"It’s very flattering to be interviewed by a film magazine as opposed to an art publication," said Shirin Neshat. "I am very flattered anybody would think it’s worth talking to me." Widely-acknowledged as one of the most influential contemporary Middle-Eastern artists (and apparently one of the most modest), Neshat and her work are staples of museums and galleries around the world, while remaining relatively little-known in film circles. That changed this year when she burst onto the independent international film stage with her first feature film, Women Without Men. The narratives of four women in 1953 Iran are interwoven in the film, which was seven years in the making. Each character comes from a different background and social class; one by one they are drawn together in a mysterious, isolated garden outside of the city where they find solace, comfort, and family in one another, at least for a little while. Women Without Men won the Silver Lion for Neshat as Best Director at this year's Venice Film Festival, and will make its American debut at Sundance this January.

Forbidden to return to Iran, the country of her birth, Neshat studied at Berkeley and now lives in New York. Her multinational background is mirrored in the film: here, Casablanca stands in for Tehran (where she is not permitted to film); the producers hail from Europe, and, like the director, the actors are primarily Iranian emigrés. Dream logic and juxtaposition order Neshat's video installations and photography, and this is also true of Women Without Men. Based on a slim, brilliant 1989 novella of the same name, the film's tone differs from that of the book. They are companion pieces, like versions of the same song by different bands. Although both employ many of the same characters and surreal, magical story elements, the spare, unsentimental prose of the book, which is frequently interspersed with single lines of thought or dialogue, is very different from the serious, lush, and highly-stylized aesthetic that defines Neshat's film. The evolution of her intense, ritualistic imagery can be traced back through previous work. Women of Allah, an arresting series of photographic portraits of women in black chadors holding guns, swords, and flowers--including Neshat herself--featured detailed Persian calligraphy filling in positive and negative photographic spaces. In 1996, Neshat turned her attention to video. Shooting on 35mm film that was then transferred to video, she has created 18 single and two-channel digital installations, many using dual or opposing projection. The pieces have names like Rapture (1999), Passage (2001), and Turbulent (1998), the latter a split screen singing competition between a man and a woman that transgresses against Iranian custom that prohibits women from singing in front of an audience of mixed genders. The piece won the International Award at the Venice Biennale International Golden Lion.



Women Without Men began its public life as a series of individual video pieces named after its main characters: Mahdokht (2004), Zarin (2005), Munis (2008), Faezah (2008), and Farokh Legha (2008). The videos were shown in darkened gallery rooms that alternated with brightly-lit spaces displaying large-format photographic still images. Landscapes featuring oceans, cities, gardens, streets and homes were depicted vividly along with the gazing, searching, characters who are simultaneously archetypal, symbolic, and individual. The characters evoked questions of desire, beauty, history, and ambition with their staring eyes and detailed settings, props, and costumes. For the artist, the pieces are emotional touchstones, visual bridges between motifs from Neshat's homeland and America, her adoptive home. The perfect places to explore them are the movie theater and — of course — the film magazine.




Shirin Neshat: It’s so strange to finally wake up at your own house after much traveling—sometimes I wake up I don’t know what country I am in or what time it is. (Laughs) This morning I woke up and was in a state of zombie.

Filmmaker: Oh no!

Neshat: It’s so nice to wake up with your own apartment. I didn’t even leave much today. I’ve lived in so many horrible places that it feels good to finally be here. I think I paid my dues in New York. I’ve lived in every possible corner that was filthy or loud! [Laughs]

Filmmaker: Really? Your apartment here in Soho is just lovely... What was your worst New York apartment?

Neshat: I remember living in the East Village, several different locations, but once above a punk rock nightclub, and they were just always driving me crazy. That was on Avenue A and Second Street. Then I lived on Avenue B and 12th Street, where there were a lot of people up all night. Then I lived in Chinatown, on East Broadway. It was really—it’s dirty, like the hallway hadn’t been swept for like 10 years. And we had a methadone clinic next door. So getting out of the house with a baby and a stroller, and there were heroin addicts next door, and they were spitting—it was just disgusting. And then I lived in Brooklyn. And then I lived on Elizabeth Street and then in NoHo. Those were really nice, but temporary... And finally here.

Filmmaker: And now you’re home. Themes of home and family arise throughout the film; your female protagonists even seem to create a family of their own.

Neshat: Yes, a community. Their garden was meant to be a place of exile; a place that these women could escape to, away from their problems; a place to be temporarily at peace. A shelter, a place of security, a new beginning, a second chance — these ideas are very poignant for a lot of us who are displaced from Iran. When I was young, 17, I left my family and never completely had a family ever again. Every seven years or so I have moved to a whole new beginning, a whole new situation [where I] try to feel a sense of security. But I’ve been a nomad. I hope it doesn’t change again, but it seems I regularly move from place to place in a big way, make new relationships and communities, and then move on again. The idea of nomadic feeling, always looking for an idea of security, is very personal.



Filmmaker: Is it a surprise, if not a contradiction, to say that in exile, you have found a home?

Neshat: How can you go about creating a new safe, secure or comfortable environment? First thing that happens, you surround yourself by Iranian people. But I’m not really a typical Iranian either; I was so young when I left that I’m very international; so for me, it’s really about balancing inside and outside of the Iranian community. To this day, I feel disjointed going in and out of the Western community and the Iranian community. I try to belong to both, but I always feel slightly an outsider and I believe that for me, as for a lot of artists, subjects that are very important to them peek their way into their narratives, characters and concepts.

Filmmaker: How did you find the book that you adapted into this film? I look forward to reading it.

Neshat: It’s a very small one; you can read it in two, three hours. Though I don’t know if I should tell you to read the book. Which book have you ever read that has translated into film that you’ve liked? [Laughs] When I decided finally to think about making a feature film, I looked for the right story. It's actually just what I’m doing now, for another film, which is really exciting. I was recommended a lot of books — like I am now — and scripts and stories to get inspired, and having worked with women’s poetry and having a feminist edge, a lot of people gave me novels to read by women. Shahrnoush Parsipour is one of the most important woman writers of modern literature from Iran, and I knew her writing as a young kid, a long time ago.

Hamid Dabashi, a friend and scholar at Columbia University, handed me the Farsi version of Women Without Men and said, “You should really read this.” All Shahrnoush’s literature is surrealistic, magic realism. She has this incredible imagination, and her writing is unlike other literature that I’ve read. It’s really Iranian, rooted in Persian poetry, mysticism, religion, politics and historical events in Iran. Yet at the same time, she has one foot in universal, ephemeral, timeless, existential, and philosophical issues. I realized that it was the right story for me because in my work, I’ve asked deep personal, philosophical questions as a person and as a woman. I've also engaged with larger issues that are above and beyond me, too.

Shahrnoush invented these characters according to some of her own mad ideas, and then I took them and I shaped them according to mine. This novel is set in the city of Tehran in the 1950s. It begins with very important historical events in the city, and then we come to the orchard, a completely different space. In my other work, these paradoxical elements were also really strong. Of course, I knew how difficult it was going to be to re-adapt a story that involves five protagonists and much historical material. But these were my initial and fundamental attractions: the book’s political and poetic properties.

Filmmaker: What spoke to you about the four central women characters?

Neshat: I think that the writer did a great job of choosing very interesting, diverse characters — socio-economically diverse as well as diverse in the type of dilemmas they have as women. Shahrnoush and I talked a lot about what childhood is like and how deep psychological issues of the body can be. As a first time feature director, it was interesting to think about how to develop their characters and think of them cinematically.

For example, Munis is interested in activism, social justice, issues that are larger than her personal needs and her own narcissistic life. Like her, part of me always wants to be involved in activism; really, really wants to get very angry; and wants to do something for others.



With Zarin, it’s a question of her obsession with the body and her feelings of shame. [In response to external] stigmas, taboos, and judgments, the woman self-punishes. I’ve always had problems with my body and so in a way, I’ve always embodied this. I physically get ill at times when I feel a lot of pressure, and have faced issues of anorexia, thinness, and the need to be desirable.

Even Farrokhlagha, the middle-aged character in her 50s, is thinking still about vanity and wanting to be beautiful and desirable, wanting to start over again and be a pioneer. This is something that I think is common in most cultures, though perhaps it is particularly [powerful] in my culture. Women hit 50 — it’s over, you know? In some ways, I embody her dilemma. They’re narcissistic things, yet very human. It’s really undeniable that all of us want to beat aging and be desirable and admired forever…and that it’s just not possible. [Laughs]

With Faezeh, the part I like and identify with most is this question of the security of tradition and traditional life; the security of wanting a simple life that involves raising a family and having a husband. That’s something I’ve never really had, you know. Everything for me has been kind of bohemian.

Filmmaker: Did you shoot primarily on location, or did you also use sets?

Neshat: We shot everything on location, just a little bit of the green screen, where we had to do when she had to fall. In Berlin we did that. But everything was shot in Morocco. We really didn’t have any money to do any sets elsewhere.

Filmmaker: Your 2007 New Yorker profile mentioned that you didn’t own a camera. You had your videos shot on 35mm and then transferred to video.

Neshat: Yes; I never even studied photography. I’ve always worked with a still photographer, or here, a cinematographer. I did not make the film alone. [Art is often] about finding ways of collaborating with people who can help,and in all the areas that you’re weak, to build more meat. I think the most important thing to mention is the collaborative part of this process. Shoja [Azari, my collaborator] and I worked forever on all the video installations we have done. When I chose to make this film, we co-wrote the script. Shoja has spent as much time on this project as I have and has shaped so much in the scenes. From the directing to the post-production, he’s been involved in every part of it, and has also helped me make this move from arts to film. I want to see that Shoja take the credit as much as me, because very often people see me. Now, he himself is about to shoot. His turn is coming now. He’s just turning his script into a film that I think he’s hoping to shoot in February. I’m supposed to be not in the driver’s seat, but in the passenger’s seat, to help him.

For me, [photography and cinematography] are about framing. Everything is carefully framed. In the feature film, everything was carefully framed and discussed in advance, almost drawn. We worked with a great Austrian cinematographer, Martin Gschlacht, who was unbelievably involved in the process. The brains of this project were Shoja, me and Martin. Every single shot was dissected both in terms of the dramatic process of the acting and also in terms of the framing. Later, he was very involved in the color correction with me. For me, the lighting is very important, and he’s a master of lighting.

With the bathhouse, for instance I really, really wanted a shot in a space that was a very high ceiling, like a dome from which we could pan down. I wanted to capture the bigness of the space. But to light such a space is really difficult. One earlier cinematographer said it was impossible. It was going to be completely sad to lose the space if you couldn’t light it, you know. I explained to him what I want, and the relationship of Zarin to these people. Martin said, “I can do it.”

I think my very favorite shot of the film is when Zarin is on the ground, on the floor, and she’s completely nude and she’s just sitting like this, this naked body. Do you remember when the boy is looking at her? When we had these little boys there, it just seemed incredibly poignant to have this moment; it’s like a loss of innocence. She was so out of it. But for a little boy, to be confronted with a nude body in this condition is just devastating. I thought that was a very important shot.

Filmmaker: How would you describe her condition?

Neshat: She’s anorexic. I mean, there’s no doubt about it. And that’s the actress — the point was not just that she was bleeding, but she was just bones. She was no longer an object of desire but an object of pain. For this little boy to see a naked body — because the other women more or less were covered — but to see it in this condition, it’s pretty early to be exposed to such a torturous figure. When Zarin goes to the mosque and all the men are down, or when she’s floating in the water, these things were treated like still photographs. With Martin, we discussed the images very often like that.

But because of the script, we also had to think about how we were going to edit. We had a continuity person, which was new for me. Now I had to think about in relation to the other, next shot and next shot and next shot. In the art installations anything could go, and then later you’ll deal with it in the editing room. But here, no. You cannot go from A to C without going to B, and point of view is important, and this and that. This was an incredible lesson. We could approach it somewhat artistically, but we always had to keep in mind the story development.

Filmmaker: Was it a process that you enjoyed, being in a new place and learning so much so quickly, or was it frustrating?

Neshat: It’s always really exciting to learn a new language. You’re seduced by education, and ask yourself, “Could I be good at this? Could I really?” It tests your ability to tell the story using very different logic. It’s very flattering to be interviewed by a film magazine as opposed to an art publication, you know. Also, as an artist, I tend to repeat things, and when you get good at something, it really takes a lot to stop repeating yourself. I kept wanting to write on my photographs, for instance, and when I made videos I kept thinking of double projecting. Yet sometimes you just have to boldly go against your own patterns. It can be liberating to suddenly find you’ve reinvented yourself.

This is the most exciting part of cinema for me: I’m just a beginner, yet it’s such a complete form that I don’t have to drop all my tools. I don’t have to stop thinking photographically. I don’t have to stop thinking about a choreographic way of telling a story. I can keep all of it, it’s just that now I have to tell a story and I have to keep my audience for a very different time span. The attention span of a person in a movie theater for 90 minutes, it’s really different than a 10-minute video. It’s a challenge that I love.

Shoja was asking me yesterday if I would want to continue with magic realism [in film], and I thought, “No, I don’t think so.” Most of my past work has been surrealistic one way or another, but I think it’s the strangeness more than surrealism itself that I need to keep and maintain.

Filmmaker: Could you talk about the shot where characters go through the wall and follows the little stream that goes through the rushes? It’s beautiful, and haunts me in kind of an Alice in Wonderland way, the entrance to a secret land.

Neshat: It’s also very sexual, like you’re entering a hole. That hole became a bridge between reality and magic, between the world of the orchard and the external world of 1953. Time had stopped. When Farrokhlagha and Faezeh and Zarin came in, they felt foreboding but were attracted to the garden. Faezeh was terrified.

I found it poignant to think that beyond this wall there is a mysterious world that doesn’t belong to anywhere else, and that once you’re there you can be so safe. It’s a very allegorical idea. There’s no mist outside, but as soon as you go in, it’s full of mist. This is why we also made it silent with just natural sounds because we thought even the garden had a voice of its own. When each woman comes in, there’s a repetition of a certain type of birds or a certain type of sounds and you say, “Ah! This must be the same place.”

Also, the pacing of the film became slower once we got there, and the camera was much slower in panning around the trees. It was gentler, like the place had its own logic. It was haunting but also beautiful, and very different than when you were in the city and there was more action, it was more real, and it was faster. The other thing was that geographically, it was not consistent. There was a desert, and then there was this lush green. It was like the garden had no walls once they entered. So again, we were really playing with these paradoxical spaces; like heaven or like hell, but nothing that belonged to the earth. Maybe it was when Munis died, that was life after death; or maybe this is a place where all the women are dead. Until the army of guests comes in to the garden, which is like a rape. When Farrokhlagha decides to open it up to the people, things start crumbling down. The garden is betrayed by being opened to the outsiders, you know.



When the film was first shown, immediately some people accused me, saying, “She’s just making these images because they’re so controversial and sensational; she’s sensationalizing violence.” The Iranian people did this also; as much as they liked it, because it looked somehow interesting to them, they were always kind of endorsing but also criticizing. When I really think about this film — this is a very important thing to add to this interview — it’s really kind of a manifestation of classic Persian literature into visual imagery. A lot of metaphors that are really rooted in our mystical tradition of literature are very subversive, poetic, existential, and philosophical.

As Iranians, we think these things are understood by everyone, but they really are not, you know. For Iranian people, for instance, the garden is the most important metaphor; in Persian painting, literature, and poetry, it’s a place of spiritual transcendence, a place of freedom. A lot of information gets lost when even the style of the film, its poetic nature, can be so alien to the Westerners that it may be read as too melodramatic, or not contemporary enough. But at the same time, the conceptual approach of the film — because I have been educated here — could put off other people who are non-Western and don’t understand this kind of construction of stories.

Filmmaker: How did you approach the detailed re-creation of a specific time period?

Neshat: The novel takes place in the summer 1953, a very interesting time. What happened politically in Iran then is not discussed very often anymore, and is often overlooked now that we’re talking about Iranian and American tension. Most Westerners still think of Iran during post-Iranian Revolution era, when Iran had become a completely different type of society. I wanted to show Iran when it had a different look, and remind us Iranians what we were like as a community, as a society.

Politically speaking, the United States and the British had everything to do with the overthrow of the democratic government and Prime Minister Mossadegh. This paved the path for the Islamic Revolution. Had it not been for that coup, his overthrow, and the return of the Shah, we would not have had a slow breakdown. Antagonism toward the West, particularly America, developed during this time. When the Shah came back as a dictator and began to kill a lot of people, people hated him and eventually embraced Islam as the next authentic ideology, an anti-West. We often get categorized as this fanatic and barbaric people, but if you look at the history, actually the U.S. was quite barbaric in the way that they intervened in another country’s affairs.

In this film, as you saw, history is not really treated in a documentary or didactic way, but the film does try to point toward the feeling of betrayal and defeat that people felt — and this is something that happened again this year. We were not able to access Iran in any way, and we were limited to working in Morocco — this was a real issue. It was a very international project — sometimes this was an asset and sometimes a problem. Shoja and I have been going across the Atlantic god knows how often; physically and emotionally it was really a test of my endurance. Yet it was very interesting for us to look in that time and see how people looked, how people dressed, and how the Muslims and the Westernerized people coexisted. It was just like a very interesting tapestry, a complex and diverse society, though now it’s homogeneous because of this regime. We went out there researching the architecture, the costume, the hair, and the different political and cultural communities that existed. It was fascinating.

For example, when we looked at the images of Tehran in the 1950s, it’s all these Art Deco buildings and looked like the beginning of modernity. If you look at Russia, or Casablanca, as we did, we started to pinpoint some of the buildings that really [resemble those in] the books of old Tehran.

From Iran, we found books. Footage usually came from the BBC. The political images from the coup d’etat came from a documentary made, ironically, by BBC, which basically glorified the coup as if Mossadegh was an evil man and had been overthrown. But if you looked at an intellectual, artistic community, like the world of the older woman, Farrokhlagha, you see her friends and the café and all these artists. You see the kind of discussions they would have; they’re very well-read of both Western authors and local Iranian authors. You see that they’re well dressed, and they also talk about politics. Then, you also have the fanatics, backwards and oppressive and religious in their way of thinking. Then, you have pro-Shah people like Sadri, the husband of Farrokhlagha, who were not really intellectual but lovers of monarchy leadership. Then, you have the communists, the white-shirted people. In our research, we read a lot of books with historical explanations about the coup. You get a different explanation from each camp.

Shoja and I interviewed ex-communists who had fled Iran for Berlin after the Shah came back. We also talked to the people who were pro-Mossadegh and pro-Shah to get an idea of what that was like. It’s very, very interesting, the dynamics of that time. You might like the great book All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer; it’s like a thriller that describes the chain of events that led to the coup. We did our best to become informed about the historical, political, and cultural life of that time. Then, we had to fictionalize everything, to make sure we are close as possible to the truth but within fiction, not documentary.

We also had a limited budget. Really we worked under 4 million Euros, so we had that in mind. We had the street protests, with a massive amount of cast where we blocked off city streets. We had to go to the orchard and have a whole thing there. The four women each had a very different lifestyle—they had to dress a certain way; live in a certain kind of location. For example, since Zarin was a prostitute, we studied the brothels at that time. There was a city for prostitutes; all during the monarchy, people could actually go to that city.

Or, for another example, we also had to look at the traditional architecture of Iran where the middle class lived, like Faezeh and Munis. It’s Persian architecture the way that they each have a little pool.



Filmmaker: In the courtyard?

Neshat: Yes, so we actually built the little pools. It wasn’t like that. All the flowers, all the landscaping was by us. It was as close as we could get to Tehran in the ’50s. At locations like the bathhouse, which for me, is very important, we built all of that. It was actually a public bathhouse, but the pool you see was created by us. The dome was there, but the space was empty.

It was a public bathhouse in Marrakech. We dressed it to be like a Turkish-Iranian bath. I think we did a great job, but even if it doesn’t seem exactly like Iran, I think the fact that it was nomadically done added flavor. It’s the license of an artist who’s herself in a kind of exile. I could be making a film that it’s Iranian, but it looks Cuba and Morocco and In the Mood for Love. This is a very global time. I have often used of color that was not necessarily authentically Iranian, but as an artist I took the liberty. It is like symbolic of what the time was like.

Filmmaker: I recognized several scenes, images and costumes from your video installations and photography in the film.

Neshat: Yes, we basically used the same footage. To dress Farrokhlagha and Faezeh and Munis, for me, was really difficult. It was out of my element. I had to really think about their personalities, their time, and the actresses, and really dissected the characters. With the dress for Faezeh, it was about her innocence. When I saw that dress, it just radiated that kind of girlishness. With Munis, we were talking about a more boyish, nerdish girl; the kind who studies a lot, but is not really pretty to look at. She is always like proper, like a little doll with her haircut and those little shoes. [Laughs] It was intentionally designed for characterizing who she is. With Zarin, though beautiful, she was so skinny it was hard to make her really desirable.

We worked a lot with secondhand clothes, you know — except with Farrokhlagha, who was the most elegant. Our costume designer’s from Austria, and he did actually make the clothes for Farrokhlagha. But the worst thing happened was that we originally had an actress from Iran who was supposed to play the role. She came, he measured her, we made all the dresses, and then she couldn’t play in the film! Suddenly we had to make this dress work for the next actress. That person had gained some weight since I had last seen her, so it was like, “How are we going to fit?” Do you remember that gray dress with white polka dots? It was bursting, actually! Yet in a way, the fact that she was a little bit voluptuous and heavy, I really felt it was good.

Almost everything didn’t fit her. The costume designer had to leave and we still didn’t have a dress for the party in the orchard. They had brought a whole trunk of clothes to Morocco from Austria, and here I was with her going through all the dresses. We were panicking because the shot of the party was the next day and we still hadn’t found a dress for the main hostess of the party! Luckily we found that dress at last. A lot of it was well planned, a lot of it was improvised, you know.

Filmmaker: It’s a wonderful scene, and one in which clothing adds so much. How do you balance planning and improvisation in your artwork?

Neshat: Here, the planning and organization were intense. We started this project in 2003, and then the script wasn’t finalized until 2007. Then we shot the film in eight weeks, and edited for two years. We spent a lot of time of going back and forth about the script, preproduction, production, and postproduction. The video installations were also very well organized, but they were small projects. They were maximum 10 days of shooting and a much smaller crew. Here, we had like 60, 80 people in all different departments, plus a casting agent. I never have had a big costume department or hair and makeup; usually I have one person who is like all that. But this was kind of an epic period film. A producer was German, and the co-production office was French and Austrian and mainly German. The music and even the actual shooting of it — there were so many people involved. Shoja and I spent about four months in Morocco and broke down the script into a shot list. Everything was really organized.

Filmmaker: Has your previous work been more intuitive?

Neshat: This time we had a script that had to be approved by the producers, and they had to get funding based on that, which was different. Also, I’ve worked only a little with professional actors, so this was really very different. But in the past we always storyboarded everything. When you storyboard, and especially if there’s not so much dialogue and continuity, there is a lot of flexibility. You can come to the editing and put the puzzle together all different ways.

In the editing, we just threw away the script and completely restructured the film. All the main shots were there, but it wasn’t really working the way we had written it. This is why also it took us a long time: we gave ourselves the liberty of reorganizing the film in the editing room. It’s a plot-oriented film, and there was always this risk of being either overly conventional and narrative, or overly aesthetic and not narrative enough. We dissected the balance between the visual imagery and the story, and I tried to make the best balance in my judgment. Yet I knew that this story itself would never allow a completely conventional narrative. It is a strange story, and so it is a strange film — you cannot make it an un-strange film. It’s impossible. That’s exactly why I chose it.

When I think about all my past works, in photography and video, there’s always something strange about them, and that strangeness is what I like. That strangeness makes many people not like it because they don’t relate to it; while some people like it because of that quality. But then the question: how do you come in and out of the magic elements in the story? We were so afraid of making a film that was like Halloween or something — like when the woman comes out of the grave or the faceless thing. We didn’t have the Hollywood money to make these perfect special effects. From the beginning we decided that we’d do the Buñuel style: first you see it, then you don’t see it. When you come to magic, it’s not like you savor it and dwell on it. Instead, you’re telling a very realistic story and suddenly someone comes out of the grave. This balance between the art and cinema, narrative versus non-narrative, strange versus non-strange, and reality versus surrealism is fundamental to the way that this story tries to tell itself.

We knew this was a very difficult story to make, to sell... (Laughs) and to become popular because it really is a demanding film for people. We tried to put in beautiful music, beautiful images, beautiful colors, and humor, but what they get out of the film is just like an artwork. It’s a very conceptual art piece. It was an experiment, an experiment that has a lot of flaws because it was an ambitious experiment, you know. It tried to be philosophical, historical and political. It tried to be poetic, realistic, and magical. It dealt with individual women and the whole community of Iranians, all looking for freedom and change. The audience had to try to get layers of meaning and symbolism and metaphor. How to do fairness and follow four protagonists simultaneously, not making one more important than the other, and give the country of Iran almost like it’s another character, a fifth woman? Everybody said, “Are you sure for the first film you want to make you want to be this ambitious? Historical periods, four characters, magic realism—you’re aiming for disaster.” But I loved the story so much, you know. You give it the best, and you accept its own logic.

Filmmaker: I love the music, and wonder if you would discuss its place in the movie?

Neshat: The [Ryûichi] Sakamoto music and the Persian music that people were singing? I wish Sakamoto could hear you because, to be honest, we had a lot more music, but we at some point felt that that was a bit dangerous. You know how sometimes music can be kind of manipulative of the story, of your emotions? We felt that less is more; that the music should add to the emotions of the film but not really take total control. So we brought a lot of silence.

Ryûichi Sakamoto and I met a few years ago. We always wanted to work together, and we were looking for the right project. I’ve always loved his work; like when I heard the music for The Last Emperor (1987) and The Little Buddha (1993). He’s also so diverse in the way he does things, and I love the way he incorporates indigenous music of the countries where the films are shot with his own music. He has brought Indian music into his own music, and in The Sheltering Sky (1990) he brought Arabic music into his own. This film tries to be universal and timeless and Iranian, so he incorporated some of the Persian music into his. At the end credits, he incorporated the beautiful santour music from Persia with his own. I feel like the amount of music that’s there really works, and when it comes, it’s really powerful.

Filmmaker: You mentioned that you had a limited budget for what you wanted to do. Did that encourage you and your team to be creative in ways you wouldn’t otherwise have been?

Neshat: We struggled a lot financially. In many ways, this was a very humbling experience. We’ve never worked with huge budgets, but in this case it was very difficult to raise the money. This project was a labor of love for anyone who worked on it; everyone worked unbelievably hard and didn’t get paid enough. Many times, the project would have been at risk if it didn’t get enough money. But somehow we pulled it together. When I think about this project I think about struggle and I think about being a student. I think about how hard we worked and how grateful we are that we finished it and had some acknowledgment.

We've gotten rejected by funders; and once, when we were about to go into production and were already on location, a funder backed out — there were numerous times where there was very great risk and good enough reason for the project to dissolve, but we didn’t give up. It was also very hard for the producers, who had never worked on a period film like this or with Iranians like us — and in a language they don’t understand! It was challenging in every single dimension. There was nothing that didn’t not go wrong. [Laughs]

When you've devoted yourself, you make it work somehow. Yet when we went to Venice and we felt so irrelevant in this big festival. We were saying, “At least we were in competition. Goodbye!” We got in the airplane and came to [the] Toronto [International Film Festival] with Shahrnoush. We arrived at night, slept, had the screening at noon, and then as soon as we got out, like 2 o’clock, the phone rang from Venice, from Marco Müller, asking us to come back immediately [to accept the Silver Lion award for Best Director and the UNICEF Award]. [Laughs] We were actually there less than 24 hours! But it was so exciting.

Filmmaker: Speaking of producers, Barbara Gladstone has been your gallerist for many years, is that right?

Neshat: Yes. Barbara has basically been the producer of the video installations. She was in this one just for a small amount, because I made those video installations [with some overlapping material]. But for the feature film she was not really involved in any direct way. The difference, I think, between an art gallery dealer and a producer is that with Barbara, she doesn’t even usually ask, “What is your idea?” Of course, [the means for my video installations are] very limited. It’s not a huge amount of money — maybe $100,000 or $200,000 maximum. But I wouldn’t even write anything down. I would say, “I’m going to make a project,” and normally I would prepare a budget, and she would give me what I needed.

She trusted you and hoped that you would do something good — both artistically and that she could sell. I really admire that element of risk that came from the gallery as funder. The difference with the producers was that they absolutely needed a good script. No funder would fund it based on anybody’s name. It was also much more of a collaboration; producers had to contractually approve the script and the final edit. Maybe because it was also my first-time film, they were very careful about what’s going to come out of this. Although most of the money doesn’t come directly from them, they had to report to funders, and these are relationships that they have to maintain, so it just cannot be a disaster. At the same time, they are taking a risk by working with me, which I really respect, because I have no record of this.

When we worked on the script, we had to meet endlessly with the producers. I worked with a script consultant in Berlin — I literally moved to Berlin for part of this process —to really make sure that they were happy with what we were doing. When we shot the film, they did a lot of test screenings everywhere in Europe to get feedback and make sure that things were being addressed. But at some point toward the end, I felt that I really needed to have them back out a little. I mean, okay, it’s my first film, but at the same time there was a danger that there were too many cooks involved, and that this film would suffer from that. So I asked them to let me take the command of the way that I think it should be as a work by me. And so they backed out.

At the end, what is out there is really a projection of what I wanted as well as really listening to people and their criticisms. Shoja, of course, was a major, part of the construction of the story and this whole development in the editing process. We always had differences, but I think it was good. He tried to challenge me from the cinematic point of view. I also always tried not to forget the artistic point of view while still taking that leap. You’re much more free in the art world. But at the same time, you have a limited audience. The video becomes a commodity, so it cannot get distributed. You hope that it will have exhibitions, and the collectors — if anybody buys it — could share it with the public. But very often it’s almost impossible to even have it on the Internet.

With film, it’s an industry, but you’re not as free. You have to deal with the producers, distributors, festivals, and critics that are going to determine whether people should buy tickets or not. But at the same time, it’s not a commodity the way artwork is. It’s closer to the general public. This is one of the main reasons of my attraction to cinema. I love going to the movies, and I love the fact that I could make a film that could be visited by the average public as opposed to just exclusive art-world people. I respect them a lot, but I wanted to see if I could expand the audience.

On that note, I am still a strong believer that it’s possible to bring art closer to the people, and that you don’t always have to draw this line. Why can’t the general audience also see films layered and loaded with symbolism and meaning, that are beautiful, entertaining, have good music, and are a bit challenging? At the same time, there can be a narrative to follow and think about after they leave. Even Iranian people who are not really used to independent films could possibly relate to this film. They see their own history as well as the music and culture of their country, and they follow the story. I think this is the direction I want to go. How can you blur the boundary between visual art and the language of cinema, yet have it accessible to the general public?

Filmmaker: The film reminds me, in some ways, not only of Buñuel's films but also of Maya Deren’s work.

Neshat: Oh yes; I love her work. It’s like a dream, her work. I was thinking of her yesterday — that when she made those works at that time, it must have been so difficult for people to relate to. Shahrnoush Parsipour explains her interest in magic realism by saying that so many hours a day you are sleeping, and so many hours you are awake, so your dreams are just as valid as the time you are awake. Why are we in denial of our dreams? With Maya Deren — oh my God, it’s to die for.

Filmmaker: I love her circularity, which seems relevant to Women Without Men. Also, watching your film, I was reminded at times of the films of Matthew Barney (also represented by the Gladstone Gallery), which make and reinforce their own mythology. Places become significant through elements of repetition, and the art that is ultimately sold is an artifact of the production of its making. Is that related to what you are doing here?

Neshat: It is, and that is also the way I think of his work. It has its own sense of mythology that you may enter it or not, and just enjoy the sheer beauty and enigma of what he creates. Sometimes it can be frustrating, but that’s the degree that he chose to go to. I chose to go less than that. For me it was the question of being between Julian Schnabel, Steve McQueen, and Matthew Barney. Not as conventional as Julian Schnabel, which is pretty much a straight feature film, or Steve McQueen (as they both have made fantastic films). With Matthew Barney, it’s dense to the point where it’s difficult to follow the narrative and sometimes you make up your own narrative. I really didn’t want to be that enigmatic; that’s his choice, and this is my choice. As my first exercise, I also didn’t want to make a film that was not me, or that departed [from my work] to the degree that people won’t recognize my own signature. Could I transport my visual vocabulary, the way I use choreography, and the way I use the camera into a narrative film? It was about the fusion of cinematic language and my art. I was also worried about the question of making an extended video installation, and I didn’t want that.

Some of the other characters were very worldly and down-to-earth, yet each is a myth on their own. Munis, for instance, is this very magical person and becomes this symbol of the Iranian struggle for democracy. She becomes like Jeanne d’Arc; she becomes the notion of sacrifice. Zarin herself is a type of sacrifice; she’s very saintly, very sacred, and she in a way reminds us of Mary Magdalene with Jesus Christ at the garden. There are all these kind of things playing underneath — some people might get them, some people won’t, but they were in our minds. Whether it’s my photographs, or the videos, or this film, they’re asking for trouble, because of the blending of East and West languages and approaches.

Filmmaker: Do you see yourself as a troublemaker?

Neshat: I think that there’s no real hope for it to be completely understood by one or the other. There will be always loss in translation. I would call this an accented cinema; it’s accented for the Iranians and it’s accented for the Westerners. It’s the same as I am sitting here, I’m dressed with this from here, and this from there, and this from Laos... [Laughs] We are like this kind of multi-influenced pollution of all these influences that it’s not so easy to pinpoint. In a way I wish I was just Schnabel. [Laughs] I was just like from one culture. But it’s impossible, because I’m really caught in between the two, and sometimes they’re a mismatch. The central style of the film, the energy of the film, is this meeting of the ancient and new, the East and West.

Filmmaker: Well, I’m glad that you’re not Schnabel. One is probably enough. [Laughs]

Neshat: Although he makes really good films. Do you see this film, Women Without Men, with an audience in this country? We did pretty well in Europe, but the producer, who is European, thinks that in the U.S. there is no appreciation for this kind of work. I know some people also really hate it. This was the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done, but I have to say that I found it satisfying. We managed to finish it, but there were many, many times that I just wasn’t sure if it was really ever going to come out into the world. Now that it’s starting to get some reaction, I understand that the reaction is very mixed, and remind myself that that’s always been the case with anything I did. Every time you finish a project, there comes a time when you read criticism. You get really discouraged or you feel like a lot of insecurity, and then you realize that that’s exactly what has been happening all along, and you’re still there.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 9:00 AM Comments (0)

RUNNING OUT OF AIR: PENNING MIDNIGHT MOVIE BURIED |
By Melissa Silvestri 

This piece was originally printed in our 2010 Winter issue.

Hell can be many things — being buried alive in the Iraqi desert, for example, or perhaps just watching your screenplay slowly disintegrate on the shelf during never-ending studio “development.” The opposite of most screenwriters, Chris Sparling knows the former but not the latter. He went directly from struggling indie director to successful Hollywood scribe when the screenplay for his horror thriller Buried was picked up, cast with a major up-and-coming star, and thrown before the cameras in just six months. And now it’s receiving its U.S. premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

Sparling made his debut feature, An Uzi at the Alamo, in 2005. He wrote, directed, acted and produced the low-budget comedy about a failed writer pledging to kill himself on his 25th birthday. The film received only minimal distribution and after making a short, Balance, Sparling decided to come up with a high-concept idea that could be shot cheaply and quickly. He remembered news reports about U.S. contractors working in Iraq and Afghanistan building bridges and houses. These aren’t the Blackwater types but “everyday folks, like truck drivers, carpenters, etc.,” Sparling says. “Over the years, many of them have been taken hostage and held for ransom. I considered the possibility of one of these individuals being buried alive and given only a very short amount of time to coordinate their own ransom. And if they’re not successful, they’re left to die right where they are.”

That ghoulish concept, echoing not only the popular Saw series but also George Sluizer’s classic psychological thriller The Vanishing, led to his script for Buried. Ryan Reynolds plays that American contractor working in Iraq and stuck in a coffin with only a cell phone and a lighter.

Although the film’s setting is a metaphorically rich one considering recent American foreign policy, Sparling says he was guided by more practical concerns. “Stealing a page from Hitchcock’s playbook,” he says, “I decided on writing a story that takes place entirely in one small location. In my case, this was inside an old, wooden coffin. From there, I needed a plausible reason why someone would be buried alive.”

To research his tale he interviewed actual contractors who worked in Iraq. “I didn’t want to tell a POV of their specific stories,” Sparlings says. “Rather, I wanted to get a sense of what it was really like over there for them. More than anything, I wanted to portray them, and the difficult job they did, accurately. I felt a certain responsibility to do this, probably the same way a documentary filmmaker would.”

After finishing the script, Sparling made a crucial decision: to step back from his previous role as a writer-director. “I decided to go out with the script as a spec,” he says. Buried was quickly picked up by producer Peter Safran, who attached Spanish director Rodrigo Cortés. “Rodrigo had an incredible vision for the film, and after watching [his Spanish film] The Contestant, I knew immediately that he was exactly the right person to direct the picture. And he was also the only director who wanted to shoot the film as it takes place in the script; that is, keeping the story inside the box for the duration of the film.”

A well-known actor had to be found to bring in investors and interest, and Ryan Reynolds (The Proposal) was quickly chosen as the hero stuck underground. “Ryan, Rodrigo and I are all repped by the same agency, so I imagine that made it a bit easier to get him the script,” says Sparling. Once he had the script, the movie happened the way movies are supposed to happen but rarely do. “We sat down at a restaurant one day in L.A. to discuss the project, and then literally, within weeks, the cameras were rolling.”

Buried was shot on a soundstage in Barcelona over a 21-day period last August. Sparling, who only knew his own no-budget productions, was surprised when he arrived in Spain to visit the shooting. “I was amazed at how big of a production it actually was in spite of the contained nature of the film,” he says. Buried’s charmed life continued when, barely four months after the start of principal photography, it was accepted to Sundance, where it will world premiere in the Midnight section.

Since Buried wrapped in September, Sparling’s been busy. He recently sold a script entitled Mercy to Gold Circle Films to be produced next year. He’ll reunite with Safran on an untitled thriller set to shoot next spring and is currently developing a script titled Falling Slowly, which will see his return to the director’s chair. And prepremiere, Buried saw its industry profile increase when its screenplay was selected in December for the prestigious “Black List” of Hollywood’s most-liked screenplays of 2009.

Of his whirlwind year, Sparling says, “I was really beginning to question if I’d ever catch my proverbial big break. I drifted away from film work and started applying for police jobs and even began the interview process with the A.T.F. It’s not that I intended on throwing in the towel, but I thought I was really going to have to restrategize my approach to... well, to life.” But Sparling is taking his current good fortune in stride. “All told, I guess I’m still waiting to see if this really is my big break,” he laughs. “But even if it turns out not to be, I’m very grateful to have a break of any kind, because, quite honestly, my hands were getting pretty damn tired from all that knocking.”

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 9:00 AM Comments (0)

Friday, January 22, 2010

CATFISH'S HENRY JOOST AND ARIEL SCHULMAN |
By Alicia Van Couvering 

The filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman work together in New York as Supermarche, and are prolific producers of music videos, commercials and feature films (Opus Jazz: NY Export, premiering on PBS this Spring, is their latest.) They also share an office with Schulman’s younger brother, Yaniv. One day Yaniv got an email from an eight-year-old girl who wanted to paint a picture of one of his photographs (a production still from Opus Jazz that had run in the newspaper.) Egged on by his brother and Henry, Yaniv said yes, and instigated an intense correspondence not only with the girl but her entire family. Thousands of emails, Facebook messages, texts, letters and phone calls later, they still hadn’t met in person.

The story is told through screens — when Yaniv and company decide to hit the road, you see the entire route on Google maps via an animated sequence of street view frames; the camera is on the ‘You Are Here’ flag of their rental car’s GPS when they arrive; you read the text messages and click through the profile pictures of the people involved, vividly mirroring the experience of the filmmakers themselves. To say that the story behind Catfish is a crazy one would be a tragic understatement, but to give away the central mystery here would be worse. So suffice to say that this is a documentary about a correspondence that turned into a face-to-face relationship, and something that you have to see to believe. Catfish screens at Sundance in the Spotlight section beginning today.

Filmmaker: The film is definitely better the less you know about it… so what should we not talk about in this interview?

Henry Joost: The ideal viewer is always someone who doesn’t know anything about it going in. Then the experience they have watching the film is most like the experience we went through in making it. But of course that’s very hard to maintain. Were you surprised?

Filmmaker: Completely.

Ariel Schulman: You didn’t know the story at all?

Filmmaker: I knew random things – basically that Nev got involved with a Facebook romance. But nothing can really prepare you for what happens.

Schulman: People are like, “Oh I know what the movie’s about, I’m not gonna be surprised.” Then they’re like…. What? The truth is just stranger.

Filmmaker: So when did you decide to start making the film?

Schulman: Henry and I film our lives constantly. We use our cameras like little sketchbooks, we’re obsessive chroniclers. For me, it’s because of dependency on my visual memory — I have no sense of smell, I have a muted sense of taste, so I don’t want to forget anything I see. On top of that, there are just tiny moments of beauty every day, not to sound like the kid from American Beauty, but wonderful things are happening every day, and I don’t want to miss them. I think it’s generational. I film my brother all the time. His life is just full of crazy stories, and I get a little pang of guilt every time I don’t get one on film. So we just have stacks and stacks of hard drives of little things that have happened to us that haven’t gone anywhere. This one turned into something. If it hadn’t, it would be just another folder in my hard drive of 2008 video clips.

Joost: We have clips of every trip we’ve ever been on, hours of footage of us goofing around in the office, every party we’ve ever gone to, our friends, our families, little things we notice on the street, on the subway, and most of it we’ve never even watched.

Schulman: So last year, when technology had gotten to the point that I just had an HD camera in my pocket at all times, Nev turned to me and said “I just got an email from an 8-year-old girl in Michigan who wants to paint my paintings.’’ The minute the painting arrived I started filming. I didn’t know what the footage was for; I thought we’d make a short film about these two artists meeting on the Internet, maybe. And then he starts falling in love with her older sister Megan. She dances, she loves photography, she loves his photography, she thinks he’s a god, he thinks she’s so sexy, she’s sweet, open minded, and he’s his best self with her. I’ve never seen him talk on the phone with anyone like that, and with her he’d just sit down and talk on the phone with her for hours, for two hours – about nothing, about chickens. He’s not usually like that; he’s a very guarded person. But when he came into contact with this family, he suddenly started opening up. He’s my dear brother, and he says to me, “I’m thinking about moving to Michigan to live with Megan on her horse farm.”

Filmmaker: What was your reaction? What did you think of the relationship early on?

Schulman: Henry and I are too involved in our own lives to spend that much time in a virtual world with people in another part of the country. Nev was going through a time in his life when he wasn’t psyched with his job, he wasn’t 100% satisfied with his life in New York, and he was looking for escape and opportunity. A girl says, “Let’s talk every day and then go live on a horse farm.” He’s like, let me see where this will take me, because right now, it’s better than the alternative.

Joost: There was also a creative element, which is that he was getting beautiful paintings of his photos in the mail and giving her artistic feedback. He was mentoring this little girl who was learning how to paint, and she was opening his eyes and helping him become a better photographer. I think he found it creatively fulfilling that he was mentoring this young artist. She inspired him.

Filmmaker: So defining this strictly as an “online relationship” is a little misleading.

Joost: Yeah, we used to say that this was a movie about an internet relationship, but it really wasn’t just an internet relationship – it was about the paintings that Abby sent and the photos Nev made, and the phone calls and letters and postcards and presents. It was a relationship.

Filmmaker: The beginning of the film, especially, is filled with screens, and instant messages, texts, phone calls, voicemails and close ups of Facebook pages – but you don’t include any exposition about social networking itself. Have you ever faced any pressure to impose greater themes on the movie?

Joost: We considered it, but the larger themes are all there in the action, the story. Since the story is about two people meeting online, early on we knew that the computer, handheld devices, and technology would become a character in the story and needed to become part of the visual language of the movie. When Nev was thinking about moving to Michigan, the first thing he did was go to Google Maps and find out how many miles away it was. He’d search for flights on kayak.com. He’d look at new pictures of Megan on Facebook. Graphic information is all conveyed through computers in the film.

Filmmaker: So when did you know that this could be a feature film?

Schulman: Well at the point when Nev was thinking about moving to Michigan, there was no form: we were still just picking up all the footage we usually get. It was only after we got to Colorado and made a few discoveries that we knew what a journey it was becoming. That’s when we started rolling and didn’t stop.

Filmmaker: Can you talk about being a subject of your own film?

Joost: We didn’t have a choice. We were part of it. We spend almost every waking hour together.

Schulman: …and Nev is my brother, and one of Henry’s best friends, so what was happening to him was happening to us too. I thought he needed to go on this journey as much as we did as filmmakers.

Filmmaker: What’s the most common reaction you’ve had to the movie so far?

Joost: The first question is always, “How is Nev?”

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 2:55 PM Comments (0)

PLEASE GIVE'S NICOLE HOLOFCENER |
By Jason Guerrasio 

This piece was originally printed in our 2010 Winter issue.

In a New York Times piece written last month on the commercial success in 2009 of films aimed at female audiences (Twilight: New Moon, Julie & Julia, The Proposal), critic Manohla Dargis also took note of the relative paucity of female directors in Hollywood. Sure, there’s Kathryn Bigelow, who won many critic’s Best Director awards with The Hurt Locker, and there are Nora Ephron, Ann Fletcher and a few others but, for the most part, wrote Dargis, “Only a handful of female directors picked up their paychecks from one of the six major Hollywood studios and their remaining divisions this year.” Noting that Bigelow took seven years between pictures, she wondered why female directors have had a hard time sustaining careers in this business while their male counterparts are given regular opportunities and are even forgiven for a flop or two.

One female director who has been able to make her films while not being dependent on the whims of studio development executives is Nicole Holofcener. Although Holofcener does Hollywood screenwriting work and directs television (Bored to Death, Sex and the City), as a director she has received little assistance from those major studios. Nonetheless she is returning in 2010, just three years after her Friends with Money, with Please Give, another semi-autobiographical story about modern women and the ways in which female identity is modulated by contemporary social convention. Like all her films, it is funny, but, as always, her humor is laced with a shot of pain, this time the lingering angst that comes from her 40-something character’s recognition of her mortality. And with this fourth film, Holofcener’s project — a series of movies that explore the different issues women face as they age — becomes clearly visible.

In her debut feature Walking and Talking, Holofcener explored female friendship between two very different women in their twenties. In 2001’s Lovely & Amazing she highlighted insecurity and body-image issues. In 2006’s Friends with Money she turned to midlife crisis. Now with Please Give, Holofcener considers, among other things, death as well as ethics. Set against the backdrop of New York City real estate, she asks why materialistic actions can make us feel better while selfless ones sometimes don’t. Catherine Keener stars as Kate, who along with her husband (Oliver Platt) wait patiently for their elderly neighbor to die so they can knock down her walls and expand their apartment. Rebecca Hall (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) plays Rebecca, the granddaughter of the elderly neighbor, who has shut down her social life to care for the ailing woman and who forms an unlikely bond with Kate. Gradually Rebecca comes to terms with her grandmother’s impending death while Kate, who also has a business with her husband selling high-end furniture of the deceased, displaces her guilt by giving money to the homeless — all the while ignoring the needs of her daughter (Spanglish’s Sarah Steele) and not realizing that her husband is having an affair with Rebecca’s sister (Amanda Peet).

Okay, it’s a far cry from The Proposal — even if Sandra Bullock was originally attached to star in Holofcener’s Walking and Talking. Perhaps controlling her own destiny in the independent sphere, continuing to pen her multilayered, tonally tricky ensemble stories, and not doing for-hire romantic comedies is why Holofcener is one of the few female writer-directors in America who has maintained a singular, unmistakable voice throughout her entire filmography.

Holofcener talked to Filmmaker the day Please Give was named to the Premiere section of the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Sony Pictures Classics opens the film in early April.

PLEASE GIVE WRITER-DIRECTOR NICOLE HOLOFCENER (RIGHT). PHOTOS BY PIOTR REDLINKSI.

Filmmaker: Where did the idea for Please Give come from?

Holofcener: The idea of buying an apartment while someone is still living in it and then waiting for them to die was the jumping-off point for this story. A friend of mine had done that and actually became friends with the old woman and went to her funeral. We actually shot in the building that my friend lived in. I know someone else who did the same thing in New York and he’s waiting for the woman to die. I mean, that’s a weird way to say it — it’s not like he’s waiting, but the apartment will become his when she dies. It’s this phenomenon in New York, and it’s a strange relationship, like every time you see this person in the elevator you’re reminded of death. The Catherine Keener character is not a bad person. Amanda Peet’s character puts it best, “You don’t think she would die if she didn’t buy the apartment?”

Filmmaker: On a broader level, was the theme of mortality on your mind when starting the film?

Holofcener: More when the script was done. I didn’t sit down thinking, I want to write a movie about death or homeless people or infidelity or any of those things. I probably would have been paralyzed if I thought I was taking on such a big subject. The characters just slowly evolved and the issues erupted naturally.Whatever is important to me consciously or unconsciously ends up on the page, I guess. I mean I’m always thinking about death. I’m on the other side of half over, so [laughs] what else is there to think about?

Filmmaker: It’s almost like you’ve made one long movie across your whole career. You’re going through the progression of life through your movies.

Holofcener: Definitely, but completely unconsciously. I can’t imagine what I’ll come up with next — an old-age home or something. I’m not ready for that yet. But because what I write is autobiographical I suppose it’s inevitable. As long as I continue to mature in the right direction these things will come up.

Filmmaker: You’ve said in interviews that you don’t constantly write and stow away scripts, so when did you start thinking about this project?

Holofcener: After Friends with Money I got this idea about the apartment and started taking notes. And then at a certain point I don’t want to take notes anymore so it inspires me to start writing, which is a pretty quick [process]. I don’t think about the script; I just start writing and assume it’s going to be terrible, which is kind of a weight off my shoulders. I’m able to be free to have it be messy and bad. This particular script I threw away in the middle because I couldn’t find it. The characters just were not good and it wasn’t ending. It wasn’t falling into place. I kept trying and I finally just put it down. A couple of months later I picked it up and reread it and had some other ideas and finished it.

Filmmaker: Was it the voice of the characters, their interaction with each other or the story that was giving you trouble?

Holofcener: Sometimes you throw ideas at the wall and see if they stick. For some reason I felt someone should be cheating in this movie and I wrote versions where everyone was cheating. I had Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt working in a lotion store, like those stores in Chelsea where they sell four kinds of lotions. They were working there and she was having an affair. It was fun to write it for a while but it just wasn’t right. I just didn’t like it and the store wasn’t right. So I threw them in another store and then when I came up with the furniture store it kind of opened up a whole other world of buying things from dead people and “stuff” and the value of stuff. That added a layer to the script without really even trying. That’s why it’s good sometimes to just let your own unconscious play and not to be afraid of [the script] being really bad at first.

Filmmaker: Does feedback from your actors shape the characters, or do you direct them toward the way they are conceived on the page?

Holofcener: Certain characters I’m more in the dark about than others. Like in Friends with Money there were one or two characters that I didn’t know as well as the others. But I always want feedback from the actors as long as it’s within reason. If I start to wonder why they took the part, then it’s too much. Sometimes an actor will say, “Why am I saying this?” And I literally don’t know the answer — I just typed it out. [Laughs] Maybe there’s a reason and maybe there isn’t and usually at this point an actor will trust me and will say the words. But if it doesn’t work we’ll come up with something else.

Filmmaker: Keener’s character this time around seems a bit more sympathetic than in your previous films. Was that intentional?

Holofcener: Yes, she said, “Make me likable.” [Laughs] No, it was not conscious. You do sympathize with her character, but she’s kind of a boob. Really bumbling. I didn’t really think this was her chance to be lovable, but also I just don’t think like that.

Filmmaker: Were Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt and Rebecca Hall people you thought of while you were writing?

Holofcener: When I was writing it I pictured Oliver. I had him and a couple of actors in mind and he stuck in my head the most. Luckily he was available. And Rebecca, I didn’t know who she was, but Jeanne McCarthy, our casting director, said I should meet her, and she was lovely. Vicky Cristina Barcelona had just come out, and I rented Starter for Ten and she’s in that too, and I thought she was perfect. I thought she was a little too beautiful for the part, but hey, it’s a movie. [Laughs] I had to work hard to get her to look pretty plain. She didn’t read for it or anything, I think I ran into her on the street, in fact, and I said I want you to play the part and everyone was mad at me because I didn’t have permission to offer it to her yet. [Laughs] Amanda, I’ve wanted to work with her for a long time.

Filmmaker: You started your movies while living in New York, but now you live in L.A. Had you thought of setting this movie there instead?

Holofcener: New York was always the setting. It’s the only place I know in terms of this kind of real estate thing happening. As I was writing it I kept thinking, “I have to set this somewhere else because I didn’t want to leave my kids back in L.A.” But you just can’t set this kind of story anywhere else. I mean you couldn’t buy this story in somewhere like Long Beach. [Laughs] And there were so many creative elements, like the narrow elevator and their front doors right next to each other, that I couldn’t concoct anywhere else.

Filmmaker: So was it strange to come back and shoot in New York, which you hadn’t done since Walking and Talking in 1995?

Holofcener: It’s just life. Once you have kids you’re going to stick around where they are. I consciously wrote Lovely & Amazing and Friends with Money to take place in L.A. because I didn’t want to go anywhere. But now that my kids are older I think I want to have something take place in the Caribbean or some place real nice.

Filmmaker: Despite all the talk about how hard it is to get a movie made, you were lucky to have Sony Classics come in and finance the film.

Holofcener: Yeah. It was scary, though — I got in under the wire, right before the economy collapsed. I wasn’t sure if the movie was going to get made at all. They were kind of anxious about taking it on. I think they only saw its darkness.

Filmmaker: I would think that the kinds of films you make — character based, with complicated tones — would be the ones most affected by the industry’s current money woes. Do you think you’re going to be able to continue making these sorts of films?

Holofcener: I don’t know, but I am a little worried. Especially because it seems the only way to get a movie made, even a $3 to $5 million one, is you have to have more than one really big star, which is completely wrong for a small indie movie. So I’m definitely concerned. I hope that I can creatively go with the flow and make a living and continue directing. Believe me, I’m not trying to not make a really financially successful movie.

Filmmaker: What projects are upcoming?

Holofcener: I’ve adapted this book, Every Secret Thing [a novel by Laura Lippman], and we’re going to try to get money for that. It will be nothing like my other films. It’s a thriller, it has death, suspense, and I don’t think it’s going to be easy to make either. It’s kind of a Mystic River type of thing. The leads are female so that’s a whole different ballgame I guess, unless I get it to three big-name female stars who can get the movie financed but might not necessarily be right for the part. We’ll see.

Filmmaker: Have you made compromises to get your films made?

Holofcener: Absolutely. But I haven’t yet had to compromise in a way that I’ve lost sleep over. I haven’t felt like I’ve sold my soul. Making movies is so difficult that one is making compromises constantly, like casting someone who isn’t my ideal choice. But then that person turns out to be fantastic so you forget the compromise. Or choosing one location over another and then later you forget that you even had that other location. But I don’t think that I would, at least this point in my life, start compromising to the point where it feels really bad. Not yet.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 9:00 AM Comments (0)

Thursday, January 21, 2010

MY PERESTROIKA'S ROBIN HESSMAN |
By Alicia Van Couvering 

Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika is a documentary that shows modern-day Russia from the inside out. Five Russian adults reveal their personal histories through interviews and home movies, talking us through their childhood in school together during the die-hard communist Brezhnev years of the 1970s, through Gorbachev, the collapse of the USSR, and, finally, the coups, oligarchs and wealth transfers that are shaping Russia today. Borya and Lyuba, a married couple, teach history at School #57, which their teenage son also attends, and the film begins in their modest apartment, the same one Borya grew up in. Olga, the prettiest girl in school, marvels when she finds out that the life she leads — with food on the table and a lake house to spend the summers — is technically below the poverty line. Andrei, the only one who has managed to move out of his parents house and into a luxury condo, opens his 17th luxury men’s clothing store during the course of the film. Lyuba hides her face remembering how she used to salute the television when the national anthem played; Ruslan shows us music videos from the punk band he formed in the 1980’s.

What is most remarkable about My Perestroika are not the poignant and surprising revelations about life in Russia, but the extreme level of intimacy that Hessman maintains in each interview. Though the majority of these are sit-down, single camera interviews, they have the candor and spontaneity of verite footage. Her insight into the subject (and fluent Russian) stemmed from a fascination with the Soviet Union since grade school and almost ten years living in the country. Hessman set out to make the film in three months and ended up filming for five years, but one thing she knew from the beginning is that no history has a single truth, and even a million voices couldn’t tell the whole story.

Filmmaker: How was the process of making this film different from how you imagined it would be?

Hessman: It definitely took longer than I expected — I look back at my early prospectus which has all these confident assertions about how we were going to shoot for three months, have a co-production at this time, and the we’ll be financed, and then we’ll premiere. Of course, I shot for five years, and was raising money through the whole process. We found most of our financing in Europe, whereas I thought it would all be U.S. investment.

Filmmaker: You can’t predict the future just by writing a prospectus, I guess.

Hessman: One of the greatest wisdoms I took away from living for so long in Russia had to do with exactly that, actually. Here’s the metaphor: if life is an ocean, the general American ethos is, we’re in our own little motorboat, and we decide where we’re going to go, and then we go there. That’s how I raised: pick a goal, and go for it, and don’t let anything take you off course. Russians on the other hand, they’re in a sailboat, so if life takes them left, they go left. Something you learn very quickly trying to do business there is that making plans in Russia involves a lot of conversations like, “Well I don’t know if I can make it next Tuesday, because who knows what’s going to happen in our lives tomorrow? Let’s talk on Tuesday if you want to do it on Tuesday.” Although even that is changing rapidly.

Filmmaker: One thing that really struck me was the stories in your film, and the way these people's conceptions of who they were and what they wanted changed so drastically as they grew older. Whereas a U.S. education is all about teaching kids to identify their own particular brand of specialness, your subjects were strict and passionate conformists as children, and they talk about it being a blissfully happy time.

Hessman: Right, one of the things about being a kid in the USSR was that you were not supposed to stick out; you had to conform. They told me stories of the class collectively admonishing one student because his tie wasn’t straight. But there are also really positive aspects of [socialist culture] that I think people miss in some ways. For example, the Meyerson’s students go to Greece every year. All of the parents and alumni pool their money to make sure every child can go – some give more money, some give less. Whereas I know that in the US, if a parent can’t afford a trip, that child just stays home. I do wonder if the next generation of Russian parents will be so comfortable thinking of their child’s class as a collective, because people have to work much harder and for much longer hours today to support their family and that will probably make them less inclined to give to the community. These contradictions and pluses and minuses are what I wanted to show with the film.

Filmmaker: Would you say that they’ve developed a different sense of themselves through their politics as well?

Hessman: When these people were growing up, there was a sense that the State and its politics existed on another level of life, so every day people just focused on their daily lives. You can’t affect the State, so why get involved in it or even think about it very much? So people focused on their friends, music, literature, family; everyone had extensive hobbies like mountain climbing and photography. Then under Gorbachev, the personal and the political began to intersect. There was a reason to get engaged, and a lot of people became very [politically active.] Today, I think people have swung back to feeling like there’s no use getting involved in politics, and everyone is again focused on their own life and their own family. The difference is that now it is a lot harder to make a living, and you have to spend a lot more time at work, so there isn’t any time for the friends and the literature and the music. You’re just trying to do the best you can, and feed your family.

Filmmaker: How did you arrive at the format of the film, which is interview-based and without narration? What were some of the challenges of that structure?

Hessman: Between these five people there are so many different experiences and opinions about what happened; having a narrator would make one point of view legitimate and not another. It would give the impression that there’s an objective truth about what happened and how people feel about it, and there just isn’t one. We also had the Soviet archival footage to get ideas across, the subject’s home movies, and of course the interviews themselves. The home movies to me are incredibly important, because they were made with no agenda other than to record daily life for future generations. I wanted to bring the viewer into the private visual world of the 1970’s and 80’s. One problem we had with the archival footage was that a lot of it is black and white, even from the 1990’s. American viewers thought it was from World War II so sometimes we had to put some identifying dates.

Filmmaker: How did you figure out how much exposition was needed, because I’m sure every viewer’s knowledge of the country is so different?

Hessman: It’s definitely a careful balance — enough information that people wouldn’t be lost, but to make sure the history didn’t overshadow the characters. The Sundance Lab helped a lot, helped identify what the individual story arcs of each of the characters were. And we also played a lot with the lower third of the screen, identifying footage. We’d have a clip of kids with gas masks on and it would say, “Teen Civil Defense Training, Early 1980s.” But as the film developed, I felt that all the editorial impositions wasn’t helping. You didn’t need to know that this was civil defense training, it’s more important to just see and hear what was going on around them at that point in their lives.

Filmmaker: Can you talk about your approach to interviewing?

Hessman: Very early on I realized that I wouldn’t be able to use another camera person. For one thing, the apartments we were shooting in were just too small to fit in more than one person. But much more than that, the atmosphere in the room completely changed when I wasn’t alone with [the subjects.] I spoke Russian, I had lived there, so there was a shared history and understanding that a journalist visiting for two weeks could never have. Because when I moved to Russia, all the friends I made were my age, college age, so I had heard so much about what their childhoods had been like that I knew the books, I could sing the songs, so we had a lot of mutual understanding. But the most important thing was time. I’m so happy that things didn’t go as quickly as my first prospectus said it would; I spent five years filming these people, and if I had only filmed them for three months, I can’t imagine the interviews would be as warm and as rich as they are. [Two of the subjects] were historians, so they were used to examining all of this, although maybe not from the perspective of personal anecdotes. Russians can sit in the kitchen and talk about the meaning of life until three in the morning, so I don’t think it was a difficult experience for them to talk about this stuff, but I don’t think anyone had ever asked them these questions.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 11:45 PM Comments (0)

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

SUNDANCE DIRECTOR JOHN COOPER TALKS 2010 FEST & BEYOND |
By Scott Macaulay 

When filmmakers heard that the Sundance Film Festival’s longstanding Director, Geoffrey Gilmore, was leaving, they wondered if his departure would signify a major change in direction at an institution that more than any other has defined the world of American independent film. When, a couple of weeks later, John Cooper, Sundance’s Director of Programming, was elevated to the Director position, they breathed a sigh of relief. As Holly Willis wrote in Filmmaker in 2006 about the 20-year veteran of the festival, “Funny, self-deprecating and entirely approachable, Cooper is known to thousands of American filmmakers as the guy who calls with really excellent news. For the festival, he’s integral, the armature that supports everything.”

But Cooper’s (and he is always known by just his last name) ascension has not meant business as usual in Park City and at the festival’s offices in Santa Monica, California. As he discusses below, Cooper is eager to put his own stamp on the festival. “This is the renewed rebellion. This is Sundance reminded,” proclaims this year’s program book, and in our talk Cooper is eager to align the festival not just with the acquisitions departments of the mini-majors but directly with the hustling DIY filmmakers struggling to execute their own more modest distribution strategies. We talked by phone a few days before the premiere of this year’s festival.

Filmmaker: So, you’ve been at Sundance for 20 years, but now you are the Director. How does it feel? What’s different now?

Cooper: Well, I can move fast, and that feels good. When we thought about putting in the new section for low-and-no-budget films, I thought, I can just do this. I can just make this happen. Of course, I still had to check with the administrative staff to make sure we could get it done. You know, behind us programmers there is an army who sets up the theaters and does all of that stuff.

Filmmaker: How about in terms of individual film selections? You have a team of programmers, and I’m not sure how it worked before, but do you have a different relationship to the individual films?

Cooper: [In the past there have been] films that split both audiences and programming teams, like Old Joy. I remember arguing for it — I was not going to give up [on having it in the festival]. It didn’t make it into the Dramatic Competition, but it should have. I have the power now to fine tune the placement of those films. I have veto power and final decision power. So I have been looking back and rethinking decisions I would have made [if I had been in this position]. Most of it has been very fun.

Filmmaker: How has the day-to-day aspect of the job changed for you? And how did you prepare for it?

Cooper: I decided that stress in general was overrated, and that this should be a fun experience. But what I really had to do in terms of structure was, I had to listen more to my staff. My staff is seasoned, and I’m glad I didn’t lose any of them. I am sitting in a good position [because my staff and I] know each other well. I moved, though, from a position of being the most seasoned person in the room with a voice to the other side where I wanted to hear what they had to say. Where was their passion around a film? What films did they love? “It’s important” – those are key words that mean [the programmers] didn’t love it. There are enough films that we do love, so let’s find those first. We still have to find 120 films in the end, but I want them to be films that have true passion behind them. Films that also have an audience — there might be a smaller audience, but there is an audience.

Filmmaker: What were the thoughts and ideas that guided you in terms of the changes you have implemented?

Cooper: My own interpretation of what the film community needs. [When I got the job] — I talked to a lot of people and asked, “What do you want from us?” And not just filmmakers. I talked to a lot of press people, publicists, some friends, and even our own audiences. I asked people to email and tell me whatever they wanted to about the festival, and I got 200 emails, some of them long and passionate. The heart of all of them was: “Please remain pure; please stay the course. Don’t blow it.” You realize that people are invested in this [festival]. They want to believe that we are mission-driven and ethical in our selection process, which we are. Yes, we are fickle, but we are also ethical. People are watching, after that big wave of scared responsibility, I felt a really nice feeling of support. I also knew that I wanted to do one thing that would capture the imagination that would be bigger and flashier, and that’s how the Sundance Film Festival USA came about. We’re doing it very brick and mortar, going out to eight cities [with films following their Sundance premieres], working with art houses and having fun with it.

Filmmaker: Tell me about the filmmakers participating in the Sundance Film Festival USA program. Did they have to be convinced to hit the road with their films instead of staying in Park City?

Cooper: It took explaining, and the filmmakers had to think about what it would mean to their lives to be leaving Sundance on Thursday, the 28th, in the middle of winter, and going to Madison, Ann Arbor, or Chicago. But independent filmmakers are at their core so resilient. The first eight filmmakers we asked said they would do it. I didn’t expect to get as many premieres in the program. The program was conceived so that, in theory, a Competition film could leave and come back, but it’s hard to find three days when [Sundance filmmakers] are not doing anything at the festival. Our filmmakers work hard.

Filmmaker: Who are some of the filmmakers taking part in the program?

Cooper: A lot of these films are premiering the first half the festival. There are filmmakers doing it like Jay and Mark Duplasse [Cyrus], who are in it for the fun of it. There’s John Wells [The Company Man]. There’s HOWL and also Daddy Longlegs, which is now doing video-on-demand after the festival too. Daddy Longlegs is directed by the Safdies, and they are going home to Brooklyn [to screen their film at BAM]. Philip Seymour Hoffman happens to be starring in a play in Chicago, so he can’t stay at the festival anyway. [His film, Jack Goes Boating, will screen at the Music Box Theatre]. But we’re experimenting all over the place at this festival in terms of alternative distribution. Bass Ackwards and One Too Many Mornings are going [into distribution] right from the festival. I think back to [Ballast director] Lance Hammer and one thing he kept saying at Sundance — that he wished he could have capitalized more on the energy coming out of the festival.

Filmmaker: So there may be a different narrative coming out of this year’s festival than the usual story of the big first weekend sale?

Cooper: I hope some great new mythology comes out of this. We hope these things become a phenomenon. I want filmmakers to make their money back and to continue to make films, because that’s what sustains what I do.

Filmmaker: Do you think filmmakers traveling to Sundance have reconciled themselves with the different state of the industry today?

Cooper: I have noticed a shift. There are more filmmakers now who just want to sustain their careers. They are clear about not getting the big break. They want to make movies. It used to be, “Get the deal, get set up at a studio.”

Filmmaker: To be honest, I thought there would be more filmmakers using Sundance as a DIY launch platform this year.

Cooper: It’s hard. There is so much they have to learn, such a learning curve. It was the only films that were finished in time. I didn’t know if any of them would have the nerve to do it this year.

Filmmaker: Do you think this will be the beginning of a trend?

Cooper: I think Sundance could get almost half and half — half films going out to the marketplace and half bigger. I am not afraid to have that split. I told my staff, “We are not going to program for commercial possibility, even in alternative platforms. Just find the most creative and excellent filmmakers, and the rest will sort itself out.” Films that are really good land places, although they don’t always make money.

Filmmaker: What would you tell our readers specifically to look out for at this year’s festival?

Cooper: Make sure you check out the NEXT section. There’s a real passion and vitality there. Jack Goes Boating is such a wonderful occurrence. Philip Seymour Hoffman directed, and he’s in it, and it comes from a play he did. It has all the credentials but then it hits its mark. He did an amazing job. And I love The Company Man, directed by John Wells. I like when people who have another career [make features]. John is a TV producer, but he has real filmmaking passion, and his is not a flashy film. The new Spotlight section is for films we love. They are programmed for no other reason. I love I Am Love and 8: The Mormon Proposition, which I found so interesting that it came out so quickly. I expected it to be more hyped-out, flashy, and built around argument and passion, but the research that went into it is amazing. And then there is Blue Valentine, HOWL, and Hesher, which is a really wonderful film. Douchebag — that could have played in the NEXT section. It’s a nearly perfect film for its budget.

Filmmaker: You say Douchebag could have played in NEXT. Why establish a section devoted to low-to-no-budget films when those films could play in other sections and not be defined there by their budgets?

Cooper: We found in the past that films like these were being shoehorned into other programs, like New Frontier or Midnight even though they weren’t, for example, midnight films, or cult-y or genre films. There was a lot of play this year between films in the Competition and NEXT, but we felt we had to carve out a section this year [for these films specifically] and hold onto it. We wanted to find six to eight films in this no-to-low budget range. We had to give this part of our community the respect it deserves. So we held eight slots.

Filmmaker: So is what links these films their budgets, or do they represent some kind of specific aesthetic?

Cooper: I think it’s an aesthetic too. These films are being conceived of as low budget, but they have an energy that is addictive. I feel it, and when I meet the filmmakers, I like their energy. I want them at the festival. They feel a little renegade to me. I would hope that if a [future] John Waters walks into the door that I could recognize him and say, “You deserve a place here.”

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 1:40 AM Comments (0)

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

PROGRAM DIRECTOR TREVOR GROTH INTRODUCES US TO NEXT |
By Alicia Van Couvering 

One of the biggest premieres at Sundance this year doesn’t involve a star-studded premiere party or the unspooling of a glossy 35mm print: it’s an entirely new section of programming: <=>, pronounced “Next” by those not brave enough to type or say the symbol. Director of programming Trevor Groth has been involved with the festival for 25 years, and points out that the symbol actually means “Less Than Equals Greater Than,” which alludes to the fact that all Next films were made for very small budgets — at least under $500,000 but in most cases much, much less than that.

Based on description alone, the eight films in the section seem to be variations on the beloved themes of American independent film: a road movie, a sex comedy, an examination of a little-known subculture, an outcast boy gets unlikely girl. Films just like them, with equally small budgets, are programmed in Competition and Spotlight; films just like them with multi-million dollar budgets will have their days in the Park City sun as well. So what is a Next film?

Below, Groth explains all the reasoning behind the symbol, and says that the point isn’t exactly to create a special “low budget” section, but rather to highlight the complex achievements of filmmakers pursuing personal, human stories outside of what has, in the 25 years of the festival, become a new institutional film system, the one populated by movie stars and studios that still calls itself “Independent Film.” Advancements in digital format and a rising tide of new distribution possibilities make the delineation a timely new line in the Sundance sand.




Filmmaker: What’s the story behind the creation of this new section?

Groth: There were a lot of factors – it started with the submissions we received, which had grown so much not just in quantity but also in quality. Our decisions were getting much more difficult because the films being submitted were getting better and better. A lot of the films making it in were films that we loved, but that also tended to have a higher profile in terms of name talent and so on. We always kept some space for smaller films, but they tended not to get the attention they deserved when competing with these bigger names that got all the press. So we felt that by giving these films their own section, they might collectively get more attention than they would standing alone alongside the other features. We want to represent with this selection of films a spectrum of what’s happening in this part of the industry right now. There are certainly low-budget films in Competition that we considered for Next; for us, when a film went into the Next section, it wasn’t 2nd place – especially this first year, I think these films are going to get even more attention by being in Next than they would if they were in Competition.

Filmmaker: It’s a tricky thing, singling films out based on their budget, because the budget of a film dictates its casting, the coverage, the format — everything. It might be hard for these films to be judged alongside films that had much greater resources. But likewise I don’t feel like films should be excused for their faults because of their lack of money, or get a break from the audience because they didn’t have all the money they needed.

Groth: That’s right, [the film] has to work, and we truly feel that all these films work despite their limited resources to tell their stories. We found the films [for this section] that we thought really represent the ‘less than equals greater than’ spirit. We don’t want the audience to forgive these films for what they don’t have. We want people to react without thinking what the budget was.

Filmmaker: What do they share besides budget?

Groth: Along the budget lines, people have asked, you know, what’s the [cut-off budget] number, and we didn’t have a hard number. In general, we said that anything under $500,000 could be considered for this section. That being said however, I think the films making it into this section are much lower than that. They all come from very different places and very different voices, but I do think they share similar qualities. They are all focused on the writing, they are all sharply conceived and written, and they’re all capturing a specific aesthetic with what limited resources they have to work with.

Filmmaker: They do all seem to be narrative and character-driven, not playing rough with format or pushing formal boundaries in major ways.

Groth: The films that are pushing boundaries are what New Frontiers is all about. We’d noticed in that last few years that there were a lot of films going into New Frontiers that weren’t necessarily formally experimental or avant-garde in any specific way, but that had this spirit of utilizing minimal resources and being inventive and creative with storytelling. So that’s another reason that we wanted to create Next, to showcase films that weren’t necessarily breaking any rules about aesthetic and story but were just very well-executed and funny — character-driven films that we think work regardless of budget.

Filmmaker: In terms of the sales landscape, the prevailing wisdom is that filmmakers should not come into the festival expecting that magical six-figure deal that makes their dreams come true. How does this section fit into these new business realities?

Groth: Definitely, we wanted to reflect what was happening in the industry. The old track of, “OK we’re going to make this film, come to Sundance and sell it to a distributor,” that really only happens for a small percentage of films these days. The ones that it does happen to are ones that have more obviously marketable components to them. What I love about the films in the Next section is that they’re not coming in with that dream. If you look at Bass Ackwards and One Too Many Mornings, they’re coming in with a complete plan for distribution. They’re utilizing the attention that they’re going to get by being in Sundance to get out there as widely and as quickly as they can. I think that is going to happen more and more in the future, and this is the year it’s breaking out. People are shifting their agendas as to what the path of their film can be. We’re going to pay very close attention to those specific examples of what the new experience of taking a film to Sundance is going to be.

Filmmaker: I wonder how it’s going to play out, because some of these films don’t seem particularly internet-friendly, or have the obviously marketable elements you’re referring to.

Groth: One thing I’m hoping is that film festivals aren’t put off by a film that’s trying to distribute itself right away, via DVD’s and downloads and other platforms. Film Festivals are the film’s theatrical distribution in this model, and hopefully there’s going to be a shift [towards accepting that.] It’s like what happened with short films a few years ago, when the big festivals refused to show short films that had played online — Sundance was one of the first to break that rule. The same thing will happen with how people think about [films that are] accessible in VOD or online — they are still worth showing theatrically at a festival. We’re doing a thing this year with the Sundance channel where three films (Daddy Longlegs, 7 Days and Shock Doctrine) will be available for VOD during the festival. A film like 7 Days would have had some options to do other things [with its distribution] because it’s a genre film, but they’re willing to roll the dice by doing VOD right out of the gate, which is great. During the 10 days of the festival is when most of these films will have the most eyes on them, so why not utilize that momentum to reach as broad an audience as possible? Whatever we can do to connect films with audiences is a positive thing.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 5:02 PM Comments (0)

WHEN DOES PLAN B BECOME PLAN A? |
By Anthony Kaufman 

This is Anthony Kaufman's Industry Beat column from our 2010 Winter issue.


Old distribution models die hard.

Everyone knows about the passing of that once-established indie film paradigm: Make a movie, show it at a festival, sell it to a distributor, get it booked in theaters, watch it find a home on DVD and cable — and then somewhere down the line, after all the release expenses are recovered, maybe even rake in a few bucks.

And yet, when talking to filmmakers and sales reps heading into this year’s Sundance, it’s shocking how few are following new distribution strategies.

Submarine Entertainment’s Josh Braun says that a few of the filmmakers he’s repping have discussed some form of alternative path. “However,” he explains, “we are going on the Sundance ride to see how things unfold. Last year we had a bidding war and sold Humpday during Sundance, and I don’t think those days are gone yet. Certain movies will still trigger strong interest from distributors who don’t want to risk losing a great film.”

This might come as a surprise from Braun, who helped orchestrate the hugely successful DIY release for Valentino: The Last Emperor. After distribution offers were deemed inadequate following its Toronto fest ’08 premiere, the team eventually formed a partnership with Truly Indie and Vitagraph Films, and the self-styled release went onto become one of 2009’s highest-grossing docs. But Braun says that was a particular case of the filmmakers’ eagerness to experiment. “For certain films, it’s a great opportunity,” he says, further noting that films, particularly documentaries with a TV partner already in place, can take advantage of the theatrical window between a festival premiere and broadcast date.

Citing the “broken down” theatrical distribution market, Cinetic Media’s Digital Rights guru Matt Dentler believes there is a greater willingness now among filmmakers to embrace alternative distrib routes. “For the right film, which didn’t cost a ton of money and where there’s a specific audience, you can use the momentum of a festival and [with digital distribution] tap into people around the country who are hearing about the film and don’t have a way to see it,” he says. Dentler adds that Cinetic’s strategy to self-release Chris Smith’s Collapse on VOD and theaters shortly after its Toronto ’09 premiere was always the plan for the film. But it’s too soon to determine whether the strategy paid off. While the film attracted an impressive amount of publicity, by publication it has only grossed $50,000.

Regardless, the fact is most reps and filmmakers won’t go on record with non-conventional distribution plans because both still want to attract big buyers. Filmmakers want the distribution and marketing muscle a conventional distributor can provide, and most reps work off commissions, incentivizing them to aim first for large advances and quick sales. For all the talk of new models, few filmmakers want to give up on the old dream. As Dentler says, “When filmmakers get into Sundance, their distribution expectations skyrocket, even in this market.”

So when does reality set in?

For Michael Mohan, writer-director of One Too Many Mornings, playing in Sundance’s new low-budget Next section, the cruel truths of the sales climate hit home while he was making his movie. “We were looking at other films of similar scale; half were coming out, half weren’t, so we thought. ‘What’s the most responsible thing to do?’”

He and his team soon decided it made the most sense to make their indie comedy available for sale off their Web site (onetoomanymornings.com) through download and DVD immediately after the movie’s Sundance premiere. They enlisted the help of TopSpin Media, a technology and marketing firm that has previously helped music acts reach their audiences directly through the Web.


One Too Many Mornings (pictured right) producer Anthony Deptula acknowledges that the film’s low budget allowed them to try a more “hybrid” approach. “If you have a $400,000 or $600,000 movie, you can’t really mess around,” he admits. But with a low-budget, low-stakes production, Mohan and Deptula are motivated just as much by a financial incentive as a creative one. “Our goal is not to sell the film,” says Mohan, “but get it seen by as many people as possible.”

Likewise, Thomas Woodrow, producer of Sundance Next selection Bass Ackwards (pictured above), was fed up with the traditional distribution model — which he sardonically calls “stealing” (“a company taking a movie and then paying their bills by selling it and giving nothing back to the filmmaker,” he explains). Instead the Bass Ackwards filmmakers are planning “to treat Sundance itself as the theatrical campaign,” says Woodrow. Partnering with former New Line exec Marion Koltai-Levine’s Zipline Entertainment and indie distributor New Video, Woodrow hopes to get the film out “on every single platform as we can — DVD, iTunes, Amazon, Netflix, and maybe even in theaters. When someone asks, ‘How can I see your movie?’ The answer will be ‘anyway you want.’ When? February 1.”

While Mohan and Woodrow are embracing the future, diving headlong into post-Sundance digitally-driven launches, many filmmakers still want to emphasize a theatrical release as their first line of fire, with or without an established distributor. As Vanessa Hope, a producer of the Sundance competition picture The Imperialists are Still Alive!, states, “If we end up needing to go directly to the theater chains ourselves in order to get the film out there, we will do it.” She believes the Internet is key to the film’s promotion, but she feels that Imperialists is akin to indies from the ’60s and ’70s “that audiences above 25 years old will want to experience in theaters.”

Like many producers and filmmakers heading into Sundance, Hope is already strategizing for public consumption no matter what happens in Park City: getting that Facebook page polished, seeking out celebrity endorsements and cultivating fans online. But she sums up the aims of many by saying, “Plan A is a buyer.”

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 5:01 PM Comments (1)