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VIEWING ZEITGEISTS AND THE BEST U.S. INDIES OF THE DECADE | By Jason Sanders

2009-12-31T12:13:00.008-05:00

To try to recall your favorite films from an entire decade (and then to limit them to only ten titles) is to immediately set yourself up for uncertainty and ridicule: first off because it's hard enough to remember what you saw ten days ago, much less ten years ago, and secondly because to limit the list to ten is to leave hundreds of excellent films out, titles that you'll undoubtedly get bludgeoned to death with through later feedback (“You blithering idiot~pretentious snob~Hollywood tool! How could you leave out Judd Apatow~Jean-Luc Godard~Abbas Kiarostami~McG,” read the heated responses to already posted lists). To create a list of a “the best” of a year (or a decade) is to confront what makes a person “love” a film in general: sometimes your response depends not just on personal taste, but timing, audience, and mood; you may have seen The Dark Knight or There Will Be Blood with a pounding headache and a group of incessant popcorn munchers to your left; you could have watched Beau Travail and Nobody Knows in a tiny overheated multiplex with a seven-foot-tall Dutchman blocking the subtitles in front of you, or you could have just been getting over some personal tragedy when, suddenly, you saw a film that made it all—life, love, friendship, whatever—make perfect sense.

Because of these random accidents of viewing, any list is bound to be personal; some of the following films were chosen because they affected the decade’s zeitgeist, others chosen because they just affected mine. Some are probably not in a top-ten for box-office, or even artistic merit; instead, they are ones that affected me the most with their intelligence/craft/humour/etc, or the ones that, due to whatever reasons of mood and life, moved me beyond belief.

Most interesting trend of the 2000’s: the return of regional styles of filmmaking to independent American cinema. Starting in 2000 with George Washington, with its decaying Southern setting and just-as-precise Southern aesthetic and mood, American film moved away from its “Anywhere, USA” style and instead rooted itself in a particular, evocative setting. Films like George Washington and All the Real Girls, Shotgun Stories, Ballast, Cinnamon, Old Joy and Wendy & Lucy defined regions of the United States usually ignored by commercial cinema, while titles like Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, Prince of Broadway and Take Out, Medicine for Melancholy, and Inbetween Days explored parts of “the big city” previously discarded.

Also, some questions about the other trends of the 2000’s:

1. Has blogging made it easier for individuals to get their voices and opinions heard about film, or has it made it paradoxically even more difficult, due to the sheer volume and periodic toxicity of such sites? Does the cream rise to the top, or only the screamers?

2. Seth Rogen and Will Ferrell are the screen emblems of the Bush years. Discuss.

3. Will the mumblecore movement last into the next decade, and how will it be remembered? Or should it be?

4. At the dawn of 1999 independent filmmakers had only one choice: to get their films into a festival (preferably Sundance), then hope it was either selected by other festivals or even picked up for “limited release,” (preferably by a larger indie distributor), and pray that it could later make a DVD release. At the end of 2009, is this the preferred route of discovery, or has online availability or self-distributed DVD deals become the alternative? And at the end of 2019, will any of these options be available?

5. Speaking of Sundance, what was in 1999 the best spotlight of American independent film has now become, arguably, the best place to see Paris Hilton in line buying perfume for the ski run. Its definition of “independent film” became “anything under $100 million, with more talking than action” and it became arguably overrun with whatever warmed-over family melodrama or this-is-our-quirky-town comedy that it could churn out.

Top Independents:

1. George Washington (pictured above), dir. David Gordon Greene, 2000. Coming out of nowhere in 2000, David Gordon Greene's debut re-introduced a specific regional aesthetic into what had become an “Anywhere, USA” approach to American indies. It also reminded American filmmakers that it was alright to fill the screen not with shot-reverse-shots of people talking constantly, or even with people, but with images of the environment and the surroundings that made up their lives (Tim Orr’s cinematography made the film the best-looking of this decade as well.) A film of the decaying American south, created with the pacing and eye of a Japanese master.

2. Funny Ha Ha, dir. Andrew Bujalski, 2002. With a battered 16mm camera and some friends, Andrew Bujalski's deceptively casual debut followed Marnie, a young woman with nothing much to do, and all the time in the world to not do it in. With its observational shoulder-cam realism and uncanny feel for the flow (or lack thereof) of contemporary youth, it touchingly unveiled the endless chatter and awkward intimacies of a new generation of the over-educated and under-employed, and bore far more resemblence to Linklater’s 90’s favorite Slacker than what it later became known for spawning, a “mumblecore” movement that shared its constant dialogue and monotonously white casting net, but often lacked its wit, pacing, and heart.

3. 10 Skies/13 Lakes, dir. James Benning, 2004. These two experimental features by legendary filmmaker James Benning (father of riot grrrl/Pixelvision icon Sadie) were as self-explanatory as their titles: images of 10 skies, or 13 lakes, but within them lay a beauty and a peace (and a true sense of life) rarely seen onscreen. To say that “anyone could film this stuff” is to miss the point; anyone could try, but very few do, and none have succeeded as Benning has in creating a work that echoes the nature, life, and awe of the American landscape.

4. Man Push Cart (2005) & Chop Shop (2007), dir. Rahmin Bahrani. Many films took place in New York City during the past decade, but few captured its energy, pace, and the struggle of its citizens to survive than these two vibrant films by Ramin Bahrani. These works, along with Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway, will define NYC in 2000’s the same way that Taxi Driver defines our image of NYC in the ‘70s.

And then, in alphabetical order…
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Better Luck Tomorrow, dir. Justin Lin, 2002. It’s easy to forget how game-changing this Asian American indie was when it debuted in 2002; its blend of valedictorians-gone-awry, suburban tract-home rebellion, and high school Tarantino’isms, added to a fierce declaration of Asian American identity, made even MTV sit up and pay attention (the company distributed the film), and served notice that Asian American filmmaking (and filmmakers, and film stars) were not only here, but ready to f**k you up.

Cinnamon, dir. Kevin Jerome Everson, 2006. Georgia-based filmmaker Everson has been making experimental shorts, documentaries and features for over a decade; his films illuminate, as he puts it, “the relentlessness of everyday life,” the gestures, rhythms, and places of black working-class America, and the pride and grace found within. A mechanic lovingly working on a car; a bank teller going through her day; correctional officers pacing a prison walls: he contemplatively turns his camera towards the worlds that most artists ignore, but that the rest of us live in every day. Cinnamon, a portrait of drag-racing in a Southern African American community, is his feature.

Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore) & Super-Size Me (Morgan Spurlock). Michael Moore introduced and perfected the one-man-with-a-camera- wrecking crew ideal in his Roger and Me, and gave it its most powerful form in the embitted Fahrenheit 9/11. Morgan Spurlock's disarming one-man-campaign to eat his body into dis-repair, Super-Size Me, was a worthy successor to Moore’s cinema, and for better or worse paved the way for the parade of foodie-conscious documentaries of today.

The Foot Fist Way, dir.Jody Hill, 2006. This droll rural-Americana merging of martial arts and middle-aged breakdown features a small-town Tae Kwon Do instructor (Danny McBride, in one of his first starring roles) on his way to losing his mind and his bimbo of a wife, but who’s (almost) kept sane by his undying, utterly incorrect belief in his own talent. With the relentlessly mustachiod McBride unleashing a terrifyingly spot-on impersonation of Suburban Homo Sapiens (complete with khaki-shorts-and-white-loafers suburban-man outfit), The Foot Fist Way is not only funnier than any independent film made this decade, but funnier than any Hollywood film. Evidently worried about the competition, Will Ferrell and his production shingle Gary Sanchez Productions picked up the film for release, and added McBride and director Jody Hill to their stable of talent.

Grizzly Man, dir. Werner Herzog, 2005. A nature film that says more about humanity than nature. Herzog takes the footage left behind by naturalist/lost man Timothy Treadwell, who lived with the bears of Alaska, and turns it into an investigation of not only the natural world, but humanity’s, vision of it. Marrying the visuals of the most intimate Wildlife Channel special one could ever see (the film, in fact, was funded by Discovery Channel) to a psychological portrait of a possibly “lost” man, Grizzly Man becomes a debate between two filmmakers, Treadwell and Herzog, with the latter asking questions of the former, and finding answers only in the images left behind. “Here I differ with Treadwell,” Herzog intones at one point. “I believe the common denominator of nature is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”

In Between Days, dir. So Young Kim, 2007. This icy Canadian psychological study follows a young immigrant teen set adrift in the dead of a Toronto winter; marrying a Dardennes Brothers sense of relentless realism to an eerie grasp of nature and environment (the crunch of ice and snow under the heroine’s boots is more omnipresent than any human voice), this debut announced a formidable talent in director So Yong Kim (who later made Treeless Mountain) and producer Bradley Rust Gray (responsible for the wondrous The Exploding Girl).

Me, You, and Everyone We Know, dir. Miranda July, 2005. The best of the "quirky little people in our quirky little town" subgenre of independent filmmaking (see: Napoleon Dynamite; Little Miss Sunshine, etc), due to its memorable aura of sadness, strangeness, and hope. Less interested in the usual indie-film expose of suburban life, July instead focuses on the magical strangeness of everyday living, of children who want to become adults, of the old hoping to reclaim their youth, and of all of us, and everyone we know, hoping to be loved.

Sleep Dealer, dir. Alex Rivera, 2008. This little-seen sci-fi epic about a future where companies controlled the global water supply and Mexican immigrants did American’s crap work not in person, but through cyber-power beamed over the border (“we get the labor, not the bodies,”) did the impossible: through new technologies and visual effects, it created a glossy, highly believable sci-fi future with about 1/100th of the budget of a Hollywood film, and, like the best science fiction, addressed the contemporary fissures of American society.

The Subconscious Art of Graffitti Removal, dir. Matt McCormick, 2001. The most inventive, comical idea I've seen in film this decade, Matt McCormick's arid 15-minute docu-fiction dryly proposes that the efforts to paint over graffiti on urban streets are, in fact, a form of subconscious art. Not just a tongue-in-cheek novelty, this short (narrated by Miranda July) calls into question all ideas of art, art appreciation, and the strange beauty that can be found even on highway underpasses or the sides of city busses.

Old Joy (2006) & Wendy & Lucy (2008), dir. Kelly Reichardt. Reichardt dragged the American indie out of its comfy shell and straight into the woods of the Pacific Northwest, where it uncovered trash-strewn mountain-sides and most of all an ignored, little-seen, but ever-growing American underclass, individuals who were either shut out of the economy, or who just preferred to ignore it completely.

Tarnation, dir. Jonathan Caouette, 2003. Seemingly forgotten now, Caouette’s stunning documentary, famously created on a home computer, opened the way for first-person, highly personal documentaries, though few matched Tarnation’s intensity and fever pitch. “Tarnation is designed to mimic my thought processes so the audience can feel like they're in a living dream,” wrote Caouette, “which can be scary and intense, but also beautiful and glorious." Such adjectives certainly apply to Tarnation, but sadly to few other American documentaries.

Top American independents, studio creations:

1. Before Sunset, dir. Richard Linklater, 2004. This Julie Delpy/Ethan Hawke sequel to Before Sunrise was utterly unlike any Hollywood romance before it, and is unlike any Hollywood romance made afterwards. No gay best friends, no moments of high comedy with blundering relatives; instead, just a measured, melancholy take on love, loss, and coming to terms not only with what your life didn’t become, but what it probably never will be.

2. Mulholland Drive, dir. David Lynch, 2001. You may have heard of this film. There’s been enough written on it, but suffice to say that decades from now, people will be thinking, “Wow, 2001 was a great year for American film, if it made, released, and made successful a film like Mulholland Drive.”

3. Being John Malkovich, dir. Spike Jonze. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may have done American Strange better and bigger, but Being John Malkovich paved the way; before its success, no one could have believed the country was ready for Charlie Kaufman’s bizarre scripts and Spike Jonze’s skateboard surrealism. (Editor's Note: Being John Malkovich placed on our poll but was removed because it was released at the end of 1999.)

4. When the Levee Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, dir. Spike Lee, 2006. Made for HBO but given a limited release in festivals, Lee’s powerful documentary on Hurricane Katrina is still the greatest work on one of the greatest of 21st century American tragedies. Personal and political, filled with both rage and quiet intelligence, it’s a testament to a city, and to filmmaking.

IT WAS THE AUGHTS, AND I WENT TO THE MOVIES | By Brandon Harris

2009-12-30T16:27:00.004-05:00

It was the aughts, and I went to (and made a few) movies. I did it mostly for pleasure, sometimes for distraction, often to see what others thought of the wild world around us; by the end, I did it simply because it was the only way I saw fit to make a living (sort of). It was a bell curve of sorts, a graph of this burgeoning obsession, this ecstatic object of study, of debate, of joy. By the middle of the decade, I was watching somewhere between three hundred and fifty and four hundred movies, old and new, each year, often alone on big energy eating screens, my carbon footprint be damned. I see a little more than half that number these days and surely saw about half that number back in 2000. When I reflect on it now, on this decade “from hell” as Time Magazine recently put it, I wonder what forces of early century American life drove this profound and insatiable passion of mine into something that could be described as a rote professional obligation. It couldn’t have just been debt (student, credit card) and the widespread mediocrity that I was one of the few privileged surveyors of. Hey, at least I still had something I could refer to as a job.

On a March night in 2001, when I turned my TV off in frustration as Michael Douglas announced that Gladiator had beaten Traffic for the best picture, I knew being disillusioned might be on its way to becoming my default psychological state. It had only been four months since I had gone to bed one night with Al Gore comfortably ahead of votes in Florida and awoken to find that George W. Bush had been elected President and only three months since the Supreme Court decided that we should stop counting votes. I was already getting prepared for a brave new post millennial world; I had decided I was an atheist (a stance I no longer sustain) with a blond Afro in the middle of my Catholic school years. I had stopped playing football and started reading DeLillo and Pynchon, making the points Michael Lewis’ Moneyball did years before it came out as I watched economic inequity take over nearly every aspect of American life, even my beloved hometown Reds. I attended the movies as some did mass, nearly everyday, writing about them with equal fervor, noticing beauty and truth in the best of the products themselves, subterfuge and deceit in the making, marketing and categorizing of them (this held true for almost everything else Americans produced to). I don’t think I saw a better movie in the year 2000 than Traffic (no matter that it was shot on some of the very streets I used to hang out and do drugs on in Cincinnati), although Edward Yang’s Yi-Yi, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Tom Tykwer’s The Princess and The Warrior, David Gordon Green’s George Washington, James Gray’s The Yards and Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream were damn close. Of course, I didn’t see Wong Kar-Wai’s In The Mood for Love for another year. Regardless, even though Traffic apparently had the best editor, screenwriter, supporting actor and director of the year, in the eyes of a gross receipts obsessed magic machine know as the mainstream American film industry, Gladiator was the best company town product. I knew we’d still be fighting a hopeless, financially devastating, morally hazardous drug war by the time I was a real film critic. I also knew my tastes and opinions, already diverging from my more Conservative and force fed peers, might get me somewhere if I just figured out how to record them with honest empiricism and eloquent thirst for truth.

Of course, since by decade’s end six hundred or so films were coming out onto commercial screens large and small, most unnoticed and uncared for, even though I was getting paid (occasionally) to write about films, I was clearly no expert on what was happening out there and neither were you. Why were so many people making so many independent movies when the public at large wasn’t going to see or hear of the broad majority of them? Was it just the democratization of the tools? Was it the heady times of easy credit and oligarchs waiting to believe in a dream? Surely not. Most of these films were not being shot by groups of teenagers, or octogenarians or Haitians or Ohioans or some other unlikely, newly empowered cohort with PD-150s (first half of the decade) or HVXs (second half). The oligarchs were still, by and large, not making their money back. I’m still asking the same questions I was a decade ago, when I was but a sixteen year old aspiring filmsomething; how do I get $200,000 to make a movie? Once I do that, how do I get anybody to watch it? I’m sure many of you are asking these same questions. Many of you already have it figured out. And despite all the tragedy and hardships that this decade held, we all kept going. We kept believing in dreams.

But whose dreams? What movies were not being made? What were (and are) the structuring absences of American cinema in the aughts? What did all of this say about what was happening to our Country? Why is a film like John Lee Hancock’s The Blind Side embraced and Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Sugar undervalued, Lee Daniel’s (woulda, shoulda been Geoff Fletcher’s) Precious championed and Tiny Mabry’s Mississippi Damned ignored by the mechanics of the movie distribution system and the gatekeepers of the media apparatus, only for audiences to submit to the easy charms of mass marketed films while objects that more accurately and delicately reflect their experiences get pushed aside? Quirky, upper middle class (Caucasian) family dramedys were everywhere, spurred on by the great, long tail success of Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, but somehow the devastating portraits of the real cultural, economic and ideological divides tearing our families’ (and our Countries’) fabric apart, like Laura Poitras’ Flag Wars oR Phil Morrison and Angus Maclachlan’s Junebug were getting lost in the shuffle. That Junebug and Sugar were both distributed by Sony Pictures Classics yet couldn’t find any significant foothold in the marketplace suggests that even when the real indie pros get a great, canon worthy Amerindie, they don’t know what to do with it, how it get it out into the cultural conversation ahead of Tiger Woods whores or the last days of Jacko.

Although we might not agree on which ones, we all know that there were some truly wonderful movies. Too many were made for their not to be! But whoever heard of The Smith Brothers’ The Slaughter Rule? How many people saw Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar or Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland theatrically? Long live Robinson Devor’s Police Beat… in obscurity. Could these films ever speak to mass audiences? If there such special works, why can’t they? If they truly can’t, then what does that say about mass audiences and by extension, our entire citizenries’ capability of decoding a century old visual language? Our schools teach people to read (just barely), but not to watch, an activity that is the first thing we consciously begin to do, one that shapes much of our biases, our reasoning capacity, the rhythm of our lives, an activity that the most fortunate of us never stop doing until we die. You’d think primary and secondary, but especially high schools might pay more attention to it when many American children watch as much as six hours of TV a day. I know I used to. Look how I turned out.

Cinema is alive and well in 2010, but it’s the world that’s not and cinema’s health cannot be considered independent from it. No wonder prominent movie producers now frequently tweet about their desire to do the impossible; produce a narrative film, an incredibly energy and waste intensive process, in a “green” manner, an environmentally friendly way. Yet the mere implication that such a thing can be done is to, as so many of our best, most essential movies this decade did, embrace the high stakes of the age we live in, that refused the intellectual and emotional complacency that Hollywood, Indiewood and Mumblecore largely offered us. Of course they were mainly documentaries (Carl Deal and Tia Lessin’s Trouble the Water, Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight, Chris Smith’s Collapse). Yet for every regrettably conceived and manufactured cycle that surfaced and thrived during the decade (the Bromances of Judd Apatow or the torture porn vehicles of Lionsgate for instance) there was an anomaly that presented a breakthrough of honest aesthetics and critical thought (Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, Errol Morris’ Standing Operating Procedure). So, at least for now, I’m keeping hope alive and my exhaustion in check, readying myself for a brave new world once again.

50 essential movies of the aughts according to yours truly — some widely known, some not — off the top of my head:

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (2000)

George Washington (2000)

Traffic (2000)

Memento (2000)

The Yards (2000)

Yi-Yi (2000)

Requiem for a Dream (2000)

The Princess and The Warrior (2000)

In the Mood for Love (2000)

Sexybeast (2001)

Mulholland Drive (2001)

Waking Life (2001)

Japon (2002)

Bowling for Columbine (2002)

The Slaughter Rule (2002)

Talk to Her (2002)

City of God (2002)

Ararat (2002)

Hero (2002)

Demonlover (2003)

Elephant (2003)

Flag Wars (2003)

The Fog of War (2003)

Mystic River (2003)

2046 (2004)

Time of the Wolf (2004)

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

Kings and Queen (2005)

Junebug (2005)

Battle in Heaven (2005)

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)

Half Nelson (2006)

Children of Men (2006)

Iraq in Fragments (2006)

My Country, My Country (2006)

Silent Light (2007)

No End in Sight (2007)

Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)

There Will Be Blood (2007)

No Country for Old Men (2007)

Inland Empire (2007)

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Hunger (2008)

Trouble the Water (2008)

A Christmas Tale (2008)

Summer Hours (2009)

Sugar (2009)

Collapse (2009)

American Casino (2009)

The Hurt Locker (2009)

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE FILMMAKER By Noah Buschel

2009-11-17T22:13:00.004-05:00

I'm at the Edinburgh Film Festival, jetlagged bad, and I'm asked for emerging filmmaker advice by some kid. He says, in particular, he wants to know about making art films and being a writer/director. Oh boy. I try to find something to say, but it's disingenuous and the kid knows it. I go back to the hotel room and roll around in the bed, can't sleep. The only thing on the T.V. is Michael Jackson's body bag.

I go to the window and look at the ancient castle and the ancient fog and I think about what I would tell the kid if I really had the nerve — if my nerves weren't all shot. This is what I'd tell him: If you really wanna make movies, and make them your own — there's gonna be loneliness. And no one really talks about it, but it's true, I promise. For instance, did you know that even the people you work with — a lot of them won't like the final product. They'll think you screwed it up and not really dig what you're doing. And your producers will hate you. And your editor will quit you. And your dog will give you dirty looks in the morning.

There isn't too much time to feel sorry for yourself. The distributors just sent you the poster and it's fine, it's fine, it's fine — you know it's fine — but Goddamnit it ain't the movie you made and you gotta at least try to make it the movie you made. At least try. But it's fine. But it's not. You take a long walk at three in the morning. Kick bottle caps.

The project is your project, and it is your problem. It's not anyone else's problem. In the years that you spend on the project, it's very likely you will never have a conversation with anyone about the project that makes you feel less alone with the project. The project is a problem.

But you know! You know it's true. You know what you're saying and that the movie is true. You're there again, in the editing room, long after the sane and mature people have gone home. You watch the scene go down again. And even some of those actors who don't like the movie — you love their performances in this movie they don't like. And even the editor who has left the building — her cuts are just so choice. And the costumes, and the camera moves, and the production design… You know. You know it's true.

But did you see what Orson Welles looked like towards the end of his life? Do you know what happened to John Cassavetes? And those are the Superheroes. What about us mere mortals? What kind of toll does this thing take? This indie filmmaking thing.

Late night movie mumblings and complaints, but now your lover is like — enuff already. Enough, yes, exactly. It's been years now. You know, for your health's sake, enough is enough and you gotta get away from the project. And you do. You start to write new stuff again. You play some volleyball. You even get to bed on time. But then there's that email. That email with the link to the trailer. That's the trailer? That's the trailer for your movie? I don't think so. This isn't gonna stand. Oh, but it will. Shoot. You're out on the street again, playing soccer with the bottle caps. Strangers cross to the other side. You've become a menace, man.

You read a New York Times article about Kenneth Lonergan and feel less crazy. You start talking with the couple producers who will still talk to you about future projects. You get scared at the possibility that these future projects might actually happen.

You go to a festival and some kid asks you for advice. You say something about "only doing it if you have no choice." The kid kind of rolls his eyes. You probably sound like one of his gym teachers.

Outside the movie theater, you get in a van. The van drives you back to the hotel. The driver of the van is talking excitedly about all the popular movies at the festival this year. You know these films well by now — they were the popular films at all the other festivals too. You're looking out the window at the cloudy streets, and you wonder what it would be like to make one of those really popular films. Something crowd-friendly, agent-friendly. And you start thinking of different scenarios and formulas.

You get out of the van, go into the crowded lobby. Everyone is listening to "Thriller" and having a good time. The lady at the front desk stops you, asks you if you are staying there. You tell her you are, produce a room key. She smiles apologetically.

In the elevator up there's a real old lady. She tells you that she saw your film today. She tells you how much she appreciated the quietness of it. You nod your head, lower your eyes, try not to let her know she just saved your life.

Read our interview with Noah Buschel at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival about this latest film, The Missing Person. Strand Releasing opens the film this weekend.

INDIE FILM INK PIRATED, FILMMAKERS PLEASED By Mike Johnston

2009-11-13T18:11:00.007-05:00

When I attended the Future of Music Conference this year I heard a lot of talk about all of the opportunities that exist today for indie musicians to create and distribute their products via digital media on the web. Later, at the Flyway Film Festival I heard former Tribeca CEO Brian Newman speak on similar topics in relation to indie filmmakers. The central theme to all of it is that indie artists can be successful without a major label contract or major studio distribution.

In the end though talk is cheap and what looks good on paper doesn’t always translate easily into the real world. I wanted to test the waters firsthand so I created a video podcast featuring live performances by indie musicians. The show runs roughly a half hour and I have been shooting a new episode every week for the past three weeks. In that time I have arranged distribution of the show via all the major video sites on the web. It is also available on TV via iTunes and Roku as well as on mobile devices and game systems.

So far the show has answered all my questions. It is indeed possible to create content of reasonable quality and achieve worldwide distribution using commonly available digital means. In addition it is possible, using these same resources, to cross the divide between computers and other systems such as cell phones, PDA’s, game systems and even TV via Roku and TiVo or AppleTV/X-Box/PS3. It is also possible to do it on a shoestring budget. The experiment, called The Indie Music Show has, to date, cost me around 2.5k.

This week, when I saw Jamin and Kiowa Winans of Double Edge Films sending out excited messages on Twitter to the effect that their movie Ink had been ripped and uploaded to Pirate Bay I was intrigued. I guess I was just sort of programmed by negative publicity to see sites like Pirate Bay as a bad thing. On the other hand, once I thought about it, I could certainly see the exposure potential of putting a project in front of the 140 million users of bittorrent sites worldwide. So I put my show up on Pirate Bay to see what would happen. In two days views of the show on its home page tripled.

It is more tricky for a movie though, since a movie is much more of a one shot deal than a weekly TV show. Most people will see a film once, maybe twice if they really like it and maybe buy the DVD if they really, really like it whereas a TV show needs to attract and hold repeat viewers. From that perspective the major studios and probably most indie filmmakers see a pirated film as lost revenue and so bittorrent remains pretty much unexplored territory in relation to positive outcomes.

Kiowa and Jamin on the other hand seem to be approaching the issue from a different perspective. I wanted to get their views on what is happening with their film and spoke to Jamin about it.

Filmmaker: Why are you guys having such a positive reaction to your film being pirated?

Winans: The last eight months have been a brutal struggle for Ink. We premiered the film at Santa Barbara Int'l Film Festival, signed with the agency UTA, and opened in Denver for a very successful eight-week run. However, indie film distribution in general has imploded. All the indie branches of the big studios have shut down and no one is buying films. So we took Ink out one theater at a time for the last several months ourselves trying to gain some momentum. The little money we made on each screen we used to push to the next screen. Theater after theater we had amazing crowds, reactions, and new fans, yet every decent distributor wouldn't touch the film. We knew we had an audience, but no way to get the film out wider to them. We were getting hundreds of emails, Facebook, and Twitter notes from people wanting to see Ink all over the world, but all we could tell them was "we're trying".

We finally decided to walk away from theatrical and make the film available on DVD, Blu-ray, and download as soon as possible. We figured the only way Ink was going to find it's way was to hand it over to the fans and hope they would run with it. Our hope was that Ink would slowly travel by word-of-mouth over the next year and ideally find it's way.

We knew Ink would likely get bit torrented eventually and accepted that it was unavoidable. However we never imagined it would happen immediately, blow up overnight, and spread all over the world. We were shocked by what was happening and spent the next several hours thinking there was some sort of mistake. But as it turns out, our one-year strategy of word-of-mouth was instead moving instantaneously. I've never seen a Hollywood campaign so effective and so instant as this has been.

Sure we could be upset that the film is getting downloaded for free, but that would make us jackasses wouldn't it? Ink was a $250,000 film with previously unknown actors. Hollywood distributors made it more than clear they saw no future for it. It was too bizarre, a mixed genre, unknown actors, low-budget. They wanted nothing to do with it. To pretend that we're really upset about the torrent would be acting as if we had all kinds of other options. No, we're thrilled Ink is exploding so much faster than we ever hoped.

FilmmakerWhat is the actual number of downloads that Ink has seen since being made available on the bittorrent channels?

Winans: It's hard for us to equate, but last I heard from the experts Ink's been downloaded over a half million times in about five days.

Filmmaker: I remember hearing you talk about making Ink at the Flyway Film Festival and you were saying that you raised the $250,000 budget for the film in part by mortgaging your house. So you obviously have a huge personal stake in the financial success of the film. On the one hand every download on Pirate Bay can be viewed as lost revenue which could be used to offset the cost of producing the film. On the other hand such a large number of downloads can be seen as a form of advertising that exposes the film to a much wider audience. I realize that it is much too soon to calculate the actual impact from having the film made available via pirate channels but what are the best and worst case scenarios from your viewpoint?

Winans: Kiowa and I don't see it as lost revenue, but fans gained. In fact, our revenue on the film has quadrupled in the last few days as a result of the exposure. It's still a fraction of what we need to be making to make it work, but it's a big step in the right direction. People are coming back to our website and buying disks, the soundtrack, posters, shirts, and making small donations. If that continues we'll be in good shape. However most downloaders are not spending money and it's certainly a possibility that they never will if that's the case, we could be hurting.

Here's the irony. We got completely screwed by the people distributing our first feature film, 11:59. We didn't get paid at all from one distributor, and barely from another. In the last five days, we've made more money from donations from "pirates" than we've ever made from a distributor. You tell me who the crooks are. Everyone is concerned piracy is going to destroy the indie film world, but I can say unequivocally that the distribution world is already destroyed because it's primarily made up of scam artists and thieves. If someone's going to rip off our film, I'd rather it be our fans than some sleaze bag feeding on struggling indie artists.

Filmmaker: I have been thinking about why major label bands or big studio films have the success they do. I mean, as often as not, products by the majors are no better than products by unknown artists in many respects and yet the majors totally control the traditional market. The obvious answer is the star power of the people in the film and the enormous amount of money that is spent on marketing. This seems to be why, even with two products of essentially equal quality (one indie, one major studio) side by side on the same "shelf" whether in a store or on the web, the studio film is always the one which makes money.

This is true even if consumers have not yet seen either film.

I wanted a term that would express this advantage in simple terms. I came up with "implied value" as a distillation of all of the ingredients that make an unseen film attractive enough to consumers so that they will invest their money in a movie ticket or DVD. Word of mouth from consumer peers is an important example of how a media project can gain this type of value and one which indie artists can best capitalize on since it doesn’t necessarily require a huge advertising budget to achieve.

From this perspective do you think that having Ink pirated and exposed to the huge audience represented by bittorrent users will increase the Implied Value of your film with the world audience? What is the biggest benefit you see — increasing general awareness of the film or sparking a larger base of word of mouth recommendations? I know from reading your tweets this week that this exposure has already caused Ink to rise to the level of a top 20 movie on the IMDb (Independent Movie Database) chart, which is certainly encouraging but do you see this translating into actual income via theater placement/attendance or DVD sales?

Winans: I don't think word-of-mouth has ever been as powerful as it is right now. Social networks and online communities have changed everything. From the beginning our principal has always been to establish fans and care for them. We're far more interested in creating a family-like fan base than we are in making general films that the studios can distribute. Rising the ranks on IMDB is cool because it's quantifiable in some way and it's nice to see Ink and the actors getting exposure, but we're much more interested in the individual notes that we get from fans telling us how much they love the film. These people are all we really care about because they'll likely be with us for a very long time. When all the hype dies down, they're still going to be our fans. And if we have our fans we don't need anyone else. I think your Implied Value theory is exactly right. Yes, I do think the recent explosion of the film has created new value for Ink. Paranormal Activity's implied value obviously sky rocketed even though it was made for $11k. In the end value really is perception. Each of us want to see the thing the rest of the world is seeing.

As far as translation into sales, the growing implicit value is certainly helping. Because Ink is blowing up a lot of people see it as a bigger film, more of a brand, and thus they're more willing to pay for it.

All this said, it's a scary time. We look at the file sharing of Ink as a great thing, however it works for us because we're a small film. The fact is, most people downloading it are not supporting it financially in any way. From everything I can tell this is not a sustainable model for bigger films. By bigger, I mean anything above $1 million which isn't much. If fans aren't paying for the films, who is? Hopefully it will all work out, but the concern is that the illegal downloading will destroy movies simply because producers have no way to fund them anymore. The only other tested and working alternative that I'm aware of is advertising and product placement and an enormous amount of it. So in the near future our film could be entitled Ink: Brought to you by McDonalds.

MAKING OUR DIY MOMENT MATTER By Zachary Levy

2009-10-27T22:06:00.000-04:00

Aw man, I am thinking. Last Thursday’s New York Times is up on my computer screen and I’m looking at the virtual front page, just below what would be the fold. The headline: INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS DISTRIBUTE ON THEIR OWN. It’s turf I’ve become increasingly familiar with in the last couple of months since I started plotting a DIY course for my documentary Strongman and I dig in to the article. I don’t get too far before I realize I have a serious problem—Sacha Gervasi took out a second mortgage on his house to pay for the distribution on Anvil. I don’t have a house.

Maybe it’s just as well, of course. If I had a house, I probably would have mortgaged it long ago. The truth is a lot of us would. We are filmmakers who operate on a certain amount of faith. We make films because we believe — we believe we have something to say, we believe that we can say it in a way that’s unique and we know, we absolutely know, that people will care about it once it is done. And the cost of that kind of faith, whether measured in credit card balances or our personal lives, has never been small. But as the unspoken corollary of The Times piece suggests, those costs may increasingly go up for filmmakers.

For The Times is absolutely right that there has been a sea-change in certain segments of the traditional distribution landscape. Sure, the big players may still go to Toronto with their checkbooks, but for most of us that was never really an option anyhow. They were buying the kind of indie films where they already know the players involved, where the people are known quantities. For our kind of indie — the scrapping from the street up kind of indie, the Craigslist and duct-tape kind of indie — the big players and Toronto require visa stamps most of us just don’t have.

It’s what’s happening at the next level down in the industry that matters more to us. And the stories we hear trickling back through the grapevine don’t seem particularly encouraging: woefully small advances from established companies, smaller and smaller amounts being put towards advertising and marketing. At a time when the big players, no matter what they say, seem to be operating with at least a couple of small glances over their shoulders — furtive peeks at “what happened to the music business” or tightened breaths at the mention of the digital bogeyman ‚ it seems that timidity has crept into all levels of the establishment. People just seem a little unsure right now.

I think I understand what’s happening when I see more and more people with traditional distribution experience on their resumes hand me their business cards having reinvented themselves as as indie-film consultants, as DIY specialists. I get it when I hear the initials repeated more and more like some kind of post-DV-modern mantra. It’s like those earliest whispers about the internet — there’s this hot new thing massing out there, and if we can just get a hold of it quick enough, jump on board in the right way, find someone to explain it to us, it just may be the answer to the industry’s sense of temporary impermanence, the thing that is going to save us all from oblivion.

The truth is, of course, that for us filmmakers, there is nothing particularly “new” about DIY. There has been a slow creep towards DIY for a long time now: we now make websites, we make trailers, we design and make posters, all in the hope that an established distributor will notice. We have already done at least the first pass on work that a distributor would have traditionally done. And yet, even in those statistically rare cases where a traditional distributor does buy the film, it hasn’t raised the purchase prices. We already are doing DIY stuff without any of the benefits.

For more and more of us then, having already taken the lion’s share of the risk during production and now doing the basic distribution groundwork anyhow, taking that step towards full DIY begins to look exactly like a logical step forward and not some crazy blind leap off a cliff. Yes, we have reached a potential tipping point between traditional distribution and the DIY models, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

For too long (from my vantage point at least), getting traditional “distribution” has been the metric by which too much of our business AND our art has been measured. Whether it’s critics who won’t pay attention to a film unless a name-brand distributor is attached (thus getting week-long runs) or film festivals who measure their importance by the number of acquisitions that happen at their festival, consciously or unconsciously, too many places have positioned themselves as feeder circuits for relatively narrowly-defined commercial success. Making traditional distribution the yardstick across so many levels of the food chain has really limited the kinds of films that get through each successive gate. At least from my vantage point, I think it has encouraged programming, writing about, and even making versions of films that we have increasingly already seen before.

A model where chasing traditional distribution is the gold standard makes it harder for all of us to take the risks necessary to make films that are different either in content (God help a politically conservative documentary get seen even on the festival circuit these days) or in form.

So what if there is less traditional distribution to chase?

Practically speaking, the DIY route is not easy. I say that from the front lines. I say that from the dozens of phones calls I make to get one call back. I say it from the emails I send out that float off into the ether of our virtual age.

Even with all the recent attention given to DIY, it’s still a path that will cause even the bravest of us some level of self-doubt. I measure my progress like some sort of Neanderthal ground fight. Both glacially slow and brutally rough, but you keep moving, hoping that critical moment in evolution is just around the corner. Ultimately, I think it is worth it, as too many of us have allowed the unspoken mandates of current traditional distribution to become a poor trade for artistic stagnation.

There will be a lot of talk in pages like these about what tools we should use to Do It Yourself. I can imagine it becoming a debate that plays itself out over the next couple of years within varying camps — the DIYdays crowd vs. the folks who have enough capital to do a service deal and buy themselves a more traditional distribution approach. But whatever the mechanics end up being, that in itself is not really the most exciting part. It is like getting caught up in the details of a new computer plug-in. It’s fun, it’s exciting, but ultimately they are just tools. The real revolution is not which tools we use — it’s what we do with them.

And for a brief moment, it seems like we have a chance to change that. As DIY distribution becomes increasingly viable, we can get to place where current commercial distribution becomes less and less of a shaping influence on our work. For if this revolution is to have real permanence, it can’t just be about our business — it has to also be about our art.

As I go down this DIY path, there have been a lot of times recently when a moment from my days as college DJ have come flashing back into my head. At the time I did a country music radio show, and I remember once probing Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings about the origins of their '70s Outlaw revolution against Nashville’s traditional infrastructure. “Well, you see,” Waylon began in his slow, deep drawl, “it was that age-old conflict between management and labor,” pausing to let the David vs. Goliath simplicity of the struggle sink in. “So we decided to become both.”

Then of course Willie piped in — “Yeah, we really screwed up.”

Sometimes total A-to-Z control is the last thing we really need as artists of course. We fight to knock down every wall we see and then wake up the next morning and don’t recognize the rubble-strewn landscape in front of us. “Man, what the heck do we do now?” we ask. Have we just added 10 more things to our to-do lists?

Perhaps. But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re making a mistake by doing it. For as in Waylon and Willie’s case, or in the case of so many other business and creative revolutions, whatever trail that gets cut on the business side can quickly become over-grown again. The industry is very good at seizing on tools that seem to work and making them their own. What has the potential to remain unique and long lasting is the artistic work that comes from these tools.

Of course, this is not a battle between management and labor. Everything from the studio collapse of the 1970s to last decade’s DV revolution has e already changed the politics of factory floor production. This one is about post production. It is about the conveyer belt at the very end of the line — the one that can only handle certain size boxes, the one that can only move at a limited number of speeds, the one that can connect only to certain size trucks to take the product to the customers. So either off-sized boxes pile up at the loading dock, or we don’t make them at all, or we start building methods to get them into trucks, no matter what size.

So what does this mean for us as filmmakers? We can increasingly become our own distributors, or perhaps soon even viable mini-exhibitors streaming our films from our own websites. We can tailor distribution models to individually fit our films rather than the other way around. We can Twitter and friend our way to brand-name recognition, but at the end of the day... we still want to be filmmakers first. DIY can’t become just an excuse to have filmmakers do more of the work. If we take the risk, we should not only reap the financial rewards for that, but we should do it in a way that allows for the filmmakers that follow to be in a better position creatively.

That means we might collectively have to do more work now. Too many non-profit art houses — the kind of places that should be most likely to take artistic risks — have retreated to becoming essentially second-run houses for more established distributors. Rather than building loyal local audiences, they worry about what happens in New York or LA. We will have to hold their hands. We will have to reassure them that there is a community of filmmakers that will support films without the shrinking advertising dollars of a brand-name distributor. We have to help build stronger local exhibition scenes. We will have to work harder to get the mainstream press to pay attention to our films, whether they play a week or a night. And we should do better at promoting each other’s work.

It won’t be long before the industry becomes calcified again around whatever develops from this, but at least for the moment, I think we as filmmakers have the kind of chance that comes along only every once in a while. It is a chance to remake not only how we get paid or what tools we use to get our films seen, but really the kind of films that the public sees. That ultimately is the most exciting part of this whole thing.

The conveyer belt at the very end of the line has been causing us to re-size and shape our films for too long. By building our conveyer belts, our own networks, it seems we have a chance to re-shape not only our financial future, but also, if we play our cards well, a new creative future as well.

In a lot of ways, the choice is ours. As we do DIY, we can choose to make the same kinds of films we have always been making and get them seen. We can simply replicate what the established distributors are doing anyhow. But we can also use this moment to push ourselves to make new kinds of films and get them seen. That is what I hope we choose to do.

UPGRADE: PART 2 By Jamie Stuart

2009-10-26T08:02:00.004-04:00

Here's Part 2 of Jamie Stuart's look at Apple's new Final Cut Studio, which he used to make his short film, Isn't She?.... Read Part 1 of Stuart's review in the Fall issue.

A week before I was set to resume shooting Isn't She?..., I installed Apple's new OS Snow Leopard. I proceeded to spend the entire week flipping out, losing hair, sending dozens of freaked out e-mails to Apple.

The cause of my China Syndrome? QuickTime X. And ColorSync.

For Snow Leopard, Apple decided to realign the OS's color mechanics to work with ColorSync. Furthermore, the new version of QuickTime, QuickTime X, was not just designed to upgrade the program from 32-bit to 64-bit, but they also sexed up the standard interface to make it more palatable to casual users.

Simply put. In no uncertain terms. QuickTime X is a fucking abomination.

And Apple knew it wouldn't fly for professional users. So they've maintained a new version of QuickTime 7 that works with all pro applications. In fact, they even confirmed to me that QuickTime X, with its over-saturated, over-bright picture that bizarrely features the controls over the image, is specifically for common users — while they recommend QuickTime 7 for pros.

Thing is, though, QuickTime 7 doesn't even look exactly how it used to — because the OS is now synched to ColorSync. The blacks aren't as rich. The color is a little less saturated and milky.

What this means is that, let's say I create and upload a Quicktime for people to see online. I'll be mastering it using the new Quicktime 7. However, once it's online, because QuickTime X is the OS default, it'll be viewed in QuickTime X if you're on Snow Leopard. If you're on a previous OS, you'll view it using the old QuickTime 7. Or, if you download the video and you're on Snow Leopard, you can watch it with either X or the new 7. Point is: Whereas in the past I was mastering for a one-format-fits-all-sensibility, now my work, while mastered with one program, might actually be viewed by any one of three programs. And that kinda sucks.

Eventually, I adjusted to the properties of the new QuickTime 7, and, putting that mess behind me, the first day of shooting arrived. Four days later I was in post-production and putting Final Cut Studio through its paces.

This short film, which was originally supposed to be a light dramedy in the Hughes/Crowe mold had morphed into a technically complex monster with dozens upon dozens of VFX composites: Everything from simple cover-ups to 3-D cartoons to 3-D photorealistic animations (I even created masks to blur background areas that picked up lens adapter grain because the focus was too close). I found myself becoming a sort of DIY Fincher.

One spirit-crushing composite was the brilliant result of trying to be creative during the shoot to save time. In order to simplify a montage, I concocted the idea that the main character would walk along in a wide shot as the background changed to show both a passage of time and location. Shot it in a few minutes. Great. Onto the next scene.

In post-production, however, the reality hit that I was going to need to rotoscope her walking with a 40-point mask for 250 frames! Furthermore, due to street traffic, most of the backgrounds were composites as well. Then, I was also going to have to deal with objects like trees and fire hydrants that she passes behind while moving. These are not the types of shots that are supposed to be found in DIY productions. And it was one of dozens.

The bulk of the compositing consisted of manufacturing — and often animating with a 3-D camera — computer screens, Blackberry screens and web pages. Each screen needed to be built from scratch, each web page required graphic design.

At a certain point in the haze of doing all this, just getting to switch up by flopping one shot 180˚ because I accidentally shot the character's wrong hand (and also adding digital steam to the contents of her cup), felt like a delight.

I shouldn't complain, because I truly enjoy doing all that stuff. That's what it's all about if, like me, you get off on using the medium to its fullest. This is why I'll never understand and respect filmmakers who simply pick up a digital camera, handhold it and improvise with their friends. So what? Just plain lazy.

If anything, expectations are so low for DIY work that it's incumbent upon the filmmaker, in my opinion, to work even harder to prove himself. DIY is a method not an aesthetic. There's no excuse, no matter what your budget is, for a lack of creativity or lazy technique. None. Whatsoever. Good filmmaking is good filmmaking.

Anyhow, aside from the initial freakout over Quicktime X, both Snow Leopard and Final Cut Studio have been mostly hassle-free. Snow Leopard even cleared up about 10 GB on my hard drive.

One strange defect I've noticed, however, is in the relationship between Final Cut Pro and Color — though I'm not sure whether this is a FCS issue or a possible QuickTime X issue.

Basically, Color is supposed to import Final Cut's 3-wheel color corrector if it's been applied to a shot and treat it as if it's a primary adjustment. There were about 50 shots that I sent to Color to create corner vignettes to replicate the look of the lens adapter (either because they were composites from scratch or close-ups I shot without the lens adapter). Most of the shots returned to Final Cut without any irregularities. However, a handful of shots that I'd adjusted the color on using the 3-wheel color corrector (I'm not talking about mids or blacks, actual color shifts) came back looking putrid. It was as if Color imported the color correction, then added the same color correction on top of it again. The results were over-saturated in the direction I'd previously shifted the color.

What else? What else? Soundtrack Pro. I used Soundtrack Pro as I always have — to both record all the foley sounds (the only live audio I ever use is dialogue), and to also manipulate tracks that require effects like reverb, distortion and so on.

For this short, even though I had great music from Edie Sedgwick (Justin Moyer), there were a handful of diegetic pieces that needed to be character specific. For two of the characters, I simply used loops from Garage Band. But for another character, I wanted a very specific pseudo-indie rock sound, so I quickly wrote and recorded a handful of riffs combining drum loops with my acoustic guitar distorted to sound like a lo-fi electric guitar garage recording.

Blah, blah, blah. I'm five days away from premiering the short at this point. My brain is flattened, fetid roadkill. I can barely make enough sense of language to make words cohesive. Hopefully, it shows in the finished short.

Nothing else to say. Splat.

Below is a teaser of Isn't She?.... See the short here.

5 THINGS YOU SHOULD DO IF YOU WANT YOUR MOVIE TO LAST By Gareth Higgins and Jett Loe of The Film Talk

2009-10-18T00:45:00.001-04:00

For the past three years, we’ve been pursuing a noble goal: to try to talk about movies and meaning in a way that might interest someone other than ourselves. We do this over at The Film Talk, and want our work to be an ongoing conversation about the movies and how they intersect with our lives. You’re welcome to join the conversation. Sometimes it’s difficult enough for us to interest each other, so that can be a pretty tall order. But thankfully there is sometimes also serendipity in talking about cinema – one of us has insights into the human experience that switches on a light for the other; as when Jett saw Tarantino’s coruscating satirisation of our culture’s addiction to violence (repelled one minute, compelled the next) in Inglourious Basterds, or when Gareth found so much to like about The Hurt Locker that it made Jett like it even more. We still can’t agree about Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, though.

After three years of this ongoing conversation, we’re in a position to consider some of the themes under which cinema, at least of the kind that gets released in the US, sails.

The first theme we want to discuss is how to make films that will last...

OK — so you’ve come up with your concept: Boy meets Girl. Or Boy meets Boy. Or Boy meets Rampaging T-Rex. Or Taxi Driver meets Himself. Or Girl meets Archaeologist. Or Boy meets Multinational Corporation CEO. Or Boy meets Antichrist played by Sam Neill. Or Big Boat hits iceberg with lots of well-dressed Boys and Girls on board.

You’ve got your set-pieces: Boy runs away from Huge Rolling Boulder in South American cave. Girl goes to the Opera with Richard Gere. Boys and Girls find pirate ship and get the gold to stop their houses being turned into a golf course. Boy observes a giant bell being crafted in medieval Russia and decides to paint religious icons again. Boy tries to avoid crossing ghost-killing laser streams with other boys. Taxi driver shoots Harvey Keitel’s hand off. Boy and other Boy talk to each other at a dinner table. Boy defuses Bomb in Iraq. Boat sinks.

You’ve got your philosophical intention: Peace on earth. Love conquers all. Life is difficult (the trick is not minding). Love hurts. Serial killers sometimes eat the right people. War is hell. Life is beautiful.

And you’ve got your open-ended ambition: An Oscar. A Palme D’Or. An honorable mention by FIPRESCI. A Sundance screening. A Toronto screening. A screening, anywhere. Please. A DVD release. Or the hope that someone may one day care enough to want to download a pirate copy of your film. Or maybe your mom will watch it. Or maybe you really will get that Oscar.

Concept + set-pieces + philosophy + ambition may be stirred together to produce the early stages of a treatment. It is at this stage that your friends in film criticism must urge you to STOP. Take a look around. We want to suggest five things you might want to think about before going anywhere else. They may not be the most important five things, but they are nonetheless important, because they constitute some of the most frequently missed opportunities in movies.

1: Psychological motivation

The terrain of the human soul is not easily navigable; anyone who has ever tried to be a person or even just watched ‘Oprah’ knows this. There is, surely, a relationship between the wounds we have all suffered, and the behavior we manifest toward others and ourselves, but, let’s face it, much of the time we have no idea why we do what we do.

So, here is our arbitrary rule number 1: Don’t use childhood or other trauma in the background of a character as shorthand for explaining their behavior unless you’re willing to earn it.

Examples? Hitchcock’s Spellbound probably looked pretty innovative on its 1945 release – evoking the then new science of psychoanalysis; but the absurd notion that a man responsible for the death of his brother could get over it just by remembering that it happened makes the film look like a Zucker Brothers comedy today. On the other hand, if you want to see how psychological depth can exist in a film that, at first glance seems to pay no attention to it, have another look at Unforgiven; hardly anything explicit is said about Clint’s motivation for killing, but the shading of maternal loss – his wife, presumably his mother, and the innocence of the prostitute whose scarring he aims to avenge – would give an analyst more than enough to work with in trying to replace outward violence with psychological integration.

2: Film as conversation

Two statements that seem true: Art is always in conversation with the real world. Many of us have forgotten this. Last year’s box office hit Wanted seemed to forget that its mockery of bland automaton economic activity was sneered at by, among others, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, whom, we can presume, do not often have to suffer the vagaries of working in a call center cubicle. More than that, it ignored the fact that there really are people in the audience who get turned on by the fetishisation of firepower, and that the notion that dehumanization for entertainment’s sake taught us a few lessons about life-imitating-art during the era of Victorian circuses.

On the other hand, Inglourious Basterds knows from the very beginning that it’s in a conversation with the real world; and not just because of its ostensible basis in history. The violence isn’t played for laughs, because Tarantino knows the world already laughs at human misfortune enough to regularly forget its own humanity. Wanted was accused of misogyny; it doesn’t warrant that moniker, because its characters are so dehumanized that their gender doesn’t get a look in.

3: Less is More

It's not the early days of cinema anymore when folks were shocked and stunned by an approaching train, a stop-motion giant gorilla or a big sphere in space being blown up, (I exclude the audience for Transformers of course — that's not the kind of movie-making, and we use that term loosely here, we're talking about).

The point is that people now know movies - they've internalized narrative structure, they're familiar with the cliches, they get who's the hero and who's the villain - you don't need to spell it out for them. To make your movie stand out now you don't need more - you need less.

The masters knew this. Look at 2001: A Space Odyssey — Stanley Kubrick removed the film's exposition as much as possible in the editing stage - interviews and voice-overs that might give some hint as to what the hell was going on were cut. As Kubrick said at the time "How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: 'The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.'"

Andrei Tarkovsky knew this — watch Andrei Rublev, perhaps the greatest masterpiece of the movies. It's a series of chapters with no exposition, nobody holding your hand — telling you what's going on — hell, the protagonist of the movie isn't even in every chapter. And it works.

It's not just past artists who knew this 'less is more' secret. Kathryn Bigelow gets it implicitly - The Hurt Locker is a series of short stories, with all the fat cut away. It's up to you, the viewer, to make what you will of the story - and in that sense films like The Hurt Locker, 2001 and 'Rublev' are the real interactive cinema — not movies with 3D glasses or based on video games.

So do less with more - by having the audience have to work out what's going, (meaning they actually have to participate in the movie), your pic will become a real, tangible thing to people, and therefore last a lot, lot longer.

4: Auteur theory is dead - Collaboration is the Key

Mike Leigh makes consistently thoughtful, reflective, and just plain good movies; and he is usually considered to be one of the most distinctive directors working today. His scripts are famously shaped in concert with a long rehearsal process; and perhaps most challenging to the notion that films belong to the director along, for 20 years until his untimely death this year, he was intimately supported by producer Simon Channing Williams. Since High Hopes and up to Happy Go Lucky Leigh made films that worked, and he has spoken of the importance of collaboration in making this happen.

Recently on our podcast, Ramin Bahrani, the brilliant director of Man Push Cart, Chop Shop and Goodbye Solo made it clear how important cinematographer Michael Simmonds is in the process of making his films. They collaborate together during the script stage, while shooting of course, and even during post. We're so often fixated on directors that it doesn't occur to critics to list Ramin's three films as the work of Bahrani/Simmonds, or even to mention Simmonds much in reviews. But they should. The writer of The Wrestler, Robert Siegal, has just directed his first film, Big Fan, and Michael Simmonds shot it. Watching that pic it's hard to imagine it would be anywhere near as powerful without Simmond's careful placement of camera and gritty yet blanched out images - he's a huge asset. So don't be shy or intimidated, work with the most talented people you can find. If it works for Mike Leigh and Ramin Bahrani it can work for you.

As for number 5., well, we were commissioned to write a 1000 word piece, and, like all passionate film critics, are already talking far too much. Tune into the next episode at The Film Talk for the exciting conclusion to our humble contribution to answering the question: "What Should You Do If You Want Your Film To Last?"

SETS AND THE CITY: ON THE HISTORY OF SMITHEREENS By Susan Seidelman

2009-10-08T00:01:00.001-04:00

Susan Seidelman's landmark 1982 debut feature, Smithereens, recently made its Cable VOD debut on Cinetic's FilmBuff channel. It will soon be made available on iTunes, Amazon VOD, and more. Seidelman reflects on the origins of her Manhattan indie classic as it finds new audiences today.

I moved to New York City in the mid 1970s, to go to NYU film school. At that time the grad school was housed in a funky building on East 7th street and Second Ave — a space it shared with a rock club called the Fillmore East.

The mid-to-late '70s was a transitional time in the East Village. The influence of the 1960s "hippie" culture was fading, and the "yuppie" gentrification of the 1980s had not yet begun. This was also during the time of the NYC bankruptcy crisis — when there was no money around to fix up neighborhoods or public spaces. That meant that the East Village had a lot of cheap apartments, cheap bars and clubs, abandoned and boarded-up buildings and a lot of disused outdoor space to put up posters advertising art shows and bands. As a result it attracted a lot of young, creative people — painters, actors, musicians, and filmmakers — who were looking for cheap space to live and work.

In 1979, after graduating from film school, I decided to make a film about this neighborhood and some of the characters that lived there. This became the basis for the film Smithereens. I had stayed in touch with my friends from NYU and we decided that if we pooled our resources, i.e. if no one got paid, we could make a low budget feature film shot on 16mm, for about $20,000. My grandmother had recently died and left me some money which was set aside for my "future wedding" — but since that wasn’t in the cards at that time, I decided to use it for camera equipment, film stock and lab expenses — and make a feature film instead. The final budget was $40,000 — due to unexpected stops and starts.

We began shooting in spring of 1979, with a script written by Ron Nyswaner and Peter Askin — based on a story by me — about a young woman named Wren (played by Susan Berman) who escapes her dreary life in New Jersey suburbs and comes to the East Village seeking fame and fortune in the Downtown punk-music scene. Because she has no discernable musical talent, nor does she think that’s necessary, she becomes the groupie to a shady punk rock star (played by musician Richard Hell) and a legend in her own mind.

The film was shot off and on over an 18-month period, as I ran out of money and dealt with various production problems. At one point, during rehearsal, the lead actress fell off a fire escape and broke her leg causing us to delay filming for several months. This meant re-casting and rewriting the script to accommodate changes in actors, locations, and crew members. Yet, all these stops and starts actually improved the film, since I was able to see what scenes were working and what story changes needed to be made. I was editing the film myself on a Steenbeck in my apartment — so during the months in between shooting, I could look at the edited scenes and adjust the script accordingly before going back out to shoot again. Had I not run into production problems, I don’t think the film would have been as good. For one thing, it would not have starred Richard Hell — since he came onboard during the six-month hiatus when we needed to recast the original male lead.

I wanted the film to be slightly stylized, but also capture the gritty reality of life in the East Village. I also wanted Smithereens to include some moments of irony and humor to counter-balance the harshness of Wren’s life. I would call the tone of the film "pushed realism." The characters are real, the emotions are real, but some of the situations and art direction are “stylized." The art director, Franz Harland, found gritty locations in the East Village and in mid-town (an abandoned parking lot under the old West Side Highway), which we then painted or decorated in a way to add a certain fantasy element. We wanted the film to capture a specific late 70s/early 80s punk graphic style. The look of the film was also influenced by the street fashion (what people wore to CBGBs or the Mudd Club) and street art — the "ransom note" graphics of the fly-posters advertising bands that lined the walls of Alphabet City, as well as early graffiti art.

Thinking back on it, there was something wonderfully naive about the way the film came together. We never thought about how (or if) the film would get distributed, or how it would be marketed. This was just a film I wanted to make that attempted to capture the spirit of a certain time and place. Fortunately, it ended up getting accepted to the Cannes Film Festival and then got picked up for distribution by New Line Cinema. But that was never something we calculated or even thought about when we first set out to make Smithereens.

The New York independent film community was much smaller back in the late '70s and early '80s, and making an independent film meant that you did so with very little money. Often the director was also the producer, the writer, the editor and the distributor as well. You really were working independently. There were no indie production companies back then, or none that I was aware of. Many of the NYC indie filmmakers knew each other and shared information, actors and crew. Often one director could be seen acting in another director’s film. If there was any source of inspiration, it would be the spirit of the French New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s. The “let’s go out and shoot a movie” attitude. It was a very liberating way to work.

I think over the past 30 years, the independent film community has gotten much more diverse, complicated, corporate, and expensive. Some of that simple “let’s make a movie” spirit has been lost, although it can still be seen in some work, such as those by the "mumblecore" filmmakers. But we are now in a transitional time, especially with the collapse of so many of the smaller distribution companies, and it remains to be seen what the full impact of the Internet will be on indie filmmaking. However, there will always be people who want to tell visual stories – and they will find new ways to get their stories in front of an audience. We can no longer do “business as usual” – but as times change, as cameras get cheaper and the Internet becomes the great equalizer - new and creative possibilities emerge that makes me optimistic about the future.

Susan Seidelman's other directing credits include Desperately Seeking Susan, She-Devil, Boynton Beach Club, and the pilot episode of HBO's Sex and the City.

TRANSART FILM EXPRESS By Shari Roman

2009-10-04T20:01:00.008-04:00

Filmmaker, critic and Filmmaker magazine writer Shari Roman died in Manhattan on Wednesday, September 9. The following is a reprint of the last piece that Shari wrote for us, published in Summer, 2007. In the piece she surveys a number of young visual artists using film and film installation as a medium. For more on Shari and her life and work, visit the blog post on her passing.

When Matthew Barney kicked off his five-part Cremaster film cycle in 1994, perforating the barrier between the art world and independent cinema, the multidisciplinary artist took some hard knocks from purists who felt he was creating his increasingly lavish HD provocations with Hollywood in mind. But the success of Barney’s large-scale Cremaster vision — museum retrospectives, film festivals, international gallery tours, theatrical release, DVD sales — also proved to have an unanticipated ripple effect. Its wide-scale acceptance reawakened a broader appreciation of that other kind of art film — films made by visual artists.

Two generations ago, painters, sculptors, performance artists and photographers working in film and video, including Andy Warhol (Sleep, 1963), Michael Snow (Wavelength, 1967), Vito Acconci (Theme Song, 1973) and Robert Smithson (Spiral Jetty, 1970), had experimented in much the same way. With their related explorations in film and video, these artists proposed gestural and narrative approaches that influenced other artists, filmmakers and those who, like Barney, bridge the divide.

Currently, in the indie/mainstream world, there are several filmmakers who continue to explore the realm between artist and arthouse. The painter Julian Schnabel, who has been making features since Basquiat in 1996, expresses the extreme reality of a severely paralyzed man who communicates through one twitching eyeball in his third dramatic feature, the 2007 Cannes favorite The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. And, Sweden’s proud polemicist Lukas Moodysson (Together) recently created the Acconci-like Container, “a silent movie with sound,” replete with its own Brobdingnagian interactive gallery installation.

Meanwhile, coming from the gallery world, the new international cadre of art-school trained, “fine”-art anarchists are unabashedly wielding the language and history of traditional cinema. Entertaining both the eye and the brain, and as at ease with a brush as with a guitar or a camera, they appropriate and stylishly compound critical narrative-image structures while toying with the construct and context of material, sound, space and time.

There are projects which run to feature length: Eve Sussman’s lushly shot “historical” feature Rape of the Sabine Women (2006); Britain’s Mark Wallinger wanders around the Mies van der Rohe museum in a bear suit in his Sleeper (2005); performing live, Gregory Weeks’ 12-piece psych-folk orchestra The Valerie Project (2007) composed a brand-new psych-folk musical score to accompany Czech director Jaromil Jires’s erotic myth Valerie and her Weeks of Wonder (1970) (at MoMA this fall). But most are working within the short form.

Among these prolific up-and-comers is Denmark’s Jesper Just, 33, who has moved from DVCam to 16mm to anamorphic over the past seven years. Staging Douglas Sirk–inspired, imagistic and operatic scenarios in settings ranging from strip clubs to parking lots to the countryside, Just has his protagonists communicate primarily through song. In I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire, men inside a gentlemen’s club sing songs by the Ink Spots into telephone receivers around the room. With Sleepwalkers (pictured above), America’s Douglas Aitken, 39, projected five literally larger-than-life characters (including Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton) onto seven facades at New York’s MoMA for two months in a crisply beautiful, interconnected narrative about humanity and the architecture of time and space. Sweden’s own Dadaist Erik Bunger, 31, is a musician, performance artist and video artist who has been appropriating and remixing media from existing music and film. His Let Them Sing It for You (2003) is an interactive Web site wherein you write a song and it is crooned back to you via a computerized voice mélange of different pop stars. In Bunger’s ironic 16-minute dialogue Gospels, he reassembles short clips in which famous faces, such as Bonnie Raitt, Eric Stoltz and Eric Clapton, seamlessly speak of “him” (whoever that might actually be) with such fervor that the piece takes on a creepy-canny, recontextualized religious dedication. Using 25 actors, the Netherlands’ Gabriel Lester, 35, now based in Brussels, played with six simultaneous 15-minute video projections, inspired by Jacques Tati’s Playtime, on the exterior of Stockholm’s Bonnier Konsthall. He also ingeniously tinkered with the image-search forms in Google and Alta Vista, and from those “found” images constructed the Chris Marker–style docufables All Wrong (2005) and All Right (2006) without ever leaving his studio. Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, collaborators since the late ’70s, were given a massive retrospective at London’s Tate Museum last year, due, not in small part, to their early video work. Their most notorious is the 29 minutes of The Way Things Go (1987) (distributed by First Run/Icarus Films and pictured below), in which they document 100 feet of deliriously synchronized Rube Goldberg destruction. (In 2003 even Honda saw fit to parody the piece for a commercial).

Unlike a bourgeoning Jarmusch, let’s say, these image-makers are nourished by a formidable “guaranteed” support and distribution platform that encourages their personal expression. Not only do they have the opportunity to screen at proper cinemas; they have museums, galleries, Web sites and a global interface of arts-funding organizations (Creative Time, NESTA, Motiroti). There are also a conflux of multimedia marketers like Japan’s Artstar (which makes artists’ work available for iPod download) and Denmark’s ArtNode (which offers ARTpod, free MP4 videos from renowned artists including Just) ready to pick up the slack. It just might pay to be an artist after all.

FROM HOLLYWOOD TO nobody By Rob Perez

2009-09-19T17:39:00.003-04:00

Sometimes people ask me how I went from living in Los Angeles, writing a studio film like 40 Days & 40 Nights, to living in Minneapolis, directing an independent comedy like nobody. It’s a fair question but it seems there’s a subtext here, too. Many people think independent film is a step down from the studio system. And I’m sure it is — for some people.

But let’s go back. 40 Days & 40 Nights is about a guy who gives up sex for lent and then meets the perfect girl. The short version of how it was made goes something like this: we pitched it to every studio in town. After nine “no’s,” the tenth place, the last place, said “yes.” (Note that this is not a storyteller’s embellishment; this is 100% true.) I turned in the first draft a few months later. They liked it and essentially the film was greenlit right then. We were filming 13 months after we sold the pitch. The film was released a year-and-a-half later. Internationally the picture went on to make just under $100 million in theaters. Those aren’t Transformer numbers, but they’re very solid, especially for a comedy that cost less than a fifth of that to make.

At the time I believed the film was made because of the script. However, in retrospect I believe it was made because of a confluence of a 20 completely random stars aligning. This included an influx of money at the studio from a new partnership; their recent films had been hits; young comedies like mine were connecting at the time; a few bankable actors in the age range wanted to play the lead; the executive(s) happened to like (or at least think it was commercial) the concept/script; and that the producer was hungry enough that when he hit road blocks, he found other ways to keep moving forward. I can go on, but hope this is enough to illustrate my point: the film was made because of 20 things that had nothing to do with the script.

I did not know this at the time. How could I? I was twenty-eight. I had been in Hollywood five years. Aside from the handful of people I had met since I got there, I didn’t know anyone in the industry. I simply assumed the studio system would always find a way to make something good and commercial. In short, I didn’t know any better.

I spent the next few years entrenched in the system, took writing assignments, spent a year working exclusively with Ridley Scott. The following year Anthony Minghella offered me a script over breakfast. (The studio killed the deal because they didn’t believe in the project). It was fun. I made some money. I learned from people much smarter and more experienced than me. Life was good. There was just one small problem.

None of these scripts were getting made into films.

A couple close calls, but no greenlight. I figured this was because I was writing their ideas instead of mine. I stopped taking assignments, withdrew from the system, and took a year to write what I still believe is the best thing I’ve ever done. The Quiet Type is a story about a small-town mute who falls in love with a New York City chatterbox. This is a romantic comedy wherein the lead character is mute. I wrote it on spec even though at the time I probably could have sold it as a pitch. I did this because I felt like a pitch was mostly about presentation wherein a script is all about substance. The project sold the first hour it was on the market. To this day, even people who don’t like me begrudgingly respect me for that unproduced script and nothing else.

I spent a year writing it. I spent another year rewriting it, addressing the notes of my studio executive. We made it better. Two years into it we were finally ready to go to actors. Now, four years later, they were finally going to make my second picture.

And then it happened.

My studio executive took a job across town. My script was assigned to someone else. I sometimes imagine this guy familiarizing himself with the new slate of projects. Having just finished the something about reptiles on a commercial flight, he picks up my script. After five pages he thinks, What the hell? The protagonist doesn’t talk? He flips through to page 30, 50, 70, 100. He’s looking for one thing — the lead character’s name in the middle of the page followed by some dialogue, any dialogue, maybe just one word. But he doesn’t find it because it’s not there. He wonders to himself? Are you kidding me? What the hell am I supposed to do with this?

It’s not his fault. This stuff is completely subjective. What you like is what you like. I liked it; he didn’t. But that’s the whole problem. It’s no one’s fault.

Some version of this sad story has happened to thousands of screenwriters before me and I’m sure hundreds since. But that’s when it hit me — I wasn’t writing movies; I was writing screenplays.

While that’s a perfectly fine way to make a living and support a family, it’s kind of a silly thing to dedicate your life to. I got into this business to make people laugh, feel, and think. When I say “people” I’m not talking about a couple of movie executives, agents, and producers, you know, the ten people who read scripts. I’m talking about real people. Regular people. Actual people. You know… people.

I had to at least try to get back to making movies.

It was now 2007. Six years without a film and the horizon was looking bleaker everyday. Hollywood was changing. Studios now had to answer to parent companies. Development money shrunk. Slates of films being produced were slashed in half or, in some cases, by two-thirds. And those films, the vast majority emphasized marketing potential over material. In other words, most weren’t even trying to be good films; they simply wanted to be commercial. On a personal level, this meant the films the studios were making were no longer films I wanted to see. This blew my mind because I never thought of myself as an art house guy. I love John Hughes, John Landis, and Blake Edwards. It’s not that I grew up with these guys. I want to be these guys. I want to affect audiences the same way they affect me. But if the studio system suddenly didn’t have a seat for them at the table, was there really a place left for me?

Meanwhile, in 2003 I had co-written this script called nobody with Ryan Miller, lead singer of the band Guster. It’s a comedy about an artist looking for inspiration. It was intentionally smaller in concept, scope, and ambition, conceived and executed for a first time director — me. I feel like a lot of first timers fail because they try to bite off too much their first time out of the gates. I wanted keep the world relatively contained and give myself a shot of actually pulling this off.

Early on a few name actors were interested, but not anyone I loved. Of course signing up the flavor of the week was tempting, (hey, instant financing!) but I made a promise to myself that I would keep to the end: try to make a picture I would want to see.

I also figured finding a leading man was a little like finding a house. You know it when you see it. Four short years later I found my house doing a one-man show in New York City. I went back three times that week and, after convincing this unknown named Sam Rosen I was not a stalker, got him to read the script and accept the lead role.

Problem is, Hollywood not only didn’t want to finance a small picture with this guy, they didn’t even want to meet him. Thus, I went looking for independent financing. The script was set in Minneapolis. Coincidentally, Sam Rosen, the lead, and Josh Hartnett, the executive producer, were also from the Twin Cities. I started pounding the pavement there. I flew back and forth from Los Angeles to Minneapolis every other month, meeting with people, hat in hand. They were interested but after a few close calls I saw what was holding them back. A little part of them was afraid I was going to take their money and move to a tropical island. If I could convince these potential investors that I was trustworthy, that my only plans with their money was to make this movie, that I was one of them, then I felt they would jump in.

In the fall of 2007 I threw everything I owned in storage and moved to Minneapolis. We were fully financed within six months. Roughly ninety percent of that money is private equity from the twin cities.

We completed principal photography in July, 2008. We are just now gearing up for a world premiere here in Minneapolis and, hopefully, at the very least, a local theatrical run. Truth is we haven’t had much luck with festivals. At first this was hard to swallow and even comprehend until I showed it to a group of my filmmaker friends, people with a ton of festival experience and success, and they all said more or less the same thing: You made a film for high school and college kids which is not the demographic the festivals want.

In other words, this isn’t art; it’s entertainment. Thing is — that’s exactly what we set out to do. Is it perfect, a classic, the best picture ever made? No, no, and yes. Okay. Maybe I overstate that last part because I’m all too aware of its shortcomings. A few mistakes are a function of time and budget, but the vast majority are one-hundred percent my fault. Some jokes don’t land. The camera isn’t always in the right place. And in one particularly painful moment, the staging is reminiscent of elementary school theater. I can go on but won’t because I choose to take solace in that old saying about how no one starts directing their third picture.

Plus, there are a lot of things that actually work in here: there are a bunch of great laughs; the relationships elicit real emotion; and one or two moments might actually be great. Oh, and my leading man kills it. But most importantly to me, for this film’s demographic (ages 14-22), this is a journey that adds up emotionally to much more than the sum of its parts.

I made a film that I want to see.

In the end, I feel the exact same way about this film as I did about 40 Days & 40 Nights. I’m incredibly proud of this thing. Truly. But if this is the last film I ever make I will have fallen short.

There’s still so much more to do.

nobody will have its world premiere October 1, 2009 at Minneapolis's State Theater, with tickets available through Ticketmaster, and will open October 2 at Minneapolis's Kerasotes Block E. For more info on these and other upcoming screenings, visit the nobody website.

(Photos: top, Perez with actress Helena Mattsson; middle, poster; below, Perez on the set.)

A DOG YEAR'S GEORGE LAVOO By Scott Macaulay

2009-09-03T21:35:00.006-04:00

In A Dog Year, the feature film directed by George LaVoo from Jon Katz's memoir, Jeff Bridges plays Katz, a midlife crisis-stricken writer who, impulsively and in an act of near-deliberate emotional self-destruction, adopts a rambunctious and unsocialized border collie, flying him cross country to his family's split-level home and their two other dogs. And while Lavoo's movie has its share of Beethoven-esque moments as the collie sprints down suburban streets or mischievously jumps rides on passing automobiles, the film is less about canine hijinks and more about the complex and unexpected emotional roles that dogs play in our lives. Bridges brings his customary outsized warmth to the character, but there's also a damaged and emotionally occluded aspect to Katz that the actor tugs away at. Depicting Katz's problems through his understated notice of the absence of his wife and daughter, LaVoo has made a film that will appeal to dog lovers while also prompting thought about the ways in which we all mediate our place in the world.

A Dog Year is the directorial debut of LaVoo, who is well known in the independent community for writing and producing Real Women Have Curves and producing Getting to Know You. Produced by HBO Films, it's also the last film from the shingle's independent division headed by Maud Nadler and responsible for movies like American Splendor and Maria Full of Grace. A Dog Year premieres tonight on the channel and will replay several times this month. I spoke to LaVoo by phone several days before his broadcast premiere.

Filmmaker: Do you have or did you ever have a dog?

LaVoo: I did have a dog growing up. I love dogs. Now, I live in New York City in a fifth floor walkup and I have a cat. Making the movie was my way of spending a lot of time with dogs.

Filmmaker: How did you come across Jon Katz’s book?

LaVoo: I had met Jon Kat online because I had been interested in another of his books, and while we were corresponding he said,” I have this new book…” He let me option it before it was published.

Filmmaker: And what was it about this material, aside from wanting to spend time with dogs, that interested you?

LaVoo: What drew me to the story is my fascination with the whole “dog experience.” My father’s generation would get a dog from the pound, a rescue dog, and then would keep the dog outside all night. Now there are dog behavioralists. Dogs have play dates. Dogs have become a key emotional link in our lives. That’s probably because we as a society have become more lonely and isolated from ourselves, and that’s a theme that I saw in Jon’s book.

Filmmaker: What happened after you optioned the book?

LaVoo: I took it to HBO, and they said, “Let’s try and get an actor on board.” That’s what HBO calls their “flashing green light.” I’ve always admired Jeff Bridges because he seems like the kind of actor who is never afraid to expose any part of himself. He’s always so fully human. We got the script to him, and that was a long process. Jeff is not someone who makes a decision quickly, and, of course, he shouldn’t. He said he was interested and wanted to meet, and we wound up sitting down in New York for a six-hour dinner at the Four Seasons. The restaurant closed down around us and because it was Jeff some people on the staff stayed. It was an incredible conversation. He asked a million questions of me personally, of the character, of how we would approach things. He talked about his experiences with his wife and talked about his memory of dogs when he was a kid. His father had gotten him a border collie when he was young. At the end he said, “Sounds good, but I’m not saying ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” We talked or corresponded for three more months before he said, “I’m ready.”

Filmmaker: Watching your film I realized the particular challenges you faced in directing the dog. Not only did the dog have to do the action specified by the script, but the dog also had to act. The dog’s expressions, behavior, and energy level were all quite important.

LaVoo: I was really excited by that challenge, I knew this film was going to involve a lot more than just actors and a camera. In terms of working with a dog – I did the research, talked to other directors, and I learned from them that making a movie with a dog as a lead is like making a special effects or stunt movie. I researched dog trainers and found an incredible dog trainer, Mathilde de Cagny, who had a whole team of people. She came on board before Jeff was cast. We started casting dogs before any of the actors, and that process was like an all-state casting call. We searched on the internet, and made lots of calls. She traveled to South Carolina and to Minnesota to meet dogs. She looked at dogs who are not trained movie dogs because there were so few trained dogs that were specifically right for our part. We just had to go out and find young dogs that had the right kind of sensibility and personality.

Filmmaker: How many dogs were used in the movie?

LaVoo: We cast one lead dog, Ryder, and then around him we cast six other dogs who looked as close to him as we could possibly get. For the movie, we had the dogs dyed so their color markings would match, and the dogs that had different eye colors got dog contact lenses.

Filmmaker: And were different dogs used for scenes with different emotional temperatures?

LaVoo: This movie is the story of a dog who goes through an emotional journey, and I paid careful attention to mapping out the steps of that journey. One of the dogs we was more skittish and nervous, but he exuded what we needed in the beginning of the movie which was a damaged dog.

Filmmaker: What has happened to the dogs after the movie?

LaVoo: What’s interesting about the dog training world, the trainers become so attached to the dogs, and now these dogs are going to be taken care of for the rest of their lives by the trainers. Our lead dog has been in a couple of new movies, some big Hollywood movies. But even if the dogs aren’t in another movie, the trainers keep them.

Filmmaker: I would have imagined that the dog and Jeff would have spent time bonding, but with seven dogs playing the one role, I guess that wasn’t the case.

LaVoo: My first idea was that Jaff and the dog would spend a lot of time together so they would have this personal rapport, but because of the technicalities of how you have to make a movie with dogs, [that didn’t happen]. But Jeff did spend some time with each dog. He said to me, “I’ve done so many kinds of movie, I’m always looking for a new challenge. And I have never had to be real and honest [in scenes] next to a dog with trainers off screen yelling commands and throwing treats.”

Filmmaker: I was struck by the elliptical portrait of Katz’s relationship with his family. We know he has a wife and daughter, but they are off screen. And while we know from the answering machine messages from his wife that things seem off between them, we’re not told much more. Obviously, all of this relates to Katz’s decision to adopt the dog. How did you approach balancing the story of Katz and his dog with the backstory of his relationship with his family?

LaVoo: In the book Jon Katz talked in just a few sentences about the relationship with his wife and family. But one thing that I observed that was happening in his life was that he leaves society and moves with the dog to the countryside, to an isolated spot in upstate New York. How does that effect his relationship with his wife? Well, he makes her an office and said she’s going to love it up here. As the movie developed I wanted to be very careful about how I handled this [aspect of Katz’s story]. I wanted to explore that relationship between Jon and his wife, so in the movie we go a little bit farther and show that it’s a marriage that’s in trouble. Here’s a guy who is most real when he is with his dog. He’s a guy who can’t even talk to his wife — he calls on a payphone and he basically hangs up on her. Part of what interested me about the story is that Jon is irresponsible, he is acting from his gut, he is angry and disconnected. He does an irresponsible thing by bringing another dog into his household. He does it with a good heart — it is an abused dog — but also because he is in such an isolated and mixed-up place in his life.

Filmmaker: What’s Katz’s situation now?

LaVoo: After we finished the movie, Jon had gotten a divorce. Now he has a new woman in his life and he is very happy. It was a very amicable split [with his ex-wife] but it was still painful. Jon looked at the movie and said, “You understood me better than I knew myself. This is true and honst, but it’s difficult for me to show my daughter this movie.”

Filmmaker: What about the film and literature about dogs? Were you inspired by any works in particular?

LaVoo: Well, Umberto D. It’s a really emotional and beautiful movie. And I did a lot of research about dogs and literature. There is one quote from Samuel Butler, the 19th century British novelist: ““The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.” I think that sums up why I loved the process of making the movie.

TWEET THIS! By Jake Abraham

2009-08-26T17:11:00.007-04:00

In my last post on our distribution strategy for Kirt Gunn's Lovely by Surprise I mentioned that I’d try to write a follow-up post when appropriate. It seems that time has come sooner than expected, and for one particular reason.

Part of our DIY release for Lovely By Surprise has been focused on digital messaging platforms, particularly Twitter and Facebook. They have been great tools for aggregating fans and followers and keeping them informed about various topics, from trivia about our actors and crew, to release dates and special screenings.

Twitter in particular has proven to be a great device for communication amongst our followers. It has also become a tool for evil, I’ve discovered. On Saturday, August 8th, one month after our official release date, there was a spike in tweets related to LBS. We wondered why and took a look. It appeared that people were tweeting and re-tweeting a URL that linked to a pirated version of the film. It was being hosted by a free file sharing network like Rapidshare or SendSpace. We downloaded it to confirm our fears. It was a 700MB file and took twenty minutes to download (the filesharing network restricts the bandwidth of downloads to users without a premium account). The colors were a bit off, the aspect ratio seemed to be askew and the frame was overcropped by a few lines. Other than that, it was a pretty high-quality image. In twenty minutes. On my computer. For free.

Wow, this brings up a bunch of issues! First, I spoke to Brandon at Indigenous (our distribution partner) about it. Needless to say, he was apoplectic. Worse than that, I don’t think there’s much we can do about it. It’s not like he’s Warner Bros. with the staff and resources to send cease and desist letters to file sharing sites and to prosecute piraters. Even the studios are rarely successful in those endeavors. Plus, with instant digital copies being created online, there isn’t really a way to stuff it back into the box anyway.

I know this part of the story isn’t particularly new. This certainly isn’t the first film I’ve produced to become available illegally. In fact, there are two great examples that I’ll always remember. One story is that within days of the Tadpole release, someone brought a DVD to the office that he had purchased on Canal St. The cover art displayed a film starring John Cusack and Gene Hackman and even included their photos. At least it said “TADPOLE” on the cover! The other story takes place in Beijing, where I was lecturing for the Motion Picture Association a few years ago. Our sponsors took us to see an example of a store where the shelves were lined with pirated CD’s and DVD’s, including packaging more elaborate that the authorized versions. There were five copies of Wim Wenders’ Land Of Plenty on the shelf. It was amazing to see this little indie film stocked in a storefront in China.

In both of those instances, I was so proud to have a film that had demand. Somehow I considered it an achievement to produce a film that piraters thought was worth the effort. I’m not feeling that thrill today.

Twitter, the very same tool that gave us a soap box to so many new fans, has also become the broadcast network for circumventing our distribution model. I’m certainly not blaming Twitter. The platform has done nothing wrong. Plus, I love the immediacy of it. Even the notoriously slow-to-adapt studios have been chatting about the power that Twitter may have in broadcasting early fan reviews of their new releases, for better or worse.

As we start to re-think our business and its production and distribution models, I wonder if we might also discuss the security of our content. Am I the only one that feels the piracy discussion has been tabled as we all fret about the collapse of distribution? I regularly talk to colleagues about the woes of distribution, but never about issues of illegal consumption of our films (aren’t the two intimately connected?). I wonder if that’s because it’s not a problem many others have faced or because no one has any good answers. Are we relying on the integrity of our audiences to purchase access to our films or will we find methods to actually protect them from unauthorized viewing? Should we even be trying? We always knew the problems of the music industry would arrive on our doorstep as broadband grew. What are the lessons we can learn from their missed opportunities? This is especially relevant for us now as the indie business moves away from a real theatrical window, one of the only places it’s still possible to protect your content. I can only imagine how easy it is to rip a high-quality version of a feature off a VOD broadcast.

I think it feels more relevant now because of the self-distribution reality. Every time the film is consumed illegally, the lost revenue is effectively coming right out of my pocket, not Viacom’s or Time-Warner’s. It makes me feel even more vulnerable at this uncertain moment.

Some would argue that the goal now should be to grow audience size regardless of the compensation as it adds value to the property over time. Somehow, that just doesn’t make sense to me. Others claim that the “long tail” is the answer. I can see where that might be the model for next generation of distributors (like the growing SnagFilms/Cinetic/IndieWire partnership), but how will that translate into sustainability for the filmmakers? To think that we’ll have catalogues selling smaller quantities of a larger volume of titles seems unlikely at best. I’d love to hear from people that can explain this to me.

Maybe I just need to get used to this new reality. Chris Anderson’s new book Free would argue that we should be allowing people to watch the film gratis and finding another way to generate revenue from it. Maybe he’s right in some instances, but we can’t all be Monty Python. You’ll need to read his book to understand that reference, which he posted for free online, but then subsequently took down after a trial period. I guess at some point he decided that he needed to charge for his intellectual property, too.

Maybe it’s just the definition of “free” that’s changing…

HIROKAZU KORE-EDA'S STILL WALKING By Damon Smith

2009-08-26T09:00:00.001-04:00

A connoisseur of longing and remembrance who brings great sensitivity to each of his reflective fables, Japan’s Hirokazu Kore-eda should be better known in the States, as his films extend the tradition of world-class artists like Naruse and Ozu. Enthralled with the operation of memory and the impact of grief on the lives of everyday people, Kore-eda has created a body of work that’s as rich with feeling as it is modest in tone. In Maborosi (1995), Kore-eda told the story of a quietly devastated young widow struggling to move on after her husband commits suicide. He then departed from this film’s elegant compositions and moody, color-saturated production design to draw on the observational techniques he’d developed earlier in his career as a documentary filmmaker. After Life (1998), built around interviews he conducted with hundreds of participants, visits an institutional purgatory where the recently deceased are asked to choose a single recollection to relive for eternity as a film. Distance (2001) and Nobody Knows (2004) are both loosely based on high-profile news items: the emotional aftermath of the Aum Shinrikyo sarin-poisoning tragedy and the heartrending story of three school-age children who survived for 200 days in an apartment after being abandoned by their mother. Even Hana (2006), an Edo period piece, has none of the usual trappings of the jidai geki genre, instead emphasizing the gentle, domestic rituals of a reluctant samurai-turned-village teacher who elects not to avenge the murder of his father. Throughout these films, Kore-eda studiously avoids the pitfalls of cynicism and sentimentality, exploring the private worlds of vulnerable, emotionally complex people with extraordinary grace and subtlety.

If Kore-eda is deeply attuned to the mystery of memory and the inner lives of those grappling with loss, he is also attentive to the subtle rhythms of family life, which he captures in an unobtrusive, naturalistic style. His latest feature, Still Walking, surveys a low-key family gathering at the home of proud, retired doctor Kyohei (Yoshio Harada) and his wife Toshiko (Kirin Kiki), who have assembled their relations to honor their eldest son, a drowning victim, on the occasion of his death. Surviving brother Ryota, an art restorer, has recently married Yukari (Yui Natsukawa), a 40-year-old widow with a preteen son (Shohei Tanaka), and is wary of Kyohei’s gruff judgments about his life and chosen career. Chirrupy sister Chinami (pop star/TV personality YOU), happily married with a small brood herself, keeps the mood light even when kitchen-table conversation turns sour. Over the course of 24 hours, as long-simmering tensions bubble to the surface, the atmosphere remains tinged with plaintive regret and flecked with wry, true-to-life humor. Kore-eda gives each of his characters full-blooded life as we glimpse each of them in private moments. Though it carries echoes of Ozu’s Tokyo Story in terms of its general themes and domestic scenario, Still Walking is gentle in its aims, comforting even in its moments of discomfort, and graced with earthly images of transcendence (flower blossoms, a child’s hands). By the end, we’re privy to a poignant farewell that carries the notion of life as a cyclical and honorable journey.

IFC Films opens Still Walking Friday in select theaters.

TOP OF PAGE: [LEFT-RIGHT] YOSHIO HARADA, SHOHEI TANAKA AND KIRIN KIKI IN STILL WALKING. ABOVE: STILL WALKING WRITER-DIRECTOR HIROKAZU KORE-EDA. PHOTOS COURTESY OF IFC FILMS.

Filmmaker: You mentioned in your director’s notes that Still Walking grew out of a personal experience, specifically the sense of regret you felt after the death of both your parents. Could you elaborate on that and say how this experience fed into the concept of the film?

Hirokazu Kore-eda: [long silence] My mother had breast cancer but continued to live alone after my father passed away. I would phone and e-mail her occasionally, but I really left her on her own. I was working on Nobody Knows at the time, so I was very busy, and I used that as an excuse and didn’t go see her very much. Then I had a dream in which my dead father called me on the phone. It was very much like the relationship between the father and son in Still Walking: We were on the phone but had nothing to talk about. Finally he said, “I’m calling about your mother.” And I said, “Oh, I just talked to her yesterday, she seems fine.” And my father said, “No, she’s not fine. I think it’s going to happen around the 28th.” I woke up thinking, “What is this, the 28th?” I didn’t want to take it literally, so I ignored it. The morning of the 29th is when she had to be hospitalized, and I felt incredibly guilty. Even though my dead father came to tell me that in a dream — which is not the sort of thing I actually believe in — I still didn’t go home and see my mother. After she was hospitalized, because of my guilt, I spent a lot of time with her. But it really was too late. At that point, I started regulating my work a little bit and seeing her more frequently. My older sister and I kept notes on conversations we had with her, and in the two years my mother was ill, before she passed away, we were able to catch up and talk about all these things that in the 15 years prior we hadn’t really discussed. Her dementia was getting worse, but she’d recall things about my childhood, the home we lived in, the tempura we used to eat — things like that. At her death, my sister and I had a total of five notebooks from all the conversations we’d had over those two years. We looked it over and that was a starting point; that was my material for writing this screenplay.

Filmmaker: You have a quiet and dignified approach to representing this family, and yet over the course of the day, the fault lines in their relationships come to the surface. There are a number of tensions in the film, between the domestic and public spheres, between men and women, youth and age. Did you have these in your mind while writing the script?

Kore-eda: I was very aware of those tensions as I was writing the script. It’s basically a social rule that you don’t say what you mean to the person that you feel [tension with], and that’s true of my mother, of me, and of most of the people around me. You don’t say what you think to their face, and then you go to someone else and say what you really think. There’s a disjointed line of communication, so that’s something I was conscientiously working with.

Filmmaker: As a filmmaker, you’re very attentive to gesture and nuance, and the subtle ways that people relate to each other. How do you maintain the balance between action and nonaction, between the things that are said and those that are left unsaid?

Kore-eda: [long pause] That’s a difficult question.

Filmmaker: Well, I could rephrase that by asking, do you write or direct certain scenes that you decide to remove because they interfere with the capturing of those nuances?

Kore-eda: There are definitely times when I’ll shoot a scene and edit it out completely later, and sometimes I’ll go in and add things as we’re going along with the shoot. For example, with this movie, there isn’t a story or plot that needs to move to a certain place. The top priority was portraying a single day in the most naturalistic way possible. Of course, we had the character relationships and the character premises before we started the film. But with Yukari, who is the new wife to the second son, she’s a person who’s in the most difficult and oppressive situation. She has to really hold her tongue and be smiling all the time. And as we were working, I could see that her character was going to want to remove herself at some point and be alone. So we have the scene where she’s alone [in a bedroom], and when her husband comes in, that’s when she says what she really thinks. And that’s something we could see as we went along.

Filmmaker: Do you think you achieved something new with Still Walking in terms of behavior and emotion?

Kore-eda: I think with this film, more than any other, I was able to portray the most sides of a character — to show their complexities and in the most well-rounded, three-dimensional forms. For example, in making Nobody Knows, of course I was involved with the children, but as a director I worked mostly from a detached point of view and didn’t really get involved with their inner selves. It was [shot] almost from a documentarian point of view. In this movie, [in terms of] my relationship to the characters, the distance was much closer.

Filmmaker: I ask you that because I see you working through and revisiting the same themes in so many of your films: death and mourning, loss and remembrance. I wonder if you’ve reached a point where you have realized those themes in a way that makes you want to think about exploring something else, or whether you think they will continue to be a persistent contour of your work.

Kore-eda: [laughs] Well, in terms of those themes you see recurring, that really happened very unconsciously for me. In a way it’s a big problem. If it was a conscious choice on my part, it’d be easier to understand. But I have to say that with my next film, Air Doll, I conscientiously depart from some of my previous themes. It’s very different in terms of its main motifs and ideas. But I think as time goes on, my personal interests will change, my environment will change, and also my technique will evolve.

Filmmaker: Nostalgia is important in Still Walking, too. What’s the story of “Blue Lights of Yokohama,” the song that has such a strong resonance for Toshiko in the film?

Kore-eda: It’s a song my own mother really loved, and it played a lot when I was in elementary school, so it always left a very strong impression on me. I always wanted to use it in a movie. The original Japanese title [of Still Walking] literally means Keep on Walking, Keep on Walking, which are direct lyrics from the song. I thought at some point in the movie I would make a scene where that song is played. It was a backwards process to do it that way, but that’s where the song came from. There are a lot of mysteries left in the movie, actually, and some stones are left unturned because the scope of the film is limited to that one day. For example, there’s someone who’s left flowers on the grave of the older brother. You don’t know who it is and you never find out — it’s outside the scope of the film. Then some things happen that other characters don’t know about: Atsushi talks to his dead father in the dark yard, but the main character, Ryota, doesn’t know that. When you have some mysteries left behind, even after a movie is done, it makes for a richer world and a richer film. Some things that are deeply hidden — emotions the mother has or an allusion to adultery on the part of the father — are left unexplored by the end.

Filmmaker: Do you think in general you strive to hark back to the Japanese cinema masters of the past in creating films?

Kore-eda: I definitely think there’s a lot I can learn from that era, but I don’t have any desire to go back to that. By the time I started working as a director, the studio system was long gone, completely dismantled in Japan, so I never had it in mind to work in that kind of environment. When I started out, the people whose works I found more helpful to reference were contemporaries who were working in the same situation as me, not the studio system, people like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Víctor Erice, from Spain. Of course, there are Japanese masters like Ozu and Naruse who dealt very much with the Japanese family. The environment they worked in is very different from mine, but in terms of how they portray the Japanese family and domestic sphere, I had much to learn from them working on Still Walking.

Filmmaker: While your films seem utterly contemporary, I could not help but think of Ozu at certain moments in Still Walking: there are those elevated shots of Yokohama with the commuter train running through the frame, and one of a potted flower in a darkened room that reminded me of a similar shot in Late Spring. I like those little homages and wondered how much they were in your mind.

Kore-eda: [smiles] Thank you very much. But it’s something I really wasn’t conscious of while I was working on the film. Now, those examples you brought up make me think — oh, a flower in a darkened room, I’ve definitely seen that before! [laughs] And as soon as you mention it, it makes a lot of sense to me. Honestly, I was not conscious of it, but thank you.

Filmmaker: Originally you had ambitions to be a novelist, so what was it about film that for you became the best forum for self-expression?

Kore-eda: I don’t know. I might find out that maybe film is not my medium! [laughs]

Filmmaker: I doubt that very much. You still write, don’t you, for magazines?

Kore-eda: Yes. I still like to write. Sometimes, if you ask me do I prefer writing or shooting, I might say writing. [laughs] These days, I’m not certain it’s exactly right for me. I’m not joking when I say this, I’m not totally sure this is what I was meant to do. In my late teens, when I started to going to college, I was in a literature department at university and my classes were so boring. I started going to a movie theater every day. There used to be a theater in the Ginza district, and it was a really stinky basement theater that had maybe 40 seats. One Sunday, they had a double feature of Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Wonderful Sunday. And at the end of the second movie, the people in their seats all got up and applauded, even though there was hardly anybody there. Maybe everyone had a different reaction to what we saw, but there was a sense we had a communal experience together. And that communal feeling was something I got really hooked on. Up until that point, I was a really independent person. I liked to read by myself and write, and I didn’t want to get involved with other people. After that experience, the joy of sharing things with other people really struck me.

Filmmaker: You alluded earlier to the fact that your techniques have evolved over the years, and I certainly notice an extraordinary stylistic gap between the lush formalism of Maborosi and the later work, like Nobody Knows and Distance, where you are drawing more on the documentary techniques that you had worked with previously in television. I wonder where you see yourself in that process now. Where is your technique evolving on Air Doll, for instance?

Kore-eda: When I made Maborosi, up until then I had only worked in TV, so I really wanted to make a movie, you know? I had a very strong desire to make a film and I was very aware of what a movie is. As time has passed, I’ve lost that sort of self-consciousness about what a movie might be or should be. In terms of making Still Walking, the only problem I had was, “How do I portray a single day and people and their lives in the most realistic and naturalistic way possible?” I never thought, “Oh, well, it’s a movie so it has to do this,” or, “How can I use the medium of film to do that?” I just wanted to portray people honestly instead of “making a film.” So that’s definitely changed over time. But you’ll see with Air Doll that I’ve taken a completely different approach, so it’s continually evolving. This is a story from long ago, but 15 years ago, when I had just finished Maborosi. I was doing an interview on TV, and I was able to meet Hou Hsiao-hsien and I got him to watch Maborosi. He said to me, “Your technique is great. But I can tell that before you started shooting, you storyboarded everything. You did, didn’t you?” And he said, “How do you know how you’re going to shoot a person before seeing that person? You started in documentary, so you should know that better than anybody.” It left a very strong impression on me. After that, I stopped doing storyboards. We’ll get to a location now and we’ll do a little rehearsal, and I’ll see how things flow. I’ll look at the people and then decide where to place the camera. Because of that one comment from Hou Hsiao-hsien, I’ve changed my approach. And not just my approach to filmmaking but also how I deal with people in general, in life. So I think I’m still in the process of working on what he’s taught me.

Filmmaker: Incidentally how do you see the landscape for independent cinema changing, or how has it changed in the past few years in Japan?

Kore-eda: The future is very dark! [laughs] One thing that’s happening in Japan is all the arthouses that show more artistic and foreign films are all going out of business. They’ve been replaced by multiplexes all over the country, which only show Hollywood films, commercial films. They really don’t want to show films from Europe or other places. These arthouses can’t financially survive anymore. For independent filmmakers like myself, the films themselves can’t survive off ticket revenues, so you can’t have long runs. For example, Maborosi came out 15 years ago, and it was in the theater for 16 weeks. Still Walking, which was pretty popular, was only in the theater 8 weeks. One other thing that’s happening now is that I’m not sure you can even say the films we’re watching are even all films. For example, TV dramas will have 11 episodes air on TV, and if it’s a big hit, they’ll call the season finale a “movie” and put it in theaters. And that’s not really a movie. So for independent filmmakers in Japan like myself and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, it’s a survival game. I don’t have a lot of hope for the future right now, but we’re going to work hard.

CHRIS FULLER'S LOREN CASS By David Lowery

2009-07-29T14:56:00.004-04:00

There’s something to be said about not being eager to please. Chris Fuller’s Loren Cass is an aggressively confrontational debut, all the more so because it is so resolutely restrained in its approach. So seemingly oblique is Fuller’s approach that one feasibly could make it through the entire film and not realize that its subject matter is the aftermath of the 1996 St. Petersburg riots; but on the other hand, that subject matter is so deeply ingrained in the film’s form that it doesn’t matter. Loren Cass doesn’t so much deal with its themes as it ingests them, and then - through the juxtaposition of gorgeously photographed tableaux, depicting the various intersections of wayward youths in a shellshocked city; and through the use of poetry and political speeches on the soundtrack; and through stock footage depicting myriad public woes – it recapitulates them.

This is a strikingly formalist work, with echoes of the old masters as well as more recent cause celebres like Tsai Ming Liang and Harmony Korine. Fuller’s intent, though, is so intensely personal and tightly wound that all comparisons are ultimately irrelevant. This is, for better or worse, his vision, and Loren Cass an entirely unique – and uniquely American – art film with a capital A.

Two years after premiering at CineVegas and being nominated for a Gotham Award, Loren Cass opened in New York on July 24th. Kino International will be releasing it theatrically in additional markets in the coming months (it is also available digitally through iTunes and Amazon).

Filmmaker: The movie starts with a temporal bang, as a single voice-over utterance takes us back to the late 90s. How old were you when the St. Petersburg riots occurred? Clearly they made a big impression on you.

Fuller: I was 15 at the time and I think it made an impression on everyone around here. It was sort of a backdrop to what was going on in my life and on my side of town and kind of colored everything during that particular time. I was working on the script and it naturally sort of wove its way into the story. I think the setting for what happens on the surface is very important and that was the perfect background for a film like Loren Cass.

A lot of people seem to be focusing pretty heavily on the racial element of the riots too, but I think it's important to put it out there that this was also, and maybe even more so, a civilian versus authority type of engagement. It wasn't like there was rioting directed purely at caucasians or anything, most of what got destroyed was in the neighborhood immediately surrounding where the police shooting took place. We've seen the same sort of thing happen in other places recently like the events in Greece, and really it's happened a lot throughout history all over the world. There's a great photograph that the St. Petersburg Times has where there's a row of civilians squaring off with a row of police officers. All the civilians are black and there are two white cops, two black cops. I think that sums up the experience or at least what I took from it. People seem to jump immediately for a black versus white sort of thing, or vice versa, and in my opinion it's more about dejected poor and the possibility that authoritarian elements could swoop in and do as they pleased, even taking one of their sons. And that's not to say that's what happened. Again, I wasn't there, so I want to emphasize that I'm not interested in the "sides" that have evolved, both of which are particularly passionate around here about their point of view. But with the history behind the film as I included it, what we wanted to show was an objective event between people that sets a certain tone and effects every aspect of everything you see. Things like that seep into your bones.

Filmmaker: I understand you were 21 years old when you made the film. It's rare for any filmmaker to have such an original voice at such a young age, much less with their first feature. Would you say the content you were dealing with dictated the style in which you made the film, or is this an aesthetic you've been developing?

Fuller: That's an interesting question. I guess my answer would be both.

I definitely feel that content dictates form. Everything should be done to service the particular project, which was the case with Loren Cass. I don't really think that a filmmaker should develop their own aesthetic consciously. Whatever the aesthetic is should come naturally and be intertwined with the form. After all it's the filmmaker who selects the subject matter, writes the film, and so on, so an aesthetic materializes from a combination of things starting with the first decision made. The moment you become conscious of your aesthetic is the moment it turns into a gimmick.

That being said, this film is intensely personal, as it should be, and I do believe in the whole auteur thing. There's definitely certain techniques and sensibilities that I favor (in all facets: writing, directing, editing, etc.), and things I'm against implementing, so I'd like to think my films are my own and original. In a way I think the "meaning" of a film should come from a synthesis of the form/style and the filmmaker/author. The content is a subsidiary of the form and the aesthetic an unconscious subsidiary of the filmmaker, if that makes sense. My next film won't be like Loren at all on the surface, but, at the same time, I'm guessing and hoping that those who have seen Loren will recognize it as mine. So, sure, it's a developed aesthetic too, but not a consciously developed one I've meticulously planned out and let control my decisions regardless of the content I'm working with. In my opinion an aesthetic, in addition to being unconscious, should be variable... or else you'd probably be a fairly boring, predictable "artist".

Filmmaker: But the important thing is that the aesthetic is developed, conscious or otherwise, which then begs the question - what was your film education like? What work did you make prior to Loren Cass?

Fuller: I have no formal education or training in filmmaking and I didn't make anything prior to Loren, no shorts or anything like that. This was my first film in every sense. I learned a lot at the library to tell you the truth. There was a period in time where I frequented a bunch of different libraries in Tampa Bay where you can score all sorts of great films by the best filmmakers for nothing, obviously. I used to take home stacks of stuff and kind of felt like I was cheating in a way cause I had access to all these amazing works whenever I wanted them for as long as I wanted them. There's also a plethora of great literature on filmmaking and art in general, but more so than that, philosophy. During a period when I was working on Loren I was really into Schopenhauer. Which brings me to something else. The internet. My generation is the first to grow up with a resource like that at the tip of their fingers, something where details on anything and everything are available all the time. I think the effect of this kind of thing still hasn't been seen yet and I think it applies to all things (art, technology, commerce), but I'm guessing you'll start to see huge advances in everything over the next few decades purely because everyone has access to an almost infinite database of knowledge instantly. People forget how new it is and how new generations have access to this tool from the time they learn to read. Between the library and the internet, who needs film school? I always hated school anyway and ditched college shortly after I got there to make Loren, just wasn't for me.

Filmmaker: Your mention of the internet and that instantly accessible information rung a bell with me because, as soon as I was done watching Loren Cass for the first time, I went online to look up not just reviews but to try to decipher the cultural enigma of the film. For example, be it due to my age or just general ignorance, I knew practically nothing about the St. Petersburg riots beforehand, and so I sort of discovered the entire context of the movie retroactively, and what was upon first viewing incredibly oblique was suddenly, in retrospect, greatly enriched. How, in preparing for the film, did you reconcile the need for exposition? Did you hope audiences would approach from a firm cultural bedrock, or were you hoping they'd find that after the fact? Or did it simply not matter?

Fuller: It definitely didn't matter. I don't believe in exposition and never thought it was a need. I think the images tell the story and everything that's necessary to convey what I intended is in the film, I think it speaks for itself and stands on its own. I'd be interested in hearing if your research after-the-fact changed your feelings on the film in any way, or if it just helped you intellectualize it better. I think that's all exposition really does and I'd wager that you felt the same way about the movie after you got the historical details. But the extra information probably let your mind rest, which may or may not be a good thing. Of course, I encourage people to go and read more about different aspects of the film, I do the same thing with works that I like and something that spurs that reaction is what we're all after. But I also believe sometimes it's best to just let your mind wrestle and come to its own conclusion.

Filmmaker: I’d say that my research after the fact didn’t so much change my feelings about the film as much as bring them into clearer resolve – as in, I now could prescribe literal meaning to an image that previously had only evoke an emotional response. But speaking of those images – you very nearly let these gorgeous chiaroscuros tell the story entirely. The compositions you and your cinematographer have created are so rich and considered. How much time did you spend on these set-ups, and what was the production process like?

Fuller: It happened fast but we had been preparing so long that the limitations associated with a small budget and short shooting schedule weren't too restrictive in the end. That being said, you feel the lack of resources and the pressure every day but the goal is not to let it change or hurt the film. A lot of credit goes to my producer Frank Craft who took a lot on himself to ease the burden on me and the whole production. [Lead actress] Kayla Tabish stepped up in a production role at the last minute because we were overworked and took care of business. We spent a lot of time working out the compositions and checking out the locations and things beforehand so only getting a few takes wouldn't matter, we'd get what we needed. Our cinematographer built a lot of his own lighting rigs and had been on board to do the project for a long time, so he knew what I was after. We used Kodak Super16mm stock and an Arriflex camera, and the colorist at our lab also did a great job in his own right. A lot went in to the overall look of the film. We shot the whole thing in 14 days and pretty much didn't sleep. It was utterly exhausting and an experience unlike any other I've ever had or will have in the future I'm sure. Everyone was pretty worn out and nuts by the last day. But it's like the adage goes with fighters, that the fight is won with the preparation. Training's hard, fighting's comparatively easy. It's the same with filmmaking.

Filmmaker: The performances seem to compliment the film’s formalism. They’re almost Bressonian — in that the actors are not actors, but 'models' in the service of the film. Do you subscribe to that notion? And how do you handle working with actors, especially since you play one of the main characters yourself?

Fuller: I did subscribe to that, in a way, for this particular film and may or may not for future ones depending on the content. But I don't think that should take away from the performances or make people believe the characters are superficial or one-dimensional, they're just non-traditional and very connected with the subtext and their environment. We've been very lucky in that the film has received a lot of praise for a lot of different reasons, but one thing that I find is often overlooked is the acting. It's incredibly difficult to carry a scene, let alone an entire film, without dialogue or with very little dialogue. That could be a disaster if it's not done right. We had some truly excellent actors that did some really amazing stuff, in my opinion. Kayla Tabish, Mike Glausier, Din Thomas, Jacob Reynolds and Travis Maynard all did really tremendous work and I hope they start getting some more attention for it. Mike did get a Best Supporting Actor nomination from one film festival which was great.

Working with the actors in this instance was a lot like the shot composition we talked about earlier, it was all in the preparation. Lots of long, late night phone calls and discussions prior to filming. The casting was very important because we knew we weren't going to have a bunch of formal rehearsal time, we didn't have the money or the room in our schedule to bring the actors out early for extra days. They needed to be strong on their own and prepared as best as possible before we got going. Once that train was moving it wasn't going to slow down.

Though there was definitely a lot on my plate at certain times, from a director's standpoint, it's hard to get a better feel for a scene than staring directly into the actor's eyes while its happening and having whatever it is sent straight at you. As for getting what you need from them, there's just a ton of variables. It depends on the content of the film, the character, the scene, the particular actor, the location, etc. regardless of whether I'm in front of or behind the camera.

Filmmaker: Your use of the Bud Dwyer suicide footage is a pretty defining point of the film; it serves as an emotional turning point, but it ties into the story in a number of different ways - I know hardcore bands have been known to use that footage during their shows, and then there was the on-air suicide of former St. Petersburg weather lady Christine Chubbuck a decade earlier. Did you always plan to include this footage in the film?

Fuller: Yeah using that footage was always part of the plan. The Christine Chubbuck one (which happened in Sarasota), a lot of people don't know about and I've never been able to see it. I did try to track it down at one point due to the things I was trying to do with this film but had no luck. It's definitely a defining point in the film and its woven into the fabric of the entire piece, I think too often some people dismiss it as gratuitous or offensive which doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I think those people need to watch the film a second time.

Filmmaker: Continuing that train of thought — I've read at least one review in which the critic was angry that he was subjected to that footage. It's certainly not pleasant, but then again it's so ingrained in the pop culture underbelly that it seems like fair game at this point. Did you feel any culpability to your audience in using it?

Fuller: Definitely not. I don't make the world, I just live in it. I think I remember the review you're talking about and this guy felt that he had a right to choose whether or not to see something when it came to scenes of real death. I think that's insane. Someone should tell him that one day he'll get a real close up view of death and he's not going to have a choice then, either. That kind of mentality just blows my mind. People die every day. I've seen people die, and I imagine you and a lot of your readers have also. Did you have a choice? Did they? I know I didn't. The fact that he was offended by that offends me. The footage should shake you to the bone, it is unpleasant and it's not supposed to make you feel good. It hurts your soul the first few times you see it. It's supposed to make you feel the way you should when you see a kid jump of the Skyway, choke down pills or shoot themselves in the face. There are things about life that are ugly and unpleasant. The whole point of Loren Cass, in a nutshell, is to embrace that, celebrate the ugly things. I think he also said something about how it had no context in the slightest and was just randomly thrown in...the film is the context, there's 83 minutes of context. I don't know how someone who writes about art for a living can be that fragile.

Honestly, I take my work very seriously and if there's anything you can see visually that could possibly offend you, don't go see my movies, they won't be for you. I'm amazed that millions of years into this thing people can be offended by anything, really. Things are what they are. And for the record, I agonized over every little detail of this film for over a decade and to think that anything is randomly thrown in or without context, particularly a real suicide, is silly and, frankly, insulting. If anything I feel I owe an audience complete dedication to what I'm working on and to shy away from things that are intrinsically a part of life would be a disservice to them, myself and my art.

Filmmaker: Have you screened the film in St. Petersburg?

Fuller: We screened a rough cut of the film in St. Pete in 2006 before finishing it up and starting our festival run. It did really well, we actually had to turn a lot of people away so I'm looking forward to getting it back into a theatre or two down here soon.

Filmmaker: On the other hand, the film has played quite a bit abroad. Given that has a very European and even pan-Asian sensibility to it, have you found that it actually plays better overseas, compared to American festival audiences?

Fuller: You know, that's a tough one. I actually hate sitting through screenings so its tough to gauge how the film has played with the crowd at all these festivals. I was in the CineVegas screening and the primary Locarno screening and, though they both seemed to go well, we got a standing ovation from a huge audience in Switzerland and that was something I didn't witness anywhere else. Based off that experience and the people who approached me while I was out there, I'd think that it would probably play better overseas than in the States, but we'll have to see. I wish that wasn't the case but all the things you hear about sensibilities and attention spans might end up being true. It's definitely a movie you have to invest yourself in. You get from it what you give to it.

We haven't had any opportunities to screen in Asia, unfortunately, and that's something I hope will change in the near future because I definitely think audiences there would be receptive to a film like this.

Filmmaker: How many times have you been asked the meaning of the title?

Fuller: About a million.

A BEACON OF DEMOCRACY? DISTRIBUTING LOVELY BY SURPRISE By Jake Abraham

2009-07-06T23:46:00.002-04:00

As I settle back in from a wonderful July 4th get-away, I am reminded of a mantra we used to chant at InDigEnt all the time (we were a spiritual bunch). It was about how the digital revolution in filmmaking truly is a democratizing factor in production and distribution. I believed it then and I believe it now. While that phrase has been thrown around to mean all kinds of things, what it really means to me is that technology is reducing the barriers to entry for the making of films and subsequently for the dissemination of those films to audiences. Doesn’t democracy feel great? While experimenting with digital production tools was the raison d'être at InDigEnt, distribution was always via traditional channels. Thus, a foray into alternative distribution is a first for me.

I did flirt with alternative distribution, or what’s now known as self- or DIY- distribution, on one occasion at InDigEnt. Puccini For Beginners had received only mild distributor interest after playing Sundance in 2006 and I thought it might be the time to experiment with a self-release. Ultimately, after scrutinizing the numbers and work involved, we decided to go the traditional route. The internet and blogosphere had not yet developed to the point it has today and the traditional distribution models hadn’t fully collapsed. Sure was nice to have options.

Fast forward to 2009. I’m fortunate to be a producer of Lovely By Surprise, the feature debut of the insanely talented Kirt Gunn. It’s a magnificent film with a serious marketing challenge. It doesn’t have big stars; it has gifted film and stage actors. It doesn’t have a high-concept plot line; it has a nuanced, multi-layered story with a big but complex payoff. It defies genre conventions. It has won numerous awards, but not Sundance.

After playing the festival circuit, we racked up some great awards but no distribution. After receiving some offers that were not really offers, it got to a point where waiting for another offer without a minimum guarantee was punishing on Kirt and myself. With no other brilliant ideas at our fingertips, we decided to dive into the deep waters of DIY-distribution. In our case, it hasn’t been fully DIY as we’ve hitched our wagon to Indigenous Film Works, a small outfit in Dallas, Texas run by Brandon Jones and Marc Stephens. I was introduced to Brandon through a film festival programmer. Indigenous has been able to put up some limited P&A support and give us very favorable terms, including non-exclusivity. They are also handling manufacturing of the DVD, shipping and returns. This is no small task. Their biggest asset is Brandon’s relationship with wholesalers and his understanding of the DVD market, which I discuss later. He has a bit of experience releasing genre films, but it’s his first time doing anything like we’re attempting with this film, making it a learning process for all of us. We also have the lovely Nevette Previd (who I knew from my time working with IFC) and Kelly Kitchens on board for some press/PR and outreach support. Rounding out the crew are Greg Lofaro and Graeme Jamieson, two tireless humans who work with me at Dandelion.

Our first task, and our most important, has been to decide what will best resonate with the public in trying to promote the film. Without the typical marketing angles and publicity machines I’m used to, we have both a challenge and an opportunity. Additionally, with no money to advertise the film, we’ve had to rely on human and earned media to get the word out. Those are the terms we use at Dandelion to define word-of-mouth publicity (via humans) and mentions in the press, blogs and other publications (advertising you can’t buy). We made the bold decision to actually respect potential viewers of the film by using a simple marketing strategy to expose it to the world… we decided to market the film itself. Not a genre, not an actor, not a controversy, not “inspired by a true story." We believe in the film, both as art and entertainment. It tends to strike up hearty discussion among audiences and people tell us they continue to think about the film long after seeing it. Others have really disliked the film, and passionately so, though that’s a small minority. So, we know we have a film that resonates, to the point of polarizing audiences. If we can just get the film in front of a critical mass of people, we have a chance to start a larger conversation about the film and can attempt to build on that. That’s the challenge we’ve put in front of ourselves. Let’s go find the people who will see Lovely By Surprise as either art, entertainment or both.

We’ve started by reaching out to every cranny of the real and virtual world in an attempt to identify potential lovers of LBS. Given that we have limited people-power, we are trying to concentrate our efforts around the most likely places. On the ‘net, that includes fan sites of the actors, literary sites, indie film sites, music sites (the film includes songs by Stephin Merritt and Tom Waits) and the like. In the real world, we have been holding word-of-mouth screenings in selected cities. These screenings are always held in conjunction with film festivals, film clubs, professional film societies, local arts magazines and other relevant organizations that like to be associated with quality projects and have a large member base that they can promote the film to. They like being able to invite their people to a sneak preview screening of an upcoming release. It’s important to pick your partners for these events carefully. Pairing yourself with the wrong sponsor can make for some very awkward screenings. We have learned this from experience.

We have been diligent in trying to use relationships that were established during the festival run. That comes in the form of competition judges and festival staff that were enthusiastic about the film. In just the few festivals and other screenings we played, we garnered fantastic comments or reviews from the likes of Scott Foundas, Godfrey Cheshire, and Nick Dawson. We have also reached out to people that couldn’t attend screenings and sent screeners to those interested in reviewing the film. If there’s one thing I underestimated, it’s the readership of some of the popular film blogs and the ways in which some of these writers have embraced the film. Not only have there been some great reviews, but some fascinating discussions in the feedback sections of these pages as well. The strong reactions we predicted have borne out, and that conversation has continued online. What more could we ask for in trying to promote this film? As an example, see Craig Kennedy’s 4-star review of the film from this weekend. Not only is it a great review from someone one who actually understood the film and took some time to think and write about it (sad to have to highlight that…), but take a look at the comments. Exactly what we’d hoped for. Also, if you Google the film, after the requisite IMDB link and the link to the official film site, there is review after review from bloggers all over the world. That happened through outreach by our diligent team and it seems to be a great tool for spreading the word about Lovely By Surprise. The team has also posted video clips that serve as sneak previews. The thinking here has been that, while the trailer is the traditional promotional tool, it doesn’t really give a sense of the pace and tone of the film. These clips do a much better job of that and we believe that the audience for this film will appreciate that. Lastly, we are making sure to keep the social media cylinders firing at all times with a Twitter feed (@LovelyBySrprise) that has great trivia and factoids about the film, its actors and other fun stuff (you’ll have to subscribe to find out!), a Facebook fan page, MySpace page and the other requisite social networking must-haves.

The flip side of this experiment is making sure the film is available for rental and purchase on the release date, July 7th. We decided on a “day-and-date” release for two reasons. One, we’re a tiny group and can only sustain this level of attention for so long. Two, as momentum has grown over the past few months of promotion, we think its time to get the film out there while awareness is still high and let people consume the film in any way they want. Unfortunately, this meant that we’ve had to pass on some deals that required exclusivity.

For example, the IFC FestivalDirect VOD deal requires that the DVD release be held back ninety days from the VOD release date due to deals with the cable operators (they don’t want to compete with Netflix). With the lengthy backlog to get on the service, we were looking at a DVD release as late June 2010. While I love IFC and was excited that they liked the film, there was no way we wanted to suspend our entire operation just so the film could be carried on a consignment basis through cable monopolies starting sometime next year.

Another challenging outlet has been theatrical distribution. The film was shot on 35mm and finished as a cut negative. There’s no IP and the prints look fantastic. Unfortunately, outside of festivals and special screenings, getting on traditional screens is a giant challenge without the support of the traditional distributors. The film has had enough buzz in certain markets that we are doing some very limited theatrical. Seattle is a good example. We’re playing the Firehouse Theater there. It’s a new art-house cinema and Seattle is where LBS world premiered and won the Special Jury Prize. It made sense and we were thrilled to be contacted by them. We will probably do some other special engagements like that but without ad money and movie stars, that route is pretty limited.

That leaves us with the workhorses of the DIY route: DVD and digital. We’ve been working with Indigenous to ensure the film is available in as many places as possible and can be consumed however anyone wants. We started months ago with the biggest buyers and worked our way down from there. Believe it or not, Blockbuster Video is still considered the biggest retailer out there and they were very interested in the film. The quality and scope of our indie marketing plan initially attracted them. They even told us they were going to buy thousands of units and had us work on artwork for them. But right before the deal was struck, their buyers were all fired and our deal was in jeopardy. On top of that, we heard from some smaller distributors that they’ve been owed payments from Blockbuster for many months and are concerned they may never get paid. Being the little guy on Blockbuster’s accounts payable list is a terrible position to be in. (Analysts in recent months were speculating that the company may be on verge of bankruptcy; their share price is currently $0.63/share). We decided to let it go. With that fiasco behind us, we worked with Indigenous to make sure that every possible outlet, both retail and online, would carry the film. They set up Netflix, Blockbuster Online, Amazon.com, iTunes and all those other online rental and purchase sites. Also, as they are set up as a vendor with all the wholesalers that distribute to retail rental stores and purchasers like Target, K-Mart, etc., we have orders coming in from those guys as well. This detail can’t be overlooked. Working with an approved vendor is a key step to getting your DVD in rental stores all over the U.S. (yes, they still exist). Don’t wait until your DVD is pressed to do this. It takes months to get all of this set up properly. The consequence of delaying this process is severe, as your film will not be available everywhere you want it to be when your marketing push is on and potential viewers won’t be able to access it.

Our release date is today, July 7th. It feels different than opening days in the past. No premiere party, no box office reports. The effects of our plan will begin to appear over the next few weeks as we see how well the promotion has worked. Yet, our job is far from over. We will continue to actively promote the film for at least the next six months, far longer than I’ve ever worked on a film when it was being marketed through a traditional distributor.

So here I am, now a member of this fledgling democracy. I can proudly say July 7th is truly Independence Day for Lovely By Surprise. I’ll be sure to let you know how it develops.

Jake Abraham is an NYC-based producer and former partner in InDigEnt. He is currently executive producer at Dandelion, a company created in partnership with Epoch Films. It is dedicated to creating programming and entertainment sponsored by brands. Dandelion is platform agnostic, having created feature films, web series and Xbox games. It has exclusive relationships with writers from SNL, 30 Rock, The Colbert Report, The Onion, This American Life and many other cool spots.

SEVERED WAYS By Mike Plante

2009-03-12T00:12:00.006-04:00

A graduate of Bard College, filmmaker Tony Stone’s first feature, Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America, unleashes an almost-new genre – the indie historical drama. It might also be the ultimate heavy metal video. Based on historical research, Severed Ways follows two Vikings stranded in medieval America, encountering both Native Americans and monks, everyone trying to survive. It is deeper than an action film as the Vikings are complete characters, violent but missing their girlfriends. In a way, Old Joy with Vikings.

Shot on mini-DV, the result is stunning, a period piece that looks like a painting but feels like an inside view with characters even speaking in Norse language.

FILMMAKER: Did you start the film while at Bard?

STONE: No, it was after with a lot of Bard friends. I did a variety of stuff at school. I tried to do a feature that ended up being three shorts for my senior project. The program was avant-garde/experimental for the most part. I was one of the few people who would do narrative. But that was great because there were no rules. Everybody was doing different stuff, which was great to be around.

FILMMAKER: And the teachers were supportive? All are great filmmakers themselves.

STONE: Definitely. The more rules you broke the better you were. They liked ambition. Anything that looked like you worked hard they were into. The teachers are big avant-garde names but they also grew up on classic film in a way. And they were making films in the groundbreaking era of the ’60s and ’70s.

FILMMAKER: Of course, when you say you were making narratives, you didn’t make a film about singles in Manhattan.

STONE: I strayed as far from that as possible. Growing up in New York, seeing the way the city is used as a backdrop in the media, from MTV to the news and films, it’s such a sterile place, a commercial backdrop with no texture anymore. It’s boring to film in, a default backdrop for American corporate culture, basically. Getting the woods in Vermont, a wide landscape is what I was looking for.

FILMMAKER: Did you have the story and then find the woods?

STONE: Both. I spent a third of the year in Vermont because my Dad moved out there as a hippie in 1969 completely off the grid -- no electricity or phone lines. No road in. It’s an upgraded farm with solar panels and a well. I grew up living in that location, so I knew it inside and out. I knew what each spot looked like at during different times of the day.

I wanted to put a film there – you figure out what’s already at your fingertips that you can use. Vikings were something I was into as a kid. But I’ve also always been into American history and that episode of it is so ignored and forgotten. It’s a whole chapter of America that is so open-ended and not known about. There was never a film about it. Taking that on and wanting to visualize it was interesting to me. I got to learn more about it. This chapter of Norse exploration has them interacting with the Native American pagan population -- the Vikings were semi-Pagan at the time, slowly converting to Christianity. It’s amazing how close the Norse actually came to settling America and how different this country would have been had they stayed and not retreated. It shows how fragile history is. The landscape of this country, the faces of the people…. It would have been night and day. The possibility of what could have been 500 years before Columbus, settled more gradually…. Indian and Norsemen were technologically equal, instead of 500 years later with Christian vigor carrying guns.

FILMMAKER: Trying to describe this to friends, I ended up at Old Joy with Vikings.

STONE: [laughs] Yeah these two vikings...

FILMMAKER: But it’s infused with the look of a 1970s saturated drama.

STONE: Those are definitely the films that influenced it. Sometimes I have trouble describing it. I often call it a “heavy-metal nature Viking film.” In terms of cross-referencing, which I don’t do too much, I think of Barry Lyndon, Aguirre and Quest for Fire together.

FILMMAKER: It feels incredibly real. How much research did you do, compared to just writing a story?

STONE: The opening quote is from the Vinland Sagas, another forgotten part of the American conquest. The myths and sagas about the exploration are incredibly accurate. That’s how they discovered the Norse ruins in Newfoundland – by sailing a replication of the ship described in the sagas, they ended up in this location and found a Norse settlement that had been built.

I met with serious reenactment actors, and that was one of the most educational things. Seeing how practical the Vikings were, it was amazing. They were such skilled carpenters. What they could accomplish with such primitive tools, from the technology of their boats to their houses which are beautiful and simple. That helped with what we had, which was the land in Vermont. Using your surroundings, from milling your own wood to shitting in the woods, the way the character does in the film. Take a film crew and put them there, and everyone is living like the characters.

FILMMAKER: How did those discussions go when hiring crews?

STONE: [laughs] Everyone was up for it. We shot it over two different falls, and we were dependent on the weather day to day. The mist in the woods and the way the sun hit the river at a time would all dictate the shooting schedule. Everybody was focused on this one task. Nobody going home at night and watching TV or doing emails, there was nothing else. Like a think tank up there.

I initially thought I could shoot the whole thing in two weeks, which of course I was completely wrong about. We shot only about a fifth of it the first year. After going through that footage and understanding where it needed to go, it ended up being four times as long a shoot, plus we went to Canada, to Newfoundland, to Maine and to Vermont for another six weeks.

Going to Newfoundland was a pilgrimage to that Norse settlement I mentioned for the flashbacks in the film. We were tromping around where the Vikings actually were, and the energy from that was pretty incredible. To physically see where they set foot and why they picked the spot they did. Fifty miles across from Newfoundland you could see Labrador. It was the gateway to Saint Lawrence, there was this amazing cove, and the buildings were so beautiful.

FILMMAKER: How long did you live in the forest home?

STONE: Full summers and weekends. Total escape from New York. I grew up in New York but that contrast has always been a part of me. In a way Severed Ways has that intense clash of the music over the intense nature. To drive four hours north and tromp around the woods then come back to lower Manhattan, it has a profound effect on a kid.

FILMMAKER: Maybe because we grew up in the ’80s, so of course metal music equals Vikings. But did you ever worry about the clash with the story’s timeline?

STONE: I think there are ideas in the music that come through and reinforce the images. A piece of classical score over Vikings pillaging, there is no connection. Basically there is a subtext in all that music. With black metal, people were listening to it and burning down churches the same way their ancestors were a thousand years ago. The music is loaded, and acoustically it makes sense. It’s triumphant. It is used to reinforce the characters belief systems. The battle cry, the fearlessness. But as the Vikings’ friendship dissolves away and the Christianity comes then the music changes too. The tonalities and sentimentality of the Brian Eno theme works as a heathen to Christianity conversion theme. The prog rock of Popul Vuh, which is very beautiful and psychedelic, represented as the Native American, and very pure, Pagan earth sides of things entering the frey.

FILMMAKER: How hard was Norse to learn?

STONE: Uh... difficult!

One of the main goals of the film is to bridge the past and the present, to not look at history as this distant thing that we are not in touch with. From the subtitles and the vernacular of the characters, to the music to the mannerism, [we are] trying to modernize the period piece and make it more familiar instead of the usual staleness found in these types of films.

POSITIF'S MICHEL CIMENT By Jamie Stuart

2009-01-30T18:23:00.006-05:00

In connection with the Film Society of Lincoln Center's new series "Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Cinema," Jamie Stuart spoke recently with Positif's editor, the noted French film critic and author Michel Ciment.

FILMMAKER: I probably know you best from your Kubrick book. What was that like, having the ability to interview him over the years?

CIMENT: Well, it came very naturally. I don't know why. I think he had a piece of mine translated from 1968 -- a long essay I did on the work of Kubrick. It was probably the first essay in France to try to show the strands of Kubrick's work and the connections between all the films. People were always skeptical about the unity of his work; he was changing all the time, his style and form and so on. I was on the list of people he would approve to do interviews with on A Clockwork Orange. He liked what I did. He liked the interview. He liked the conversation. He would call me regularly for information on various things he wanted to know: Distribution in France, exhibition, technical things, people who could help him and so on. And then, I met him regularly -- I was not a friend of his, I don't think anybody was really friends with Kubrick -- but he was not at all aloof, he was extremely charming. I found him one of the best people to interview, though of course it was a little intimidating because you'd have such a short time. But he was very professional. We'd talk quite a lot on the phone, that's true. And then, I wrote this book in 1980. My wife said Kubrick called, he'd got the book. He called me back at 9 in the evening and said, "I received your book. It is the most beautiful book I have seen on a film director. I would like to order 400 copies, if you could get me a price." There's not much else to say, except of my fascination with Kubrick's work. But it went on quite easily. I think he knew my book on Kazan; he was a great admirer of Kazan. I did a book with Joseph Losey; he knew Losey too, and Losey was a great fan of Kubrick. I think the fact that I was a professor -- I was teaching at the university -- I think he appreciated that. I think he was a little suspicious of the press in general. He'd had bad experiences: Interviews that had been published without his approval, or they'd say things that he didn't really say. So I think the fact that I was a scholar, for him, it made him more respectful.

FILMMAKER: What makes Positif different from other film magazines?

CIMENT: Well, I think, first of all, it's part of history now. It started in '52, like Cahiers du Cinéma, in '51 -- two magazines with more than half a century of life. I think it's also a magazine which has established a very strong relationship with directors, because I think they felt that we were not conditioned by ideology or by clannishness, and so on. It's a magazine that is fueled by a love of cinema. We are not poseurs trying to be Maoist or structuralist. We really react with a passion for film. After that, of course, we exercise our intellectual curiosities to analyze the films. But before that, our first reaction is not to wonder how we'll look if we like a certain film: Can we like American films while the Vietnam war is going on? Can we like this film which is telling a story when it is the end of the story in films? As Godard said, "We can't tell stories anymore." We have never been into this thing which makes magazines very popular among intellectual circles, because it's always flattering to say, I am intolerant, or, I believe in this. We have never been -- even if we are accused of eclecticism -- we don't care. What fuels us, again, is this love of cinema, curiosity, openness toward foreign cultures. The magazine was known in the '50s for looking for new directors from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and later, in Brazil. The next issue is about new Belgian cinema. It is open to new forms and styles, and at the same time to study the past -- to make connections between the past and present, commercial cinema and sometimes very peculiar types of cinema. As you can see in these selections ("Mavericks and Outsiders: Positif Celebrates American Cinema"), we have David Holzman's Diary. We're difficult to pigeonhole -- it's the freedom of the magazine that makes it difficult to pigeonhole. But I think on the whole, when you look back on 55 years of issues and articles, I think it has an image -- an image due to the fact that several generations of critics live together at Positif; we don't have one generation which kicks out the previous one. Young people come to Positif when they have read the magazine for 5 or 10 years, and they decide they want to write for this particular magazine because it has this kind of spirit, this kind of freedom. So, therefore, there is a sort of unity, due to...in spite of the 70 year-old critics and the 25 year-old critics -- they belong to the same culture, though they are different, of course. The young people have their own ideas, a new vision of things, as do the older ones. It creates a rather unique experience.

FILMMAKER: It's impartial.

CIMENT: I don't know. We are pretty partial. We are partial on our own criteria. We are partial to our own individualism. We are not partial because of the trends. It's true that we are, perhaps, unfair with some films while praising other films. But the case of Kubrick is a very interesting case. Truffaut was established immediately as a great director. But, I think he is not as great a director as Kubrick. However, Kubrick was despised and neglected by a lot of critics even in America -- remember Sarris and Pauline Kael, how they reacted to 2001. So Positif was always a fan of Kubrick, as soon as Paths of Glory -- which was dismissed by Godard. So Kubrick or John Boorman -- I also wrote a book on Boorman -- they are very much what we try to be as critics: They have not decided to be this type of filmmaker, a filmmaker with a signature that you can immediately recognize. It was much more difficult for Kubrick to be accepted as an artist than for Truffaut or Jacques Demy. Everybody loved Demy immediately -- The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was immediately hailed. But The Shining or Full Metal Jacket or even till the end of his life -- Eyes Wide Shut was dismissed. So that's what we liked. We liked the freedom that he had. We try to, in our modest way, to behave the same, as critics.

ROTTERDAM '09: THE HUNGRY GHOSTS By Jason Guerrasio

2009-01-21T10:08:00.010-05:00

Opening this year’s Rotterdam International Film Festival is Michael Imperioli’s directorial debut, The Hungry Ghosts, a gripping look at five New Yorkers all struggling to satisfy their physical and spiritual needs while facing down their own – and society’s – flaws.

Best known for his Emmy-winning portrayal of Christopher on The Sopranos, Imperioli has over the course of his 20-year career worked with such top directors as Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee. He’s also built a sub-career as a screenwriter, having penned numerous episodes of The Sopranos and Lee’s Summer of Sam, which originally Imperioli was going to direct. For The Hungry Ghosts, the title of which comes from a Buddhist metaphor for people futilely attempting to fulfill their insatiable appetites, he makes a film small in stature (shot on HD Cam and budgeted at $600,000) but large in ideas about life and the human condition. There’s also a strong ensemble of talent that Imperioli brought to the production from family, actors of Studio Dante (Imperioli and his wife’s Lower Manhattan theater group) and friends, particularly Steve Schirripa (best known as Bobby Bacala on The Sopranos), who gives a remarkable performance as a gambling, drug addicted overnight DJ and lousy father who attempts to reconnect with his son after a life-changing event. The Hungry Ghost is an impressive debut film that offers an uncompromising look at the complexities of life and the redemptive qualities we need to get through it.

Imperioli talked to Filmmaker over the phone hours before catching a flight for Holland for the film’s premiere.

TOP OF PAGE: STEVE SCHIRRIPA AND EMORY COHEN IN THE HUNGRY GHOSTS. ABOVE: THE HUNGRY GHOSTS' WRITER-DIRECTOR MICHAEL IMPERIOLI. PHOTOS COURTESY OF CICALA FILMWORKS.

FILMMAKER: Have you always been interested in Eastern thinking?

IMPERIOLI: It is something that has interested me for a long time. Their philosophy is something that I’ve been reading about for a number of years, and you start to examine your own life in terms of those ideas. The title didn’t come until the first draft was almost done, I wasn’t even totally sure that that was the direction it was going to go in, I was just writing from a sketch of the Frank and Nadia characters and it just kind of blossomed from there.

FILMMAKER: In our Summer ’08 In Focus column you told Mary Glucksman that you’d been playing around with two characters for a couple of years. These were the characters?

IMPERIOLI: Yeah. I had the Frank character as the host of a children’s TV show for another script that didn’t really go anywhere, and there was something about the character that I liked and something about Steve playing the character that I liked. I started writing the script using that character and then I had this idea of Nadia, played by Aunjanue Ellis, and the two of them together on a train. That was the initial seed of the script for The Hungry Ghosts.

FILMMAKER: Had you always had Steve in mind to play the part?

IMPERIOLI: Well, Steve and I are good friends. We met on The Sopranos but we became very, very close and one of the episodes that I wrote for The Sopranos was when his wife dies in a car accident. He did some stuff in that episode that really showed a lot more depth than he was allowed to show before. Then just knowing him as a person, knowing the depth of him as a person I thought it would be great to give him something really meaty like this. I knew he would be great but he really surpassed my hopes. His instincts were amazing.

FILMMAKER: Are you interested in seeing how audiences will react to that character? He’s a jerk for most of the movie and at the end people may want to see him get what’s coming to him, but you didn’t go that route.

IMPERIOLI: Well, what I’m hoping is that people give him an opportunity to maybe now change, because where he ends up in the movie is very different than where he begins. Obviously the step in the right direction is that he hears his kid tried to kill himself, and he gets on a train to try to be with him. I’m not saying he’s going to become a guy who meditates all the time or starts to head towards Eastern spirituality, but at the end of the movie he is at a different place. What I would hope people get is that there is always hope no matter how ingrained you think your habits, addictions, ignorances and selfish behaviors are, that there is an opportunity to change. Hopefully it’s not at a point where it is too late.

FILMMAKER: How did the multiple character structure come together?

IMPERIOLI: I did a movie, I shot it about two years ago and it came out last year in Europe. It’s called The Lovebirds, and a guy named Bruno De Almeida, someone I’d worked with before, directed it. It was about six separate stories but there was something in the way that he told those stories that I really loved. We did a screening in New York right before I sat down to write The Hungry Ghosts, and I liked the way he told the story. I thought it could work for these characters.

FILMMAKER: How did you work with the actors, especially the ones from your Studio Dante theater?

IMPERIOLI: I think 18 or 19 of those actors in the film worked in the theater either in main stage productions or as acting students in our classes there. So I knew them and worked with most of them. Nick Sandow, Sharon [Angela] and Steve I’d worked with a lot before on many different things so that already gave me kind of a leg up. We did a pretty extensive rehearsal process — about two weeks every day we worked on the big scenes, and there were some [script] revisions that came out of that. It saved us a lot of time because when you’re shooting independently time is of the essence. They had already found their groove when they got to the set.

FILMMAKER: I’ve read that a big influence on you has been John Cassavetes.

IMPERIOLI: He’s been an influence on me, I really love his writing — I find him really underrated as a writer. A lot of people thought his movies were improvisations. I know people who worked with him — actually Zohra Lampert, who plays the Guru in my film, played Ben Gazzara’s wife in Opening Night. His stuff was scripted tightly, they rehearsed and maybe tweaked stuff in rehearsal but he was able to write in ways that he didn’t give everything away. He let the audience work and let them think. There’s something very organic about his writing that really inspires me. It definitely inspired me, but I don’t know if that’s evident when watching it.

FILMMAKER: There is a lot of deep thinking in the film about the human condition. Was it therapeutic for you to get these thoughts on paper?

IMPERIOLI: Yeah. I would say it was. And more so in actually filming it, not just the writing, but also the filming and working on it [with the actors].

FILMMAKER: I know you wrote Summer of Sam and had the opportunity to direct that, and you’ve written episodes of The Sopranos, so how did you directing not come sooner?

IMPERIOLI: I wanted to direct Summer of Sam and Spike originally came on as an executive producer to help me direct it, but I never had the opportunity because we couldn’t raise the money to do it, which is probably a really good thing because I think it was beyond me at the time. We didn’t have the money so we kept rewriting it and then the scope of the movie kept getting bigger and it kind of encompassed more of the city and the riots and all of the stuff that’s going on. I kind of backed away because I really felt it was biting off more than I could chew. Then it kind of died for a while and Spike [came back to it]. And then I co-wrote a script for Peter Falk and he wanted to do it but we never got the money for that, so that’s just sitting in a drawer. That one I wanted to direct. I’ve been offered independents to direct over the years but I always felt that if I was going to direct something I wanted it to be something that I wrote.

FILMMAKER: And they never offered you to direct episodes of The Sopranos?

IMPERIOLI: No, for the same reasons. Directing television you really have to do what’s been laid out. There’s a template for that show and then you can add your own style, but I just didn’t have the chops to do that. That’s why I wanted to wait [until I had] my material and could make my own style on my own terms or mess up my own thing.

FILMMAKER: Did you ever have to consider starring in The Hungry Ghosts to find the money you’d need to make it?

IMPERIOLI: I got the money really, really easily. There were three investors, and the two major investors were my two biggest donors to my theater so they had been with us for five years. They really love what we do there and said if we were going to do a film to ask them. I wrote the script and asked them and they both wrote big checks.

FILMMAKER: And you never thought of starring in it?

IMPERIOLI: No. I didn’t want to direct my first movie and star in it.

FILMMAKER: Where are you in your career now? Do you want to produce plays and direct films more than act?

IMPERIOLI: I want to do all of the above. I’m shooting [ABC’s] Life on Mars so I work a lot right now, but as soon as I’m done with that in March I’m going to start writing again. It’s really hard to write unless you have the discipline that everyday you’re going to do it and get into that rhythm. So the next free time I have I’m going to work on another script.

Read our coverage of this year's Rotterdam Film Festival on the blog.

OF TIME AND THE CITY By Scott Macaulay

2009-01-20T10:00:00.000-05:00

For Terrence Davies, his youth -- his early years in Liverpool, his relationship with his mother, and his feelings about being gay in that working-class town -- have always provided the raw material for his filmmaking. His celebrated “Terrence Davies Trilogy,” a collection of shorts, and later features like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes summon up for the viewer an interior life with a rare combination of lyricism and heartache.

These films cemented Davies’s international reputation, but after two more, non-autobiographical features (The House of Mirth and The Neon Bible), he became less active, a development that had more to due with shifting trends in British film financing than his own creativity. But now, almost ten years after his last feature, Davies is premiering an unexpected success, his first documentary about – what else? – his early years in Liverpool. Of Time and the City is a lushly realized memory piece, a symphony of images, archival footage, narration and classical music that transforms grey old Liverpool into a digitally-realized reverie that is beautiful, sometimes acerbic, and always tinged with melancholy.

Of Time and the City opens January 21 at New York’s Film Forum from Strand Releasing. I spoke with Davies this past fall at the Toronto Film Festival.

TOP OF PAGE: TERENCE DAVIES'S OF TIME AND THE CITY. PHOTO BY: BERNARD FALLON. ABOVE: OF TIME AND THE CITY'S DIRECTOR TERENCE DAVIES. PHOTO BY: SOLON PAPADOPOULOS. COURTESY OF STRAND RELEASING.

FILMMAKER: I’ve read a number of interviews you’ve done for this film, and I’ve also read the reviews. They’re all fantastic. What’s it like talking so much about a film that is itself a revisiting of your childhood?

TERENCE DAVIES: Well, I mean, it’s lovely because I’ve known what it’s like when people weren’t interested. After Neon Bible, no one was interested or wanted to talk to me. I’m as vain as anybody else, so it’s nice to have your ego massaged. I’m quite happy to do it because I never thought it would have this kind of reaction, I can assure you. It was made with the most modest of budgets, and the most modest of intentions.

FILMMAKER: Tell me a little bit about how this specific project came to be.

DAVIES: Well, it was by accident. Sol Papadopoulos, who was one of the producers, rang me up and said, “Do you remember me?” And I said, “Yes. You took some pictures of my mother about 20 years ago and they’re very beautiful. And I’ve still got them.” He said, “Well, I’m a producer now, and something called Digital Departures is coming to Liverpool, because it’s the European city of culture of this year. And they want to produce films for 250,000 pounds each, would you be interested?” And I said, “No. I don’t want to make any more fiction films about Liverpool. I’ve done that.” But then I said, “What might be interesting is to do a documentary about the Liverpool I grew up in, from 1945 onwards, and then contrast it with the new Liverpool, which is an alien city for me.” My template would be Humphrey Jennings’ [film] Listen to Britain, 1941, which is a great poem. It’s greater than a documentary -- it’s a poem. He was trying to capture the nature of being British when we were about to be invaded, and it’s glorious. I just wanted to capture what it was to be Liverpudlian – something much more modest. And he said, “Yes, we’d like to do that.”

FILMMAKER: Was there any wrestling either on their part or your part with this notion of you, a fiction filmmaker, making a documentary?

DAVIES: No, because I’d written a sketch of what I wanted to do and we produced a six-minute trailer. I said, “Look, it is a personal essay. So if it’s not what you want, you better give the money to someone else, because it’s not going to be a straight documentary: this happened, that happened. I’m not interested in that.”

FILMMAKER: Once you went through that process was this a hard film in any way to make?

DAVIES: Well, the hardest thing was actually what to leave out, because there was so much of it and some of it was ravishingly beautiful. We said, “Oh, I wish I could put that sequence in but I can’t.” It had to reach its natural length. You can’t force it. I’d written a sort of story, and, of course, that went out of the window very early because all this material brought back other memories of other things which had happened and which made me say, “Look, can you find footage from that or from this?” Or, “Can you find footage that’s in color?” All sorts of things. Memory is like smell. As soon as it’s pricked, it begins to work, and things that have lain dormant in you start to emerge. And memory, of course, is nonlinear. It’s completely cyclical and it’s completely disparate and elliptical. What you remember most intensely can be the tiniest things but they’re powerful for you because they have a whole emotional meaning beyond their surface meaning. And so it was quite hard to actually disregard some of that material.

FILMMAKER: Well, that’s one of my questions. What was the ordering process for this movie? Not necessarily in the shaping, but in terms of finding the through lines and assembling all of these disparate things into a feature film.

DAVIES: It was a mixture of finding material and then writing the through line. But you very rarely get to the through line fast. That is discovered while you put [the film] together. It’s like the through line of a script, of a fiction script. You find that eventually. I usually get it by the second draft, and then I do a polish. But here the script was being written daily. There were times when I couldn’t see the line, and that was very worrying. It’s not like sitting in your own flat with a piece of paper and a script and saying, “No, this doesn’t work. Why doesn’t it work?” You can walk around and shout at the walls, but you can’t do that in the cutting room. You just say, “Okay, it doesn’t feel right, does it?” And Liza [Ryan-Carter], who is a wonderful editor, says, “No.” But when something is right, you think, [snaps] “Yeah.” Or you say, in a sequence, “No. If we take that out and reverse those shots and begin there, it will work.” And it does. Sometimes you get it that easily, and sometimes it takes three, four days. But I did say to her, “We’ve got to cut it like fiction.” When there was music, we’d cut it mute and then put the music on and see where the cuts fall. And then you’d sort of say, “Tweak it.” You’d say, “No, this cut here really has to come on the beat.” Or on that word. But others fell beautifully. The through line emerges subconsciously, and when it does, then [the film] begins to sing. But it takes a long time sometimes to get to that.

FILMMAKER: Was one particular element – the music, the narration, the archival footage, or simply your memories – more central than the others to the way you organized the material?

DAVIES: Well, I was writing the narration as I was cutting it. But we saw two films: one by Nick Broomfield, called Who Cares, and another called Morning in the Streets, the director of whom I’ve forgotten, ad I extracted things from them. I wanted to build up this idea of the street coming to life. Gradually the day begins. The children go to school. They play in the schoolyard. Their parents work hard. The school day ends. They come home. And again, I’ve no idea where it came from. I had heard on the BBC Radio 3, which is the classical music station in England, Angela Gheorghiu singing this Romanian folk song called “Watch and Pray.” As soon as I [heard it], I said, “That’s what we’ve got to have underneath it.” Don’t know where it came from. I have no idea. But that prompted all the reminiscing about Christmas, about going to war, Korea. (My eldest brother was in the army and had an accident and couldn’t go because he was injured very badly.) And then that led into the coronation -- I had to get the coronation and have a go at the monarchy because they’re such parasites. [laughs] All that comes by searching – searching your own memory and looking at the material.

FILMMAKER: How resonant was it for you when you first saw the archival footage? Because it’s not your archival footage -- it’s material that somebody else shot with an eye towards capturing history as opposed to personal moments. When you looked at this material did it take you back in time? Or did you have to work to allow your own memories to be triggered by it?

DAVIES: Well, [the archival footage worked] in different ways, really. I mean, I remember vaguely the elevated railway, which was the first elevated electric railway in the world. It ran the whole length of the docks, which is between eight and 10 miles. I remembered it and I said, “You can find me some footage.” And the footage that we found was like outtakes from Metropolis -- they looked wonderful. But I was shocked at how awful the slums were, and I grew up in them! I never, never remembered them being as grim as they were. The sheer hard work just to keep them clean – just to keep your house clean, yourself clean, your children. That was a shock. It also brought memories back when the women used to go to the washhouse. My mother used to go on a Thursday. We only had one set of curtains, and they were washed every Thursday. And the house looked so bare without them. I hated Thursday, because I’d come home from school and there’d be no curtains on the windows and it looked so bleak.

FILMMAKER: Have you seen Guy Maddin’s film My Winnipeg?

DAVIES: No. I believe it’s very good, though.

FILMMAKER: Yeah, it’s very good. It’s about him cinematically remembering his hometown on the occasion of his move to Toronto. It’s a mixture of history and fiction, and a lot of the history feels like fiction. What was your take on historical truth versus the truth of memory in the film?

DAVIES: [pause] Well, I think I would rely more on memory truth, because that’s more emotional, and that’s something that I’m more concerned with. That, too, in its own way, is real.

FILMMAKER: There’s a lot of talk in the American independent world right now about the need for new ways to make, distribute and even view films. What are your thoughts on where cinema is now?

DAVIES: Well, I’m not sure. I haven’t worked since 2000, when I finished The House of Mirth, because The Neon Bible was before that. But the climate seems to be improving in England. The people at the U.K. Film Council now – like Lenny Crooks, especially – want to do films and they actually care about them. The previous regime did not do that. But what was wrong [previously] in England was the destruction of the production board of the BFI. It was an act of cultural vandalism to have actually got rid of it because it gave people their first chance to make a film, without any of this nonsense about, you know, “Well, it’s got a climax on page three,” or everyone’s got a back story, or all that nonsense – utter nonsense – that Robert McKee spouts. You had 25-year-olds telling you how to write a script. And when you said, “Well, how many have you written?” it all goes quiet. “Well, how many have you written?” “None.” “Oh, I see. So, you’ve written no scripts and you’re telling me how to write them and I’ve been writing them for 30 years? I think that’s a bit arrogant, don’t you?” And you shut the door. I hope, with things like Hunger – which I’ve not seen, but it was a very courageous film to be funded by Channel 4 – the climate has changed. There’s hope there. I’m glad that my film got funded, and I hope that provides some hope for other people. But once you get into the position that Britain is in – being a client nation of America, with all the indignity that goes with that – you’re in trouble. Because now, culturally, we look to America for validation when we should be looking either to ourselves or to Europe. Our future does not lie with America, and neither does our culture. Now, in England, if you want to celebrate anything about our culture, you’re dismissed as elitist, or middle class. It’s almost fascist now. It’s exactly like it was after the civil war, when you had to be politically and religiously correct. Hopefully that will go. It’s far too early, but I am cautiously optimistic.

FILMMAKER: What about new ways of viewing films, whether that be through the internet on your computer, or on a handheld device?

DAVIES: I’m a technophobe. I don’t understand all this new technology. I just simply don’t understand it. If we’ve got to make things on digital, I will do it, because I enjoyed it. I think digital will probably replace film, because it’s quicker and all the rest of it. But all that downloading things, I have no idea what it is. At the end of the day, if you’re going to make a film, in whatever format, the only real way to see it is on a large screen in a darkened room with other people. There’s no other experience like it. Watching it on DVD or an iPod is not the same. Watching it on television is not the same. It’s not like sitting in a full theater with a huge screen. Everyone responds to it collectively, yet everyone feels that the secret is only being told to them. Nothing replaces that.

DRAWING FROM MEMORY By Nick Dawson

2009-01-19T16:00:00.000-05:00

Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Waltz With Bashir writer-director Ari Folman for our Fall '08 issue. Waltz With Bashir is nominated for Best Foreign Film.

It’s been said that the job of the filmmaker is to put on screen things that have never been seen before. And while cinema is essentially an infant art form, these days there are still relatively few films that move into genuinely new territory. Waltz with Bashir, which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is one of those films.

In this unique documentary, Israeli director Ari Folman attempts to reconstruct the missing memories from his time as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War. His main goal is to discover where he was during the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp, a revenge killing of hundereds of Palestinian civilians by Phalangists in response to the murder of newly appointed Lebanese president Bashir Gemayel. To piece together his past, Folman visits old friends and interviews soldiers he fought alongside, and this journey of discovery is as compelling a narrative as any piece of fiction.

While the unflinching, personal detective story aspect of Waltz with Bashir already makes it unusual, what makes it even more so is that Folman’s documentary is animated. Though on paper this seems like an impossible collision of genres, Folman uses the freedoms that animation gives him to take the film to places another documentary could not go. What’s more, Folman plays with our preconceptions of cartoons always belonging to the realm of narrative filmmaking, and in the process asks exactly where the line between documentary and fiction lies. And while Yoni Goodman’s vivid animation, hand-drawn and in a variety of styles, looks stunning, it always complements rather than distracts from Folman’s compelling and ultimately moving tale.

Sony Pictures will release Waltz with Bashir this December.

TOP OF PAGE: A SCENE FROM WALTZ WITH BASHIR. PHOTO BY: ARI FOLMAN AND DAVID POLONSKY. ABOVE: WALTZ WITH BASHIR WRITER-DIRECTOR ARI FOLMAN. PHOTO BY HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.

I thought it was very interesting that the film starts not from your perspective but from that of your friend Boaz. That seemed like a very conscious decision. It was a very conscious decision. You can imagine that I got a lot of criticism — even for the screenplay — that I’m not there in the first frame and that it might confuse the audience about who the protagonist is in the film. But, I mean, how narrow-minded can we get?

It’s true. I think we do usually assume that the first character whose perspective we see from will be the protagonist. You’re right. It was a deliberate decision and I insisted on it. I saw this other film here [at the Toronto International Film Festival] called Hunger. The main character appears after 14 minutes, and the film is amazing. You don’t need to be hooked on conventions.

Did this film start out as a personal attempt to recover your past? Well, I’ll tell you how it started and you decide. Five years ago, I turned 40. In Israel, I served a few years in the army and between two weeks and a month [of every year] you’re a reservist. I was a screenwriter in the reserves doing shorts and commercials [on topics] like how to defend yourself in a chemical attack, and I got really tired of it although I hardly did anything. I asked for a release a few years earlier than usual and they said, “You know what, we can give you the release but there is this experiment the army is working on. You will have to see our therapist for a few sessions and tell him everything you went through during your service.” So I went to 10 meetings, and when they ended I realized that it was the first time I ever told my story to anyone — even myself. The content of the story was not that amazing, but the fact that I never dealt with it for more than 20 years was amazing, for me. So I went to my inner circle of friends and family and I tried to see if people felt the same, and they did. Then I thought, “Okay, there’s something going on here.” At the time, I was working on this documentary series called The Material That Love Is Made Of and it was the first try I made with animated documentary. I started imagining this journey because I had these black holes in my memory when I was at those sessions with the therapist. I started imagining this animated journey where I go to pick up all those pieces that I’m missing. So this is how it all started.

Did you do historical research about the events depicted before going into the personal aspects of this journey? I advertised on the Internet that I was looking for stories from the first Lebanon War. I got a response from something like 100 men, and we heard all those stories, which were quite extreme. Afterward I wrote the screenplay. Most of the research, of course, is out [of the movie] because we had to keep a very narrow storyline. Then we shot everything on a sound studio, because I thought that the human ear is totally non-tolerant to location [sound] in terms of animation. We cut it as a video documentary film and then we made storyboards out of the video because it’s not a rotoscope film. We moved the storyboard really basically. We picked something like 3,000 key frames and then we would move them.

So the journey that you take in the film is one that you took yourself in real life prior to filming? Yes. I met all those people, and then at the studio we tried to dramatize everything, like if I was interviewing someone in a car we would sit one beside each other with plastic wheels and pretend it was a car.

And when you were shooting it in the studio, you got the real people you had interviewed to recreate their conversations with you? I did, but we had two actors in the film too because the guy from Holland had cold feet a few days before shooting. He didn’t mind [being in] the story so we took his monologue and we gave it to an actor and we invented a new face. It’s one of the things you can do when you have the freedom of animation. Basically, we were having the same discussion as he had twice before, first with the researcher and the second time with me.

What was it like to recreate these conversations on a sound stage, acting almost as if they were fiction? First, it depends who you are. For example, the journalist [Ron Ben-Yishai] has told his story probably at least a thousand times — he wrote a book about it and you can see in the way that he’s talking. But the swimmer, for example — it was the first time he had told his story after so many years. He had so much to get out of his thoughts and the third time was better than the first. It’s something really personal. With someone like Frenkel — the karate guy, the dancer — the first time was the best by far. When we met at my studio after so many years, he couldn’t do it again. It was not as good. So, one is for the better, one is for the worse… I still don’t know if I have the best version… but, you know, that is the price you sometimes pay when you make a film like this.

Why did you specifically conceive this as an animated documentary? It seems that almost anybody else would not have tackled the story in this way. Well, frankly, it isn’t important to me. I’m kind of tired of film formats and if I would have declared this film five years ago as a fiction film, I would have raised the money much easier and I’d be more secure and I would have completed it a year ago, at least. I don’t know why I declared it an animated documentary, but I did. I mean, who decides? Is there a committee who decides when a specific film starts off being a documentary and turns into fiction, or the other way around? I wouldn’t know. I just don’t know what to say, and I don’t care. I mean, this is the film, okay? You’re the journalist — you decide. If you decide that for you it’s a fiction film, I’m happy for you. If, for you, it is in the structure of documentary or what you define as documentary, I’ll go with you as well. I think it’s great that you can choose. Why should I choose?

When I was scribbling notes on the film, I called it a “recalled documentary.” I mean, would it feel more convenient for you if it were a fiction film based on true stories? I don’t think so.

I don’t feel there’s one easy way to categorize this film, and I think that’s a real strength. This was obviously the way that you felt you needed to handle the material, so the label that other people put on it is not important to you. Totally.

Because of the ambiguous genre the film sits in, was it difficult to pitch? I was at Hot Docs three-and-a-half years ago; I had a three-minute scene and I pitched [the film]. There were 40 coordinators from documentary funds and [television] stations there. You had to declare that you had 40 percent of your budget — of course, I didn’t even have 5 percent, so I had to lie but I was selected anyhow. Thirty-eight out of the 40 took their microphones and said, “Why animation? It’s a documentary, we’re at a documentary film festival. Why can’t you film the real people?” It is weird for me to explain, “why animation,” even now. It’s the most frequently asked question since Cannes, and it’s still the one question I can’t understand. I mean, of course it’s an animation ‑ how else could it have been done? It’s absurd to me.

When you realized the film should be animated, did you have a clear picture of how it should look, and the particular style of animation? I had a clear vision, but it was more than a clear vision: I was obsessed with a few things. First of all, that the audience would still be emotionally attached to the characters, and that meant for me that we would draw them as realistic as the illustrators could. Meaning, we should put as much detail as we can: more contours and shapes; and, of course, the more detail you have in a face or in a body, the more complicated it is to animate it, to move it, especially in cut-out animation, which is the main thing. And then we had the dream sequences, which are more freehand, open in terms of color and shape, and then we had the last part of the film, which is more of a hardcore documentary. When you go to the massacre, it is monochrome and a little more depressing. You know, in this kind of animation, the style dictates the animation and not the other way around.

As the animation process took so long and you were working on Israeli TV shows at the same time, how involved were you in the day-to-day postproduction process? Believe me, I was working on the film. I was involved in every frame. It is about giving the film cinematic taste, trying every little thing that will work as a feature film. Because it takes time, we were screening the materials every two days and reworking them, every shot, every single angle, every aspect of the film. A frame here, a frame there. But Yoni’s main role was that he created the technique of this specific animation, which is an incredible thing.

And what is that technique? This is his invention, a combination of cut-out animation, flash-based [animation], classic Disney frame-by-frame animation and 3-D animation. And then he had to instruct the team because no one was qualified like him to do what he had invented. We only had eight animators. And when we needed two more, we couldn’t find them.

The film has a great score by Max Richter, and I was wondering how early on you had a clear sense of what the music and the sound design of the film would be? I started to work with the guy on the video-board stage already. First I went to Edinburgh [where Richter used to live]. We met and I screened the video board to him so he could see the color of the thing. I told him what I believed should be in every scene, and gave him guide [tracks]. I put in guides in every scene — I always do that. I put in music for my mind, but I don’t understand how [composers] can compete with the guides that film directors give them. There was Brian Eno stuff in there, and Sigur Rós — good things to match. High challenge. But he did it. The guy is absolutely brilliant.

What was the personal impact of making this film and succeeding in uncovering that lost portion of your past? Was it cathartic? It was kind of a therapeutic journey, but any filmmaking is. I would say that five years ago if I had looked at a photo of myself from when I was 19, I would have recognized the guy but felt totally disconnected. And now I live in peace with everything. This is the major change I went through.

The end of the film has a huge impact as we move from animation to news footage. Was the feeling of that shift similar to what you felt when you regained your memory of the massacre? Yes, it is as if you regain your memory and in a symbolic way as if you regain the real footage. In the end, we were not on the beach when the massacre took place, we were outside the camps. Basically, the ending was done just to prevent the situation where anyone anywhere would walk out of the theater and think that it was a really cool animated film with really cool drawings. I wanted to let people know that it really happened. Real people, they died. Thousands of them. On the other hand, if the film is like this bad acid trip like war is, in the end you wake up and this is what you see. So it works both ways.

GOTHAMS TRIBUTE: PENÉLOPE CRUZ By Jason Guerrasio

2009-01-19T15:50:00.000-05:00

Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Jason Guerrasio interviewed Vicky Cristina Barcelona star Penélope Cruz for our Gotham Independent Film Awards special section in the Fall '08 issue. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is nominated for Best Actress (Penélope Cruz).

Talking over the phone from London where she’s rehearsing her role in Rob Marshall’s film adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical, Nine, Penélope Cruz sounds humbled when congratulated for being named one of this year’s Gotham Award Tributes, but she admits there hasn’t been much time to think about the honor. Before filming Nine, Cruz wrapped production on her next project with Pedro Almodóvar, Los Abrazos rotos, a modern-day noir where she says she plays “a very different character from anything that I have done for Pedro before.” This comes off the two distinctly different roles she performed on screens this year — Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Isabel Coixet’s Elegy — where she has received some of the best reviews of her career.

In Vicky Cristina, Cruz plays Maria Elena, a fiery Spaniard who is the ex-wife of Javier Bardem’s Juan Antonio, a playboy painter who woos two American girls to Barcelona during their summer vacation. But when Maria Elena reenters Juan Antonio’s life she takes over the film: Her heated exchanges with Bardem, spoken in her native tongue, are one of the film’s highlights. In Elegy, based on the Philip Roth novel The Human Stain, Cruz is more subdued. The obsession of an aging bachelor played by Ben Kingsley, her character, Consuela, is more than a mere sex object. In full control of the situation, Consuela wants to take the relationship further than the occasional romp, and when she doesn’t get it she breaks it off with a voice message that is itself a heartrending minimonologue.

In her mid-thirties, Cruz has been nominated for an Oscar and is an international star, but as Filmmaker learns, both of her performances this year are examples of her continued drive to challenge herself by playing women who fascinate her.

Most times Woody Allen has an actor already in mind when he casts his films. Is that what happened with you for Vicky Christina Barcelona? No. I think my agent found out that he was going to shoot in Spain so he called and got a meeting. I had never met Woody before and the meeting was 40 seconds long. [laughs] He said he was writing but the script wasn’t finished and that he would let me know because he thought there was a character that could be right for me. Then a month later they called me and said Woody wanted me to do the movie. It’s been a great experience. I would love to work with him again because he shoots very fast — I did my whole character in three-and-a-half weeks but I wanted more time with him.

How would you compare his style to Pedro Almodóvar’s? I think the only thing they have in common is they are both geniuses with an amazing sense of humor. Most of the time their characters can laugh about pain and human confusion in a way that almost makes you feel guilty when you are working in those characters. You suffer as part of the audience sometimes. I love that feeling because they challenge you. And their systems could not be more different; it’s like day and night. Pedro rehearses for months and months and Woody doesn’t rehearse. But I didn’t miss rehearsal time working with Woody because he gave me a script many months before so that is his way to make sure that you have the time to feel ready [for the role]. It’s good to jump into that adventure.

How did Elegy come about? I was attached to the project for about five years with producers Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi. We finally put it together when Ben Kingsley and Isabel Coixet came on. I think they are the perfect people to do that movie; I can’t imagine another actor doing that character than Ben and I think Isabel is the perfect director to bring Philip Roth’s world to a movie because there’s just something that she has, her eye and her sensibility.

Many have called this your best English language-speaking performance to date. Is it still a challenge for you to do English-speaking roles? It will always be a little difficult because it’s my third language. I learned English when I was 18 and I knew French before so it’s always hardest to learn it that late. But I feel much more comfortable now because I have lived in New York and L.A. and had to use it in real life. When I started my career in America I really didn’t speak it, I only knew my dialogue so I’ve been working very hard all these years, and I’m still working on it. I want to keep working on the accent. But I feel more freedom and I can understand what’s going on because in the beginning I couldn’t.

You do a healthy mix of Hollywood movies, indies and Spanish-language films; is there a preference? I think every movie is a new adventure, a new goal, a new challenge and I see it like that, one at a time. My home is in Spain, sometimes I live in L.A. and I don’t want to stop working in Europe. If good, interesting projects keep coming from America I’m so happy to be part of them too. I don’t make a plan of every year going to work more there or here, it’s just more of what comes up. Now I’m making an American movie and I couldn’t be happier, but I don’t know, maybe later I’ll do three Spanish movies in a row.

What was it about the characters you play in Vicky Cristina and Elegy that interested you? Those characters are very different, very complex women, women that I would like to know and explore and understand. When I read about them I felt fascinated by them. That was what made me want to do them, and I’m just happy that I’m receiving these offers of characters like this. When I say this I don’t want to make it sound less about the projects that I’ve done in the past, because I don’t measure the success of a project by how well they do at the box office or how good the reviews are, I measure it from how much I learned when I was making those movies.

And what does a role need to spark your fascination? The ones that are going to make you feel like this is the first time you’re on a movie set, that make you feel new. There’s an insecurity that comes from acting that is natural because you can never control everything. That is a beautiful insecurity, and you have to feel like that to enjoy making a movie. I’m interested in the characters that are going to make me feel frightened. The farther they are from you the farther they are from each other, like these two movies where they are so different. But I think we all look for that with this job. It’s just great when you get the opportunity, and right now I feel very grateful with the opportunities that I’m being given. I cannot complain right now to tell you the truth.

SMUGLER'S BLUES By Scott Macaulay

2009-01-19T15:44:00.000-05:00

Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Scott Macaulay interviewed Frozen River writer-director Courtney Hunt for our Summer '08 issue. The film's lead, Melissa Leo, was also interviewed in a sidebar to the piece by Jason Guerrasio. Frozen River is nominated for Best Actress (Melissa Leo) and Best Screenplay (Courtney Hunt).

At Sundance this past year, two films in the Dramatic Competition especially stood out: Lance Hammer’s Ballast and Courtney Hunt’s Frozen River. It’s easy to mention the films in the same breath, because both are examples of regional American independent cinema attuned to the economic realities of life in this country today. They each feature characters mainstream Hollywood films rarely notice: single parents hovering just at or most often below the poverty line. People struggling to contain a justified depression in order to help a neighbor or keep food on their family’s plates.

But beyond these similarities, these two excellent films could not be more different. Ballast is loosely structured and its story points are small and indicative of the randomness of life. A subplot in which an armed child is threatened by local teen thugs is allowed to gently dissipate while the film’s emotional climax occurs when one character learns to use a credit card machine. Clearly influenced by the Dardenne Brothers, Ballast finds truth in the people and the moments movies often ignore.

Frozen River also begins by introducing us to the kind of working class character Hollywood has largely forsaken, but rather than remain intimate in its ambitions, the film steadily becomes a tersely executed, plot-driven thriller; it’s got the kind of classic Hollywood storytelling that even the studios rarely pull off anymore. And in addition to its indelible portrait of a blue-collar mom, the film makes complicated and resonant points about this country’s current debate around immigration and the nature of the American character.

Set in upstate New York near the border of Canada, Frozen River introduces us to Ray (Melissa Leo), a single mother who works at a local retailer and tries to save enough of her minimum wage to feed her young son and daughter. When her economic situation becomes dire — and she’s about to lose the sizable down payment she’s put down on a new prefab home — Ray joins a Mohawk Indian woman, Lila (Misty Upham), in her illegal immigrant smuggling operation, ferrying in the trunk of her car poor Chinese workers over the icy border to Canada. The smuggling trips go well for a short while but soon, of course, things spin out of control…. Frozen River, which will be released by Sony Classics this summer, is the winner of Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize.

TOP OF PAGE: MISTY UPHAM (LEFT) AND MELISSA LEO IN FROZEN RIVER. PHOTO BY: JORY SUTTON. ABOVE: FROZEN RIVER WRITER-DIRECTOR COURTNEY HUNT. PHOTO BY HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.

I love that your film is a thriller. The movie works like a thriller, even though it doesn’t initially seem like it’s going to be one. It’s funny, because Tarantino said that too. I never thought of it that way. I just think if a story is good enough to compel people to watch it, then it’s a good movie. And so when I’m writing, I work on structuring things so that you have got to keep turning the page, or you’ve got to keep sitting there and seeing what happens. You have to get invested. But I didn’t think of it as a thriller.

You have all these thriller elements. There’s danger throughout, and you have a car chase. And the great thing about the car chase is that because it’s on ice, it’s a slow speed car chase, which is a fantastic twist on the way car chases are usually handled. Well, I hate car chases in movies deeply, and I wouldn’t have been any part of one if it hadn’t grown right out of that story. But that clumsiness of how they aren’t moving very fast made it okay.

When did you begin the first incarnation of Frozen River? I had an idea when I was graduating from Columbia Film School — I wanted to do a story where women were really active, where they were doing stuff. Not relationship stuff, just stuff in the world. Acting. My husband is from extreme North Country, which is north of Albany. I learned from him about this Indian tribe, the Mohawks, and that this [smuggling] went on. I met some women smugglers who were at that time smuggling cigarettes across the river. It was simply a business to them. They told me about some of their adventures, and I thought, why would [these women] do this? I talked to a few [producers and executives] about it right after Columbia. I was like, “I’ve got this smuggling story.” And they were like, “What are they smuggling?” “Cigarettes.” And they were so not into it. Then I wrote this other script but it didn’t really work. Remember how after 9/11 there was this whole year of [questioning whether] art can happen anymore. Well, I learned that [the Mohawk women] were then actually smuggling immigrants, and I thought, “Hmm, this really is relevant.” So those characters, especially Ray, who I tried to kill off and to put in a drawer, just kind of came back up. I was writing something one day and I just started writing her point of view, and that became the short [film of Frozen River]. After [the short] went to the New York Film Festival, I thought, “Okay, this thing has some legs, let’s fill it out.”

The short was a success on the festival circuit? Well, it made a big splash, but it was kind of an iffy short in my opinion. I mean, it played by most of the rules.

How helpful was the short in fund-raising for your feature? Being in the New York Film Festival made people pay attention, but my husband and I still couldn’t get anywhere with [the feature script]. I shopped it all over the place. Melissa [Leo] and Misty [Upham] were on board from the beginning, and any big place we went to immediately wanted us to get bigger names, but that was just not what this story needed. I’d say, “You help me find somebody who is better and I’ll lose them, but there’s nobody better than these two.” Finally my husband said, “How hard can it be to write a prospectus?” So we did and took it to these investors, people we knew or knew of, and we found four people. And obviously [because of the short] they knew that I knew what to do behind the camera, could tell a story and that the characters were engaging.

These were not film investors? No.

And then in terms of deciding what scale to make the film, I don’t know the budget… Teeny.

But there’s probably very different ranges it could have been made for depending on who you were making it with. Exactly.

So how much of what you said you were going to do did you actually do? In other words, how much did your production match the prospectus? Pretty much exactly what we said we were going to do we did. We got it in the can pretty much exactly [on budget], and then there have been more post expenses. They’re a drag. They’re still going on. But yeah, we did it for what we said we could do it for, which was impossible, but we could get away with it with this story and setting. It’s gritty — it didn’t have to be beautiful — and the weather was forgiven when it wouldn’t cooperate. We shot in HD, which was a savings, and we had some people who were not as experienced but they worked very, very hard. We went to a place that wasn’t at all film savvy and [the locals] were into it. It was a story about their region and everybody knew this kind of stuff goes on, so everyone had a story of their own to tell. It was fun — the whole town was involved, and that’s what you want. It was great. I mean, it was miserable, but it was great.

How did you find your crew? They all came from a little place called Brooklyn. [laughs] My d.p. lives in Brooklyn, one of my producers is in Brooklyn. It was a New York crew, all the grips and gaffers. They were very good, and very young. For some of them it was just their fourth or fifth film.

How did you find Melissa Leo? I met her at this little film festival in Chatham, New York, called FilmColumbia. [Focus Features president] James Schamus will often show whatever he’s got upcoming, and he brought 21 Grams. And she came — she’s really good in that movie. I met her at the party afterwards. I’m not much of a schmoozer, but there she was with her big hair and I sort of cornered her. She was really nice, and then I sent her a short and another script. Then my husband said, “Courtney, what about the smuggling thing?” I was like, “Oh my God, you’re right!” So I sent her that short and that’s kind of how this happened.

Earlier you said you wanted to make a movie where women are active and out in the world. Is that how you’d pitch the movie to people, by referencing that desire? You hear these things at film school about how women’s movies tend to be talky, sort of like Fried Green Tomatoes. I so resented that. I mean, I was raised by a single mother, and she was not talking — she was doing stuff all the time just to get by, but somehow that stuff is not considered “action” or interesting. So to hear it called a thriller now is really gratifying because it just means that something happens in it that grips you which life often does for men and women.

Your screenplay is rock hard. There’s no flab, the beats are precise and there’s purposeful foreshadowing. You know when they drive past that police car two times and aren’t caught that they’re not going to sail past the third time. All the secondary characters have their very specific wants and needs. So what was your development process like? How did you arrive at such a classically structured screenplay? I went through three drafts. There were subplots and other things. I had to decide whether or not to see the husband. That was a big issue. In terms of the “threes,” rather than that being an invention, I think that’s a natural arc. Did I sit down and think, “Oh, they’ve got to go past this trooper three times?” No, but it naturally worked within the context of the story. You know what I did? I wrote everything I needed to write and then I took everything out. I just stripped the script down. I don’t like dialogue-y movies, and I didn’t think that witty, clever dialogue would really be believable. But I’m not sure how to really answer the question.

You just did. All I was really saying is that the movie seems precisely plotted and structured. One reason it seems that way is because we didn’t have any fucking money. And so it was like, get the story told and don’t waste time. There’s a lot of plot in a tiny movie. I didn’t have any throwaway scenes. You’ve got to understand what the hell is going on at the border, what the hell is going on with her husband, and who this other woman, the little kid and these random Mohawk characters floating around are. I didn’t have the luxury of going off in any kind of direction except what was happening with [Ray] and where she was going. And she’s kind of that way too, the character. She’s trying to get it done, and I was just trying to get it done.

And how about the ending? So much independent film explores concepts of the family. Breaking it apart and putting it back together again. I found your ending completely unexpected and realistic, while still being deeply satisfying on an emotional level. How long did it take you to find it — was that the ending from the beginning? Or was that the ending you found? I found that ending. I didn’t know [what the ending would be] for a long time so I just left it at bay. And when I got to that final hard character read for [Ray], that last one, it just bubbled right up. It sounds so ridiculous, but I really do listen to the characters’ voices, and the better I listen, the more they tell me. If I’m trying to control them, if I’m projecting myself onto them, you can tell because the writing stinks. But when I took this totally groovy approach and said, “Okay, what does Ray have to tell me today…?” If you really get in the habit as a writer of listening to what your characters say and honoring it even if it seems weird, then often the ending will grow right out of it. [The ending of Frozen River] was almost a surprise to me, but it was sort of right there [in the logic of the story]. I did just let it literally bubble up.

How late in the process was this? Late! When I got closer to shooting, I felt like the pressure was on. I had taken people’s money, I promised to do the best I could to pay it back, and that meant telling the story economically and effectively in the least amount of scenes possible. I felt I had one chance to tell the truth of this character and I’d better not screw it up. So I really devoted myself in those last few tinkering rewrites to just getting in there, and if it felt like a false note, out. I let scenes fall out. There was a huge opening scene that never got shot because it was too expensive.

What was that scene? It was the whole backstory of Lila and when her husband goes through the ice. She’s pregnant and he’s gone in the ice and she’s trying to pull him out. It was big Hollywood. People would read it and they would just burst out laughing, like, “You’re insane!” Some people said to me, “Cut it off, you don’t need it. Nobody cares.” And that’s why you have very little of her backstory.

How much was Melissa involved in the creation of her character aside from simply portraying her? She is really exacting in a great way. She holds your feet to the fire on every motivation, every choice. If she doesn’t believe it, she’ll tell you. Luckily on this one she and I were on the same page. The thing about Melissa is, she only challenges you when she’s right. And she’s pretty much always right. She picks her battles and she picks them to win. If she wasn’t so right all the time, she’d be a pain, but she’s great.

And what about Misty? Misty is a different kind of actress. She’s a very gifted actress, a “one-take” actress. She just nails it. It was really annoying to Melissa. They’re a total odd couple. There’s such a stoic thing about [the character of] Lila, but Misty is not really like that at all. She’s really funny, and she’s a baby — she’s like 22.

She has that great quality that makes you almost think she’s a non-actress. She totally plays her character. Everyone assumes that she’s this little Native American girl we pulled in. But no, she’s actually a well-trained, very gifted actress. Shows that you can cast off the Internet.

You cast her off the Internet? I went to a Native American actor Web site and I looked at all the pictures, and I was like, “Hmm, does anybody actually look like a Native American instead of Shania Twain or something?” And she did. She had a gorgeous look. She looks [from the] Mohawk tribe. So I just called her up and she came, got off the plane and started acting [in the short] the next day. There was no audition.

Were you inspired by any other films while making Frozen River? Oh, yeah. Everyone is talking about the ’70s movies now. I was brought up on them, my mom and I would scrape together money to go to the movies. She was really great at taking me to every thing. I was not that popular a teenager so I spent a good deal of time in the movie theater. I saw every Bergman film. I saw Lina Wertmüller, I saw Arthur Penn, Bonnie and Clyde. I love Paul Schrader. But in terms of this movie, I looked at Badlands. And of course I love The Searchers. [Frozen River] is set in a sort of border area, and I thought of it as a frontier, as, a little bit, the Wild West. I have a very traditional, Southern dad, and he really likes John Wayne. I told Melissa to watch John Wayne in Rio Grande, to watch how he does absolutely nothing but gives up everything. He’ll do nothing and you’ll be in tears. Melissa tends to be much more expressive, so I was like, “You’re John Wayne — give us less.” So, yes, John Ford and John Wayne were very inspirational.

In this post 9/11 world, immigration and the border security are big issues. When you listen to the anti-immigration folk, they seem not just concerned with national security but with protecting a certain kind of “American identity” from outside influence. Your ending takes these issues head-on, but, at the same time, it feels subtle and nuanced and originating from character. How conscious were you about your film’s potential political message? When [I wrote the ending] I had to accept that “this is what you have and this is what the characters told you.” So was I going to stick with them or get in there [and change it]? I didn’t want to touch it, and then I thought, “Who is this going to offend?” And I didn’t even care. I don’t think we’re clear about immigration as a nation. The discussion is going on, it’s developing and this is part of the discussion. Is it dangerous to have people streaming over the border? Yes it is. But on the other hand, the large majority of those people coming in are coming with a good intent. So it’s very much your typical American debate. I didn’t set out to say anything about immigration, I’m just calling it like those characters see it. There is no overall agenda. I took myself out of it, because I’m much more a screamer, but they aren’t.

Was shooting HD your choice from the beginning? I felt okay about it because I knew I probably couldn’t afford film. What I was shooting is not so sumptuous that beautiful scenery was being lost. The camera was good — it only clammed up once — and we played fast and loose with lighting a lot. We weren’t so constrained as we would have been on film. And a lot of it’s at night, so that’s really great for HD. We had no dailies…

But you were shooting on tape, couldn’t you have just watched what you shot? We could have, but we didn’t want to because that was our original. So we’d only watch the tiniest bit, and we only got to see dailies the second week of the four-week shoot.

By then you were making dubs? Right. We finally started getting them. We just didn’t have the money to kind of make that happen [in the beginning]. Someday I want to shoot a movie where I get to see the dailies, although there was something great about not seeing them. You are out there, and you’d better get it right.

With HD the exteriors can sometimes be harsh. And they are, but for this film, that’s okay. HD is so bright, it seems like there’s white in everything, even the blacks. When I saw the film out for the first time, I got all upset because it was moodier, and it made it sadder. It’s a hard movie to watch. Most people don’t live in that world, and asking someone to sit there for 97 minutes and live in a trailer is tough. The brightness of HD had kind of lightened it a little bit. So when I first saw [the transfer], I thought, “Something’s wrong, it’s way too dark, they’ve messed it up.” And then I was like, “No, that’s just what film looks like [laughs].” And as soon as I made that transition I was okay. It’s so rich, and black is black again, and it’s great.

Were there any surprises when you put the story together? I had a great editor, Kate Williams. We had no money for postproduction. I had pieces of the movie and the cassettes in my purse and just dumped it in her lap. We went to the Edit Center and that was unique because she got to see everything before we actually committed to each other. And I got to see that she was really good.

She was an instructor at the Edit Center? Yes.

So the students did your first cut at the Edit Center. How was that process? It’s interesting because you have people who are going to learn how to edit a movie, and they’re going to do it in six weeks. I spent five years on this project, my guts are all over the ring, and they want to play, as, of course, they should. But this was my heart and soul, and I was like, “You’re not dropping any scenes from my movie!” I think it was a good experience for them to see what really happens between a director and an editor, how that dynamic gets set up.

So what happened after you made that rough cut at the Edit Center? Kate came up to the country and brought her family. We set up the Final Cut Pro system in the garage, our kids played together, and we cut all of July and August. My friends have a little guesthouse, so she and [her husband] Matthew lived there with her boys.

It sounds kind of idyllic. It was pretty cool. Kate is incredibly dedicated. When she goes into [an edit], she goes all the way in and she does not come out until it is done. If the story is good and your actors are good, there’s a lot to work with and editing is really fun. I mean, there were a few things we had to finesse, but the basic dramatic structure was there to lay the film on. And she saw that, and so we just did it. It doesn’t really come through in the script as much as it actually comes through in the acting. The script is a little bit bare bones. I think when she read it at first she was kind of like, “Interesting, but what is this?” But when she saw the footage she was like, “Oh!”

Because of the performances? I think when you can see that river and how dangerous it is, it’s just much more powerful than it could ever have been written.

MELISSA LEO IN FROZEN RIVER. PHOTO BY JORY SUTTON.

Melissa Leo Q&A
A veteran character actor with more than 20 years of experience on the stage, television and big screen, Melissa Leo isn’t the type to get giddy over recognition, though she admits the reception she’s gotten for her performance as Ray Eddy in this year’s Sundance Grand Prize-winning film Frozen River feels new. Having recently played scene-stealing roles opposite Benicio del Toro (21 Grams) and Tommy Lee Jones (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada), there hasn’t been much work since her four-year stint as Kay Howard on Homicide: Life on the Street ended in 1997. But when Courtney Hunt approached her with the role of a struggling mom who takes drastic measures to give her kids a better life, Leo knew she had something special. Played with a tenacious desperation, Ray Eddy is a character audiences will not soon forget and whom Leo believes will never leave her.

Filmmaker sat down with Leo at the Sony Classics offices where she speaks candidly about her career and the role of the female actor in today’s moviemaking. — Jason Guerrasio

What attracted you to the Ray character? Let’s cut to the chase and make very, very clear that my entire career has been sort of taking whatever has been across the table. There was no picking or choosing. I remember after we shot the short Courtney asked me if I wanted to do a feature. I said, “Sure,” and for four years I would call that woman every seven, eight months and ask, “Are we making the movie?” There’s something I understood so deeply about Ray — the mothering and the desperation, which isn’t to say that I lived through Ray Eddy’s life myself but [I’ve been in] close enough proximity in different kinds of ways to feel that I had something no one else had to bring to the film — a willingness to be a person who has made some pretty bad judgments from time to time and makes no bones about it.

Courtney says in her interview that she wanted to make a film about women doing stuff, and that most films about women are talky relationship films. Do you think that’s true? Yeah — a lot of chatting with each other. Much more often we are “someones.” When I did Homicide it became quite clear that everyone thought of Kay Howard as Danny’s partner. Well, I’m sorry, but he was her partner! She was the better cop — more experienced, a better person — but they wouldn’t write it that way. But I don’t like to engage in the conversation of, “Oh, no parts for women!” From the beginning of time there have been parts for women… but they used to have men play them. [laughs] But women are a major part of the world so our stories are out there and every once in a while we get an opportunity to do something.

You played the character of Ray in Courtney’s previous short film. During the time you spent waiting for the feature, did you think about and work on the character? There have only been a couple of opportunities where the work is with me for some amount of time before I actually do it. More often it’s a remarkable handful of days and then we’re in and doing it. But with Frozen River I had the script for some time. It’s not like I would pull it out all the time and write little notes, but there is something about a character being with you through years. [The character of] Kay Howard had that. One day I was Kay Howard and four years later she and I had both grown and changed. As an actor, that’s a fascinating thing to me. I call it filtering down. My actor’s tool is myself — I go through molecular restructuring so when the molecules of Ray Eddy are with me for years in one way or another, yeah, that’s some delicious work. Like when the costume designer brought me one pair of jeans after another to the point that I finally went to K-Mart with her and when I had Ray’s jeans on I knew it.

How is it to be on a successful TV show for four years and then when it ends have to go back out to find work? I could not get hired, not for anything. I couldn’t get hired to play police because they didn’t want that same policewoman, I couldn’t get hired to play victims because Kay Howard couldn’t be a victim. [Homicide] really blocked me out of work, strangely enough. I loved the respect that I got from playing that part, but it didn’t help my career too much.

When Courtney looked for money for the feature she was often told that she needed bigger names to play the leads. Did that lurk at all in the back of your mind when you did this film? “I’m going to show these people what I can do." No, you carry a grudge like that and all it’s going to do is hurt yourself. [long pause] I think Frozen River aside, my industry is in pretty deep trouble because of that issue. There is something about “right casting” — not about how big the name is but about [an actor] being close to the character, or elevating it with [his or her] own experience and understanding. I can’t tell you the number of first-time filmmakers, people without a pot to piss in, saying, “Oh, no, we’re going to get ‘blah, blah, blah’ ” because then they can make their movie. Unfortunately “blah, blah, blah” is going to be a pain in the ass to work with, is going to bust their budget and make shooting more difficult because of their demands. And then there’s this really sweet independent filmmaking that is really about the project. Which isn’t to say that “blah, blah, blah” couldn’t play the part, but the necessity [of them playing it for financing reasons] is really dangerous for the industry.

How proud were you to see the attention that the film got at Sundance? Pride is not an easy emotion to come up in me, but yeah, I’m very, very proud of Frozen River and what I brought to it. I know I made it a better film. It’s not because of me it’s a great film; it’s because of every single one of us who where there, Courtney Hunt, first and foremost. And her husband Donald Harwood, who raised the money, and every single one of those kids who froze their asses off with us and stayed in that dreadful little motel. It’s all on the screen, and that’s delicious moviemaking.

MOOD SWINGS By James Ponsoldt

2009-01-19T15:43:00.001-05:00

Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. James Ponsoldt interviewed Happy-Go-Lucky writer-director Mike Leigh for our Web Exclusives section of the Website. Happy-Go-Lucky is nominated for Best Original Screenplay (Mike Leigh).

Picking a favorite Mike Leigh film can be a frustrating and exhilarating challenge. They’re all so uniformly excellent, so hilarious (Life Is Sweet), moving (Secrets & Lies), angry (Naked), honest (Meantime) and compassionate (Vera Drake) that the body of work begins to take on a holistic value -- each movie a nuanced iteration of one director’s worldview. Overseeing improv sessions with a group of consistently top-notch actors, Leigh develops the raw material of his screenplays during a period of months. What has resulted is a series of films —- dating back over thirty years -— that define collaborative cinema, highlighting the talents and fears and hopes of the actors who helped generate the film’s scripts. Leigh is always at the helm, but he has the confidence, generosity, and intelligence to allow his actors —- and the characters they play -— the freedom to truly reveal themselves on screen. Though Leigh has a unique and much admired working process which leaves the fingerprints of each actor all over the screen, his films are as unmistakable and personal as those of Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, and Francois Truffaut.

Having played smaller parts in Leigh’s All or Nothing and Vera Drake, actress Sally Hawkins now stars as the iconic, optimistic Poppy in Happy-Go-Lucky. Since Hawkin’s performance won the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival, Poppy has become something of a litmus test -- viewers seem to find her perpetual optimism inspiring, or they want to stuff a sock in her mouth. Most surprised by this response is Leigh himself, who, though often labeled a cynic, sees Poppy as well-balanced and perhaps even wise. Happy-Go-Lucky is a disarming film, which evolves from a seemingly structureless character-study into a subtly taut story about friendship, teaching, patience, love, and joy. The film slowly accumulates gravity and dimension, and by the ending it becomes clear that Poppy’s unflinching hopefulness is an active choice and a product of internal strength, not naiveté. In this way, Poppy resembles another one of cinema’s great heroines: Cabiria.

Miramx Films opens Happy-Go-Lucky this weekend.

Filmmaker: I wanted to ask you about Poppy from Happy-Go-Lucky and Johnny from Naked, how they might be seen as two sides of the same coin, as it were.

Leigh: Yes, I mean I think it’s an interesting discussion. But I think it’s dangerous to make too much of it because aside from everything else it’s not something I’ve thought consciously about at all until after I’ve made this film.

You could say that Naked is the dark side, and more than any other of my films pretty much focuses on a single protagonist on a journey in a way. Although, it has to be said that dramatically and structurally, Happy-Go-Lucky focuses exclusively on Poppy much more than Naked does on Johnny because there’s quite a lot of parallel action in Naked which doesn’t involve Johnny whereas there are only two tiny moments in Happy-Go-Lucky where you see Zoe which are very minor. So you can talk about the differences but I think what’s interesting is what Poppy and Johnny have in common which is that they are both idealists. She is an optimistic idealist who is disposed to being positive and he is a frustrated idealist who is disappointed in the world. When we made the film someone described the film and Johnny as cynical, neither of which is true. He is lamenting. He laments the same things that Poppy would lament but he has actually become frustrated and embittered.

Filmmaker: Do you see there as being a certain rigidity to their optimism that sets them apart from the people in their lives?

Leigh: Certainly not. I think you certainly couldn’t say that about Poppy. Do you think you could say that about Poppy?

Filmmaker: No... but I think there’s a knee-jerk reaction people have when they first meet her.

Leigh: That’s a different matter. That may be true but that’s not what we’re talking about. That’s a whole different matter. Johnny, in a way, I don’t think rigidity is relevant to either of them, myself. I mean, when Johnny runs into Brad he’s up for a discussion. I really think too much can be made here. Some people have said that somehow Scott [from Happy-Go-Lucky] is an extension of Johnny. I think Johnny understands all the things kicking around in his head while Scott understands none of them at all. He’s all over the place. And also, Johnny is nothing if not sexually active and confident. A person beginning by being potentially irritated by Poppy is fair enough. You know, you forgive them. It depends on your own disposition. You can forgive them for thinking “Can I spend two hours with this person?” But, you know, in time you have the opportunity to start to access what she’s about and you see that she’s focused and responsible and successful and intelligent and she’s got a great sense of humor. But when she meets Scott, instantly you see he’s a person with no sense of humor, and people with no sense of humor bring out the worst in us basically. That’s what that’s about.

Filmmaker: I said a “certain rigidity,” but perhaps what I meant was that there’s deep core of loneliness in her and she’s actively trying to keep her focus on staying positive.

Leigh: What is it that makes you think she has a core of loneliness?

Filmmaker: It’s a gut feeling... she constantly wants to do better. For the kids she teaches, for everyone.

Leigh: I think it’s certainly important that at a certain point she finds a guy. I think she doesn’t shy away from him. You’re the first person to identify a core of loneliness in her. Loneliness is not a word that’s come up. I think she’s certainly... she’s spiritually centered in some way. She’s able to enjoy her space and meditate in a sense. I don’t see any evidence myself for her being lonely. I think she enjoys people and company, being part of things. I think the other characters in the film absolutely are lonely, not she. But, having said that, I make films that are for you to interpret however you like. There are people, not you obviously, who have said that this is the most irritating character in a film ever and they cannot stand her and they want to kill her by the end. Now I find that so incomprehensible that I cannot begin to negotiate.

Filmmaker: When I say lonely I don’t mean to suggest, counter to what other people say, that she tries to act so happy that she’s obviously sad. I think any person who is grounded in some code of personal morality/ethics, who lives by that code and is something of a mega-ethicist, feels like they’re not ever doing enough. And there’s guilt and an isolation that comes with that guilt.

Leigh: Maybe you don’t mean lonely. Perhaps you mean spiritually centered.

Filmmaker: Perhaps. Just a hope, a desire that things could be slightly better in the world.

Leigh: Yes, but that’s a different thing. That is not being lonely. Poppy’s absolutely sensitive to the woes of the world and passionate about those things. But that has nothing to do with being lonely. It has to do with caring and being motivated by concern and sensitivity.

Filmmaker: What do you think it is that compels Poppy to not share with Zoe the fact that she met the homeless man and was engaging with him?

Leigh: Well, some things are private. Some things you just kind of... for me, my thing is that Zoe’s got the idea that she’s out there with everything and on display and she just has some coolness and that’s just that really. I think it’s important not to decode such things. It’s very important to avoid the tendency that we all have to decode such things in the sort of measured plot terms as laid down by Hollywood. It becomes “Why is she not telling? Why is it at that moment she doesn’t reveal what she’s been doing?” That’s all rubbish really because that’s not the kind of story it is. It’s not the type of thing where you think, “Now there’s a really significant reason for this which will become apparent later.” That is completely in the wrong language.

Filmmaker: There’s a quote from Nietzsche which I’m going to mangle slightly: “That for which we can find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”

Leigh: Yeah! I think that’s possible.

Filmmaker: I’ve heard a lot of people talk about Poppy’s temperament. I haven’t heard that much about teaching and the different iterations of the role of teaching. And that’s actually for me what was most personally fascinating because it’s such a complex and integral part of society. I was wondering if you could just talk a little but about that.

Leigh: Well, obviously it looks at teaching, the film, and you’ve got a very good teacher in Poppy and obviously Heather, the headmistress, is also on the case. And Zoe in her own way is a good teacher and we assume that her boyfriend is a good teacher. And we’ve got a Flamenco teacher who is a very good teacher I reckon but unfortunately forgets one of the first rules of teaching, which is that you’ve got to leave your own baggage outside the classroom. And then you’ve got this guy who actually has a great deal to say about education and thinks he’s a really good teacher and is actually the worst kind of teacher there is and actually doesn’t know anything about it and is in fact infused with ignorance on the subject, as is Scott. I don’t make films that are in any way polemical, I mean, I reflect the nature of things and respond it. And hopefully you’ll come away with stuff to reflect on yourself, make of it what you will. And this is a reflection on education. It’s not a diatribe. There are no conclusions. An important scene in many contexts, including this one of education, is the scene in which she goes to see her pregnant sister. Values are right on the line. I think that’s important in the context of teaching.

Filmmaker: Do you think in some context filmmakers, or directors, could be seen as teachers?

Leigh: Oh yes, but you could say that about all art. Yes, of course. I don’t want to make that much of that, because that devalues the specific subjects of education in this particular film.

Filmmaker: Do you think the best teachers work in a Socratic method?

Leigh: In principal, yeah. In the last twenty years in the United Kingdom they’ve issued a national curriculum. I’m totally opposed to a national curriculum. I think it’s dreadful. But also, they’ve introduced all kinds of gradings and testings at various stages. All kind of stuff that imposes uniformity and standard criteria and content and teaching methods on all teachers. I think that’s completely opposed to what education should be about, which is people teaching their strengths and their passions.

Filmmaker: With a national curriculum, how do you think Poppy would go about that? Would she be crushed?

Leigh: Oh, she’d deal with it. She’d get on with it and deal with it. I thought about that for the film and whether I should deal with it and then I decided that’s not really relevant to what the film was about. No, no. These guys get on with it. That’s what you do because what’s important to you is the kids. People like the Poppies of this world, and there are millions of them everywhere. I mean the reason I call it an anti-miserablist film is because it is about the fact that, although we have a great deal to lament and be gloomy about in the 21st century people out there, all kinds of people, including people like you and me, are getting out there and doing stuff and being positive and optimistic. And teachers, not least! In the end, apart from anything else, the Poppies of this world just deal with it. It’s what they do.

Filmmaker: Poppy asks Scott whether he was bullied in school. We also see the troubled student in Poppy’s class who’s obviously dealing with quite a bit at home. Do you that think the damage that’s done to us in pre-adolescence is baggage that forms us for the rest of our lives?

Leigh: There is a connection there between the two, yes. Scott is somebody who you could tell from all the evidence that you pick up there that he’s had a bad relationship with his family, and it’s complicated with his mother, but you can bet your bottom dollar that at school he did not have the kind of treatment most kids get, and the caring. It was neglect. Yeah, obviously those characters resonate with each other.

Filmmaker: Will Scott find some peace in his life?

Leigh: What do you think?

Filmmaker: I hope so.

Leigh: No, that’s different.

Filmmaker: Well... no. I don’t know if he will, unfortunately.

Leigh: The guy is fucked up. Basically he’s doomed. Though it’s probably in the grander scheme of things not his fault, he is his own worst enemy. He’s isolated and it’s an exploration of a guy who’s so isolated. He creates his own reality. It happens to all fantasizers who’ve lost the capacity, or ability, or opportunity to really interact. As to the whole question of what happens afterwards, that is really where I hand it over to you. And if you say well you hope he’ll be alright, great, sure. But if you say you think he’ll be alright then I think you’re being deeply optimistic. But I don’t know what’s going to happen to anybody—including you and me.

Filmmaker: I read an article several years ago about scientists who were trying to determine whether we’re essentially hard-wired to be happy or sad much in the way with our genetic makeup whether we’re going to be obese or skinny, diabetic or not, straight or gay, etc. Do you, in your experiences, think that some people are fundamentally happy or sad?

Leigh: Well, I don’t know about hard-wired. We are, apart from our genetic makeup, affected by our environment and the way we relate to it. I mean, I know that my makeup -- which manifests itself in what’s in my films -- does come from some stuff in my relationship with my father and the way I was brought up. There’s a running theme through my films that manifests itself particularly when Poppy goes to see her sister. All my films in one way or another are about the kind of battle between freedom and anarchy and repressive conservative suburban material values. That runs through all of my films, well, obviously is a function of my own suburban experience.

Filmmaker: Scott says that he’s never given up on a student the moment when he’s about to give up on Poppy. But in the film, you really feel that it’s Poppy who refuses to give up on him and that when she does it seems heartbreaking.

Leigh: The other thing about it in the end is that she obviously knows what he’s going through. She sees what’s happening. The great thing I think for me was that we know by the time we get to the climax that Poppy knows how to deal with kids. And Scott is one big kid, so Poppy can deal with him.

Originally posted 10/10/08

WERNER HERZOG, ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD By Nick Dawson

2009-01-19T15:42:00.000-05:00

WERNER HERZOG AND D.P. PETER ZEITLINGER CAPTURE ANTARCTICA IN ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. COURTESY THINKFILM.

Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Encounters at the End of the World director Werner Herzog for our Director Interviews section of the Website. Encounters at the End of the World is nominated for Best Documentary.

For more than 40 years, Werner Herzog has been redrawing the map, both cinematically and geographically. He started making short films in the mid-1960s, and made an impact internationally with Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), the tale of a mad conquistador's doomed jungle quest, the first of five collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski. Herzog and Kinski's relationship was often turbulent and violent, but the ambitious, outlandish and usually unhinged films they made together over the course of the 70s and 80s – Nosferatu (1978), Woyzeck (1978), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987) – would all become classics, as would other Herzog films of the period such as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Stroszek (1977). Herzog's narrative features have boldly explored dark, uncharted areas of the psyche as well as the planet, and in his parallel, synergetic career as a documentary filmmaker he has tackled similar themes. His non-fiction films predominantly bear the mark of the fearless adventurer, from his early The Flying Doctors of East Africa (1969) through to 1997's Little Dieter Needs to Fly (which he remade last year as Rescue Dawn) and the recent hit Grizzly Man (2005).

Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog's latest documentary, proves that at the age of 65 he is still undaunted by the world's least hospitable places. The film is a typically offbeat travelogue of his visit to Antarctica, a place which fascinates him not only because of its natural phenomena (the active volcano Mount Erebus, the strange world beneath the ice) but also because of its unusual collection of inhabitants, scientists, bohemians and nomads, who have found their way to the base of the planet. The film engages with Herzog's career-long preoccupation with man's relationship to savage nature and is ultimately an idiosyncratic vision of the planet's seventh continent, where the director finds a parade of people with buckets on their heads, disoriented penguins and a woman who transforms herself into human hand luggage.

Filmmaker spoke to Herzog about the genesis of his latest expedition, fainting at Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, and the need for documentaries in a world filled with video games, virtual realities, the internet, Photoshop, WrestleMania and breast implants.

DIRECTOR WERNER HERZOG WITH D.P. PETER ZEITLINGER DURING THE SHOOTING OF ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. COURTESY THINKFILM.

Filmmaker: How are you?

Herzog: I'm a bit jet lagged. I've come from Europe, and a few days before I flew from Los Angeles to Europe – that's nine hours, and back six hours. It takes me some time to understand where I am, and who I am and why. [laughs]

Filmmaker: How long did it take you to get used to Antarctica, with the long flight and then constant daylight once you arrived?

Herzog: Well, jet lag doesn't occur there because it's on the same line of longitude as New Zealand, but it's a long flight, almost eight hours. It's quite a distance down there. And adapting to Antarctica, I think nobody ever will be able to fully adapt, you are only partially adapted. We are not made for understanding that there's five months of day and never night, and then some twilight zone, and then five months of night. We are clearly not really organized for that. When you're on the South Pole, you look in one direction and you look north. You turn around 180 degrees and you're still looking north. Any direction you're looking is north, and it's a strange notion.

Filmmaker: Did you ever consider shooting during the Antarctic winter?

Herzog: No, because you couldn't do much filming. It's always dark, you could only do interior stuff, and it's extremely cold. And then the population is very limited – you have the so-called “winter-overs,” but it's maybe only 20% of the regular population of scientists, and many of them are just in maintenance. There are some scientists who love the Antarctic night, for instance astronomers who can do long-time observations, and some others who love to be there at that time for good reasons.

Filmmaker: A major focus of the film seems to be to show the people who go to Antarctica, and the reasons they travel there, rather than concentrating entirely on the nature and landscape of the place.

Herzog: In a way it started out with landscape, but I say that with necessary caution because it was all underwater footage. [It's] a completely strange science fiction world, totally fascinating, and we have never seen anything like that on any screen, so that was what intrigued me to go there and I wanted to do diving and filming under the water. I got intrigued by the continent in a way and I wanted to go down there. I knew I would never have a chance until this diver and musician Henry Kaiser told me, “Watch out, there is an artists' and writers' program [run] by the National Science Program. Why don't you apply?” Even after I applied I thought I had no chance because there are Nobel Prize winners lining up to get the chance to go there and do science but all of a sudden I find myself invited. I didn't know if this was a good or a bad surprise because you couldn't do any scouting. You are flown down, and six weeks later you are flown back and you have to have a movie in the can.

Filmmaker: Given those restrictions, how clear an idea did you have of what you wanted the movie to be?

Herzog: Well, I had a couple of basic places that interested me, for example, this very high active volcano, Mount Erebus. I knew I would go to a diving camp and I knew roughly who I would meet there, for example the lead biologist at this camp was a great fan of early 1950s doomsday science fiction movies and I got fascinated by him showing them to his colleagues and divers. A few things I knew in advance; I knew I would probably do something about neutrino research, but it was quite vague and I had no idea who the people were doing this. I had to be quick and look out and find people, but I'm a filmmaker and I do find the real people.

Filmmaker: You mentioned diving and the science fiction elements of Antarctica. Did you do any diving yourself?

Herzog: No, I'm not a diver but I really wanted a crash course and [to] learn quickly [laughs] and I was immediately dissuaded from it. There's no way to do it because it's too dangerous and only the best of the best do it. Antarctica cannot afford to waste resources in a big rescue operation. In fact, they did have fatalities – it is dangerous and it's not to make any jokes about. I have no problem to delegate filming underwater to a really good diver.

Filmmaker: Was there any way that you could direct the divers who were filming for you?

Herzog: No, they are left alone down there. But Henry Kaiser, who shot almost all of the [underwater] footage understood that, for example, I wanted to have long takes not just five-second clips and he did it marvelously. I wanted him to go very close to certain strange creatures and he understood it and came back with fantastic footage. I owe him not only the footage under the water but lots of the music in the film. He did it together with David Lindley and it's just very, very beautiful.

Filmmaker: The choral music in the film seems to suggest the experience of being in Antarctica is almost religious.

Herzog: Yes and it's not only me, others understand it similarly. Some of the divers before they go under the ice speak jokingly of “going into the cathedral.” There is a strange sacrality about some of these landscapes underwater or outside. It's very, very odd, and through this Orthodox Russian Church choir music you all of a sudden understand it and start to see it. The music allows us to see it.

Filmmaker: Although you narrate the film, we don't really see you in Encounters.

Herzog: You do see me , but it's from behind when I'm crawling through some ice tunnels up in the volcano. But you do not see my face. It was better [that way]. We tried to do it without any person, but it's better to follow the curiosity of the human being. I did not want to be shown, but it was also good for the cinematographer, because I could whisper to him, “There's a bump – watch out.”

Filmmaker: The relationship between man and nature has been one of your preoccupations, so were there ways that you wanted to explore that specifically in this film?

Herzog: In a way yes, although of course I'm not out on huge expeditions like in the old days and of course I see many of the absurdities down there. McMurdo Station is like a noisy, ugly mining town with the noise of Caterpillars, and the first thing you run into is an ATM machine. You just do not expect that.

Filmmaker: How many places are there left that you want to go and film?

Herzog: There's enough - I've always been curious. In the film there's a very nice moment where a Caterpillar driver – who actually is a philosopher and has a degree in comparative literature – speaks about how his grandmother read The Odyssey to him, about the Argonauts. He says, “That's when I fell in love with the world,” and I thought, “That's exactly what I've done in many films, falling in love with the world.” This is clearly a film where I have fallen in love with Antarctica and it's actually my Antarctica, my love story with Antarctica. And hence there are many places I will never go. They are sending robots to Mars. It's far too expensive and risky to send human beings but sometimes I think instead of a robot they should send a poet up there. It would be me that would volunteer, I would be the first to apply. Of course I'll never be there, but so be it.

Filmmaker: How does Antarctica rank in terms of the most unforgiving places you've been to for films?

Herzog: We should be careful to avoid the clichés about Antarctica. Antarctica, the way human beings experience now in most cases is very easy. It's easy. You have the aerobics studio and yoga classes and an ATM machine and a warm bed like in a motel or a college dorm.

Filmmaker: Do you almost wish you had been there 100 years ago when it was untamed?

Herzog: Well, that's an interesting question. Not really, because there were very, very good films made at that time. Shackleton had 35mm film with him and they created phenomenal footage which in our spirit of today we probably could not achieve. It has a very strange beauty and I do not mind that I have not been down there 100 years ago. I'm never out to seek the difficulties in the world in any of my films, I'm a professional filmmaker. I avoid the difficulties as long as I can do that, but if they are in my path I'm not afraid to cope with it.

Filmmaker: There's a fascinating part of the film where you have a conversation with a scientist about penguins.

Herzog: I was interested in one basic question though I knew I wouldn't get a real full answer: “Is there such a thing as insanity or derangement among animals?” As we were in a penguin colony, [I asked] “Is there such a thing among penguins?” All of a sudden, I get very interesting answers. Not a full explanation – we'll probably never have it – but it's good to ask an unusual question once in a while.

Filmmaker: OK, well maybe I can ask a slightly unusual question myself now. With your direct association with the wilds of nature, isn't it paradoxical that you live in L.A., which I think you have called the most culturally rich city in the world?

Herzog: No, not in the world, in America. With the most cultural substance. Of course it sounds provocative now sitting in New York – New Yorkers will immediately contest it. But there's a serious side about Los Angeles beyond the glitz and glamor of Hollywood, and I've made a lot of films not out in wild nature. My next film is going to take place in New Orleans. I don't see myself pinned down to films about wild nature. It appears in some of the movies, yes. When I film in the jungle in Fitzcarraldo, the jungle is just another forest. Period. It's nothing so special.

Filmmaker: But what is it that L.A. gives you that you can't get elsewhere?

Herzog: It's complicated. I would need much more time than we have. There's something very vibrant, things get done there. Things get made here in New York; much of the culture is being consumed and not so much fabricated. Of course there are painters here, but some of [the culture] was borrowed from Europe, like the opera. Los Angeles is very essentially American. I moved to Los Angeles because I married an American. I'm happily married and I enjoy to be in Los Angeles and it's new horizons, new alliances, new subjects. I'd never have been in touch with Henry Kaiser if I hadn't been there, or the National Science Foundation, I never would have made Grizzly Man with the Discovery Channel and Creative Differences. So it's a very good time for me.

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

Herzog: I do not cry in movies, I laugh in movies. But I do faint. I keep fainting in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, the wonderful great silent film. There's a moment where they cut the elbow vein of Joan and blood is spurting out, and that's when I faint.

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

Herzog: I would cast Humphrey Bogart, the young Marlon Brando. I don't know what film I would make – I wouldn't want to repeat any film that was already made. I would love to venture out with some of the finest: Lillian Gish, Edward G. Robinson. They are so great that I would find it the most exciting challenge to work with them and engage them. [And] Fred Astaire. [laughs]

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

Herzog: A parking attendant at the Munich Oktoberfest where I had to deal with 3,000 drunk drivers each night.

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

Herzog: I believe it's a natural concomitant of a very massive shift in our understanding of reality because we have got video games, virtual realities, the internet, Photoshop, WrestleMania, breast implants, so it's an onslaught of new things. We as filmmakers have a huge, momentous task to redefine our sense of reality and that's why I do Fitzcarraldo, where I move a ship over a mountain. Although it looks like a fever dream, you know it's not a joke because it is a ship over a mountain and not a digital effect.

GOTHAMS TRIBUTE: GUS VAN SANT By Peter Bowen

2009-01-19T15:41:00.000-05:00

Leading up to the Oscars on Feb. 22, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Peter Bowen interviewed Milk director Gus Van Sant for our Gotham Independent Film Awards special section in the Fall '08 issue. Milk is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Gus Van Sant), Best Original Screenplay (Dustin Lance Black), Best Actor (Sean Penn), Best Supporting Actor (Josh Brolin), Best Original Score (Danny Elfman), Best Editing (Elliot Graham) and Best Costume Design (Danny Glicker).

In the early ’70s as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Gus Van Sant made a momentous decision. He changed his major from painting to film. But Van Sant didn’t leave painting behind. Rather he brought to film a painter’s concern for the materiality of the image. In his latest feature, Milk, a historical portrait of the slain gay San Francisco politician, Harvey Milk, Van Sant does not simply reconstruct a chronology of events but breathes life into a series of tableaux from another time. Milk lives in this strangely real world from the past as well as in our imaginations. He is a figure who still speaks to us.

As an artist, Van Sant makes moving pictures — moving both in the sense that he animates the frozen composition of photography and in the way he invests those images with emotion. In Milk, this becomes an almost literal practice as archival footage frequently dissolves into the film’s “real life” universe, and Harvey Milk (Sean Penn), his lovers Scott Smith (James Franco) and Jack Lira (Diego Luna) and his band of political pranksters from Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch) to Anne Kronenberg (Alison Pill) take over San Francisco. But Milk’s San Francisco belongs neither to the past or the present, and neither to history or fiction, but rather, as with so much of Van Sant’s work, it partakes of all these worlds. In shooting Milk, Harris Savides elegantly elides the difference between documentary and the dramatic. The sight comes from actual footage, gay photography, personal memory and dramatic transformation and the sounds from Puccini’s opera, disco-diva Sylvester and the actual noise of modern — and past — San Francisco.

From the start, Van Sant has unfolded his stories about sad-sack lovers and good-humored hustlers in the real world, like the wet, scraggily streets and suburbs of Portland in Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy, the immense sublimity of nature in Last Days and Gerry or the real back streets of Boston in Good Will Hunting. Even the Hollywood imagination can become a real world as, for example, in his faithful reconstruction of Psycho, he pays the fictional realm the same reverence he maintains for the archival footage in Milk. In Van Sant’s filmic world, the “real” and the fictional are not opposing forces, but collaborators and partners. In Milk and his other work, the photographic images present a tactile materiality that far exceeds the controlling needs of fiction, and his fictions bring to the natural realm an unexpected poetry and perspective.

TOP OF PAGE: JOSH BROLIN (LEFT) AND SEAN PENN IN MILK. ABOVE: MILK DIRECTOR GUS VAN SANT. PHOTO BY SCOTT GREEN.

When I starting thinking about your career, I originally thought this was your first reality-based historical film, but then I realized most of your films are based on some sort of real event, a piece of history refracted through your aesthetic lens. Yes, I guess the real difference between this film and my other ones is that we use the real characters’ names here. Although in Mala Noche, the characters of Walt and Pepper have the same names as the people they are based on.

What about your other films? Drugstore Cowboy was based on a novel written by James Fogle who had lived that life. There was a real Bob — whose name wasn’t actually Bob — and a real Dianne. James LeGros played Rick who was based on the real James Fogle. These were real people that we could meet and talk to. My Own Private Idaho was based on a guy I used to know. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was not based on real people. However, there was someone that Tom Robbins said inspired him, but I think she was a waitress he met at a bar in Vegas. And To Die For was based on the Pamela Smart case, which was one of the first real television media events. Good Will Hunting was loosely based on people that Ben and Matt knew. It was fashioned into a fictional film, but Tim Affleck, Ben’s father, was actually a janitor at Harvard who was very intellectual and could have probably answered those questions in the film.

In most of these films, the real elements are somewhat buried, but Milk appears to be a transparent look at an actual historical event. How was that different for you? It is mostly the same process of trying to learn from reality that we go through in the other films, of trying to understand the logic behind the things that happened. But using real people and their names in Milk was difficult because you can never really get it completely true. You are doing a play about real characters, but it doesn’t have a fictional base. So in a way it’s more like pantomime, the replication of something that happened in real life with the characters called by their real names. It’s like an opera about those people. You can never really get to the real place.

In talking about your “Death Trilogy,” you once said that each story was sparked by a news item that was also a mystery. Do you think that there is a mystery at the heart of Milk? There was a sort of mystery in those three films — Gerry, Elephant and Last Days. Gerry [based on an actual incident in New Mexico in 1999 where two men went into the desert and one killed the other] had a mystery because it only had one witness; only one person came out alive. And in Elephant [inspired by the Columbine massacre] the boys were dead and their diaries hadn’t been released. And in Last Days, Kurt Cobain was missing during his last days — no one knew where he had been and what he had done. In Milk, there are lots of little mysteries about what might have happened at different points, events that different people are always trying to clear up with different stories.

How did your story veer from the historical record? Mostly we tried to keep it very accurate. In some cases, where we had actual filmic record we just recreated the scene. But there is a scene when Harvey is meeting with Representative Phil Burton over Proposition 6. Cleve Jones, who was our advisor, had actually been at that meeting and explained that Harvey had put on a real show, running around the room and flailing the paper in the air. He was livid because they had left the word “gay” off the flyer fighting back against Prop 6 [the proposed bill to ban all gay teachers in California]. We were shooting in the exact room that the meeting took place, with the real costumes, even with the same furniture, which hadn’t even been reupholstered since then. We had Sean do an intense version, even wiping his ass with the flyer before throwing it in the fire. But it wasn’t keeping with the rest of the film. So we have a much more calm version in which Milk never gets out of his seat.

I remember being in San Francisco when Milk and Moscone were assassinated. It was a very strange time, because only a week before was the Jonestown massacre. And most of those people came from San Francisco. The entire city went into shock. Do you remember where you were when you learned of the event? I was in L.A. working in the film business, but I wasn’t really an out gay person at the time. I was driving a car to Portland when I heard it on the news. I knew he was gay, but I didn’t know much about him. I wasn’t really that aware of his contribution in defeating the Briggs initiative. At the time, I had this image in my head of all these supervisors in suits in City Hall. I’d heard that Dan White killed the Mayor first and then walked down the hall to kill Harvey. It seemed like it was one supervisor killing another supervisor, a sort of in-house murder — a bunch of executives killing each other.

For many, especially in the gay community, Milk’s death is a powerful and significant historical date. What was your visual strategy in trying to capture the life and times of Harvey Milk? We started off with this one plan, but then quickly aborted it. We’d been working a lot with the styles of the Hungarian Bela Tarr and documentary maker Frederick Wiseman. And also Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, and 1080 Bruxelles was a big influence, especially in Last Days. Before we shot Gerry, we constantly watched Jeanne Dielman. For Milk, we were going into a Frederick Wiseman world, so we were going to hire documentary filmmakers, or people who has shot alongside some of the more famous documentary makers. But we weren’t shooting in black-and-white [like Wiseman), and that really changed how it was going to look. And then we screened what we’d shot, and it looked a lot like what other people were doing on TV. Shot on 35mm and in color, it didn’t really look like Wiseman. When we realized this, we quickly bailed out. We were like, “Holy shit, this doesn’t look any different than The Office.”

You start the film with all this great archival footage of gay life in the early ’60s, like an invasive camera trying to record all these people who don’t want to be seen, which then morphs into the real film. The look and feel of archival footage seems to really inform your visual sense here. That is one of the reasons we wanted to shoot in 16mm originally, so that the archival footage would be indistinguishable from our film.

It works great the way it is. I understand you used other photographical material, like Crawford Barton’s work, in the film. Yes, but the subjects of Crawford Barton were more interesting than his photographic style. Our style was more connected to someone like William Eggleston than to Barton.

I am often struck by how much your films are as much about the photographic image, as an image, as they are about the story those images tell. There often seems to be a palatable materiality in the image itself. I am not sure that isn’t Harris Savides and not me. Often when we are shooting, all that stuff — the depth of field, the grain, etc. — is controlled by Harris.

Yes, but in many of your films, the image takes on a lot of the work of telling the story, and sometimes even seems to tell a story all its own. I like to let the image take over from the story. You can have something down about what you are going to film, but the minute you start shooting, all this new stuff starts happening. There is a new reality to it all. Usually it is a character, and sometimes it is an environment, or, really, a character in an environment. It’s like you are photographing some sort of dance between the real world and the story, and I often let the real moment of the real environment and the real character sort of take over. The whole strength of the shot is that moment when you are beholding this character in this real environment.

Yes, I think that tension of a fictional story unfolding in a real world creates this very powerful sense of drama. That is something that I have learned watching lots of different films. The French New Wave use that a lot. And for the neorealists, that is what they were showing in The Bicycle Thief. It is a real boy and a real worker and you are watching them at the same time that you are watching the story.

In many of your films — I am thinking a lot of the desert in Gerry and the wind and the woods in Last Days — nature and natural landscapes seem to belong both to the real world and to the fictional world of the story. What was the natural landscape in Milk? Ever since Elephant we’ve been shooting with a stereo mic, which we used in Milk as well. So even if we built the sets, we are using the sound of the real space, which we did all the time in Milk. When you use a mono mic, you have to stop traffic and outside sounds so you can later add them back in at a level that is agreeable to you. With the stereo mic, we encourage stuff to go on as usual. We don’t turn off the refrigerator and we don’t stop the traffic. Unfortunately in Milk much of the traffic is modern-day traffic, not period traffic, so we had to throw in period traffic. But still we are using what is really there rather than trying to limit it.

Many writers have picked up on how many of your films revolve around self-created or improvisational families. In Milk, family takes on a whole new meaning. Milk’s big fight is against Briggs’s initiative, which would have fired out gay people from the school system, because, according to Briggs and Anita Bryant, the “gay lifestyle” was destroying the American family. The film seems to take on the very definition of family, as well as what’s American. Why is family so important to you? It’s true; the films that I have made are about newly created families. And that is what the Castro was in San Francisco, groups of people that created their own family. I guess it’s just a preoccupation of mine.

For the family of gay people, Harvey Milk is their saint. What sort of responsibility do you feel about getting this right? Or do you feel that your responsibility is to simply tell the story as a filmmaker? This is the first time that I have really made something that is a historical document. But it really is something else. When Henry Fonda plays young [Abraham] Lincoln, you are not supposed to be thinking that he is actually Lincoln. It is a pantomime or a political passion play. As a creator you want to be able to play with it and not be overburdened by the historical accuracy. But at the same time, you want to stay true to Milk. In some cases, it was easier since we had actual footage, so what we shot was exactly what happened.

Isn’t that also the problem with biopics? Since we all know what’s going to happen, it takes away the power of suspense. For Hitchcock, suspense was all about the audience knowing what would happen. We see a bomb under the seat, but the people on the train don’t know it’s there. That’s why we say upfront that Harvey and Moscone have been murdered. But we don’t say who did it, nor why.

The film is coming out in a very turbulent political time. What effect would you like it to have? By the time the film comes out, the election will be over, although we will be having screenings, including the big opening at the Castro, before the election. I hope that some of this will have some effect on California’s Proposition 8, which is the vote to take away the already confirmed right of gay people to get married in California. We thought about whether to release the film before the election, especially if it could affect Prop 8. The end decision was not to have the film speaking directly to the election, because if it was seen to be just about the election that might take away its chance of having a life after the election. We decided to straddle the election, to have the opening affect the election and the release be after the election.

That sort of fits Harvey Milk himself, who claimed that his election was about him but also about the larger movement of gay rights. You could look at it that way. But I think that if Harvey was the decisionmaker, he would want the film to affect the election.