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.

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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.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 11/04/2009 12:14:00 PM Comments (1)

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.



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!”

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/30/2009 12:16:00 PM Comments (0)

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.



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.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/21/2009 12:12:00 PM Comments (1)

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.



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."

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/16/2009 12:37:00 PM Comments (1)

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.



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.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/09/2009 06:32:00 PM Comments (0)