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UNBREAKABLE UNBREAKABLE Jennifer
Jennifer Jennifer Lawrence Lawrence takes hold of takes hold of Debra Debra Granik’s Granik’s Sundance Sundance winner, winner,
WINTER’S WINTER’S BONE BONE The Duplass Brothers’ The Duplass Brothers’
CYRUS CYRUS Alex Gibney’s Alex Gibney’s CASINO JACK CASINO JACK AND THE UNITED STATES AND THE UNITED STATES AND THE UNITEDOF STATES MONEY OF MONEY
Harmony Harmony Korine’s Korine’s
$5.95 U.S. / $7.95 Canada Spring 2010, Vol. 18, #3
TRASH TRASH HUMPERS HUMPERS Laura Laura Poitras’s Poitras’s
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FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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CONTENTS
FILMMAKER SPRING 2010 VOLUME 18 NUMBER 3
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28 A DAUGHTER’S TALE Set in the Ozarks, Debra Granik’s gritty adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel, Winter’s Bone, was praised at Sundance earlier this year and walked away with the Grand Prize. With a powerful performance by lead Jennifer Lawrence, Granik delves into the methamphetamine-dealing mountain countr y of Missouri to follow a young girl searching for her father. By Scott Macaulay | Photographs by Henny Garfunkel PLUS: Jennifer Lawrence Q&A 34 HOUSE RULES Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney returns to white-collar corruption to examine the incredible rise and sudden fall of mega-lobbyist Jack Abramoff in Casino Jack and the United States of Money. By Jason Guerrasio | Photograph by Henny Garfunkel
38 THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE In The Oath, her follow-up to the Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country, director Laura Poitras refracts America’s post-9/11 years through the story of two estranged brothers-in-law. One is Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard, free in Yemen, and the other is bin Laden’s driver, locked away at Guantanamo Bay. By Scott Macaulay 42 DON’T YOU WANT ME Taking their highly improvised storytelling to the mini-major level, the Duplass brothers team with stars John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill to create Cyrus, an unconventional love story between a man, a woman and her grown son. By Alicia Van Couvering
44 AN ENTOMOLOGY OF LOVE With Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo director Jessica Oreck creates a beautiful homage to an unlikely creature: the insect. Journeying to Japan, Orek shows through a poetic experimental style the country’s unusual love for bugs. By Michael Tully | Photograph by Richard Koek
50 ROCK IN OPPOSITION Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats mixes documentary and fiction in telling a musically exuberant, politically charged story set in Iran’s underground rock scene. By Livia Bloom | Translated by Sheida Dayani
54 CURBSIDE Harmony Korine follows up his Mister Lonely with a defiant Nashville-shot stealth feature, Trash Humpers, a bizarre ode to vandalism, urban decay and VHS tape-trading culture. By Scott Macaulay
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FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
FILMMAKER SPRING 2010 VOLUME 18 NUMBER 3
™
68 Jay Street, Suite 425 Brooklyn, NY 11201 www.filmmakermagazine.com Tel: (212) 465-8200 Fax: (212) 465-8525
EDITOR Scott Macaulay
[email protected]
SENIOR EDITOR Peter Bowen
[email protected]
MANAGING EDITOR Jason Guerrasio
[email protected]
ART DIRECTOR Diane Ferrera
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[email protected]
COPY EDITOR Leah Dueffer
LINE ITEMS
22 GAME ENGINE
58 STRAIGHT TALK Producer Mike
Games of Tragedy. By Heather Chaplin
S. Ryan challenges the current preoccupations of our independent film scene.
24 LOAD & PLAY
60 SET UP
26 THE SUPER 8
Alicia Van Couvering highlights the important collaboration between a film’s production designer and cinematographer.
Eight thinks that will keep you in the know.
66 DESIGNS FOR LIVING
Is Ten, Hindi New Wave, The Lazarus Effect, Film Forum Turns 40.
Jack Fisk looks back on his over 30 year career as a production designer. As told to Alicia Van Couvering
ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Ian Gilmore
Filmmaker’s look at the season’s DVD releases.
REPORTS 8-15 Ciné Rebuilds Haiti, Creative Capital
ETC.
ASSISTANT EDITOR Melissa Silvestri CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Nick Dawson Mary Glucksman Brandon Harris Anthony Kaufman Ray Pride Alicia Van Couvering
CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS Henny Garfunkel Richard Koek Michael Lavine Tom Le Goff Ilona Lieberman
PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS James Osei Dan Schoenbrun Jaimie Stettin
WEBMASTER
68 WITH THESE HANDS
6 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Filmmaker Brent Green recounts the mad act of set building behind his Gravity Was Everything Back Then.
79 AD INDEX
PRINTER
80 PARTING SHOT: Tilda Swinton
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70 PAY TO PLAY
CONTENT SYNDICATION S
Build Your Audiences with Apps | Creative Production Design Build Your Audiences with Apps | Creative Production Design
P R I N
Featurewell.com
ADVERTISING SALES
New York: (212) 465-8200 x 220
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Youtube’s Sara Pollack discusses the site’s revenue-generating distribution model. By Alicia Van Couvering
Michael Medaglia
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a publication of
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COLUMNS
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Reports from Sundance, Berlin & Rotterdam.
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20 FEST CIRCUIT
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Youthquake: Where is the Under-30s Audience For Indie Film? By Anthony Kaufman
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18 INDUSTRY BEAT
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Want to build an audience? Start making apps. By Lance Weiler
16 CULTURE HACKER
UNBREAKABLE UNBREAKABLE Jennifer
SUBSCRIPTIONS, MERCHANDISE, BACK ISSUES
Jennifer Jennifer Lawrence Lawrence takes hold of takes hold of Debra Debra Granik’s Granik’s Sundance
Filmmakermagazine.com
Sundance winner, winner,
WINTER’S WINTER’S BONE BONE The Duplass Brothers’
The Duplass Brothers’ CYRUS CYRUS Alex Gibney’s Alex Gibney’s CASINO JACK CASINO JACK AND THE UNITED STATES AND THE UNITEDOF STATES MONEY OF MONEY
Harmony Harmony Korine’s Korine’s
$5.95 U.S. / $7.95 Canada Spring 2010, Vol. 18, #3
TRASH TRASH HUMPERS HUMPERS Laura Laura Poitras’s Poitras’s
www.filmmakermagazine.com
THE THE OATH OATH
Cover: Winter’s Bone’s Jennifer Lawrence. Photo: Henny Garfunkel/Retna Ltd.
FILMMAKER (ISSN 1063-8954) is manufactured and printed in the United States. FILMMAKER welcomes unsolicited articles but reserves complete editorial control over all submitted material. All articles, letters or reviews represent the opinion of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher or editors. All materials become the property of FILMMAKER and cannot be returned unless a stamped, self-addressed envelope is included. FILMMAKER is listed in the Film Literature Index. FILMMAKER is published four times a year. The title FILMMAKER and “The Magazine of Independent Film” and logotype are registered trademarks and service marks. Copyright 2005 FILMMAKER Magazine. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be copied by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system without the express written permission of the publisher. Newsstand: $5.95 U.S./$7.95 Canada; Subscription: $18.00 U.S./$20.00 Canada/$40.00 Foreign. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to FILMMAKER Magazine, 68 Jay Street, Suite 425, Brooklyn, NY 11201.
EDITOR’S LETTER This issue of Filmmaker is bookended by two pieces representing the twin poles of our changing independent film world. In his “Culture Hacker” column, Lance Weiler looks at the potential for apps — iPhone, Android and iPad — to both connect our films to new audiences as well as extend the potential of their narratives. I believe he is right. At Sundance I sat down with Lance over lunch and he showed me the Android game app he designed for his upcoming feature, HiM, and I can confirm that it is seriously cool. (Look for an upcoming discussion of it on the Filmmaker blog.) A couple months later I attended SXSW both on the film and the interactive side. The film events — the panels and discussions — were informative affairs featuring many key figures participating in what now seems to be one giant rolling conversation about the future of independent film and both its collapsing old and possible new business models. However, like last year, when I sauntered over to the interactive side I was energized by the huge audiences and deep nature of the dialogue. While 200 or so people listened to a group of industry experts ruminating on VOD as monetized indie film platform, 2,000 would be listening to a speaker like Danah Boyd, whose discussion or publicity and privacy in the Internet age was inspiring and deeply ethical. My point, though: The crowds, investment capital and even intellectually provocative conversation were definitely over on that side of the convention hall, and if we are to renew independent media we need some of what those other guys have. In the back of the book our Line Items section kicks off with a passionate editorial by producer Mike S. Ryan, who body checks many of the prevailing Indie 2.0 sentiments of the moment. Specifically, he reacts to the idea that artists should aggregate audiences before making their films, worrying that this thinking is leading us toward the creation of marketing-driven work. He finds the current focus on new business models and practices like app development distracting from the goal of discovering and championing new auteurs. I won’t recite all of his positions here — go and read the piece! — but I am sympathetic to his arguments. Like Mike, I look to independent film to supply what mainstream culture doesn’t. I still remember having my mind blown by Eraserhead during my first weekend in college. Would a young David Lynch have been able to construct a viral marketing plan for that film? (Come to think of it, if you head over to davidlynch.com you can see that he probably would.) I don’t see my appreciation of both Lance’s quest to expand film practice beyond the screening room and Mike’s mission to make sure our rush toward new business models doesn’t stifle the Webdisconnected auteur as contradictory at all. I know both these men and can attest that their positions come from passion, core belief and hard-fought experience — not calculation and received wisdom. I will be attending the premiere of not only Lance’s film, when he makes it, but his app as soon as I can download it. And I can’t wait for the next Béla Tarr film that Mike has been involved with. The point is to allow film practice to bring us closer to our artistic desires, not farther away from them. See you next issue. Best,
CONTRIBUTORS
Independent Filmmaker Project 68 Jay Street, Suite 425 Brooklyn, NY 11201 Tel: 212-465-8200 Fax: 212-465-8525 Email:
[email protected] Website: www.ifp.org
BOARD OF DIRECTORS Jeffrey Levy-Hinte Chairman Jewell Jackson McCabe President John Schmidt Treasurer Jeanne R. Berney Anthony Bregman Mark D’Arcy Howard Graff Hunter C. Gray Andrew Karpen Stephan Paternot Carole Rifkind Mark Urman Lance Weiler Adam Yauch Interim Executive Director Joana Vicente After debuting with a program in the 1979 New York Film Festival, the nonprofit IFP has evolved into the nation’s oldest and largest organization of independent filmmakers, and also the premier advocate for them. Since its start, IFP has supported the production of 7,000 films and provided resources to more than 20,000 filmmakers — voices that otherwise might not have been heard. For additional information: www.ifp.org.
Scott Macaulay Editor
LIVIA BLOOM (pg. 50) is a film curator. Her writing regularly appears in the film quarterly journal Cinema Scope; she is editor of the book Errol Morris: Interviews (University of Mississippi Press, 2009); and she is the Film Festival Programmer of the 2009 Nantucket Film Festival. HOWARD FEINSTEIN (pg. 21) is a film critic for American and European publications living in New York. He is a programmer for the Sarajevo Film Festival. BRENT GREEN (pg. 68) is a self-taught animated filmmaker who lives and works in a barn in rural Cressona, PA. His films have been shown at the Sundance Film Festival (2006-2009), the Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Getty Museum (LA), Hammer Museum (LA), MoMA (NYC) and all kinds of other festivals, museums and galleries around the world. Green’s work is represented by the Andrew Edlin Gallery, NYC. BRANDON HARRIS (pg. 24) is a Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker. GABE KLINGER (pg. 77) is a teacher, writer and programmer who splits his time between Chicago and Madrid. BEN REKHI (pg. 12) is an award-winning filmmaker and journalist who sees the future of the film industry between Hollywood and Bollywood and is committed to developing strong ties to both. MIKE S. RYAN (pg. 58) is a NYC based producer, his latest film by Frank V. Ross, Audrey the Trainwreck, premiered at 2010 SXSW. His upcoming releases include films by Bela Tarr, Todd Solondz and Kelly Reichardt. MICHAEL TULLY (pg. 44) directed the films Silver Jew and Cocaine Angel and is currently the head writer-editor of HammerToNail.com. He lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. ALICIA VAN COUVERING (pp. 42, 60, 66, 70) has written about mumblecore, tax credits, union strikes, micro-financing, film festivals and many other things for this magazine. Her production credits include Junebug, Old Joy, Tadpole and Precious. Recently, she produced Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, the Jury Prize winner of the 2010 SXSW Film Festival.
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FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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ANNIE NOCENTI (CENTER) AND STUDENTS FROM THE CINÉ INSTITUTE.
CINEMATIC RESTORATION “Zaka (Chery Claudel) and I were watching location footage we shot,” says Ciné Institute student Fréro Pierre, “and suddenly I felt my chair shaking and heard a weird sound like a helicopter and my computer started to move across the table. I tried to protect the computer then realized it was an earthquake.” On Tuesday, January 12, the Ciné Institute students of Haiti’s first free film school in Jacmel, Haiti, were in preproduction for three films about water for The University of Miami’s international waterawareness project. “The ground was moving under my feet,” Frero continues. “The walls started to fall down. My whole body was covered in dust. I thought of a movie I saw once about the big earthquake in Los Angeles, about a catastrophe that was supposed to happen in 2012. All the movie’s images came out of my mind.” The Ciné Institute was founded by filmmaker David Belle two years ago and is run by Chief Administrator Paula Hyppolite
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and School Director Andrew Bigosinski. With filmmakers coming from around the world to teach, the Ciné Institute students have made short films and attracted the eye of Francis Ford Coppola, who sent funds for cameras. The students were just beginning to get work on commercials and films. Director Paul Haggis visited the school and became a supporter. “I saw Marie Lucie Dubreuse (fellow student) running from place to place going crazy,” Fréro says. “Then it stopped shaking. Marie Lucie was paralyzed with fear so she couldn’t walk. I dragged her into the street. I could see all the houses falling. A second quake hit and an artist, Marc Arthur from Fosaj, lifted his hands and cried, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Paula cried to Jah Rasta, “What is happening, Rasta!?” The roof of the Ciné Institute’s theater space at the Condorde collapsed. The school’s walls cracked. It is still not safe to enter either building. The Ciné Institute will have to rebuild.
“Paula, Donald Charles (fellow student), Andrew and I went back into the school to get cameras,” says Fréro. The studio was cracked and covered in dust. It was scary — we were watching the walls to see if they shook again. We got the cameras safe then heard people crying, ‘Tsunami, tsunami!’ We saw the ocean coming and started running. A third shaking hit and more walls and houses started to fall down. The ocean came up and hit the Yaquimo Bay Club. I started to breathe again when I got a few blocks away, next to the prison. People were going crazy. Some people were acting like zombies. Their eyes were rolling. I lost close friends and family but I couldn’t cry because there is too much pain. But I have a hole in my throat and it hurts.” “When (Ciné student) Simeus Fritzner called us to ask if we would go shoot, I said yes. That was the true therapy. I started to feel better. Then Zach Niles, Annie Nocenti and Bremen Donovan came all the way from the United States to help teach
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CINÉ INSTITUTE
In the Summer ’09 issue we highlighted the Ciné Institue, Haiti’s first free film school. Here filmmaker Annie Nocenti, a teacher at the school, recounts with her students the horrific earthquake that happened in Haiti in January and how the school is helping in the rebuilding.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CINÉ INSTITUTE
us how to make good reports. When I saw our footage on CNN I was so proud. I realized I have an importance in the Haitian community. I could imagine a better future because of Ciné Institute.” Despite the loss of both of the Ciné Institute school buildings, the school was transformed into a functioning newsroom. Every day since the quake, the students continue to shoot, making journalistic reportage and short documentaries. “The first shot we took was of the destroyed gas station; Fritzner shot it,” says Bonga (student Hermane Desorne). “Then we shot a possessed man’s house and the little hole where they pulled him out. He was possessed but that was how he got the strength to dig out. It felt weird to be shooting all the damage and dead people. I was wondering: Is it true? I thought it was a movie. I thought I was dreaming, because I’ve seen movies where weird things happen, like in Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, so I thought this was a movie. The worst thing was you could see the big houses stretching… about to fall and then sway back. It was as if they were alive and struggling to stay up so people could get out. It was like the quake didn’t want to kill all the people so the buildings pushed people out before falling.” “We are still getting crazy-strong aftershocks,” wrote Bigosinski, a week after the quake, “at least once a day, and usually more often. These frighteningly quick tremors send us running in all directions. We work outdoors, sleep outdoors — everything. We are all too tense and frightened to go inside.” David Belle went to Port-au-Prince and began working with doctors in Miami, and with the help of actor Sean Penn and Senator John Edwards, were able to medevac many Haitians with spinal cord injuries to hospitals in Miami. “Not once have we witnessed a single act of aggression or violence,” David Belle wrote after the press was filled with stories of violence in Port-au-Prince. “To the contrary, we have witnessed neighbors helping neighbors and friends helping friends and strangers. We’ve seen neighbors digging in rubble with their bare hands to find survivors. We’ve seen traditional healers treating the injured; we’ve seen dignified ceremonies for mass burials and residents
CINÉ INSTITUTE STUDENTS.
patiently waiting under boiling sun with nothing but their few remaining belongings.” “David [Belle] and John [Edwards] showed up with the flatbed,” wrote Paul Haggis, “and, working with the St. Damien’s staff and the Jenkins-Penn Haiti Relief Organization doctors, they started loading. And within hours, a convoy of six vehicles — flatbeds and pickup trucks — drove slowly over the potholes of the destroyed streets of Port-au-Prince to get them to the airport, which is a scene out of hell right now, and into the safe hands of Lt. Col. Lee Harvis with the 1st Special Operations Support Squadron, and their amazing doctors, nurses and medical staff.” Ten of the Ciné Institute students went to Los Angeles to work on the 25th anniversary “We Are the World” music shoot with Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones and Paul Haggis directing. Other students went to Port-au-Prince to film children singing “We Are the World” with director Doug Liman. They then worked for three weeks at The Post Factory with Belle and Haggis editing a film about the earthquake. Director Jonathan Demme and cinematographer Charles Libin were set to shoot
a music video with Ciné Institute. The earthquake shifted their efforts from filmmaking to relief. They helped arrange for a container full of supplies, including six generators to power the tent camps, to come to Jacmel on a steamship. The school continues to function from a temporary shelter at Kros next to the airport, below the roar of endless helicopters. Ciné Institute’s “Cinema Lumiére,” a project partnered with FilmAid, brings films into the tent camps three nights a week. The students have produced 15 short documentaries for CBC TV that can be seen on the Ciné Web and right now Bellegarde and Rony are out filming the story of a Haitian band that decided to convert from Voodoo to Protestantism because of the quake. Roudeline Michel is editing a film she’s making about an 89-year-old woman who lived through Papa Doc Duvalier and Baby Doc, and now she’s survived an earthquake. The old woman does an “earthquake reenactment” for us. “Bom bom bom bom bom!” she cries, her arms rattling like the quake that rolled under her feet. Visit our Web site to see the films: cineinstitute.com. FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
REPORTS
DECASIA.
SOMETHING VENTURED There’s a wonderful irony at the core of Creative Capital, the arts-funding organization celebrating its 10th anniversary with events including a film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City this spring. An organization that funds boundary-breaking work by some of today’s most innovative and often unconventional artists, Creative Capital is also an organization that preaches the most quotidian of skill sets — fiscal management, career planning and the necessities of marketing and promotion. “I had so many friends who thought this was a crazy idea,” laughs Creative Capital executive director and president Ruby Lerner over lunch near the organization’s NoHo office. “The idea of giving artists money but then providing this whole other set of services — they thought it was way too interventionist and that artists would hate it.” Quite the contrary, as the 10-year milestone testifies. Creative Capital has supported more than 400 artists, providing $20 million in support including not just traditional grants of up to $50,000 but also advisory services designed to assist artists in professionalizing their business practices. And while Creative Capital’s visual artists, filmmakers, writers, theater and dance artists certainly appreciate the grant monies, if you talk to them they also
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FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
By Scott Macaulay
wax positively about all that other “interventionist” stuff. Says Lerner, “I think the non-money parts of the grant have turned out to be as important or sometimes more important than the money itself.” Still, she admits, “the [Creative Capital program] is like being in a relationship with a high-maintenance spouse — it isn’t right for everybody!” Creative Capital was born in 1999 at a very specific political moment. During the “culture wars” of the mid-’90s, the National Endowment for the Arts had gotten rid of its grants to individual artists, killing an entire subsidy category as a response to the political pressure created by a handful of controversial grants. Lerner left her position as executive director of Association of Independent Film and Videomakers to head up Creative Capital, which was principally backed at the outset by the Andy Warhol Foundation. Its president, Arch
THE ZO.
Gillies, was what Lerner calls a “driving force” in Creative Capital’s formation. She says, “I think initially the idea was that this would be kind of a fellowship program, just to replace the lost fellowships. But I think because of that dot-com moment, when venture capital sort of made its way into the public consciousness, people who had made money in new-economy businesses were turning philanthropic. They looked at traditional philanthropy and thought, ‘Who would do business this way? Maybe there is another way to think about philanthropy?’ So the whole kind of venture philanthropy movement was born. There were no manifestations of those ideas in the cultural arena, and so it was decided that Creative Capital would be just that: an experiment to see if you could take those ideas and translate them into something that would work in support of individual artists. It was like, ‘Individual artists, venture capital, go!’” What developed was a four-part program. Explains Lerner, “The first part is supporting the [artist’s] project, which is mostly about money and meetings. Next is supporting the person beyond the project, which is the skills-building part of what we do. Then there is helping artists build relationships with people in the field, and then the last is engaging the public, which we do by being an information broker.” Of the skills-building part, Lerner stresses that Creative Capital isn’t an organization that writes a check and waits for the final report. She employs a comparison from the for-profit world: “Just because somebody has a fantastic business idea, they don’t necessarily have all the skills and tools to realize that idea. How many businesses have faltered because the person had a great idea but didn’t know how to balance a checkbook or their idea? The idea is that you surround somebody who has a good idea with external resources that help the idea succeed.” The third step, the relationship-building part, has as its focus Creative Capital’s yearly retreat. Artists and arts professionals are invited to a college campus for a summer weekend, and the panels and seminars are mixed in with marathon presentations in which grantees present their works in progress. The retreats are stimulating and inspirational affairs where see page 72
Stop Wasting Time.
Start Making Movies. sagindie.org
Sure, pulling three straight all-nighters to get your Alliance past the Horde and safely into the distant lands of Mulat may have been heroic, but was it productive? When it’s all you, making a movie can be a time consuming business. Don’t waste time with second-rate talent. Go with the pros and use one of SAG’s Low Budget Agreements. The AbMaster wouldn’t battle a threeheaded dog before getting armed with a grenade launcher or magic sword. You shouldn’t take on your next production before getting armed with professional actors at affordable rates.
REPORTS
LSD: LOVE, SEX AUR DHOKHA.
THE HINDI NEW WAVE Namaste! Welcome to Indian cinema. The world’s largest film industry, India produces more than 1,100 films per year, roughly a third of which are Hindi-speaking or “Bollywood” films. A word play on “Bombay” plus “Hollywood,” Bollywood is known the world over for stories of true love, its signature bright colors, and its non-stop singing and dancing. But there is a new movement currently underway in the Indian film industry, and it may just be what the subcontinent and the world needs. Similar to what happened in Hollywood in the ’60s and ’70s, Bollywood is undergoing a massive cultural shift in content and consciousness. There are new voices and new audiences that are reinventing Indian cinema as a major player on the global stage. This is the Hindi New Wave. “This new generation is making films because they want to make films, not because they want to make money,” says Anurag Kashyap, the undeclared pioneer of the Hindi New Wave. At 37, Kashyap has directed seven motion pictures across all genres — think Steven Soderbergh in the ’90s. Kashyap plays by his own rules. And now, both Hollywood and Bollywood are chasing after him wanting a piece of the action. Danny Boyle hired Kashyap as a consultant on Slumdog Millionaire after seeing the slum sequences of his terrorist-
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By Ben Rekh
themed film Black Friday. Kashyap recently signed an unprecedented nine-picture deal with UTV Motion Pictures, the most progressive film studio in India. With more than 30 credits to his name as writer, director and producer, Kashyap leads an army of creative rebels behind him. “These are the new voices of the new people.” In 2009 Kashyap’s Dev. D broke into Bollywood and created mayhem with its revolutionary style and controversial content. A clever reinvention of the classic Bengali tale Devdas, the film explores themes and storylines previously taboo in India. An alcoholic spinster trolls for drugs and prostitutes on the dark streets of Delhi. A young schoolgirl is ostracized by her friends and family after her sex video circulates around the country. The film was a forceful punch to the face of Bollywood bubblegum. Kashyap describes the origins with his collaborator and leading actor, Abhay Deol: “Abhay told me a story he wanted to do about a man who falls in love with a stripper, and this guy was self-destructive like Devdas.” Adds Deol, “No one had ever imagined this modern spin on the classic tale. At its core, the film is about addiction, a theme as relevant today as ever.” Made for under a million dollars, Dev. D gave voice to the angst of the country’s youth and became
an instant cult classic. “We went from having only one TV station that would play for only two hours a day to the 24-hour programming of MTV,” explains Deol, citing the opening up of the Indian economy in 1991 as a major influence on the new filmmakers’ credo. “Our generation saw the transition happen in our lifetimes.” In addition to Dev. D, actor-producer-youth icon Abhay Deol stars in several groundbreaking films including the international co-production Road Movie and the darkly comedic Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! The latter is co-written and directed by the third axis of the New Wave, visionary filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee. Born and raised in Delhi, Banerjee wowed audiences with his first two films. Khosla Ka Ghosla! (Khosla’s Nest) portrays a suburban family terrorized by an underworld landowner who lays claim to their abode. Oye Lucky! charts the incredible rise and fall of one of Delhi’s most notorious thieves. But nothing could prepare audiences for his latest venture: LSD: Love, Sex Aur Dhokha (“and Lies”), a shocking portrait of India’s modern youth. The first digital feature produced in India, LSD follows three desperate and disparate tales, all told via the protagonists’ cameras. In the first, an aspiring filmmaker directs a see page 72
Photo by Tom Nowak
From the film Structurally Sound. Photo by Amanda Bose.
announCing ColuMbia College ChiCago’s new
Media ProduCtion Center reinventing Media arts education for the 21st Century Columbia College Chicago’s state-of-the-art Media Production Center is the first educational facility of its kind, designed to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration. rel ATed ProgrAMs oF sTudy undergraduate (u) and graduate (g): Film (u, g) Interactive Arts & Media (u)
Television (u) semester in l.A. at raleigh studios, hollywood
the MPC Features 35,500 square Feet oF adaPtable sPaCe, inCluding two soundstages, a MotionCaPture studio, aniMating suites, and More. designed by Jeanne gang /studio gang architects, the innovative structure is a model for the incorporation of “green” building practices.
A Fe w C oluMBIA AluMs: len Amato (’75) president, hbo Films:
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Mauro Fiore (’87)
Janusz Kaminski (’87)
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director of photography for steven spielberg
Michael goi (’80) president, american society of Cinematographers
Bob Teitel (’90) and george Tillman (’91) heads of state street Pictures: Notorious, Barber Shop, Soul Food
colum.edu/mpc FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
REPORTS
BEFORE AND AFTER PHOTOS OF A SUBJECT IN THE LAZARUS EFFECT.
By Jason Guerrasio
For more than a decade the news out of Africa about its fight against the AIDS pandemic has been grave. Much of the continent is uneducated about the virus, children are still born with HIV or become orphans because of it, and the money sent to help people in need is often siphoned by corrupt governments. But recently there’s been a glimmer of hope, as Lance Bangs chronicles in his intimate documentary The Lazarus Effect. Originated through Bono’s (RED), the U2 singer’s “not a charity” that directs private sector funds to the purchase of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) for AIDS sufferers in Africa, the film chronicles Bangs’s journeys to Zambia to show how these ARVs are greatly improving the health of infected Africans. Known for directing music videos for Sonic Youth, R.E.M. and Green Day in the ’90s, and most recently his behind-thescenes documentaries for films like Being John Malkovich, Be Kind Rewind and Where the Wild Things Are, Bangs was working with Spike Jonze on their doc Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Mau-
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rice Sendak when he learned of (RED)’s project. “I had friends who died of AIDS in the ’80s and ’90s,” Bangs says. “Then I stopped hearing that much about AIDS, and with the ARVs being so accessible in the West, I didn’t understand all of the reasons why there wasn’t the same access in the rest of the world.” Bangs jumped on a plane and spent two weeks in clinics in Zambia last May filming people who were just starting to take the ARVs. The trip also gave Bangs ideas on how he wanted to tell the story. “I didn’t want to make a film where white people are commenting about Africans,” he says, “I wanted to show people in their daily lives.” Bangs also knew the most striking visuals of the film would be the transformations of his subjects. He returned two more times to Zambia to capture the drastic change in his subjects’ health through ARVs, which are provided to Africans for free and have treated more than three million people there. One of the most amazing moments is when Bangs interviews a young girl with HIV — the virus making her unable to grow,
she sits next to her mother and looks like the size of a large doll. When Bangs returns three months later the girl’s health improves to the point where she can play with other kids. The Africans have dubbed ARVs “The Lazarus Effect.” Though Bangs admits he was caught up in what he was seeing, the reality is there’s a lot more work to be done as 3,800 people in Africa still die every day due to HIV/ AIDS. “Dr. Phiri, who’s in the film, said to me, ‘This is never going to get solved until we as Africans learn about cutting transmission and preventing the spread of [the virus]. It would be great to make the medication in our own country and not rely on outside governments. We need to learn to take care of ourselves.’” Spike Jonze is executive producer and HBO will air the film in May. Bangs hopes audiences will see that we shouldn’t give up on Africa. “The way that [Africans] have dropped the rate of people dying is an amazing thing,” he says, “so I hope people get a sense that aid to Africa can work and be effective. It is not a bottomless pit.”
PHOTO BY: JONX PILLERMER/THE PERSUADERS, LLC.
RESURRECTION
(LEFT) FILM FORUM DIRECTOR KAREN COOPER.
COOPER PHOTO BY: ROBIN HOLLAND; MARQUEE PHOTO BY: PETER AARON/ESTO
FILM FORUM AT 40
By Jaimie Stettin
Celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, Film Forum has long been essential to the New York City cinephile. Whether rediscovering the classics or premiering new works, the cinema’s longtime director Karen Cooper has consistently prioritized quality over the bottom line. And, as this celebratory time underscores, she never looks back. “As much as this moment is rooted in our 40th anniversary,” Cooper says, “I am a very forward-looking person and an antisentimentalist.” However there are certain moments and films that Cooper looks back on warmly: the move to the twin-screen cinema on Watts Street, and finally to its current triplex on West Houston St.; Bruce Goldstein’s important repertor y programming — arguably the most important in the U.S. — brought new audiences and new publicity; and a good number of seminal independent documentaries have also passed memorably through Film Forum’s doors, like Crumb, Paris Is Burning and Atomic Café. Documentaries have always been where Cooper’s heart is, and in recognition of the crucial role she has played in nonfiction film premieres, MoMa sponsored “Karen Cooper Carte Blanche: 40 Years of Documentary Premieres at Film Forum” this past February. MoMa screened Cooper’s personal selection of past Film Forum documentary premieres, ranging from Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect to Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning.
Cooper says the goal of Film Forum has always been to create “a balance between more esoteric films and the ones that had been financially and critically acclaimed,” and she does that with her coprogrammer Mike Maggiore by attending the major festivals — Berlin, Amsterdam, Cannes, Sundance and Toronto — and also newer, emerging ones. A recent grant from the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation will send them to African, Asian and Latin American Film Festivals in the next few years. Cooper believes this diversity has set Film Forum apart from other arthouse theaters in the country, and numbers confirm that opinion. According to Cooper, 2009/2010 is panning out to be a 300,000-person audience year. “They can’t all be filmmakers and they can’t all be SoHo artists,” she jokes. In terms of upcoming premieres, Cooper is excited for the April screening of Connie Field’s Have You Heard from Johannesburg?, which she considers “a really epic, in-depth documentary of the antiapartheid movement.” This fall, Film Forum will show Kings of Pastry, a recent documentary by D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus, one of Cooper’s favorite filmmaking teams. Pennebaker’s landmark Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back is, according to Cooper, “one of the best documentaries ever made.” “I remember when Karen started her theater uptown and thinking, ‘At last there’s someone in the movie-showing business who’s interested in something
besides selling popcorn,’” Pennebaker says via e-mail. “It almost got us thinking about renting an old theater on Eighth Avenue and trying it ourselves. Almost. I think people should do what they know how to do best, and she was clearly going to be better at it than anyone else, including us.” Pennebaker says with no takers Stateside for Kings of Pastry they weren’t sure what to do with the film. “It seemed like a disaster. So we showed it to Karen, and she said, ‘Sure.’ It makes me feel like the frog that got kissed.” Besides skillfully selecting films, Cooper is keeping the physical theater itself up-todate. She’s redesigning Film Forum’s lighting with lower-impact fluorescents, and the concession stand now carries healthier snacks like dried fruits and nuts (though Cooper’s favorite remains the orange cake with chocolate frosting). And, “We twitter,” Cooper proudly declares. “Well, I don’t twitter, but someone here does.” After 40 years, can Karen Cooper pick out a favorite film she’s shown? “You know, I think the pleasure of my position has really not emanated from showing one film or even a group of films but having had the freedom to show all kinds of films. The fact that we presented narratives, documentaries and work like Matthew Barney’s Cremaster series, and animated films — there’s a tremendous diversity. And I think there’s a cer tain joy and fun to having that kind of freedom. That’s more impor tant to me than any one title.” FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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rytelling device. For instance, geolocational services that enable users to connect and share experiences have become popular in recent months. Foursquare and Gowalla are two companies that are leading the category. Early adopters are not the only ones taking note — Foursquare recently inked a deal with Bravo that has viewers and fans of their programs “checking in” to various locations they visit and along the way earning badges and status within the community. Joseph Stump, CTO of SimpleGeo, a company that provides ready-to-use infrastructure for locational-based services and solutions, believes that location is going to be a part of everything we do. “The biggest shake-ups are going to come in social networking and gaming,” he says. “I see location now where social features were a decade ago. Social features made large corpuses of data interesting and relevant based on a person’s social circle. I think location provides another view into data that makes it extremely relevant to the user.”
WANT TO BUILD AN AUDIENCE? START MAKING APPS BY LANCE WEILER
Where Data Meets Storytelling HiM.
It’s a known fact that the film industry has no shortage of middlemen. The path between filmmaker and audience is littered with them — some good, some bad. But the promise of a direct connection to an audience has become the currency of the future. These days it seems as if everyone is trying to find a way to capitalize on fostering stronger relationships with audiences. Much of these efforts are focused after the film is finished when it comes time to promote and market the work. Although some filmmakers are including audience development in their initial business plans, many are still only working to build awareness around traditional elements such as theatrical, DVD and VOD. Are we missing a window of opportunity by limiting ourselves to formats, running times and traditional markets?
Consider the following:
• To date, Apple has shipped more than 70 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices and it’s projected that within the next two years they’ll have more than 200 million in the market. • More than 140,000 applications have been created for the iPhone and iPod. • Each day, 60,000 Android devices ship. • The fledging Android Market has more than 10,000 apps.
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These stats are just one part of a growing mobile device market, which is currently expanding due to a new generation of tablets. Apple’s iPad and a slew of other computer and handset manufacturers have tablets entering the market over the next few months. Larger screens, faster processors, wireless connectivity and the ability to run various browser and mobile-based applications will all be here soon. We don’t know yet if this generation of tablets will resonate with consumers but, as we have seen in the past, devices do have the ability to influence user behavior and consumption. The iPod revitalized the value of a music track and now the publishing industry is hoping the iPad can do the same for books and zines. For the time being, these devices all offer opportunities for filmmakers to reach audiences directly, with little to no intervention from middlemen. While the selling of a film on iTunes requires a filmmaker to go through one or maybe two aggregators, it is possible to go direct to the App Store as long as the mobile app receives approval from Apple. Android allows you to rapidly prototype so that beta testing can be done directly with users thus enabling access to a diversity of handsets right out of the gate. An area of growth within the mobile market will come from embracing apps as a sto-
Mobile apps offer not only a direct channel to audiences but they carry your story to places where the audience will consume it. As stories travel they can harvest a variety of data such as: GPS coordinates, viewer preferences and/ or contact info. This data can be filtered and used in a variety of ways to enhance a story. For instance, media (video, audio, photos) can be released to viewers when they reach a certain location, data can be used to connect audience members who share similar interests around a story, and characters can contact players directly via SMS, e-mail or even phone calls. With my newest feature/transmedia project HiM, my company Seize the Media, which specializes in story architecture (design and delivery of stories), is hard at work on a series of mobile applications and Web browser-based extensions. Our efforts are focused on an area known as Contextual Storytelling — the use of data to enhance and customize the delivery of story elements and social entertainment experiences to audiences. Pandemic is a transmedia property that resides within the storyworld of HiM. The game enables players to step into the shoes of the protagonist as they are forced to scavenge for food and encouraged to search for other survivors. One core feature of the game enables the player to create a 360-degree panoramic view of a space. By standing and snapping pictures in a see page 73
COLUMNS
YOUTHQUAKE: WHERE IS THE UNDER-30s AUDIENCE FOR INDIE FILM? BY ANTHONY KAUFMAN
BREAKING UPWARDS.
Question: “When was the last time you went to an arthouse?” Answer: “Years ago. I watch everything online. I don’t have time to go to the cinema.”
While this reply from Alex Johnson, a 30year-old interactive strategist, filmmaker and co-founder of WBP Labs, doesn’t speak for an entire generation of new movie consumers, it certainly begs the question: What is the future of the indie movie-going audience? As Ted Hope recently noted on his blog trulyfreefilm.com, “It is really surprising how few true indie films speak to a youth audience. In this country we’ve had Kevin Smith and Napoleon Dynamite, but nothing that was youth and also truly on the art spectrum like Run Lola Run or the French New Wave.” Distributors have the evidence to support such concerns. IFC Films’ marketing head Ryan Werner says American indie films with a younger bent, whether the work of Joe Swanberg, Andrew Bujalski or Barry Jenkins, are the hardest to connect to their audience, and not just in theaters, but on VOD and DVD, as well. “There isn’t a tougher breed of film right now,” he says. Many industry insiders had hoped Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, distributed by Magnolia, would break out, but the film underper-
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formed. “The main thrust was about married people getting older,” says Magnolia Pictures’ Eamonn Bowles, so younger audiences stayed away. What is the consequence of this disconnect between millennials — those aged 18 to 29 — and today’s American indie cinema? As New York Times critic Manohla Dargis wrote in a piece that picked up on Hope’s blog, “Any future alternative film culture will depend on the cultivation of younger patrons,” she wrote. Not only that, but this is a demographic, she added, “who are used to receiving much if not all of their entertainment at home and on handheld devices.” Indeed, WBP Labs’ Johnson says, “I’ll stream movies on Netflix, rent from my Xbox, use torrents, whatever is easiest. If I can watch something on my cell phone, I will.” Because in the new age of watching-whatever-youwant-whenever-you-want, according to Johnson, “it’s really about being able to watch it immediately and talk to other people about it and be a part of that conversation.” For Johnson, the kind of buzz that once
drove young people to see cult movies doesn’t happen around alternative theatrical releases so much as popular torrents, pointing to the success of freely pirated movies such as Jamin Winans’s sci-fi indie Ink (downloaded by more than 400,000 people on BitTorrent in a few days after it was leaked). Johnson also suggests that “event-izing” a film can work for both big movies — like Twilight-watching parties — and small movies, if a group of like-minded young folks can embrace seeing a film as a social happening. Tim League, the founder of the Alamo Drafthouse and Fantastic Fest in Austin, Tex., agrees. He says one of the best ways to reach out to younger audiences is “to make the moviegoing experience more than just paying 10 bucks to see a movie” by adding events such as preshow video entertainment, food tie-ins or bringing in celebrity guests. New York City’s IFC Center also frequently hosts director Q&As in a hipster atmosphere, while the Gen Art Film Festival has always lured younger audiences with its “7 Premieres, 7 Parties” format. Similarly, the Film Society of Lincoln Center recently rebranded its Young Friends of Film program as “The New Wave,” aimed at cultivating arthouse audiences through a social gathering-like atmosphere, with postscreening conversations and parties, says New Wave board member Michael Shulman, a 28-year-old actor (Party of Five) and indie producer (Sherman’s Way). “My friends want to see great independent films, but they don’t know they exist,” says Schulman. “But people come see these events if there’s a basis of understanding that the experience will be a fun and enlightening one.” In other words, it comes down to trust. “It requires us to be part of that experience,” says League. “Our niche audiences know us, and we hang out with them and listen to what they like and don’t like.” Similarly, 26-year-old filmmaker-promoter Todd Sklar, whose Range Life Entertainment takes “awesome movies” on tour across the U.S., explains that their cross-country grassroots campaign can do what most distributors can’t: “Being at the screenings, doing events, panels and workshops and getting the audience excited to talk about the films afterwards.” Sklar notes that comedies do particularly well with the university crowd, such as films like his own feature Box Elder and Dan Eckman’s Mystery Team, which grossed see page 73
PHOTO BY: ALEX BERGMAN
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REPORTS FROM SUNDANCE, BERLIN & ROTTERDAM
EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP.
Sundance Film Festival BY SCOTT MACAULAY
It is now almost three months after the Sundance Film Festival. I will leave it to you to decide whether or not the revolution promised by the festival’s marketing materials (“This is the renewed rebellion,” proclaimed the program book) materialized, but I think it is safe that the 26th edition of the Park City festival ( Jan. 21-31) will not be filed alongside May ’68, the formation of the Dziga Vertov group or the drafting of the Futurist Manifesto in the history books. In fact, I doubt that many of the folks who actually attended Sundance noticed the guerilla intent. Debra Granik’s excellent Winter’s Bone won the Grand Jury Prize, and, indeed, it is the kind of film the festival has traditionally celebrated. There was a large sale — The Kids Are All Right to Focus Features — from veteran Sundance filmmaker, Lisa Cholodenko, who found success there with earlier features High Art and Laurel Canyon. And, as always, the festival was the launching pad for quite a few important documentaries, including Laura Poitras’s The Oath, Lucy Walker’s Wasteland, and Tim Hetherington & Sebastian Junger’s documentary Grand Jury Prize winner Restropo. New discoveries included Detroitbased Sultan Sharrief with his Bilal’s Stand and Philadelphia’s Tanya Hamilton with her Night Catches Us, both of which were subsequently picked up for New Directors/New Films; actor Josh Radnor transitioning to directing with his Audience Award-winning happythankyoumoreplease; and Todd and Brad
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Barnes for their Homewrecker, which won a prize as the “Best” of the festival’s new lowbudget NEXT section. In the end, then, was Sundance’s revolutionary rhetoric just a marketing come-on and ready-made lede for sleep-deprived journalists looking for an easy angle? (As you’ll note from my posts at the Filmmaker blog I firmly place myself in that group.) Not necessarily. Discounting the marketing hype a bit, there were big changes at Sundance this year, but some of them were felt not at Park City but in theaters and living rooms far away from the festival. Sundance USA brought premiering films like Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Jack Goes Boating to art houses around the country concurrent with the main festival, and a partnership with YouTube saw other festival films streaming to online viewers. For new fest director John Cooper, taking over for longtime head Geoff Gilmore, these small initiatives lay the groundwork for future editions in which Sundance will more directly engage the current problematics of the independent industry it helped create. Maybe these weren’t huge changes, but their modesty was of a piece with the festival. Cooper and his director of programming Trevor Groth were so buoyant in their debut outing that their attitude was infectious. While the marketing said one thing, the overall vibe emanating from the festival’s programmers was one of cheerful experimentation, a lack of self-importance, and an encouraging willingness to reconsider the role a festival plays in the ecosystem of independent film.
My favorite film at the festival was a surprise screening not listed in the program guide. Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop is a brilliantly made and entertainingly confounding sort-of documentary that morphs from a portrait of the reclusive British conceptual artist to one of Thierry Guetta, an amateur French documentarian who, in the course of making a movie about street artists, becomes a successful one himself. “You know it’s a mock documentary,” a friend told me beforehand. I didn’t, but with his thick accent and memorable mustache, Guetta would seem to have come right out of Central Casting. Later I learned that my friend was wrong and that Guetta is for real and something of an art-world scourge. (Some believe that he is a “creation” of Banksy’s.) I had to rethink the film and Banksy’s reality manipulations before deciding that I liked it just as much. It’s an enormously witty, gently satirical film laced with Banksy’s realization that his outsider ethos and conceptual art tool kit are easily appropriated by others to financially if not artistically rewarding ends. Another best-of-the-fest favorite — although I saw it months ago right after Cannes — was Josh and Benny Safdie’s Daddy Longlegs. It’s the story of Lenny (Ronald Bronstein), a projectionist and divorced dad, and it’s set two weeks during the summertime when he has custody of his two young sons. Lenny’s lifestyle is both perpetually frazzled and compulsively bohemian, and his take on parenthood is somewhere between unaffected love and a call to child services. Lenny is based on the Safdies’ own dad, and their ability to weave their complicated emotions about him into a work that is alternately shocking, free-spirited and joyful is a testament to their extraordinary emotional intelligence as directors. Other strong works included Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, moment for moment one of the best shot and directed films of the festival. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams star as a young couple whose marriage is unraveling. A Bergsonian meditation on love and identity, the film is painful yet honest in its refusal to sentimentalize or demonize either character. Mark Ruffalo’s Sympathy for Delicious wasn’t as altogether successful, but it was a bold and idiosyncratic directorial debut that grew out of the actor/director’s long relationship with the film’s writer, Christopher Thornton, who stars as a paraplegic turntablist who becomes an unlikely faith healer. Stunningly shot by Chris
PHOTO BY: PHILIP OEGAARD
Norr, the film has a refreshingly unpredictable narrative that feels exactly like the outgrowth of a complicated friendship. I also liked Estonian filmmaker Veiko Õunpuu’s The Temptation of St. Tony. The film is an oddly delirious, blackly comic reverie about an alienated midlevel businessman who becomes more and more untethered from reality. Part of New Frontier was Sam Green and Dave Cerf ’s Utopia in Four Movements. In what was billed as a “live documentary,” filmmaker Green explores a precondition for revolution: a shared vision of utopia. Green collaborated with Cerf, who composed the score, which was played live by the Quavers, and also did live commentary over film clips and slides. Green’s piece had a charm to it, much of it deriving from his sincerity as narrator and the poetry of its quixotic goals. Perhaps appropriately, the piece, which began by placing utopia within a historical frame, tracing it from Sir Thomas More onward, had a hard time finally answering its central question of whether utopia can still be imagined; retreating from historical analysis, it found the seeds of utopia’s renewal in such ahistorical values as hope and faith. Still, the idea that one could reintroduce the concept of utopia to a jaded 21st-century audience through the power of the spoken work, three musicians, and a video projector was perhaps its own utopian gesture and thus the piece’s true ending point. John Well’s The Company Men, purchased by The Weinstein Company postfestival, is a well acted (particularly by Ben Affleck, Rosemarie DeWitt and Tommy Lee Jones) story of recession and job loss as seen through the lives of several employees of a Boston-based ship-building conglomerate. For the first half hour I was fascinated by its fantastic production design and location work, which form an almost alternative narrative in which plot points are replaced by gradations of comfort. By its end, The Company Men becomes a 2010 version of an ’80s yuppie-redemption film like Regarding Henry. On a human level, The Company Men is a good-hearted and well-observed piece; as a political statement, however, its narrative plays as a kind of neoliberal fantasy that provides closure for the characters but perhaps not audiences still pondering the roots of the current recession and America’s future industrial policy. Flat-out disappointments included Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s uncharacteristically unimaginative adaptation of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine; Hesher,
A SOMEWHAT GENTLE MAN.
Spencer Susser’s tonally uncertain tale of family grief; Four Lions, a comedy about jihadists by iconoclastic British comedy director Christopher Morris that runs out of satirical juice long before the end; and Drake Doremus’s Douchebag, a lazily imagined, no-budget shaky-camera comedy about two brothers on the weekend before one’s wedding. The latter played in Competition although it would have seemed a more natural fit for the NEXT section. Regardless, I would have preferred the better written, better shot, Jack Black and Luke Wilson version of this story.
Berlin International Film Festival BY HOWARD FEINSTEIN
I’m rethinking green. On account of the unusual cold wave that hit Europe recently, Berlin was covered in snow and ice. Walking was treacherous, even with the appropriate cleated shoes, which I wore. It was inevitable: One evening I slid on a sheet of ice and fell on my knees, tearing open the skin on my right leg so badly that blood was dripping everywhere. For diabetics like me, an injury to a limb can be lifethreatening. I finally went to a nice pharmacist, who disinfected it and sold me plasters. There is a point to this self-indulgent story. A nice woman in Berlin explained why it was so icy in spite of a law, like the one in New York, that snow and ice must be cleared in front of any building by its tenant. It turns out, they ran out of sand. As far as salt goes, they are not allowed to use it because it is considered an environmental hazard: It can
kill the trees. The ERs were packed with folks with broken bones, and foreigners attending the festival, who walked everywhere, took their lives in their hands and prayed to God or Allah that they not succumb. The trees, however, will be fine. Some of the best films I saw at the Berlin International Film Festival (Feb. 11-21) were shot with relatively unconventional cameras. The best film of all, Alexei Popogrebsky’s How I Ended This Summer (which I wrote about on the Filmmaker blog), was shot with a RED camera. The film was later transferred to 35mm. The RED is of course, near the size of many 35mm cameras, but it still allows the flexibility and ease of movement necessary for a film about two men working on a remote Arctic island in which the natural settings convey the narrative flow. The film was awarded Outstanding Artistic Achievement (Best Cinematography) and a shared Best Actor prize for the two leads. The other most impressive cinematographic feat was L.A.-based Rodrigo Garcia’s segment “La 7th Street y Alvarado,” one of ten 10-minute shorts in the portmanteau Revolución, the collaboration of ten Mexican filmmakers to honor the centenary of the Mexican revolution. In a contemporary barrio in Los Angeles, scores of pedestrians, many with cell phones in hand, walk past charmless discount stores. Suddenly, rebels on horseback from 1910, wearing wide-brimmed sombreros, pass through the crowd, with sad looks in their eyes. For THIS we fought against a dictator? Everysee page 77 FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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COLUMNS
GAMES OF TRAGEDY BY HEATHER CHAPLIN
TRAIN.
In February 2008, Brenda Brathwaite’s 6-year-old daughter came home from school talking about the Middle Passage. Brathwaite, whose husband is half African-American, said she’d always known this conversation was coming, but she hadn’t expected it so soon. And she hadn’t expected her daughter, Maezza, to be so blasé by the facts of the slave trade. She seemed emotionally unaffected — which affected Brathwaite tremendously. Brathwaite is a game designer. Her solution: design a game on the spot for her daughter to play. First she had Maezza color little wooden figures of people and group then into families. Then, when Maezza was finished, she grabbed handfuls of the little people and stuck them randomly on index cards she called ships. Maezza was confused. She hadn’t taken whole families! Mothers were separated from their babies, fathers from their wives. “Sorry, honey,” Brathwaite said, “they don’t get to choose.” Then as the index cards set sail, they rolled the dice to allocate food. “Mom, you’ve made a mistake, there’s not enough food for everyone,” Maezza cried. Brathwaite told her they could put some people into the water or try to make it to the end and hope people survived. Brathwaite didn’t need to finish the game. When her husband came home, they all ended up talking together for hours, crying together. “It was an amazing experience,” Brathwaite says. “Maezza had spent some time inside the system of slavery, as abstracted as it was, and came away with this really deep understanding. It was transformative.” If there’s one thing games are good at it’s teaching how to think systemically. Brathwaite’s games are created from her realization that so many of the great human tragedies,
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the mass sufferings of history, have taken place within systems. Someone designed those slave ships. Someone developed the system of taking land from the Irish during the Cromwellian invasion in the mid-1600s. And, probably, most recognized, the Nazis implemented a fantastically complex and efficient way of exterminating Jews during World War II. Perhaps games were the ideal way of fostering a real sense of understanding and empathy about these atrocities. In her spare time, Brathwaite decided to make a series of tragedy games. While Brathwaite designs video games in her professional career, these would all be non-digital board games, each made painstakingly by hand. First up was Siochan Leat, or “The Irish Game.” At the beginning of each role of the dice, an orange square representing English forces under Cromwell take over a portion of the board. As the game progresses, players are fighting each other for space on the board. When space runs out, the figures representing the Irish are forced onto slave ships for Barbados. Brathwaite made the game by hand, bundling little hand-painted figurines together and burying within the burlap ground of the board to represent the dead. She even buried some family heirlooms (Brathwaite is of Irish descent), like her grandmother’s rosary. The game that has gotten the most attention is Train. In Train, players are presented with a board that is a window frame with its glass panes shattered. There’s a typewriter, three train tracks with trains on them, a stack of cards and handfuls of little yellow figures. Instructions for the game are in the typewriter. On one hand it’s a turn-based raceto-the end game with cards instructing you
how much to move your train forward or presenting setbacks like derailment. While playing the game you’re stuffing the little yellow figurines into the trains. Disconcertingly, the figures are just a tad too big to fit easily into the train entrance so you find yourself shoving them in. Also, once your train car is full, the “people” are not lined up but squeezed in at all kind of angles. At the end of the game you get your destination card — each one is the name of a concentration camp. “I want to make you feel complicit in a system of human tragedy,” Brathwaite says. Brathwaite named her game series “The Mechanic Is the Message.” This may be confusing for non-gamers, but the holy grail of game design is to express oneself not through the artwork in a game, or the music, or the cut scenes, but rather through the actual game mechanics itself, like requiring players to force their little figures brutally into the train cars. Brathwaite designed the rules of Train to be intentionally vague. So if a card instructs that a car has to be derailed, you don’t have to pass it on to your opponent; you can choose to derail your own train. Or if a card orders people to be removed from your train, you can choose to force them on another player, or put them in your pocket. In other words, the mechanics of the game design forces players to think about the decisions they are making; and the fact that they are making decisions. Watching people play Train is in itself a fascinating experience. Some people figure out what’s going on right away and start derailing their own trains and pulling people out whenever they can. Others only realize it’s a game about the Holocaust at the end when they get their destination card. Crying abounds. And when people realize that the typewriter is actually a Nazi artifact, complete with the SS sign above the five buttons (Brathwaite bought it from an Air Force veteran online for $1,000), there is shock and horror. The other games in the series are about Mexican immigration to California, life in a Haiti slum (this was before the earthquake), and the Trail of Tears. Brathwaite has no idea what will become of her games. Each one has been made by hand by her and is not easily reproduced. (Can you imagine trying to supply Nazi typewriters to a mass market?) So far, she’s been traveling around the country showing them at game festivals and conferences. She doesn’t want to turn them into video games because see page 73
PHOTO BY: JOHN MCKINNON
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FILMMAKER’S LOOK AT THE SEASON’S DVD RELEASES CELESTIAL NAVIGATIONS: SHORT FILMS OF AL JARNOW Numero – IN STORES You probably grew up on the shorts of Al Jarnow and never even knew it. From rocks finding different ways of crossing a river to watching a billion years elapse on a hillside in the span of one minute, Al Jarnow’s contribution to animation is unquantifiable. Making abstract works for children’s shows like Sesame Street and 3-2-1 Contact in the ’70s, Jarnow’s heightened sense of observation elevated the medium to more than just colorful figures doing funny things on paper. Now 45 of his shorts are showcased in this remastered anthology, which also includes a documentary profiling Jarnow and a 60-page booklet written by some of his closest collaborators and son Jesse, who was the inspiration for many of Jarnow’s works. A must-own for animation enthusiasts or if you just want a keepsake from your childhood. — Jason Guerrasio
EASIER WITH PRACTICE Breaking Glass Pictures – April 6 Winner of last year’s Grand Prize at CineVegas, Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s intimate debut feature looks at the yearning for companionship, even if it’s only over the phone. In Easier With Practice Davey is on a book-tour road trip with his brother when he gets a mysterious phone call in his motel room from a sultry female interested in talking dirty. Instead of hanging up Davey goes along for the ride, which gradually forms into a bizarre relationship, and inevitably leads to the moment when the two meet. Highlighting the talents of its lead Brian Geraghty (The Hurt Locker), who plays the lonely schlub to perfection, Alvarez’s unique love story got him major notice on the fest circuit and this year’s Someone To Watch Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. — J.G.
BURMA VJ Oscilloscope Laboratories – June 15 Defying the traditions of documentary form in myriad ways, Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ is not just a bold aesthetic achievement but an act of solidarity and courage. Restitching footage shot by various brave souls, whom the film dubs “Burma VJs” and from whom the film gains its title, the Oscar-nominated doc portrays nearly suicidal protests, often carried out by imperiled Monks, within war and genocide-torn Burma. Using footage smuggled out of the country by anonymous shooters into neighboring Thailand, Østergaard pulls the curtain back on this repressive place while offering glimpses of acts of pure selflessness in the pursuit of freedom by a perpetually imperiled grassroots movement of protesters and Handycam-bearing witnesses. — Brandon Harris
QUEUE IT April 6: BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS First Look Pictures
DIRT! THE MOVIE Docurama HARLEM ARIA Magnolia Home Entertainment YES MEN FIX THE WORLD The New Video Group April 13: DEFENDOR Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
THE MISSING PERSON Strand Releasing THE SLAMMIN’ SALMON Starz / Anchor Bay April 20: 35 SHOTS OF RUM Cinema Guild
44 INCH CHEST Image Entertainment CRAZY HEART 20th Century Fox SUMMER HOURS The Criterion Collection VIVRE SA VIE The Criterion Collection THE YOUNG VICTORIA Sony Pictures Home Entertainment April 27: HAL HARTLEY’S SURVIVING
DESIRE: SPECIAL EDITION Microcinema THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS Sony Pictures Home Entertainment WILLIAM KUNSTLER: DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE Microcinema May 4: PAPER COVERS ROCK MPI
TETRO Lionsgate TOKYO SONATA Koch Vision May 18: THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN Strand Releasing
THE MESSENGER Oscilloscope Laboratories OSHIMA’S OUTLAW SIXTIES The Criterion Collection May 25: MYSTERY TEAM Lionsgate
THE ROAD Sony Pictures Home Entertainment STAGECOACH The Criterion Collection June 15: MYSTERY TRAIN The Criterion Collection June 22: CLOSE-UP The Criterion Collection June 29: EVERLASTING MOMENTS The Criterion Collection
– April 27 At times fanciful and at others mournfully taciturn, Ang Lee’s oft overlooked Ride With the Devil, which quietly and all too briefly came and went amidst a flurry of better-known Oscar contenders in the winter of 1999, is getting the Criterion treatment with a new remastered Director’s Cut that Lee claims will finally bring his vision of the American Civil War’s western entanglements to glorious life. The story of a pair of Confederate Bushwackers (Toby Maguire and Skeet Ulrich) who sign up to ride with the notorious William Quantrill during the conflict along the Kansas/ Missouri border with the Union Jayhawkers, is as beautiful and well observed as anything Lee and frequent collaborator James Schamus have ever made. It contains an absolutely sublime performance by Jeffrey Wright as a black man fighting for the Confederacy, a plot point that probably ruined its commercial prospects in theaters at the time. — B.H.
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RIDE WITH THE DEVIL.
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EIGHT THINGS THAT WILL KEEP YOU IN THE KNOW
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for you. Capable of projecting hi-definition images through WiFi or its internal SSD storage, the OO works wirelessly for up to three hours. It is lightweight and functional, promising a new, more attractive, more portable future for the projector. And with its sleek design, duplicating the circular nature of the lens in the roundness of its slim machine (hence the name: “OO”), you’ll be lookin’ good doing it. Learn more at flylyf.com/oo-high-definition-wireless-projector/. 6 SPEAKEASY STYLE For those who can’t get enough of their gangster fix on screen, the Museum of the American Gangster opens this spring in a former NYC speakeasy. It is fitting that a past underground watering hole will now pay homage to the gangsters of yesteryear that inspired films like The Godfather trilogy, Bugsy and The Untouchables, to name a few. This speakeasycum-museum also nicely complements the recent accumulation of hidden Prohibitionstyle bars around the city. For more information visit moagnyc.org/.
2 FIRST EVER TCM FILM FEST Meet the first ever Turner Classic Movies Film Festival, April 22-25 in Hollywood, Calif., where international film icons will host screenings of classics at historic Hollywood venues. Jean-Paul Belmondo will be present to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Breathless at the North American premiere of its restored print, and Stanley Donen will introduce Singin’ in the Rain. Catch rare films like The Story of Temple Drake (a precode production) and archival prints of films like Casablanca. More screenings, panel discussions and other events are soon to be announced. Learn more at tcm. com/festival.
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3 SHEDDING LIGHT ON NOIR “This book is likely to become the book on film noir,” claims Robert Benton, director of one of the genre’s classics, Still of the Night. Due for its first rerelease since its original 1979 publication, Film Noir: The Encyclopedia (The Overlook Press, $45) will now include entries for more than 500 films, as well as a new selection of illustrations and photographs. What do 550 femme fatales have in common? Find out when Film Noir hits bookshelves in May. 4 HOLLYWOOD TRIBUTE Witness to Warhol’s Factory, Georges Monfils is a Nouveau Pop painter whose current works “Paparazzi” and “City of Angels” examine the satiric nature of celebrity and the entertainment industry with a specific Hollywood focus. From recreations of magazine covers to spinning film reels, Monfils’s imaginative paintings are confrontational and captivating. His show opens April 24 and runs through the end of July at the San Marino gallery in Pasadena, Calif. Learn more at sanmarinogallery.com. 5 SLEEK PROJECTION For DIY filmmakers wanting to screen their works anywhere, the new OO Wireless HD Projector is just
8 MULTIMEDIA RESOURCE Since 1996 UbuWeb.com has been gifting poetry of all sorts — audio, visual, multimedia — to anyone and everyone who logs on. According to the site, UbuWeb is “a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts.” Relying on the generosity of various media-hosting sites as well as on the unlimited storage of cyberspace, UbuWeb provides an incredible archive of visual, concrete and sound poetry. Independent of institutional constraints, UbuWeb features everything that pleases its editors. Explore the site (ubu.com) for an incredible range of works.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SAN MARINO GALLERY
1 YOU ARE NOT A GADGET Internet pioneer and virtual-reality visionary Jaron Lanier’s first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95), is an exhilarating provocation, a beautifully written argument against many of Web 2.0’s sacred cows. Tackling free culture, the copyleft movement, crowdsourcing and, most particularly, the ascendancy of “the cloud,” Lanier asks if our unthinking engagement with Internet technology is making us less human.
7 SCREENINGS Recently moved from its old space in Sunset Park to a new location in downtown Brooklyn, Light Industry remains a venue for film and electronic art. Inspired by cinematheques and alternative art spaces alike, Light Industry has a weekly screening program, with each event organized by a different artist or curator. Past screenings range from Echoes of Silence, introduced by avant-garde pioneer Jonas Mekas, to Bijou, introduced by writer and poet Eileen Myles. Check for upcoming screenings and events at lightindustry.org.
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Set in the Ozarks, Debra Granik’s gritty adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s novel, Winter’s Bone, was praised at Sundance earlier this year and walked away with the Grand Prize. With a powerful performance by lead Jennifer Lawrence, Granik delves into the methamphetaminedealing mountain country of Missouri to follow a young girl searching for her lost, possibly deceased father. By Scott Macaulay | Photographs by Henny Garfunkel
WINTER’S BONE DIRECTOR AND CO-WRITER DEBRA GRANIK.
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(OPPOSITE PAGE) PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.
The Ozark mountain holler that is the setting for Debra Granik’s fierce and extraordinary Winter’s Bone seems carved away from much of what signifies as “contemporary America” in cinema today. The movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year, dwells in a landscape that imbues it with the starkness of classic Western frontier drama. Seventeen-yearold Ree Dolly is the single-minded heroine who has to venture into the wilderness to save her family home — the dwelling of her younger brother and sister and infirm mother — from repossession. To do so, she must find her wandering father, who, after a prison stint, is rumored to have died in a meth-lab explosion. Relying on little more than information meted out by her father’s estranged brother, Teardrop (superbly played by John Hawkes), and confronting a group of meth producers who do not want their secrets poked into, Dolly takes us into a world that is both of this country and defiantly sheltered away from it. Her journey, of course, is something of a coming-of-age tale, but Granik shies away from any of the genre’s more sentimental flourishes. Dolly’s efforts do lead to her father, but the film is as much about her education in the ways of the criminal subculture she’s been brought up around and the family ties that may keep her from ever entirely escaping it. Winter’s Bone is Granik’s second feature, premiering in Park City six years after her debut, Down to the Bone. In that similarly tough-minded film Vera Farmiga played a mother struggling to kick her drug addiction while holding down low-wage work and raising her children. With this new film, Granik and her producing and writing partner Anne Rosellini enlarge their canvas considerably, venturing into an Ozark community that has rarely been portrayed so realistically on screen. Shot on the RED One in chilly blues and grays by Michael McDonough, the film memorably captures the desolation and flashes of spare beauty in this landscape. But Granik also manages the harder job of depicting the people in this community without condescension or judgment. Eschewing any trace of Hollywood glamour, Kentucky native Jennifer Lawrence (The Burning Plain), 19, gives a star-making performance in Winter’s Bone; the supporting cast who include actors like Hawkes and Sheryl Lee, blend seamlessly with the local hires; and there’s a scene on a boat that I think is the best scene I’ve seen in a film all year. The film will be released by Roadside Attractions in June. I spoke with Granik a few weeks after her Sundance win.
You’ve made two films about women and their relationships with drug culture. What attracts you to those worlds, those stories? You know, it never starts with something so overt. It’s almost like the drug aspect was the burdensome reality I encountered in both of those stories. Down to the Bone started from [the story of ] a family that I was interested in and their central struggle was whether they as adults in that family structure could become sober. I [didn’t choose the story] because I relished taking on drugs or addiction but because their story was inherently suspenseful. And in Winter’s Bone, that’s the backdrop of Ree’s family. That [aspect of the story] frightened me the first time I read [the book] and contemplated what it means for a kid to be growing up with family members who are involved with meth. So, I didn’t go seeking those [stories and milieus] — they were attached to the lives of the two females that I was interested in. How did you find the book? Had you been reading lots of novels and spec scripts looking for your next project after Down to the Bone? Did you know Daniel Woodrell? My producing partner, Anne Rosellini, and I had been reading a lot of scripts. We’d been getting
them in the conventional ways, through what I call “the general pipeline” — or, “the general colon.” [laughs] Were these from an agent? We had representation at Anonymous Content; manager Shawn Simon was looking for stuff for us. Of course, the majority of stuff had female protagonists, but… I don’t know how to say it but [reading all these scripts] stoked a kind of disheartened misogyny within myself. [laughs] Because if [all these female characters I was reading] weren’t cutting themselves, they were collapsing psychiatrically; if they weren’t collapsing psychiatrically, they were having a bad time in a psychiatric institution;
HOW THEY DID IT PRODUCTION FORMAT HD/4k. CAMERA Red One. Generation 18. EDITING SYSTEM Final Cut Pro. COLOR CORRECTION Autodesk Lustre incinerator by Tim Stipan at Technicolor’s New York DI Theater, which includes NEC IS8 2K projector. Transcoded to 10bit log dpx files. Conform and visual effects done on Autodesk Smoke 2010.
if they weren’t doing that, they had other devastating illnesses or pathologies. I mean, at the end, Anne and I felt like this big being female Homo sapiens. And then along comes Ree Dolly, okay, and who couldn’t resist her? I mean, just even on the level of fantasy — a female hero, a girl with moxie? An old-fashioned kind of Western gal? She appealed to us literally on the level of relief and fun. Even though her life has superhard elements, we had pleasure imagining her. We enjoyed her strength, her quick-witted responses. She’s got interesting relationships with the men and women in her life. And [Daniel Woodrell] told such a damn good story. I read it three years ago in Washington Square Park in one sitting — on a hard bench! I hadn’t done that since I was a teenager. So your manager sent you the book. I presume it had been shopped to the studios too. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the book went out widely. A lot of Daniel’s other material is out in the world and some very prominent people have adapted his books. Daniel’s not our discovery by any means. Once you decided you wanted to do it, what was that process like? Was it still a process to get Woodrell to agree to give you the book? He felt positively about Down to the Bone and so was predisposed to us being the people who might do the next interpretation of his work. Initially it was probably a blow to see that it would be a very humble production because he was used to something quite big with very prominent American stars being involved. He had to take a huge leap of faith. And then what about the adaptation? Was he involved? We would sometimes ask him to interpret for us or just to clarify things that were ambiguous or had multiple meanings. We’d ask him things like, “What were you thinking here? Did you think Teardrop was fronting? Was he being sincere?” And we asked certain questions about the sheriffs, how they work. He was very forthcoming with the research that he had done. One thing I was fascinated by in your film was the milieu and how removed it is from the usual signs of contemporary American life we see in films. It felt like it could almost have been a period film while it’s clearly very much a film of today. Well, there were satellite dishes. What? I’m trying to remember them. It’s okay. They were there just because they really are there, and we weren’t going to cover them up or take them down. In the cattle-auction scene, there was a man on his cell. But, you FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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know, for me it was unusual to meet a family where wild game was being consumed for dinner, and then that same family has a grandmother who works as a greeter at WalMart. That grandmother is bringing stuff home for her granddaughter, who actually plays Ashley, the granddaughter in the film. She does have pop icons on her T-shirts, and there are figurines in that house that represent the contemporary things that are being sold at Wal-Mart. So that stuff is there. It’s in
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every nook and cranny. I guess I just missed a lot of that. It felt like this was a world that is resisting the homogenization that’s going on in American culture. Well, visually [those cultural signs] are not heavily represented [in the film]. I like that really contemporary stuff isn’t shown, but it was also because of [clearance issues]. The way [modern culture] is actually being absorbed the most [in this region] is with the loss of some of the actual turns of speech, the
PHOTO BY: SEBASTIAN MLYNARSKI
JOHN HAWKES IN WINTER’S BONE.
phrases that are unique. Linguistic homogenization happens very rapidly, I think. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the whole film rests on an understanding of “and.” Ree’s family has good people and really difficult people. Her uncle has a serious chemical dependency and he has a certain kind of nobility to him. And he does fucked-up things [laughs]. And he’s surly and difficult. There is meth in this story and Ree Dolly doesn’t want to use meth. If “and” isn’t the umbrella under which the film can be perceived, I always feel like I’m cooked, because there’s some particularly sensitive material in this film. I was fascinated by how cut off the region feels, but at the same time, I didn’t think you exoticized it as a filmmaker. Was that a worry, that you’d exoticize the Ozark people? Yes, it was a big concern. And hillbillies have already gotten an extra dose of that [in film]. My husband showed me early films from 1919, 1920 where they’d get a bunch of so-called “mountain people” together on a primitive film set and they’d be shooting at each other. As a Northeastern, upper-middleclass urban woman, I was such a foreigner. But before [Anne and I] even really contemplated going further with the project we had to go down there. We had to do the visual anthropology and those trips helped hugely. That’s when we started to get confidence. When people gave us access [to their homes] and allowed us to take the several hundred photographs of almost every detail of their existence, that’s when we could say, “I believe Ree’s family could live in this holler. I believe Ree could live in this house. I believe this is the high school she would go to.” Someone down the road would show us how squirrels are caught and prepared for consumption. It felt all-important to us to get the details right, to actually be instructed, and we had some really indispensable guides who did that. What was your relationship with your production and costume designers like with regard to these issues? Yours is a contemporary film that almost had to be approached as a period or historical film in terms of its research. With wardrobe, [costume designer] Rebecca [Hofherr] was really into it. She ended up being a very openhearted anthropologist of wardrobe, of clothes, of class, of circumstance, of winter. And she got access to so many people’s wardrobes. Her questions about them were very novel, and she was able to perform an exchange in [many cases]. We had new Carhartts and we’d exchange them for old and tattered ones. We didn’t have to
PHOTO BY: SEBASTIAN MLYNARSKI
distress a lot of the wardrobe. That was her major technique — swapping clothes. What about with production design? Mark White, the production designer, he took very astute notes, and there were [locations] we knew we didn’t really have to touch. Many props utilized in the film came from houses that we were filming in. Mark was very invested in making sure that he wasn’t recreating something differently [than it was in real life]. He wanted to just preserve — to keep the continuity and precision of place. That’s not to say that [the art department] didn’t do anything. Everything still had to be in its place, had to make sense. It’s all very much organized with great care, but there was a spirit to how and what was chosen to be there. I think to the film’s credit it didn’t seem to have overly obvious references in terms of its visuals. A lot of times you see movies about rural America and certain influences, like Walker Evans, or Days of Heaven are obvious. Maybe it’s because of the RED camera, maybe it’s because of the wintery palette, the grays and blues, but I didn’t feel those things. Well, you know, it’s funny, but you put three children on a porch in clothing that is well used and you’ve got Walker Evans! Was that shot a direct reference, then? It wasn’t a direct reference, but we did look at [Walker Evans]. Our tear book was rich, though. I mean, we weren’t drawing just from one [source]. But really, does any frame [in a film] ever really look like [a director’s] tear book? The tear book is to get yourself so amped up [to make the film], and almost to praise the people that you’ve loved. What else was in yours? Oh God, you know, in terms of actual camerawork, [d.p.] Michael [McDonough] and I adore how the Dardenne Brothers work with a moving camera, that kind of balletic camerawork that is not gratuitous in its movement but is designed to keep up with the actors. Paul Greengrass and his unusual framing. Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA for its palette of winter and smoke and smokestacks and its long lens work. And there were some photographers who shot in Appalachia and other mountain settings, stuff that’s both immediately accessible and stuff that’s actually provocative and concerns us. Shelby Lee Adams has been around the block with the controversies that surround his image-making, and we felt like some of that was really relevant to what we were about to do. Did meth as the subject matter affect any of your relationships in the community as you shot it? Absolutely. We had to make sure
(LEFT-RIGHT) ASHLEE THOMPSON, JENNIFER LAWRENCE AND ISAIAH STONE IN WINTER’S BONE.
“At the Sundance Lab, one mentor preached something that stayed with me forever... What is an actor bringing already?” people read the book. We had to say, “This has this content in it. You need to read this before you even consent to say that you’ll shoot with us.” You mean the extras, the locations, the — Yeah, especially the primary location, where we were involving every member of a family. We were asking their 7-year-old grand-
GO BACK & WATCH FROZEN RIVER Melissa Leo received an Oscar nomination for her performance as a mother struggling to make ends meet in upstate New York near the Canadian border. With no other options, she decides to smuggle illegal immigrants in the trunk of her car from Canada to the U.S. to support her family. DOWN TO THE BONE In Granik’s debut feature, Vera Farmiga turns in a careerdefining performance as a mother balancing her troubled family life with her addiction to cocaine. NORTH COUNTRY Off her Oscar win for Best Actress two years earlier, Charlize Theron gets an Oscar nomination in ’05 for her portrayal of a Minnesota female miner who endures abuse from her male workers and wins the first major sexual harassment case in U.S. history.
daughter to [play a character in the movie]. It was imperative. They had already had life experiences that made them feel very concerned and saddened by meth. They had a real-life understanding of the way it can insidiously work its way through a community and the lives it can touch. Meth is a fact of existence in many communities, but it’s what a character chooses to do to get away from it or to navigate around it that counts in the end. Tell me about the actors. You mentioned the Dardenne Brothers, who famously work with non-actors. How did you take your Hollywood actors and blend them so seamlessly into this other world? To a huge extent, that is about relying on what the actors are willing to do. In the case of John Hawkes, I think he feels challenged by research opportunities. Because he’s not so necessarily recognizable in certain circles he feels he’s totally free to go into a bar, hang out, listen really carefully to how people are talking, the humor that’s being used, the cadence, the sound. He’s able to pick up on stuff. He’s able to ask questions. He’s able to be in a place, to absorb it and make his notes. I think he relished the opportunity. Jen [ Jennifer Lawrence] really tried to do the same, but she had a leg up because she comes from Kentucky. Again, not in those circumstances — she would be the first to say that. But she had relatives who probFILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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ably spoke with quite a pronounced accent, so she was open to the actual dialogue. Nothing felt very foreign to her. Another thing: with her on-camera [locally cast] siblings, she was able to create a little world for them. She was able to be a big sister and then to close down their world so they weren’t so aware of the whole production. She made a more hermetic setting for them. That can be something too that an actor brings. What kind of director are you with your actors? What’s your approach to directing actors? At the Sundance Lab, one mentor preached something that stayed with me forever. First and foremost: What is an actor bringing already? What’s been their notetaking, their imagination when they read the script? First, see what they’re bringing, and usually that becomes the foundation. Maybe that’s why casting is so intense: it’s because you’re already getting a vibe of what parts of their life experience they are going to bring [to a part]. I’m deeply, deeply interested [in my actors]; it’s not like I am more knowledgeable or more insightful [than them]. Next, I want them to listen to the world around them. I especially like it if an actor is open to working with either a non-experienced actor or a real-life professional who is performing their real-life job in the film. Like in [Down to the
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Bone] the court-appointed attorney was just a real guy from New Paltz court. [laughs] Actors like Vera [Farmiga] and Jen — they are so willing to listen, to really respond and just be present in that exact moment. They don’t get unhinged that each take is different, that a question might occur that they haven’t been asked before. That [attitude] to me is just gold because it allows for chance occurrences. But obviously, I can’t be willy-nilly. I’ve learned, painfully sometimes, that when every take is unique there’s hell to pay in the editing room. And yet, you know, the joy then is finding an editor who can swing with that irregularity. It sounds like once your actors are in that space, they’re in their characters and there are not a lot of adjustments or changes. Exactly. I feel like my adjustments are really tiny. [laughs] I go through huge phases in all parts of production — this is not me being coy or falsely humble — where I literally lose my way about what the director’s role is. I just feel like I’m a coordinator. I mean, Michael [McDonough’s] off doing genius work, the actors are busting their asses and I’m just vibing off them at the monitor. I’m just sort of checking [laughs] that things are going well. There are times when I feel like the director thing has this very uncertain quality to it, like my role just sometimes feels very malleable, you know?
It’s interesting to hear you say that because I’ve talked with a lot of directors who would never say something like that. I’d love to know what’s inside their minds sometimes, you know? I think where this feeling comes from is when filming gets rough — when it’s a night shoot or a long day or it’s cold — you can’t believe that [your crew] don’t just quit on you. They stick with you. And then after that feeling is “we.” “We” made this. Was it a tough shoot? Was the environment difficult? The winter was a lot less brutal than we thought it would be. The shoot was not arduous on the level of keeping our crew biologically warm and okay, but arduousness came from, I think, the speed. How long was your shoot? Twenty four-anda-half days. Were you moving around a lot? Seventy percent of the film is shot in one holler. That was like our soundstage, if you will, because our big trucks parked at the entrance to the holler. A holler is…? There are hills and hollers. A holler is sort of a low-line piece of family property, an enclave where several dwellings from one family or close-knit people will all be assembled. There might be a shared animal pen and ATVs — all-terrain vehicles. The numerous dogs that are in the film were see page 75
Jennifer Lawrence Q&A By Jason Guerrasio
PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.
It’s not often a striking young girl makes it in Hollywood without accentuating her looks, but Jennifer Lawrence is not your typical 19year-old actress. While many of her peers go for lightweight parts in bubblegum teen comedies, Lawrence has taken a more serious route, filled with dark roles that deal with issues well beyond her years. The Kentucky native left home for L.A. at 14 and after getting bit parts on TV shows like Monk, Cold Case and Medium, landed the role of daughter Lauren on the TBS series The Bill Engvall Show in 2007. A year later she was cast in her first leading role in The Poker House, an intense drama playing a young girl whose mother is a prostitute. She followed that with Guillermo Arriaga’s moody directorial debut The Burning Plain, where Lawrence once again is a teen dealing with mom issues. So when her agent handed her the script to Debra Granik’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s gritty novel Winter’s Bone, Lawrence had no doubts she had what it took to play the demanding role of the book’s lead, 17year-old Ree Dolly. Covered in a bulky jacket, winter cap and her face chapped from the cold, it isn’t Lawrence’s physical traits but her tenacious performance that grabs our attention and draws us deeper inside Ree’s struggle to find her crystal meth-making father in the Ozarks. Gaining high praise at this past Sundance, where the film won the Grand Prize, Lawrence has continued her good fortune as she’s recently wrapped her next film, The Beaver, a dark comedy starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster, who also directs. Filmmaker talked to Lawrence over the phone about her performance as Ree, which has already started Oscar buzz. I believe in an interview you did at Sundance you said that your mother read Winter’s Bone some time ago and told you Ree would be a good part for you to play. Yeah, she said if they ever make it into a movie I would be perfect for it. Then five years or so later I got the audition and ended up doing it. So it was sweet because I got the movie but bitter because my mom was right. [laughs] What was it that grabbed you about the role? I can’t even remember a movie I’ve seen where a woman is the strong one, a woman is at the forefront of the story and she’s not a sidekick to another man who is going on an incredibly difficult journey. And not even a grown woman, a young 17-year-old woman. I just craved to be
JENNIFER LAWRENCE.
able to do that character. Then after talking to Debra and hearing her plans for the movie, I couldn’t resist it. I became obsessed with it. What was your audition like? I’m really bad at auditions. I don’t really like them because I feel
like you get six pages and you’re supposed to just go in front of people you don’t know and “start acting.” But I was able to read the script first and develop what I thought would be my idea for see page 76 FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney returns to white-collar corruption to examine the incredible rise and sudden fall of mega-lobbyist Jack Abramoff in Casino Jack and the United States of Money. By Jason Guerrasio | Photograph by Henny Garfunkel
CASINO JACK AND THE UNITED STATES OF MONEY DIRECTOR ALEX GIBNEY.
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(OPPOSITE PAGE) PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.
On January 3, 2006, lobbyist Jack Abramoff solidified himself as the latest Washington villain when he exited a Federal Court in D.C. wearing a black trench coat and fedora. For someone known as a movie buff and producer of the low-budget action movie, Red Scorpion, in the late ’80s, it looked like Abramoff had cast himself as the menacing bad guy in his own cloakand-dagger thriller. But even before Abramoff had donned his black fedora, Alex Gibney had an eye on the man they call “Casino Jack.” Through Susan Schmidt’s reporting for the Washington Post he learned of Abramoff ’s illegal practices — which included lavish trips and gifts in exchange for political favors, heading a scheme in the Mariana Islands that can be best described as 21stcentury slave labor, and defrauding American Indian gaming tribes of tens of millions of dollars. Digging deeper, Gibney found a man driven to succeed by any means necessary, a hyperactive personality who charmed the pants off everyone he met (including Gibney) and had skills enabling him to manipulate Washington politics to a point where it may never be repaired. Gibney is no stranger to white-collar corruption. Before making his 2007 Oscar-winning doc Taxi to the Dark Side, he received an Oscar-nomination for his 2005 film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, an in-depth look at how one of the world’s largest corporations became America’s largest corporate bankruptcy. Like Enron, Casino Jack and the United States of Money takes the greed, deceit and cons at the forefront of the story and strips them down to present a human drama. Gibney walks us through Abramoff ’s rise as a College Republican alongside colleagues who would later have high-level roles in the Bush administration; joining the group Citizens for America in the mid ’80s, which helped support the Nicaraguan Contras; to becoming a lobbyist in the mid ’90s, doing everything from bribes to building fake companies to influence the political system; and ending finally with Abramoff sentenced to almost six years in prison for fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion. In his wake lay resignations (House Majority Leader Tom DeLay) and prison sentences (Congressman Bob Ney and Ney’s Chief of Staff Neil Volz) with countless others on Capitol Hill rumored to have ties to Casino Jack, including then-President George W. Bush. With a wealth of archival footage at his fingertips, Gibney not only shows how Abramoff became one of the most influential people on K Street, but highlights what he calls “the kind of wheel-and-deal nature that the Republican Party had become.” What’s most frightening is that even though Abramoff is behind bars it doesn’t mean his tactics have been locked up with him. Casino Jack premiered at Sundance and will open in early May through Magnolia Pictures.
Since you screened the film at Sundance the Supreme Court has ruled to remove limits on corporate campaign spending, which was something that was in Abramoff ’s arsenal. Has that ruling in the Citizens United case become a dark coda to your film? Yeah. It’s devastating. I just put a card about it in the end. Jack lost but he also won. Before this ruling had you hoped that there would be some uplifting feeling at the end? I did, and I still hope that for the film but it’s a much higher bar. I mean, I don’t think people can lose hope, even with that horrible ruling. But man, as I was doing the movie I realized we all thought after Abramoff we enacted all of these reforms, and things haven’t gotten better — they’ve gotten worse. You’ve also trimmed down the film since Sundance? We had to take out the Medicare section. That was very hard for me to do because it’s a great section that is so relevant to what’s going on today, but it was a very dense section. It had an Abramoff connection but it wasn’t that central to him. A thing happens in the cutting room — you get to a certain phase in the process and there are all of these great sections that you
want to include but the film, kind of like a gremlin, starts telling you to pay attention to the story, follow your story, and our story was Abramoff. So by taking it out, which was very hard, it made the story better. And we’re going to experiment a bit more with this one with the Internet, so when we release the film I’ll take that whole section and release it on YouTube. Was editing this difficult because you had so much good material? The editing process is always the most fun and the most brutal, particularly brutal at the end because the films are always too long. Particularly when you have director’s disease. Director’s disease is, “You know what, I agree that most films
HOW THEY DID IT PRODUCTION FORMAT Digital HD. CAMERA Panasonic: P2, Varicam, HDX-900, EX-3. TAPE STOCK DvcPro HD when applicable. EDITING SYSTEM Avid Media Composer 3.5.1. COLOR CORRECTION Pandora Pogle, not the Quantel Pablo.
should be closer to 90 minutes, but for this particular film two hours and thirty minutes sounds like a better time for me,” and you start fooling yourself. But I think there’s a Rubicon crossed at two hours and we crossed it. The Sundance cut showed at two hours and three minutes and a couple of screenings they were great but we realized watching it again — Your brain goes on overload. Your brain goes on overload and you have to give people rest. We felt there was something kind of propulsive because this also is in Jack’s character; it’s full of enthusiasm and high energy — it’s part of the con. So we developed a rhythm that seemed consistent with his character. But in the recut we just needed to pull out stuff so you could pause and get into the next [topic]. We let the music play more, cut down the amount of facts and figures. It’s tough to find that rhythm because you want to be accurate, but the audience can’t be working too hard that they get exhausted. And you also have to examine why you’re making a movie. You don’t want it to just be a parade of interviews that turn into a lecture; you want there to be scenes that have other reasons to exist besides a kind of two dimensional information giving. If you see how luscious the Mariana Islands are you kind of get it and why it works for the Congressmen. What did you and your longtime d.p. Maryse Alberti talk about in regards to the film’s look? Do you guys try for a signature style, or do you change it up for each film? Every time we go out we try to find a style, for the interviews in particular, and for this one there was a kind of a “lobbyist backroom vibe” that we tried to convey. When we went to the Marianas we shot everyone outside because we wanted you to know immediately you were in the Marianas. With me and Maryse, it’s always about finding a kind of atmosphere for a certain place, like when we shot in a casino in Louisiana, we actually had a Steadicam, so it was a little bit like the vibe from Casino. You feel like you’re in the action. It was fun and it was movie-like, which was the other thing — Jack is a movie producer so we wanted it to have that vibe. When you do those aerials in the Marianas I wanted it to feel like Shangri-La. With films like this one, Enron, and Taxi, what is it that first gets your attention and makes you think there’s a movie there? This one was the story. Abramoff ’s story was so outrageous that it just seemed compelling. And it seemed compelling as a way of looking about what had gone wrong with government. I wouldn’t have pursued it if his story hadn’t been so extraordinary. That was the spark. Same with Enron. Taxi was differFILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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“As I was doing the movie I realized... things haven’t gotten better — they’ve gotten worse.” ent but it ended up in the same place. Taxi was one where I was given the assignment. I didn’t know what I was going to do. But in order to do a movie I had to find a story and so in each case the story is the thing. Did you want to get Abramoff on camera? It was always my dream and we came very close to doing it but the Department of Justice thwarted us. I think Jack actually was willing. You went to the prison? I went to the prison and I met him. How many times did you see him? Three or four. I thought he was a very likable guy, very funny, good storyteller, very charismatic. Did you get a verbal agreement from him that he’d be willing to be on camera? Yes. Did the Justice Department give you a reason why he couldn’t be in the film? The Department of Justice used carrots and sticks to persuade Jack not to be interviewed. We were forcing the door open through legal efforts and then the Department of Justice went to Jack and persuaded him to write me a letter saying that he did not want to be in the movie. But I know he wanted to be in the movie — he told me he wanted to. And I was working with his lawyer in order to make that interview happen. We shut down for a year trying to get Jack. But at the end of the day the Department of Justice intervened. Why didn’t they want him to be in the film? The legal argument is that you don’t want your witness to be testifying to anybody else because you want to control his version of the acts and you don’t want his testimony, if he had
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ever testified, to be impeached. And you don’t want versions of his story floating out there in the ether that could be attacked by defense counsel. So that’s their rationale. But, the fact is Jack had been sentenced and there was nothing abridging his First Amendment rights, so in my view what they did was improper. When you realized you weren’t going to get Abramoff on camera, were you unsure if you had a movie? Trying to get him came
GO BACK & WATCH ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM Casino Jack isn’t the first time Gibney’s turned his lens on corporate greed. In this 2005 doc he examines the major players responsible for the collapse of one of the largest U.S. companies. MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON Nominated for 11 Academy Awards when it was released in 1939, Frank Capra’s look at Washington politics through the eyes of a naïve U.S. Senator (played by James Stewart) is considered one of the first looks at the political system run wild. THE NATURAL Barry Levinson’s classic look at corruption and the national pastime stars Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs, a pitching phenom in his late teens whose career is cut short after a freak incident. He returns to the game in his mid 30s and becomes one of the game’s greatest sluggers with his bat. “Wonderboy.”
very late. You can’t go into one of these things thinking you don’t have a film if you don’t talk to one person because then a witness can have too much power over you. You go in thinking, “I’m going to tell the story and I’m going to tell it the best I can.” There’s always a way to tell the story, and we started out telling the story through the detectives: [executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] Melanie Sloan, [lobbyist] Tom Rogers and Sue Schmidt. [They were] the people who dug out the story. And the story changed because while waiting for Jack we ended up getting [Congressman] Bob Ney and [Abramoff business partner] Adam Kidan, and they’re great. They weren’t Jack, but they were pretty close. They both have been in prison and were Jack’s partners in crime. So you never know what you’re going to get; you just have to keep plugging and hope you’re going to get something good. From what you show in the film Tom DeLay is perhaps a bigger villain than Abramoff because he got away with it. I agree. It’s unbelievable that he’s gotten away with it. I’m surprised that he was never indicted. It really floored me. I mean, he had people like [DeLay Chief of Staff ] Ed Buckham and others doing his bidding and you always have deniability in that context. The way the system works allows for an extraordinary amount of flexibility. In order to be found guilty of bribery there has to have been an explicit quid pro quo. But there’s never an explicit quid pro quo — that’s never how it works. Where [DeLay] and Abramoff saw eye to eye was once you become a kind of hardcore ideologue then anything that contradicts your beliefs is just hidden in plain sight. Jack would always tell me that “Willie Tan [who was involved in the Marianas sweatshops] is such a good guy, and
PHOTOS COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA PICTURES
(LEFT-RIGHT) TOM DELAY AND BOB NEY.
JACK ABRAMOFF.
think that we’re going to be wealthy some day. The sparks coming down on the ground are like pennies from heaven until you realize that it’s all kind of a dupe; you see those fans cheering in the stadium and it’s like we’re all being duped. So there’s something fundamental about that spectacle we all believe in. We all believe in the American Dream —
that’s [Redford’s character] Roy Hobbs, the American Dream — but in fact the American Dream at times can be a con because we don’t want to ever say to the people in power, “You are abusing that power.” And that’s because we imagine we’re going to be in power someday and we don’t want anyone to put checks and balances on us.t
PHOTO COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA PICTURES
he told me there was no abuse going on so I believed him.” Okay Jack. But did Jack ever hire someone who spoke Mandarin to go out to some of the factories to really talk to workers when the foreman wasn’t there? When did the idea come to intersperse clips from Patton, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Manchurian Candidate? It comes out of the character. Jack is a movie buff so he kind of sees things cinematically. He loved to quote movies, so it seemed to me that was fair game. That was a way of finding a style for the film that would mirror his character. The way you used the last scene from The Natural at the end of the movie is really jarring: showing a memorable cinematic image of America’s pastime during a voiceover explaining how America’s political system is failing us. It’s a funny thing and we debated a lot about it. It’s kind of a coda to the film but The Natural, as written by Bernard Malamud, is a story of corruption. There’s a happier ending in the Robert Redford version, but when [So Damn Much Money author] Bob Kaiser says, “The national pastime is not baseball, it’s making money,” that seemed like a grand visual metaphor for this idea that all of us
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In The Oath, her follow-up to the Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country, director Laura Poitras refracts America’s post-9/11 years through the story of two estranged brothers-in-law. One is Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard, free in Yemen, and the other is bin Laden’s driver, locked away at Guantanamo Bay. By Scott Macaulay
Both intimate and epic, mysterious and clear-eyed, Laura Poitras’s The Oath examines the legacy of 9/11 through two unfortunately linked Yemeni men. Abu Jandal is the jihadist, a soldier who left Yemen to travel to Afghanistan where he became an al-Qaida member and one of Osama bin Laden’s personal bodyguards. He invites his brother-in-law, Salim Hamdan, to the country where he becomes bin Laden’s personal driver. So why at the movie’s start is Jandal driving a taxicab through Yemen and discussing jihad with young Yemenis while Hamdan, who was simply a low-level employee in al-Qaida, on trial in Guantanamo? That question tugs at us as we watch Poitras’s astonishing and essential documentary, which opens in May from Zeitgeist Films. While telling a factual story about the political, legal and intelligence issues informing our war against al-Qaida, Poitras also draws a complex, novelistic portrait of two men whose intertwined destinies tell us more about this conflict than most newspaper articles ever could. Hamdan is never seen in the film; he is locked somewhere inside the anonymous Guantanamo prison buildings that are photographed with a disquieting beauty by d.p. Kristen Johnson. We hear through recited voiceover his sadly eloquent words, however — letters to his family waiting at home in Yemen. As Poitras follows Hamdan’s Guantanamo trial as well as his Supreme Court case challenging the authority of the Bush administration’s military commissions, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, she cuts back and forth to Jandal’s more inward journey as he grapples with the personal legacy of his fealty oath to al-Qaida and his knowledge that he is responsible for his brother-in-law’s imprisonment. In emotionally involving, formally provocative filmmaking, Poitras argues for our human understanding of these two men, but in doing so she also refuses to simplify them; she turns Jandal and Haman into psychologically complex characters whose mysteries, if we could unlock them, might offer a way out of our post-9/11 policy cul-de-sac. The Oath is Poitras’s follow-up to her Academy Award-nominated My Country, My Country, which told a story of the military occupation of Iraq by focusing on a Sunni doctor and political candidate whose practice becomes engulfed by the victims of that conflict. The Oath premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where Johnson and Poitras were awarded the Excellence in Cinematography Award. It traveled to the Forum at the Berlin Film Festival, the True/False festival (where it won the True Vision Award) and New Directors/New Films. I spoke to Poitras by phone a few weeks before her film’s opening in theaters.
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So many documentaries start by establishing the authority of their characters so that the audience believes them and trusts what they say. You have taken almost the opposite approach, withholding key details about them until later in the movie. How did you come up with this structure? I was interested in this approach because when I met [Abu Jandal], he was presented to me in one certain way, and then as I learned more and more there was a certain kind of unfolding of his past. [Editor] Jonathan Oppenheim, who did Paris Is Burning and Children Underground, and I felt that [Abu Jandal] was a character with something to hide. We wanted to take the audience on a journey where they think they know where he is coming from and then his backstory, as we slowly unravel it, makes them rethink what they know about him in the present, including his defense of the 9/11 attacks. It makes them question, “What actually is his motivation for defending them now? Is it that he has something to hide? Is it that he believes [what he’s saying]?” We wanted the viewers to always be questioning. It’s a pretty classic trope of narrative storytelling to have these sorts of reversals or reveals — it’s the “unreliable narrator” — but I think it isn’t used that often in documentaries. How did you meet Abu Jandal? I went to
THE OATH.
Yemen with a lawyer, David Remes. At that point I think he had 12 Yemeni clients [in Guantanamo], and some of them have since been released. I was looking for a story about somebody returning home there from Guantanamo, and I filmed his trip. We met a bunch of families, and then he went home and I continued working there for the next couple years. On the second day in Yemen I was asked if I wanted to meet Salim Hamdan’s family. Of course I said yes — it was a year after the famous Supreme Court case. Then I met Abu Jandal, and it kind of blew my mind that this guy was driving a taxicab. What did it mean that he was free and driving a taxicab while we’re imprisoning people who probably had no direct contact with bin Laden? I was immediately compelled. It was rich story material, I could sort of piggyback into the taxicab as a narrative or visual trope, and there were all these psychological subtexts I could play with. A guy driving a taxicab in and of itself isn’t particularly interesting. A guy who was bin Laden’s bodyguard, who’s free in Yemen driving a taxicab? That’s really interesting. Jonathan and I wound up working really hard in terms of calibrating what we anticipated to be the audience’s relationship to him and the questions [we knew the audience] would ask, like “Why is he free?” and
“Why does she have this access?” Did you always restrict yourself to Yemen? Did you explore other countries? I pretty much felt like Yemen would be an interesting place to set the story, and so many Guantanamo prisoners are from there. I figured that when prisoners were released they’d be going home there. That turned out not to be so true. Most of the first prisoners released went back to Saudi Arabia. But also, as it’s often reported, Yemen is the ancestral homeland of bin Laden, and it’s just a fascinating country. How did your relationship with him evolve? And over what period of time was your relationship? Even though I met him on my first trip, it took a long time to shoot the film. Immediately I was like, “So, do you think I
HOW THEY DID IT PRODUCTION FORMAT HDV and MiniDV 24p. CAMERA Panasonic DVX100A (24p Advanced), and Canon Vixia HV20 mounted inside the taxi. EDITING SYSTEM Avid Express Pro. Online conform to HDRS (23.98) on Quantel IQ. HD titling generated on the Avid Symphony Nitris. COLOR CORRECTION Pandora Pogle Evolution at PostWorks.
could put a camera in your taxicab?” [laughs] He was resistant for a long time. After the first trip I just did some other filming and was meeting lots of families. I was still searching around for what story I would land on. And then I made another trip back to Yemen and said, “Hey, can I get in your taxicab?” It didn’t happen that trip either. And then I went back and rented a house in Yemen and spent two years going back and forth. I had a lot of patience. I would go for a month and I would come back with not a whole lot of footage and go again. How about on a personal level — how did your relationship with Abu Jandal evolve over time? As you can see, he talks to media, so he’s not shy. But I needed a different kind of access, and that took a long time to get. I made a film in Iraq about the war [My Country, My Country] and he looked at that. I think that film kind of gave me a level of access that was different than what he gives to typical media. But it was slow. Usually I would contact him through a producer I had there [in Yemen]. I mean, [Abu Jandal] is alQaida, and I was already on a watch list when I went to Yemen. I had to be careful in terms of communication — like, I’m not in direct contact with him now. We had to be cautious and also stay under the radar. FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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ABU JANDAL IN THE OATH.
Why do you think Abu Jandal agreed to talk to you? I mean, obviously he’s attracted to publicity. But was it deeper than that? I think he wants to still have some relevance. I think he’s somebody who wants to get his position or word in. He’s a bit of a player. He wants to say what he believes. I think he’s also got something to hide, and I think he’s trying to constantly set the story straight. But he’s maybe, I think, creating more problems for himself in a certain way. It’s pretty extraordinary how open he is. Everybody is shocked that he speaks so freely, and that he’s, you know, walking [laughs] and that somebody hasn’t taken him out — the Yemeni government, the U.S., or the younger generation of al-Qaida. It’s not just a mystery for us Americans; it’s actually a mystery for people who really know this universe well. He’s clearly media-savvy and trying to control his image and message. But across the board, everybody in national security will tell you he’s a very important source for information about al-Qaida. Less so now — I mean, his information is old, but when he was originally interrogated, what he said was important stuff. What’s happened to him since the movie? I’m not in direct contact with him. I think he’s got an office, and I think he’s been trying
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to set up this institute to retrain guys who’ve gone to fight jihad and get them some practical skills so that they can transition back into normal life. But nobody actually wants to fund that. I think he has these ideas, you know? I think he’s taking some businessschool classes, but I think he’s in a tough position because of his background to get a job. Has he seen the film? He has seen the film.
GO BACK & WATCH MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY For Poitras’s 2006 film, nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar, she spends over eight months in Iraq to chronicle a Sunni Arab doctor as he runs in the ’05 elections. THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross mix drama and doc to examine the Tipton Three, three British Muslims who were held in Guantanamo Bay for two years and released without charge. RECYCLE In this ravishingly shot film, director Mahmoud al Massad offers an intimate look at a Jordanian father living in Zarqa, a breeding ground for recruits to the jihadist cause and birthplace of alQaeda’s Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
Do you know what his reaction was? Well, you know, again, I’m not calling him up and saying, “Hey, how’s it going?” It was through an intermediary. The first rumors I was getting were negative, and that he was very upset. Then the second thing I heard was that actually he was happy with the film. He said the strength of the film is that it showed the human dimension of this conflict, and that it exposes that he’s against the policies of the West and not the people. But I don’t know — he might need to distance himself from the film because of some of the content. Did you go to Guantanamo? Kirsten Johnson, our cinematographer, and Jonathan, the editor, did the Guantanamo shoot while I stayed in Yemen. Being on the U.S. travel watch list — that’s a dimension I hadn’t even thought of. How did that impact your practice of making this movie? [laughs] Well, you know, I assume everything is listened to, including this interview. That’s how it impacts how I did this work! If you’re talking to any lawyer who’s representing Guantanamo [prisoners], you basically assume you are getting caught in the net of people who are being monitored. And the question is to what extent? Is it just electronic monitoring? Are they really paying attention? We always kept multiple copies of footage in different places. I didn’t want to be subpoenaed — that was certainly a concern. And when I travel I experience difficulties. Returning back to the States, I’m always met at the airplane by Border Patrol folks who question me. So yeah, it’s a particular way of working. When were you added to the travel watch list? I got flagged on the list in the summer 2006 after I finished My Country, My Country. It was before I’d even begun work on something about Guantanamo and al-Qaida. So [this film] certainly raised the stakes in terms of subjects that touch on nerves, subjects that are going to flag interest by the government. Did you ever expect to get Salim Hamdan on camera? When we started filming I certainly didn’t think he was getting home any time soon. I thought, “Okay, well, he’s going to get sentenced and I’ll finish the movie.” It was always shot with the sense that he would be a ghost in the film, and that we would have one protagonist who was missing. That was actually an important [emotional] element. I spent a lot of time with families in Yemen, and there were people missing. You could feel their presence. We all know how many Iraqi civilians are dead, or how long we’ve detained people at Guantanamo, but we don’t really
“The film is about loyalty and betrayal, and that relates to me too. Loyalty and betrayal between the filmmaker and the subjects.” have a palpable relationship to those facts. I feel it’s my job as a filmmaker to translate those experiences on a more emotional level. And so with Hamdan’s story, we’re using the [voiceover recitation of his] letters to go beyond the image of guys in orange jumpsuits, to [create] an emotional connection to this [idea] of “being gone.” Did you ever try to film Salim Hamdan? I wanted to and he declined. The filmmaker in me would have loved to have witnessed that moment [of his release] and the reunion, but I also have respect for his decision not to engage the media. I think it’s probably the right decision not to talk to folks. And it’s not just me he hasn’t talked to. He hasn’t talked to Al Jazeera. He just hasn’t done interviews. I read your statement on indieWIRE where you referenced Don DeLillo and the Dardenne brothers as influences. At what
point in the filmmaking process do influences like these come into the movie? Don DeLillo’s work I loved for years. I brought both Underworld and Libra to Yemen and read them there. The antihero and the themes of terrorism are just so resonant in his work. He has almost predicted certain things. There’s just something very ominous in his body of work pre-9/11. Underworld has just such a fantastic nonlinear structure. I think [his influence] allowed Jonathan and I as artists to tell the story in a way that didn’t conform to something more generic, to really let it unfold in complicated ways. And then in terms of the Dardenne brothers, I just love their open-endedness. They’re basically saying, “We believe that the audience is smart, and we want them to do some work here.” I think that’s something we [as filmmakers] see page 78
THE OATH DIRECTOR LAURA POITRAS.
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MARISA TOMEI AND JOHN C. REILLY IN CYRUS.
Cyrus is the new film by the brothers Duplass (emphasis on the “Du,” as in, DU-plass, for the record). It stars John C. Reilly as a man on the brink of giving up on love altogether, Marisa Tomei as his long-awaited love interest and Jonah Hill as her man-child son, who tries his best to wedge himself between them. Mark and Jay’s first feature, The Puffy Chair, premiered at Sundance five years ago, one of the first of the DIY/Cast Your Girlfriend as Your Girlfriend films that were soon grouped into the semi-unfortunate lump christened “mumblecore.” In the intervening years, the Duplass Brothers have done good on their promise as bright lights of a new film generation, exploring horror (Baghead) and getting deeply involved in the films of their peers as producers (Lovers of Hate) and actors (Mark’s credits include Hannah Takes the Stairs, Humpday, True Adolescents, Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg and Geoff Marslett’s Mars). On the eve of the Sundance premiere of Cyrus, writers-directors-brothers Jay and Mark Duplass spoke to Filmmaker about their film influences, studio politics, their on-set methods and snuggling. Fox Searchlight opens the film July 9.
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PHOTO BY: CHUCK ZLOTNICK
Taking their highly improvised storytelling to the mini-major level, the Duplass brothers team with stars John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei and Jonah Hill to create Cyrus, an unconventional love story between a man, a woman and her grown son. By Alicia Van Couvering
(LEFT-RIGHT) CYRUS CO-WRITER-DIRECTORS JAY AND MARK DUPLASS.
Do you see your film as part of the pantheon of scary-kid movies, such as Clifford or Problem Child? JAY: I haven’t seen any of those movies. MARK: I haven’t seen either of those films. JAY: The Toy would be a good example… Of a film that informed your screenwriting? JAY: No, not at all. MARK: No. We’ve just seen it, and there’s that cool piranha scene, which I’ve always loved. JAY: This is going to sound remarkably pretentious — MARK: …and ostentatious, and douchey — JAY: But we really don’t reference other movies, ever. Honestly our biggest influence in film is documentaries. That’s what we’re obsessed with, and we would probably make them if they didn’t take four years and ruin your bank account. MARK: And your marriage, and also your
PHOTO BY: CHUCK ZLOTNICK
HOW THEY DID IT PRODUCTION FORMAT HD/4k. CAMERA Red. EDITING SYSTEM Final Cut Pro. COLOR CORRECTION Red log files colored and conformed on a Quantel Pablo Neo. We recorded onto 2242 Kodak film stock using an Arri laser recorder.
friendships. [ Jay Duplass laughs] Well, narrative films ruin all of those things too. MARK: Not for us. We can do it. Like when we made The Puffy Chair, it was nine months from script to Sundance, and it was relatively painless. Docs destroy. We like having control of the narrative, and with docs you have no control. So we just try to basically approximate, as closely as we can, the documentary feel inside of a well-structured narrative. How do you run your sets? JAY: There’s a lot of yelling and screaming. MARK: We use a bullwhip. JAY: We use flamethrowers. Basically we’re the opposite of most directors in that — MARK: It’s like a big therapy session. [both laugh] There’s a lot of hugging going on. There’s a lot of positive reinforcement happening. It’s really stressful in a lot of ways to be an actor on our sets, because — JAY: — we work in a state of confusion, basically. MARK: [The actors] need to improvise. They need to find the moments, and we don’t let them lean on the script too much. We want them to try to reinvent some of the dialogue and make it fresh. JAY: We don’t do any blocking. Our whole goal is to just set up a room and basically foster an
interaction that we feel is interesting and real. MARKS: And spontaneous. JAY: And spontaneous. We’ll basically do anything in order to get that. We’ll throw the script out, we’ll insert different motivations. I mean, we’re always working within see page 78
GO BACK & WATCH PROBLEM CHILD Not since Dennis the Menace has there been a dysfunctional child like Junior. Foster parents Ben and Flo (John Ritter and Amy Yasbeck) are smitten by the child, but after taking him in they quickly realize it was the worst decision they’ve ever made. But boy it’s fun to watch. ABOUT A BOY Sometimes it’s the adult who’s the dysfunctional one as the Weitz brothers show in their 2002 film starring Hugh Grant as a cynical womanizer who grows up after building a friendship with an unpopular schoolboy (Nicholas Hoult). THE TOY Richard Donner’s racially charged comedy finds Richard Pryor as an out-ofwork newspaper reporter who is bought by a wealthy businessman (Jackie Gleason) to be the living toy of his bratty son.
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BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO WRITER-DIRECTOR JESSICA ORECK.
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With Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo director Jessica Oreck creates a beautiful homage to an unlikely creature: the insect. Journeying to Japan, Orek shows through a poetic experimental style the country’s unusual love for bugs. By Michael Tully | Photograph by Richard Koek
Jessica Oreck’s Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is one of those dazzlingly precocious documentary feature debuts that make you wonder who on Earth could have possibly dreamed up such a thing. A quick résumé inspection proves revealing: Oreck’s day job is working as a live animal keeper, and sometimes docent, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. With this bit of insight, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo begins to make more sense, as it’s clear that Oreck is coming at filmmaking from a truly unique perspective. This fresh, atypical approach has paid off, resulting in more acclaim and attention than most borderline experimental documentaries ever get, culminating with Oreck winning the Spotlight Award at the 2010 Cinema Eye Honors and being nominated for the Truer Than Fiction Award at the 2010 Independent Spirit Awards. In Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, which opens in theaters in May, Oreck travels to Japan to explore that country’s ongoing fascination with insects. Interviews with experts are interwoven with vérité footage of collectors and everyday citizens going about their daily lives, which are in turn threaded throughout by a poetic voiceover that sheds more light on the history surrounding this entrancing subject. Perhaps the best compliment one can pay to Oreck’s film is that it’s so refreshingly hard to describe. Filmmaker sat down with Oreck to discuss how this marvelous debut came to be. FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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Did you go school for your day job? No, I went to school for filmmaking, and then I minored in biology and ecology, and I have a certificate in botany. “Certificate.” What a stupid thing to get! [laughs] But I have that. Does that imply you understood early on that film was most likely going to be a hobby as opposed to a breadwinner? Well, I always knew I wanted to make movies about biology, and now more ethnobiology, the way that human cultures interact with the natural world. But I never expected it to be a breadwinner. [laughs] And I still don’t expect it to be a breadwinner. So the day job is a really great fit for me in terms of that. But I don’t really want to work in science, like in a laboratory, just because I feel like a lot of times, in the science world and in academia as well, the ideas become so focused that they become totally obsolete. I didn’t want to pursue a career in science — I really wanted to stay sort of on the periphery, because I feel like then you can interact a little bit more with the masses, shall we say? [laughs]
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I love hearing people talk about the moment when they had the realization that their idea was becoming an actual movie. Do you remember when that happened? Yes. It was almost the same moment that the idea came. Bugs are my passion, more than any other animal. I was teacher assisting at AMNH, an in-between job between the video and the live exhibits, and we had a guest speaker come in who talked about how Japanese people love bugs. And I thought, “This is awesome, I want to make
HOW THEY DID IT PRODUCTION FORMAT MiniDV. CAMERA Panasonic DVX 100A. TAPE STOCK Panasonic miniDV tapes (AY-DVM63PQ). EDITING SYSTEM Final Cut Pro. COLOR CORRECTION Apple Final Cut Pro to conform entire movies, densitry grade performed with a Da Vinci 2k plus technology. Mastered to D5 1080i.
(PREVIOUS SPREAD) PHOTO BY: RICHARD KOEK; (THIS PAGE) PHOTOS COURTESY OF MYRIAPOD PRODUCTIONS, LLC.
BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO.
a movie about this.” I started doing research that night, and there was nothing in English about it. So I sort of set that idea aside, and I was like, “Well, I’m still in school, I’ll wait. I’ll see how it goes.” Then literally two days later, my sister randomly met this Japanese-American entomologist in an airport in Baltimore. They started talking and he said he was an entomologist and my sister was like, “Oh, you should get in touch with my sister, she wants to be an entomologist,” blah blah blah. So she put us in touch, and it turns out that he’s totally bicultural. He grew up half in Tokyo, half in New York, and so he knows both cultures really well. And he goes around the U.S. talking about how Japanese people love insects, because it’s really surprising, obviously, to most people, especially to entomologists here. So I said, “Cool, I want to make a movie about this.” And he said, “Great! We’ll stay at my parents’ house and I’ll introduce you to my entomologist friends.” That was it. It really was that first phone conversation with Akito [Kawahara] when I knew we were going to make this movie. I’ve recently been talking to a lot of people who shoot docs in languages they don’t speak. That’s a terrifying thought to me! Did you have Akito or someone else with you who translated at all times? Akito was with us for the first two weeks, and then the rest of the time we were with my friend Maiko [Endo]. What we would do is we would get to the place where we were going, and we’d sort of do the preliminary introductions, and then as soon as Sean [Price Williams, the d.p.] turned on the camera, we stopped knowing what was going on. They just started communicating in Japanese. And as much as possible, we would try and get Akito not to talk to us. [laughs] Sometimes he was explaining just because that was his habit, but for the most part we sort of lost touch with whatever was going on, and when he would say something and point, Sean would follow his finger and just hope to God [laughs] that he was paying attention enough to know what they were talking about. But, yeah, that part was difficult, for sure. The film has an unorthodox ebb and flow to its storytelling. Was this more informed by the fact that you hadn’t made a feature before, or was it more directly linked to the subject matter itself? Well, I knew going into it that I wasn’t going to have a narrative arc. Not because I think that narrative arcs are bad, but because they just didn’t inter-
PHOTOS COURTESY OF MYRIAPOD PRODUCTIONS, LLC.
est me. I think that sometimes they’re really useful, and sometimes they feel really forced. As I was doing research I realized that there was just too much that I was interested in talking about for me to force it into a narrative arc. When I think about the film, I think about it — this is going to be hard to explain through audio — like this: When you’re following a narrative arc you’re on one plane; you’re going up and down on the xy-axis. But then if you add z, you can move in a three-dimensional spiral. That’s sort of the idea when I think about the film. So, if you had a camera on a track, you’ve got this cultural phenomenon in the very center, and then the camera’s moving around it in all these different planes. You know you’re traveling through time, but you’re also traveling through space in this direction. So when I started the research I had come up with this very vague idea of that structure, this crazy, weird spiral that doesn’t make any sense probably to anybody but me. But that was calculated at least. That wasn’t something you discovered after the fact. Yeah. I mean, the list that I made of all the shots that I wanted, Sean looked at it and was like, “What type of movie are we making? What the hell is this film about?” So it was pretty clear early on that it wasn’t going to be a particularly tight story. I mean, literally the way I did it was I wrote this 14-page paper about all the things that I wanted to talk about, and then I printed it out and I cut each idea out individually, and then arranged it in a way that I felt represented this spiral, sort of this passage through time. And then just kept cutting it down, because 14 pages, I mean, that would’ve been like a 16-hour movie. [laughs] In the end, it ended up being about three and a half pages. As far as the merging of the voiceover and image, which is such a delicate process, how did that work? It was a bunch of different things. Sometimes I would cut knowing that I wanted certain points to be made. Even though the voiceover wasn’t written, I knew I was going to write about, say, Zen gardening, so when I cut the Zen gardening scene I knew that it could be abstract to a certain degree before it would lose its meaning. Because I was going to be talking about Zen gardening, you didn’t necessarily need to see full pieces of banzai, you could just get the idea of it from the images. There were some times when I’d say, “Okay, I’m going to cut this knowing that I’m going to be talking about it.” Then other times, like with Theo
BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO.
[Angell] and sometimes with myself, we could cut stuff just because it was awesome, the footage, and we’d be like, “We have no idea what we’re going to use this for, but we’ll cut it,” like the cherry blossoms scene, where it’s just those stills of cherry blossoms. Theo cut that, and we had no idea what we were going to use it for, and then when I got the voiceover, you know, we both had a cut that we lined up with different things. I don’t remember who put the haiku with the cherry blossoms, but it just worked. So it was a bunch of different things. How about the music? That’s also very important in enhancing the film’s poetic, dreamlike quality. The music was a bunch of different stuff. I mean, Sean and I both love Japanese pop music from the ’80s: YMO [Yellow Magic Orchestra], Sakamoto, Takahashi, Hosono — all those guys are some of our favorite artists ever. I had a list of about 400 songs that I had to include in the movie no matter what! They all had to be in there. So originally I was cutting
just to Japanese pop music. And obviously some of those things still remain in there: that opening credit sequence, the firefly sequence, some of the really early stuff that I cut. But then, of course, I was like, “Okay, I can’t obviously cut all the time to Japanese pop music, I need some other stuff in there.” So I started just cutting without music. And then I had sort of a fiasco with a bunch of different composers. None of it worked very well, until the end, when finally J.C. [Morrison] came up with the theme song that sort of plays a few times now. Nate Shaw did most of the music throughout the film, and a lot of the sound design and stuff. It was really fun working together because I would play pop music for him and I’d be like, “I want this to be, you know, really…” I’d describe it some way and he’d come back to me with something totally different than what I’d say and I’d be like, “Great! This is exactly what I’m looking for!” So if you knew before shooting that your movie didn’t have an arc or a climax in a FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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“The film is so aligned with my belief systems and my aesthetic ideas.” traditional sense, when did you know you were finished shooting? Was it as simple as having a plane ticket home? It was the plane ticket. How long were you there? Six weeks. Sean and I had a really hard time. We had one twin bed for the both of us. And you know Sean, he’s 6’4”, and that bed was about five feet long. [laughs] So we were both ready to come home, even though we both loved Japan a lot. So there was no option that we were going to stay any longer. At what point did you know that you had enough footage for a feature-length film? Was that always an agenda? Feature-length was always an agenda. Sean and I were really, really careful, because we really didn’t want to come back with 300 hours of footage, that just seemed overwhelming. So we only brought 50 tapes with us. We ended up buying a few more when we were there, but in total, even with the voiceover — like recording the voiceover onto tape — we only had 68 hours. So we were really careful to not go overboard on the shooting, but I could’ve easily made it a four-hour documentary. I was like, “Ninety minutes is the very longest it could be.” This seems like a film you could’ve tinkered with forever. Did you call it a picture lock when you got a festival acceptance? Or did you give yourself your own invisible deadline? In terms of when it was done, I had a cut that I didn’t love, but it was close, I thought. And originally the
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voiceover was in English — same woman reading it with a Japanese accent in English. I showed it to a bunch of people, and everyone was like, “Yeah, yeah, it’s cool. We like it. We like it, you’re close.” Then I showed it to my friend Robert Greene [Owning the Weather, Kati With an I], and he was like, “It has to be in Japanese.” Which I had been fighting the whole time, because my parents kept saying, “Oh, you know, if it’s in Japanese then you can’t get mass audiences.” Finally at that point I was like, “Mass audiences? I’m not getting mass audiences! I don’t care if it’s in Japanese! It needs to be in Japanese.” The whole time I’d been struggling with this idea,
GO BACK & WATCH SANS SOLEIL Chris Marker’s groundbreaking 1983 documentary/essay examines Japan as the repository of the “Other,” a world whose strange customs are key to comprehending the dominant culture. MICROCOSMOS Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s 1996 documentary uses a macro lens to focus on the huge world of tiny insects that exists in a French meadow. MOTHRA Ishirô Honda’s 1961 horror standard features a giant moth that attacks Japan and spawns several sequels, including the legendary 1964 showdown Mothra vs. Godzilla.
PHOTO COURTESY OF MYRIAPOD PRODUCTIONS, LLC.
BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO.
and finally I was like, “What the fuck am I even waiting for?” By that time Haruko Shinozaki, who’d done the voiceover, had moved back to Japan. It was such a disaster. I called Haruko and I was like, “We have to do the voiceover in Japanese.” And then as soon as I put the Japanese in, everything just felt so much better. I mean, people complain about the subtitles, that you can’t read the subtitles fast enough because you want to pay attention to the visuals and why didn’t I record it in English. Two of the main reasons were: it feels right in Japanese; I think you would feel like an intrusion if it was in English. And the other reason is that I really like to watch movies over and over again — that’s something about my obsessive personality. What I love about watching really good movies more than once is that you notice different things every time. I really hope that someone will watch the movie and only pay attention to the visuals and then go back and see it again a second time and get something totally different from it. Once you had your footage, how did you begin to approach the editing process? Everyone has different methods for doing things, but when I was in high school and I had to do homework, I’d do math homework first, because even though I didn’t love it very much, once it was done, it was done. You know, your English paper you can always keep reediting. Math homework, you either got the answer or you didn’t get the answer, but you were done. So I felt sort of the same way when I was making this. Like the scenes that I knew how I wanted to cut, I just cut. Even if I didn’t think they might end up in there, I was like, “Okay, I’m just going to cut everything that I know how to cut.” Then the rest of it just sat around for a long time, and I was like, “Ohhh! I don’t know what to do!” A lot of that stuff I left to [co-editor] Theo [Angell]. Then once he had cut it, it was very clear to me whether I needed to recut it or whether I was okay with it the way it was. I get really overwhelmed when there’s too much, when there are too many options, so it was really good to have Theo there, and I would definitely work that way again. Did you ever worry about the question of exploitation, being a foreigner and making a movie about this subject? Or were you always just excited at the prospect of learning? Initially, the prospect of learning was really exciting, but as I delved more and more into
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it, I realized — this is going to sound totally hokey — but that I was Japanese in a past life. [laughs] So much of what’s in the film is so aligned with my belief systems and my aesthetic ideas. So at first I was really excited about just learning about it, and then I started to feel like this was a really personal project. In the end when I started showing it to Japanese people, I had a little bit of fear — I was like, “Oh, wait a second, I realize now I’m an outsider.” The first person I showed it to was Maiko, because I feel like she was really somebody I could trust to be like, “You’re an asshole. Take that part out.” But she really liked it, which was a good start. And so far all the Japanese-Americans that I know that have seen it have really, really loved it. They feel like it’s really nostalgic for them, that it feels like it represents what they believe. I haven’t found anyone that’s like, “Wow, this is totally unaligned with my ideas.” But I’ve never showed it in Japan. Have you tried? I applied to two festivals, and I didn’t get into either of them. I don’t know how else to do it I don’t have any other contacts in Japan — I mean, Maiko’s parents, but I don’t know what they could do for me. I know a lot of people come out of their first feature tired on the other end. But are you rejuvenated to keep going, especially since Beetle Queen has been received so well? It’s interesting. I’m really excited to work on my next project because I really like the way that Beetle Queen came out, but the positive stuff that’s happened with Beetle Queen has actually been harder to deal with than anything else. Even though it’s been really positive, and even though it’s doing really great, I’m having to come to terms with the fact that I can’t afford to make another movie and that there are no solutions for me on the horizon at all. Like, I can join Kickstarter and I can make $20,000, and that won’t even cover a quarter of my next project, because the next project takes place in Eastern Europe, so we’re traveling for three months. Filmmaking is so expensive. You can do all this stuff sort of in a vacuum, but if you want to get it into a festival, if you want it to look really good — especially if you’re shooting on film — there’s just so much money that you have to sink into all this postproduction stuff. I mean, the movie itself wouldn’t cost that much, it’s the postproduction expenses. [laughs] And that part of it feels really hopeless right now. But I’m trying not to lose my excitement about the next project. If I can just get it started, some-
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Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About Persian Cats mixes documentary and fiction in telling a musically exuberant, politically charged story set in Iran’s underground rock scene. By Livia Bloom | Translated by Sheida Dayani
The soundtrack to Bahman Ghobadi’s film No One Knows About Persian Cats is like a mixtape, each song meticulously selected and arranged in a perfect order. Its alternating highs and lows and its shifts in language and tone place it in the company of compilations that have taken on life independent of their films — from Pulp Fiction to Saturday Night Fever. Like these, Ghobadi’s is a soundtrack that ought not be shuffled. The film it accompanies is also a special one, not least of all because it allows each song to function as a strong-willed character in its own right. In this documentary-fiction hybrid, shaped by a simple structure and a brilliant coda, we follow Ashkan and Negar, two hipster musicians playing versions of themselves as they search for a bandmate with whom to go on tour. (In real life, their duo is called Take It Easy Hospital and Ashkar also performs as Ash Koosha.) Since they live in Iran, however, the complications of hitting the road take on not only political subtext, but clear and present danger. Ashkan and Negar have already been to prison. Now they need passports—which means illegal ones—and the ready cash to pay for them. If they get caught practicing their music, let alone performing it, severe consequences await—particularly for Negar. In Iran, not only is much of Western-style music banned, but women are not allowed to sing. Yet despite the risks, the pair sets off on an odyssey of auditions, meeting a range of Iranian bands in search of the right musician to join them. Each group they meet has found a way to remain out of earshot of neighbors and police; to remain “underground” even if that means taking to the rooftops. The sounds in the film exhibit unusual cross-cultural pollination, or what the writer Sasha Frere-Jones has described in the New Yorker as “musical miscegenation. ” A range of cultural musical influences are audible within single songs as well as on the soundtrack as a whole. Hip-hop by the talented rapper Hichkas (his name means “nobody” in Persian) is matched with the metal of The Free Keys and the growl of Mirza, a crooner who belongs in the company of Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits. In a director’s statement, Ghobadi writes, “In the eyes of Islam, music (ghéna) is impure, giving rise as it can to cheerfulness and joy. Hearing a woman singing is considered a sin, because of the emotions it stirs.” In the case of chanteuse Rana Farhan, critics might have a point: her voice smoulders like hot coals. The title of the film, No One Knows About Persian Cats (out in theaters through IFC Films in mid April), might be thought of as a reference to the American jazz appelation “hepcat.” But that was not what Ghobadi had in mind. “I compare [expensive, rare Persian cats] to the young protagonists of my film, without liberty and forced into hiding in order to play their music,” he has explained. “What’s more, when I visited the musicians’ homes, I noticed that cats liked to stand in front of the amps and listen!” For a film and a mixtape like this one, that’s not a bad idea.
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What first brought you to filmmaking? I really liked sandwiches when I was a kid. I was born in a very small town called Baneh in Kurdistan. There was a movie theater next to the sandwich shop. Whenever I told my father or my uncle that I wanted a sandwich, they would tell me to take it with me into the movie theater and eat it there. I always had my sandwiches with Coke, and they wrapped the sandwiches in paper. I never managed to eat it all before the lights went off, and as soon as the lights went off, I would watch my movie and eat my sandwich in the dark. I never realized until the film was over that I had eaten not only the sandwich, but half the paper, too! [Laughs] So my love for sandwiches took me to the movies, and I became a moviegoer. What kind of sandwiches tempted you so much? They only had three kinds: salami, hot dogs and hamburgers. I loved the bread: small, white bread, sandwich bread shaped like hot dog buns. When I think about it now, I can still taste the bread and the paper that I ate with it. I didn’t choose cinema; cinema chose me. I gradually got drawn into watching films all the time. There were no Kurdish filmmakers in the region when I was born. Cinema chose to have a Kurdish filmmaker when I first made my movie A Time for Drunken Horses. We did not have cinematic education, universities or higher education in my town or in Kurdistan. Even a hundred years after the invention of cinema, there is still nothing available. I went to two universities and I
PHOTO BY: MIJ FILM
ARASH FARAZMAND IN NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT PERSIAN CATS.
left them both because I could not learn cinema there. I did not learn filmmaking in the classroom; I learned it in life in Iran and Kurdistan. The struggles that I went through day after day, the wars that I witnessed in Iran and Kurdistan — these are the things that made me a filmmaker. What brought you to the film No One Knows About Persian Cats? Censorship, repression, and pressure: these are the things that brought me to the film. I had been trying to make another film for three years, but the government gave me a very hard time and would not release permission for it. I was kept at home and I couldn’t do anything; it was a struggle day after day. Often I thought about committing suicide. Finally, I packed everything, and wanted to leave Iran. Then, however, a friend who was visiting said, “This was exactly what the system wants. They want you to leave and not to work. If you really want to fight this, you have to stay here and do something — move! If you cannot make films, do something else; go study music.
You love music; do something in that world.” So I did: I went to study underground music, and I got to know many underground bands in Iran and Tehran. I realized that these kids were very brave, and that they were doing what they want to be doing. They were making music in their basements without any money, without any equipment, but with a lot of courage. I decided to make a film in their style; I learned this particular style of filmmaking from them. With the music of these kids, my whole view of the world has changed. They have opened a new window in my life, and I owe them very much. Your first film, Life in Fog, was a documentary short. This film’s characters use their
HOW THEY DID IT PRODUCTION FORMAT HD/2k. CAMERA Silicon Imaging + P&S Munich EDITING SYSTEM Adobe Premier CS3
real names, and play their own music. Can you discuss the documentary elements of this film, and the way that the documentary and fiction modes intersect in your work? Many of the films that I’ve made have their roots in reality and truth. I don’t make films based on fiction, I make them based on real life. Many of the people in my films have actually experienced the lives you see onscreen. When I started making a film about the underground music world in Iran, I realized that although I was making a documentary, it was very similar to a fiction film. These stories have a lot of drama. The underground music world in Iran is very different from the underground music world in the U.S. or in other western countries. It exists because of a lack of space and lack of permission to make music. These people are actually hiding. Their lives are so traumatic that there is a lot of inherent drama in even a documentary portrayal. For instance, when I met Ashkan and Negar, the film’s two main characters, I FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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“The truth is that we are in a very bad situation in Iran, and we need to talk about it.” decided I wanted to make a documentary about them. But when I followed them as they tried to leave Iran, I realized that their story in and of itself had a lot of fiction-like drama. A lot of my films are this way. They are documentaries that have a lot of fiction in them. Every time I want to make a film, I go and I live with my characters in advance. Fifty percent of my script comes from the people who are living those lives, and the other 50 percent I make myself. The half that I do, my 50 percent, has roots in my memories of childhood and my own experiences. For example, characters like Ayoub in A Time for Drunken Horses, Satellite in Turtles Can Fly and Nader in No One Knows About Persian Cats all are based on real charcters from my childhood and in my life. So to a certain extent, I replicate my life in my films. To what extent are your films written or spontaneous? Most of the time I don’t even have a script. I start filmmaking with just two or three written pages. I go to the location and prepare my dialogue about half an hour before I start to film, and I usually complete the script after I’m done directing. I do this in order to be as natural and close to reality as possible. Before filmmaking, I go to live with my characters. We stay together in a big house
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and I don’t separate from them. I want to monitor every little thing that they do and the precise way they do it. I observe them very closely, and then I ask them to repeat some of those parts the next day in front of the camera. I don’t give them unreal text; I want them to use their own lives. I take from them, and then I give back to them. Usually when I ask writers to cooperate with me, it’s because I want them to challenge my ideas. So if we sit down and I say, “A boy and a girl…” Then the person will say,
GO BACK & WATCH PLATFORM Jia Zhang Ke’s 2000 saga reflects the change in China from Maoism to the new capitalism through the antics of a musical troupe in the Shanxi province. HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD In this 2007 documentary, filmmakers Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi travel into 2005 war-torn Baghdad to watch Acrassicauda, a homespun heavy metal band. IRAN: VEILED APPEARANCES Thierry Michel’s 2003 documentary was one of the first works to reveal a surging youth culture at odds with the established theocracy in Iran.
PHOTO BY: MIJ FILM
NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT PERSIAN CATS CO-WRITER-DIRECTOR BAHMAN GHOBADI.
“Why a boy and a girl? Why not two girls? ” I want them to constantly question my ideas and to complement areas where I might be lacking. This is the second time that I’ve asked a writer to sit down with me to complement and complete my ideas. We can’t really touch the scenarios because we want to make films exactly like the lives that are happening. What we do is control the stories a little bit and give them a cinematic shape. We follow them, we record all the events that are happening in their lives. Everything that you see in No One Knows About Persian Cats is exactly the same as what’s happening in real life —we just give it an ending and a cinematic form. Can you describe your technical procedure for this film? How many people were on your crew? Because our subjects were all musicians, we had to have a lot of people with us to carry equipment and other stuff. Minus them and our drivers, however, it was only about five or six of us going to locations: a very small crew made up of me, two assistants, a cinematographer and a sound person. We used a couple of motorcycles and one SI2K digital camera. We didn’t have permission to shoot this film, however, and therefore we could not be seen on the streets. On that note, you were arrested while making Persian Cats. Could you describe what happened? I was arrested on June 2, 2009, because I wanted to leave Iran through the airport with a legal passport. My friends told me not to leave legally because the authorities would stop me and take my passport away. So I went to Kurdistan, in order to leave illegally at the border where I made A Time for Drunken Horses. It was there that I was arrested by plainclothes militia. They took me to Hamedan for three days, and then to Tehran. It was two days before the presidential elections in June that they told me to leave Iran. They had created this kind of fear in me prior to this event, but this time it was a lot more intense. Every time I traveled, they would take me in at the airport, interview me, and invite me to the Ministry of Information. There, they would tell me very politely to take my stuff and leave Iran. This had happened seven or eight times. Each time I questioned why I should leave my own country, they told me, “If you don’t want to leave, don’t make movies in the Kurdish language, or don’t interview with foreign media outlets, or don’t make movies about such matters.” I could still go back to Iran. I’m not afraid of anyone; of course I could go back. But if I do go back, I’m sure that I would be taken
into prison, like my friend Jafar Panahi. Then, if they ever let me out of jail, they would take my passport away and not let me travel anymore. When I think about it now, I wonder if it’s better to go back, or if it’s better to stay outside Iran, make films, do interviews with people like you, and work in Iraq to help other people make films. I’m in the process of doing a number of activities here, outside Iran, for the benefit of people who are still inside. I’m making films, finding budgets and working hard for the benefit of filmmaking in Iran. I’m conducting a workshop and building studios in Kurdistan Iraq so that Iranian bands can come record their music there. During the production, did you run into trouble with the police? Only once did they question what we were doing, in Tajrish, Tehran. But I talked to the police officers and calmed them down. I explained what we were up to and gave them DVDs of my films. One of them told me that he had a daughter and asked me to make her an actor. I gave him my phone number and said, “Sure. Contact me anytime you want.” So they calmed down and left after two or three hours. We were not arrested, and they didn’t take us anywhere. Two or three times I was compelled to borrow permits that my friends had for other films. For example, a friend of mine had a permit to make a film about drugs. The scene with the police in my film is all real — but they hadn’t come to be in my film, they were under the impression that they were part of a different film. I told them, “This kid we’re filming is being arrested for drugs,” and they acted along, thinking that it was all being done for another film entirely. Anything that’s being said by the government about drugs — and any films that are being made by them — are propaganda. They make it appear that they’re actually fighting against drugs, but that’s not the case. When you go to many regions of Kurdistan, you see that people are encouraged to use drugs. Drugs are also another reason that it’s difficult for these kids to make music in Iran. They are accused of being into drugs and alcohol; they are also accused of being devil worshippers and fire worshippers. But when you go and see them up close, you realize that that’s not the case. In fact, I got to know God better through these kids, their bands and their music. Through them, I learned more about God than I ever knew before. Are you saying that there was a religious element to this project for you? I’m not a
NEGAR SHAGHI AND ASHKAN KOSHANEJAD.
religious person, but I believe in an energy in the world around us that you might call God. When I told you at the beginning of this interview that these kids changed my view of the world, this is exactly what I meant. They made me question myself, who I am, why I am here, and what I’m doing in this world. In Persian we say, “Religion makes trouble for people.” I don’t think that there’s anything inherent in religion itself that is a difficulty; multiplicity of religions is the trouble. The fact that there are all so many different religions makes it difficult for human beings to coexist. Your recent conflict with Abbas Kiarostami has been of great interest to the film community. Would you like to say a few words about that? I’d like to set the record straight for the last time here in this interview. First of all, I have a lot of respect for Abbas Kiarostami. He is my teacher and I have the greatest respect for his films and his work. He was like a father to me, and when I wrote to him [publically], it was like writing to one’s father. He knows, better than anyone else, that in the Iranian filmmaking world I have the highest regard for him. Recently, Abbas Kiarostami did an interview with an Arabic newspaper in which he congratulated me, Bahman Ghobadi, on leaving Iran. He said it in a sarcastic tone, ��� implying that I had run away. It’s not right for him to make me appear as a cowardly person who would flee Iran. I did not run away; I was made to leave my country. He also said, “I’m living in my country, in my
homeland, and making films in my language,” thereby implying that I, Bahman Ghobadi, was not doing this. Yet at exactly the time that he was making a film (Certified Copy) with Juliette Binoche in a non-Persian language, I was making Persian Cats in my own language and in my own country. Of course there is nothing wrong with making films in other languages, but the fact is that he shouldn’t have made me seem like a coward and himself a hero in front of people. I did not appreciate being put down in front of my own people when I had no choice other than to leave. He’s in an international boom. He’s an international figure who’s very safe in Iran. But he makes it sound like everybody can sleep peacefully in Iran. That is really not the case. If you’re in a position of power, you should not assume that everyone else is in that same position. So what I am saying is, “Please do not make it sound like all the people in Iran have a peaceful and calm life like you do.” When I open my mouth and say something, I want to represent the reality of life in my country. The truth is that we are in a very bad situation in Iran, and we need to talk about it. Mr. Kiarostami must remember that there’s a big difference between his filmmaking and my filmmaking; we’re not making the same kind of films. My filmmaking, like that of Jafar Panahi and Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, is political; we take the camera out into society. Naturally, we don’t get permission to film as easily as Kiarostami does to make his art films. see page 79 FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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Harmony Korine follows up his Mister Lonely with a defiant Nashville-shot stealth feature, Trash Humpers, a bizarre ode to vandalism, urban decay and VHS tape-trading culture. By Scott Macaulay
When Filmmaker last covered Harmony Korine it was the spring of 2008 when his film Mister Lonely, a drama about a Michael Jackson impersonator, opened in the States. An emotional story of personal transformation, it was Korine’s first feature since 1999’s julien donkeyboy and saw him working on a larger scale in Europe with a cast including several name actors (Diego Luna, Samantha Morton, Denis Lavant). At the film’s end, the Jackson impersonator played by Luna learns to live without his mask — his stage makeup and King of Pop costume — transitioning into a new, uncertain and yet hopeful phase of his life. The release of Mister Lonely followed Korine’s move back to the States from Europe. He settled back to Nashville, his childhood home and the location of his first feature, Gummo, got married and now has a young daughter, Lefty. And he’s become an in-demand commercial director, helming original spots for companies ranging from Budweiser to Liberty Mutual. So one might think that his next feature would be a more conventional film following up on Mister Lonely’s move towards straightforward narrative. Such an assumption is ripped apart by Korine’s latest, Trash Humpers, opening in theaters in May through the record label Drag City. In fact, the mask removed at the end of Mister Lonely is placed right back on again here. Korine and his wife, Rachel star underneath a layer of prosthetics as a delinquent elderly couple, trawling the back alleys of Nashville and engaging in ritualistic vandalism that is both oddly symbolic and disturbingly random. Assorted characters enter and disappear, and the band of trash humpers — so named for their propensity to dry hump garbage cans — communicate mostly in nonsensical bursts of cackled laughter. And although Trash Humpers, which looks like a montage of degraded VHS clips, is a feature-length film that will debut in theaters, crucial reference points — the Kipper Kids, Paul McCarthy, Cameron Jamie — all hail from the art world. Indeed, Trash Humpers has as much to do with performance as it does with cinema. Nonetheless, for all of its seeming disinterest in conventional storytelling, Trash Humpers does have a surprising and unexpected narrative build as its themes of discarded people in a disposable society are imbued with a subtly tender belief in family and personal connection.
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We covered you in 2008 with Mister Lonely, so I wanted to start by asking about this film in relationship to that film — not only the content but the mode of production. Why did you follow up Mister Lonely with Trash Humpers? I don’t know if it was a reaction to Mister Lonely, but I guess that movie was very frustrating to me — the amount of time I spent making that film and how complicated everything got… Sometimes I feel like the lack of spontaneity, the lack of immediacy works against a director. I have always felt like it would be nice to work as quickly as I can think, you know? For Trash Humpers originally there were just these photographs. I was dressing up my assistant, we’d go out late at night in the alleyways by my house, and he’d wear these kind of crude masks, like he was a burn victim. And he would go and fornicate with trash. I would use the worst cameras possible, disposable cameras, and take these pictures, get them developed at the drugstore. It was more of like an art piece or something. And then I looked at the pictures, and there was something kind of creepy and compelling about them. And so that’s kind of where the idea came from.
TRASH HUMPERS.
It’s also a very different kind of production. Gummo and julien donkey-boy were both made in the midst of that ’90s American indie movement when a company like New Line would finance films like those. And then Mister Lonely was another model. You moved to Europe for a while and figured out how to access different subsidy funds and foreign sales advances. And now this film — I don’t want to call it “DIY,” but it’s a much more grassroots affair. Well, this one, it’s its own thing. I mean, in some way the idea of what movies are now is changing. I don’t necessarily think that cinema means the same thing as it did 10 years ago, or even that I feel the same way about it as I used to — especially narrative filmmaking. With this movie I wanted to make something that wasn’t even really a movie in the classical sense. I wanted to make something that was more like a found object, like a movie that had been thrown in the trash somewhere, a VHS tape that had been buried in a ditch. I didn’t want it to remind anyone of a conventional film in any way. I didn’t want to make a film where there was even too much thought going into the compositions, where
“I wanted to make something that was more like a found object, like a movie that had been thrown in the trash somewhere.” there was no such thing as coverage, where it was more just about a kind of documentation. The thing that’s most exciting to me is that I started shooting this movie just 11 months ago and now it’s about to come out in the movie theaters. We did it with no studio, very little money, a stealthy crew. It was more of a concept, an idea away from the world. It was an exciting way to function. But there still seem to be aspects of the traditional movie experience that are important to you. Because, you know, Trash Humpers is a movie. It is in theaters. It could have been something else, though, like a video installation or, as you say, a collection of photographs. Right. That’s true. I mean, I guess having said that, I still always feel that theatrical distribution is the ultimate. You still always want it to be projected. Now what happens after that almost doesn’t even matter
to me so much. But yeah, I do make these things hoping, no matter how kind of unorthodox they are, that they’ll play in the movie theaters. I’ve always dreamed that my movies would play in multiplexes, like on a Miley Cyrus double bill or something. [laughs] And, once they play in theaters, however else they are seen almost doesn’t matter to me. VHS releases, cell phones or someone projecting it into a toilet bowl, I really don’t care any more, you know what I mean? After seeing Trash Humpers I began to think of your films as having a real autobiographical thread. Gummo is a movie coming out of your youth in Nashville. Yeah. And julien donkey-boy deals with New York and your family in Queens at the time. Mister Lonely was made after time spent living in Europe, and now this film has been made after a lot has changed in your life. You got FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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married, you have a house, you have a kid and you’re back in Nashville. And because you and your wife Rachel are both in Trash Humpers and you’re wearing old people masks, I guess I just thought of the idea of going back to your hometown after being away and imagining growing old there but still wanting to have the kind of relationship you had to the place when you were growing up. The movie to me was almost about taking an attitude one would have when they were young and projecting it into the future, into an older version of themselves, if that makes any sense. Yeah. [laughs] It could be, I don’t know. I haven’t even thought about that really. You know, it’s like an emotion. It’s like a feeling or a pull. I just remembered growing up here, and I remembered seeing certain things in the alleyways. There’s a kind of vernacular here I understand that was speaking to me. I didn’t question it so much. I almost wanted to make a film in a way that I almost didn’t know what was happening, where I was creating it from the inside out. I wanted to make a film that was primarily an ode to vandalism, or a film that was almost about the glory of de-
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struction. In some ways I admire these characters because what they do is live in terms of the opposite. Like, for example, while you sleep they’re awake. They’re artists and they find some kind of beauty in destruction, in watching things burn, in messing with the laws of reality to create their own kind of language. In that way I identified [with them]. Physically, have those neighborhoods in Nashville changed a lot since Gummo? They have. Like in a lot of America people seem to just knock down anything that’s too old. A lot more white people have moved in, at least into the city limits, and they pushed back a lot of the minorities. You know, there’s still traces of the way things used to look and feel, and I tend to film in those areas, just because it feels like they’re not going to be there much longer. Eventually all the bowling alleys and strip malls and abandoned car washes become like, you know, check-cashing places and coffee shops. That thing, that feeling is still present, but you have to look for it. Tell me about the masks. The masks were interesting because we had had someone try to make them and they turned out really bad.
PHOTO BY: RACHEL KORINE
TRASH HUMPERS DIRECTOR HARMONY KORINE.
And I almost pulled the movie. It was two days before we were supposed to start shooting and the masks didn’t fit [the actors’] faces — they couldn’t move and they couldn’t show expression. I felt if the masks were bad, then the film just wouldn’t work. And so Avi, my brother, he did some research and found these [mask makers] in Los Angeles. They did an amazing job in like three days. We got a UPS box full of masks. So the masks were made specifically for you and the other actors? Yes. At one point I considered having real old people, but I knew that it would be pretty physical. We would be living [the movie] and, you know, I didn’t want anyone to die. I would have had to have found old people willing to do that stuff. I decided that there would be something more interesting about them being partially young as well. Young bodies, old faces — kind of shape-shifters, characters that live in the shadows. How many days did you shoot it? Approximately two weeks. This is the first film you’ve done without a high-profile d.p. involved. Yeah, yeah. I just shot it myself. I mean, again, it fit the concept because it really was made the way it looks. We basically would live out in the woods. We would just drive around or walk through the alleyways. Some nights we would sleep in these tractor tires that we would make, and we would kind of just document things. I never did things more than once or twice. We would just walk around with a VHS camera. And then after about two weeks I just figured that this movie was all done. We had destroyed everything there was to destroy and gotten to a point where there was nothing left to do. But then in some ways the editing was like staying in character. I would just sit there with my editor with a stack of VCRs. It was really hot, so we would be in our underwear. He’s 75 percent blind, and we would just take apart the machines and I would always catch him sticking pencils in the VCR to give the footage these glitches. We would tape over the same tape, degrade the images over and over again. And it almost felt like these characters were just making the films on their own VCRs. Did you ever think of distributing it on VHS? Yeah. I mean, I’m still going to do a VHS release. We’re going to tape over a lot of old other movies, like we’ll put this over Three Men and a Baby or some Jean-Claude Van Damme film. Originally we had thought about not even releasing it, just making this film and then randomly dropping it off onto different people’s doorsteps or police stations,
sending the footage to newspapers, throwing the tapes in the trash and letting people pick them up on their own and seeing what happened organically. But I didn’t have the patience for it. [laughs] There’s a scene in this film in which Rachel’s character instructs a little boy on how to put a razor blade in an apple. I thought back to Gummo, and how this scene in that movie would have felt very different — like it was deliberate provocation. In this film, it almost seemed to me to be a meditation on fragility and the dangers that can befall kids. I guess for me it was informed by you having a daughter. Yeah, I can see that. And then of course Lefty comes into the movie at the end. It was a strange time making the movie because she had just been born. And so her mom and my wife, Rachel, and I were in it. At a certain point I started to feel like I was losing myself into this movie. It started to become kind of scary, actually, but it was also exciting. We would mostly film at night and we’d sleep during the day. When your objectivity goes, it’s wonderful and also frightening. Tell me about some of the other people in the movie. Well, there’s a little kid who was a Pentecostal preacher, this kid that I’d heard about who lived on the outskirts of Nashville and who would spend a lot of time in front of a Holiday Inn screaming at guys who were fucking whores. He would also hang out in front of 7-Elevens standing on egg crates. I’d heard about this kid, this exceptional character who was all into serpents and strychnine and all that kind of fire and brimstone. But when we met him all he really wanted to talk about was his obsession with the African basketball league. Another one is Chris Crofton, who’s a comedian from here. He’s a really good comedian; he specializes in jokes with no punch lines — more like insults. But he does them really
RAssociates eiff &
wonderfully. And there’s Dave Cloud, the guy with the humongous toenail who’s a master of the one-string ukulele. One of the characters, Chris Gantry, is a well-known songwriter who wears a nursemaid’s outfit and says that poem. And there’s Brian Kotzur, who’s a drummer for that band the Silver Jews. Tell me about the balance you’ve struck between making movies and doing commercials. I’ve been interested that your most narrative work is for commercials, like the Liberty Mutual campaign you did. Yeah, I love making commercials because in some ways when I do them I get to pretend that I’m a commercials director rather than really being one. It’s almost like I step into a character. And they’re exciting for me because they’re technical exercises. They are really not even so much about me, and I get to work with people I wouldn’t normally get to work with. How do you work as a commercials director? Do people bring you boards or do you come up with the ideas? Yeah, usually people have concepts, they come to you, and they want you to develop them — you know, make them vi-
GO BACK & WATCH THE IDIOTS Lars von Trier’s 1998 tribute to chaos features a cadre of Copenhagen citizens who spend their free time “spazzing,” i.e. acting idiotically. EVEN DWARFS STARTED SMALL Werner Herzog’s beautifully bizarre 1970 drama recounts the adventures of a group of oppressed little people who take over the mental institution that houses them. PINK FLAMINGOS John Waters’s 1972 cult favorite, which featured Divine out to show the world she really is “the Filthiest Person Alive,” set a high bar for low taste in films.
sual, give them a story, character. I don’t really do too many. I’ll do like two or three a year. I try just to do the ones that are interesting. Tell me a little about having your production entity in Nashville. What’s it like trying to have a production company there? Well, I’m just trying to stay away from the big cities. I’m trying to stay away from places where I feel like people can suck my lifeblood. As far as the production company goes, we have it set up here because, again, it comes back to that dream of being able to move as quickly as I think. I’m starting to get close to this point where I can actually act on all my impulses, you know, like I don’t need too much to do it. I can just kind of work on my own here and no one really pays too much attention to me. Are you still as voracious a movie watcher? You know, it’s strange, I don’t really watch as many movies as I used to. I still go to the movies, but there hasn’t really been that much I’ve been superexcited about, honestly. How about music and art? Yeah. It’s not even really music that much anymore, either. I got to this point where all I could really do was just listen to radio, like the local rap station here. It’s more like artwork [l’m interested in] — painters and some photographers. I don’t know what happened. It’s like you can get so filled up with things that you have to cut yourself off and then just work them out. There’s so much information now, so much noise in the world. At some point you’re just like, “Man, there’s just so many bands, they all sound the same.” You know what I mean? There’s maybe just a fraction of difference from this movie to that movie. You’ve never been big on promoting yourself through social media. Faceboook, Twitter, any of that stuff. No. To me that just sounds like hell on Earth. [laughs] This idea of see page 79
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STRAIGHT TALK Call me crazy, but I don’t think distribution is the greatest problem facing independent cinema right now. Distribution is a problem, but it has always been. Returning investment is perennially difficult, but even when we had a few exceptional profit leaders most films lost money. The brief heyday of what seemed like a profitable indie industry was just a bubble, like dot-com and real estate. Bubbles typically selfinflate with the hot air of the people inside, spewing gas to mask secret truths. In the case of independent film, it is this: uncompromising, quality work that exists outside the mainstream has only ever been profitable for a few. Today most of us in independent film are looking for new ways to justify investment in our movies. DIY output deals, VOD and niche marketing seem like the new hot ideas. And recent successes with new platforms are a true sign of hope. Our expectations are adjusting to reality; innovative, passion-driven films are finding their audience again. What concerns me, though, is not the slow, vague emergence of new business strategies but the idea that filmmakers need to adjust their ideas to conform to these so-called new models. Post-screening, filmmakers are used to hearing from potential distributors: “Great film, but we’re not seeing the poster.” In other words: “We’re passing because we don’t know how to market this.” These distributors don’t believe they can interest a mass audience in original, unclassifiable films. Today that marketplace concern has not only become more intense but is almost accepted as a justified reaction to difficult movies. And it’s not just distribution execs but also the press and even other filmmakers who retreat to this mindset, dismissing innovative work that seems alien to our commercial marketplace. Roger Corman was famous for mocking up one-sheets before his films rolled camera. Today, filmmakers are told to have Constant Contact lists of their target audiences on their hard drives before their first days of filming. The required strategy is to first launch a Facebook page, make your fans your “audience” and allow their swelling numbers to serve as your green light. And, then, as you shoot, make sure these fans don’t get away by marketing your film through Twitter updates, blog posts, and other forms of social-media messaging. This is indeed a great strategy for certain
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MIKE S. RYAN.
films — but not all films allow for such easy niche preconceptions. While defining a film’s possible marketing plan early can be helpful, a promising marketing plan should not justify a film’s existence. And, more importantly, the lack of one should not designate a film as worthless. Developing content and nurturing auteurs should be our top concern, not figuring out distribution models or revenue schemes. The whole purpose of independent film is to make films that aren’t prefabricated to hit a target audience of someone else’s devising. In fact, it’s that kind of market-centric thinking that puffed up the bubble with derivative films; it’s those goals that made indie go flaccid in the first place. Audience-driven content posing as truly independent film has numbed the audience that is hungry for innovative work. Powerful statements told in direct, aesthetically challenging and possibly uncomfortable ways are what mark visionary work. The outer margins are where true visionaries live, and the fact that these artists may not reach the mainstream is not sad; it should be embraced. I’m not interested in dragging everyone I know to the new Béla Tarr film. Béla Tarr is not for everyone (his work is actually for very few), but it is exceptional work, and it deserves to exist, despite the fact that Béla does not have Facebook or Twitter accounts. I’ve heard it said that because filmmakers like Todd Solondz and Jim Jarmusch don’t have readily-defined young audiences reachable through all these various wired platforms that their work is considered less relevant today than the latest viral sensation. Frankly, I find that a sad and scary opinion. I worry that the traditional gatekeepers — the festival programmers, the critics and the producers — are starting to ignore the cultivation of true visionaries by wholeheartedly drinking this niche transmedia KoolAid. If gatekeepers start to agree that the only way to make indie film relevant again is
through new forms of community outreach then there is a chance that films that alienate and aren’t crowd-sourced huggable will be passed by. I fear that in the rush to embrace new methods of promotion and distribution that worthy yet seemingly unpromotable films will be completely ignored. If festivals get behind day-and-date VOD or free YouTube multiplatform releasing then isn’t there a chance that these fests will pick films that best lend themselves to these new screening platforms? Films catering to easily distracted Web surfers and not contemplative theatergoers? Likewise, are there producers passing on strong work because it can’t be broken into Webisodes and streamed on YouTube? Some films do not lend themselves to viewing on computers, phones or in loud crowded rooms. The extreme margins is where the true groundbreaking work is done; it’s always been that way, and no amount of crafty virile Twitter DIY distribution chatter is going to change that fact. Films that make their marketing campaigns their highest priorities are audience-driven films and these are the films that have historically alienated viewers hungry for visionary work. I am not into indie film because I like being part of an indie “community.” I don’t help make bold, boundary-pushing work because I want to connect to or be part of a group of outsiders. Though this group can help spread the word, it’s not the reason I work on these films. I am into indie film because no other medium can express my feelings about the world. It’s because I don’t get what I need from mass culture that I seek it in the margins. I don’t crave mass acceptance nor do I dream of it. And I would hate to see the young artists who would otherwise make the boundary-pushing work of tomorrow not do so because they haven’t impressed gatekeepers with their viral marketing plans. There is a problem with independent film today, but it’s not that filmmakers don’t have access to the marketing tools they need. If we create strong innovative work audiences will come, and in turn, new forms of profit will evolve. But if we start by encouraging filmmakers to please as wide an audience as possible then we will destroy what is alive and essential about alternative cinema. New see page 73
PHOTO BY: RICHARD SYLVARNES
PRODUCER MIKE S. RYAN CHALLENGES THE CURRENT PREOCCUPATIONS OF OUR INDEPENDENT FILM SCENE.
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SET UP ALICIA VAN COUVERING HIGHLIGHTS THE IMPORTANT COLLABORATION BETWEEN A FILM’S PRODUCTION DESIGNER AND CINEMATOGRAPHER. Without an environment to shoot, cinematographers have nothing; without directors of photography to shoot their sets, production designers have no purpose. It takes a lot of people to build a world for the camera to film, and while the director may inspire and supervise its creation, it takes a production designer and a cinematographer to get it in front of the lens. The creative and practical collaboration between these two key crew members often gets personal. It is always co-dependent. We spoke to three such teams about their most recent projects together – Inbal Weinberg and Andrij Parekh of Blue Valentine; Andy Byers and Sam Levy of Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno and Seduce Me shorts; and Tom McCullagh and Sean Bobbitt from Steve McQueen’s Hunger — about how they did their jobs on key sets and what made their relationships work.
BLUE VALENTINE Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine was one of the most celebrated features at Sundance this year, lauded for intense lead performances by Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling. The script had been in development for years before Cianfrance got to make it, and when he finally did, he brought on cinematographer Andrij Parekh (Half Nelson, Cold Souls) and production designer Inbal Weinberg, who had worked with Parekh on Half Nelson. The film oscillates back and forth from the present and the past. As we watch a couple’s marriage reach its breaking point, we flash back to long sequences of their meeting and falling in love. The seeds of their fundamental problems are planted, scene by scene, in the story of their early relationship; simultaneously we watch their love breaking apart, years later. The filmmakers shot on two formats. The RED camera was used for the present day and 16mm for the romantic past. Says Parekh, “The format choices were based on a shooting style that would allow for extremely long takes — 45 minutes was our longest — and a theoretical approach to the past and the present.” Long lenses were used for the present and wide lenses were used for the past. “We wanted to be ‘away’ from the actors in the present, physically, and just watch them from afar, whereas in the past the camera was always close to them to give an immediacy and presence to the camerawork.” “For the past sections,” says Weinberg, “our color palette was slightly subdued but also rich, accommodating both pastels and darker earthy tones.” Weinberg felt that the 16mm helped to “romanticize” the interiors “almost like vintage photographs,” a contrast with the more realistic present. “Film also takes well to patterns, which was great in the interiors where we used wallpaper.” For the present
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sequences on digital, “we went for a much more monochromatic and emotionally cold feel. The RED helped create a sharper and harsher environment.” One of the most important sequences in Blue Valentine occurs about 20 minutes into the film. Attempting to reconnect to the wife he fears he’s losing, Gosling spontaneously books a night in a “romantic” themed motel a few hours from home. He picks “the Future Room.” When they walk into the silver-walled, midnight-blue hotel suite, replete with rotating bed and Day-Glo light fixtures, Gosling cries out, “this looks like the inside of a robot’s vagina!” “I was like, ‘Ryan, did you have to say that about my set?’” jokes production designer Weinberg, who had spent the previous week slaving away to get the space ready. To keep his actors’ reactions as genuine as possible, Cianfrance had made sure that his actors would see the room for the first time on camera. His shooting method also called for two cameras at all times, and, due to the nudity, a completely closed set. He also wanted the ability to shoot in every direction for up to 40 minutes at a time in order to give the actors the maximum amount of flexibility and space. “Production had initially intended to build the Future Room on a stage, but we couldn’t afford the build,” remembers Parekh. The producers found a theme motel with an actual future-themed room, albeit several hours away from where they had based the rest of the shoot. The hotel’s version of the future room, says Weinberg, “was very crazy, pretty far from what we were going for, which was like a 1980s’ DIY version of sci-fi. The original room had red Formica on the walls with giant triangle structures harshly lit by two pending lighting fixtures. The walls really bothered me. I didn’t know what to do with them. I saw blue and white light for this
room, not red.” Because it was a location, not a set, they were limited in their capacity to destroy the room; everything had to be restored to its original condition afterward. This temporarily set back Weinberg’s plan to paste a giant mural of a moon behind the bed, until she found a solution: “We basically built a fake wall on top of the wall that was already there, and then wallpapered this huge moon mural to it.” In order to build inside the room without harming it, they Velcroed and taped sheets of custom-cut Luan to the existing walls, and then painted over them. To be faithful to the scripted elements in the scene, the art department would also have to add a dividing door to part of the room and a spinning bed. But the biggest challenge for everyone was the lighting. “Because Derek and I wanted to shoot 360 degrees at all times and run long master takes without turning around and relighting, we decided to design [the set] in a way where there was no chance to stop and adjust lights,” says Parekh. “The location was incredibly small, maybe 15 feet wide, 30 feet deep — like a big tunnel with 8foot ceilings. You can’t hide lights anywhere. A d.p.’s nightmare, really.” And, remembers Weinberg, “The room has no natural light, no windows.” The only viable solution was to incorporate the lighting into the production design. “Instead of hiding the lights, we built them right into the set.” Approximately 40 Kino Flos were tucked behind opaque panels in the walls. “I also asked Inbal to provide some 25 to 40 watt globes that sat on the floor and contained low-wattage incandescent bulbs. These three ‘lights’ were the only lighting fixtures that were moved during the entire week.” According to Weinberg, these Ikea-bought fixtures “had a ‘spacey’ look that blended seamlessly into the set.” Parekh chose three theatrical gel colors to gel the lights: blue for the part of the room where Gosling and Williams sit, drink and mentally destroy one another; red for the bed, and purple along the shower wall, “where they have a brief, passing moment of intimacy.” The effort was a joint one between the art and lighting departments; the leadman and the rigging gaffer working on the same fixtures at the same time. “All the lamps were fixed,” he continues, “so that we could only shoot during the shoot and not tweak any
BLUE VALENTINE’S “FUTURE ROOM” SET; (INSERT) ROOM BEFORE DESIGN.
lights, guaranteeing Derek only performance time during our shooting days.” The schedule allowed for a rigging gaffer and art department to spend four days prepping the space before the shooting crew arrived. “Sometimes the crew is very divided — you just dress the set and someone comes to light it,” says Weinberg. “But this was a real collaboration.” Every light had to be part of the set, and everything was potentially visible. “There was a lot of experimentation while building, and a lot of figuring out how to hide wires.” For instance, because most of the technical crew (including the sound recordist) had to operate from an adjoining suite, cables had to somehow extend out of the set. Explains Weinberg: “we couldn’t lay them through the door, because it had to be functional at all times. So we ended up drilling a hole through the back of the closet, and threading the cables into the adjacent room.” The result of everyone’s hard work is an insane and vivid blue and silver sex den, photographed in a way that is too strange and constrained to be corny, accented by red lights and mirrors that reflect the characters’ anxieties back at them. It feels airless; suction-sealed from the outside world. Accessorized with whiskey, cigarettes and a well of resentments
and frustration, it’s the perfect environment to facilitate the rapid and violent breakdown that the couple endures inside it. Both Parekh and Weinberg are noticeably proud of how far they went to get out of the director’s way. It took a week of full-time rigging by the lighting department and one quarter of the art department’s entire budget for the film. “It wasn’t just about making the set, it was also about facilitating the special nature of our shoot,” says Weinberg. Counters Parekh: “I realized early in my career that nobody goes to a movie to see great lighting. Once you understand that, that you need to make space for the actors and the director to work on the performances foremost, you approach things differently.” What are the most important elements of a d.p. / p.d. relationship? According to Parekh, “flexibility and compromise. The thing with any movie’s budget is, there’s one pie, and everyone has to share that space and money. The more you can help each other, the more successful the movie can be. If you start getting selfish and eat too much pie, someone else’s department is going to suffer. For me, the production design is as important, if not more important, than the shooting format, because 35mm makes no difference if you’re
stuck shooting on a set of four white walls. I’d rather take the money for film processing and put it into set dressing.” For Weinberg, “the most important thing is to have a clear line of communication, to be communicating all the time, as much as possible. I love being around the camera, to look into the eyepiece, to understand what the framing is and what the shot is. I also try very hard to go to the screening of the camera test to see how the film stock is going to react to different colors. The aspect ratio is also important — that affects how I approach a set in a major way. For Blue Valentine I knew they were going to be doing a huge amount of very tight coverage and close-ups, so I had to come to terms with the fact that my sets wouldn’t be seen very much. It was about the actors, not my sets. A lot of what we did on that film was so the actors would feel comfortable — or uncomfortable, in the case of the Future Room.”
GREEN PORNO & SEDUCE ME “When I first met Isabella, she said she wanted [the sets] to feel pretty naïve, and I said, ‘paper’s pretty naïve,’” states Andy Byers, designer of the sets and costumes for Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno and Seduce Me series of short films, available on the Sundance Channel. FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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SEDUCE ME SET.
In the case of Green Porno, each vignette is the story of one animal’s reproductive behavior. Green Porno: Praying Mantis for instance, begins with Rossellini’s elegant face, looking quizzical. “If I were a firefly… I would light up my ass at night. I would fly here, and there, and there…” she intones. The camera zeroes in on her regal rear end, lit with one bright bulb and flitting from one side of the frame to another. It cuts wide, to an ink blue-lit night scene, with a carpet of tall grass and curling, silhouette leaves in the foreground. It’s clear immediately that the set is made of cut paper. The tone is whimsical and deeply adorable, and it’s impossible not to think of the exceptional skills it took to craft it. Rossellini narrates the fireflies’ behavior as light bulbs of different colors begin to appear on the set, moving and blinking. Her face appears, lit up behind paper grass — “Different fireflies flash different lights… they are imposters! Mimicking our species’ flashes!” she cries, her face swathed in the dark blue unitard of her firefly costume. The pieces are only about a minute long each, and all were shot on a soundstage, in front of a colored backdrop. Virtually everything — from the giant whale penises to the translucent squid face to the shiny school of three-foot anchovies — is made by Byers and his team out of colored paper with the occasional dash of fabric and bubble wrap thrown in when necessary. “When we met, I showed her a dragonfly made out of paper, and she thought it was fantastic,” says Byers. “So first it was like, ‘Okay, let’s just make everything out of paper.’ And now it’s like, ‘Okay, we have to make everything out of paper.’” Rosselini begins with scripts and very simple line drawings of the costumes and
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sets, which she gives to Byers months before filming is set to start. D.P. Sam Levy, whose feature credits include Wendy and Lucy and the upcoming The Romantics, met Byers when they were both hired for the first season. “Sam is the first d.p. I’ve ever worked with who’s become my friend,” says Byers. “It works when you see the same thing. The most disappointing thing is when you read a script and you’ve got something really specific in your head — like, you’ve made the perfect kitchen for the character you read — and then the d.p. comes in, moves things around and lights in a way that makes it clear that you’re on completely different pages.” One of the first things that the two agreed upon was how to light Isabella. “Really early on, we had this idea to do like 1970s pornstar lighting: kind of glitzy, gold, glamorous,” says Byers. “It makes me really happy when Sam does that.” For the snail episode, in which Rossellini, as a snail, defecates on her own face, “there’s this soft focus glow, which is actually super corny, but then she poops on her face,” says Byers. Levy has used a different camera for each season. For Season One of Green Porno, working with a very small budget, he used a Sony HRV-V1U: “Basically a mini-DV camera that shoots 1080i. I wanted to use a primitive camera that recorded to tapestock that I could operate myself.” A black Pro-mist diffusion has been used since Episode One to soften the hard digital edges of HD. “Isabella had mandated a very handmade, simple approach,” says Levy, which led him to the simplest cameras he could find. “I always think that if you’re good you can point any camera at a subject and create a strong image, even if
you’re using a cell phone. The V1U very much tested this theory.” Originally designed only for small screens — simple, graphic images employing just a few colors each — the team got the chance to watch the series projected on movie screens when it became popular. After seeing them big, Levy says, “I wanted to photograph Isabella using 35mm depth of field.” For Season Two, he used a Sony EX-3 card camera with a Letus adapter and Zeiss 35mm superspeed primes, employing the Pro-mist filters once again. Before the first season of Seduce Me was set to begin, Levy bought a Canon 5D Mark II “like every other d.p. in the world,” knowing that the color space and shallow depth of field would be great for the project. “I love [the 5D] because it feels like a medium-format stills camera, which is the perfect way to photograph Isabella Rossellini.” Byers has a background in ceramics and sculpture, not film. “Sam helps me with color quite a bit because there’ll be certain questions like, ‘I think this looks right together but what kind of colors are you thinking about?’ He’ll also help me with scale: ‘that’s not going to fit on camera’ or ‘that would look better really big.’” At first, Byers was building the pieces in his apartment, a location that became untenable for various reasons, notably his young daughter’s discovery of the joy of stomping on paper animals. The operation was moved to Brooklyn, and then further out into Brooklyn as the sets themselves got bigger. Byers uses mainly Canson art paper, employing photo background “set paper” for the larger pieces. What you might expect to go wrong with enormous paper sets and costumes often does. “It’s gonna rip all the time,” admits Byers. “It’s gonna mess up. Also I sometimes forget that Isabella Rossellini is going to have to wear them and move around in them.” One of the main differences he has noticed between making art for art and art for film is that the camera only looks in one direction. “The back of these things are covered in duct tape and wire and glue; it took me a few film jobs to realize that you don’t have to make something beautiful all the way around.” The homemade touches are part of the plan, though it’s often hard for Byers to make things as homemade looking as he could. “I keep trying to make things look awful, like pieces of crazy garbage, but then we make them like that and I’m like… ‘Guys, these should really look better.’” Nevertheless, he loves the paper’s unslick, practi-
ISABELLA ROSSELLINI AND PAPER DUCK.
cal charm: “I hope people like looking at the stupid gags we create, and seeing the stupid tricks — I think it’s so much fun to see the wire that makes the whale penis move, rather than doing it with a computer — if we can’t do it on camera, we don’t do it.” For Levy, color is what he thinks about most of all, beginning in preproduction when he meets with Byers to see the sets and animals in their early stages. “I look at what Andy’s doing, and that really sets the palette,” says Levy. Early plans were to paint the backdrop for each piece; they decided quickly that lighting the cyc with theatrical gels looked much better. Levy meticulously tested hundreds of colors of gels and built a reference board with all of his favorites. “When we shot the whale in Season 2, Andy had built these beautiful blue whales, so I lit the backdrop a muted blue — but then they had these enormous pink penises, and Isabella thought they were getting a little lost in all that blue. So each penis had its own Leko pointed at it, with a bit of pink gel, to make sure they popped. No pun intended.” “I think the best way to work is to first ask the designer what their parameters are,” reflects Levy. “Especially on smaller budgets, the art department usually only has so much leeway with what they can do. These are the colors, this is the mood, these are the spaces. As a d.p., you just take those parameters and run with them, start thinking about the color
temperature of the light, how it’s going to fit into what the designer is doing, how it’s going to contrast and complement the environment. There’s really only so much you can do with lighting and camera blocking to make something look good.” One would think that shooting two-dimensional sets out of flammable materials might force a great deal of photographic compromises, but Levy insists the opposite. “Andy’s sets were really easy to shoot. He used muted colors and matte paper, which I loved.” Using powerful stage lights — 12k chimeras and nine Lite Maxi’s — helped ensure that the paper was never close enough to any units to catch fire. “Things look the best when the director can direct me and the designer to one goal, but when they also give you room to work,” continues Levy. He cites one specific example from their recent Seduce Me shoot, about duck mating. Byers had built a gorgeous paper duck, essentially a giant hat that allowed Isabella’s body to be under the paper “water line.” Levy and Byers had agreed on an amber-gold color for the sky, which Levy created with light, and showed it to Isabella on set (who happened to be trying on her bed bug outfit at the time). Knowing that the next part of the piece involved an immersive journey through a bright pink labyrinthine duck’s vagina, Rossellini requested to change the horizon lighting to pink. “Sometimes what’s best for one individual
image isn’t best for the transition, or the entire project. Isabella was thinking about the viewer in that case, and not just the one image, and we all agreed that it was the best thing. At the end of the day we’re all just trying to keep the viewer engaged in what’s happening on the screen, even if they don’t understand what’s happening inside this huge pink duck vagina.”
HUNGER Color was also on the minds of the creators of visual artist Steve McQueen’s debut feature, Hunger, a brutal and visceral film about one of the most famous episodes of “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland, a hunger strike endured by Republican political prisoners in Belfast’s HM Maze Prison that left Bobby Sands and several other IRA fighters martyrs for their cause. The film’s imagery is deeply beautiful and equally unsettling: a snowflake melting on the bloodied hand of a Protestant prison guard, trying to collect himself after a beating; the slow steps of a man in a Hazmat suit approaching a prison cell; the rings of concentric circles drawn in feces on the wall, fading as they’re sprayed off to reveal gleaming white tile. We enter the prison at the height of the “dirty protest,” when IRA captives, denied the status of political prisoner they felt they deserved, refused to wear clothes or bathe. The death of Bobby Sands and the plight of the hunger strikers attracted massive international attention, drastically changing FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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PRISON HALLWAY IN HUNGER.
the nature of the conflict. “When I met with Steve, I knew that his take on the Troubles was going to be in a similar vein to the style of his own art,” says McCullagh. “From the beginning it was to be all about the reality of our environment, and the detail within that reality.” McQueen’s art films, several of which were shot by Hunger d.p. Sean Bobbitt, could well be described as being preoccupied with the physicality of environment. “When you’ve got nothing, the only thing left you have [to protest with] is your body,” says production designer Tom McCullagh, a native of Northern Ireland who was a teenager during the hunger strike and remembers the riots that followed. He began his career
working for the BBC in Belfast. McCullagh was initially reluctant to take on the project. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to do another so-called ‘Troubles’ film,” he admits, though McQueen’s approach as a visual artist and the imagery of the script, combined with his goal to make a film about the reality and detail of this extraordinary environment, convinced him that this project was going to be different from the rest. McCullagh had done extensive research into the Maze Prison and had been inside several times, a privilege that was no longer granted by the time the Hunger producers were ready to start. “It was all budgeted based on shooting inside the actual prison, which had been dormant since the
PRISON HALLWAY SET.
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Good Friday agreement [in 1998]. When I met the producers I told them that I didn’t think there was a chance we could get in there to shoot. It had become a very iconic building for the Republicans. It was just too politically sensitive.” McCullagh assured McQueen that they could build it, on budget, and set about recreating the prison exactly to spec. “I think Steve felt nervous at the beginning about what myself and the art department had to achieve within a very limited budget,” admits McCullagh. “If the prison set did not truly represent the original, then the story and detail that both Steve and I wanted to portray would not ring true.” The early stages of prep were devoted to meetings between McQueen, his Heads of Department [HOD’s, in the local parlance], and a number of ex-prisoners and guards who had lived and worked in the Maze prison. From these meetings, says McCullagh, “we were able to build up a microscopic picture of what it was like to live and work there, from both sides.” “Tom’s knowledge of the history, his knowledge of H block specifically, was stunning,” says cinematographer Bobbitt. “He created the most amazingly accurate set, working with almost nothing.” Explains McCullagh, “The Maze was a purpose-built prison with a very distinctive design, used specifically to house paramilitary prisoners caught up in that conflict.” The original prison was built in an H formation, a cross bar lined with administration offices, with cells running up either side. McCullagh built “a sort of L” inside a huge abandoned warehouse. The longest portion of this “L “ turned out to be about 170 feet long and used up almost all of the available floor space in the warehouse. The surfaces of the actual prison are concrete and block work with painted concrete floors, which McCullagh’s team tasked themselves to copy. “The environment had to be unforgiving. There was nothing that we used as a finish which could give a comforting impression.” The surface of the walls was rough plaster, painted over with a few coats of paint. On top of that, inside the cells, was layer upon layer of prop feces, created by “trial and error,” says McCullagh. “I wanted it to look like a surface that never really dried out fully, therefore giving the impression of an endless, living damp; an untouchable surface — something hellish.” McCullagh’s personal reckoning with the environment of the prisoners was also a reckoning with his own country’s history. “A prison offi-
HUNGER PHOTO COURTESY OF IFC FILMS/PHOTOFEST
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cer told a story about one of the guys who was covering his walls in feces, but actually doing a mural almost where he had outlined a fireplace on one wall. On another wall he had done the shape of curtains and flower pots and things like that. I suppose if you’re going to live in that environment you might as well get some humor out of it, though I can’t imagine it.” McCullagh remembers the entire build taking about six weeks to complete at a cost of about £80,000. “When Steve first visited the set during construction, I think he was shocked by the scale of it,” says McCullagh. “I think he was expecting a lot less for the budget.” The metal bars used throughout the set were real iron, and extremely heavy, requiring four men to move each one into position. “I wanted to use actual metal for reasons of movement and sound: the weight of them when being opened and closed, and the sound that heavy gates like that would make.” They built the hospital set, which dominates the last third of the film during the scenes of Sands’s wrenching death by starvation, inside an unused gymnasium. Comments producer Laura HastingsSmith, “We had an eight-week lead-in for Tom so that the H Block could be completed — design, build, set, prop — for shooting. Then, [the art department] continued to build the hospital set while we were filming. The H Block wing had to be lit from above as well as from the floor to the side. Plus, the corridors are very, very long — a perspective painting that makes you believe the corridors are twice as long as they are. It was crucial that that was [done] right.” For most d.p.’s and designers, sets offer the obvious bonus of flexibility. Walls can fly away, ceilings can rise up. But McQueen wanted the cells built as accurately as possible. “He wanted you to constantly feel surrounded,” says Bobbitt. “He didn’t want breakaway walls. It was very important to Steve to strive for reality, which we embraced.” For Bobbitt, the cramped space “was the choice that inspired us to shoot in 2:35 aspect ratio, so that you’d always feel the walls, so you could get that feeling of confinement. There was discussion about making the cells larger to get the camera in there but we all felt that the reality should be the first priority.” “A lot of films use the Troubles as a dramatic backdrop but this is a truly visual depiction of the story,” says McCullagh. “Steve put a lot of trust in his HODs to create something that, while obviously visual, would have
a tactile essence to it. The audience had to have a total physical experience while watching it. They had to be able to smell inside the cells, they had to feel the cold and damp, they had to flinch from the beatings — almost as if when they left the cinema they would need to go home and bathe in a warm bath. It was about trying to stir up your other senses.” With regards to color and texture, McCullagh based his choices equally on what was real, and what was emotionally true to the story. “In 1981, when the film takes place, was before anyone had done any research into the emotional effect of colors in institutions,” reminds McCullagh. “We were told that the cell doors were red, the bars were black. I don’t think Sean and I are too far off the mark with the actual colors we used,” though together they focused on cold hues of blue, white and green. Their dull, cold color palette “also lets the red stand out,” continues McCullagh, “the red of blood and of the visitors’ clothes. Red can be warm, but in this story red is also associated with pain. Red marks on their bodies, red blood on the floor spilling off their face after a beating.” In Bobby Sands’s hospital room, one red chair sits, unoccupied. “There’s nothing audible to know that [Sands] is suffering; it’s almost all visual. That snippet of red I think helps [that idea] along.” “Their visual environment should reflect the physical environment and what they’re going through,” says McCullagh. “We based our use of creams and neutral colors on the fact that nothing was going to give [these prisoners] comfort. If you look at a cream wall, there’s nothing there to warm you or inspire any memories. It’s a combination of those kinds of thoughts — we stayed with creams for the walls, gray for the walls, colors that would reflect what the guys were suffering through. The hospital also is quite cold and blue — blue is a standard hospital color, but, for instance, we chose more warmed-up, comforting blues for the guard office. The hospital blues don’t give any comfort.” The lighting, too, had to marry this extreme realism and extreme emotionality as well. “When we got into preproduction,” remembers Bobbitt, “Steve gave me a book of Velázquez, filled with his incredible chiaroscuro lighting.” Characterized by intense contrast and strong, often singular light sources — a candle, a window — the artist’s work became an important visual reference. “We started out just wanting to emulate Velázquez — in some shots espe-
cially we lit with just one light source, from a window,” says Bobbitt. “Which was fine, because sometimes all we had was one window or one skylight.” Indeed, light sources were few and far between in 1980s jail cells: often there was only one open window, one blaring television, or one hallway skylight. But in the real prison, says McCullagh, “any practical lighting is from florescent tubes running the length of the main corridor,” with a bit of sunlight coming in from skylights or windows. Working with Bobbitt, McCullagh worked precisely these same lighting schemes into the set. “Any job I take on I just feel like [my work] is combined with the other departments, and that’s what makes it so interesting,” says McCullagh. “The final product should be a lot better as a result of that awareness. When everybody’s pulling their own weight, it can make you aware of these other [elements] — the conditions of light, the possibilities of sound.” Adds Bobbitt: “You make a lot of films, and once in a while you get one where everything works, when one pure idea can actually become a reality. It’s a rare joy to be part of that. The director has these ideas, which you then try to puzzle out with the designer and try, between the two of you, to turn into a visual reality.”t
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DESIGNS FOR LIVING JACK FISK LOOKS BACK ON HIS OVER 30 YEAR CAREER AS A PRODUCTION DESIGNER. AS TOLD TO ALICIA VAN COUVERING
I was studying fine arts in Pennsylvania with a good friend of mine — actually my best friend, David Lynch. They asked him to come out to go to the very first year of the American Film Institute in Beverly Hills. We rented a U-Haul with his brother John and put all his stuff in it and headed west. When I got out here I had no idea what I was gonna do. David was working in the art
department on an AFI picture called In Pursuit of Treasure, and he wanted to get off of it, so I got on it. My hotel room was the editing room, and I spent my day casting gold bricks out of plaster. Then I came back and I got a job working on a film that Jonathan Demme was producing at Roger Corman’s company; it was called Vigilante, I believe. I was hired as the art director. I called one of my friends up and said,
“What does an art director do?” but he had no idea. I knew you had to get the sets ready, so I knew how to start, but I didn’t know where the job ended. So I was doing props, and set dressing, and costumes and graphics, just sort of doing everything I could think of to cover myself because I was so afraid that I wouldn’t be doing what I was supposed to be doing. So I kind of figured out in that film that I liked doing everything, as much as possible. You know, you kind of fall into what you’re doing and then you realize that everything in your life up to that point has really helped you. I learned so much in art school about color, composition and about getting the courage to start something. I grew up outside the union, and really outside the industry, so I was continually reinventing the wheel, trying to figure out new ways to do it without any instruction. I remember my first union picture was a film called Movie Movie. I was on the lot, and the union kept filing grievances against me because I was painting and hammering things — it was because I was used
DAYS OF HEAVEN.
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PHOTO COURTESY OF THE CRITERION COLLECTION
From Days of Heaven to Mulholland Dr. to Badlands to The Thin Red Line to The Straight Story to Phantom of the Paradise to There Will Be Blood to several of your other favorite movies, Jack Fisk has created the physical worlds for some of cinema’s most important films. He has tried directing (Raggedy Man, with Sissy Spacek, Eric Roberts and Sam Shepard), did well at it, but decided that he liked designing better and went back to it when he heard that Terrence Malick was returning to film after a 20-year break with The Thin Red Line. His touch is always simple and genuine, even when the look of the film is stylized or surreal; the product of a kid from the South with the mind and training of an artist who likes most of all to hit nails into wood and drive trucks around wheat fields. Fisk’s work will next be seen onscreen in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Below, in his own words, Jack Fisk talks about how he likes to work, how he became a designer, and why it’s important to take care of sets.
PHOTO BY: BILL CAMPBELL
to doing it that way. To me the sets were just like big sculptures. I just wanted to be involved with them and I liked climbing around on them. Designing was the easy part and you were sitting down; I like being more physical. I got a reputation as being more of a hands-on production designer. Even on There Will Be Blood, at the end of the film Bill Holmquist, the construction coordinator, gave me a hammer as a going-away present. They found out that I was always happiest if they gave me something to build. When I was starting out there was a production designer named Leon Erickson, who did McCabe & Mrs. Miller, and I heard that all the carpenters were living on the McCabe sets. They were building the houses and then living in them and building more houses, and they built that whole town, which was just magnificent. To me, that was like the perfect way to build a set. He used a lot of real props and real construction waste instead of trying to create everything. It not only saved money but it looked great. I didn’t know him personally but he had a big effect on my life. The other art director I loved was John Box — when I saw Lawrence of Arabia, that’s when I seriously started thinking about becoming an art director. In 1972 I heard that Terry Malick, who was at AFI, was going to make a film and that it was a period film that took place in the ’50s; it was about Charlie Starkweather. I got so excited about doing a period film that I started researching his project. He heard from mutual friends that there was this art director in town that was researching his project on his own. [laughs] We met and got along and a few months later I got in a paneled truck with a bunch of tools and headed out to Colorado. They showed up six weeks later and we started making Badlands. So I’ve been working with him ever since; Terry’s become like my brother. I met Sissy working on Badlands, and it was like I was building the sets for her. I got so carried away in the details — I would be filling the drawers with stuff I wanted to share with her about the story. I’ve tried to continue that practice with all actors. I find that actors are a great resource for finding out about the characters because they spend so much time thinking about them. The more you learn about characters the more you can know about the environment they’re living in; when stuff ’s in sync like that it makes for a stronger presentation and story. Terry and I have developed a relationship where we just go and look at locations together, for weeks, and that way we kind of get in sync on a
JACK FISK.
picture. And then he says, “Whatever you do will be fine.” He’s so trusting, but I’ve worked so hard to fall in line with what he’s after. I think also over the years we’ve kind of developed similar tastes. Some of it came about because we never had any money, so we always had minimal set dressing and props, and we found out that we really like the way that looked. Even today, I spend most of my time taking stuff away rather than putting stuff onto a set. Just try to keep it simple, because if people aren’t confused by the background, they pay attention to what’s happening with the characters, I think. I try to create backgrounds that are easy to understand so they tell you in shorthand what you need to know about the place or the character and don’t distract you by giving you too much to look at. [The balance between simplicity and authenticity] is a hard one. I’ve developed a real love of Edward Hopper. His paintings have a simplicity and an essence of location, so he’s probably who I reference the most — I think of him almost like an art director. You really feel the humans in those environments because there’s not a lot of distraction; he paints just what you need. The other artist I like is completely different and that’s Francis Bacon. The thing I really like about Francis Bacon is his passion. I look at his paintings and they’re like falling apart. He’ll put water-base paint on oils — whatever he does, he doesn’t worry about preserving it, but he worries about the moment. If he needs a dash of purple up there, he’ll put whatever purple he has. I appreciate that passion. [Twenty years after Days of Heaven], this film critic came up to me and said, “Oh I heard Terry’s making a new film.” And I thought, “Oh my god he’s making a film? I don’t want him to do it without me.” So I sent him a fax saying, “I just recovered from Days of Heaven, and I’d love to work with you again.”
Days of Heaven was, I guess, 1976, and when Terry started telling me about the picture his idea originally was to build a house that we could pack up, put in the truck, and drive from wheat field to wheat field and shoot. But we had no money. The story took place in Texas, but Texans had already harvested all their wheat. So we started moving north because of the later harvests. By the time the picture got its cash flow, we were up scouting in Canada. They were going to harvest the wheat in six weeks, which meant we had four weeks to build everything if we wanted some time to shoot. Now this was a nonunion film at a time when Canada didn’t have much of a film industry like they do now. So it was hard to find set dressing, hard to find construction people. We found these great old steam tractors, did the barracks around the house, built the house, the barn, all in four weeks. So now when everybody says, “We only have four weeks of prep!” I say, “Oh that’s plenty of time.” We broke so many rules to get that done. When I started directing, I probably thought of Terry most of all. But you know, I think I’m a better designer than director. I think I enjoy it more. The thing I don’t like about directing is dealing with studios and raising money. And the thing I like about art direction is they call you up when they usually have all the money already. And when it starts, you know that in six or nine months, you’ll be free again. I like things that end. With directing, it never ends. You could work on prepping something for two or three years, and it could never get made. So I’d rather work on my own projects on the farm, be with my family and then go and do a film and work really hard for a while. Once you realize that you’re not only designing a film but you’re designing the way it can be shot, the collaboration with the cinematographer becomes more important. If you give them something they can’t shoot, it’s like you’re cutting off your own foot. On Terry’s films, working with Chivo [Emmanuel Lubezki] — that’s really fun — because we’re trying to do it without lights. A lot of times I’ll be cutting extra holes in buildings to create more windows: holes in the ceiling and stuff like that, so he can shoot. I never wanted to plan the sets in the office and accept whatever we got. I keep working on a set until the crew leaves, until it’s shot. I keep working until the actor pushes me out off the set. Because it’s permanent. It’s alive. Sets are alive. You have to take care of them and love them and not ignore them — be there every minute while they’re being built and shot. Because that’s their whole life.t FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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WITH THESE HANDS FILMMAKER BRENT GREEN RECOUNTS THE MAD ACT OF SET BUILDING BEHIND HIS GRAVITY WAS EVERYWHERE BACK THEN. Brent Green is a self-taught filmmaker and artist who lives and works in the Appalachian hills of Pennsylvania. His unique hand-drawn and stop-motion short films have played venues including the Sundance Film Festival, the L.A. Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. He was also one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces in 2005. Recently he wrapped up filming his first feature-length film, Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then. Shot entirely in stop-motion using human beings, the film tells the true story of Leonard and Mary Wood, two people joyously brought together but separated through forces far beyond their control — a schism that results in creation of something wonderful. The making of Green’s new film has been a process unlike any other. He crafted it by hand with little more than the help of his friends and his own ingenious creativity. Here he talks of the daunting, obsessive production of his new film. Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then premieres at the IFC center in New York City May 7.
Leonard Wood lived outside of Louisville, Ky. He built his house into a kind of healing machine to try to save his wife’s life when she was diagnosed with cancer. Rural Pennsylvania, where I live, looks a lot like the area around Louisville. I have six acres of land and very little money, so the only way for me to tell Leonard’s story was to make it on my own property. I had to reconstruct the house. I couldn’t make the film a hand-drawn animation or shoot it on miniature sets because Leonard’s act of building the house wouldn’t seem so Herculean. He built this thing himself, by hand, with no money over the course of 20 years. I knew my movie about his life had to embrace a similar kind of crazy ambition.
When I decided to rebuild Leonard’s house — which I first saw when working on Christoph Green and Brendan Canty’s Burn To Shine series in Louisville — I started by making a small-scale model so I could decide where to place the trusses, how much wood building the whole thing would actually entail, and how I would make it with what I had or could access. Luckily, two of the things I had were falling-down barns. I knocked them flat, stripped the wood and the giant old beams and got to work. I spent my version of a fortune at my local hardware store on screws, L-brackets and electrical wire (the whole set was wired up proper — it’s a really pretty thing). I pulled the toilet out of the
abandoned farmhouse I live next to. (It’s the house where I grew up, but it’s empty now, with a huge hole in the side I haven’t been able to fix, yet. This year… the film has to do well, but this year….) So, most of the film’s building supplies came from abandoned farmhouses and barns in the area and Dewald & Lengle, my local hardware store. Building the set outdoors had its upsides and downsides. The biggest upside was in making the house look old and lived in. We built the floors and interior and exterior walls first, no roof, and finished the rooms beautifully. Some of the rooms have old cloth wallpaper, others are painted, and we made really nice-looking hardwood floors out of planed-down two-byfours. We built the floors, put up and decorated the walls, and then waited. The rain and wind did amazing things to them. The house began to look incredibly worn and lived in. The floors warped. Mice moved in. It had to look old. It did. It was gorgeous. To further control the lighting and try to increase the amount of time we could shoot in a day, Donna K., who plays the character of Mary Wood in the film, sewed 34’ tall black cloth curtains that we could use to cover the walls around the set. As the film goes on, the curtains are pulled back and you see more and
GRAVITY WAS EVERYWHERE BACK THEN.
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more of the walls. Everything I built for the film was built entirely with my filming needs in mind. I wanted to be able to circle a room at any point and see entirely new and interesting details in everything from the furniture to the wall to the set as a whole. Outside of the house we built three 64’ long by 32’ tall walls — an openended square. We strung wire across the top of the walls with pulleys so we could hoist our wooden stars up and down to accommodate any kind of shot. Every light in the film is on a dimmer, too, so we could use them in all kinds of situations. All stars are on dimmers and the moon too, which is 16’ tall, and made out of wood that I routed paper-thin so all the lightbulbs inside it would glow through it beautifully. The front of the moon was faced in cloth to disperse the light around each bulb and then covered in strips of thin balsa wood, like the kind hobbyists use for model airplanes. All of the electricity for my little solar system above the set ran into one of Leonard’s neighbor’s houses (which we also built). I could stand in the first floor of the house and twist dimmer switches, watching the stars through their window, until I had the shot I wanted. Building the set in my backyard in Pennsylvania rather than on a soundstage somewhere, in itself, I think, made the whole film a lot more honest. I had to do the vast majority of the work myself. (I have an amazing girlfriend and some awesome neighbors who all helped a ton.) It felt like I was Leonard,
LEONARD WOOD’S HOUSE.
RECREATION OF WOOD’S HOUSE.
driven by an obsession to save something (his story) by building something wonderful (this movie), which seemed completely impossible when I started out a couple years ago. And the best part of making a film like this with no budget is the fun! There were all kinds of problem solving at every stage of the game. How could I make Mary Wood 25 feet tall without hurting anyone? Giant wooden legs! With concrete shoes! When we had to crash cars, we crashed our own cars. Donna made her own dresses for a bunch of the scenes. Everything in the film is either stuff we made or found around the property, which led to the film having a strange now quality, rather than looking like any kind of particular period. There was no extra money for any-
thing, which I really think helped in telling Leonard’s story — the truth is a lot easier to discern when everything in front of you is stripped bare. Even though there is a lot of starkness in the film I built a lot of beautiful details around the house. There are really pretty hand-carved wooden lightbulbs in the door-frame corners. I made a working piano where the sound comes out of two phonograph horns on the top. The keys are weighted with old fishing weights, and all the hammers in the back of the piano are oak — but they grow out of the keys in a complicated tangled mess, like weird plants at the bottom of a pond. There are all kinds of beautiful little details like that throughout the film, but I try hard never to call attention to them. When you’re obsessed with something, or when I’m obsessed with something, anyway, I’m not able to see the big picture. I can only see the little details and imperfections right in front of me and can only think about how to change those little details. I tried to do that with the whole film: a straight narrative love story told relatively normally, but sort of patched out of glimpses and occasional clarity. Even the special effects in the film are in camera and, I hope, truthful. We shot the whole film frame by frame with a mix of wooden characters, moving wooden set pieces and real people. In order to make the spectacularly strange special effects sequences flow with the more standard scenes, the straight see page 74
MARY WOOD 25 FEET TALL.
THE MOON.
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PAY TO PLAY
PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA.
One of the most visible signs of change in the distribution landscape at Sundance this year were the YouTube movies: the three 2010 films that premiered on the site during and after the fest, along with three films from Sundance 2009. Did the experiment work? Was Bass Ackwards’s number of views on the first day good or bad? Did Children of Invention’s availability there generate overall buzz in the marketplace? Was it the pioneering shift in distribution strategy that some claimed or, as others argued, a failure given the low number of rentals (hundreds, not thousands) most of the titles garnered? These are the questions we posed to Sara Pollack, the entertainment marketing manager at YouTube, both during and three months after the festival. Approaching her three-year anniversary at YouTube (her “Google birthday,” as they call it internally), she began her career at the production company GreenStreet. From there she moved to Miramax to work for production head Meryl Poster, then moved over to Big Beach where she became a production exec overseeing Little Miss Sunshine and Everything Is Illuminated, and was about to start on Sunshine Cleaning when she was snatched up by Google to figure out how to empower filmmakers on the Web. “Sundance was an experiment,” she says gamely. “There’s no question in my mind that the initiative helped these films increase their audiences, and that was the goal.” “The idea that YouTube was ‘a place for film’ has been in existence for some time,” she
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continues. Aaron Crumley and Susan Buice’s film Four Eyed Monsters, one of the first features to air on the site in 2007, was “the perfect film to start testing the waters.” The Four Eyed team had already built an enormous social network, been playing clips about the making of their film on YouTube, and were employing a multiformat interactive Web-based way of making and marketing their movie that had deep appeal to a young, wired audience. Since then, a lot of very different films have begun to play in their entirety on the site, and a number of different methods of monetization have been set up by the company. Says Pollack, “Luc Besson put his film Home on site last June, Wayne Wang premiered The Princess of Nebraska here on the YouTube Screening Room with about 200,000 hits the first weekend, which was equivalent to a very high box-office ranking.” Several films have chosen to go online for free, “usually documentaries dealing with political or activist issues,” notes Pollack, such as the Oscar-nominated documentary No End in Sight. Pollack says that her real goal is to empower filmmakers by offering as many choices
BASS ACKWARDS.
and as much freedom as possible. “The adsupported model doesn’t work for everyone,” she points out. (That model occurs when Google decides that you have enough of the right kind of content to partner with you, in which case you are deemed “monetizable,” and YouTube can begin selling ads to appear in and around your videos.) The Sundance films this year were operating on a rental model, but what’s different about it for Pollack is that filmmakers “choose the price that they want to set for their films. You know your film best, you know your audience best, you know how to reach them and know what they think they should or want to pay, so you make the decision about how much you want to charge them.” The majority of the revenue goes to the filmmaker, and the filmmaker can decide the term of the rental as well — maybe $1.99 buys someone three hours of your movie, maybe $10.99 buys them 90 days. The agreement is non-exclusive, and the revenues — as indicated by the number of views — are transparent. “It’s really about giving filmmakers and content creators choices as to how they want to reach their audiences because we’re just trying to get as much content on the site as possible for our community,” she says. “The best way to do that is by giving partners more choice about how they monetize and distribute their work.” What makes YouTube different from other online viewing sites? Pollack thinks it’s the viewers, not the platform: “[YouTube users] not only watch content, they rate it, they share it, they comment about it; it’s really about creating a conversation around videos. These films inspire a lot of debate over characters, over storylines, over distribution models. The site built around this diversity of content that’s about what’s happening right now — whether it’s censored video of protests in Iran that gets spread around the world or the latest sports thing that everyone is talking about — I think that really carries over to movies. What’s new, what’s relevant, what’s fresh?” Still, for all the excited press the YouTube Sundance partnership generated, there were many who dubbed it a failure. Indeed, on the festival’s close the numbers were poor, with The Cove, which went on to win the Best Documentary Academy Award, scoring the most see page 74
PRINCESS PHOTO BY: RICHARD WONG
YOUTUBE’S SARA POLLACK DISCUSSES THE SITE’S REVENUE-GENERATING NEW DISTRIBUTION MODEL. BY ALICIA VAN COUVERING
SOMETHING VENTURED from page 10 everyone watches all the funded work, which means that all of us film folk have our consciousnesses raised by seeing what’s happening in all the other fields. (Full disclosure: I’ve been a panelist for Creative Capital’s Film and Video program twice and have attended the retreat several times.) The final phase consists of Creative Capital supporting the publicity and distribution of a work when it is completed. What type of artist is a good relationship match for Creative Capital? Says Lerner, “They have to be willing to engage, they have to be at a kind of self-defined point of change in some way. This can be a young artist, somebody mid-career, or somebody who’s been at it for a long time who believes that they need to make a shift in their work, or who is thinking things in a new way. I remember the year that we funded [experimental composer] Mary Lucier. She is obviously an icon in her field. In her application she wrote, ‘People think when you get to this point in your career that you have everything figured out, but you haven’t.’ And that was really appealing to the panel, somebody saying, ‘Yes, I’m a mature artist, yes I’ve had a lot of success, but, that doesn’t mean I have all the pieces put together.’” And for all the talk about business models and checkbook balancing, when you dig deeper Creative Capital is hardly the straitlaced taskmaster it might first appear. There’s a strong dose of compassion alongside the interventionism and venture capitalism. While Creative Capital encourages artists to articulate a long-term view of their practice — not one simply fenced in by the project’s due date — that longterm view can take many forms. Says Lerner, “Over the last few years we’ve been trying to get artists to define what it is they want to get out of the project so that we’re working with them to assess whether the project was successful using their metrics, not external ones, like ‘This ended up at the Sundance Film Festival, or this ended up on Broadway.’ If those are somebody’s metric for success, then, yes, we’re going to measure the success by that. But we’ve also had people whose metric is, ‘I want to get pregnant, have a baby, and get tenure in my job.’ And, you know, okay!” In the last decade Creative Capital has supported more than 80 film projects, in-
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cluding feature-length work, short animation and experimental film. Often these projects cross categories. Lerner remembers Bill Morrison’s feature-length foundfootage symphony Decasia: “It started as a commission from the Basel Sinfonietta [as a collaboration with composer] Michael Gordon from Bang on a Can, and then it had this amazing life in the film world and on television. And then Bill wasn’t satisfied with that; he really wanted it to be seen as a live performance piece in this country; it opened the 25th anniversary season at St. Ann’s. And then he ended up showing stills from the film in a gallery in Chelsea. These trajectories are just not predictable;, they unfold over time.” As we finish our lunch, Lerner and I reflect on the irony of Creative Capital’s 10year anniversary happening at a moment in which artists everywhere are suddenly concerned with the issue of sustainability that was at the center of the organization’s creation. “You know, 11 years ago, I could argue that it was a little bit ahead of its time, but in the same moment I can argue that it helped make the time right for these ideas,” Lerner says. For the next 10 years, Lerner lists a few developments that need to happen for the arts community to replenish itself. “We have to look for a process to breed a new generation of producers with a background in not just the media but the visual arts,” she says. “And I think more funders really need to open up.” Citing some of the now-deceased major arts philanthropists, Lerner says, “If they were alive today they’d be funding Internet art. Or bio-art. What would Andy Warhol be doing right now? He’d be on the front lines of everything. So, with all the walls that are cracking open, the question we are asking ourselves is: Do we need to modify the system of support we have built? And how to we become an advocate in the field for those other resources, like strong producers, that need to develop?” A project for the next 10 years. For now, though, lovers of innovative film and video practice can attend the MoMA retrospective from April 30 – June 6. Organized by the Department of Film’s Joshua Siegel and Rajendra Roy, the series includes a number of “the most original, impassioned, and rebellious films and videos” supported by the organization. Appropriately, the forward-thinking nature of Creative Capital is echoed in
the curation; the series opens and closes with new work in their premiere screenings. On April 30 is Here [The Story Sleeps], “a deconstruction of [Braden] King’s forthcoming feature film Here, a landscape-obsessed road movie romance starring Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal” that will be presented in a live-performance with composer Michael Krassner and the Boxhead Ensemble. Closing on June 6 will be Eve Sussman’s whiteonwhite:randomthriller, which is provocatively described in MoMA’s press release as “a film of indeterminate length whose continuously evolving narrative is generated by computer code.” Also in the series are films by Ela Troyana (La Lupe: Queen of Latin Soul), Kalup Linzy (Keys to Our Heart), Caveh Zahedi (I Am a Sex Addict), Glenda Wharton (The Zo), Christopher Munch (The Sleepy Time Gal), and Sam Green (The Weather Underground). (I was on the panel awarding a grant to Wharton, whose beautiful and disturbing hand-drawn animation dealing with themes of abuse is under-recognized and highly recommended.) There’s also essential work by two artists you can read about in this issue: Laura Poitras (The Oath) and Brent Green (Paulina Hollers).
THE HINDI NEW WAVE from page 12 campy Bollywood remake, falls in love with his lead actress, and finds his life in danger when they elope in the real world. The second, shot entirely in a pharmacy from the POV of security cameras, follows the store supervisor as he manipulates his female co-worker into unknowingly starring with him in a sex tape to pay off his debts. Peeking out from hidden cameras, the third film follows a reality-show reporter collaborating with an ex-model to catch a leading pop star in a video sting operation. The genius of the film unfolds in how the stories are woven together, the final disturbing picture becoming clearer at every step. It’s a brilliant cinematic experience, a film whose psychology is as rich as the best of today’s international cinema. The beauty of the New Wave filmmakers is that though they are provocative in their content, their sensibility is distinctly Indian. There is song and dance in Dev. D; it is just under a black light with pop-and-lockers from London. There is romance in LSD, but it is manipulative, desperate and complex. And Abhay’s heroes are disillusioned and angry. India is a young country, with nearly
70 percent of the population under 30. And they are coming out in droves to support the new cinema that reflects a reality closer to their own. “Slumdog kicked open the doors for Indian-themed stories around the world, but it was still a British and American production,” admits Kashyap. Deol adds, “The true change will have to come within.” Like Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg of the American ’70s, Kashyap, Banerjee, and Deol boldly tackle contemporary issues that resonate with their country’s restless youth. And like the Easy Riders and Raging Bulls that came before them, theirs are not arthouse films. This is the new mainstream cinema in India. While Bollywood’s shimmering glitz fades across the world, the Hindi New Wave is poised to explode onto the global cinema stage. If people around the world think Slumdog Millionaire is the real India, they have no idea what’s about to hit them.t
CULTURE HACKER from page 16 circle, users can capture any space and place it within the game world. In a sense the Pandemic app creates a crowdsourced type MMO (massive multiplayer online game) that enables players to virtualize the real world around them. Prior to attending the Sundance Screenwriters Lab with HiM we released the “panoramic feature” of Pandemic as a standalone Android app. Without any promotion more than 20,000 people have downloaded it. In the process of downloading users are prompted to “opt in” at which point they can decide whether they wish to provide us with GPS coordinates, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and the operating system and model of their handset. The collected data enables us to build a better storytelling experience that can be designed and targeted more specifically to individual users while at the same time giving us a sense of the global activity within the game world. Working within the mobile app space has given me a new creative outlet that enables the stories I tell to reach audiences directly in an efficient and targeted way. I am finding more effective methods to drive audiences to theatrical, DVD and VOD releases. The process of building audiences has shifted into a realm that is a natural extension of the creative process, something that is developed as a storytelling opportunity as opposed to just marketing and promotion afterthought.t
INDUSTRY BEAT from page 18 after visiting around 30 college towns. Interestingly, Sklar says it’s also strategic to undersell the movies “so audiences will go into them with lower expectations, and then it’s part of that discovery process tied to independent film.” Like Sklar, Scott Beiben, of the Evil Twin Booking Agency, also touts the efficacy of the on-the-road model. “Filmmakers need to start touring like bands,” says Beiber, who is currently promoting a multimedia event called Scientists Are the New Rockstars. “Then, they’re going to hang out with the people who are watching their films, go out to dinner with them, and hop fences and swim in pools with them. The only way to penetrate that culture is to be a part of it,” he adds. “You can’t just make a product and expect it to sell anymore.” All this may sound old hat to readers of Filmmaker, Scott Kirsner’s Fans, Friends & Followers and the writings of Lance Weiler. But to reach younger audiences — who are plugged into local groups via the Web more than any other demographic — the most obvious strategy is cultivating community and dialogue. Daryl Wein, the 26-year-old director of Breaking Upwards, a low-budget romantic comedy that premiered at South by Southwest in 2009, also believes Generation Next is best seduced by Internet-based viral marketing. On the eve of his film’s DIY release, he points to a comic music video his team put on FunnyorDie. com, featuring the film’s recognizable co-star Olivia Thirlby (Juno), which has been viewed more than 13,000 times. “The under-30 crowd has a shorter attention span than older audiences, so you have to find ways to excite them in a short amount of time,” says Wein. It’s also widely accepted that young audiences base their movie-going decisions less on reviews and more on two-minute video chunks. Sklar says newspaper blurbs, pull quotes and festival pedigree means little to younger audiences. “They don’t care if it played at Sundance,” he says. “They just want to know if they can watch the trailer and do they like it?” Should Andrew Bujalski, then, have made a short music video to promote his next film? And what would the viral comedy clip for Bradley Rust Gray’s The Exploding Girl look like? These are questions the next generation of art filmmakers might need to consider. Or not. Magnolia’s Eamonn Bowles says he’s never relied on young audiences. “Independent films are more complex, more intellectual, so it’s really always been the domain of people that are older,” he says. “I can’t
speak for the ’60s when Antonioni was blowing people’s minds, but since I’ve been doing it, the younger audience has always been the most overrated.” Perhaps, then, no matter how much millennials are occupied with interactive, shortattention-span experiences like videogames and the Internet, all that will change when they enter their 30s and even they will seek more complicated and contemplative entertainments. Will those entertainments be independent films? Stay tuned….t
GAME ENGINE from page 22 the coding process would remove the infinite possibilities of choice that exist now, which is essential to the gaming experience. And she doesn’t want to profit in any way from them. But all of this is okay for Brathwaite. The games are part of her own healing process. She was violently attacked in 2006 and realized when she started the series that it was her way of working through her own unresolved pain. Why do people do such horrible things to other people? What is the system of tragedy? Of human suffering? “I’ve been making games since I was a kid and professionally since I was 15,” Brathwaite says. “I didn’t know any other way to work through my thoughts and feelings. It’s me trying to understand all this stuff.” So for now, just making the games is enough.t
STRAIGHT TALK from page 58 distribution strategies are inevitable, but we should not allow our search for new platforms to dilute the content or crush the dreams of our next generation of auteurs. There are some brilliant films out there today that are having a hard time finding an audience. This isn’t the filmmakers’ fault. It’s the fault of the youth audience whose minds have been melded by the corporate consumer-entertainment machine. What was potentially indie film’s next greatest audience didn’t materialize because it never learned about true rebellion, what counter culture means and where it is often found. It’s often conjured up and cultivated under smelly overpasses by angry outsiders, not in corporatesponsored high-tech think tanks by salaried media trend experts. Films like Happiness, American Splendor, Safe, Gummo and, recently, Ballast are films that were not made to imitate a preexisting popular Hollywood model. FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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These are films that were made because they resembled no other prior films. It used to be that bold unconventional visions like those were the raison d’etre of indie film culture. It was those visions that made indie cinema essential viewing for any self-respecting young anti-establishment non-conformist free thinker. Today those films would be considered “undistributable.” Perhaps it’s not the youth audience’s fault, though. Even if they are looking for it, young people today actually aren’t able to associate outsider perspectives with most current independent cinema. Market forces are so shaping independent content that we have castrated the whole reason indie got started in the first place. “Independent” alt culture helped kill itself by distracting its audience with the petty bourgeois aesthetics emboldened by a decade-long onslaught of overpriced Sundance-launched quirk. We need to get back to the heart and soul of what it means to be independent and stop chasing the mainstream dragon; it was a pipe dream to begin with. We need less sweating over what we think the audience wants and to focus more on the people who could care less and are busy right now marching to their own fucked-up, out-of-time drummers. The indie film industry as it has been defined since sex, lies, and videotape is dead. Hallelujah. Let the inmates run free. By my definition, “indie” means not being afraid of rejection. If you are a filmmaker who has no idea who in the world would ever want to see your movie then there is a pretty good chance that you are on the right road to creating something truly groundbreaking. You are our true future.t
WITH THESE HANDS from page 69 dialogue scenes and the portraiture, the whole film had to be shot stop-motion. So, for instance, the dialogue was all prerecorded. After I recorded it, I’d go into the audio file and map out the syllables everyone was speaking frame by thousands of frames. It was obsessive, but I didn’t want the wonderful scenes, like someone flying through two windshields in a car crash, to stand out. I didn’t want the film to be going along and have a noticeable shift to, “Okay, here comes something strange.” I wanted the viewer’s eye to adjust to the stop-motion so even the impossible things seemed like normal life. The film was shot entirely on a digital still camera (a Nikon D70, until it died after five years of impossibly hard and reliable work, and then a Nikon D90). The filmmaker/narrator is a
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major character in all of my films, and I wanted his presence to be felt with the camera floating around and following people. I had some furniture dollies and I’d tape the tripod onto those and wheel it around. There were also a few amazing days where I rented a crane from a friend and flew around the set on that thing, camera in tow. The sound… since this whole thing was stop-motion we had to do all the sound in post, which is really effective. All of it was done like in old cartoons: huge sheets of metal, sandpaper, throwing cinder blocks across our basement. For the dialogue and the foley, we recorded on a combination of relatively fancy mics a musician friend lent us (an Audio Technica AT3035) and whatever mic was on the front of my Canon XH A1. We’d recorded everything through those mics and a small Samson mixer and put it together in Garageband. The dialogue was fun. I had it all written, but I wouldn’t let either of the main actors read any of the script. We’d start on a scene and I’d say, “This scene is where Leonard and Mary first hang out. It’s their first date. We’re going to start around here and, Mike, you’ll say something like….” Then Mike McGinley (who portrays Leonard Wood) and Donna would instantly dismiss my dialogue and go into much better, much funnier bits, with the same base feeling as what I’d written. The two of them were a godsend in terms of making this film accessible and, really, so damned funny. I approach all my films from a very literary perspective. I’m much more interested in literature, and stories in general, than I am in films or pictures. So when I design the set, title cards, narration and overall look of a film, I’m only trying to accentuate the story. I know some scenes have to be beautiful to look at, and I certainly aim for that all the time, but even a visually stunning scene should only be there to push the narrative forward. When I’m planning out a film, I’m thinking much more about how to recreate a feeling of, for instance, reading a Kurt Vonnegut scene, or how I felt actually standing in Leonard’s real house. I’m thinking much more about life and literature than filmmaking. One of the main points of the film is: “You have to build your own world. Everyone does it. From the richest Wall Street investor and medical venture capitalist to the biggest nerd dropping a McFish into a deep fryer. All of us do it.” In my mind, the film’s design is a physical representation of how much not just Leonard but every single person I respect really builds his own world. I love ideas that seem impossible. I love reach-
ing further than I can actually grasp. It makes me focus on every little detail. There’s no comfort zone whatsoever in making a film for me as long as I keep it impossible. A couple years ago, the idea of building a town in my backyard seemed absolutely ridiculous — and that’s the kind of idea I want to start with when I make a film. That’s what keeps me concentrated and excited to get out of bed every morning.t
PAY TO PLAY from page 70 views at 303. The possible reasons cited for the low number of rentals was diverse. Brian Newman, who at his Springboard Media blog called the venture “a failure” and “a travesty,” pinned the blame on poor marketing and search optimization. Others pointed to a possibly greater problem: YouTube’s brand as a “free content” site and the difficulty of changing the behavior of viewers who land on it. Counters Pollack, “There is no doubt that the Sundance experiment helped those films find greater audiences than they would have found otherwise. The numbers you see on YouTube may speak to the number of people who watched the film on the platform but not the number of people who learned about the film. [Children of Invention] producer Mynette Louie, for example, said that sales of her film’s DVD spiked on the Web site during the screenings. Each filmmaker was able to connect with additional fans.” Regarding the marketing, Pollack acknowledges that it was an issue but cites the fact that the rental program was announced so close to the festival as an impediment that won’t be encountered in the future. She also underscores that filmmakers’ ability to market their own films will be key to their success on the platform. “Going forward, we are going to look for marketing [ability],” she says. “We are a platform — we provide the tech for people to distribute work in a simple, user-friendly manner. We are excited to do our part to make this succeed, but you wouldn’t put a film in a theater and leave it there and expect people to walk by and see it. Over time studios spend billions of dollars to create awareness around their films. Filmmakers don’t need to spend those billions, but they still need to create awareness by investing time and energy.” Pollack cites the example of Garry Beitel’s The Socalled Movie, about Montreal rapper Socalled, which was available for rental during SXSW. Some of Socalled’s videos on the site have clocked as many as 2.5 million views. “In addition to us doing our own outreach,” Pollack says, “Socalled
tapped into existing fans through Twitter and Facebook, sent e-mails to his database of fans and directly marketed the film that way.” Of the final criticism — that viewers don’t want to pay for content on YouTube when there is so much free stuff on the site — Pollack says, “No doubt a change in user behavior has to take place on our platform. We have to do some thinking on how best to facilitate that change. But the more that people understand what they are paying for, the more likely they are to pay for it.” She references some of the comments threads for the Sundance films on the YouTube site. When the films went up for rental there were negative comments from people objecting to the idea of a rental price. “What was great was when some of the filmmakers jumped into the comments,” she says. “They spoke to the fans about why they were doing this, talked about the struggles of being an independent filmmaker — being in debt and trying to recoup — and that changed the tone of the comments. People recognized that this was not just some ploy to take money out of their hands and that the majority of revenue was going to the filmmaker.” Of course, it’s possible that other forms of content, not independent features, will succeed at the YouTube monetization game first. At SXSW, Pollack talked about the site’s interest in Web series. In late March, YouTube opened an official store (youtube.com/store) containing some of the Sundance titles (Bass Ackwards, One Too Many Mornings), other movies old and new (Smithereens, Bunny), and short-form content (the animation series Sands of Destruction and a travel series called Bikini Destination). “There are exciting things happening in original content made for the Web, whether it’s the next generation of new media studios or user partners of ours becoming more prolific, building the infrastructure to create more work of a better quality and with more energy. The Web will facilitate a new era of content creation — it’s not just about pulling content made for other mediums but stimulating a new type of content. And that is something that we will be aware of as we find new partners.” So, then, is there — or will there be — a specific sort of YouTube movie? Pollack answers, “When movies online were still a very unique thing, it was about ‘what fits this [Internet] audience.’ But as people become more accustomed to watching films online, the idea that there’s an online-type of film is going to become moot.” Filmmakers can apply to have their film on
YouTube via youtube.com/filmmakerswanted.t
A DAUGHTER’S TALE from page 32 the dogs that belonged to that piece of property, that holler. Let’s talk about the film’s relationship to genre storytelling, because it’s a lot more of a defined narrative than Down to the Bone. I mean, on one level, it’s the oldest story in the book. It’s “they’re coming to take away the farm.” It’s older than that. It goes back to German fairy tales. Tales from the woods are even older than losing the farm. And then, of course, issues of trying to bury your father are even older, right? Daniel, I felt, did a great job of getting some throbbing essential storytelling elements and making them cohere beautifully in his setting. But, yes, the actual structure that was given to us — a mystery that has to be solved, a time frame, an urgent deadline — who doesn’t love that? I mean, especially a gal like me who could make observational films for the rest of her life. You don’t hammer those points, though. It never felt that it had any artificial dramatic quickening or something heavy-handed to amp up the drama. Yes, but at one point we got severe with [the edit]. In a couple of the edits, we took out even more of the quotidian material to try to please this “mistress of suspense.” And then it did feel a little unrecognizable. I was like, “Oh God! What did we originally like when we went down there? What did we originally photograph?” [Editor] Affonso [Gonçalves], Fonzie — he was my dream collaborator because he so wanted to defend that stuff. He didn’t want to lose that [material] either. The “mistress of suspense,” was there some outside force advocating for a different rhythm? A faster pace? More melodrama? Or was it just your own idea that it should be — There was no outside entity telling us [to cut more]. Maybe it was our own need to see how far we could go. You can get in this really brutal mind-set that’s actually kind of painful. Once you don’t need some things that you love, once you’ve got rid of some of your favorite scenes, you get on this roll where it’s like, “Well, we did without that, so we can just do without this.” But you can get too brutal. It was almost like once it got sparse, it had to go even sparser. And then I missed certain things, and so did [Affonso]. And we knew that we had to go back and make peace with our own taste. In the end it felt good. The thing that tormented me until the end, though, was how
to end the film, because there were two really viable ways to end — I’m talking about the very final notes of what happens to Teardrop. There was a very concrete ending and there was a much more open-ended situation. We filmed it both ways. We went with the more concrete, which is that Teardrop sort of does indicate overtly to Ree at the end of the film that he’s still very troubled. There was another way in which he didn’t actually enunciate that in lines, and you weren’t sure. But I had a real split in the people near and dear to me, people who really love the classicism of a tragic destiny — Teardrop as a more conventional tragic hero, where there is a destiny that he feels compelled to play out. And maybe the vanilla in me, the wuss in me, the female in me, whatever, [felt otherwise]. [laughs] But you did wind up going with the tragic. I did. One scene in your film is, I think, the best scene I’ve seen in a movie all year. I’m speaking of the scene on the boat. Character, plot and theme all converge in a single scene. The sound design is also innovative in the way background noise drowns out Ree’s reaction, which makes it even more powerful. That scene was always a daunting, daunting aspect of this project. The scene was written that we’d be cutting through ice, and we came very close to doing that. At times there were really heavyduty suggestions. When a larger production company was involved in the movie early on, they were contemplating doing that scene on a soundstage with technology and special effects and whatnot. All that was foreign to me; I said, “I am open to that” even though it felt like I was going farther and farther away from a zone I knew how to operate in. I would have had to rely heavily on the special effects person to be the co-director of that scene with me. I can’t storyboard with that kind of precision — that’s just not how my brain functions. And luckily once freed from the larger entity, [laughs] we had to go poor man’s process and do it rolling on a lake, on a pond. We did have one really significant production concern, which was we had to do it day for night, because we didn’t have a budget for condors. We didn’t have any way to light. So that was difficult. The actors had to apply a lot more concentration. Dale Dickey, who plays Merab, was so fabulous in this scene. Her solemnity, her focus brought Jen [into the scene]. And then there was the fact that [the actors] had real tools to actually operate. We had to go through safety protocols to figure out how to actually do that. The filming was topsy-turvy. The operator was in waders. But people rose to FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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[the challenge]. We shot the rest of the scene that evening, which really helped. Getting the actual black sky behind her, that was done on shore. So we did it half on a boat and half on shore next to a pond. How do you work with your producer? Because your producer’s also your screenwriting partner, right? Yes. That relationship is really healthy. We don’t always see eye to eye, but it’s really healthy. She was also a producer on your other film, right? Yes. What’s it like for you to have someone who is dealing with the practical side of filmmaking also be your artistic collaborator? Well, she also brings order and semblance to that process. She’s a taskmaster in a great way — in a way that I so flourish under. In our writing sessions, there’s no funny business. I value how she brings the focus in. Also she reads [material] copiously and quicker than I do. She’s vetting and trying to find the information and the stories, the articles. She also loves documentary, so we’re always trying to sniff out, are there documentary ideas that could lend themselves to some form of growth or expansion through a narrative? She’s just a hungry, interested, alive person who’s constantly trying to read and look. But she also wants [production] to be qualitatively a rich, lived experience. Filmmaking has so much pain in it, and she doesn’t want it to drag us down to the point where we can’t make more films. How did you get this one financed? Private equity? Yeah. You know, the first time it was canceled two months out from production. It took us a huge amount of time to actually bounce back to where we were not feeling extremely deflated. This was the year before we made it. It was October, Halloween night when we got the pink slip. And — This was the bigger company? Yeah. It was very hard to bounce back because it had gotten so close. And then there was a whole period [when people would say], “If Keanu Reeves is Teardrop, maybe we can get you some money.” Oh my God! What kind of film would’ve come from that! That recipe of thinking — first of all, it never really comes true, and second, most of those films don’t work. Let me ask you a final question about the role of the director today in terms of promoting a film. A lot of people are writing and blogging that the director has to be an active marketer of his or her film. The director should be blogging and Twittering and directly engaging with the audience. Is this
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something you have thought about doing? I think there’s a lot of credence to that. I wish some of the cast and crew were involved with Twitter. I would sanction them. I would say, “Please Twitter!” But that’s not a talent that I have. I think I hesitate too much in like — I mean, if I could write it in broken sentences, I’d be happy, but like actually, you know… my list of who I even want to e-mail is so long right now. I don’t know how to manage! And actually look for a new project? I almost feel like I need to like get a really rambunctious young Twitterer and pay them a stipend. That’s what celebrities do. Oh God, they do? Not all of them, but many of them do not really write their tweets. That’s so disingenuous. I think [the idea of the filmmaker as marketer] has a lot of credence. But how to enact that and perform it is a whole other question.t
JENNIFER LAWRENCE Q&A from page 33 the character. I went in there and they liked it. How long was the wait before you knew you had the part? Gosh, it felt like 45 years. After the audition I think I got called back right away and that’s when I met Debra and [co-writer and producer] Anne [Rosellini]. Then they went back to New York [for more auditions]. They liked me but they thought I was too pretty. I wasn’t very happy when I found out why I wasn’t getting the movie. So I flew to New York and read for them again. I flew the red-eye over and was on no sleep, so I guess then I wasn’t too pretty. What conversations did you have with Debra about the part? Debra’s main concern was she wanted everything to be authentic. She pulled it off. There’s not one thing in that movie that isn’t sincere and authentic. And she just wanted to make sure that I understood not only Ree but the life of the people there. I spent enough time with the families and saw the way that they lived life that I could play a girl growing up in that place. Ree was up to me, since I was the actor, but Debra wanted to make sure I understood what it would be like for a girl my age to grow up in a home and in a family and in a place like the Ozarks. So you hung out in Missouri and stayed with a family? I did. I spent a lot of time with the family of the house that we shot the movie in. And the little girl Ashley, who played my little sister, she lived there and we became really close, so when we began filming it was like second nature to me and I was so comfortable with her. Having grown up in Kentucky, I would imagine you’ve spent a lot of effort as an actress trying to lose your accent, so was there an in-
security in trying to create one for this role? It worried me at first because Debra had recordings and the people in it pronounced things a little bit differently. Every time I would try to speak my Kentucky accent would come out. I just thought it was going to sound horrible. So I wrote Debra an e-mail and said “I don’t know if I can do this,” and she was like, “Just speak in your Kentucky accent.” She loved the way that I spoke. So that was a huge relief. All I had to do was call my mom and talk to her for five minutes and I had the accent for the rest of the day. You’ve played some serious roles before this one. I read after shooting The Poker House you had to go through therapy. Is it hard to leave the characters you’ve played? With The Poker House I was 16 and it was my first movie. Now fortunately I know how to leave the character when I leave work. In fact, it leaves me after [the director calls] cut. But with that [film] I just felt I had to take all of it on, and it did take a toll on me. It’s just hard to come out of because you spend two months being a person and going in these dark places, and when you’re young you don’t know how to get out of those dark places. But it wasn’t that bad. My friend knows a therapist and I just talked to her for a little while. I just needed someone to talk to. Has it always been a conscious decision to go for the more serious roles as opposed to the young glamour parts that most teens your age take? Yes. I remember being 14 and I told an executive at Disney that I didn’t think I was very Disney and did not want a television show. [laughs] There are people for that and they’re extremely talented, but everybody has a different avenue that they take and I didn’t fall in love with those things. I fell in love with the dramas and the grunge and the edgy and the dark — whatever you want to call it. The things that I’ve done are simply the things that I really wanted and I cared about. If I don’t really care about something I don’t have any interest in doing it. I don’t know what that says about me. But I don’t want to do sad movies my whole life. I’d love to be the female Alec Baldwin. [laughs] And it sounds like your next film, The Beaver, is on the lighter side. Yeah, I do get to be funny. I was able to be as normal a teenage girl as I could be. Your performance in Winter’s Bone has already started talk of it being Oscar worthy. Have you thought about that possibility? No. I can’t. My mom e-mailed me an article last night about that and I had to shut my computer. I was like, “I can’t be thinking about this at 19.” [laughs]t
FEST CIRCUIT from page 21 thing is shot in slow motion — but such graceful slo-mo that it was as if you were seeing the technique for the first time. How did Garcia do it? I naively asked him if the revolutionaries were shot at the same time as today’s residents. “A Phantom camera,” he responds. “It can go up to 1,000 frames per second, but I was not sure that it would work, so I shot it at 450.” He then showed me on his cell phone a photograph of Glenn Close dressed as a man — believably so — for his next project, based on the true story of a female butler who passed herself off as a man. I realized that this filmmaker, whose features (Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Ten Tiny Love Stories) I never cared for, is special, a whiz. And then it dawned on me: He is the son of Gabriel García Márquez, not that he would ever bring it up. His genes are good: Maybe creative genius is inherited. The only other remarkable film I have not blogged about for Filmmaker is Michael Winterbottom’s Sundance entry, The Killer Inside Me, which was in Berlin’s official competition. For me, a Texan and a Jim Thompson fan, it is a faithful adaptation of the source novel, even with troubling violence directed toward women. The Killer Inside Me, as in almost all of Winterbottom’s films, is intelligently executed and perfect for the genre he is working with. I can’t help but wonder why most of the Sundance reviews and interviews with the British director focused almost entirely on the shocking on-screen acts and not the merits of the film itself. Is it as p.c. in Park City as many of my critic pals say? (I’ve never attended Sundance.) If so, it’s just not right, and does films and filmmakers an injustice. Brief mention of some other Berlinale films to look out for: A Somewhat Gentle Man, by Hans Petter Moland, from Norway, starring Stellan Skarsgård. If you like Kaurismaki’s sensibility, you’ll love this well-integrated dark comedy. Crab Trap, by Oscar Ruiz Navia, Colombia. A no-budget feature shot in a beach area populated by a community of black ex-slaves, people who are never represented on film. The storyline is very good — two white interlopers crashing into their culture. Self, a short by New Yorker Oleg Dubson. This very controlled film addresses one’s existential dilemma, yet it is highly accessible. Dubson himself plays the lead. Most of the other segments of Revolución, especially Fernando Eimbcke’s opener.
Best line of the festival: In the awful, campy Austrian/German coproduction Jew Süss, the wife of a Nazi soldier, while the non-Jewish man who played the lead role in the infamous 1940 propaganda film Jew Süss is taking her from the backside, screams out, “Do it to me, Jew!” After the giggles, a British Jewish critic told me it should have been, “So do it to me already!”
Rotterdam Film Festival BY GABE KLINGER
Now and historically, the International Film Festival Rotterdam ( Jan. 26 - Feb. 6) is one of the most adventurous events of its kind. Size wavers and leadership occasionally changes, but the festival has been consistent in its aim to question and expand our ideas of cinema since its inception in 1972. Indeed a sort of modus operandi can be found in the festival’s continued use and reconfiguration of André Bazin’s phrase “What Is Cinema?” In recent times Rotterdam has answered this question by inviting filmmakers to expand their work outside of movie theaters and into galleries and other alternative spaces with painting and photography, installation art, performances and virtual and online projects. A few years ago, the festival even had the idea of asking its guests to stop watching movies and partake in an indoor soccer tournament that lasted from morning to night in a converted theater space. Such ideas are not merely irreverent; former Rotterdam director Simon Field believed in thinking outside of the prescribed norms as a way to combat the market forces that inevitably impact film festivals. In Field’s words, the festival “has a responsibility to discuss rather than simply consume.” A rethinking this year of Rotterdam’s consumptive habits was the opening of the festival’s first shop, The Break Even Store, where one could sift through vintage issues of Cahiers du Cinéma and other cinephile-friendly goods. But the most significant aspect of the store was its free-trade policy in which any filmmaker or artist visiting the festival could sell their work “A2C” (artist to consumer). This generous incentive once again provokes the question of whether sales companies and distributors are still relevant in today’s rapidly changing digital economy where filmmakers visiting festivals are able to position and sell their work with increasing facility. Another notable experiment was Rotterdam’s implementation of an online server hosting nearly all of the new films screening and which could be accessed wirelessly from a personal laptop.
The concept of the video library is nothing new, but the idea of online streaming in such a personalized fashion runs dangerously close to negating the entire concept of a film festival, where films are carefully curated and projected on big screens. The initiative itself isn’t bad, but it encourages lazy practices that are already quite common in the DVD and video-on-demand sectors. This year Rotterdam took on the daunting task of demystifying an entire continent of filmmaking. “African cinema has been neglected,” writes programmer Gertjan Zuilhof in the festival catalogue, “by us and by itself.” In the aptly titled sidebar “Where Is Africa?”, Rotterdam proposed multiple strategies. For instance a dozen works were commissioned from non-African filmmakers and shot in different countries such as Angola, CongoBrazzaville and Zambia. Cameroon Love Letter (2010), by the prolific Khavn De La Cruz, uses as a loose framework the characters and storylines of a Philippine soap opera that has become popular in Cameroon to capture the attention of the locals. Many of the works are very much in the same discursive spirit. Other components to “Where Is Africa?” included musical accompaniment by African musicians to projections of silent films either shot in Africa or fictitiously set there. At least on paper, these events have the possibility to underline the power of cinema as an unpredictable global phenomenon. One of the major highlights of the festival and an important global cinema specimen was John Gianvito’s four-hour documentary essay Vapor Trail (Clark), a film that, due to its length and unglamorous subject matter (the disastrous environmental and human effects of the removal of two U.S. military bases in the Philippines), was virtually ignored by pleasure-seekers. Perhaps it’s indicative of certain trends that industry and audience members alike would prefer to watch Gianvito’s magnum opus in small, easily consumable morsels on disc or online. On the other end of the spectrum, the Mexican Tiger-prize winner Alamar, praised for its scenic images and easygoing story of a father on vacation with his son in a secluded Caribbean paradise, was one of the festival’s biggest hits. Clocking in at a brisk 73 minutes, it fits into a certain worn-out notion of the festival film in its exotic, faux-naive look at a community detached from the bustle of modern life. It is escapism of a highly amorphous kind and the wildly overblown hype around it suggests that market forces are still looming large around FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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Rotterdam’s artist-friendly core. For better or worse, the question “What Is Cinema?” encompasses both good and bad, under- and overrated, commercial or non-commercial — and it’s one of the virtues of the festival that it presents us with this ample vision, even if it means a few filmmakers ultimately get lost in the shuffle.t
THE MAN WHO WASN’T THERE from page 41 too often forget. So this is the second film in a trilogy about the aftermath of 9/11. Yeah.
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What can you tell us about the third, and how it will draw from or be influenced by the two films you completed? In terms of process the way it always works is: you say, “Okay, I’m starting a film,” you have certain ideas, you go out and start to make it and then everything kind of gets turned on its head. And so I assume that’s going to happen again with this one. I’m interested in the 9/11 trials if they actually happen in Federal court on U.S. soil. Not really the trials themselves, but what might happen around them. If they end up as military commissions at Guantanamo I won’t be so interested. I’m also interested in looking at something on domestic surveillance in the U.S. In either case I’m interested in doing something in the U.S. as the final part to this [series]. What about formally as a film? You’ve spoken here about how the first film differed from the second. Is there a new approach you are thinking about for the third? It’s probably too soon to say. I mean, I’ve also thought about trying to do something as a narrative. I’m not quite sure. But, I wouldn’t have been able to make The Oath without having made this film about this really saintly Muslim doctor in Baghdad, you know? Having made that film allowed me to make The Oath, which is much darker and more politically incorrect. It’s a more complicated film in terms of how you leverage it — like, I’m against Guantanamo, okay? I want Guantanamo to be closed, but this film could be leveraged against that wish. You could say, “Oh, well, they’re all crazy fanatics and we should throw them all in jail.” I know I’m treading in much darker territory, more complex territory, in terms of filmmaking and storytelling in this one than I did in the last one. So they’re related. In terms of what I’ll do the next time, I’m not sure. I mean, I’d like it to sort of develop in some sort of a different direction that will build off of these other two films. Tell me a little bit about your relationship with your editor, and how on a practical level that plays out. All the collaborators who worked on the film are incredible. Jonathan, who’s the editor, he started working on it while I was still in the field. I was back and forth to Yemen and psychologically it was just a lot to carry. How was I going to make a film about this guy? How was I going to tackle somebody who is so complex? In a sense his charisma is his personality so how were we going to not let him run away with the film? So [ Jonathan and I] were editing and then I would go to Yemen and come back and we’d keep working. There was a lot of back and
forth. One of the real contributions that he brought to the film later in the process was this [idea of ] exposing the filmmaking process, which is typically something I don’t like to do. I like my films to be stories, to take the viewer on a journey. And we know that [in early cuts of this film] the viewer was spending a lot of energy wondering about the camera, saying, “Why is there a camera in the room?” Audiences were having a hard time connecting to the story. So then we started bringing in these [moments] where [Abu Jandal] lies about the camera and about what’s it doing in the taxicab. Those more self-reflexive elements to the film that break the narrative wall came in later in the editing process. One last thing. In one of your interviews you commented on the multiple meanings of “the oath,” and said one was whether or not you as a filmmaker had broken your oath to your subject. Could you elaborate on that? Well, I mean, there’s a point in the film that, you know, Abu Jandal asked me to take something out, and not only do we not take it out but we also show him asking us to take it out. We also probably revealed things about him that wouldn’t be his choice to reveal. I think that the film is basically a film about loyalty and betrayal, and so that relates to me too. Loyalty and betrayal between the filmmaker and the subjects. [ Jandal’s] loyalty towards bin Laden and also Hamdan. Our government and [whether it’s a] betrayal of our trust in terms of how it’s conducting itself. So those are just a few of the things we wanted the audience to grapple with.t
DON’T YOU WANT ME? from page 43 the framework of what that scene is trying to accomplish and the scope of the whole narrative, but honestly, if we’re not getting a genuine and in-the-moment performance, we’ll throw everything away just to get to that point where the actors have released all these previously conceived ideas about what a scene should be and are just interacting with this other person. MARK: Because I don’t care what every actor says, most of them rehearse their lines in the mirror. [Jay Duplass laughs] And you have to get through that. It sounds like a lot of the movie comes together in the edit. JAY: Yes. MARK: It took us almost nine months to edit Cyrus. Were there other avenues that the film could have gone down? What did you throw away? JAY: We threw away tons of stuff.
MARK: There’s a couple of different movies that could’ve been made out of the footage. JAY: By “a couple,” he means like 50. [laughs] How was your experience working with a studio, Fox Searchlight, versus working on your own? JAY: It was very, very different. [laughs] I mean, Mark and I come from a cave. We were not even working on 30-people independent film sets, we were working on five-person film sets. MARK: We’ve never had someone else’s money before. So that was a whole new item. JAY: It’s not even about answering to somebody else, it’s about discussing it with somebody else. MARK: Jay and I discovered that we were particularly bad at communicating what we needed done because we share a shorthand between ourselves, and we share a shorthand with our previous cast and crew, who are our friends, parents and wives, essentially. So we had to really get good at setting [the studio] at ease and saying, “Yes, I know you just watched four hours of improvised dailies, 10 percent of which are out of focus, and you can’t really see the script in there, but there’s a scene.” And [we found out that] that’s not really good enough. We [had to] cut some scenes for them, let them into our process. Once we kind of figured that out, everything went smoothly. But it was a little rocky for a while, kind of all of us finding our footing, you know. I imagine that it was different working with a professional, studio-sanctioned crew as well. JAY: Definitely, hiring crew was a more difficult learning process than working with the studios. We probably had to interview 15 people per position before we found somebody who really got what we were doing and wanted to do it. In particular with the [designers]. I mean, our movies aren’t like the best-looking movies in the world. We’re going for vérité. What we feel like we have to offer are real moments happening in front of you that mean something to you and add up to something important. MARK: A lot of production designers will come in with ideas like, “He should be blue and she should be red!” JAY: And we’re just like, “No! He should be wearing a T-shirt. That’s it.” MARK: “It should look like it looks like in your neighbor’s house.” And finding that person who not only respects that but wants to be a part of it is hard. JAY: Because we’re not looking for people who can tolerate what we’re doing, we’re looking for people who love what we’re doing. Because,
obviously, we’re making weird, kind of special little movies in a very specific little zone, and Mark and I are not tyrant directors — like if we don’t have a lot of love around us, we’re going to crumble immediately. MARK: We need crew members who are also pillows [Jay Duplass laughs] essentially is what it comes down to. “Snugglebug” really should be on their résumé. Snugglebugs only. MARK: [laughs] Exactly. JAY: That’s right. That’s actually our new production company, Snugglebugs LLC.t
ROCK IN OPPOSITION from page 53 resistance in my films, as I have always done and as I will continue to do. In my letter to him, I invited him for ���� further dialogue. But I want to ask you to do some research and find out whether or not I’m telling the truth. I want you to find the truth on your own. Would you like to comment directly on the situation with Jafar Panahi? The problem is that in his letter, Kiarostami says that the arrest of Jafar Panahi has to do with the Cultural Ministry. But the truth is that the Cultural Ministry is really nobody in Iran. This didn’t come from them, it came from higher up. These kind of arrests come from the Presidency and leadership of Iran. We have to realize that once Jafar Panahi has been to jail, he’s not going to be the same person after he gets out. He will be changed. Right now, in jail, they’re killing his feelings and his emotions. It’s not very easy in countries like mine to have filmmakers. Once we have them, we cannot afford to lose them.t
CURBSIDE from page 57 wanting people to know where you are at every second and what you’re doing — it’s like I want whatever the opposite of Twitter is. I wish I could make myself more invisible. I just don’t know where that compulsion comes from where you want everyone to know everything about you all the time. I mean, it’s like a disease. The various Web sites devoted to you — are any of those official? No, I don’t have Web sites, or MySpace; other people who I don’t know just do them. I was always unsure about it, like, whether that was something I should try to stop, but now I kind of like it. I kind of like the idea of people pretending to be me. There’s something comforting about it. It just allows me not to worry about it.
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I agree with you that some artists are too present in the social mediasphere. Sometimes maintaining a kind of mystery is best. Yeah, I just try to live my life. It’s hard because I have to promote the films, or else they don’t exist, you know? But I try not to think about myself too much, or why I do the things I do. Like sometimes I’ll just make a film because I feel like I should, but I don’t exactly know what I’m trying to say. I’m doing it because I feel like I have to do it. So I guess the only time I really think about myself objectively is during interviews. By making the film you figure out why you want to make it. Yes, exactly. That’s right. Exactly. It’s the same thing with anything. It’s like drawing a picture or something. Same thing. You just kind of sketch and play and then start to say, “Oh, maybe there’s something more there.” Most of the time people make movies it seems like they have like a point to prove or like they’re trying to plot their life or have some kind of message. I’ve just never felt like that. I feel like films should just be more like experiences. They should transcend words and be more like feelings or emotions. They should move you like the best things in the world that you can’t necessarily articulate.t FILMMAKER SPRING 2010
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Over the course of two decades, Tilda Swinton has quietly become one of the most respected actresses working today, unique in her ability to move between Hollywood, international arthouse cinema, fashion and the art world. Seemingly uninterested in fame but only in how she can challenge herself through her craft, Swinton chooses roles that are rarely similar and always unique. Becoming the muse of Derek Jarman after first appearing in his 1986 film Caravaggio and then starring in 1991’s Edward II, the London-born Swinton spent the ’80s and ’90s feeding her avant-garde sentiment, taking roles for filmmakers like Sally Potter, Susan Streitfeld and John Maybury. Then in 2001 she broke into America’s indie landscape with her Golden Globe-nominated performance in the Sundance hit The Deep End. Winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her brilliant portrayal of an unethical corporate attorney in Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton in 2007, she’s since done everything from trying her hand at the Hollywood tent pole — playing White Witch Jadis in The Chronicles of Narnia franchise — to working with the likes of the Coen brothers, David Fincher and Jim Jarmusch. This spring, Swinton plays the lead in Luca Guadagnino’s family drama I Am Love, released by Magnolia Pictures. Swinton (speaking in either Italian or Russian the entire film!) is the mother of a wealthy Milanese family who engages in a heated affair with her son’s business partner. A decadent, elliptical melodrama, I Am Love offers Swinton the canvas for yet another powerful performance in her dazzling filmography. – Jason Guerrasio, Photography by Henny Garfunkel
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PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.
TILDA SWINTON
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