‘ooooooooh.’

Filmmaker: What else do you miss?

Maringouin: There was a scene where Borut is standing in front of a poster of Martin, and he says, “Here you see this poster. It says Talent, Technology and Tolerance. And these are the three main words that describe how Martin relates to business in Slovenia.” And on the one side they have all these pictures of Martin in a speedo. And on the other side they have all these pictures of Industry. Then it cuts, and he’s just standing there in this bright red shirt in the middle of all these suits, and they’re all standing there in a row in this like Xanadu-style opening of this technology park, called Technopolis. And they had this like Puff character on stage singing, and this huge screen with images of technology and the future of Slovenia, and Martin is the mascot for all of this. You really get a grip on how important he is to this country. I couldn’t believe we cut that, but the pressure from the sales end was that we really needed to get to the Amazon as quickly as we could. [In early cuts] I had it structured like Deer Hunter practically, where we had an hour of Slovenia, and then an hour and a half of the Amazon.

Filmmaker: So when you went down to meet Martin in Slovenia, when did you know that you could make a film?

Maringouin: From the first moment when he pulled up his car onto the sidewalk at the airport. His car [sponsored by Mazda] has his name plastered along the side. And the security guard said, “Oh that’s Martin Strel, he parks wherever he wants to in this country, you’ll see.”

Filmmaker: Your understanding of the relationship between Martin and Borut really grows during the film. How do they work together?

Maringouin: Well, the thing that blew my mind was how much Martin was such a big wig but he was propped up totally by this 24-year-old kid, who is his son. His son didn’t sleep at night, though Martin slept just fine. I expected there to be like a big team of financiers and expeditionaries that were putting this huge expedition together and there was just the two of them. So there were billboards all over the country, and he’s on the front page of Yahoo and MSN and everything, it was just Borut orchestrating the whole thing. I just thought that was incredible. I miss that storyline too.

Filmmaker: And he actually pretends to be Martin for interviews, too…

Maringouin: That’s more footage that I miss. As Martin was deteriorating, BBC and some other outlets were doing follow-up interviews as he went down the river. Borut was performing Martin’s voice to the media, but he was trying to act more deteriorated as time went on. By the end he did this live CNN interview, and Borut himself got drunk and put these plastic bottle caps in his mouth, and he was like, “Ohhhhh, I’m totally gone….” We cut it because it calls not only what he’s doing into question, but it makes you laugh so much that it throws you out of the flow of his deterioration. But I very much miss seeing it.

Filmmaker: How did you come to understand the overall structure of the film?

Maringouin: I saw it as Heart of Darkness in reverse – you start at the beginning of time and you swim towards civilization. Civilization is what swallows you up and what defeats you. That’s what I wanted to be the structure of the film: his ultimate success is also the moment where he gets completely devoured and destroyed by civilization.

JOHN HILLCOAT, THE ROAD

2009-11-24T23:59:00.010-05:00

In life and art, John Hillcoat takes the road less traveled. Born in Queensland, Australia and raised in the United States, Hillcoat got a crash course in mid-sixties American music and culture from his parents, who took him to folk festivals where Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and old-time blues musicians left a distinct impression. “As a young kid, I was thrown into the sixties in America, which was an unbelievable period, and my parents were very swept up in the civil rights movement,” he recalls. “I remember going on marches and seeing the profound upheaval of that time.” Hillcoat returned Down Under as a teen and, having soaked up the influence of Southern writers like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, as well as Canadian author Michael Ondaatje (The Collected Works of Billy the Kid remains a touchstone), began making short films. While bouncing around Melbourne in the late ’70s, he met Birthday Party front man Nick Cave, who became a close friend and, many years later, an important collaborator on Hillcoat’s critically acclaimed Aussie western The Proposition (2005), which the rock singer wrote and scored. “He watches more films than anyone I know,” says Hillcoat, explaining their natural affinity. “Whereas in my free time I’m listening to music, so there’s another connection I think works.”

In his three previous features, Hillcoat has adopted a more visceral approach than his hippie-youth history might imply, immersing us in a series of isolating environments, whether physically constraining (a barbaric prison in Ghosts...of the Civil Dead), emotionally claustrophobic (a New Guinea jungle town in To Have and To Hold) or, in the case of The Proposition—a brutal, late-19th-century parable of justice filmed in the outback—austere and forbidding. Mired in obsessions of one kind or another, his characters also push back against such enforced limitations, displaying all the paradoxes and complexities of human nature in their quest for freedom. His latest is The Road, a harrowing, gray-scaled adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee ) heading South to the ocean after an unnamed apocalyptic event has ravaged the Earth. Civilization has been wiped out, and now militia-like gangs with cannibalistic proclivities are on the prowl. Anguished by the suicide of his wife (Charlize Theron, glimpsed in flashback), the Man’s sole purpose is to protect and feed his child, who “carries the fire” of hope and begs mercy on a few of the pitiful survivors (like Robert Duvall's blind old scavenger) they encounter. Both are archetypes of human endurance, ragged, starving ghosts wandering a benighted landscape where they scrounge for whatever's edible or useful and mostly try to stay out of view, hiding at one point in a fallout shelter stocked with imperishables. Yet it’s the devastating tenderness of their relationship that Hillcoat foregrounds against such a cynically bleak and inhospitable backdrop, letting a small act of filiation, finally, justify the Boy's innate decency.

Filmmaker sat down with Hillcoat to discuss the anxieties of adaptation, the challenge of creating a futuristic world with natural light, and why Cormac McCarthy’s favorite film is La strada.

The Road opens today, November 25, in New York and select cities.

John Hillcoat directing Viggo Mortensen on the set of The Road. Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Filmmaker: When I first heard that an adaptation of The Road was in the works, I couldn’t imagine that a movie could approximate the emotional effect the book had on me. It sticks with you so long. So I was curious about the impact it had on you, and also what your main concerns were going in.

Hillcoat: Well, that was one of them, certainly. [Laughs] It was a real gift having this material, because it works on so many levels. I’ve rarely come across something that has moved me so deeply. How do you deal with that? Luckily, I got it before it was published. But there were several points of concern. There was the legacy of McCarthy--his writing is so amazing. How do you create that world on this kind of budget? Above everything was how the hell do you get a kid to pull it off? So all that gave me pause for thought. But I thought anything that moves me like this I’ve got to embrace. Also, I’ve got an eight-year-old boy, and that certainly added another wallop to it for me. I tried not to get overwhelmed. McCarthy helped a great deal. A huge weight came off my shoulders when, during our first conversation in pre-production, he said “A book’s a book, a film’s a film. I’ve done my thing, you do yours.” He never asked to see a script, and we never volunteered. He was there to answer questions.

Filmmaker: What kinds of questions did you need him to answer?

Hillcoat: I asked him loads, I’d be on the phone for hours. Some he would actually not commit to because he said “Well, that’s for you to decide. It’s up to you.”

Filmmaker: So what ideas or themes did he clarify?

Hillcoat: He finally let me know what he thought of the Big Event. But the point leading up to that was that it was irrelevant, because if anything on that scale happened, we wouldn’t have the media [to tell us] what had happened. It wouldn’t exist. The here and now of survival would totally kick in and make all of it irrelevant. You know, [McCarthy’s] very precise with his words, he’s like a scientist. His passion is science, he doesn’t read prose anymore. And yet he’s also a great poet, so that combo was amazing. He said that it’s a book about human goodness. And really [it’s] that simple kernel--the idea of the boy being born into all of this and yet still becoming a moral compass and taking that leap of faith. McCarthy’s giving [us] an unflinching look at how we can easily slide into base nature, which we’re constantly reminded of too often. We had a lot of conversations about nature and human behavior and the types of people in this world.

Filmmaker: Did that help you sharpen some of the character portraits?

Hillcoat: It helped me in the discussions with the actors. The whole rehearsal was really more about sharing our own points of view, how this big macro thing, the apocalypse, is really just a huge projection of humanity’s worst fears. It’s ancient, in a way. And this situation with the child is every parent’s worst fear, so we were trying to keep it at that very simple human response and not get sidetracked by the cannibal stuff or any spectacle aspect. We showed them locations, we showed them pictures and talked about the homeless. And then the next big leap in the process was when the actors were in the actual world. And it was like enforced Method. [Chuckles] For them, it was really useful in the end, because they were reacting off it like it was a three-hander as opposed to a two-hander.

Filmmaker: You put together a position paper that included some themes and photos you wanted to work with. What were those visual references?

Hillcoat: A lot of that was style notes, too: the cinematography, the music. We never even saw this as a futuristic thing. We looked at books like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, the way civilizations come and go. So we looked at preexisting [locations], whether man-made or natural, and the aftermath surprisingly looks very similar. Apocalyptic films can almost be in a cul-de-sac [where it’s] all about the Big Event and the spectacle, and there’s no human dimension or reality left. And The Road seemed to be about simple things—a shopping cart full of possessions, oh that’s the homeless. So it was trying to tap into all of that. We did this location scout across eight states—our apocalyptic tour. It’s Apocalypse Now, really, whether it’s strip mining in Pennsylvania or the cleanup of Katrina in New Orleans or Mount Saint Helens. Those were our visual references. On a more thematic level, the big influence for me was [John Ford’s] Grapes of Wrath and [De Sica’s] The Bicycle Thief. When I looked at father-son relationships, I was amazed that in cinema there are mainly tyrannical or absent fathers. Whereas in The Bicycle Thief, there’s a father and son struggling under huge pressure. Again, the kid becomes the moral compass, the father takes the weight, and the fear pushes him into a [corner]. McCarthy was very influenced and inspired by that generation of filmmakers, too. In fact, La strada, by Fellini, is his favorite film.

Filmmaker: You mention all these levels you had to consider, so in terms of style ...

Hillcoat: We wanted to avoid Mad Max. I think it was so ground-breaking, but it just spawned an endless genre. It was more of a samurai film in many ways. Visually, some things with the [body] suits, the road gang, and the army with the slaves in chains we deliberately avoided. Our own road gang we modeled more on Deliverance, because we figured hunters and ex-army and people like that would probably form their own gangs and that’s what it would be like.

Filmmaker: The post-apocalyptic scenario gave you an allegorical realm to work within, too. Did you flesh that out together with your writer, Joe Penhall?

Hillcoat: There were a lot of discussions. We initially put out a little web for screenwriters, which included some very big names, Hollywood writers. Some of these guys said “Impossible, this can’t be translated.” Even some filmmakers told me that. The thing that Joe and I kept reminding ourselves is that even though it’s got this great canvas, it’s incredibly simple, almost a timeless parable. If we just focus on that and protect this emotional journey and don’t get intimidated by the poetry or the language or the legacy of McCarthy or all this other stuff, we’d be [all right]. I have always been drawn to extreme worlds and environments that put people under pressure, that show the best and the worst. We talked about the fact that hope is most special when it’s surrounded by hopelessness.

Filmmaker: That seems consistent with things you’ve been interested in as a filmmaker, from Ghosts...of the Civil Dead on. Why do you think you’re drawn to material that encapsulates those themes?

Hillcoat: I left Australia when I was four. When I returned, I did this incredible trip with The Proposition, through the desert and in the outback with my production designer, Chris Kennedy. And the extremity of that landscape and the alienness of western Europeans trying to control and inhabit this land—the power of nature and all of those things—really hit me. I think Australians are very aware of that. Look at Picnic at Hanging Rock or even Mad Max. There’s an elemental disjunction, where there’s this tradition that comes from Europe but [people are] living in this place that’s primeval.

Filmmaker: The visual look of this film is key to selling an audience on this world. How did you find working wth Javier Aguirresarobe?

Hillcoat: He’s a great poet, he’s got a lyrical quality to his work. He’s also very sensitive to natural light.

Filmmaker: Victor Erice’s Quince Tree of the Sun, which he lensed, is a favorite of mine.

Hillcoat: Yeah. Also amazing is Talk to Her, which is stunningly beautiful. He’s a true master and I did want this familiar world to be slightly unfamiliar. And this was Javier’s first American film, so I think that had a positive influence. He had a huge task, and it was a total inverse: how do you keep out the sun? Every day when the weather was gorgeous, we’d be miserable and Javier would be screaming at the sky in Spanish, he was very fiery. He was so passionate, he would do anything for this film. When it was freezing and the rain was sideways he would come out, roaring with enthusiasm, because this is a world where electricity has ceased to exist. So that was major.

Filmmaker: McCarthy’s book is so much about the thought process of the Man. How did that influence the way you handled the voiceover?

Hillcoat: If you started writing a script like this and you start using that voiceover with the brilliance of McCarthy’s writing, we would have wound up in a lot of trouble, because there was a simplicity to the tale. So I believe that the voiceover [can’t be] just exposition and that the plot isn’t depending on it in that way, that it’s an added thing. For me, the voiceover is thoughts the Man’s having in his head that he can’t share with the Boy. It’s a way of internalizing characters. We wanted it to feel like the thoughts of an actual character, not a literary commentary, and to avoid it being self-conscious or pretentious. So there was navigating around that and Joe [Penhall] did a great job at stripping it down. Cormac also loved that. He wasn’t ever pushing any of his poetry.

Filmmaker: What are your thoughts in general on literary adaptations?

Hillcoat: Well, I’m actually one who thinks part of that problem is being too sidetracked by the poetry or the language of the book or the legacy. I think simplicity is key when it comes to adaptations and to really capture the essence of the book, so you don’t feel like you have to be literal. You just need to capture the spirit of it. With pulpier books, they can be transcended. But I do think it’s a totally different medium. When you start to physicalize everything, and the actors embody the characters, it takes on a different dimension, and you have to work with that.

Filmmaker: Your ongoing collaboration with Nick Cave, who composed music for The Road with Warren Ellis, has been very fruitful lately. He’s like your Ennio Morricone and your Paul Schrader.

Hillcoat: Yeah. I realized [that in] his narrative songwriting, the characters are so vivid, and that’s why he can script something great. It’s the new revelation since The Proposition. Then he wrote Death of the Ladies Man’ for me. This is a smaller film that we wrote for Ray Winstone, in Brighton, and it’s more of a black comedy, actually. He got frustrated so he’s turned it into a novel [The Death of Bunny Munro], and now it’s taking off. And we’re hopefully getting Channel 4 to step up to HBO, which actually has some of the best dialogue writers, the best characters. The best drama, full stop, comes from HBO in recent years.

Filmmaker: You must be a fan of Deadwood, because you cast Molly Parker in the role of the motherly woman, and Garret Dillahunt as a predatory gang member.

Hillcoat: Yes. Actually, I tried to get David Milch to write a screenplay! I’ve got Pete Dexter [Mulholland Falls, Deadwood] writing a screenplay for me. Also, there’s The Sopranos and The Wire. I tried to get George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane, who’ve both written [episodes]. That, to me, has raised the bar on [TV drama].

Filmmaker: What are your thoughts on the state of indie cinema in Australia right now, in terms of where it’s been and where it’s going?

Hillcoat: I think it’s always been [about] the dominance of the studios. Countries struggle with trying to protect their own industry. It’s very tricky when you have crews used to well-paid studio jobs. There’s so much emphasis on gaffers or grips, and [they’ve had] a choice between making next to nothing working their guts out [on an indie] or doing a fairly nicely paid, endless studio shoot. But then circumstances changed, the dollar went up, New Zealand was a cheap, better option, and suddenly studios were [bankrupt]. Because Fox and Warners had built these huge studios, and suddenly this infrastucture of crews they used were left with nothing. On an aesthetic level, since the heyday of the Australian New Wave in the '70s, there was a resistance to genre in the '80s and '90s. What they did was hit on their own genre, which was the quirky comedy. And that became such an overwhelming thing for decades, that for a filmmaker like myself it was an uphill struggle. I could not make films, because it was outside the box. But now, it’s a lot more positive, there’s been an incredibly inspiring shift of indigenous talent coming to the fore. I know there's been a rebirth of genre, particularly with horror, and I think variation is a good thing. So hopefully, it will be a new healthy state.

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.