™ F A L L 2 0 0 7
a publication of
F I
15 th Anniversary
L M M A K E R M A G A Z I N E
going electric
V O L U M E
Todd Haynes’s radical Dylanism:
1 6 , # 1
I’m Not
There
Ryan Gosling interviews screenwriter Oren Moverman
Tamara Jenkins’s
The Savages
Amir Bar-Lev’s My Kid Could Paint That Anton Corbijn’s Control Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly Strike strategy for independents Planning your post production $5.95 U.S. / $7.95 Canada Fall 2007, Vol. 16, #1
John Sayles’s
Honeydripper www.filmmakermagazine.com
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 VOLUME 16 NUMBER 1
PHOTO BY: ETIENNE GEORGE
CONTENTS 34 the jigsaw man Todd Haynes examines the life and mythology of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There. By Howard Feinstein
40 THE OVERACHIEVER Ryan Gosling chats with screenwriter Oren Moverman about his latest achievements, I’m Not There and Married Life, along with the unique collaberative relationships he has with his directors.
46 SENIOR MOMENTS
70
Nine yesrs after making Slums of Beverly HIlls, Tamara Jenkins returns to feature films with a comical but highliy emotional look inside one family’s turbulent relationship with The Savages. By Ray Pride
52
52 PRAY FOR ROCK ‘N’ ROLL Jason Guerrasio sits down with John Sayles to discuss the future of filmmaking and the challenges of making his latest film Honeydripper.
60 THE UNSEEN HAND Amir Bar-Lev got more than he bargained for when he followed child painter Marla Olmstead and her family for a year in the riveting documentary My Kid Could Paint That. By Jason Guerrasio
70 THE INSIDE MAN In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel makes Jean-Dominiqie Bauby’s best-selling memoir into a funny, moving and wise contemplation of morality and the artist. By Scott Macaulay
74 SOMETHING MUST BREAK Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis is put under the microscope in Anton Corbijn’s debut feature Control. By Nick Dawson
78 THE HOLLYWOOD LIFE Anthony Hopkins blurs fantasy and reality in the disorienting Slipstream. By Scott Macaulay
80 MY SUPER SWEET 16 Jason Reitman delves into teen pregnancy (with a little help from firsttime screenwriter Diablo Cody) in his follow up to Thank You for Smoking, Juno. By Lisa Y. Garibay
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34
80
PHOTO BY: DOANE GREGORY
Justin Lowe talks to Andrew Wagner about his sophmore effort, the deeply resonate drama Starting Out In The Evening.
PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK
66 THE LAST DRAFT
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 VOLUME 16 NUMBER 1 PHOTO BY: DAVID DALTON
™
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104 West 29th Street, 12th Floor New York, NY 10001 www.filmmakermagazine.com Tel: (212) 563-0211 Fax: (212) 563-1933 Publisher
Jay J. Milla
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Scott Macaulay
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Peter Bowen
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Jason Guerrasio
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LINE ITEMS
14
86 EDIT POINTS Benjamin Crossley-Marra reports on the different post production options four directors chose to finish their films.
90 ...AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH? In attempting to define documentary filmmaking Arne Johnson learns the line between ficiton and non is very blurry.
92 CAMERA TEST Jamie Stuart test out the Panasonic AG-HPX500P.
94 THE POWERS THAT BE Alicia Van Couvering helps indies strategize for the upcoming strike.
96 PLAY AGAIN Head Trauma director Lance Weiler on gaming and the worlds beyond independent film.
98 SUPPORT GROUP
92
[email protected] COPY EDITORS
Lance Kaplan Leah Dueffer CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Mary Glucksman Anthony Kaufman Bari Pearlman Ray Pride Chuck Stephens CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
Henny Garfunkel Richard Koek Michael Lavine Tom Le Goff Ilona Lieberman PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS
Benjamin Crossley-Marra Jeffrey Kunze Gavin Mevius Nathan Wagner
COLUMNS
CONTROLLER
Five new films in postproduction. By Mary Glucksman
George Henik Paul Koufos PRINTER
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Indie docs struggle to satisfy Oscar. By Anthony Kaufman
CONTENT SYNDICATION
26 FEST CIRCUIT
Advertising Sales
Reports from Toronto, Venice and Edinburgh.
30 Load & play Filmmaker’s look at the season’s DVD releases.
32 The SUPER 8 Eight things that will keep you in the know. REPORTS 8-18 The Orphanage; Handbangers Ball; Canvas; MobMov; Mexican Revolution; Maysles; Screenwriting book; IFP Market. ETC.
FILMMAKER FALL 2007
Arnold Salas
WEBMASTER
24 INDUSTRY BEAT
4
[email protected] SUBSCRIPTIONS
Scott Macaulay recaps the 2007 IFP Narrative Rough Cut Lab.
20 IN FOCUS
Cover: I’m Not There director Todd Haynes. Photo: Henny Garfunkel/RETNA LTD.
Carl Gilliard
6 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR 111 AD INDEX 112 PARTING SHOT: David Lynch
Featurewell.com New York: (212) 563-1577 Los Angeles: (818) 763-2678 Subscriptions, Merchandise, Back Issues
Credit card orders, call toll-free in U.S.: (800) 992-9755 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, 104 West 29th Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10001.
editor’s letter In thinking about this editor’s letter and Filmmaker’s 15th anniversary issue, I was tempted to ruminate about all the ways that independent film has changed in the past decade and a half. But before I could do so, my mind wandered instead to all the ways in which the process of making Filmmaker itself has changed in the last 15 years. In 1992, putting together this magazine was a very different enterprise. Without much in the way of office equipment and in-house design expertise, we’d spend many evenings at a Chelsea design firm, waiting for the harried owner to finish with his corporate clients and devote an hour or two to us. Articles would arrive by FedEx on disk, with new versions often flying back and forth the same way in an editorial process that stretched out to weeks per piece. We’d get slides from publicists that we’d pay to have professionally scanned. Pitches would come in by snail mail. People would have a hard time navigating our phone system. (Um, I guess some things don’t change.) And there was no Filmmakermagazine. com, no Filmmaker blog, no e-mail newsletter, and weekly online director interviews or video podcasts. Filmmaker’s audience was in the tens, not hundreds, of thousands. Today, thankfully, things are a lot different. Faster computers and the Internet have accelerated and streamlined our production cycle. Feedback from our readers is both immediate, through email, and public, on our blog. With his Panasonic HVX200P and Final Cut Pro, Jamie Stuart singlehandedly creates for our website idiosyncratic yet gorgeous short films that would have required the services of small crews years ago. In looking then at independent film during a time that has spanned Pulp Fiction and Blair Witch, mumblecore and Michael Moore, YouTube, Kazaa and Netflix, it’s easy to see that a lot has changed but a lot has also stayed the same. And while it may be easier — more efficient, even — to make a microbudget film today, the kinds of inefficiencies that caused us to laboriously scan photos and FedEx edits still seem to exist when it comes to the distribution and marketing of indie movies. Hopefully as we approach Web 3.0 the business of independent film will make it to version 2.0. We look forward to being hear to talk about it. I also want to take a moment now to thank Jay Milla for his great work as publisher over the last two years and to wish him well in his new position as publisher of Moving Pictures Magazine. Thanks for reading us over 15 years and see you next issue.
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BOARD OF DIRECTORS Steven C. Beer Jeanne R. Berney Anthony Bregman Mark D’Arcy Ira Deutchman Matt Dillon Nelson George Howard Graff Dan Klores Jeffrey Levy-Hinte Jewell Jackson McCabe John Penotti Carole Rifkind John Schmidt Cyndi Stivers Mark Urman Joana Vicente Lance Weiler George Zuber Thomas D. Selz, General Counsel Frankfurt, Kurnit, Klein & Selz
Scott Macaulay, Editor
Executive Director Michelle Byrd
CONTRIBUTORS
Senior Director, Finance & Operations Mitchell Micich
BELLE N. BURKE (pg. 110) writes, translates and follows film in New York and Venice. JAY CASSIDY (pg. 88) is a film editor
IFP is a non-profit organization supporting independent filmmakers. Headquartered in New York City, IFP organizations can be found in Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Phoenix and Seattle. For more information, visit www.ifp.org.
living in Los Angeles. His most recent credits include An Inconvenient Truth and Into The Wild. PAMELA COHN (pg. 18) is a freelance media producer, writer and filmmaker based in New York. She writes a blog on nonfiction filmmaking at stillinmotion. typepad.com. NICK DAWSON (pp. 74, 111) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. He is part of the programming team of the Glasgow Film Festival in his native Scotland. HOWARD FEINSTEIN (pp. 26, 34) is a film critic living in New York. He programs fiction and documentaries for the Sarajevo Film Festival. LISA Y. GARIBAY (pg. 80) writes about film, music and Latin culture for various print and online outlets. RYAN GOSLING (pg. 40) is one of the most talented actors of his generation. His breakthrough role came in the 2001 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner The Believer. Last year he received a Best Actor Oscar nominated for
his role in Half Nelson. He will next be seen in Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl in the fall. ARNE JOHNSON (pg. 90) was a journalist for ten years before recently joining childhood chum Shane King to make the feature Girls Rock! which will hit theaters in March 2008. Learn more at girlsrockmovie.com. LOREN KING (pg. 16) is a Boston-based film critic and features writer whose work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Boston Phoenix and other publications. She is the president of the Boston Society of Film Critics. JUSTIN LOWE (pg. 66) is a freelance entertainment journalist based in Los Angeles where he covers independent and international film. LIZZIE MARTINEZ (pg. 57) lives with her family in Austin, Texas. Her last article appeared in Mothering Magazine. MIKE PLANTE (pp. 10, 14) is the associate director of programming at CineVegas and the publisher of Cinemad magazine. RAY PRIDE (pg. 46) writes about movies and makes them, too. He is also a photographer. Links to his work are at raypride.com. DURIER RYAN (pg. 16) is a Philadelphia-raised filmmaker and currently is on staff at IFP in New York. JAMIE STUART (pg. 92) is a New York-based filmmaker. His work has run exclusively online, and he currently operates the website mutinycompany.com. ALICIA VAN COUVERING (pg. 94) works nebulously in New York independent film as a writer, actress and in production. Her credits include Junebug, Palindromes, Old Joy, Tadpole, Liberty Kid and Choke, as well as numerous music video and multi-media projects. LANCE WEILER (pg. 96) has written and directed two feature films — Head Trauma and The Last Broadcast. Visit his website at lanceweiler.com.
CORRECTIONS: In our Summer 2007 (Vol. 15, No. 4) “25 New Faces of Independent Film” section, Craig Zoble’s film Great World of Sound was misspelled (pg. 83). And in “Transart Film Express” (pg. 16) we didn’t credit photos of The Rape of the Sabine Women to Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation (Girls at the Pool, 2005, photo by Benedikt Partenheimer (pg. 4); Disintegration at Hydra, 2005, photo by Ricoh Gerbl (pg. 16)). We regret the errors. 6
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belÉn rueda in the orphanage.
HELPING HAND With a Best Foreign Language Oscar nomination for Pan’s Labyrinth and his membership in the much heralded “three amigos” — the others being fellow Mexican filmmakers Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuarón — Guillermo del Toro has enjoyed an increase in notoriety within the last year. Along with making more movies himself, he hopes to leverage his critical and box office clout to help lesser-known talents get their films made. So far, his beneficence is paying off with Juan Antonio Bayona’s chilling debut feature The Orphanage. Like Pan’s Labyrinth, the film mixes fantasy and reality as the story follows a family who moves into an abandoned orphanage on the Spanish north coast with the hopes of converting it into a home for disabled children. Laura (an amazing performance by Belén Rueda, The Sea Inside), who once lived in the house when it was an orphanage, becomes uneasy when her son Simon begins to talk about his imaginary friends and draws a scarecrow-headed child that resembles someone from Laura’s past. The tension builds until finally Simon disappears, leaving his mother searching for answers, including calling on the help of a medium (Geraldine Chaplin), who in 8
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a spine-tingling scene, reveals a supernatural presence in the house which may hold the key to Simon’s whereabouts. Written by Sergio G. Sánchez in the late ’90s, The Orphanage attracted Bayona’s interest several years ago. But while Bayona had already made a name for himself with award-winning short films and music videos, that experience didn’t help when it came to financing the film. Having known del Toro since he came to Spain to screen Cronos in the early ’90s, Bayona asked his old friend if he’d be interested in coming onboard as a producer. “They were having huge trouble raising enough money and getting the right talent,” del Toro recalls from the set of Hellboy 2: The Golden Army in Budapest. “Frankly I read the script dreading the worst. I thought I’d end up saying no because it’s very rare that I respond to a screenplay, but I was very happy when I read it and we ended up getting financing rather quickly.” Having del Toro fully endorsing the film didn’t only get Bayona financing and a stellar cast, but also sparked the attention of an American distributor: Picturehouse (which released Pan’s Labyrinth last year) bought the U.S. rights during this year’s
Berlin Film Festival. “Guillermo first told me about The Orphanage about a year ago, and when I saw the rough cut I realized he was not exaggerating when he said it was both frightening and incredibly emotional,” says Picturehouse head Bob Berney via e-mail. “We’re opening The Orphanage around the same time we did for Pan’s. Guillermo’s film opened a door for a wider release of Spanish language films, and I think Bayona’s film will be able to benefit from that.” Recently Bayona’s good fortune continued as The Orphanage received positive reviews at the Toronto Film Festival for its scares, gorgeous visuals and surprise ending, and New Line announced at the fest that it bought the rights to do an American remake (del Toro will produce that as well). But looking back, Bayona believes del Toro’s greatest contribution to the project was that he relieved the anxieties of making a first feature. “The only pressure was to do justice to the script and take it to the big screen in the best way possible,” he says. “I was able to make a film without compromising my instinct or my creative freedom. It was a blessing.” The Orphanage opens December 28.
REPORTS
suroosh alvi and eddy moretti's heavy metal in baghdad.
headbangers ball
BY Mike Plante
Heavy Metal In Baghdad, a doc that recently premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, follows the Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda as they try to survive the war-torn city while practicing and scoring gigs. Directors Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti (of Vice magazine) offer a brave look into the Iraqi situation. Proudly lo-fi and all the stronger for it, the film shows how totally fucked the band is amidst the war and occupation. In Iraq you can live 15 minutes away from your best friend yet go six months without seeing him for fear of getting killed outside your home. Alvi and Moretti jumped into this dangerous environment headfirst, drawing a powerful portrait of the occupation by not focusing on politics but rather by following the band as they stage a concert in Baghdad and, later, move to Syria. The doc is a continuation of the Vice team’s work in film and television. Their other projects include The Vice Guide to Travel series and the Internet channel vbs.tv. When they started vbs. tv Alvy and Moretti wanted to cover big news stories but without the usual pontificating experts. When Vice heard there were two-headed animals living in Chernobyl, they went to hunt them. Learning that there were two original Nazi-era Aryans living in Paraguay, they sent a black correspondent to confront them. “We’ve always believed that subjectivity is important with Vice,” Alvi says. “But with substantiation as well, so it’s not just some guy ranting.” For Heavy Metal In Baghdad the filmmakers hired a personal militia to take them everywhere and did all the reporting themselves. Contrast their approach with that of the news agencies, which send out Iraqi teams to get stories and footage after which their own correspondents stand outside hotels and give the reports. Alvi and Moretti began their film in 2005. Landing in Baghdad, they eventually located the band — cell phones and wireless still work well in the city, they note. “For the first six months of the occupation, postwar, whatever you want to call it — Baghdad had a 917 area code,” Moretti explains with amazement, “because it was being serviced by a cell phone company from Westchester. That’s the first thing the Americans did when they went in.” 10
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Alvi and Moretti went on to shoot the film in an incredibly quick 15 days — a week in Baghdad, a week in Syria, and the day of the band’s concert. They edited the film from just 40 hours of footage. The scenes of the band’s performance in the film are tense as army officials, bombs and electricity blackouts all are capable of stopping the show. And while the goal of staging a heavy metal concert in the midst of a war may seem crazy, these kids are just trying to live normal lives. Wasn’t that the goal of overthrowing Saddam? Currently the band are refugees in Damascus, Syria, and live under the daily threat of being deported back to Iraq, where their practice space has been bombed. The official Web site for the film is taking donations to help the band get out of Syria. “They can get to a particular country where they can arrive with Iraqi passports, which are not worth the paper they are printed on,” Alvi says. “But they need money when they land so then they can go and claim refugee status with the UN. Hopefully [the Toronto screenings] will generate enough buzz that we can create a strong petition for them to get into America. They’ll have support. They’ll have a purpose. They’ll have something to do. They won’t just come and be a burden on the system. They’ll have a chance at some semblance of a normal life.” Although they have run a successful magazine for more than a decade and have jumped leaps and bounds over the Internet — the five-minute intro on heavymetalinbaghdad. com got more than a million hits on YouTube — Alvi and Moretti still covet a traditional theatrical release for their film. And they plan to make “any distributor’s job easy,” Moretti says. “We will get the word out and build an audience. Getting into theaters is really important. There is still this real excitement of a theatrical release — it creates a different kind of buzz in the public sphere. It becomes an event where the public can go together and engage in something. The Internet is mostly old men masturbating by themselves.” After watching Heavy Metal In Baghdad the term that came to my mind for the Vice style of reporting was “gonzo journalism.” But is that fair? “We weren’t in a drug-fueled mission to Baghdad and partying in Sadr City with Iraqi prostitutes,” says Alvi. “When we started the Vice Guide to Travel the mission was 60 Minutes meets Vice. Whatever label you can give that is what this is.”
REPORTS
True to life
DIY DRIVE-IN
by Jeffrey Kunze
BY Benjamin Crossley-Marra
Schizophrenia is a very misunderstood illness in our culture, a fact that is reinforced by what is commonly portrayed in films about the disease. Some medical professionals believe that the one movie that’s come close to capturing its true nature is the 2001 Academy Award winner A Beautiful Mind. Now there’s Canvas, a small-budgeted regional fest hit about a young boy (Devon Gearhart) who is forced to simultaneously cope with his ill mother (Marcia Gay Harden) and workaholic father (Joe Pantoliano). States director Joseph Greco, “the mental-health community has unanimously declared [Canvas] the most accurate portrayal of schizophrenia ever seen in movies.” But getting the approval of the mental-health community was no easy feat for first-time director Greco, whose experience in the matter goes as far back as his childhood when he had to deal with his own mother’s schizophrenia. That firsthand experience is “one of the reasons why it’s taken me so long to get the film off the ground,” he says. “I was reluctant to trivialize the subject by using clichés of what Marcia’s character goes through. I just wanted to tell an honest story about an average blue-collar family that’s dealing with a very common problem. It’s not so much about a mental illness as it is about the effects of a mental illness on a family.” After writing the script, Greco felt obliged to consult with mental-health professionals and make sure that what he did was both accurate and sensitive to the issue. The actors also felt the need to research their roles. “Marcia and Joey both asked me what they could do to prepare, and I suggested that they go to Fountain House in New York City, which is a clubhouse for people with mental illness,” says Greco. “They went for what was supposed to be only an hour or two and they ended up staying most of the day. About an hour into the visit Joey said, ‘Where are all the crazy people?’ The person giving the tour responded, ‘Well, we’re the crazy people.’ He suddenly realized he couldn’t determine who had a mental illness and who didn’t. This was his first foray into the world of mental illness, and he’s since really become an advocate.” Once the initial cut of the film was complete, Greco wasted no time in sharing his passion project with the very community he sought to help out in the first place. He showed an early cut to the members of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) at their national convention in Washington, D.C. “I just wanted to make sure the film played well and to give them an opportunity to see it first,” he says. “I wanted to make sure that if I did anything that was going to offend people, I would know about it before I finished the film.” But to his delight the film received two standing ovations and NAMI’s award for Dramatic Motion Picture. “It gives you a sense of the humanity of a person struggling with the illness,” says Dr. Kenneth Duckworth, medical director for NAMI, about the film. “The person comes first, and the illness second. What you see in a lot of films with [mental-illness] stereotypes is that [people] simply become their symptoms or a vehicle for this evil force. But Canvas is genuinely authentic.” Since then, Greco has received dozens of invitations from mental-health organizations around the country wanting to screen the film, and after having its world premiere last October at the Hamptons International Film Festival, has won numerous awards at regional festivals. Greco believes the steps he’s taken to get his film seen will increase awareness for those in need. “If your heart is broken you get a pacemaker, but if your brain is misfiring it’s a different story. The reality is the more people feel comfortable talking about it, the more people will be inspired to talk about it and then more people will get treatment as a result. Hopefully the tide is turning.” Canvas, distributed by Screen Media Films, opens in limited release October 12.
One of the last vestiges of the rapidly vanishing arthouse and drive-in theater cultures can be found, paradoxically, online. MobMov (short for “Mobile Movie”) is a Web-based organization which launched in 2005 that’s dedicated to guerilla film exhibition across the globe, screening, well, whatever you want. “Did you just make a kick-ass documentary about the environmental impact of the factory in your hometown?” asks MobMov founder Bryan Kennedy. “How about a martial arts action movie about ninjas with a sleeping disorder? These are niche films, and they won’t ever earn distribution rights. What MobMov does is combine the enabling freedom of Internet distribution with the community experience of watching a film in a theater.” MobMov basically brings the drive-in to you. Projectors are set up on the backs of cars, a little promotion is done, and crowds gather in an abandoned part of town to watch films broadcast against a wall. “Face it,” Kennedy says, “the current movie-distribution system sucks. If you’re lucky enough to have the right connections to make it to a big festival like Sundance and then are willing to sell your soul enough to actually get a distribution contract signed, you’ll still probably wind up in a handful of theaters across the country that don’t even bother to promote your groundbreaking film. It’s heartbreaking.” Luckily enough, getting a MobMov chapter together in your local community might not be as hard as you think. The Web site (mobmov.org) has all the necessary information on how you can set up a screening and even advice on how to create your own MobMov community. It’s easy, safe and completely legal; the site provides tips on reserving space and preventing noise pollution. The organization has enjoyed tremendous growth over the last few years — including impressive turnouts over the summer for M dot Strange’s Sundance entry We Are the Strange on the West Coast — and has grown into over 158 chapters across 26 nations. Kennedy stated that one of his favorite experiences was watching films with the French chapter under the Parisian sky.
joseph greco's canvas.
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Rodrigo plÁ's la zona.
mexican revolution
BY Mike plante
At the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival five Mexican-produced features demonstrated the exciting range of talent coming out of that country’s growing film industry. La Zona, made by first-time director Rodrigo Plá, is a contained thriller. Small-time thieves invade an upper-class suburban neighborhood separated from neighboring poor society by 1984-style walls and security. Their simple plan of robbery goes bad when they unexpectedly kill an elderly woman. A disillusioned rich kid is caught in between the upper crust’s lust for blood and one of the scared teen thieves who hides in his basement. La Zona has a cable TV vibe (no longer a slam on a film!) with an extremely polished visual style. Director Plá (from Montevideo, Uruguay) studied at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City. He displays adeptness for solid filmmaking with flowing crane shots, freaky security camera shots, and definitive genre characters. There are some confusing moments — it actually takes a while to understand how the suburban homes are a compound. Various jumps in time don’t help the plot structure. But the director is obviously someone to watch. The film won Toronto’s FIPRESCI International Film Critics Prize. Under the Same Moon is also very polished, dealing with U.S.-Mexico border issues. Patricia Riggen's (from Guadalajara) feature debut, she's the first Mexican to ever win a Student Academy Award (with the 2002 short The Cornfield) and she won Sundance’s Best Short Film Award for Family Portrait (2004), her documentary on Gordon Parks. The “hero” of Moon, nine-year-old Carlitos, cares for his grandmother in Mexico while his mom works in America, sending money back home and figuring out how to reunite the family. When the grandmother passes away, Carlitos can’t stand waiting any more and bravely sets off to cross the border, despite the dangers of authorities and criminals alike. The film is played very straight — A to B to C — with solid acting and a nice look into what illegal immigrants are going through on both sides of the border. An assured crowd-pleaser, the film could be a nice success and even educational if it is marketed to families and teenagers. I’m not taking a real leap by saying Carlos Reygadas’s new film Silent Light is a masterpiece. It contains subtle and realistic acting, pacing that is stoic but gripping, and is layered with absolutely luscious imagery and sound — even a shitty ’70s American car looks mystical. The strange setting of Mennonites in Mexico provides magical reality as a farmer supports his wife and kids but is having an affair. He doesn’t keep the tryst hidden because he believes it is all God’s will. 14
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In another director’s hands this would become trite or obvious, but Reygadas keeps the humanism intact. There is no blackand-white in his world, only people getting through unusual situations with their belief system to guide them. Star actor Gael García Bernal makes his directing debut with Déficit, a character drama of friends, family and laborers at a house party, where loads of tension is brewing under the surface. Simultaneously enjoying and hating his sister, her friends, and his own lifelong buddies, rich kid Cristobal (Bernal) is soon leaving the world of his distant, rich parents and even more distant girlfriend (on her way to the party) and about to enter college. Enter hot friend of a friend Dolores and the social status bubbles over. Déficit plays to the indie film vibe with multiple characters and a single house as a location, with realistic atmospheres and shooting style. While the film suffers from too many characters and subplots that don’t flesh out completely, there are some great subtle moments between the actors when they break away from the group. The real find of the Mexican entries is Cochochi, winner of the festival’s Diesel Discovery Award. Hopefully the award will lead to distribution of the small and wonderful film. Set in the Sierra Tarahumara of northwest Mexico, Cochochi recounts the humble story of two Raramuri boys and their efforts to find a lost horse. The search takes us through their native land and life — a completely unique inside look, shot on location and with everyday people as the actors. The film is directed by first-timers Israel Cárdenas (from Monterrey, Mexico) and Laura Amelia Guzmán (from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and schooled in Cuba). Reminiscent of the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, Cárdenas and Guzmán capture real life so effortlessly and pure that it becomes more than a documentary. You walk alongside the “actors,” who never seem like they are in a movie. Cochochi sends the audience deep into another world, where the local radio station, not a phone or computer, is the most important mode of communication in the society. In recent years the Academy Awards have taken notice of Mexican talent in cinema, but now many festivals are championing the next waves. The country currently offers as much fresh excitement in new films as anywhere else in the world.
self-portrait BY loren king
PHOTO BY: KENDALL MESSICK
REPORTS
Over the course of his 50 years as a filmmaker, in such landmark documentaries as Salesman, Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter, Albert Maysles has humanized the eccentric, the ordinary and the extraordinary. One half albert maysles. of the filmmaking team the Maysles brothers (younger brother David died in 1987), who, along with Frederick Wiseman and D.A. Pennebaker, pioneered the “direct cinema” movement that revolutionized the documentary in the 1960s, Maysles rejected the voiceof-authority style that was the standard in the ’50s. Instead his camera sought random and intimate moments, lingering on a subject’s face, letting silence speak more eloquently than words. Loose, occasionally messy and always raw, his films allowed the viewer to be both confidant and voyeur. Now, at 80, Maysles is turning his lens inward for an autobiographical film, Handheld and From the Heart, a title that references both his technical and emotional cinematic signatures. Maysles decided to undertake the project when a producer for PBS’ American Masters series approached him and said, “Let’s do you,” Maysles recalls. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I do me? I have so much material, so many outtakes… I’ve been doing this for 50 years now.” In addition to his archival material, Maysles is shooting new footage as he traces his roots from his native Boston, visiting the neighborhood where he grew up as well as Boston University, where he earned his M.A. in psychology and taught for several years. He also reconnects with old friends and even film subjects, such as one of the salesmen in Salesman, who is now driving a cab in Boston. A meticulous cataloger — he shot so much good footage for Grey Gardens that he was able to release an equally startling companion film, The Beales of Grey Gardens — Maysles will dust off not only outtakes but personal footage as well. He remembers when he and David went home to see their mother, whom Maysles cites as an important influence on his life. “She was getting an award from the American Jewish Congress, so we were going to film it,” he says. “I knocked on the door and my mother opened it, and there I was with my camera on my shoulder. She looked right into the camera and said, ‘Albert, you need a haircut!’ There’s so much stuff like that.” Maysles has always been prolific, but, as he enters his ninth decade, he seems to be working with even more urgency. He’s in production on In Transit, a film about the literal and metaphorical journeys of people on trains all over the world. He was a cinematographer for the recent Gypsy Caravan and participated in From East Hampton to Broadway, a documentary about the making of the musical Grey Gardens, the first stage musical to be based on a documentary. Unlike his earliest films, which had theatrical distribution, Maysles’s films in the last decade, such as Abortion: Desperate Choices and Lalee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton, have found a comfortable home on HBO. But his films can still draw crowds to the theater. The rarely shown What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA (1964) recently had a sold-out engagement at the 1,000-seat Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles. Arguably his most famous film — one that the director never expected to be a hit — is Grey Gardens, which has inspired the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical and a soon-to-be-released feature starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. The enduring popularity of Grey Gardens was never anticipated by Maysles, but, he recalls, Edie Beale herself predicted it. “When we finished the film, we went over to visit them and screened it for [Edie and her mother],” he says. “When it was over, Edie said, in a very loud voice, ‘The Maysles have created a classic!’” Maysles has long served as a teacher and mentor to young filmmakers. His sprawling production offices in Harlem house the Maysles Institute and a program called On Our Side, which has partnered with the Incarcerated Mothers Program to teach kids ages 8 to 12 how to create short videos of their lives. Maysles conducts workshops with the kids, teaching them technical skills as well as how to express themselves through filmmaking. He abhors much of commercial filmmaking, particularly television commercials, which he says is technically sophisticated but lacking in emotional or human elements. “They’re a visual jumble. It’s dehumanizing,” he says. “There’s no heart-to-heart connection.” After 50 years and some 36 films, Maysles is still seeking that connection. 16
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Organic arc BY Durier Ryan
Often relegated to the self-help section of the film enthusiast’s library, how-to books on screenwriting have been a little passé since Brian Cox played story guru Robert McKee in Adaptation. But a new book by a well-known Hollywood script consultant, Dara Marks, is shifting the how-to dialogue back toward the personal, character-driven ground historically called home by the indies. In Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc (Three Mountain Press, 2006), Marks argues that “the arc inside the arc” — the emotional journey that’s taken by the writer, the character and the audience all at once — is the actual essence of the story. “While the line of action tracks the protagonist’s engagement in an external conflict,” she writes, “the transformational arc tracks the protagonist’s internal struggle to rise to meet that external challenge by overcoming internal barriers.” While she describes her approach with a linear, three-act model (and supporting triangular diagrams) that recalls the work of her more mechanical predecessors, Marks eschews plot-driven tendencies in favor of a more organically evolved character arc, expanding on techniques such as finding the character’s “fatal flaw” and “turning theme into character.”“When a story is told without that sense of the main character’s personal growth,” she says, “it diminishes the quality of the human experience.” There’s a suggestive but respectful sensibility in her book; she stresses the ultimate importance of working structurally but encourages the writer, almost therapeutically, to explore what they don’t know in order to find the story’s natural form. “Independent filmmakers have an opportunity to look at the human condition in a more microscopic way that looks inward and tells a bigger story,” she says. For the writer or writer-director who’s writing specifically for a smaller budget, Marks notes that “the cheapest money you’ll spend is making sure that what you want to say is on paper before you start.”
PHOTO BY: MORGAN DOREMUS
REPORTS
meetings at the ifp market.
MARKET watch
BY pamela cohn
“The challenge is keeping up with who the new players are, where the new money is (if there is any), and who’s got it,” says Documentary Spotlight Programmer Milton Tabbot about the shifting sands of selling, marketing and distributing independent film these days. Hot on the heels of the Toronto International Film Festival, the annual IFP Market and Filmmaker Conference takes place every year in downtown Manhattan at the historic Puck Building. Right down the street from the Puck sits the Angelika Film Center, one of the premiere independent movie houses in the city. The theater hosts the week’s exhibition screenings and has receptions in its spacious, sun-filled lobby, while providing an alternative place to meet for talks between filmmakers and sales agents. Many of these filmmakers are also participants in other IFP programs like No Borders and the Rough Cut Lab, and during Market week, it’s not unusual for them to take as many as 20 meetings a day. As filmmaker Cathryne Czubek, director and cinematographer of the documentary A Girl and a Gun, says, “The advantage of pitching your project endlessly from one meeting to the next is that, by the end, it really helps you clearly envision your film and understand exactly what remains to be finished.” But as many filmmakers know, finishing is just the beginning. How to build and engage your audience directly, and the necessity of creating constantly new and effective ways to do that, was a huge topic in panel discussions, one-on-one meetings and casual conversations. IFP Executive Director Michelle Byrd says that the emphasis on the Market and Conference this year was to think about and help implement “more proactive ways of helping filmmakers engage future audiences well before they’re into production.” With DIY poster child M dot Strange (“YouTube was my film school”) blogging daily from a couch in the lounge and panel discussions on creating content for new platforms, 21stcentury film journalism, digital downloading and niche marketing, this year saw a strong presence of DIY-generation folk leading the charge toward new ways of making movies. There is still a sense that this sea change in the industry is being met with a bit of resistance from the more conservative old guard, but the creative and financial benefits of doing business on the Internet can be negated no longer. Despite the tidal wave of user-generated content and Web-based movie studio startups, the consensus among most attendees I spoke with was that this year’s Independent Film Week was permeated by the kind of creative juices that gets people excited. Danielle DiGiacomo, Documentary Film Coordinator for IndiePix, a New York-based distributor, commented, “This year’s IFP Market was — and I am not being hyperbolic — the most invigorating yet. The projects I came across were uniformly strong.... As well, the panels were thought-provoking, the highlight for me being the contentious, yet enormously important, documentary ethics discussion.” 18
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Documentary ethics was just one of dozens of subjects discussed formally at the conference. With close to 30 panel discussions, staged readings of the six scripts that were up for the Emerging Narrative Screenplay Award, a special preview screening and brunch put on by the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund, and seven hours of screenings every day, it was busy. Filmmakers Laura Murray and Misho Stawnychy, producers of Predator House, which got a lot of good buzz, said, “Before the Market, we had a very difficult time raising money and we were feeling disheartened. However we had such a positive reception last week that we find ourselves in a great position for raising finishing funds.” “What stood out to me most this year was that, due to having the strongest staff that we’ve ever had, all of what we do at IFP had a platform,” says Byrd looking back on the Market’s 29th year. “It was a blend of the [goals of the] organization’s founders with those of the current generation of new artists. The barrier between industry and filmmaker was very malleable and part of our plan for next year is to further sharpen this kind of integration.” A luncheon hosted by IFP’s Board of Directors was held during the event to honor the following 2007 prizewinners: The Adrienne Shelly Director’s Grant ($10,000 grant provided by The Adrienne Shelly Foundation and Artists Public Domain) went to Eunhee Cho for Inner Circle Line. The Emerging Narrative Screenplay Award ($5,000 grant provided by Artists Public Domain) went to Avi Weider’s script Zeroes and Ones. The Rising Star Award for Emerging Narrative Screenplay went to Nir Paniry, who received a production grant valued at $6,000 from Eastman Kodak for her script Kamikaze Dolls. The Fledgling Fund Award for Socially Conscious Documentaries ($10,000 grant) went to Landon Van Soest’s Good Fortune. The Fledgling Fund Award for Emerging Latino Filmmakers ($10,000 grant) went to Yolanda Pividal’s Tijuana, Nada Más. Panasonic Digital Filmmaking Grants (with a total in-kind value of $54,000) went to the following filmmakers: Frederic Collier for M&N, Sean Patrick McCarthy for Mohammed and Mary, Eric Lane for Murnur, Jennifer Sharp for Native Honkeys, Phillipp Wolter for The State of Being, Nena Eskridge for Stray, Paola Mendoza and Gloria LaMorte for We Can and Avi Weider for Zeroes & Ones.
COLUMNS
Five new films in postproduction. By Mary Glucksman PHOTO BY: MARTINA GEMMOLA
IN FOCUS August Wall Street is imploding in the month before September 11 while two brothers struggle to keep their dot-com going in August, the second feature from XX/XY director Austin Chick. “It captures a very specific time in New York after the Internet bubble burst but when [entrepreneurs] who were millionaires on paper continued to lead lavish lifestyles,” says Chick. “[The two brothers’] stock has been plummeting, and they have a month left before they can cash out. If they don’t find a way to generate revenue, it’s over.” Chick grew up in New Hampshire and studied art at Sarah Lawrence and film at SUNY Purchase. His feature debut, XX/XY, starred Mark Ruffalo, premiered at Sundance ’02 and sold to IFC Films. August’s screenplay was written by USC film school and writing division chair Howard A. Rodman (Savage Grace). Chick is making the equity-financed film with Original Media producers Charlie Corwin and Clara Marcowicz and 57th and Irving Productions’ Elisa Pugliese (The Cake Eaters). “Austin brought me the script and it came together fast,” says Corwin. “The images are iconic — it’s a story about hubris, a microcosm of a time in America when we were still riding the high from the dot-com explosion and felt indestructible as a nation.” The 35mm anamorphic August shot five weeks in New York in April and May with Andrij Parekh (Half Nelson) as d.p. Josh Hartnett and Adam Scott (The Matador) star and supporting cast includes David Bowie, Rip Torn and Naomie Harris (28 Days Later). Composer Nathan Larson (Dirty Pretty Things) is writing the score.
The Christians “It’s a story of spiritual dread somewhere between Children of Men and Eric Rohmer,” says Stephen Cone about The Christians. “It asks how far faith can take you in a world of doubt defined by global unease and constant fear.” Cone’s micro-budget film is a chilling drama about two Christian couples barricaded in a Chicago apartment following the release in the city of a biological weapon. When midnight comes and goes with no sign of the Rapture, says Cone, “[we see] what happens when their comfort zones crumble. They’re forced to consider each other as individuals as well as broth20
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Jace mclean and joe leonard’s sons of liberty.
ers and sisters in Christ. It’s a rare look at urban Christians as complex human beings with doubts and sex lives, and it’s as much chamber drama and dark comedy as thriller.” Cone grew up in South Carolina, where his dad was a Baptist minister. He graduated from the University of South Carolina with a theater degree in 2002, worked as a stage actor and playwright in New York, Utah and Chicago, and was twice a finalist for San Francisco’s Bay Area Playwrights Festival. He made his first short, Church Story, in 2005, and has the Iraqi War-widow tale Young Wives entering the fest circuit this fall. “I’ve been an aspiring filmmaker all my life, but I stumbled on playwriting and found satisfaction with it,” he says. “I’m inspired by the creativity of DIY projects from Mala Noche to Primer and the recent mumblecore films, but I didn’t want to make a movie about my friends and their lovers with a handheld DV cam and no lights. And I wasn’t willing to wait two or three years for a half million dollars, so I packed my own obsessions into one interior and added a bit of cash.” The high-def Christians shot two weeks in Chicago beginning August 17 with 2007 ASC Heritage Award winner Brian Melton as cinematographer. The film stars Arian Moayed (M.O.N.Y.), Rob Belushi (According to Jim),
Krissy Shield (2wks, 1yr) and newcomer Laurel Schroeder. The executive producer is Jason Stephens and is a Split Pillow/Cone Arts coproduction. Cone says he’ll follow Christians with a dark comedy about two middle-aged true believers taking off to share the Gospel with the lost souls of the adult-film industry.
Sons of Liberty Sons of Liberty is a comedy about three aimless and indulgent Los Angeles roommates — an actor, an analyst and an artist — and what happens when the Marine husband of one of their girlfriends returns from Afghanistan and prompts a sobering reality check. First-time filmmaker Jace McLean co-directs Sons of Liberty with his long-time short-film collaborator Joe Leonard, and he wrote the script with significant input from Leonard and producer Jared Parsons. Like the film’s characters, the three are roommates. “With all of us turning 30, we’re of that generation,” McLean says. “[The film] is about seeing the bigger picture and where you fit into it, but rather than being didactic we wanted to sneak up and tap you on the shoulder.” McLean is an accomplished stage actor, with dozens of credits from productions at the Actors’ Studio, the Flea Theater and the Ensemble
david boyle’s white on rice.
Studio Theater, as well as a B.A. in political science from Wheaton College in Illinois. Leonard got an undergraduate degree in film from NYU in 2002 and worked as director’s assistant and assistant editor on The Architect and The Great New Wonderful before moving to L.A. to develop a feature version of his award-winning short How I Got Lost, which he plans to shoot this winter. The three filmmakers have worked on each other’s projects since meeting 10 years ago in the East Village; the micro-budget Liberty is the first feature from the L.A. film collective Blatantly Subtle Productions, which they recently founded as the creative arm of a breadand-butter post division. The HD Liberty shot for three weeks in and around Los Angeles last February with Chris Chambers as cinematographer. The cast includes Benjamin Seay (Veronica Mars), Peter Kenney (Nash Bridges), Jack Guzman (Heroes) and Sarah Deakins (The Dead Zone).
True Adolescents “It’s about masculinity, responsibility and identity and making peace with what you can be rather than what you’ve always dreamed of,” says Craig Johnson about his first feature, True Adolescents, a coming-of-age comedy that’s also his thesis project for NYU’s grad film program. The Seattle-set story stars filmmaker Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair) as a drifting indie rocker who finally grows up when he reluctantly agrees to take his 14year-old cousin camping and ends up putting his life on the line to keep the kid safe. “I’m 22
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trying to make a film that’s not only wildly funny but harrowing, poignant and ultimately uplifting,” says Johnson. Johnson, 31, grew up near Seattle doing community theater with a teenage Hilary Swank and worked on some 15 stage projects there as writer, director or actor after graduating from the University of Washington with a theater degree. “We were laboring intensively to make work that played to tiny audiences, and I wanted to take a stab at having a greater impact,” he says, “so I rolled the dice and went to film school.” He’s making Adolescents with fellow NYU grad film student Thomas Woodrow, 29, who won the school’s prestigious Craft Award two years in a row for producing before graduating last year and being hired as one of several producers on Shadows, made by NYU prof Milcho Manchevski (Before the Rain). Woodrow brought Gill Holland on board as exec producer and raised Adolescents’ under $1 million budget through private investments. The Super 16mm Adolescents shot four weeks in Seattle and the area’s Cascades woods and Olympic Peninsula beach beginning August 11, with another recent NYU MFA film grad, Kat Westergaard (Day On Fire), as d.p. On the recommendation of adviser Miguel Arteta, the film hired casting directors Meg Morman and Sunday Boling to help find the boys (newcomers Bret Loehr and Carr Thompson); Melissa Leo and doc director Linas Phillips (Walking to Werner) have supporting roles.
White on Rice “Hollywood movies promote a lot of misconceptions about Japanese culture,” says David Boyle (Big Dreams Little Tokyo) about his second feature, White on Rice. “I wanted to make a film about characters who happen to be Asian, where their ethnicity is secondary to their personalities and the specifics of the story.” The offbeat comedy tells the story of a shy 40-year-old Japanese man new to the U.S. sharing a bedroom with his Americanized 10-year-old nephew and what happens when both are smitten with a delicate young beauty who comes to stay. Hiroshi Watanabe (Letters From Iwo Jima) stars in a role Boyle wrote for him after working with him on Big Dreams. Boyle, 25, grew up in Tucson and studied Japanese culture and literature at Brigham Young University. The San Jose/Salt Lake City–shot Dreams premiered at the AFI fest in 2006 and drew frequent comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite for its sly humor and Boyle’s deft presence in a leading role requiring him to emote in two languages. “I grew up loving filmmakers like Truffaut and Jacques Tati,” he says. “As a kid I found that the process of reading subtitles made a moviegoing experience much richer.” Rice reteams Boyle with Dreams producer Duane Anderson, also editor on both features. The Super 16mm film shot in Salt Lake City for five weeks beginning June 20 with AFI grad Bill Otto (Big Dreams) as d.p. The cast includes Big Dreams costars James Kyson Lee (Heroes), Pepe Serna (Scarface), Mio Takada (Conan O’Brien) and Lynn Chen (Saving Face). The juvenile lead is Salt Lake City local hire Justin Kwong. PiL (Public Image Ltd.) guitarist Mark Schultz — more recently composer on Big Dreams and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane — is writing Rice’s score, and the film should be done in early 2008.t
contact information
PHOTO BY: AMOS JAMES
COLUMNS
■ August
Charlie Corwin
[email protected]
■ The Christians
Stephen Cone
[email protected]
■Sons of Liberty
Jace McLean
[email protected]
■ True Adolescents
Thomas Woodrow
[email protected]
■ White on Rice
David Boyle
[email protected]
COLUMNS
INDUSTRY BEAT Poor documentary filmmakers. As if it weren’t already difficult enough to follow a subject for years on end, log hundreds of hours of footage, scrape together financing from grants, relatives and broadcasters and craft an amazing nonfiction opus, the Academy Awards don’t want you. Ever since they were announced earlier this year, the new — and seemingly annual — changes in the Oscars’ qualifications for documentary films have sparked debate on indie film blogs and at nonfiction film festivals around the world. Some aspects of the modifications have been embraced; others have been criticized. But one thing’s for sure: Oscar’s new demands — and the subsequent outcry — show just how much the stakes for documentaries have grown in the marketplace. The most profound alteration is that in addition to a seven-day qualifying run in New York or Los Angeles before August 31 — with films requiring two screenings daily between the hours of noon and 10 p.m. (eliminating popular earlier start times of the past) — films must also complete a multistate rollout of 14 engagements, of at least three consecutive days, in 10 or more states, by November 15. The new theatrically intense requirements are a result of the Academy’s mandate “to evaluate films in a theatrical world as opposed to the television world,” argues Ric Robertson, the Academy’s executive administrator. “One of the reasons the rules are so convoluted is to make sure that a film has legitimate theatrical credentials. We don’t want to do anything that opens the floodgates. Too many entries don’t help us either.” But in trying to winnow out nonfiction small fries, the Academy is eliminating films based primarily on economic criteria, not aesthetic quality. As Academy member and distributor Ira Deutchman contends, “It’s the best documentary that should win the award, not the richest filmmaker.” “This year the changes were profound and change the economics of the game completely,” echoes Mark Urman, head of distribution for THINKFilm, which is qualifying some six films for the category this year. Among the chief costs for a documentary film not delivered on 16mm or 35mm film is an up-res process to meet Digital Cinema specifications (23.98i) for the one-week 24
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Indie docs struggle to satisfy Oscar. By Anthony Kaufman
ricki stern and annie sundberg’s the devil came on horseback.
qualifying run (approximately $8,000). Then there’s the expenditure to fund the 14-city rollout, which, contradictorily, doesn’t require any technical minimums (theaters could show films on DVD). The price tag for such a release, depending on chosen format, advertising and marketing, ranges dramatically, however. Teddy Leifer, producer of We Are Together, an inspirational account of a South African orphanage, says he’s hired veteran indie Shadow Distribution to take the film out for a price tag of about $12,000 to qualify the film entirely separate from a planned commercial rollout. “There are companies that I know that charge $10,000 for the week and another $20,000 for the 14-city run,” he says. Many filmmakers choose to qualify with the help of the International Documentary Association’s DocuWeek, an exhibition program aimed specifically at meeting all Academy requirements. But the curated DocuWeek program is also expensive. (Entry fees cost $75.00; if selected, feature selections pay up to a $3,500 co-op fee and, if they don’t have a print, another $8,000 to 10,000 for the Digital Projection up-res, plus another $5,000 for the 14-city rollout.) IDA executive director Sandra Ruch complains that the digital requirement is not only costly for filmmakers but prohibitive because the movie theaters that show docs don’t have projectors suited to the format. “So we have to bring in our own equipment to great expense,” she says, putting the price tag of the machines at $16,000.
“It’s an unrealistic standard,” says Film Forum programmer Mike Maggiore. “And an unnecessary expense that seems out of touch with the way in which the majority of documentaries are shown digitally in theaters.” Ira Deutchman, whose Emerging Pictures theater chain has helped qualify at least one feature doc, The Cats of Mirikitani, calls the tech specifications “so ludicrous that it doesn’t make sense.” “We recognize that it’s a problem,” says AMPAS’s Robertson, who explains that the digital requirement is all about “striking that balance between setting a high standard and not penalizing the independent documentary maker.” Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, co-directors of The Devil Came on Horseback, used DocuWeek to qualify their previous film, The Trials of Darryl Hunt, but this time around they’ve decided to treat their qualifying run as a legitimate theatrical release. Using money from investors, they’ve funded a release through International Film Circuit, which they feel is far superior to what DocuWeek supplies. “They’re not geared to grow a theatrical release,” says Sundberg. “If your film does well out of DocuWeek, there’s no ability to capitalize on that.” Still, even though their film performed healthily in release and they cite the likelihood that they’ll make their money back, Stern admits the reality of getting your doc on screens is extremely difficult. Even an established indie distrib like Magnolia Pictures, see page 109
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FEST CIRCUIT
Reports from Toronto, Venice and Edinburgh.
Toronto International Film Festival Howard Feinstein
All right, you do spend most of your time in a shopping-mall multiplex. And the facades on the busy streets of Yorkville are brutal at night — their harsh lights are not kind to a festivalgoer short on sleep. I might also add, two nights in a row I went to eateries that precooked their hamburgers — a cardinal offense! But as a festival, Toronto (September 6-15) is a godsend. It is so all-inclusive that Venice is dispensable (I stopped going three years ago) and Cannes might be for those who don’t need to see its offerings right away (I do). Most of the good movies in the New York Film Festival, barely two weeks later, have already screened in Toronto. It is one-stop shopping and so well-organized, especially for the press, and the industry and staff are so nice. (Confession: The smoothness of it all makes me want to hit someone, or at least yank their hair. I can’t find the rupture I require.) In fact, the festival is so large — 350 films — that writing a coherent article summing it up is near impossible. As I look at the litany of titles I viewed in one week, several common themes and genres emerge. I’ll try to tackle this mountain from those angles. (I will not use up too much space on films I blogged about on Filmmaker’s Web site or those I wrote about in the magazine’s wrap piece on Cannes). And if I succeed in finding some organizing principles, I’m going to treat myself to a burger at New York’s Corner Bistro — and I’m going to watch them cook it. THE MUSLIM WORLD AND ITS DIASPORA Canadians are generally more open-minded than their southern neighbors, so an abundance of progressive, politically oriented films at the festival is the norm. Not surprisingly, Islam plays a part in many of them. In the brilliant Battle for Haditha, Nick Broomfield restages the events, many as banal as life itself, leading up to, including and occurring after the massacre of 24 civilians by vindictive American soldiers in Iraq on November 19, 2005. It followed an explosion by an IED planted in the road by paid insurgents more mercenary than ideological. Broomfield composes and edits efficiently and dramatically, often with a handheld camera, leaving the focus on the as26
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Tom mccarthy’s the visitor.
sorted characters, be they Iraqi lovers and their families, the insurgents, their dogmatic bosses or troubled young American GIs. Known primarily as a doc-maker, the director makes you feel the sounds and smells of an Iraq where everyone is afraid of someone. Broomfield addresses the requisite military cover-up, as does Brian De Palma in Redacted. The crime here is the rape/murder of a 15-yearold girl and the killing of her family in Samarra, a vendetta by overtly racist American soldiers (who De Palma unfortunately makes into psychos) following the loss of a buddy. Unable to move forward from his usual gloss, the ex-master of neo-Hitchcockian suspense and atmosphere, after a flirtation with Eurotrash flicks, now fakes a doc. The effort is fraught with fraud and overacted. As usual in his body of work, everything is mediated: A soldier is making a video diary, we see checkpoint harassment as part of a faux French doc within the film, and De Palma conveys way too much info via computer screens and other electronic devices. It’s like having plate glass between your nose and fresh cuisine: You smell nothing. Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor, Parvez Sharma’s A Jihad for Love, and Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis, from France, give visibility to other Muslims, many of who are on an immigration track. In The Visitor, one of the finest films at the festival, a soulful young Syrian player of the djembe, a kind of drum, is ethnically profiled in a New York City subway station and busted, detained in a windowless Queens detention center, and ultimately de-
ported. (His girlfriend is an illegal alien from Senegal.) Casting Richard Jenkins as the Connecticut widower who helps him was a stroke of genius. Downplaying histrionics, Jenkins’s performance does not interfere with the realitybased drama of the one who really suffers. While a missed opportunity on account of incompetent direction and superficial investigation, A Jihad for Love does break new ground in profiling gays and lesbians in the hard-line Muslim world. Several of those Sharma speaks to are of necessity in exile: an Egyptian in Paris and two Iranians in Canada. Based on Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel, the clever, animated Persepolis surveys 20th-century Iranian history through her and her family’s experiences. Repression under the Shah (who was shored up by the U.S.) and under the Islamic revolutionaries has not made for a happy country. The parents of Marjane, her character, send her to study in Vienna, where she is often treated as an uncivilized outsider. Nostalgia gets the best of her and she returns home, only to leave again for France after a bad marriage and further political disillusionment. In Alexandra, by the Russian master Aleksandr Sokurov — arguably the best film of the year — an elderly Russian woman ventures to the breakaway Muslim province of Chechnya to visit her grandson, a soldier who lives in a makeshift military compound. She is haughty, difficult, and neurotic, but somehow she and the senior women of the nearby town, who have been through hell, bond over their com-
COLUMNS mon humanity. Sokurov seems to be asking isn’t Russian vs. Chechen, Orthodox vs. Muslim irrelevant at some primal human level? ALL ABOUT WOMEN Alexandra and Persepolis are two of the many Toronto films in which females occupy center stage. Toughest of all of these women is Angie, played by Kierston Wareing in a tour-deforce performance, in Ken Loach’s troubling It’s a Free World…. She is a feminine, platinum-blonde Barbie doll — in fact, slutty. And this character construction is not accidental: She’s also a working-class kid trying to better life for her son and herself in a stratified society and using whatever resources she can muster. She starts a business hiring out mostly illegal immigrants for low, and frequently unpaid, wages. Talking tough, she threatens them. She embodies the crass capitalism that has transformed the U.K. and exploits its new arrivals. Even though the workers turn on her, she manages to come out on top, a triumph for social Darwinism. Another survivor, if of better economic standing and possessed of a little more social conscience — oh, hell, she’s an aging actress, a total narcissist — is Silvia Perez’s Erni in Argentinean director Anahí Berneri’s Encarnación. When she desires sex, she rings the doorbell of a sometimes lover. She is in control — the fact that she refuses to accept a non-thesping job from him reinforces the point. And though she feels close to her teen niece in a provincial town, she doesn’t mind making waves during the girl’s quinceañera over her own sister and brother-in-law’s encroaching on a shared inheritance from their father. Despite a hasty departure, she leaves the niece the handsome local she’s had a fling with, even though she might like it to continue: She’s not without heart. Neither Angie nor Erni is as cold as Nicole Kidman’s title character in Noah Baumbach’s deftly directed Margot at the Wedding, about sisters who disagree on a choice of marriage partner for one ( Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Pauline). Kidman, whose newly unlined face provides a Kabuki cover suitable for the part, continues the Laura Linney role from The Squid and the Whale: the selfish, affectless, distant mother, a writer again, insensitive to her young son’s needs. If only Baumbach would advance from his seeming personal obsession with his own maternal line, his otherwise nifty scripts would benefit. Like people everywhere, some of the 28
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aleksandr sokurov’s alexandra.
women are weak. In Swedish filmmaker Åke Sandgren’s To Love Someone, a TVish look at the ambivalence a married woman experiences when her physically abusive ex-boyfriend gets out of the joint, the protagonist learns she has no control over her attraction — even though she has just been diagnosed with permanent brain damage from the pummeling her ex gave her a few years before. Yes, people vacillate, we can’t help whom and what we are attracted to, but there are limits. Sandgren stacks the deck: The lover is much better looking than she, and he never shows the intent to harm her again. In fact, she is responsible for pain inflicted on him and her husband. More egregious is Ludivine Sagnier’s sexy young Gabrielle in great Gallic director and misogynist Claude Chabrol’s A Girl Cut in Two. Not only does she allow herself to be treated like shit by her married lover, an elitist novelist 30 years her superior, but she testifies against his memory in order to cash in from the family of his killer, her superwealthy, onthe-rebound husband (and also a passive-aggressive sociopath). In spite of a final scene in which she plays a woman sawed in half on stage during a magic show, I do not have a clue what the title means. In fact, I do not have a clue why this film was made and why its atmosphere is so rarefied. Juliette Binoche stars in and waltzes through Israeli director Amos Gitai’s pretentious Disengagement. Never mind that the controversial Israeli pullout from Gaza occupies the backdrop that foregrounds an international star. In just the opposite vein, Belén Rueda (The Sea Inside) gradually moves to the center of Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona’s gothic The Orphanage. In spite of the movie’s plethora of psychological horror clichés — creaking doors, thunder, you name
it — the astonishing Rueda makes it bearable as a mother of an HIV positive child who disappears from the family’s new home, a huge seaside mansion that housed the orphanage in which she grew up. GENRE Though way overrated, The Orphanage is one of a number of genre films that thankfully round out the festival’s artier fare. Several are revisionist thrillers. The talented Serbian director Srdjan Golubovic’s The Trap is a superior suspenser embedded in the unpleasant political and economic realities of post-Milosevic Serbia. A man referred to as “ordinary” falls into extraordinary circumstances. It’s bad enough that the contracting company he works for will survive only if a foreign investor buys it, but his beloved only child requires heart surgery that can only be performed in Germany and is not covered by insurance. Out of desperation he hires himself out as an assassin — we assume it’s a political hit because several films with the theme of political killing have emerged from Belgrade in the past decade — but his murder plotting simply revolves around a noxious business rivalry, thus showing the mercenary crassness of the new Serbia. Also a variation on the classic suspense film is Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur’s Jar City, one of the finds of the festival. It is an original concoction with shades of Hitchcock that interweaves a detective’s harried investigation of a murder in the present with a closed case involving a child’s death 30 years before. Kormákur has one of the best eyes in filmmaking today. Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a studiolike hybrid of the gangster and family genres, a tale of disparate siblings so in need of cash that they hire a thug to rob their own mother.
Typically for Lumet, it is set in New York City. The direction is fine, but it becomes mannered. Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke are excellent as the brothers. Reinventing film noir is a thankless task: Already a parody of the German Expressionism that flourished in the teens and ’20s, the genre is intentionally exaggerated in plot and design. Hungarian Béla Tarr succeeds in borrowing from it in The Man From London because the story contained in this adaptation of a Georges Simenon novel melds well with Tarr’s own propensity for black-and-white, shadows, posing and extreme behavior. Ira Sachs fails in Married Life, however, because his color neo-noir about two friends and the femme fatale they share is a well made but empty exercise in mere style. UNCATEGORIZABLE BUT HIGHLY RECOMMENDED It’s a “small” film, but The Pope’s Toilet, by Uruguayan directors Enrique Fernández and César Charlone, is a funny satire based on the Pope’s actual visit to the poor village of Melo in 1988. A small-time smuggler who gets around on a bicycle decides that building a usable toilet for the expected throngs will earn him the money to send his daughter to school in Montevideo. You feel you are in the world of peasants: the barbecues, the relationships within families, the connection with community. The Pope comes and goes quickly, causing all of the town’s investors — in food and drink vending, mostly — to lose their asses. As if the Catholic Church hasn’t beaten them down enough. From neighboring Argentina comes Lucía Puenzo’s XXY, a “little” movie that’s a finely drawn portrait of an intersexed teen whose gender identification is called into question. Like its protagonist, the film defies classification. I also can’t put a label on New Yorkbased Lee Isaac Chung’s Munyurangabo, an amazingly accomplished if low-budget rendering of the friendship between two Rwandan boys, a Hutu and a Tutsi, and their increased awareness of the enmity they are supposed to feel toward each other 12 years after the genocide. I don’t know what to call Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an exquisitely drawn portrait of a man with lockedin syndrome who can communicate, and even writes a book, only by batting an eye. The visuals are unforgettable, and this story of an immobile man moves. Gus Van Sant’s see page 110 FILMMAKER SUMMER 2007
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COLUMNS
LOAD & PLAY
Filmmaker’s look at the season’s DVD releases.
The Films of Kenneth Anger, Volume 2
Fantoma Films, October 2
Not a moment too soon comes the follow-up to Fantoma Films’ first collection of Kenneth Anger’s legendary short films. Again, the pristine new transfers, informative full-color booklet and extras make this essential to any Anger fan, and indeed, any aspiring filmmaker. This round-up of his later shorts are nothing short of stunning, even today. Scorpio Rising sure didn’t look like this when I saw it at film school! — André Salas
Manufactured Landscapes Zeitgeist Films, November 20 Directed by Jennifer
QUEUE IT Titles coming out this season that caught our eye. October 9 BLACK SHEEP
The Weinstein Company
MAN PUSH CART
Baichwal, this reflective meditation on how Earth’s natural environment has been manipulated and destroyed by the industrial power of mankind is stunningly photographed by Edward Burtynsky. The documentary’s main focus is on China, with scenes set at shipyards where old oil tankers are destroyed, toxic recycling centers that comprise half the world’s discarded computers (referred to as “e-waste”) and massive-sized factories where workers endlessly toil on tedious assembly lines. It’s often bleak and depressing, yet the filmmakers don’t condemn the situation but instead reveal the inevitable heartbreak of new-age industry on China’s once beautiful landscapes. — Jeffrey Kunze
Koch Lorber Films Releasing
Blade Runner: Five Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition
Paramount Home Video
Warner Bros., December 18 Hardcore fans will spring for this collector’s edition, which touts
THINKFilm
Ridley Scott’s new “Final Cut” of the film, the 1991 Director’s Cut, the international cut, the original theatrical cut and a never-before-seen workprint. Also included is the new film Dangerous Days, a comprehensive documentary which includes interviews with Harrison Ford who, until now, has not spoken publicly about the film. On disc-four fans will find an “Enhancement Archive” chocked full of new featurettes, trailers and other unique treats. For a little extra, you can purchase the DVDs in a “Deckard” briefcase which contains productions stills, toys and a personal letter from Ridley Scott. — Benjamin Crossley-Marra
October 23 BREATHLESS
THE TREATMENT New Yorker Films
YOU KILL ME IFC Films
October 16 CRAZY LOVE
Magnolia Home Entertainment
A MIGHTY HEART
THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT
The Criterion Collection
FIDO
Lionsgate
October 30 JOHN WATERS: THIS FILTHY WORLD Dokument Films
TWIN PEAKS: THE DEFINITIVE GOLD BOX EDITION
PHOTO BY: THE CRITERION COLLECTION
In the Spring ’97 issue of Filmmaker we asked a group of Directors to pay tribute to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With the release of his 15 1/2-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz from Criterion in November we look back on Harmony Korine’s thoughts on the late German master. It is known that Fassbinder’s ninth favorite actor was Zeppo Marx. Anthony Quinn’s sixth favorite artist is Velazquez. In In a Year of Thirteen Moons, a crossdresser (Volker Spengler) takes a stroll through a slaughterhouse where cows are destroyed. This reminds me of Anthony Quinn’s face. In 1972, Fassbinder made a film called Jailbait about a 14-year-old girl who falls in love with an older boy. When her parents find out that their daughter’s hymen has been busted they have a private conversation: Mother: The Nazi had their faults. Father: I would rather 100,000 Jews murdered than this happen to us! It is also a well-known fact that Fassbinder used to whore out his actresses for the purposes of financing his films. In an interview Fassbinder mentioned that for one year straight he used to walk around with a copy of Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz in his back pocket, but this got me upset because the book is extremely thick, well over 600 pages, and his pants at the time were very tight. There was no possible way the book could have fit. It was around this time that I lost interest in Fassbinder. Also, berlin alexanderplatz. Douglas Sirk makes me sick. You can find Filmmaker’s take on upcoming DVD releases at filmmaker.com/loadandplay. 30
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Paramount Home Video
WE ARE THE STRANGE Ryko Distribution
November 6 FOUR SHEETS TO THE WIND First Look Home Entertainment
November 13 DECEIT THINKFilm
PARIS JE T’AIME
First Look Home Entertainment
November 20 COLMA: THE MUSICAL Lionsgate
GHOSTS OF CITÉ SOLEIL THNKFilm
THE LADY VANISHES The Criterion Collection
November 27 THE NAMESAKE 20th Century Fox
VITUS
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
December 4 THE HOTTEST STATE THINKFilm
December 18 THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT Zeitgeist Films
COLUMNS
THE SUPER 8 1
Eight things that will keep you in the know.
1 One Sheets To celebrate the influential artistic vision of two recently-deceased directing legends, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, the Posteritati gallery in downtown New York City is holding a special exhibit showcasing a compilation of posters from their diverse, half-century careers, including such iconic classics as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and Blow-Up. The exhibit will be held Oct. 2-Jan. 31, 2008 and is a mustsee for any appreciative fan of art and cinema. For further info, visit posteritati.com. 2 HD Tips For those of you that don’t want to keep buying $30 books every time a new digital advancement comes along, head over to Mike Curtis’s HD for Indies Web site (hdforindies.com) for the latest updates in the high-def world. The site has tips and tricks on postproduction, cinematography and just about anything one would want to know about HD production. There are also interviews and podcasts of top industry professionals discussing the latest advancements in HD. And Curtis is readily available to answer questions. 3 Earth Cinema Circle With several filmmakers going green, it was inevitable that a company would come along offering a way to spread their message to like-minded citizens. Enter Earth Cinema Circle, a new eco-friendly subscription-based DVD club launching in January. Members of the EEC will receive three to six films every other month on such hot button issues as endangered wildlife, eco-travel and a gamut of other important topics. For more information visit earthcinemacircle.com. PHOTO COURTESY OF: EDWYNN HOUK GALLERY, NEW YORK
4 Danny Lyon Show On display at the Whitney Museum Sept. 7-Dec. 2 is a retrospective of Danny Lyon’s work in film and photography. Lyon championed the “New Journalism” movement, in which he became a participant in the subject that he was studying, starting in the 1960s. His work projects an intensive study of different social situations, such as the Civil Rights Movement in the south and a breakdown of the prison system in Texas. 5 OurStage.com
This site serves as an open forum for aspiring filmmakers and musicians to upload their work to be viewed and voted on by fans. There is a catch though: The top-rated filmmakers and musicians receive a special one-on-one session with established figures such as John Cameron Mitchell, Ryan Fleck and John Legend, who give advice on how to start out and maintain success in the ever competitive entertainment business.
6 The Filmmaker’s Handbook The cornerstone for film 101 courses across the United States, The Filmmaker’s Handbook (Plume, 2007) has just come out in a new edition, which includes updated information on the latest digital advancements. This text has received glowing reviews throughout the years and has led many film instructors to refer to it as the “Filmmaking Bible.” Authored by film professors Steven Ascher and Edward Pincus, the book includes information on everything from preproduction to distribution.
4
7 Toon Boom Studio 4
Described as an “all-in-one” animation program, Toon Boom provides many advantages for a young filmmaker starting out in this field. Choose from drawing your work digitally, scanning hand-drawn animations or quickly and easily importing existing artwork. This new version gives the artist additional abilities such as lip-syncing your animation, setting up action in 3D space and allowing you to format and display your creations on the Internet, TV or even iPod. To get all the technical details, plus free video tutorials and examples of what others have done so far with this progressive software, check out toonboom.com.
8 Brad Neely Anyone who’s seen Brad Neely’s hip-hop history lesson about George 7 32
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Washington — a cult hit on YouTube — can attest to the cartoonist’s unique genius. Alongside reinterpretations of Sodom and Gomorrah and the life of JFK, he has recorded Wizard People, Dear Readers an adult version of the first Harry Potter movie’s soundtrack which can be played while the movie is on mute. See these and more at creasedcomics.
a jigs w THE
MAN
Todd Haynes examines the life and mythology of Bob Dylan in i’m not there. By Howard Feinstein
Todd Haynes’s first film, a 1985 student short called Assassins: A Film Concerning Rimbaud, focused in a manner both engaging and Brechtian on the anarchistic French poet who scandalized the bourgeoisie in 19th-century Paris and London. Haynes was studying semiotics and art at Brown, and it’s not by chance that he is one of the few directors working today whose gorgeous images are wrapped in real but sometimes indefinable meaning. Now 22 years later in his magnificent film essay on Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, he casts the English actor Ben Whishaw as a Rimbaudesque incarnation of the chameleon-like composer-singer, a poète maudit whose oblique responses to an unseen interrogator intentionally sidestep direct discourse. Whishaw’s 34
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Arthur (the poet’s actual first name) is a rebel living outside the system, much as Dylan, in all his incarnations, has managed to do since the late 1950s. The musician also went through a phase (following his political activism period) of doling out tangential, sometimes nonsensical, responses to queries. You can read some of these in Nat Hentoff ’s revealing interview with the usually guarded Dylan in the February 1966 issue of Playboy (interferenza. com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm), which Haynes kindly lead me to. A sample: DYLAN: My older songs, to say the least, were about nothing. The newer ones are about the same nothing — only as seen inside a bigger thing, perhaps called the nowhere.
But this is all very constipated. I do know what my songs are about. PLAYBOY: And what’s that? DYLAN: Oh, some are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about 11 or 12. PLAYBOY: Can’t you be a bit more informative? DYLAN: Nope. But then, all of Haynes’s cinematic studies have been about people who fall outside the margins of general acceptability: young, future-gay Richie in Dottie Gets Spanked; the eponymous anorexic in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story; each of the protagonists in the three dark segments of Poison, Julianne Moore’s environmentally allergic housewife
PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK cate blanchett in I’m Not there.
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in Safe; Jonathan Rhys-Myers’s glam rocker in Velvet Goldmine; and Dennis Quaid’s closeted gay husband and father in Far From Heaven. He has addressed celebrity culture in Dottie, Superstar, and Goldmine — not to mention Assassins. Isn’t Dylan a logical subject for Haynes to tackle now at his most mature and accomplished? Whishaw is one of six thesps portraying characters — an überAlienation Effect — who are all aspects of Dylan, a man who reinvented himself frequently and who drove fans desperate to pigeonhole him nuts and angry. I’m Not There, from a song recorded during the 1967 Basement Tapes sessions with The Band and circulated only in bootleg copies, is the perfect title for the film, as you can see in Hentoff ’s interview: PLAYBOY: Writing about “beard-wearing draft-card burners and pacifist income-tax evaders,” one columnist called such protesters “no less outside society than the junkie, the homosexual or the mass murderer.” DYLAN: I don’t consider myself outside of anything. I just consider myself not around. Sometimes I have the feeling that other people want my soul. Dylan’s different personas are embodied in Haynes’s film by a young black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin, the only actor who does his own singing, as Woody), a woman (Cate Blanchett as Jude), and several adult males (Christian Bale as Jack and Pastor John; Heath Ledger as Robbie; and Richard Gere as Billy). Each represents a relatively distinct period and/or aspect of Dylan the man: the folk singer, the activist, the electric guitarist, the misogynist and failed husband, the Pentecostal, and the country-and-western aficionado. Haynes attaches particular songs sung by both Dylan himself and various cover bands to each. If the black-and-white and color I’m Not There (The Weinstein Company opens the film in limited release November 21) needs to be categorized, I would use the term “non36
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PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK
“i actually don’t think my concept is imposing some big interpretation on [dylan] once you really examine his life.”
co-writer-director todd haynes and charlotte gainsbourg on the set of I’m Not there.
naturalistic collage,” though that is misleading. Naturalistic sequences do creep in next to those constructed from artifice and fantasy. Yet the film is more than mere collage: The complexity of its construction boggles the mind. Haynes and his team utilize distinct film genres, costumes, and set designs for each of the characters, with just the right Dylan song performed at just the right moment. This is less Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, where different actors portrayed one character, than the documentaries of Holland-based Heddy Honigmann, who frequently links particular objects or songs to the people she interviews in her films. Fortunately for Haynes, Dylan’s son Jesse, who introduced the director’s work to his dad, served well as a gatekeeper. After watching Haynes’s earlier films, the elder Dylan gave him the music rights. (One condition was that Haynes also create a stage version, which was ultimately done by Twyla Tharp as The Time’s They Are A-Changin’). It’s not surprising that one artist recognized not only the talent but the similar life passages in another. It is appropriate, then, that we begin the interview, done during the Toronto Film Festival, by discussing a makeover in the director’s own life occurring after his 2000 move from New York to Oregon. You moved to Portland from New York City in 2000. I’ve read about a connection between you and Dylan at that time — listening to his music, identifying with him.
Is that true? It’s all really true. I don’t know what happened. I kind of crashed in New York. I was in Williamsburg the whole time I was there, for 15 years. I was basically having life disappointments and romantic disappointments at the end of the millennium. After Velvet Goldmine, I took a break from films. I read all of Proust over a year and a half. I was depressed and sick of New York. There I am recognized and can only be “Todd the filmmaker.” I thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to get out of New York.” I just didn’t know that I needed something else, really, until I saw it in a smaller city. My sister lives in Portland, and she told me there was a place free for three months. I drove out there almost without stopping and stayed in this beautiful Victorian house. I felt good. I met fantastic people there. It’s just a fantastic place. I let go of that guarded thing I felt in New York. I took hikes, smoked pot. Then I found out I lost my Williamsburg apartment, so I stayed. More people in the world are living in second cities than ever before, apparently. So, did Dylan keep reinventing himself, or did we keep reinventing Dylan? That’s a good question considering how deeply Dylan’s followers invest and interpret him. But I think Dylan is the active party in the process of reinvention. Too many of his changes have been met with too much resistance or confusion over the years — plugging-in electric and converting to Christianity, to name two biggies — for me to see it any other way. I
actually don’t think my concept is imposing some big interpretation on him once you really examine his life. Can you say a bit about the “Dylan” you see for each of the six main characters? Woody is the young, aspiring Dylan under the spell of Woody Guthrie’s music and character. Arthur is Dylan the poet, rebelling against coherent political intent and responding to his offscreen interrogators in Dylanisms from his famous ‘65 interviews. Jack is clearly the early folk prophet of 1962-64, and Pastor John the born-again Dylan of 1979-81. Robbie is Dylan balancing fame and a private life, incorporating aspects of his early ’60s relationship with Suze Rotolo with that of his marriage to, and divorce from, Sarah Lowndes (1966-76). Jude is the electric Dylan, born at the famous Newport performance in ‘65 and dying with his motorcycle crash in 1966. Billy is Dylan in exile, which began in Woodstock following his crash, and his turning to roots-inspired music (The Basement Tapes), Bible-infused secular music (John Wesley Harding) and country (Nashville Skyline) — let alone his part in Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. In many ways, Dylan’s retreat from the pulse of modern life that he experienced in the ’60s has never really ended. Can you tell me something about your deployment of artifice as a vehicle in your film? In Velvet Goldmine, the use of artifice was all upfront, but here it is kind of a mix. The whole question of America’s fixation on notions of authenticity is such a fascinating and delusional kind of infatuation. When you
look at the pillars of this, people like Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, you find at the root of it such performance, such adoption of the kind of gestures and emblems of what the grassroots experience is supposed to be. Woody Guthrie basically fathered it as a racket. You know, he was a very educated New Yorker, an intellectual guy, but he gets back on the road and he has to do the “aw, shucks” hick show for his fan base. He was aware of it and talked about it. And Dylan too, when he heard that Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s real name was really Elliott Charles Adnopoz, some [ Jewish] kid like himself, but from Brooklyn, and he was
the first real spokesperson of the followers of the Woody Guthrie line, he just fell into hysterics, rolling on the floor in some bar in Greenwich Village. It was like, “Bob, what’s so funny?” and he just couldn’t answer. Bowie was the one who said, “It’s the person who does it second that counts.” I love the way Greil Marcus looks at America’s folklore and its roots [in his books]. He basically looks at America as a place where reinventing yourself is primary. It was a new world where your past, your bloodline, your caste, your class were all the things that were the first to go. It was almost required to adopt a persona. So when Marcus talks about roots
HOW THEY DID IT ■ Production Format: 35mm, Super 8mm, Super 16mm, HDCAM. ■ Camera: Moviecm Compact. ■ FILM Stock: Kodak 5218, 5279, 5205 and 5274. (Black and White) Plus-X 5231 and XX-5222. ■ Editing System: Avid. ■ Color Correction: Cinebyte Digital Inc. was the DI facility used for I’m Not There. There were multiple formats used to create the different looks in the film. We got HDCAM, D BETA and BETA SP tapes that held Super 8mm transfers, still photos and stock footage. We also received Super 16mm film in both color and black and white and 35mm in both color and black and white. The 16mm and 35mm film elements were scanned on our Northlight scanner, super sampled at 6K resolution and then down sampled to the working resolution of 2K. The video images were transferred to digital information using our in house proprietary software. All images, once conformed to the edit decision list, were made available to the Baselight color grader. Once the film was graded to Todd and d.p. Ed Lachman’s satisfaction, and all of the main and end titles were incorporated, along with all of the digital opticals, the film was then shot on the Arrilaser film recorder.
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PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK marcus carl Franklin in I’m Not There.
“these characters are trying desperately to escape these projections that are coming from us.” music and looks at the origins of American folklore, he sees it as a process of masks, of adopting guises and personas, not as the validation of some authentic core about “who we are.” I think Dylan is the subject of such a desire for authentic justification and validation in peoples’ deep identification with him. They want to find some stable truth in the guy. But his actual practice as an artist and his lived history as this ever-changing and elusive figure suggests exactly the opposite. But he keeps stoking that desire all the more because he doesn’t fulfill it. The occasional facial blowups behind characters remind me of the concept of the dream screen. They go well with the film. Probably not many people will think consciously about this, but I see them as larger-than-life projections of dreams. Definitely. I just wanted the sense of the projected image of a character to start to become this oppressive and sort of autonomous commenting source, sort of looming over these characters, like when Jude is starting to turn on his cohort. I thought it was about us too, as spectators — our projections. Absolutely. That’s what this whole thing is about. These artists, these characters are trying desperately to escape these projections that are coming from us. 38
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I read that you watched a bunch of films from the ’60s. One you mentioned was Fellini’s 8½. Are there other films or filmmakers that you thought about when you were doing this film? Oh yeah, totally. I wanted each story to have a distinct look. I felt that the palette of the film, the range of references, should all belong to the ’60s, At least, I limited myself to that. It’s the decade that produced Dylan and that he defined for so many people. 8½ was a pretty easy discovery and a film that’s been referenced many times, but it seems to get to the core of something that the Blonde on Blonde era
GO BACK & WATCH ■ Don’t Look Back D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary on the free-wheelin’ Bob Dylan follows him to Britain where he sheds his identity as the voice of a folk generation by electrifying his act and confusing all his fans.
■ PETULIA Richard Lester’s 1968 drama is a kalidoscopic look at the ‘60s seen through the story of a divorced doctor (George C. Scott) having an affair with a kooky married socialite (Julie Christie).
■ Hedwig and the Angry Inch John Cameron Mitchell’s 2001 musical about a transsexual German rocker takes the theme of fractured identity (national, sexual, anatomical, metaphysical, etc.) as its glamkicking premise.
was about, that Dylan was about, stylistically and definitely in the literal, biographical predicament that he was in: being hounded for his meaning and being questioned why he was not doing what he used to do. Jean-Luc Godard is really the keynote for the Robbie story, the Heath Ledger story, those films from the mid-’60s like Masculin, Feminin, and the color ones I love like Two or Three Things I Know About Her. They are also curiously symptomatic of a kind of male prerogative view of women from the ’60s that I found to be a really useful vehicle for talking about Dylan and his checkered relationship with women, or at least an attitude toward women, depicting women in his songs in a way that has been questioned in some places. He’s written some of the most beautiful love songs, but, as with Godard, there are the more political and complex discussions they are kind of exempt from, you know, so that – Women become commodities. Yeah. In the ’60s, they were the ones bringing in the coffee. Totally, exactly. And then a penny dropped, and you get women’s and gay lib following in the early ’70s. It’s nice that you round him out in this way. Oh, yeah. He’s too interesting to not do that. The amazing thing was that Jeff Rosen, Dylan’s manager, who was sort of our link to everything, was open to all of this and let that coexist in the film with everything else. By the way, and I think I know the answer — which of your talking heads is closest to Joan Baez, Dylan’s ex-lover and friend? Julianne [Moore]. Yeah, she’s really kinda doing a Joan Baez, in her lingo. Yeah, but not a passive, victimized Joan Baez, which I like. Yeah, yeah. It’s probably one of the ballsiest roles Julianne has ever played in any of my movies. She’s kinda like a little resentful — she has a real ego, you know. We just cracked each other up. She had to send me out of the room when we did her scenes. When you would use a song or write a sequence in the script, which came first, or did it just depend? Rarely would just a song determine an entire scene. I was basically constructing the film based on the idea that it’s almost like the characters were these vials that I would be filling with references from Dylan’s work, from Dylan’s influences, from the political and literary backdrop of the ’60s, from films and visual references from the ’60s, and, of course, Dylan’s music — the starting point. But there are songs I would have preferred, for example, from his Christian period — some of his beautiful gospel songs that came out in the late ’70s, more than the one I chose, “Pressing On.” It
is almost a throwaway song, but we made it something really special. It’s a song that he put on as a sort of encore during those Christian concerts. But it is a throwaway on the record that it appears on, and it was never one that I particularly knew or loved, but it made more sense – “pressing on” — as a kind of continuum for the narrative. You are kind of taking a huge chance in resurrecting [a lesser known song]. Or maybe you are taking a bigger chance when you try to cover extremely famous songs that are so well-known. In this case it was John Doe from the band X that did the cover of that particular song, and it ended up being this beautiful, really rousing cover. And what it does for Christian Bale, who walks on looking very much like the Dylan of that time in a way that people can laugh at and kind of dismiss, the song and its power somehow transcend that and take you into the emotional power of how Dylan must have been feeling about that time. How were you planning to do the stage version Dylan required as a prerequisite for making the film before Twyla Tharp eventually did it? We [Owen Moverman and Haynes] only got so far with the stage version, but it began as an exciting process of finding theatrical equivalents to do the various styles for each of the stories; Medicine Show carnival theater for Billy, ’60s Living Theater-style interventionism for Jude, and so on. But the stage concept allowed for all the characters and stories to coexist on stage in ways never quite possible through cinematic intercutting. How are you responding when people ask about the budget? What are you supposed to say? I forget what I’m supposed to say. It was really about $17 [million], under $20. It was between $17 and $20, and that’s amazing. How long was the shoot? Forty-nine days. Where did you shoot it? Everything in Montreal. Everything. How did you decide when to use archival footage and when to recreate it? It all looks so authentic that I was having déjà vu. Recreations usually look so fake. Thank you. The train scene that’s in the credit sequence is one of two extended bits of archival footage, except for obvious stuff like the civil rights clips that you see halfway through. But that stuff was supposed to be scripted, it was supposed to be something we created for the film, but we couldn’t find the train station that we could use. Some things about matching New York City to Montreal were just absolutely impossible. And to find subway cars that were correct in [the Montreal subway] became absolutely undoable, so we hoped we
could find something and then blend it with the street footage that we had done ourselves. It’s on 16mm so it has that extra grain. I have to tell you that the faces of the Quebecer extras all across the film are so extraordinary. The faces that you get in the Billy section, the crazy, weird, rural stuff, and then the faces of the people at the banquet hall when Christian Bale is making his speech about [Lee Harvey] Oswald, they still blow me away — they look like they’re from archival footage. It’s also that our hair and makeup team was superb. Quebec is like a different world, it’s like nowhere else in Canada, nowhere else
in North America. It’s really amazing. We lucked out with shooting there. Have you met Dylan? Has he seen the movie? I haven’t yet met or spoken to Dylan myself. Never felt the need to in order to make the film. The idea, in fact, seems stranger and more preposterous the more people ask me why I never did. What was I going to do, ask him, “How does it feeeel?” I look forward to meeting the guy at some point in the future. And no, he hasn’t yet seen the film. We just recently sent Jesse Dylan a finished DVD. I hope they’ll check it out together in the comfort of home.t
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the overachiever
Ryan Gosling chats with screenwriter Oren Moverman about his latest achievements, i’m Not There and married life, along with the unique collaborative relationships he has with his directors.
screenwriters” still work almost exclusively in the studio world. By virtue of the unique niche that screenwriter Oren Moverman has claimed for himself, he is that rare top screenwriter who has, until recently, operated primarily in independent film. His special talent has been successfully collaborating with auteur directors who have written their own previous work. To their projects he not only brings the ability PHOTO BY: ASHKAN SAHIHI
We don’t cover enough screenwriters in Filmmaker, but that’s not entirely our fault. This magazine is devoted to independent film, and for many, the director is also the writer. Or the script has emerged from improvisation or some other nontraditional means. And while there is a new breed of independent-minded screenwriters today — Charlie Kaufman, Capote’s Dan Futterman and Juno’s Diablo Cody come immediately to mind — many of the “marquee
oren moverman.
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to collaborate but also a wide-ranging knowledge of art, philosophy, politics and literature – material that enriches the worlds of the films he contributes to. In 1999, Moverman co-wrote Jesus’ Son, Alison Maclean’s film version of the Denis Johnson story collection. In 2002 he co-wrote Bertha Bay-Sa Pan’s indie drama Face. And this year, he shares screenplay credit with the directors of two of the boldest movies around. With Ira Sachs he co-wrote Married Life, which premiered at Toronto and is forthcoming from MGM and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment in February. And with Todd Haynes he co-wrote I’m Not There, the profound and deeply satisfying journey into the various personas of Bob Dylan. (He’s also adapting Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi novel Empire for producer Joel Silver, but we’ll leave discussion of that for his Fade In profile.) He also plans to step out of the writer’s den into the director’s chair this year with one of a couple of projects he is close to financing. We’re very happy that Ryan Gosling agreed to interview Moverman for Filmmaker. Gosling is the star of such films as Half Nelson (for which he was nominated for an Academy Award), this year’s Fracture, The Notebook and the Sundance Grand Prize-winner The Believer. Like Moverman, his interests are passionate and wide-ranging, and he commits to challenging material whether that hails from the independent or the studio space. Gosling is also at work on his own project as a director. He’s developing it with Moverman, and they talk about it
I’M NOT THERE PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK Pierce BrosnAn and rachel mcadams in ira sachs’s married life.
briefly at the end of the friendly, funny and thoughtful conversation that follows. Now, just because we’re friends, it doesn’t mean I’m going to take it easy on you in this interview. I owe it to your fans to ask the hard questions. You realize that? I didn’t, but let’s test our friendship. I also want it on the record that in certain independent circles I’m known as a kind of edgy Barbara Walters. I will make you cry. Well it’s very easy to make me cry. I don’t consider that an achievement, you know. So, my first question is, on IMDb, you have interesting credits. “Uncredited Writer.” “Special Thanks To.” First of all, if you’re credited as the uncredited writer, isn’t that a credit? I think that’s technically true. We have to check with the Writers Guild. But I don’t think I’m credited as an Uncredited Writer, I think I have an uncredited role in a movie, which is even more embarrassing. See, I get right to the heart of it. What is it, Oren? It’s a movie called Vanya on 42nd Street that was directed by Louis Malle. I worked on the movie — I kind of walked in off the street and ended up being a PA. This was 1994. I had come to the States in 1988 — after I finished my military service in Israel, where I’m from — and I worked for a few years at JFK airport doing security. Then I was out of a job, and had nothing to do except wait for my daughter Maya to be born. I went to Brooklyn College for a few years, studied film, but I didn’t know anyone. One day I opened The New Yorker,
and there was a picture of Louis Malle, Andre Gregory and Wally Shawn — they were shooting Vanya in the Old Amsterdam Theater. I don’t know what got into me, but I literally ran down there, met Andre Gregory’s assistant, who allowed me to just stand in the lobby, and walked up to the producer — the security guard pointed him out and said his name was Fred Berner — and I said, “Hi Fred, I’m here for the job.”
christian bale in I’m Not There.
movie, this is real! Let me write the end of this. So he told me to go across the street to the production office and ask them if they have anything. So I went across the street and said, “Fred sent me for the job.” They gave me the script and said, “Come back tomorrow. We need PAs, there’s no money but Louis Malle is directing.” I knew his films and I loved some of them a lot, especially Elevator to the Gallows and Au Revoir, Les Enfants. So I came back the next day,
“i come into [a collaboration] with the need to tap into the director’s vision, to understand what he or she wants as opposed to what i want.” [laughs] I like how in your version of this story, you kind of talk like the guy from Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. [laughs] Oh, man, I love that film. [in a Warren Oates impression] “Hey Frank, I’m here for the job.” [laughs] That’s a great movie. “Do you think Alfredo would give a damn if his head could buy us everything we’ve been looking for? A way out?” How come you can’t write stuff like that, Oren? Nobody can write stuff like that. You can’t even make a film like that anymore. And starring Warren Oates! So you walked up and said, “Frank, I’m here for the job.” His name was Fred — this is not a
met Louis, and he said, “Okay, I’m also going to put you in the movie.” I ended up being in front of the camera a little bit as an uncredited actor as you so cleverly found in IMDb. And then I started talking with this young actress on the set, Julianne Moore. She said, “You should meet my friend Todd because he’s a genius.” All right! I rented Poison, watched it and liked it. I wasn’t blown away, to tell you the truth, but I was very impressed. And then I was invited to the cast and crew screening of Safe, which blew me away, and that’s when I met Todd. And the rest is history — as you can tell from IMDb. Were you writing at that point? I actually was writing, but I wasn’t writing in English. I wrote a screenplay in Hebrew. Then I wrote a FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK ben whishaw in i’m Not There.
“my goal is to make the screenplay go away, and to let it go, hopefully, because the film gets made.” film called A Hiding Place — later it became Looking Glass — which was my first English feature, and through some very weird circumstances, I actually got the money to make it. And so a few years after Vanya, I was in preproduction to direct the movie with money from France when four days before shooting the money was pulled. The film collapsed and died right then and there. But I was left with a script that became my writing sample, and it really kind of made a career for me. You have a lot of “Special Thanks” on your IMDb page too, by the way. How special are those thanks? Is it like, “Hey Oren, thanks for coming into the editing room and making sense of this mess,” or is it, “Oren, thanks for letting us shoot at your house”? [laughs] No one can shoot in my house, it’s too small. No, they are all very friendly thanks that have to do with me giving my two cents. On Velvet Goldmine, for instance. On Velvet Goldmine, I gave notes on various drafts of the script, and I gave notes, along with a lot 42
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of other people by the way, on the edit. I did the same thing on Far from Heaven. So by the time we got to write the Dylan movie, I really knew what a Todd Haynes script looked like and what it needed to do. The others were all about giving opinions, ideas about cutting and things like that. And camaraderie. You’re big on camaraderie, huh? I like camaraderie. [laughs] I like camaraderie too. You’re never alone with camaraderie. Let’s talk about I’m Not There. I’m hoping that this is the biggest movie of all time, because if it is, the studios are not going to know what the hell people want to see and movies are going to be so interesting for the next 5 or 10 years. But tell me how you go from reading Chronicles [the Bob Dylan memoir] to making a movie about Dylan without him? Todd comes to you and says, “I want to make a movie about Bob Dylan” and you say, “The only way to do it is to have five people play him!” I think that I’ll probably generate a little
bit of controversy in giving you my version of this because, true to a Dylan project, there are a few versions of how exactly the idea was born. All I can do is give you my mine. And by the way, the film was written before Chronicles came out. What happened was after Velvet Goldmine and before Todd moved to Portland, he was in Brooklyn and we would see each other a lot. My son Amir was born, my second child, and I was a stay-at-home dad, basically. My wife did the heavy lifting; I didn’t have much work at the time. Todd would come by every few days and we would be like an old couple with a baby. We’d go have coffee while Amir was napping next to us. It was great. Todd is an incredibly interesting guy and you can talk about anything with him. We probably talked about politics more than anything else — more than movies. And then one day, he came in to the apartment and said, “I want to make a film about Bob Dylan.” And being the visionary that I am, I said, “Forget it — you’ll never get the rights. And even if you get the rights, the movie will be about casting, the whole thing would be about “Where do you find a guy who looks and sounds like Dylan?” We then talked about it for a while and it sort of made sense that if there were to be a movie about Bob Dylan that nobody and everybody would play him — it would just have to be the “Bob Dylan experience,” a kind of non-narrative, nonlinear film made of fragments of some of the characters Bob Dylan has been in his life, but none would be called “Bob Dylan.” So Todd developed this whole idea and these characters. In the beginning there were more characters actually. I remember “Charlie,” a spin on the Charlie Chaplin elements of Dylan’s early years. Through various connections and Killer Films, a short proposal got to Dylan’s manager. He showed it to Dylan and Dylan said yes. I think he liked the idea — the approach made sense to him. But [Dylan] also wanted a stage version. So I get the call from Todd, and he says, “Guess what Oren, you are now ‘of the theater.’ ” Killer sent me out to Portland, where Todd moved to after a cross-country road trip devoted entirely to Dylan, and we worked out a stage version of I’m Not There. It was going to be the same characters but the stories were going to be different. It was very elaborate, and then we worked out the stage design and how it’s going to be divided up and how characters are going to come in and out. I went back to New York City, and started writing, but after a while I realized that this was not happening. [laughs] Dylan, or somebody, changed directions and it ended up going to Twyla Tharp,
who did her own thing. That’s a whole story in itself. And so I was off the island, and I was doing other things, writing other films, including Married Life with Ira Sachs. Then months later I got a call from Todd saying, “You know what, this is too much, I need you to work with me on the film.” And I said let me just give you notes and support you and do everything the way we always do it, because he would read my screenplays and do that for me too. But he said, “No, this is a writing partnership, this has to be done right, this is a lot of work.” So I packed my bag again and went to Portland and we worked on the screenplay. He had a ton of ideas and material. I remember sitting down with him and he said, “Look, we’re not writing a screenplay, we’re interpreting,” which sounded very Talmudic to me. From then on we started talking about every single word in the screenplay, analyzing things from different points of views and reviewing all the books and research that we had done. From that point it came together really fast. And how did it come together financially? What studio got behind it? Who made the film? Originally we developed it at Paramount. Then they had a regime change and put it in turnaround, and then it was put together piece by piece. Celluloid Dreams were involved in foreign sales and John Sloss was involved at Cinetic. Jim Stern came on board and Soderbergh got involved at a later point. But I can’t pretend to know exactly how they pulled it off. How do you pitch an idea that there’s no reference for? Because there’s nothing to compare the film to, which from my understanding in Hollywood, you really need if you want to get something made. They need a comparison film. Did you talk about Bob Fosse at all? No. The film is obviously unusual, but I think the process of making it was also unusual. I didn’t do that part of the labor. I know that Todd met with people and described it, but it wasn’t like Paramount came on board because they “bought a pitch.” I think they knew it was Bob Dylan, Todd was coming off the Academy Award nomination for screenwriting on Far from Heaven, so I think there was just this idea of “Okay, Todd Haynes wants to develop an interesting film about Bob Dylan; that’s potentially something.” Once the screenplay became what it was and they took a look at it, I know for a fact the quote was, “This is not a screenplay, it’s a headache.” You write scripts like a director, and you are a director — you are going to direct your own films. What’s it really like for you to collaborate? Do you really like writing for other
people, or are you just a masochist? [laughs] That’s a two-part question. The second part first: I’m not a masochist. I do like collaborating with people, but I actually think that collaboration is not one thing. There are different types of collaborations, different flavors, and most of them I like. My favorite type of collaboration is with a director, although I’ve had some really good collaborations with cowriters who were not directing. I come into it with the need to tap into the director’s vision, to understand what he or she wants as opposed to what I want. It’s a great exercise, and I don’t think it’s that far removed from acting. It becomes similar in that you have to get some
basic understanding about what the director is trying to achieve that involves putting your ego aside. It’s kind of like learning a language that you didn’t really speak before. Contributing to the process by always asking questions and trying to understand what the director wants so I can give it to him or her. And it’s not that far from a director’s collaboration with the cinematographer. I bring my lenses — my various ideas, my point of view — and I propose them to the director and he or she can choose… Right, but a cinematographer is not involved in the conception of the idea. I mean, you and the director are on each other’s minds for a certain period of time and the
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“i’ve been [in america] for almost 20 years, but there is still a limitation of being ‘the outsider.’ but it’s also a very liberating limitation.”
BILLY CRUDUP IN alison maclean’s JESUS’ SON.
script can go anywhere. And then at a certain point you kind of have to relinquish it. Is collaboration a “letting go” process ultimately? When do you, Oren Moverman, start to say, “I should back out of this now?” Well I think that my objective is always to let go. I have this very pretentious approach to screenwriting that I will now share with you. Do you know Marcel Yanko? No. He was a Romanian artist, a Dadaist. At some point he moved to Israel and created an artist colony. When I was a kid, I saw him paint this beautiful painting on a woman’s
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breast. [laughs] He was very old. Keep it clean, Oren, c’mon. Breasts are clean. Not if they’re painted on. It was a work of art, and I remember being very impressed by it but also for the first time being introduced to the idea that there can be a sort of art that is not permanent. I later learned that he used to do assemblages of these machines that he would put in museums and they would destroy themselves after a while. I became intrigued with this whole idea of art that destroys itself or makes itself go away, and I kind of found myself approaching screenplays that way, which is to say if a screenplay is written and is made, then truly for most people the screenplay doesn’t exist. It goes away. It’s an intermediary kind of format designed to move ideas, language and structure to the screen. And if it doesn’t ever get made, aside from the pain it caused the writer, it again doesn’t exist because it never made it as a film. It froze and died.
People can’t have access to it. So my goal is to make the screenplay go away, and to let go, hopefully, because the film gets made. But how do you turn off the part of you who wants to be a director? Or is that not hard for you? It’s not, because I try to think like a director and to think of the needs of a director and apply them to the screenplay. I try to find the language that’s right for each project. And then some directors direct you. I think both Todd and Ira gave me directions, they told me what they wanted. Todd told me to interpret and Ira told me to be kind, because every character was fighting a great battle. Other directors I’ve worked with have said things like, “Well I’m just going to ramble for the next hour and you just take what you think is good for you.” And then there are directors who say, “I trust you, come back with something interesting.” If they do that, then I go and I direct it on the page as well as I can,
and that’s the screenplay. Tell me about Ira. You have a special thanks on his film Forty Shades of Blue as well. Right. That’s the thing — once they give me special thanks, they’re mine — they have to hire me! It looks that way. Ira and I had a mutual friend, Jonathan Nossiter, who directed Sunday, Signs & Wonders and Mondovino, and is now making movies in Brazil. He wanted us to meet and the official excuse was that we should meet because people think we look alike [laughs]. We’re both bald, Jewish guys with glasses. So we met and we got along. What I didn’t know was that he was auditioning me for work. I was dumb enough to believe that we were meeting because… You’re both bald and Jewish and wear glasses? Yeah! After a while he said, “Do you want to read a screenplay that I wrote really quickly, a first draft? It needs work, but I think it’s got something.” It was based on a book so I also read the book and got some clear ideas of what I thought the screenplay could be and how it could be different. I talked to him about it and then went off and wrote a draft while keeping in close touch with him. He looked at my draft, and we started working on it together and shaping it, and that became the film Married Life. Do you want to talk at all about the difference in directing styles between Todd and Ira or is that kind of like trapping you? Not at all. They’re very different personalities and have very different kinds of visions and approaches, but they are both obsessive filmmakers in the best sense of the word. They are in charge of every detail and really work hard to control all the elements of their movies. So in that respect, they’re very similar. Both are great with actors. Obviously directing I’m Not There is just a different process for anyone, no matter who you are, because it’s a film about fragmentation. When I was on set I would see a shot, something they were shooting really quickly before the end of the day, and I would have no idea where the shot belonged in the film. And I knew the screenplay inside and out! It was so fragmented and all in Todd’s head. He sketched everything out, had very extensive storyboards, had done tons of research — he’s always very organized about all that. He puts together huge books of visual references for his films. Ira does that too in a way. He just may not put it all into one portfolio, but there are always piles of books and references he pulls out of thin air, and there is always stuff to talk about, from photography to literature to music to art. He’s a huge cinephile and there are hundreds of movies in his head.
Our good friend Noaz Deshe brought up an interesting question. Have you ever had to do a rewrite on a script in the editing room, like after a film has been shot? Not for reshoot purposes but for structural purposes? And how involved are you in the editing process overall? So far I’ve been very involved and have always been welcome to contribute. I’ve watched every cut of the films, all of them, and I’ve gotten to give comments and suggest changes. They don’t always listen to me, but I think it’s my duty and privilege to give notes, and sometimes they actually listen and that’s very rewarding. Do you get pissed when they don’t listen?
No, I try to be very respectful. I think at the end of the day every movie is rewritten in the editing room by the editor and the director. Sometimes it’s extreme and sometimes it’s not. On Married Life, I think that film sort of found itself in the editing. Ira did a beautiful job shooting the script, but then there were certain things about it he liked more than others and certain ideas about what the film should actually be at the end. I really admire him for that, it took an enormous amount of confidence. We wrote some new voiceovers, and it was a really great process discovering what the film could be through the editing. see page 101
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PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD. the savages writer-director tamara jenkins.
m senior m e n t s
Nine years after making slums of beverly hills, Tamara Jenkins returns to feature films with a comical but highly emotional look inside one family’s turbulent relationship with The savages. By Ray Pride
Note-perfect, Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages was one of Sundance 2007’s stellar surprises. Where another unlikely gem from the festival, Once, was bittersweet in its simple romance, Jenkins’s long-in-coming sophomore directorial entry (after 1998’s Slums of Beverly Hills) is a complex mesh of tones and social observations. The film is witty about neurosis and unblinking about mortality and is filled with the sort of melancholy humanism we only get from European features these days. Yet it also is imbued with the observational precision and winning performances of the best American comedies. Jenkins’s Savages are a scattered clan. Father Lenny (Philip Bosco) approaches his own sunset in Sun City, Arizona; semi-estranged daughter Wendy (Laura Linney) is a New
York City playwright who, after many years, is surviving on temp jobs and her brother Jon, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is an academic struggling with an epic book on Bertolt Brecht. The two siblings are brought together after their father acts out against his nurse in a scatological way and they have to find him a new home whether their own or one in assisted living. There are nicely nuanced side characters and witty bits, but The Savages belongs to these three actors, who are at the top of their game. The film boasts some of the most formidable comic dialogue of the year and Jenkins’s screenplay is lovingly structured. A sampling of her ear for dialogue: “We’re not in therapy right now, we’re in real life” and “I’m not leaving you alone, I’m hanging
up.” Mostly though, what Jenkins gets down is behavior, and it’s exquisitely performed. We spoke in late summer at a café near her apartment in New York City’s East Village, which she shares with her husband, screenwriter Jim Taylor (Sideways, About Schmidt), and talked about casting, tone, finding ways around writer’s block and what it’s like to have so much time pass between features. Fox Searchlight opens the film in late November. At film festivals, I’m not one of those people who rushes to weigh in after premieres, but after the Sundance press screening of The Savages, I sat cross-legged in the Holiday Village and posted a few notes right away. I called it an unlikely mix of Annie Hall and… FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. The [publicists] emailed it to me and I was like, that is fucking hilarious. Obviously you were responding to something about the dialogue… Where it’s witty but not necessarily a punch line. Where it’s character observation. I appreciated that because, well, it’s been an interesting thermometer. Some people say [the movie] is so funny, and some people say it’s so sad or depressing. I was grateful you appreciated the language of it, and that these are sort of hyperarticulate people having to do something that being hyper-articulate doesn’t help you with. I always find it auspicious when a film like this can deal with essential human pain, mortification, embarrassment and humiliation, and then find a way to laugh at it without humiliating the characters. And one of the cruel things in your movie is the title. Was this family always going to be the Savages? I can’t remember when that happened. It sets up that you’re going to deal with people reduced to elemental, primal things they don’t have defenses for. These Savages don’t know how to make nice. Well, also there’s something about just taking old people and putting them in buildings and not dealing with them — the sort of savagery of old age and the way it ravages you and strips you of
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anything that would be perceived as civilized. The Savages opens and you have this geriatric dance number of sorts — it’s like the June Taylor Dancers from the old Jackie Gleason show — and we meet Mr. Savage, Philip Bosco. Within five minutes, what does he do to act out? He writes “shit” on the wall. This scene, like so many others, is very complicated tonally. Was the movie a tonal nightmare to edit? Its scary tone is the trickiest thing in the world. So many ingredients have to accumulate to create tone. It could be music, it could be the tone of the comedy and the tragedy and how you let them live inside
HOW THEY DID IT ■ Production Format: 35mm. ■ Camera: Arricam LT with cooke S4’s mostly 32 and 35mm lenses. ■ FILM Stock: Kodak 5218 and 5205. ■ Editing System: Avid Adrenaline 2.1.8 Unity, 14:1 compression. Developed at Technicolor NYC. ■ Color Correction: 35mm Digital Intermediate: Northlite 4K Scanning at Laser Pacific, Los Angeles. Visual Effects by Mike Castillo at Laser Pacific. Lustre Color Correction by Dave Cole at Laser Pacific. Arri 2K Recording at Laser Pacific. Digital Intermediate Original Negative Output - Acetate 5242. Print Stock - Vision 2383. Print/IP/IN/Answer print at Deluxe Hollywood, L.A. by Harry Muller.
the same vessel and not undermine each other but instead support each other. I’m very attracted to holding funny and sad [together]. It’s an accumulation of all these little details that you are putting into the same stew, hoping that you can keep them within the same vocabulary and that [the result] is not jolting and melodramatic when it becomes serious. As long as the material is truly driven from character — if it truly is organically growing out of character — you can get away with it. Considering how wonderful Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman are, it’s almost like after casting them as the two siblings, your work as a director was done. I was done — I didn’t have to do anything! No, the process of casting in general was a long thing, but in terms of getting Laura and Phil and them just being so… [Jenkins smiles]. We had very little rehearsal, just a couple of days in my apartment. There is a certain truth about actors that when you find the right person for the part, and the dynamic between them is working… all three of them really, Bosco too, I just felt when they came over to my apartment, and we were just reading through the script, I was like, “Wow!” As in, “Wow! Who wrote that?” It wasn’t that the material was so brilliant, but the dynamic
PHOTO BY: ANDREW SCHWARTZ philip seymour hoffman and laura linney in the savages.
it just felt like it would be believable, like I will believe this. You can always just throw three people together and put them around a table and call them family. I see movies where people are playing family members and something doesn’t feel right. The larger feeling I took away from the movie is the evocation of two siblings approaching early middle age who are still unformed as people. They’re still incomplete. Do you think in these big terms when you write? Or do you just write the characters
and let the larger themes emerge? It’s about how quickly you become conscious of what you are doing. I feel like the whole process of writing is sort of being unconscious and then becoming conscious. Unconscious, conscious. If you are too pre-determined at the beginning, then you are writing an essay [instead of just] letting it go and then interpreting the tea leaves of all this stuff that [bubbles] up. You’re putting things on a clothesline, but you wouldn’t see any relationship unless they were all pinned there together. Yeah,
“i came up with the idea of these two going on this journey like hansel and gretel.” filmmaking is so like that anyway because that’s all you’re doing, putting one shot next to another shot, one frame next to another frame. The form is structured like that. But there was a conscious moment at a certain point [in the writing] about those siblings being kind of like Hansel and Gretel. You know that book, that Bruno Bettelheim book…. The Uses of Enchantment? I’ve had it forever. There’s something brilliant about that book. I remember working on the script and there were many siblings — a whole crew of them. I was stripping it away and then I came up with the idea of just these two going on this journey, and then I was like, “Oh, like Hansel and Gretel!” I grabbed Bruno Bettelheim and wrote in my notebook something like, “their journey through old-age land.” So it’s a terrible fairy tale unfolding in
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PHOTO BY: ANDREW SCHWARTZ laura linney and philip bosco in the savages.
“i guess [the savages] pushes buttons for people because there’s something about putting a parent in a nursing home that really flips people’s lids.” front of them? Yes. Bettelheim talks about how that story is about confronting mortality and that Hansel and Gretel are thrown
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out of the house into the woods and into the darkness. They lose their parents and have to make their own way. And I was like, “Oh,
that’s what this is — they’re thrown into this surreal weird world of old-age land.” It became the way they became grownups, or truly whole people, complete people, which is sort of what Bettelheim talks about, individuating and stuff like that. It was an interesting little guiding principle, “Oh yeah, they’re like these neurotic modern Hansel and Gretel. Yeah!” So, where are the missing movies, Tamara, the last eight or nine years? All those pictures? You have Slums of Beverly Hills, this one film largely about a teenager, and then you’ve got the one that’s about middle-age siblings and an old person. Where’s the twentysomething bohemian movie? Where’s your Laurel Canyon? [laughs] Laurel Canyon, that’s funny. I know Lisa Cholodenko really well. But I don’t know what to say. I spent a lot of time writing, and I worked on a project for a long time that never happened. You’ve made a living, but a frustrating one? In terms of trying to make motion pictures, I mean, I made a living in various ways. I wrote for hire, non-credited rewriting things. But I didn’t direct a feature as we know, because it would have been heard of! I worked on screenplays that I thought I would be able to make that didn’t happen for one reason or another. One in particular was a nightmare and many
years of wasted time. I didn’t own the project; the producer had it. Then [The Savages] took a really long time. I know that that’s going to become a question — like what the hell have you been doing — and I guess I’ve been writing. Why did it take so long to make The Savages? I feel like I know so many people who have made movies and then struggle so hard to get their next movie happening. This almost didn’t happen like 100 times. Just getting the financing…. [First] it was at Focus Features, and they really liked it, they financed the writing of the script, but then they were dissatisfied with the casting, which was crazy. And then we were out. They gave it [back] to us so we could shop it around, which took forever. We couldn’t get anyone to finance it, even with Laura and Phil. People were scared of the subject matter. I mean, try to get The Death of Mr. Lazarescu financed in the United States. Forget it! And there’s still a lot of anxiety about anything that’s dealing with…. People had primal-like reactions when we sent it around to all the various financiers. People would get very personal about it, like, “Well, my father died and it wasn’t like that” kind of thing. I guess it pushes buttons for people because there’s something about putting a parent in a nursing home and confronting
that part of life that really flips people’s lids. Or people have done it in a different way, or people might say something like, “Well, why would Jon and Wendy help their father? He was such an asshole, I don’t believe it.” Anyway we had a really hard time getting it going, and it took me a long time to write it, too. You did performance art earlier in your career, which is an art form that provides immediate feedback. What sustained you as an artist during the process of developing this film and then trying to get it made? I have a really good
GO BACK & WATCH ■ Lovely and Amazing Nicole Holofcener confirms her skill at bringing out both the love and insanity that binds a family in this 2001 comedy of three dysfunctional daughters and their even crazier Mom.
■ Away from Her Actress-turned-director Sarah Polley’s 2006 drama captures the tender and terrifying emotions that occur when a husband (Gordon Pinsent) tries to reach out to his wife (Julie Christie) after Alzheimer’s has transformed her into someone completely different.
■ Assisted Living Elliot Greenebaum’s 2003 sweet-hearted drama about a nursing home janitor being mistaken by one of the residents for her son was shot in an actual Kentucky nursing home with many of the elderly residents as actors and extras.
friend named Eric Mendelsohn who is a person who made a lovely movie many years ago called Judy Berlin and should also be making more movies. I guess I have a group of friends, and you know, I spend time at writer’s colonies and stuff like that. Yaddo was very helpful for this movie and for me. It’s a great place, and I was surrounded there by [other kinds of writers]. As a screenwriter you always feel like you’re not really a real writer, that real writers are novelists, especially when you’re in a place like that where John Cheever, Philip Roth and Sylvia Plath — real writers — come from. I spent six weeks there about four years ago. I had all of this stuff assembled [for The Savages], all these ideas and miscellaneous scenes and stuff that was also building toward whatever the screenplay is, and I went there for six weeks and kind of indexed my brain. That really was the beginning of figuring out what this movie was in a concrete way. It’s almost like accumulating scraps and not really ever having the [example to finish until] I was around real writers. When I got stuck I would pretend the screenplay was a novel, because screenplays are such haikus. Poetry and carpentry together. Yeah, and you’ve sucked out all the descriptive juices because that’s what you’re going to see and see page 102
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PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD. Honeydripper writer-director-edtor john sayles.
pray for
rock ‘n’ roll
Jason Guerrasio sits down with John Sayles to discuss the future of filmmaking and the challenges of making his latest film HONEYDRIPPER.
As I sit eating lunch with John Sayles in a near-empty Mexican restaurant a few blocks from his home in upstate New York, it’s easy to listen to the maverick director and think that he’s telling me stories about his travails attempting to make independent movies in an increasingly studio world. But while these war stories could probably fill many a book about independent film, right now Sayles is just talking about the protagonist of his latest movie, Honeydripper. Played by Danny Glover, Tyrone Purvis is a down-on-his-luck juke joint owner who will do anything to keep the doors to his failing club open, except book the more commercial electric music that’s beginning to take the country by storm. “[Purvis] has to decide if he’s going to go with the flow or not,” Sayles says, wearing his usual garb — a loose-fitting tank top and mesh shorts. “He’s like, ‘I’m going to continue being a jazz artist even though people are making money playing this rock-and-roll stuff.’ It happens in almost every art form; there’s this new thing and you either say, ‘I’ve got to eat so I’m going to start writing or singing this new stuff,’ or you say, ‘You know what, I’m just going to keep doing what I want to do.’ It’s not the club that Purvis is worried about losing — he’s worried about losing his independence. Like he
says, ‘If I lose that then who will I be?’ ” If Sayles is consumed by the kinds of anxieties that are tearing up Purvis, he doesn’t show it. He has long since become accustomed to the sacrifices required in the name of independence and for 30 years has been making them in order to see such landmark independent films as Return of the Secaucus 7, The Brother From Another Planet, Matewan and Lone Star produced. As many of his peers have gone for the quick buck in Hollywood or faded away trying, Sayles keeps making films, and, aside from his frequent (and well-paid) forays as a screenwriter and script doctor, rarely plays the Hollywood game. In his upstate town, surrounded by antiques shops, farmland and wine trails, the closest thing resembling the movie business is the presence of his next-door neighbor — friend and actor David Strathairn. With longtime producing partner Maggie Renzi, Sayles embarked on making his 1950s Alabama-set rock-and-roll fable by self-financing the film and teaming with Ira Deutchman’s Emerging Pictures for distribution. Honeydripper, which will open at the end of the year, world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and many there called it Sayles’s best work in years. The film tells a simple story, but one that’s
richly textured with powerful performances from Glover, Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay Hamilton and newcomers Yaya DeCosta and Gary Clark Jr. It also boasts tart dialogue, an appreciation of American history and Sayles’s trademark themes of social progressiveness and the struggle for racial equality. So, Honeydripper is based on a short story, “Keeping Time,” from your shorts anthology Dillinger in Hollywood, right? It’s kind of similar to what I did with Matewan. In my novel Union Dues, a kid tells a story about his grandfather, and that was the inspiration for Will Oldham’s character. For Honeydripper I was inspired by a character from “Keeping Time.” But mostly, Honeydripper is based on a rock-and-roll legend. There was this guy named Guitar Slim, an early electric guitarist out in New Orleans, and he had a big hit with the song “The Things That I Used to Do.” Guitar Slim was known for missing gigs. At some point, a lot of these guys early in their careers — Albert King, Albert Collins, B.B. King — [would be approached by club owners] who would say, “Well, you know how to play this guy’s stuff, you be him tonight.” Back then there were no album covers; people didn’t know what you looked like. Also, [the 1950s] FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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danny glover in honeydripper.
“there’s something good about it being hard [to make movies]. it keeps you from making a movie just because you haven’t made something in a while.” is an era that I’m really interested in. Some of the film is about the big changes happening then — it’s the South before the civil rights movement but we’re still going to have black combat troops when we go into Korea. It’s about that moment when something changes rapidly and it’s about who is going to be able to deal with that change and who’s not. You often discuss America’s handling of racial issues in your films. What is it about race that keeps you coming back to it? Well, I’m an American filmmaker and in a lot of ways that’s the story of America. And even when it’s not involved specifically, to me it’s the most striking metaphor for what we tried to do in this country and are still trying to do — setting these very high goals of liberty, fraternity, equality, independence, freedom and then living up to them, including having to rewrite the rules every once in a while. Within [Honeydripper] the racial situation is kind of menacing. Stacy Keach and I worked out the sheriff character so that he’s not a psychopath. He’s not the guy Kris Kristofferson played in Lone Star. In my bio for him I said, “You’re a former boxer, George Wallace was a boxer, and the way that you run things is you like to keep people off balance.” So sometimes he’s a little friendly or humorous, other times 54
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he comes right at you. I think for me the most powerful line about race in the script is when the sheriff is in the car and he says to the kid: “Take your hat off.” The kid forgot that’s what you do when a white man addresses you. How did Danny Glover get involved? Well, as usual it wasn’t just, “Oh, we want to make a movie and here’s the money.” For about a year, before we actually stared down the road of making it, we were trying to raise money. When I was writing this the only actors on my wish list who I knew [personally] were Danny and Stacy Keach, so I approached them. I try not to think about actors when I write because you are so often disappointed — they aren’t interested, they’re not available, whatever. Danny got interested and as it turned out it took us another whole year to realize that we weren’t going to raise enough money to do this. We had just enough money from what I’ve made writing many, many, many screenplays [for hire], and we decided to just finance it ourselves. But Danny had two other jobs right before us. So we only had five weeks to shoot the movie, and we only had Danny for threeand-a-half of them — and he’s the lead and in almost every scene. So for a week-and-a-half we shot every single thing we could without
Danny, including some scenes where he’s seeing other people — reaction shots. And then Danny came in and was in everything else. Which is one of the ways we get such good actors to be in our movies — it’s kind of a vacation from their usual career, but it’s a short one and it’s a finite one. So since Silver City you’ve been figuring out how to get Honeydripper made. Yeah. Just figuring out how to do it. One of the things I tend to do now is to have the idea for the script, maybe write a little outline just for myself and then I’ll go scouting and see where we’d be likely to shoot this. Can we find a place that has some things already built? One of the reasons we ended up in Alabama was because in Aniston there’s still an army base and it has some old barracks from World War II and the Korean War. Then we went down to cotton country and found some cotton fields, some old general stores that could be converted into the Honeydripper club and the town of Georgiana, where Hank Williams grew up, which has the railroad tracks down the main street. So when I wrote I had the places in mind. And when you talk to agents and say, “Danny Glover is going to be in it,” that opens a lot of doors. We didn’t do the final casting until we really knew we were going to go down and do it. How did you find Gary Clark Jr. and the rest of the musicians in the film? Our friend Louis Black is one of the guys who started the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, and he said, “Oh, you have to come and see Gary Clark Jr. He’s this local kid who plays the guitar.” I think he was turning 21 the night that we saw him. He was just terrific and there are just not that many young African-American guys who play that kind of guitar anymore. So we auditioned him at a friend’s house and he was surprisingly good. After Gary this guy Tim, who’s been helping us and who’s been a manager for various rock acts, mentioned Mable John, an old soul singer. She was the first person signed to Berry Gordy’s label, which eventually became Motown. And then
HOW THEY DID IT ■ Production Format: 35mm. ■ Camera: Two Arriflex Arricam cameras. One was the Studio model and the other was the Lite.
■ FILM Stock: Fuji 8573 (500T) film. We used Cooke S4 prime lenses. ■ Editing System: Avid Media Composer-Meridien. ■ Color Correction: Quantel Pablo at Orbit Digital/Postworks. Conformed and color corrected on Quantel IQ/Pablo from 2K scans. Scanning performed on Spirit 2K datacine, film record on ARRI laser, prints on Fuji.
the musicians mentioned other people. One person led to another, basically. They’re all terrific. After a two-hour rehearsal they went out and did a great set at the Chicago Blues Festival and now they are touring the country as the Honeydripper All-Star Band. Is Gary playing his own music or stuff you guys wrote? Both. We adapted a couple of songs. He sings “Blue Light Buggy.” We adapt what sometimes is called the first rock-androll song, “Good Rocking Tonight,” which was done by Roy Brown. I wrote the basic melody and some lyrics for “China Doll” and then my longtime collaborator, Mason Daring, took it over and made it much more musical. Do you direct your actors very specifically or do you let them find their own way into their characters? Generally what I tend to do is write a bio for every character, one to five pages, and I send it off to the actors. In Danny’s case it was his history — how he got there, when he met his wife, where he learned how to play the piano, where he’s from, that he was in World War I, a story really. So a certain amount of work has been done beforehand. I don’t have read-throughs or rehearsals or anything like that where you bring everybody [together]. I just can’t afford it and it’s just not my way of working. I start working with the actors when we start doing the blocking. I say,
“No acting yet, let’s just talk it through and see where you would go given these parameters.” And so a lot of [my direction is like], “Okay, give me one this time where you’re not trying to show how upset you are.” The scene at night when the sheriff comes into the bar, there’s a lot of ways that Danny could play it and sometimes I want to see more than one. It’s not the right way or the wrong way — it’s about options. This issue of Filmmaker marks our 15th year of publication. Where do you see film 15 years from now? It is sort of where music has already gone. Musicians, both newcomers and known veterans, can record and either make CDs or directly download their work more cheaply than ever before. This will continue to be true of filmmakers as well. The difference is that musicians now have to tour to make a decent living, and filmmakers don’t really have that option. So I believe that independent filmmaking will remain mostly the realm of new directors. I’ve always said that to make your second movie you either have to pay people or get new friends. As people get older and either join unions and guilds that have minimum salary requirements or move to straight jobs, the openings are filled by a never-ending stream of film-school graduates and hungry actors. As it becomes easier to hook your computer
up to your giant flat-screen TV, middleman vendors like Blockbuster, HBO and Netflix will become less important. I imagine that film fans of off-Hollywood stuff will have accounts to clearing houses in the Amazon.com model. The audience phenomenon will still be dominated by corporate blockbuster movies that are massively advertised and depend on first weekend revenue. Film clubs for nonmainstream stuff may reappear, booking movies for a show or two over satellite. It will be harder and harder for independent filmmakers to make a living at it. Would you ever release a film through the Web? It depends on what it is. It’s kind of like the question that people ask me about the capture format — digital, 16mm or 35mm? The last two movies before this were shot on 16mm, just for the cost of it — it was cheaper. This particular film wouldn’t look good in anything but 35mm. If I felt I could have gotten the look I wanted in digital with those others we would have gone digital for the expense. But some movies I feel like you can’t stop and start and really get the feel of the film, and I think of digital and movies-ondemand, or watching it on your computer, as start-and-stop movies. There are some things that really lend themselves to that, whereas other things need an emotional flow. When
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you break them up with commercials or with people stopping their machine they just don’t work as well. Every d.p. I know will beg to shoot 16mm rather than DV. If you look at the release slate this season Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma and yourself are all coming out with movies after long hiatuses and are doing them, for the most part, on their own. Why do you think that is? I think it’s that we’re just all old enough [to realize] that the studios really aren’t interested in making risky movies for adults. My agent told me that one of the studios, I forget which one, issued a kind of fatwa. They said, “We don’t want to see any scripts that are period movies or dramas.” So what they meant was [they only want to make] either the Judd Apatow-youth comedies or Spider-Man. I think having had our adventures in studioland there’s that point, like the phrase from Vietnam, where we had to destroy the village in order to save it. Well, getting a movie made through the studio system can be like getting a bill through Congress — it may not be recognizable by the time it comes out the other end. It’s amazing how many movies with well-known actors never get a theatrical release these days. That used to
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be the guarantee and now it’s, “Oh yeah, we’re not going to spend any more money on this, maybe we’ll put it on video.” That has to be very frustrating for someone like you. Yeah, but quite honestly movies do skew very young. I’m older than most of the studio executives I talk to so it’s not surprising, and it happens with every generation. I’ve met these guys like Stanley Donen, Robert Wise and John Frankenheimer, who were great filmmakers, but the
GO BACK & WATCH ■ Mo’ Better Blues Denzel Washington plays a burgeoning trumpet player in Spike Lee’s 1990 ode to jazz music. In the film Bleek (Washington) finds himself in the midst of a rivalry with friend Shadow (Wesley Snipes) that may lead to disasters off stage.
■ Black Snake Moan Rock-and-roll cures all in Craig Brewer’s followup to Hustle and Flow. Christina Ricci plays a tramp who just can’t say no, but when Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson) finds her on the side of the road he decides to exorcise her demons with some hard licks on his electric guitar.
■ Bird This 1988 biopic on Charlie Parker stars Forest Whitaker in a Golden Globe nominated performance as “Bird” Parker and looks back on the troubled life of the legendary jazz saxophonist helmed with care by jazz aficionado Clint Eastwood.
last 20 years of their careers were struggles to get anything made. We’ve been very fortunate and very persistent — we have gotten to make 16 movies in about 30 years. But the other side is that there’s something good about it being hard. It keeps you from making a movie just because you haven’t made something in a while. Usually the worst movies [by mainstream filmmakers] are when another project fell apart, the person hasn’t worked in a year-and-a-half and there’s something else that’s ready to go so they sign on. Sometimes they’re not bad movies but they’re usually not their best movies. And sometimes they are pretty bad. So if it’s hard you really want to make that movie. You know, Honeydripper is something that a studio would make for about $25 to $30 million, if they would even bother with movies that small anymore. We had about $5 million to make it and five weeks to shoot it, and music rights ate up a certain amount of that. So, what we had to actually shoot was not that much. That’s the good side of it, then — if you’re lucky enough to get the chance to make this movie, [it’s a movie] you really want to make. It can be frustrating but who said that people should be allowed to make movies?t
REACHING OUT: 10 Years of grassroots casting for John Sayles. By Lizzie Martinez
men with guns.
MEN WITH GUNS It’s twilight in Zongolica, Veracruz, and I’m standing on a table in the mercado trying to mediate a heated quarrel between the meat vendors (who happen to be large men carrying machetes) and the other street vendors — the ones who sell herbs, plastic baby Jesuses, kids’ underpants and tropical fruit of every variety. Everyone is shouting. Tomorrow is one of our biggest scenes: an action sequence in an open-air market full of people. I have about 100 extras coming from all over this remote part of Mexico to be in the scene. People with no phones who work in sugarcane fields who heard my brother (and assistant) David make casting calls on the local evangelical radio station. Tomorrow we’ll rise before dawn to meet them. But that is tomorrow. Today the dispute is over the amount to be paid to each vendor to be an extra. The meat vendors want more than everyone else. The hierarchy of power here is slowly making itself clear to me. The meat vendors have some kind of cabal-like control over the mercado. The reality of this situation and the current open forum of discussion instigated by us have brought out some longheld resentments amongst the other vendors. They’re pissed. About a month before we came to this isolated mountaintop town to film, the townspeople had lynched someone they accused of rape. So I’m really feeling the need to keep everyone calm. Suddenly from around the corner comes another mob of people being led by a round man in a maroon guayabera and a gold ring — obviously the mayor. The mayor tries to listen but the shouting increases. I’m still standing on the table but they seem to have all about forgotten me. “Al centro!” someone
shouts and everyone starts marching toward the city hall. My brother and I look at each other. We’re both exhausted. All we can think about is our 4:00 a.m. call the next day. But we join the mass of people knowing we must respect their decision-making process. Besides, we’re pretty much the ones who started the whole thing. What follows is an interminable city hall meeting where what seems like every citizen of Zongolica stands up and vents some grievance, related or unrelated, to the issue at hand. Each person stands up, introduces themselves and then basically tells their life history, sometimes circling back to the topic of the meat vendors, for or against them, but sometimes not. Sometimes it’s just a very long story about Senora Ramirez and how her goats have been crossing into other people’s gardens for years. The mayor listens to everyone. Finally it is decided. The meat vendors will earn more tomorrow because their stalls are wooden and must be rented for the scene and everyone else is just on a blanket vending their wares. We agree to this because obviously the depth of the town history is deeper than our momentary influence. It’s finally over. Old resentments are reaffirmed, grudges are upheld. The mayor bangs his gavel. Everyone goes home. I hardly sleep. Then, at 4:00 a.m. my brother and I wait in the dark dirt road for the extras and locals with bit parts to show up. It’s drizzling and we’re in rain gear holding Styrofoam cups of coffee. Then out of the mist from the mountains they appear. All of them. Right on time. It’s incredible. Some have walked for more than an hour from villages, high in the mountains, most with no shoes on, to come and make this scene with us. We scoop up kids, pass out coffee and head off to spend the day together. Another day in the life of a John Sayles movie. I met John Sayles and Maggie Renzi (his longtime partner and producer) through a little film festival I programmed 15 years ago. The event introduced us, but what kept us together as friends and collaborators over the years was a genuine interest in and compassion for the world around us. Sayles really does think everyone’s story is interesting. At that festival, we screened 16mm prints of The Brother From Another Planet and City of Hope at different housing projects in San
Antonio, Texas, on projectors we borrowed from the library. I wanted everyone to have access to these films — to take them away from art house cinemas and show them to “the people.” My goals were lofty and Sayles was patient. He answered questions, led discussions and used his free time away from the festival to look about San Antonio and get ideas for a story he wanted to tell called Lone Star. And years later, when they came back to Texas to make that movie, I went to work with them. John Sayles’s films are as much about a place as about its people. He and Renzi make films not as a business but out of curiosity for the world and the insatiable desire to tell stories. Their compassion for those around them and for those reflected in their stories extends to their hiring practices and the spirit of collaboration in their filmmaking. Not that Sayles’s films are collaborations. They are 100 percent his stories and vision. But Sayles and Renzi love their friends. And what better way to make a movie than to surround yourself with people you care about and to make something together that you all feel has worth in the world. It is a method that is underrated in our country and, these days, seems almost nonexistent.
limbo.
LIMBO It’s day three of one of our biggest extra scenes in Juneau, Alaska. It’s a wedding scene and the extras and small speaking parts are made up of a who’s who from the community. It’s been drizzling and we’ve all been stuck in a tent together, 60 or so of us, with most of the extras in their nicest clothes — heels and tuxes. The first 10-hour day everyone FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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laughed and talked and enjoyed an interruption in their workweek. The second 10-hour day, most people read. Now on the third day, they’re getting antsy — actually, mutinous. These are outdoors people — people who hike and bike and fish and boat constantly. This is the town where, upon my arrival, a guy interested in being an extra asked me out on a “date.” He says, “We’ll take a helicopter to the top of mount so-and-so, jump out with our skis on and ski down to where potential avalanches originate to assess the situation.” Do I want to come? “Are you crazy?” I ask him. “I’m a brown person from South Texas. Skiing is not in our DNA. Nor do I think jumping out of a helicopter for my first time ever on skis sounds like the safest way to learn.” Needless to say, outdoorsy people trapped in a big tent in the rain in fancy clothes are not a pretty sight. They are becoming downright bonkers. So at lunch, I ask Sayles if he would come and talk to them — pep them up a bit. Right after we ate he comes and sits with them for a while. He tells everyone the story of the film, he talks about their roles and he tells some anecdotes about other films of his with other big groups of extras. He gets everyone laughing. Then he leaves, and there is a
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palpable calm. The extras are able to make it through the rest of the shooting. They felt acknowledged. Sayles hired me to do grassroots casting for his films for speaking parts and extras. Grassroots casting has all the elements of community organizing. I entered each community with some knowledge of its history, local politics and culture. I gathered as many contacts as I could before I left, and then I would just hit the pavement — meeting people, talking, listening, following leads and telling the story of the movie over and over again. Afterwards, I always felt like I could run for mayor. Since I was in the first wave of crew to enter the town where we would film, it was always foremost in my mind that our interaction with the townspeople would set the tone for the arrival of the whole crew. A film production working within a community can either create a harmonious, mutually beneficial relationship or the town can, in the end, feel taken advantage of with a literal wake of environmental damage left to deal with. I used my office as a place where people from the community could come and ask questions, tell me their stories or tell me about someone I should meet, a local
character or an old-timer. In turn, I encouraged people to audition for speaking parts. I explained each part to them and how it wove into the tapestry of the story. When I would tell people the plot of the film, they were fascinated that a filmmaker was trying to tell a story about them, about their history or about what was happening to their community. After shaking the bushes around town, I would start bringing people in to audition or taping them on the spot wherever they worked. I tried to make the auditions fun and relaxed. I explained scenes. I contextualized lines. I paired people up to read together. I let people take their lines home to practice. I found surprising performances in bartenders, teachers, local politicians and union organizers. I auditioned people in hotel rooms, backyards, schools and on the side of a mountain. I made up skits with hundreds of school children and then filmed each performance. In many cases, I tried to cast the real person who was depicted in the script. For example, in Alaska I found an Athabascan woman who really worked gutting fish on a “slime line” to play just that, a woman on a slime line. She had a pretty big part and no acting experi-
ence. But she was open and natural and ready for a challenge. Instead of bringing in an actor, teaching them to act naturally while gutting a fish and delivering lines, I just worked harder with the untrained actors — practicing lines, letting them know what to expect, guiding them through the process. It helped that Sayles values every character and part no matter how small. He watches all the auditions I tape. He writes character biographies for every part in order to help the actor understand their roles. Each character is in the script for a reason. In this way, the person chosen to play the part, no matter how small, feel their own importance within the larger narrative. In rural Mexico, most people we worked with had not ever seen a movie much less been in one. So my brother and I would gather people together with our little video camera and act out their scenes ahead of time — just to get them ready for what it might be like when the big camera came. We gave names to extras’ parts to help them understand their role and give them an identity within the story. In one scene, a village is set on fire by the military. We practiced the scene over and over again. Afterward, a small boy who had practiced
running and screaming all day proudly told everyone, “My name is The Burned Kid!” As in grassroots organizing, knowing something of local politics is essential for grassroots casting. In Mexico, we needed to cast more than 50 speaking parts in six different indigenous languages. Each rural area we entered had a different political and religious allegiance — for or against the Zapatistas, evangelical or Catholic. Towns only miles apart could be in solidarity or bitter enemies. We had to earn the trust of each village before we even started to audition. We found an indigenous theater collective in southern Mexico whose reserved acting style worked well as the doomed leaders of the fictitious community. But because of the true political turmoil of their region, they had to be sure that they believed in the content of the film, that it did not belittle the struggle of their people, before they would participate. I’ve guided many untrained people through the process of being in a film from start to finish, as an extra or a speaking part. But there are few things as fun as telling someone they got the part — like the naturally wisecracking ice-cream vendor who got cast as a pushy tour guide in Casa de los babys.
lone star.
LONE STAR I’m running down the street with a breast pump in my hand. The extra dressed as a waitress has started lactating and we don’t want to stain her shirt. Shyly, she hands me the key to her house and explains in a whisper what is happening to her. I cast her because her serene face was almost Arabic-looking, like some of the people of Lebanese descent in this border region. So I’m running as fast as I can in flip-flops (which I probably decided to wear because summer in Eagle Pass, Texas, is brutal, not because they’re good for sprinting) with a walkie-talkie slapping against my leg, a massive notebook (all my contacts and schedules) under one arm and that breast pump under the other. A guy see page 104
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The Unseen Hand Amir Bar-Lev got more than he bargained for when he followed child painter Marla Olmstead and her family for a year in the riveting documentary
MY KID COULD PAINT THAT. By Jason Guerrasio
Amir Bar-Lev never intended on hurting anyone. It was just an innocent fascination with abstract art that got him interested in making a documentary on Marla Olmstead, a four-year-old painter whose work has sold for thousands of dollars. To make his film, Bar-Lev did what any filmmaker making a movie about a child would do — get close to the parents, in this case Laura, a dental assistant, and Mark, a Frito-Lay factory worker. And while becoming friends with Laura and Mark, he filmed the day-today life of their Binghamton, New York family — Marla and younger brother Zane — as they were thrust into the spotlight of the art world, attending gallery openings and appearing on The Today Show and Inside Edition. But BarLev had only one problem — he didn’t actually have footage of Marla painting. Whenever he tried to capture her artistic process she would just play around with the paint as if it was kindergarten art time. Then on February 23, 2005, six months 60
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into his filming, the bombshell: A 60 Minutes report about Marla made the charge that she was not a prodigy. It questioned whether or not she did the paintings on her own, implying that her father helped her. Suddenly, Bar-Lev becomes the parents’ last hope to clear their names, and My Kid Could Paint That shifts from a film on the craziness of modern painting to an investigative report on possible art fraud. Regardless of whether you walk away from Bar-Lev’s film thinking Marla does the paintings on her own or not, what My Kid Could Paint That definitely demonstrates is that our culture is obsessed with putting people on a pedestal and then gleefully knocking them off at the moment their talents are in question. And, for filmmakers, Bar-Lev’s film is a master class in the difficult decisions documentary makers face as they get close to the personal lives of their subjects. Sony Pictures Classics opens the film October 5.
When did you first hear about Marla? I read about Marla in a New York Times story [in 2004]. To me, it was just an interesting story. Number one, her popularity made me think about the question of “What is art? How does one judge art? How does one value art? Is it all a big con or is there something to modern art?” I also thought it would be interesting to follow this family, which was not the type of family one would normally associate with child celebrities. Or just the art world in general. You’re exactly right. Here was this family that literally overnight had been pulled into international art stardom. I wanted to see where things went with them. Over the course of the next half year or so I became real friendly with the family. It proved very challenging from the get-go to turn this four-year-old into a subject of a documentary for the very obvious reasons that all she really wanted to do was play. She didn’t want to be interviewed about the meaning of representation [laughs]. So by the time
PHOTO BY: MARK AND LAURA OLMSTEAD/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS Ocean by Marla Olmstead.
this surprise came six months in — that possibly it was all a big hoax — I was closer to the family than most documentary filmmakers get with their subjects. How did you initially approach the parents about making a film about their daughter? I approached them right before this big gallery opening. I said to them, “Look, I’ll shoot all weekend because this is a very important scene and at the end of the weekend we can discuss it. If you don’t want to do [the doc] I’ll just give you the tapes and we’ll go our separate ways.” So when Sunday afternoon rolled around I sat down with them and they said, “We’ve been discussing it and asking ourselves why we should do this. What’s in it for us?” I mistakenly thought they were talking about financial compensation, and they said, “No, we’re not talking about money, we’re just wondering — you seem like a nice guy, but why would we let some stranger in our house to play with our kids?” It stumped me, and then I answered, “Well, the only
“ultimately what i wanted to make the film about was what happens when you let a documentary director into your life.” thing I can say is that I think that the film might meet a deeper truth than some [of the work] of these other news crews that are coming in and out of your life. Maybe my film will reach more people; maybe my film will be something you will be happy to have 20 years from now because it will show what this year was like in your lives.” So, fast-forward to six months later when all of a sudden I’m confronted with the possibility that they’ve been lying. My first thought, and not for the last time did I have this thought, was why would they have invited me into their lives if they had something to hide? So I believed when I first saw 60 Minutes that this was impossible. Have you made up your mind on whether
Marla gets help with her paintings or not? I’m painfully aware of how important the subject of their innocence or guilt is [to Mark and Laura], but I hope that’s not all people think the film is about. It’s not that I’m saying it doesn’t matter whether she had help with the paintings or not, because I think it does. But ultimately what I wanted to make the film about was what happens when you let a documentary director into your life — the issues around representing people on celluloid. What happens on a human level. I definitely don’t want the film to be construed as a knock against documentary filmmaking. On the contrary, I’m just trying to talk a little about the process of representation. Whether you are painting someone, documenting them or writing a novel about them, there’s FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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PHOTO BY: MARK AND LAURA OLMSTEAD/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS marla and laura olmstead.
“[documentary making is] not about objectivity, it’s about evaluating your own subjectivity.” always this disparity between how you see people and how they see themselves, and I just wanted to point to that. But this family, however, was looking for my film to exonerate them, and I was unable to find proof in either direction. I was not able to prove that they were guilty nor was I able to prove that Marla does all of those paintings by herself, so then I was confronted with the responsibility that every documentary filmmaker has, which is to take that one year of time and turn it into 90 minutes of film. And whichever 90 minutes I chose was going to have a major impact on this family. In the absence of “proof ” there would just be the way that I portrayed them. What went through your head when you realized you had to make a different movie than you initially wanted? After the initial shock my first thought was, wow, this is really interesting for my film. And then the next thought was, boy, I feel parasitic because this terrible thing has just happened to my subjects and, as they rightfully say at the end of the movie, “it’s documentary gold.” That’s a weird feeling, morally, so I decided to try and draw attention to that element of the relationship between filmmakers and their subjects; how complicated it is to be friends 62
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with someone and at the same time want to tell an interesting story. I don’t think I did anything different than what every filmmaker does, which is to ride this bucking bronco of reality where you are constantly trying to figure out how you’re going to tell the story and adapt to reality. There is a moment in the film where the gallery owner, Tony Brunelli, says that everybody is trying to shape the story into something they want it to be instead of letting the story be what it is, and I kept that line in there not because I agree with it but because I disagree with it. There is no story without a storyteller, and it’s not one person shaping the story, every single person is. You can see as the film goes on that the notoriety Tony and Mark get goes to their heads a little. I would see this film as a cautionary tale to anybody who would decide to let other people tell their story for them. That’s what you do when you’re a celebrity. Whether it’s the news or your publicist or a documentary crew, you’re handing over the story of your life to someone else and they’re going to draw their own conclusions. It may work in your favor and it may not, but you lose control as soon as you let other people start telling your story. In one way that’s what the film is about. It’s about this family
who probably went into it with good intentions but couldn’t control their lives once they became an international story. Some would argue that as a documentary filmmaker it’s your responsibility to tell all sides of the story and not give your own opinion. I’m not sure I agree with that. I don’t think it’s about not putting in your opinion, I think it’s about scrutinizing your own opinion and your own perspective to such a degree that you stand behind it. It’s like the film is neither true nor false; it’s just how I saw things. It’s not reality — it’s a construction. I don’t think that a filmmaker should exclude his opinions. You can go one of two ways: You could choose to try and make a film as objective as possible or you could let the audience in on the fact that this isn’t reality, this is a fallible person’s opinion. You see in the film how much I struggle with the conclusions I’m beginning to draw and their potential impact on my subject, but I stand by the characterization. It’s an interesting thing to try and define objectivity. I mean, it’s important not to mess with the facts, that’s for sure. It becomes complicated because you’re omitting things [when you make a documentary]. It’s not about objectivity, it’s about evaluating your own subjectivity, and I find that really interesting. Documentary filmmaking is kind of like therapy in a way. You have to look at your own motives. At every juncture in any film you’re reducing weeks of time down to seconds, so it becomes less about objectivity and more about whether you are making a sensational story or trying to get to the heart of the matter of how you really think things went down. How often would you go upstate to shoot the family? With this particular film you end up sort of partnering with your subjects in a way. They become your line producers. They’re calling you and telling you when something interesting is happening. You begin to ask yourself, is this a collaboration or is it journalism? A case in point was that as we began to struggle to get the footage that would prove that Marla was single-handedly doing the paintings, the family said the reason we were
HOW THEY DID IT ■ Production Format: MiniDV. ■ Camera: PD150, DVX 100A, Canon XL2 with anamorphic lens adaptor. ■ Tape Stock: MiniDV. ■ Editing System: Final Cut Pro. ■ Color Correction: Uncompressed HD Final Cut Online up-convert through Teranex to 24fps HD at Final Frame Post NY and film out at Alpha Cine.
PHOTO BY: MARK AND LAURA OLMSTEAD/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
having trouble getting that footage was that Marla had become too familiar with me and my camera man and would be distracted every time we came up. So what we came up with was that I wouldn’t show up; I would get a new camera man, one who they hadn’t even been introduced to them to do the work. It became this absurd type of shooting where we would start out of New York City at six in the morning, arrive at nine because she paints in the morning at nine-thirty, and we would stake out their house. We would be outside drinking coffee just waiting for the phone call, and then the phone call would come, “She’s painting, send Nelson in!” So Nelson would come in and just imagine he’s not being introduced, he’s not even being acknowledged; she’s painting and suddenly this stranger comes in with this camera. It was weird but it was also sad because this accusation against them had caused them to lose sight to a certain degree of some of their initial protectiveness of their kids. We had reached a 180-degree difference from where we started. At the beginning they had said, “We’re only going to let you into the house if you’re friendly with our kids” and now it was the complete opposite — I was too friendly with the kids. What would you do when you weren’t shooting? Honestly, I became an insomniac. It was a
my kid could paint that.
really tough situation to find myself in because I just felt there was a lot at stake. Whatever happened or didn’t happen, certainly this little four-year-old is innocent and I knew the film would live with her, potentially even shape her recollections. So here I’m putting this documentary into the world that calls into ques-
tion her parents’ honesty. Seriously, there were times I thought that maybe I’ll just abandon this project. There are people who watch the film and get frustrated that I don’t act like a better inquisitor, that I didn’t become the type of person who would be able to get to the bottom of
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my kid could paint that director amir-bar lev.
“i don’t think i would have done things differently, i just think that documentary filmmaking is complicated.” this mystery. Some people ask, “Why don’t you take Marla off to the side and ask her whether her Dad was helping her?” Or, there’s one scene where the family says, “Give us a polygraph.” I don’t want to be the type of person who gives people polygraphs. That’s just not who I am. The nature of this particular mystery was such that to really get to the bottom of it you would have to have had to do something like that, and it just felt cheap to me. Take the paintings to fraud experts! I just didn’t want to do that. So you never asked Marla if her Dad helped her? I didn’t ask Marla for two reasons. One, in some ways I guess I was afraid of the answer and two, I feel that it’s in the film. I’m not asking, but she does say stuff. The scene where she says, “Zane painted the green one.” I mean Zane didn’t paint the green one, you know what I mean? But I know it is frustrating for some people and maybe I should have [asked her]. It’s not a perfect film because it was very muddy waters to tread in ethically. Looking back on it, do you think you got too close to your subjects? [pause] Um, I don’t think so. Would you ever get this close to a subject again? Sure. I don’t think there’s any way of getting around these issues. I mean, if you get less close to your subjects you’re not going to 64
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get the material you need to get. I don’t think I would have done things differently, I just think that documentary filmmaking is complicated and everybody needs to go into it understanding what’s involved — which is that there are going to be these two somewhat incommensurate elements to your relationship with people. One is your striving for journalistic integrity
GO BACK & WATCH ■ Who The #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? When a 73-year-old truck driver buys a painting for five dollars at a thrift shop she unknowingly becomes the talk of the art world after realizing she owns a Pollock. But there are those who doubt the originality of the painting, which leads to an often-humorous mission to authenticate the work chronicled by director Harry Moses.
■ Overnight Directors Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith document director Troy Duffy’s sudden rise to fame after striking a movie deal with then Weinstein-owned Miramax and the even quicker fall from grace when the deal goes sour. In the wake, Duffy alienates his contacts and friends leading to a depressing finale.
■ F for Fake Orson Welles’s 1974 free-form documentary on fraud examines the value of art and (of course) himself by studying the notorious art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer Clifford Irving, who also wrote the fraudulent Howard Hughes autobiography. An “illusionist” himself, Welles plays some tricks on the audience as well.
and the other is your feelings of affection for them. There’s no getting around that. A good amount of people see the film and conclude that there’s been no hoax whatsoever, which has been very gratifying for me because I feel the confusion that’s been in my brain has been spilled into the seats of the cinema. The other thing is we premiered at Sundance and we brought six of Marla’s paintings. We borrowed them from collectors just for display and somebody offered $35,000 for Ocean, which is more than anybody’s ever offered for her work. We’ll see what happens moving forward when the film comes out. I think that the paintings are only going to rise in value. Has everyone in the film seen it? Nearly everyone’s seen it. It’s my hope that the Olmsteads will warm up to the film when they realize how many people come away from it feeling the way about them that they always wanted a film to make people feel about them. So they didn’t see it at Sundance? They’ve seen it in the privacy of their own home but they haven’t been at the festival screenings. They weren’t at Sundance. Have you talked to them since they’ve seen it? Yeah. I talked to them. [pause] I’m hoping that our relationship improves by the time this comes out. And that’s all I want to say about that. Does Sony want them to do press for the film? I think that Sony and I both feel the same way, which is, we don’t want the film to be the last word on the Olmsteads. I’m hoping that they are interested in participating in publicity in some way or contributing to the DVD. [EDITOR’S NOTE: At press time, the publicist for the Olmsteads says the family is doing limited press and that there is no offical word yet on their involvment in the DVD]. Even if our perspectives aren’t exactly alike we need for both perspectives to be out in the world. Would you ever go back and re-examine this, say, when Marla is a teenager? Well, I’m hoping to do some of that with the DVD. I really hope to do follow-ups with everybody. I tell you what, though — somebody is going to do [a follow-up years later]. It’s probably not going to be me. Do you feel any guilt over having made the film? [pause] The answer is no but I feel sad that I no longer hang out with Marla and Zane. I thought those kids were pretty amazing and I am concerned about the impact the film might have on them. But when push comes to shove I think the film is fair so I don’t feel guilty.t
The Last Draft
Justin Lowe talks to Andrew Wagner about his sophmore effort, the deeply resonate drama starting out in the evening.
While audiences, critics and acquisitions execs attending the 2007 Sundance Film Festival were flocking to a variety of high-profile dramatic competition entries — many riding a wave of pre-festival buzz — a quiet consensus was developing on the excellence of a small, Manhattan-set drama by writer-director Andrew Wagner. Starting Out in the Evening attracted both critical and popular praise for its smart, literate sensibility, outstanding lead performances and dedication to the type of thought-provoking character drama that seems increasingly rare in contemporary cinema. It also represented something of a quiet milestone: Starting Out in the Evening is the final film produced by the now shuttered indie production company InDigEnt, which found success for many of its ultra-low-budget films at Sundance. Wagner’s offbeat, semi-autobiographical comedic drama The Talent Given Us, which starred his parents and two sisters, appeared at Sundance in 2005. Prior to his feature debut, Wagner earned an M.F.A. in directing at the American Film Institute, made a series of short films and took a feature adaptation of the novel The Man Who Gave Up His Name to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab before completing The Talent Given Us. Starting Out in the Evening centers on Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), an elderly New York City writer and former university professor, struggling late in his career to complete a final novel. In the decades since his first three books found widespread acclaim, the literary world has moved on, Schiller’s works have fallen out of print and his reputation is courting obscurity. When ambitious, vivacious young graduate student Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) tracks Schiller down and proposes to write her thesis on his novels and career, Schiller is initially skeptical and declines to cooperate. Heather persists, however, and gradually Schiller relents enough to engage in her probing interviews, as long as their discussions don’t disrupt his writing routine — although in actuality he’s making painfully slow progress on the novel he’s 66
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been writing for the past 10 years. Meanwhile Schiller tries to provide encouragement to his beloved daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), who on the cusp of turning 40 is desperate to have a child but is bereft of a suitable partner. As Leonard and Heather’s relationship becomes more personal, moving toward intimacy, Starting Out in the Evening adroitly skirts salaciousness in portraying the conflicts and aspirations of a talented, principled artist challenged to reimagine his own creative life. Wagner co-wrote Starting Out in the Evening with filmmaker Fred Parnes, adapting the screenplay from the PEN/Faulkner Awardnominated novel by Brian Morton, a longtime friend of Parnes’. While many filmmakers are searching for a hook that plays to investors, distributors and specific demographics, Wagner’s film stands out from other independent releases with its thoughtful tone, New York literaryscene setting and emphasis on acting craft. Star Frank Langella is a distinguished veteran of American stage and screen with a long list of honors, most recently for his Tony-award winning best leading actor performance as Richard Nixon in the Broadway production of Frost/Nixon, a role he recently reprised onscreen for director Ron Howard’s film adaptation, scheduled for a 2008 release. In his totally committed, fully inhabited role as Schiller, Langella delivers an outstanding performance that could attract awards-season attention. Lauren Ambrose, who has built her career with recurring roles on a variety of TV series, including Law & Order, Party of Five and an award-winning turn in HBO’s Six Feet Under, engages Langella with equal intensity. Starting Out in the Evening was shot on HD in 18 days in New York City and completed for just over $500,000. Roadside Attractions will release the film in late November.
walking the dog with my wife Chelsea and I bumped into one of my good old friends from my early days in Los Angeles, Fred Parnes. Fred is an active filmmaker: He made a documentary called Spread the Word and he had recently made his first narrative feature, A Man is Mostly Water. He was walking in [our Los Angeles] neighborhood holding this book entitled Starting Out in the Evening. He was about to embark on the idea of raising the money to make an indie film version of the novel. And I promise you it happened just like this: I had this incredibly powerful feeling, just a wave of intuition that made me say, “I don’t know where this came from — I just had this flash that somehow, some way, years from now, I’m going to be directing a film based on Starting Out in the Evening.” Sometime later, after having completed a rough cut of The Talent Given Us [in 2004], I was showing that version of the edit to Gary Winick. Gary had started a company with John Sloss in New York City called InDigEnt, which was designed around the premise of making quality-driven, character-rich films in very few days for very little money, but with the intent of affording a director the opportunity to realize a scaled-down vision as freely as possible. And after watching The Talent Given Us, he said, “Are you interested in making a film with InDigEnt?” That’s when the lightbulb went off and I remembered my conversation with Fred that night in 2000, now over four years ago, when we’d talked about Brian Morton’s novel and this small universe of characters who play out their lives in New York City. [Fred] had run into the usual impediments of getting Starting Out financed and he happily agreed to al-
Starting Out in the Evening differs significantly from your first feature, The Talent Given Us. How did you select it as your second project? It was in 2000 — I hadn’t even made The Talent Given Us yet — and I was
■ Production Format: HD Cam 24P. ■ Camera: Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta camera. ■ TAPE Stock: Sony HD Cam. ■ Editing System: Avid Adrenaline 1.8.1. ■ Color Correction: Lustre at Technicolor.
HOW THEY DID IT
low me to direct the film. We then [began] our collaboration on the screenplay. I just had this intuitive connection to the material, I decided to trust in it and of course it was in the months and years that followed in adapting the novel that I came to truly find my love for the book and then the storyline, but that’s where this choice came from. Was this your first time co-writing a script? It was; it was my first collaboration. I had been a solitary screenwriter for almost 20 years. My sister Emily Wagner, who is one of the featured actors in The Talent Given Us, had written a one-act play called Counting which years before we had made into a 45-minute independent film. She and I had actually collaborated on a feature version of that screenplay, but it was her first time writing, so it wasn’t a traditional idea of two writers coming together to collaborate. This was for all intensive purposes my first collaboration. This was [also] essentially Fred’s first collaboration. What types of challenges did you face in adapting Brian Morton’s novel? I think we were up against a number of core challenges. The first was how to find a dramatic relationship to the beauty of Brian’s writing. It’s such a poignantly observed novel and Brian’s ability to capture nuance and the essence of character and language, which at moments is singularly novelistic, [presented] us with the challenge of looking beneath and around and past the beauty at the core dramatic joints of the story. And in looking at those we felt that [our objective] was to heighten the drama of the key relationships and push them toward a more dynamic conclusion. Were there any unexpected opportunities that you discovered in translating the book to film? I think the novel offered us two major opportunities: One was to tell a compelling story and secondly to embrace the particular magic of film to explore the shadow regions inside the characters, where the hungers of the soul express themselves, often in mysterious ways. When I watch the film now, half a year removed from completion, it’s gratifying to have that step-back experience where the characters come to life and reveal themselves as if under their own agency. Frank Langella has become such an iconic American actor at this stage of his career. What do you think he was able to bring to the part of Leonard Schiller? Frank is a force of nature and what is particularly exciting about his performance was the call for him to release his virtuosity, release the mastery that has made him an American icon. He
walks into the room and the electricity in that space becomes amplified — he just has that much power. His call in playing Leonard was to hold his power within and to let it act as water underground, something that collects and breaks to the surface much later. Leonard is an emotionally sealed man who says and expresses much less than he feels. How did you approach Langella and persuade him to take the part? It was incredibly simple on one hand and rigorous on the other. It was simple because Frank’s agent Bill Veloric read the script, liked it and gave it to Frank, who had a very positive response and said, “Well, let me meet this director.” We met for dinner [in Los Angeles] and he walked in the restaurant and I said to myself, “Leonard Schiller just walked into the restaurant.” He sat down, we proceeded to have a
four-hour conversation and we talked about the material. A week or two later I flew to New York and we met at his apartment at 11 in the morning and I left 12 hours later. Were you familiar with Lauren Ambrose’s work before casting her in the role of Heather? Of course I knew of Lauren from her portrayal of Claire Fisher in Six Feet Under and I had two competing feelings at the time [we were casting]. One was that this woman is a remarkable actress and the other was that [Lauren] was so distinctively Claire and she’s so distinctively different from Heather. I had to really work within myself to understand that it was [Lauren’s] talent and her craft that allowed her to be so convincing as Claire and it would be those same capacities that would allow her to transform herself in portraying Heather. Starting Out in the Evening is really quite a
“i just had this flash that somehow, some way, years from now, I’m going to be directing a film based on Starting out in the evening.”
frank langella in starting out in the evening.
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lauren ambrose in starting out in the evening.
“i try to keep it simple in my approach to the films i want to make — which is, I need to feel a passionate connection to the material.” serious literary — and literate — drama. It seems an exception when so many filmmakers are looking for catchy concepts to entice financiers and audiences. Did you feel like you were taking a risk at all with the material? I really try to keep it simple in my approach to the films I want to make — which is, I need to feel a passionate connection to the material. My belief in film is born of the premise that it’s an act of necessity. The need produces creative energy and the creative energy opens up to possibility and I think that’s as much as you can control. I’d like to believe that if the film is alive, if it’s born of necessity, it will house a life force that will make it appealing to people who have to sit in the dark and take something back from the story being told in front of them. Years ago I walked through that door of
GO BACK & WATCH ■ Adaptation Perhaps one of the most original looks at the screenwriting process ever put on film, Spike Jonze’s take on Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to adapt The Orchid Thief has all the components we love about a Jonze/Kaufman collaboration: comedy, bewilderment and originality.
■ Ikiru Kurosawa’s 1952 film charts the odyssey of a retired city official (Takashi Shimura) stricken with cancer as he travels through the failures of his past, searching to create meaning and purpose for his fading future.
■ Wonder Boys Michael Douglas stars as a pot-smoking, wisecracking literature professor who attempts to complete his novel over the course of one hilarious and life-changing weekend in Curtis Hanson’s 2000 film.
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commitment where I felt my creative life had to be about making films that could be transformative experiences for myself, that had the chance to move people in ways that film can. I just wear those blinders when it comes to thinking about the realities of the marketplace, because if you think about them, you’ll never make a film you believe in. What was your approach to financing the film and partnering with InDigEnt? Somewhere amid the journey of this film moving from the screenplay form to before the cameras, the traditional InDigEnt financing model changed and their films were no longer being financed by the Independent Film Channel. We found ourselves from a financing standpoint having to become innovative in the more traditional privately financed independent film [model]. So like an independent filmmaker must learn to do, we asked — we asked for money. So between [Fred and I] we raised enough to shoot the film, which was a quarter of a million. Then on the day before production, literally, Gary Winick and John Sloss’s efforts to cover the rest of our budget met with success through their longstanding relationship with IFC, who introduced us to a Cablevison [division] called Voom. Voom agreed to give us the balance of the budget that we’d need to complete post and that was roughly another quarter million. Our total budget was just above $500,000. How did you manage to work within the constraints of InDigEnt’s stipulated 18-day shooting schedule? In a way, it was just the InDigEnt model and adhering to that model
co-writer-director andrew wagner.
from the start, we just moved forward with those limitations in mind. The film looks really great. How did you adapt your production process to the limitations of the budget? We owe so much to the talent of our cinematographer, Harlan Bosmajian, who was able to achieve genuine beauty and creative truth under incredible adversity. From an aesthetic standpoint, we had a simple premise, which was to concentrate on what we could achieve, not on what we couldn’t. And that pertains to the look of the film and the emotional center of the film. We just wanted to shoot an arrow to the heart of the story, which was: “What’s in the hearts of these characters?” And thankfully Harlan could achieve a lifelike feeling where the light was concerned so that it was not only naturalistic, but painterly. You adopt a fairly classic directing style that really lets the actors take the foreground in the film. What was your approach to conceiving and achieving the visual aesthetic of Starting Out? We paid careful attention to navigating that line between an observational posture and a subjective [point of view]. This wasn’t simply a vérité film where we just followed the characters, documentary-style. This is a man whose life, from an emotional standpoint, is ordered and decorous and he’s also a traditionalist, a classicist himself in his approach to his art and in his approach to his life and we needed to achieve a quiet elegance in underscoring this facet of his character. The classicism in composition grew out of the spine of his character.t
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In the diving bell and the butterfly, Julian Schnabel makes Jean-Dominique Bauby’s best-selling memoir into a funny, moving and wise contemplation of mortality and the artist. By Scott Macaulay
Most films draw us in with some promise of possibility. Buy a ticket, sit back and have your world expanded for a couple of hours. Be someone new and go places you’ll probably never see in your own life. But there’s another sort of movie that derives its drama from the opposite journey. Movies as diverse as Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot and Gary Tarn’s recent doc Black Sun place the audience within a world that’s drastically — and painfully — smaller than their own. Through the strength of their storytelling, these films both dramatize their protagonists’ quests to conquer the challenges of their new worlds while confronting viewers with the existential questions posed by their dilemmas. Julian Schnabel’s third feature, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is a challenging, sagacious and unexpectedly sensuous addition to this genre. Adapted from the best-selling memoir, the film tells the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, an editor at French Elle, who is one day stricken with locked-in syndrome. Although his mind functions perfectly, he is paralyzed except for the ability to move one eye. In a harrowing tour de force reel of filmmaking, Schnabel shoots the beginning of the film almost entirely from Bauby’s viewpoint, forcing us into the most extreme identification with his character. As the film progresses, however, it opens up. The details of this world — the color of the columns in the hospital hallway, the hue of the linoleum on the floor — seduce us. Bauby develops relationships with a series of 70
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spectacular nurses who not only teach him to communicate but also enable him to write the book the film is based on. By the film’s end, we are living comfortably within Bauby’s world, like him no longer scared, and a simple change of season provides all the excitement and sense of accomplishment we need. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is Schnabel’s third film dealing with death and an artist, won him the Best Director award at Cannes this year (and will be released by Miramax in November). It caps a typically busy year for him that included not only his art direction of the newly reopened Gramercy Hotel in New York City but also his live theatrical staging of Lou Reed’s Berlin album in New York, Sydney and Los Angeles. In Toronto, he not only screened The Diving Bell and the Butterfly but also his film Berlin, which should also see a release sometime in the next year. I read somewhere that you dubbed The Diving Bell and the Butterfly a “treatise about dying.” As an artist making a movie about
HOW THEY DID IT ■ Production Format: 35mm. ■ Camera: BOGARD 1 camera, ARRI MEDIA Arricam ST full. ■ FILM: KODAK 5279 (500T VISION1). ■ Editing System: AVID adrenaline. ■ Color Correction: Chemical (no digital grading).
another artist confronting mortality, how did your own feelings about, and perhaps fears of death and dying, affect your approach? Well fortunately or unfortunately, I think coming to grips with [the process of dying] is part of what it is to be alive. It takes up a good part of being alive, in fact. So I don’t really separate his experience from mine — or yours — and that’s probably what’s good about the movie. But I guess the notion of transgressing death by making art probably had something to do with the making of this movie too. You had a certain distance because it was someone else’s story? I’ve never been able to separate intellect from feeling. People who can do that — I don’t trust them. Fred Hughes, who used to work for Andy Warhol, had MS and got progressively worse over the years. We were friends and when he was lying in his house and couldn’t speak anymore, I used to read to him. His nurse, Darin McCormick, gave me this book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, as a gift. One year my kids were out of school for Christmas, and we were going to Mexico. My father, who died on January 17, 2004, [was sick] and I couldn’t bring him with us. I thought of who could take care of him [when I was away] and Darin McCormick came to mind. He came to my studio one day in December, and it was the same day that the script of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly arrived. So I wasn’t analytical at all about it. [Making the movie] had very much to do with me trying to
PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD. the diving bell and the butterfly director julian schnabel.
deal with my father’s death. The movie is really a self-help device. When you say “the script arrived,” what do you mean? Had you been developing it, or was it something offered to you by a producer? They had asked Johnny Depp if he wanted to play this role and he wanted me to direct the movie so the script was sent to me. [That script] was written by Ron Harwood, and then I worked on it. Like I said, I had had the book for some years, but I didn’t plan on making the movie. I did think about making a movie about Fred, who I knew pretty well. I thought, here he is lying in this bed, and I know all the things that he did and what an active life he had. The idea of this person being still and the audience knowing what is going on in his head — that’s a structure I like. I had written a script for the book Perfume: The Story of a Murderer that was similar in a way because the main character had a sense of smell that was extraordinary. He could travel through his olfactory senses in the same way that Jean-Dominique Bauby could travel with his imagination and his memory. So I applied some of the [devices] I used in the script for Perfume to the script that I received that day from [producer] Kathy Kennedy. How much did you change it? I made it into French — it was written in English. I couldn’t see having English and American people making believe they have French accents speaking in English and then watching a French audience watch the movie in English reading French subtitles. I also thought it was very important to go to France and be at the hospital where this [story] took place, where Jean-Do actually was. The author wrote it based on the book, but I went there and met his best friends and talked to them and found out a lot of things that made me change things or made things make more sense to me. For example when his wife says to him, “Do you want to see your kids?” and he says, “No” — in the script he originally says “Yes,” but the fact of the matter is that he didn’t want to see his kids. Anne-Marie Perrier, who was his best friend, picked him up in an ambulance one day 72
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PHOTO BY: ETIENNE GEORGE
“[making the movie] had very much to do with me trying to deal with my father’s death. the movie is really a self-help device.”
max von sydow (left) and mathieu almaric in the diving bell and the butterfly.
and took him to see another man with lockedin syndrome who lived at home with his family. The two of them sat facing each other and then at the end of the day he was taken back to the hospital. After seeing how another man who had locked-in syndrome could still be a father, I think he realized that he was still a father. Even a shadow of a father is still a father, and I think he came to understand that later. How much of the characters of the nurses are like those real people? To some degree, the film almost has a quality like Fellini’s 8½ with this artist meditating all of these beautiful and interesting women. The first lady you see is his real nurse, and his physiotherapist, this guy Daniel, the one who is holding him in the swimming pool — he was his nurses’
GO BACK & WATCH ■ THE SEA INSIDE Director Alejandro Amenabar (The Others) won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2005 for his moving take on the true story of quadriplegic Ramon Sampedro (Javier Bardem), who was confined to his bedroom for 30 years and fought for his right to die.
■ BASQUIAT Julian Schnabel moved from internationally celebrated artist to cinéaste in 1996 with this portrait of his friend and fellow painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat (a breakthrough role by Jeffrey Wright), who tragically died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at 27.
■ MY SEX LIFE... OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT After over a decade as an actor, Matthieu Amalric came to prominence in 1997 in director Arnaud Desplechin’s acclaimed three-hour comedy drama about a self-involved young academic caught at a crossroads in his life.
aide. All the medical details are probably about 95 percent accurate. We had people [in the film] doing what they really did with Jean-Do — they were the actual people who worked with him. [But referring to the principal nurses and the 8½ reference,] I think that’s true. It’s my version obviously of how I see these people. The [real] people are one thing and the people in the movie are something else. What I was more interested in was the bigger picture of what he achieved rather than how his girlfriend and the mother of his kids felt about each other. The movie ended up being about men and women and the way women were able to really be many things to him. He needed all of them in his life for different reasons. One was able to teach him the alphabet, one supplied him with some kind of connection to his kids, another one with a fantasy life. One helped him finish his book. Why was it important to shoot in that exact hospital? Your film feels, quite precisely, art-directed — it doesn’t have a doc-like feel at all. I thought it was very important to go to the hospital where Jean-Do actually was. The tide goes in and out about 500 meters, back and forth, every day there. It looks like you’re on the moon. [ Jean-Do] wrote that you’re on the far side of life when you’re out there, and that’s definitely part of this [story]. I think I saw a lot of Antonioni inside of the arch of the hospital and the landscape around there, so [his films] popped into my mind sometimes too. I also built the room that would work for me in the hospital.
You sort of turned the hospital into a stage? Yes. I made the floor with linoleum squares because I thought, okay, when people talk to you, well maybe you don’t want to look at them, even if they’re talking to you. You can look at the floor, or their hand, or their leg. Jean-Do could look up at the fluorescent lights and the ceiling, particularly if somebody was telling him something he didn’t want to hear. Your films have always mixed score music with very memorable source cues that seem to be drawn from all over. How do you select the music for your films and at what point do those selections occur? I always listen to music, carry it around with me; I know [certain songs] are going to pop up [in my movies] some time or another. I always thought “Pale Blue Eyes” was going to play in that scene on that boat. Years ago I was going to meet my wife — I was in Cannes and rented this Mercedes convertible and drove 110 miles an hour to meet her listening to “Ultraviolet (Light My Way)” by U2, and I knew that I was going to use that song with that girl’s hair flying around way before I shot this movie. Paul Cantelon [who composed the score] was a child prodigy and then was hit by a car and had total amnesia. Years later, he was playing the piano and said, “Hey Mom, listen to this,” and she said, “That’s Bach.” So he identified with this [ Jean-Do’s] life and his problem. One day he came to me with these preludes he had written. One of them was perfect, so that was it. There’s some Nino Rota music [in the film] and also Nelson Riddle playing the theme to Lolita. Whenever I would watch the dailies I’d play music and see how things fit. You try to invent other kinds of music, but many times I’ll go back to something I thought of originally. In Before Night Falls I used the Popul Vuh music from Aguirre: the Wrath of God, and there was another bit of Ennio Morricone from The Battle of Algiers. You said you spoke to the real people who were involved in this story, but obviously the one person you could not speak to was JeanDo himself. Did making this film reveal to you something you had not surmised about his character? I didn’t realize that he probably felt he was selected instead of cursed. It was as if some, I don’t know, God or whoever, said: “You can be a great artist and have no body or you can be perfectly healthy and normal but you’ll be an ordinary person: Which one would you like to be?” I think he was an ordinary guy who was talented when he was a magazine editor but he became somebody else when he became the author of this work.t FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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must something
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Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis is put under the microscope in Anton Corbijn’s debut feature Control. By Nick Dawson
Anton Corbijn, the 52-year-old Dutch photographer, music-video director, designer and now film director, almost didn’t direct Control. He initially turned down producer Orian Williams’s offer to make a movie about Ian Curtis, the iconic lead singer of the British band Joy Division, who hung himself in 1980 at only 23. “I was so fed up with people just calling me a rock photographer when that’s really not what I’m doing,” says Corbijn. “I felt if I did a movie that was connected even slightly to music, people would say it was a rock film and therefore not take me seriously as a director. I felt it was not a great start for me. But then I rethought [it] after a few months.” It’s a good thing he did. Control is not only an exceptional debut but also one of the most compelling, moving and visually arresting films of the year. Though the idea of a film about Joy Division — especially one made by someone best known for being a “rock photographer” and promo director — inspired dread in the hearts of the band’s fans, Control avoids being a hackneyed biopic of Curtis, the James Dean of the postpunk generation. Corbijn instead creates a complex and deeply human portrait of the man in the context of the times he lived in. As one would expect 74
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from someone with Corbijn’s background, Control — shot in piercing black-and-white — looks stunning, but his ability as a great director of actors is the real surprise: In the lead role, first-timer Sam Riley, an ex-indie singer, is astonishing as Ian Curtis, giving a performance that merits a Best Actor Oscar nomination; Samantha Morton, one of Britain’s best actresses, is typically excellent as Curtis’s wife, Deborah; and Toby Kebbell, so good in Shane Meadows’s Dead Man’s Shoes, has a great scene-stealing turn as the band’s manager, Rob Gretton. Though Control’s script, by Matt Greenhalgh, was adapted from Curtis’s ex-wife Deborah’s memoir, Touching From a Distance, the film also draws on Corbijn’s own experiences during the late 1970s when, as a shy, young photographer (and Joy Division fan) in Manchester, he was hired to take pictures of the band. I briefly spoke to Corbijn after the Edinburgh International Film Festival awards ceremony (where both he and Riley won prizes for Control), and then caught up with him a few days later to discuss his memories of Joy Division, working with Riley, and the film’s success at Cannes. The Weinstein Company opens the film in October.
I believe you moved to the U.K. in 1979 because of Joy Division. I’d been there a couple of times prior to that. I was sort of thinking of leaving Holland anyway, and when that music came out I felt I should really be there, where the music comes from. So they were the catalyst, in a sense. The few times I’d been to England prior to that I felt that my pictures were stronger when I took them here, and that had a lot to do with the atmosphere of music, which people took very seriously. It was much more of a choice: You get a job, or you go make music. And there was an inten-
HOW THEY DID IT ■ Production Format: Super 35, 1:2.35. ■ Camera: We had two cameras with us all the time: one Panavision Millenium XL and as a back-up we carried a Panavision Platinum. We used primo spherical lenses. ■ FILM: Kodak vision 5217, 200 ASA tungsten for everything and only for the concert scenes we had Kodak vision two 5218, 500 ASA tungsten. ■ Editing System: An Avid, I think we used version 9 of Media Composer. ■ Color Correction: We did a 2K scan on an arri scanner. The digital intermediate we did on Fuji color print stock (if that did not change) and some prints on b&w print stock. The DI was put on to film with an Arrilaser. The colorgrading was done on a film master from digital vision.
PHOTO BY: DEAN ROGERS sam riley in control.
PHOTO BY: DEAN ROGERS (left-right) director anton corbijn, riley and matthew mcnulty on the set of control.
“there was a beautiful thing about sam [riley] that didn’t feel so much like an actor and therefore would probably be more believable.” sity to what people were doing here too that I didn’t feel so much on the continent. What was it about Joy Division’s music that you particularly connected to? It’s difficult to describe. I guess I felt a kind of strength in it, a gravity, a sort of weight and seriousness that I must have responded to at the time. My English was pretty poor, so it wasn’t the lyrics, but maybe just the way that they were sung in combination with the music. There was this whole atmosphere about it. I love that Control shows Ian Curtis’s warmth and humor, particularly in the scenes where he’s working at the job center. Were you personally very aware of that side of his personality? No, not so much. Because of my lack of English at the time, I wasn’t a great conversation-maker. I was also a little shy and they had a bit of an accent, so it was not that easy for me to speak to them. They really liked my pictures, and one time they asked me to come 76
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to Manchester. The initial picture I did in the tube [station], where they walked away from me, that was my idea and they really liked that picture. I got a lot from the book [Touching From a Distance] and from talking to people for all these kinds of [personal] details.
GO BACK & WATCH ■ SID AND NANCY Alex Cox’s 1986 movie tells the story of the all-too brief life of Sid Vicious, the Sex Pistols’ bassist who was the other notable musical casualty of the postpunk era.
■ ANDREI RUBLEV Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece is stunningly photographed in black and white and has a simplicity and emotional clarity that is echoed in Control.
■ 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE Michael Winterbottom’s upbeat, raucous film chronicles the Manchester music scene surrounding Factory Records, the seminal label founded by the great Tony Wilson (one of Control’s producers as well as a character in the movie), who recently died.
How did you approach the casting of the film? It seems like you were trying to find new faces rather than use well-known actors. Well, initially there were some people involved on the production side that would have liked more well-known faces, but for the role of Ian it was very hard to get a well-known person to want to play that. I think it’s a very difficult role to play, very big shoes to fill. So we talked to a couple of people but we also did a lot of open castings both in London and in the North [of England], and that’s where Sam Riley was spotted — and I can’t tell you how much of a blessing that has been for the film. Did you know instantly when you saw him that he should play Ian? Well, I saw him on film initially, and when I met him I then thought he was very much the only option we had. There was something about him that was very reminiscent of how I met Joy Division, who I also met in the winter. There’s a Northern English thing where people underdress and they don’t eat too much and they have these long overcoats on and they’re smoking a cigarette and trembling with their hands. When I saw Sam doing that, I thought that’s exactly what I remember when arriving in England and meeting Joy Division. So that was quite a good omen, I thought. There was
a beautiful thing about Sam that didn’t feel so much like an actor and therefore would probably be more believable, where you really believe that the person you are watching is a real person. I watched Kes, this Ken Loach movie about a young boy, a couple of times and he’s so believable that you really feel that it’s a documentary. I was hoping to get something close to that. What was your relationship with Sam like during filming? Quite close. We were both first-timers and a lot of our success depended on the other. In a way he saw me as a father figure [laughs] on the set, at least. I really wanted him to do well, and he was just amazing, he didn’t need much pushing at all. He worked very hard and studied everything that there was to study. There was never a problem for Sam that he didn’t give 110 percent, including the epileptic fits, which are very hard to do. And the fact that he had become a singer helped us in the film, because initially I was just going to do playback, but then the [actors] became so good that they really wanted to play for real — and thank God they did. So the actors decided they wanted to actually play the Joy Division songs rather than just mime? Yeah, they did. I just wanted them to study [their instruments] so that they could look believable for the playback, but they wanted to go further. They rehearsed every day with the musical director, so that was brilliant for those live scenes, but it was also great for non-live scenes because throughout these rehearsals there started to become a dynamic that was like a real band. Did you know that Sam had been in a band when you cast him? I did, but the only thing I thought was that it was quite good that he knew how to hold a microphone and probably had the right pose. But, of course, it might also have been a hindrance because you probably get used to your own pose at the microphone and we wanted an Ian Curtis pose. But he did that so well. I was quite adamant to get the live stuff correct, because although it’s not a Joy Division film, I knew that it would potentially be a film that Joy Division fans would go to and that they would be scrutinising the performances. [The performances] are the only thing we actually have film of. There’s nothing of Ian walking in the street, that sort of film doesn’t exist. How closely did Sam connect with the character of Ian over the course of filming? There’s a nice irony in that Sam and your actress Alexandra Maria Lara fell in love just like their characters, Ian and his mistress see page 105 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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The Hollywood Life Anthony Hopkins blurs fantasy and reality in the disorienting slipstream. By Scott Macaulay
There are actors who direct and their films seem like extensions of the personas they’ve already developed in their screen performances. For example: Clint Eastwood with his lean, iconic dramas; Takeshi Kitano with his bemused, off-kilter take on the cop movie; Woody Allen’s New Yorkish blend of erudition and goofball comedy. After seeing Slipstream, however, I think it’s fair to say that there’s been nothing in Anthony Hopkins’s onscreen work that could prepare one for the path he’s taken for his third directing effort. At heart it’s the tale of a dying writer, Felix Bonhoeffer, and the contortions of his mind as recent people and events in his life merge with a crime thriller screenplay he’s writing. It owes something, perhaps, to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive but also to Alain Resnais’s Providence, an-
other film about the blurring of perception within the creative mind. But Hopkins, working with d.p. Dante Spinotti and editor Michael Miller, has scrambled all manner of narrative storytelling convention, creating a deliberately disruptive montage that conveys the cosmic craziness of life itself while also challenging the staid conventions of mainstream storytelling. I spoke with Hopkins by phone about his decision to direct Slipstream, his thoughts on the nature of time and what the film means to him. The film will be released through Strand Releasing in late October. I read an interview you did about the film and you talked about being fascinated with the nature of time. I think you even said that you speculate that God is, in fact, time itself.
So with Slipstream, which came first: these kinds of philosophical questions, or simply the character of Felix Bonhoeffer? About four years ago I just sat down at the computer and wrote [Slipstream] as an experiment. I didn’t set out to write it as a piece with any meaning or message or any sort of significance. In an offhand way I just said, “Okay, I’m going to write something,” and that’s how I started. I don’t want to [use] highfalutin words such as “stream of consciousness,” but I think that’s what it was. I started with scene one and let it write itself. I tried not to edit my mind as bits came out. I didn’t spend days intensely working — I’d write two scenes, maybe, and then I’d walk away. Then I’d come in the next day and do something else. I think I wanted to see where it would take itself and how random it would be. After a few months I read what I wrote, and I thought, “Well, this is kind of interesting,” and I let it go at that. Some other people read it, and they said, “This is really, really weird and strange — what does it mean?” I said, “Well I know what it means, but I can’t actually explain it to people.” So I asked Steven Spielberg to read it for me. A few weeks passed and he phoned back, and he said, “This is very interesting, a stream of consciousness, I guess.” I said, “Yeah, I suppose”. He said, “You’re going to have a bit of a difficult time mounting this. No studio will want to take on something like this, but anyway, good luck with it.” Then I examined [the script further] and I began to understand what the meaning of it was for me. It’s about the strange nature of time, and how
HOW THEY DID IT ■ Production Format: Sony HDCam SR. ■ Camera: Panavision Genesis. ■ Editing System: Avid Media Composer. ■ Color Correction: Conform on Qu-
slipstream writer-director anthony hopkins.
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antel IQ and Discreet Smoke; DaVinci 2K DI at Company 3; film out at EFilm to acetate stock; Prints on Kodak Premiere stock at Deluxe.
we can never grasp it. It’s so inevitable, such an enigma. You cannot even grasp a microsecond of it because it’s already flashed into the past. Do you think our conception of time has changed as the modern era has progressed? Are things faster now? Is a sign of our times a kind of disorienting “speed of life?” Oh I don’t know. I think it’s always preoccupied people through the centuries. It has preoccupied playwrights like Shakespeare and poets like Blake. But as I’m getting older, I’m drawn back to the past. I don’t live there, but I am drawn back to the past, and my memories are clearer and clearer as I get older. I think what I have tread upon [in Slipstream] is, what the hell is it all about? Why are we here? But I didn’t want to put that as a message in the film — there is no message in the film. The other thing that I wanted to do was, I suppose, to annoy the audience. I wanted to provoke [the viewer] by doing the opposite thing [you’d expect in the film]. For example, the waitress in the restaurant [scene], as soon as she takes the order from the two seemingly main characters, the camera follows her outside and then it goes off into tangents, picking up on other peoples’ lives. And I knew there was no logic, no good reason, why these two guys [played by] Christian Slater and Jeffrey Tambor would have any reason to hijack a café in the middle of the desert. There’s no money. But I put a red herring there that maybe Christian Slater recognized Gina who nearly killed him on the road at fast speed, and he may have remembered that she could have been a witness in the parking lot the night before he murdered Michael Clarke Duncan’s character. But I thought, why do we have to offer explanations? I’m not even going to explain it. The scene in the desert and then the whole film-within-a-film story with the crew making a low-budget movie was a part of the film I really enjoyed. I recently saw Frank Perry’s film Play It As It Lays. Frank Perry? Yeah, do you know that film? I know the book, but Frank Perry directed The Swimmer, didn’t he? Yes. But Play It As It Lays also deals with a kind of psychological breakdown that occurs in the context of a film shoot in the desert. What is it about the particular psychology of the people that work in film, or maybe that kind of impromptu community of people that comprises a film set, that interests you? They’re like circus animals. They come into town, they arrive with their big trucks and for a few weeks they become a family. And then it’s all disrupted in the end, and they all go their separate ways. I
christian slater in slipstream.
“i began to understand what the meaning of [the script] was for me. it’s about the strange nature of time, and how we can never grasp it.” watch a movie and think, just off camera you’ve got a whole crew with coffee cups, and craft services and catering, and God knows what. You’ve got the director who at the end will say, “Okay, cut,” and eventually someone will say, “That’s a wrap everyone, thank you very much.” And everyone goes back to his or her little boxes on the hill. But in fact that’s what life is — it’s all a dream, an illusion, and at the end of this film, particularly when Bonhoeffer is killed by the car and lies there on the windshield, you realize the whole thing was make-believe. It was a film anyway. I perceive life as a game, a game
GO BACK & WATCH ■ Barton Fink The Coen brothers’ surreal journey into the dark side of Hollywood stars John Turturro as a screenwriter who seeks help for his writer’s block but winds up p[emomg one too many doors to horror and absurdity.
■ play it as it lays Frank Perry's 1972 dyspeptic Hollywood drama stars Tuesday Weld as an actress recovering from a mental breakdown and the suicide of her nihilist movie producer friend.
■ last year at marienbad Alain Robbe-Grillet, celebrated French novelist of the nouveau roman, scripted this puzzling art film for director Alain Resnais. In a stately French luxury hotel, a woman, Delphine Seyrig, tries to decide whether to run away with a stranger with whom she may or may not have had a previous affair.
that we play at some unconscious level. We have no knowledge of what lies deep under it. Maybe if we were visionaries we would but I don’t think many of us have any clue what this is all about. In some ways you could call Slipstream an experimental film. It certainly rejects conventional film storytelling and, specifically, continuity editing. In devising the language of this film, did you consider the work of earlier experimental filmmakers? I tried to stay as uninfluenced as I possibly could. I was obviously interested in the way Oliver Stone edited films like JFK, particularly those peculiar flashes of images in the middle of the scenes. But if I thought of anything it was Last Year at Marienbad. I love that movie. That was a really interesting film that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. I believe it was 1961 that it was shown, and it deals with the nature of perception, the nature of memory and the peculiar puzzle of life and its repetitions, which I find really haunting. [Slipstream is] also based on one — well, several — experiences I’ve had. I experienced two or three concussions from accidents with a loss of memory that lasted about an hour or so. An acute form of amnesia. They were very unnerving. The first time it happened, I was doing a movie with Alec Baldwin called The see pag 106 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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My super sweet
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Jason Reitman delves into teen pregnancy (with a little help from first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody) in his follow up to Thank You for Smoking, Juno. By Lisa Y. Garibay
The pairing of writer Diablo Cody and director Jason Reitman was one of complete chance, like one of those cop-buddy movies where the grizzled vet is set up with a renegade newbie and against all odds the two wind up catching the bad guy with everybody rooting for them in the end. Although Juno is only Reitman’s second feature, he was born into the film business; as the son of Ivan Reitman, he’s been involved in the making of movies all his life. Reitman’s award-winning short films played the likes of Sundance, Seattle and the Los Angeles Film Festival; his feature debut Thank You for Smoking was lauded by the National Board of Review and Independent Spirit Awards. Cody, on the other hand, arrived on the film scene out of seeming obscurity with a readymade notoriety. Her blog Pussy Ranch, which detailed Cody’s exploits as a stripper and phone 80
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sex operator, attracted the attention of a bored ’net surfer who turned out to be manager Mason Novick. In 2004, Novick got Cody a book deal for her memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. On the heels of the book’s success, Novick suggested that Cody try to write a screenplay just to see what would happen. Cody (whose real name is Brook Busey-Hunt) hit a home run with her first shot at bat: Juno became the hot script around town and was first handed to Brad Siberling before ending in Reitman’s lap. Reitman gathered a stellar cast that included Hard Candy’s Ellen Page as the pregnant teen who steals your heart and is as much a cheerleader to her family, friends and audience as they are for her throughout her trials and tribulations. Supporting Page are Allison Janney, J.K. Simmons, Michael Cera, Olivia
Thirlby, Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner; together, they form a circle of love and laughs that has enveloped cheering crowds at Telluride and Toronto. In the midst of year-end awards hopefuls, Juno has come up from its unlikely roots to prove itself a strong contender. None of Juno’s successes is as coincidental or far-fetched as it may appear. Reitman champions Cody as a born storyteller; he was so taken by her work that he put aside a script of his own in order to go after the chance to direct Juno. For her part, Cody took advantage of her perspective outside the industry to think about the kind of people she’d like to see on the big screen and came up with a story that reflected the complexities, strengths and smarts she wasn’t witnessing in women’s roles these days. Here, Reitman and Cody — who are still as much a team in the
Juno director Jason Reitman. PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.
PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD. juno screenwriter diablo cody.
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film’s promotional process as they were during its production — talk about how much Juno meant to them and how they worked to make sure viewers would appreciate the potential they believe it always had. Fox Searchlight opens the film in mid-December. What are the most common reactions you’re getting from viewers or the media about Juno? Cody: I’ve been repeatedly asked — and I do think this is a good question, it’s just difficult for me to answer every time — the sort of all-purpose “Where did the character of Juno come from?” Which is difficult because when you’re a writer, you just pull characters out of the ether that are mutant babies from your brain. So it’s hard to describe that process; every time, I feel like I’ve done it inadequately so I dread that question. That would not be a question that I’d ask because one of the reasons I liked the film so much was because Juno reminded me of myself and all my friends when we were adolescents. She was so familiar to me. Cody: Great! Bless you — I think that’s so cool! Was the experience of making Juno anything remotely close to what you imagined making a movie was like? Cody: I could never have imagined it would be this wonderful! I have enjoyed every single moment of it. There does not seem to be a downside to the process of making and promoting this movie. It’s just been awesome. Obviously I’m kind of green, so all of this is new to me, but this strikes me as great. Do you feel — and Jason, you could probably speak to this — that people were protecting you by going the extra mile to make it a good experience for you because you were so green, as you say? Cody: I guess I would agree with that except I have a lot of friends who have also been first-time screenwriters and they have not been protected in the least. So maybe in this situation I have just been incredibly lucky. Reitman: I’ve always felt very protective of Diablo, but as far as the experience on this film, the reason that I always wanted her on set was very selfish. I constantly wanted her input on Juno’s life and how she spoke and what she’d wear. On Thank You for Smoking, I thought I had a pretty good insight into who Nick Naylor was and I felt like I understood his voice. In a pinch, I could write something on set. On [Juno], I would never pretend like I could do that; it was always very valuable to be able to turn to Diablo and also Ellen, who understood what this character was going through. Cody: How cool is that? You don’t hear that from a lot of directors! Jason, your script for Thank You for Smoking got
PHOTO BY: DOANE GREGORY
a lot of positive attention and racked up a few awards. You obviously know what you’re doing, so based on your experience and judgment, what was it that Diablo did with the script for Juno that was absolutely right and made it a strong, shootable script? Reitman: What excites me about a screenplay is [when it] takes on a tricky subject matter, has a very original point of view and basically makes original decisions throughout. I was actually writing another screenplay myself that I was going to direct when I was given Juno. I read it and I fell in love with it because it did exactly that. It took something like teenage pregnancy, which is a tricky topic that can easily get political, yet this movie doesn’t get political at all. It’s filled with human experience and human decision and original choices from top to bottom. It was one of those things where I started reading it and just a few pages in I thought, “Wow, this girl can really write!” Then, by the end of the first act I thought, “Wow, this is a really good screenplay!” and by the end of the screenplay I was thinking if I don’t get the opportunity to direct this I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. Diablo, how did you go about prepping yourself to write a screenplay given the fact that you had never done it before? Cody: It was a modicum of preparation to say the least. I think I went into it as an experiment; I didn’t really have a whole lot invested in it. It was more something I just wanted to try. I had no idea throughout the process that this would ever wind up being a produced screenplay or that this would ever be cast with these amazing actors. There was absolutely no pressure on me because I was just sitting in Minnesota writing for my own edification. So I think that was freeing in a lot of ways. I’ve written a couple of features since then and Juno was definitely the easiest even though it was the first because there wasn’t that sense of… I guess ignorance is bliss is the best way of putting it. [laughs] The only thing I did was I went to Barnes & Noble and bought the shooting script for a couple of movies that I liked so I could see how they looked on the page and that gave me a little structural guidance. But that was all I did. Did you do any work with your manager on the script before it was circulated to get it shipshape? One of those cardinal rules you hear in screenwriting classes or read about in screenwriting books is that your script should be absolutely flawless because you’re competing with thousands of others out there and if you have the wrong act structure or bad punctuation or any distraction in that regard, then you’ll get discarded immediately. Cody: So I’ve heard! Which is so funny
(Left-Right) Ellen Page, olivia thirlby and allison janney in Juno.
“by the end of [reading] the screenplay i was thinking if i don’t get the opportunity to direct this i’ll regret it for the rest of my life.” to me because when we sent that screenplay out, it was riddled with typos and formatting errors because I had no idea what I was doing. [laughs] My manager, I think, was so stunned that I had turned out something vaguely coherent that he just said, “Let’s throw it out there and see if anybody likes it.” We really didn’t obsess; I think it was just a case of expectations being so low that there was not a lot of polishing and spit-shining going on. Reitman: I think the literary world and the screenplay world are very different when it comes to grammar, per se. Thank You for Smoking had grammar mistakes all over it. Cody: You’d be surprised, though, Jason. After Juno I was hired to work on this pilot and I made the smallest, the most benign formatting error — like parenthesis were like a tick to the left — and the show runner called me and was like, “This is not acceptable! You
HOW THEY DID IT ■ Production Format: 35mm. ■ Camera: Panavison Platinum, Panavision Millenium XL, Panastar. ■ FILM STOCK: Kodak. ■ Editing System: Avid. ■ Color Correction: We did a DI over EFILM.
cannot work if you are doing this sort of thing!” I was like, “I think I did that a hundred times in Juno, lady, so back off! I really don’t think the spacing in this particular case is very important to the story.” [laughs] I’m into great grammar, don’t get me wrong — I don’t want people to scrawl shit in a napkin in crayon, but tone down. Jason, did encountering somebody from outside the industry as you did with Diablo help give you perspective on not just this project but also your approach to filmmaking? Reitman: To be perfectly honest, I never really thought of it that way. I grew up in the business and Diablo grew up outside of the business. In terms of perspective, when I was working with Diablo on Juno, all I felt was that I was working with a great storyteller and whether she’s industry-savvy or not really didn’t factor into anything. That was never part of our conversations, really; they were about how we can translate the story into the screen and how I saw things and how she saw things. Whether she had shown up in Hollywood the previous day or 20 years prior, I don’t think I would have noticed. Was there anything that you pioneered or learned about your own style of filmmaking FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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PHOTO BY: DOANE GREGORY (Left-right) Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Page in Juno.
“there were a few times jason needed something and, as a writer, that’s the most stimulating, fun exercise — being able to sort of write on the spot and create something right there.” in Juno? New things that you tried or things that you never thought you would do because it was such a different script? And how did you make decisions about what the visuals were going to be to complement such great dialogue? Reitman: I think Juno’s a much more sophisticated film than Thank You for Smoking. As for my directing, I’m much more proud of it; the style’s more complicated, it’s more real, it’s more honest and the screenplay definitely offered the opportunity to do that. On Thank You for Smoking, I was trying to be a little more cute. I was definitely doing more portraiture photography; it was a satire, so it lived in a heightened reality. Whereas for Juno, I was just constantly asking myself, “Is this real?” filmmaker-final.pdf and “Is my camerawork9/14/2007 getting12:44:15 in theAMway of telling the story? Is anything I’m doing as a di-
rector drawing attention to the fact that you’re watching a movie?” Because I didn’t want that
GO BACK & WATCH ■ Fast Times at Ridgemont High After 25 years this classic ode to teen awkwardness by Amy Heckerling (which started careers for Sean Penn and Forest Whitaker) still holds up, combining serious issues with comedy in a way that is both realistic and relatable.
■ Junebug Director Phil Morrison’s comedy/drama focuses on family issues while engaging the audience on several levels. Amy Adams steals the show in a Oscar nominated supporting role as a pregnant southern girl who makes up in heart what she doesn’t have in smarts.
■ Election Alexander Payne’s sophomore effort is a dark, satirical insight into the confusing world of high school and the pressures teenagers face in an extremely witty and intelligent style.
— I wanted the story to speak for itself. Diablo, talk about how Jason involved you in the production and about tweaking the script during shooting. Cody: That was actually a really fun process for me. Obviously, it was really righteous being on set; that was supercool. There were a few instances in which Jason needed something and, as a writer, that’s the most stimulating, fun exercise — being able to sort of write on the spot and create something right there. So having had the opportunity to do that a few times was really cool. As a writer, those requests for changes never bugged you? You weren’t concerned with having your own vision of the story changed? Cody: Oh, no! You don’t understand how much I trust Jason. He could’ve asked me to put in like a random competitive-eating scene and I would’ve done it. I’m not really precious about my writing. Did you guys go out to specific people that you had in mind for the cast? Reitman: I did something a little different on this. I had a few people in mind right from the start, and I didn’t want to do a traditional audition process; I didn’t want to be going out to people and waiting. So right off the top, I took Ellen Page, Michael Cera, J.K. Simmons and Olivia Thirlby and I went over to a stage at Panavision and we shot something like 45 pages of the movie in one day, shooting scenes on 35mm with a black background. Then I edited the whole thing together and I presented it to Fox and said, “This is how I want to start the cast — these four actors.” It was really nice because instead of watching an audition, which doesn’t really say much, they were watching scenes that if you watch them, there was no way that you could think that these people were wrong for the film. So that became the initial cast and we went from there. Why do you think more filmmakers don’t get their projects started this way — put something like this together? Reitman: I don’t know…this is how they used to do it! I mean,
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this is what they did in the ’40s — it’s a screen test! Nowadays, it’s two things: one thing is that many actors won’t come in for something like that, but on top of that I think the audition process opens, from a studio point of view… I don’t want to say that. I don’t want to talk bad because Fox is so supportive of me, I don’t think they would have ever pushed me in a direction I wouldn’t want to go. So it would’ve been wrong for me to say that. But I think that’s just what the process has become, especially now with video — you just set up a video camera in a room and it’s a simple way to do it. I direct commercials and that’s how we do casting on the commercials. But this is a movie that’s all about relationships and the idea of auditioning people outside of each other, oneon-one with the casting director, didn’t make sense. I needed to see how Juno and her father were going to interact and how she and her best friend would interact and how her and the guy who got her pregnant would interact. So seeing them do the scenes was really important. Diablo, some writers entertain the notion of becoming a screenwriter and breaking into the business, but some are okay with never going in that direction. Since it was such an unexpected direction for you, would you be fine if you never made another movie again? Cody: No, I absolutely would not be fine. I’m a complete junkie at this point. I’m like gearing up for my next fix! [laughs] Reitman: Diablo and I had this conversation at one of the film festivals: We want to go to every screening because it’s such a rush to sit there and watch the audience laugh at the movie and be moved. Once the film festivals end, it’s like, “God, I need to go make another movie!” Cody: I’ve been writing a lot since Telluride and Toronto and I feel like it’s motivated by the desire to do this again and again. I mean, I love writing in general, don’t get me wrong. It’s just when you write something and it becomes a film that people treasure — and I hope some people do — then the situation becomes epic. But I’m happy writing in any form. Jason, you talked about how Juno was a step up from Thank You for Smoking in certain ways. How has it changed you as a filmmaker? Reitman: I’m very proud of Thank You for Smoking; it’s my first film, but this movie seems to move people in a way that Thank You for Smoking never had the opportunity to. It’s exciting to watch Juno and see myself growing as a storyteller and a filmmaker. Your hope always is that you haven’t reached the limit of your abilities and that you keep on improving yourself.t FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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EDIT POINTS BENJAMIN CROSSLEY-MARRA reports on the different post production options four directors chose to finish their films.
The Film: Antidote Films executive Jeffery Levy-Hinte has produced some of the biggest hits on the indie scene, including Thirteen, Laurel Canyon and Mysterious Skin, but now he’s putting the finishing touches on a documentary he’s been shooting for over three years to be titled either The Boat Movie or The
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Sawdust Chronicles. Levy-Hinte’s passion for film and post production (for years he owned and ran the Manhattan posthouse Post 391) is equaled by his enthusiasm for classic wooden boat construction. With the film, he hopes to reach an audience that shares in his interests. The Workflow: Even though Levy-Hinte’s $200,000 budget allowed him to shoot The Boat Movie on Super 16, he hopes to premiere the film using HD projection rather than a costly 35mm blowup. Levy-Hinte is editing the film himself on his 12-inch Mac G4 laptop using Final Cut. Although he’s worked with Avid before, the simple interface of Final Cut is exactly what Levy-Hinte feels this film needs. The 16mm footage was labtransferred to standard definition DV tapes with the time code and key code burned in. One problem that has arisen on the project concerns audio layback. For the production’s first two years, Levy-Hinte used a Fostex DAT ma-
chine as location recorder. This year, he switched to a Sound Devices hard-disk recorder because it’s able to record more tracks in the field. However when Levy-Hinte was ready to edit he discovered that the dailies with audio transferred from the Fostex were missing snippets of sound. The DAT didn’t lock up quickly enough, so the heads of some scenes were missing. Using all the burn-in info on the dailies tapes, Levy-Hinte was able to resync the sound himself. After his final cut, Levy-Hinte will have an HD master by scanning the original 16mm negative and onlining. The film will then undergo color-correction before an HD tape is created for festivals. Filmmakers may want to take a page from Levy-Hinte’s book and opt for a 35mm blowup at a later date as most major festivals now have HD projectors. The Film: Another emerging filmmaker from the low-budget spectrum is Sam Neave, who
“even before a film begins principal photography there are many important questions to be answered regarding post production.” 2
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(1) Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s The Boat Movie; (2) levy-hinte editing boat movie; (3) sam neave’s first person singular; (4) neave editing singular.
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PHOTOS 2 & 4 BY: ANDREI SEVERNY
Filmmaking is a career that attracts both artists and technical professionals alike. Unfortunately for those coming from a more artistic or even literary background, the technical complexities of the filmmaking process can leave a novice feeling like a deer in headlights. Even before a film begins principal photography there are many important questions to be answered regarding post production: Avid or Final Cut? DI or no? Is a 35mm print really necessary in today’s HD world? There are no correct answers to any of these questions. Instead there’s just that balance between ambition and what the circumstances of one’s film and budget realistically allow. Filmmaker visited four films, all with different budget levels and workflows, in order to see how filmmakers are navigating today’s plethora of post production choices.
the cut is almost done, and the edit now lives on Neave’s MacBook Pro. Like Levy-Hinte, Neave is unsure whether or not a 35mm blowup is worth it. He knows he wants to do a color correct and create an HD master — as well as do a professional sound mix — but he is unsure what technology he will utilize as his budget is dwindling. If worse comes to worst, he can always do the color correct right in Final Cut. Until he makes a definite decision, Neave continues to tweak the film himself on his laptop and steadily adds music.
got his start in post production and has been editing and filming throughout New York for the past nine years. His first feature, Cry Funny Happy, toured festivals in 2003 and he recently wrapped principal photography on his new drama First Person Singular. Described as an intimate story about personal relationships, Neave hopes to have the film on the festival circuit early next year. The Workflow: Neave shot more than 90 hours of footage using three Panasonic DVX100A 24p cameras. His $25,000 budget wouldn’t permit a multicamera HD shoot. Also, the cost of downgrading HD material to SD for cost-effective editing was prohibitive. Even though Neave is from the post production world, he did not want to cut the film himself and so he hired editor Anna Holtzman for the job. She digitized all 90 hours of footage using her G5 desktop equipped with Final Cut, and both she and Neave began a 24-hour process of shuttling tapes and filling up their Western Digital hard drives (one terabyte and one 500 gig) with footage. The two then split the editing process with Holtzman cutting together the more dialogue-driven scenes and Neave the atmospheric ones. Both appreciated Final Cut’s multiclip mode, which allows for watching a scene shot from different angles at the same time. It was a helpful resource considering all the multiple-camera footage they had. After three months of editing on the G5,
The Film: Film editor Jay Cassidy has had the opportunity to cut all of Sean Penn’s films, including his latest, an adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s novel Into the Wild. Penn wanted the film to be shot in the exact locations that Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) visited on his way to living in the wilds of Alaska, so the production was a journey of North America
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PHOTO 3 BY: ANDREI SEVERNY; (4) CHUCK ZLOTNICK
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The Film: Director James Mottern has always had a soft spot for the Southwest and his film, Trucker, was shot on the open roads that sprawl through the American deserts. Michelle Monaghan plays a truck driver who reunites with her estranged son and the two of them begin a journey of reconciliation (the film also stars Joey Lauren Adams and Benjamin Bratt). Coming from a background in documentary television, this is Mottern’s first narrative feature, and it is produced through Plum Pictures on a midseven-figure budget. The Workflow: Mottern decided to shoot the movie HD on the Panavision/Sony Genesis camera, which allows for 35mm anamorphic lenses. (The Genesis is the camera used recently for Superman Returns and Superbad, among others.) Although Mottern and d.p. Lawrence
Sher (Garden State, Dan in Real Life) experimented with Super 16mm, Mottern was eventually won over to HD by the ease it promised in post production. The footage was sent to L.A.’s Laser Pacific for the downgrade to the standard-definition DV tapes to be used for editing. These tapes were then shipped to editor Deirdre Slevin (Because of Winn-Dixie, Last Holiday), who worked out of the Final Frame post production house in New York. Even though the film was shot on HD (at 23.98), the downgrade to SD (29.97) was necessary because editing on HD still requires huge amounts of storage space and processing power to handle the large files. The film is being cut on Final Cut running off a Mac G5 quad 2.5ghz processor tower. Trucker is still in the early stages of the director’s cut and the filmmakers have begun to scope out various DI suites, looking for the best price. They’re going to do an HD online from the edit list provided by the Final Cut system and create an HD master for their color correct. Then they’ll transfer the HD master to 35mm.
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(1) jay cassidy’s into the wild work station; (2) james mottern’s Trucker; (3) DEIRDRE SLEVIN and MOTTERN editing Trucker; (4) sean penn’s into the wild.
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LINE ITEMS and Cassidy got to go along for the ride. The Workflow: Into the Wild is what is considered a modestly budgeted studio picture — $45 million. And while the budget allowed Penn and Cassidy more choices than the filmmakers discussed above, their desire to see high-res versions of the footage throughout the editing process forced Cassidy to be as efficient as possible when constructing his workflow. Wide landscapes and mountain vistas were a prominent part of d.p. Eric Gautier’s (The Motorcycle Diaries, A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints) Super 35, 2.35 cinematography, and when the negative was telecined to Digibeta tapes, Gautier made sure to be in constant communication with the colorist at Company 3 in L.A. so that dailies would provide an accurate representation of the film’s desired look. Because Cassidy was on the film’s distant locations so much, he didn’t have access to a proper editing suite. So both he and his assistant in L.A. would receive the Avid media/bins that Company 3 had digitized from the Digibetas. Since they had the same media, his assistant could organize the footage in L.A., and then send the updates to Cassidy via iDisk. Cassidy has always cut with the Avid software, and while he admits Final Cut is an ample enough program, he likes all the options that Avid offers as well as its robust interface. Once Penn and Cassidy finished their picture edit, they scanned and conformed the 35mm negative at 2K. The first HD tape output is when they really began to see how beautiful the film would be. The film still needed some tweaking, however, and Cassidy continued cutting, reconforming and scanning new material into the DI, basically treating the DI suite like a big Avid but with the capability of screening the film at its proper resolution. After all was done, a pristine 35mm print was generated for the theatrical run.t
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FROM SCRIPT TO SCREEN Editor Jay Cassidy reviews the Avid ScriptSync.
In the craft of film editing, discipline does not assure success. There are those editors that can rip into the material right out of the gate and brilliance occurs. I’m not one of them. Throughout my career, I’ve found that a certain amount of organization and study is necessary to allow me to do what I do. “Memorize the footage” is the school that I came from and, over the years, I’ve adopted and discarded all manner of different organizational methods, first with film and now with Avid. All of those organizational methods had something to do with a script. By that I mean “script” in the larger sense; it could be written beforehand as in a dramatic film, a lyric sheet for a music video, a transcription in a documentary or a pile of index cards of sequences for projects with very unstructured shooting. The goal has always been easy access to particular moments in the morass of material. In March of 1998 when Avid version 7.0 was released, Avid representative, Michael Phillips claimed at a seminar at the Sony studio that “the script software finally works.” Script-based editing had appeared with Avid version 6.5, however, the word was not good. The frankness of his admission was enough for me to give it a try. As I understand it, Avid had bought the core code from an older system called Ediflex, a system I’d never used. It was software design circa 1985 — clunky and unforgiving but allowing a dynamic connection from a line in the script to a clip in the source monitor. Click on the line in
the script and it plays in the monitor. This organization came with a price. The user had to import an electronic version of the script — fortunately the script program Final Draft supported an export format that preserved the page formatting — and then “line the script” and add marks from the clip in the source bin to make this dynamic link possible. Avid provided a variety of helpful tools but, when the day was done, it was still “find the line, place a mark, find the next line....” A daunting task with the pressure always to get cutting. For me, the price was worth it. When marked up completely, the script acts as the only open-source bin when cutting. The coverage is instantly clear. It’s possible to have frame representations of each setup. We evolved all manner of custom scripts to deal with generic material. And, as re-cuts occur weeks and months after a scene was originally cut, the script stays invaluable in recalling previously studied material. Apparently I was in the minority in adopting script-based editing. Directors who knew Avid would look at it and say, “I’ve never seen that before,” and then become very dependent on it. Clicking through every reading of a particular line at a moment’s notice was amazing at first and now is so ingrained in my process that I’d be hobbled without it. Script-based editing did not change much from 1998 until this spring when Avid released a new version of the software called ScriptSync, in which a speech-recognition engine
avid scriptsync.
takes over the chore of marking the individual lines. Script preparation has crossed a threshold from “too daunting” to “why not?” For those of us who have labored for nine years with the manual marking, this was divine intervention. But I have to keep telling myself that they didn’t create this tool just for me, they created it to allow others whose first impression was to dismiss script-based editing as too labor-intensive to consider trying it. I was tied up finishing a film until July so I did not touch the new tool until I started a short project in early August — a play-on-film of Dalton Trumbo”s Johnny Got His Gun. In one sense, this would be an easy test of the speechrecognition abilities of ScriptSync because it was one character shot on a controlled set. But the play is 60 or 70 pages of very dense dialogue. This is the moment in the article for a description of how to make it work. I’m going to skip
“Scriptsync... has crossed a threshold from ‘too daunting’ to ‘why not?’” that and refer you to the Avid Web site which has nice Quicktime demos (avid.com/products/ media-composer/scriptsync.asp) and also to the Editors Guild Magazine for the summer quarter which has a detailed description in the “Tech Tips” section (editorsguild.com/v2/magazine/ archives/0707/techtips_article02.htm). Does it work? Yes, surprisingly well considering the variations that occur in real life. Put the line on the script that covers the dialogue for the particular clip in the source, trigger it and watch the marks appear much faster than real time. In fact, more marks than anyone would do manually. But who cares if there are more marks? The computer speed has overcome the large file slowdowns of the past. Housekeeping
is still necessary as actors read lines incorrectly, transpose phrases, ad lib and so on. What about resets and pickups within the same clip? There’s no reason why a clip can’t be lined several times for each internal take. This was a solution before ScriptSync and is still viable. Anyone in the software industry knows that the product is never done, it’s just the next release. The conventional wisdom is that the software company listens to its customers and adds features accordingly. ScriptSync is different. Here was an underutilized feature — Avid script-based editing — and no one was clamoring for speech recognition. By all rights, it shouldn’t have been developed but there it is.t
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...AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH? PHOTO BY: SHANE SIGLER
In attempting to define documentary filmmaking ARNE JOHNSON learns the line between fiction and non is very blurry.
jennifer venditti’s billy the kid.
“Look, it’s all fiction!” Haskell Wexler practically shouts in exasperation. “Every single bit of it is fiction.” We’ve been talking about the search for a definition of documentary film and where you can draw the line between fiction and non. Wexler was blurring those lines in Medium Cool before I could tie my own shoes, so his frustration is understandable. “We’re conditioned to accept images and sounds as truth which, in a sense, they are. But they are selected by us as filmmakers, and so they have a point of view. There is no fact, no three-dimensional graspable fact... once you filter what you do through a reproducible medium, it’s not the truth of the subject, but the truth of you that’s filming.” I mumble something about filmmaking being on a reality continuum rather than divided up into categories like documentary and narrative and he interrupts me. “For instance in this article, after talking to me for 40 minutes, you will write about what I say and you’re gonna pick what I say that will filter through your sensibility, your aperture, and so there goes literal vérité.” This is true (see sidebar). However, Americans have a kind of plainspoken belief in the truth of images that they don’t have about words. It’s not clear whether this is because we are basically open, trusting people, or that our visual media makers are just phenomenal liars, but the result is that documentary film is invested with a tremendous power of objective truth. 90
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“any filmmaker who endeavors to enter the world of documentary has to confront his or her own ethics and philosophies about truth-telling.” Any filmmaker who endeavors to enter the world of documentary has to confront his or her own ethics and philosophies about truth telling, but perhaps just as importantly, they will ultimately face the expectations and perceptions of their audience. The first part I tangled with early in the process of making my first doc (along with co-filmmaker Shane King), was about children. Before we ever shot a single tape of Girls Rock!, we had extensive discussions about our relationship to the subjects, how we could avoid feeling exploitative and what our overall sense of ethical boundaries were. Even still, along the way, we challenged ourselves while shooting (“should I put down the camera and break up this fight?”) and editing (“Do people really need to know about her funny side?”) and mostly had to trust our instincts in the moment rather than rely on any clear documentary guidelines. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the directors of Jesus Camp, another film about children that is laced with themes about the larger world, don’t feel one should back away from that challenge. “Rachel and I are really interested in all of the ethical dilemmas that filmmakers undergo,” says
Heidi. “We embrace the fact that documentary filmmaking is a series of ethical decisions. We are very aware of the power in the editing room, but people have trusted us so far.” Rachel adds, “I actually find it appealing that every day in this job you have to constantly make ethical decisions.” While Jesus Camp gives the kids plenty of space to be themselves without judgment, the use of some eerie electronic music and warnings about the cultural war with fundamentalist Christians by a radio host tip their hands. “With the 300 hours of footage Rachel and I shot, would other filmmakers have made a different movie?” Heidi asks rhetorically. “Probably. Jesus Camp is a condensed, bottled version of a one-year experience we had. We selected the messages we wanted to get across, but does that make it not true? Nothing we put in there didn’t happen, but it’s real murky sometimes.” Sam Green, the filmmaker behind the acclaimed doc Weather Underground, has a fairly simple criterion for how he guides his ethical hand. “In the historical documentaries I’ve done,” Green says, “there’s always been people involved,
and so I felt an obligation to them to be accurate and fair. When you imagine showing them the piece later, it’s a real test if you can look them in the eye, even if you’ve been critical.” In Weather Underground, a doc about the radical group from the ’60s of the same name, Green used aspects of each of the six main subjects to illuminate the group, which led to one ex-member being disgruntled with how he was depicted. “He said, ‘You just used me being critical and that’s just a small part of what I feel; I’m much more than that.’ And I said that’s true, but I explained to him I was trying to show a range of sensibilities and experiences in the group, and I used different people as characters. When putting together a doc, you’re making a larger truth rather than accurately representing each person.”
J’accuse! Unfortunately no matter how much you embrace the contradictions that are central to documentary filmmaking, you can’t control how people will perceive your film. At the Maine International Film Festival, Jennifer Venditti, the director of the wonderful Billy the Kid (a coming-of-age film about a teenage boy in a small town), told a story of her review in Variety that was enough to make any documentary filmmaker’s hair stand on end. Here’s the key passage from the article: “The major fallacy about Billy the Kid is its masquerade as vérité filmmaking. On the contrary: Almost every scene is a setup, with sequences involving Billy and his would-be girlfriend, Heather, shot from multiple angles, but not, it seems, multiple cameras.” The first irony of this criticism is that though most people mistakenly blur the philosophies of direct cinema and cinema vérité together (people often use “vérité” as shorthand to describe observational shooting), the two movements that arose in the ’60s to address documentary’s unruly relationship to truth were sharply and even vociferously differentiated. Jean Rouch and other French filmmakers of the vérité school angrily confronted Richard Leacock and progenitors of direct cinema at the 1963 MIP TV conference for not acknowledging their impact on their subjects. Scholar Eric Barnouw describes their different perspectives like this: “The direct cinema documentarist took his camera to a situation of tension and waited hopefully for a crisis; the Rouch version of cinema vérité tried to precipitate one. The direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility:
the Rouch cinema vérité artist was often an avowed participant.” But for Venditti, those arguments are academic anyway — she was just trying to make a film in the ever-shifting sands of an adolescent boy’s life. “I don’t think of myself as a documentarian anyway, but as a filmmaker. I’m inspired by narrative stories: to me, cinema and fantasy are all around us. People would often ask me if Billy was acting for the camera, and it’s like, ‘Yeah, he’s been starring in a role in his movie for his whole life, that’s how he survived. He does that when the camera’s not on too.’” Later in the festival, while I was eating at a diner in Maine with Jennifer, Billy and his family, Billy looked up and saw a karaoke setup. He immediately turned to me and said, “I do a great falsetto on the song ‘Dream Weaver’” and then proceeded to sing the whole 1976 Gary Wright song for the table. There were no cameras. Was it real? Or am I telling you this story in an exploitative way to support a colleague? “Everything that happened in that movie was uncontrolled,” Jennifer says, still wincing. “The only thing that didn’t happen on camera was the clapping [a bunch of old fellas on the street applaud Billy when he holds Heather’s hand]. And that really happened, but we missed it around the corner so we asked them to do it again. In the scene with Heather [that the Variety reviewer singled out], you’re seeing 10 minutes condensed out of 8 hours straight of shooting. We, of course, were shooting it thinking of coverage, moving the camera around. There’s no documentary d.p. who doesn’t shoot thinking how it can be cut.” An additional irony is that the reviewer goes on to criticize Venditti for not shooting long enough (she shot for eight days), which of course would have resulted in even more footage that needed to be condensed down. Knowing we shot nearly 250 hours for our Girls Rock!, a shiver of fear went through me. Isn’t this what we do? Shoot, edit and craft stories? I mean, I thought the role of writers, filmmakers and artists was to bring out the colors and characters and stories that everyone misses and show them to us in an artful way. If what we want is unexpurgated reality, aren’t we all already living the perfect documentary? The history of documentary film is dotted with attempts to pull apart a film and discover where it was staged or altered in a way that obscures reality, and the irony here is that the very history of the form began in 1922 with Robert Flaherty’s nearly completely staged
POLISHING UP
Wexler has a point. I definitely weeded out some extraneous words and clarified some grammar in his quotes... this sentence: “There is no fact, no three-dimensional graspable fact... once you filter what you do through a reproducible medium, it’s not the truth of the subject but the truth of you that’s filming.” Was literally transcribed like this: “There is no fact, fact literally, third graspable fact... once you filter what you do through a reproducible medium, it’s not fact. You are making a judgment, it’s not the truth of the subject, but it’s you that’s filming.” Also, I really liked Wexler’s, “It’s all fiction!” quote to open this discussion of documentary truth, but then I spliced in quotes from later in the interview that follow the same train of thought. This often happens to journalists — what sounds like a great conversation in the moment is actually filled with “um”s, “er”s, distractions and digressions. So those of us who tape-record clean things up so they’re readable and coherent, and note takers apply the filter through memory. And yet, despite all that lying, reality altering and fictionalization, in more than a decade of writing profiles and interviews I’ve never had a single person question an entire article because I changed the order of some quotes or cut out an “uh.” When I became a documentary filmmaker, however, I quickly realized I had entered a different world.
Nanook of the North. “You couldn’t come up with a definition of documentary that would have Nanook in it,” says Sam Green. “If someone made it now, it would never be considered a documentary. It’s a fiction film. That’s the great thing about it being the first documentary — it got to the heart of a lot of sticky issues in documentary right at the beginning, and I actually like that.” Because of this slipperiness, even those we think of as holding the highest standards of observational ethics are not immune to attacks. The Maysles Brothers were born right out of the Direct Cinema crucible, and yet when Gimme Shelter hit theaters, it was subjected to vicious assaults on its methodology by Pauline Kael and other critics and, for Albert Maysles, see page 106 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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CAMERA TEST Jamie Stuart tests out the Panasonic AG-HPX500P. I just spent two weeks staring at a big-ass metal case on my floor. Yeah, I opened it once or twice just to look at the big-ass camera inside. The big-ass camera does have a proper name: the Panasonic AG-HPX500P, which, for the purposes of this review I’ll be forced to use — though for me, it’s still just the big-ass camera in the big-ass metal case on my floor. The HPX is a professional-minded camera built on the same P2 system as the betterknown AG-HVX200P. What makes it more professional besides the size? Greater storage (four 16GB P2 slots) and the ability to change lenses. It’s also designed with a shoulder-mount curve on the underbelly. A base plate can be attached for tripod use as well. I’ve been shooting Panasonic exclusively for the past three-and-a-half years, primarily with the AG-DVX100A, though recently I rented an HVX for my last short, 12.5 Seconds Later....That said, the HPX review loaner sat on my floor for so long mostly because I was trying to adapt my head to the camera’s size, which is equivalent to that of a news camera; I’m used to smaller, lighter-weight gear. I like the idea of being mobile, and the HPX is not what I’d consider mobile. Strangely enough, around this time, I was Web surfing and came across David Lowery’s Drifting: A Director’s Log blog (road-dogproductions.com/weblog), which, under a post titled “More Blood” featured a photo of the HPX with a wall of splattered blood behind it. The HPX in the photo was on legs and also had a matte box attached. The camera was apparently being used to shoot a vampire comedy called Blood on the Highway, which David was helping to edit. I asked him how he liked using the camera, and he replied, via the comments on his blog, “We haven’t really had to keep more than one 16GB card in it at any time, but it’s nice knowing there’s that extra space. The best thing about it, in my opinion, is the fact that you can put another lens on it. We put some really nice glass on it, and that makes all the difference in the world, especially since we’re doing almost all night shooting.” Okay. A proper production is one thing. But using it in a manner to conduct a test — a manner that would invariably be guerrilla — meant I needed an “in.” 92
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“what ultimately intrigued me was the camera’s ability to shoot variable frame rates, a luxury of its tapeless workflow.” What ultimately intrigued me was the camera’s ability to shoot variable frame rates, a luxury of its tapeless workflow. When shooting 720P in the PN mode, which locks playback to the chosen record mode — 24PN or 30PN, for example — the actual recording frame rate can be adjusted to overcrank or undercrank in increments of two frames. When you watch footage shot at 48fps, because playback is locked at, say, 24PN, it’s legitimate slow motion, not the frame-blended footage many have become accustomed to by altering the speed in postproduction. In other words, it basically works under the same assumption as a film camera. Once that decision was out of the way, I still needed a subject. While brainstorming for a topic, I considered that it might look interesting if I were to capture a long tracking shot at 60fps. I set up a shoot and decided that the actual actions and coverage would be determined only then. As I started blocking out the shot, which would ultimately stretch from one side of an apartment to the other, to out into the hallway, up a ladder to the roof, and then move from wide to tight to wide on the roof, I realized the inherent dreamlike quality of the piece and started making some offbeat choices. This was partly about aesthetics, but also, I had one serious technical challenge: adjusting the iris from a dark, practical-lighted interior to an overblown exterior set against a wide-open sky. I learned immediately that the HPX’s
built-in ND filters are operated by a knob on the front of the camera. Unlike the DVX or the HVX, which have an easy-to-reach switch that when flipped automatically makes the changes, here I had to reach around and turn the knob without being able to see what I was doing. Furthermore, as I turned the knob, I could actually see the black borders of the filter wiping across the screen through the shot. And that was awful. Completely by accident, on the next pass, I inadvertently left the #2 ND on and didn’t find this out until after the take was over. To my complete surprise, the camera was so sensitive that I could see everything perfectly during the interiors, and because the ND was already on, I didn’t have to turn it on as I approached the exterior section. This was a positive derived from a negative. At this point, I started blending techniques that would both heighten the reverie of the piece while also calling attention to the medium itself. To affect the former, I manually set the focus to roughly seven feet while keeping the zoom completely wide; this created a look where nothing is ever terribly out of focus, yet the actual focal point can never really be spotted. In relation to the latter, I left the iris on auto, allowing for visible light adjustments both inside the apartment and during the exterior transition. I also made a point of not being entirely smooth in my handheld coverage, rendering a floating image that’s not always accurate in its motion or framing. After 16 takes, the post was simple: I just FireWired the footage right into Final Cut Pro via the Log and Transfer option. I was happy enough with the ND-affected look of the image that I didn’t even apply any color correction; what you see is straight from the camera. see page 107
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THE POWERS THAT BE Alicia Van Couvering helps indies strategize for the upcoming strike. It is contract-negotiation time in the movie business with actors, writers and directors all gathering for a standoff against the studios set for June 30, 2008. While talks between the studios and the unions become tense, news of preliminary strike authorizations have led to a rush of green lights as studios get everything they can into production to prepare for the possibility of a walkout that could last months. Hollywood may be quivering in terror, but what about the independents? How does the strike affect us? Except for documentaries and very lowbudget films, most productions become signatory to the same basic agreements with the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Directors Guild of America (DGA). A strike would shut down most independent producers while leaving the network and studio brass at the negotiating table. However, the threat of a strike may hold a silver lining for indie producers accustomed to betting the house in the name of their movie. First let’s examine where we are now. Although the WGA contract expires in October, if a deal isn’t reached by the end of the month its officials are encouraging writers to work until June. That way they could join SAG and the DGA in a work stoppage, causing a near-total shutdown in projects utilizing members of any of these three unions. In Hollywood, lists of fast track projects have been circulating for months, and development assistants spend their days making “pre-strike availability lists” for directors and actors. Studio production slates must be full in order to ensure product for next year. TV shows like Heroes have been putting in double orders for episodes and filming through their hiatus to make sure they don’t get caught without programming in the fall. Filming days in Los Angeles are dramatically higher than this time last year. “It’s good in some ways,” says Cotty Chubb, Executive Vice President of Production at Groundswell Productions in Los Angeles of the pre-strike frenzy. “There are opportunities to get shows into production because talent is motivated and so are their agents. But it’s dangerous in others. Too much filming now can 94
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“[if] a strike doesn’t happen, or even if it’s over very quickly, all the studios will have blown their annual budgets by the deadline. indie producers might be the only ones fishing in a suddenly flooded talent pool.” mean clogged distribution later. And no one knows what’s going to happen next summer, strike or no strike. Last time [the unions went on strike], there was a real slump [after the strike] in both development and production since capital budgets were exhausted, and the pipelines were full. People lost their jobs.” Others on the ground are finding that all this activity is making the business of producing smaller-scale independent films even harder. Because actors are worrying about a prolonged work stoppage, it’s not easy to appeal to their sense of art over commerce. “Most actors are looking for a big payday right now and trying to get studio movies,” confirms casting director Adrienne Stern (Broken English). “Fear of the strike isn’t making it easier to get cast attached to a low-budget film.” Even if cast is committed to an indie project, however, strike fears can still harm independents. “Personally, I would be careful starting anything in the next few months because you’re going in knowing that everyone you’re going to want, especially for crew, is probably already booked,” says producer Jeff Levy-Hinte (Thirteen, The Last Winter). But aren’t there eight months left between now and the strike deadline for Hollywood and the unions to make nice? Why is Hollywood acting as if the strike is a certainty? One reason is the fierce saber rattling that’s already occurred on both sides of the table. The unions are demanding a bigger cut (in the form of higher residuals) of the new media pie, while some studio bargainers are suggesting that the residual system be all but dismantled. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), a bargaining group made of representatives from the networks and studios, offered an initial proposal that sought to eliminate the paying of residuals before a film shows a profit. Variety quoted Warner Brothers’ Barry Meyer as asking why his studio should have to
pay any residuals on a money-losing flop like The Adventures of Pluto Nash. Seen widely as a purely provocative “nuclear option,” the residuals scale-down was immediately rejected by a union spokesperson who, in Variety, fired back by dubbing Hollywood accounting “a fantasy designed to pay talent as little as possible.” The guilds, on the other hand, are arguing that the current contracts don’t adequately address a distribution landscape that now includes iTunes, video-on-demand, Netflix, torrents, distribution over gaming devices and so on. Movies rented or viewed via these new outlets earn writers and actors less in residuals than those viewed on cable or rented from brick-and-mortar stores like Blockbuster. The slow but inevitable rise of Internet-only entertainment, which remains largely under the radar of unions, can’t be ignored much longer. As the new models overtake the old, the unions want to make sure their compensation mechanisms can adapt. They also argue that the current contracts don’t reflect the state of more accepted media either. Cable television’s revenues have risen from $2.5 billion in 1994 to $13.5 billion last year, said The Hollywood Reporter, while actors’ minimum salary requirements have risen only 35 percent during the same period. The studios counter that income from new media distribution is essential to balance out the pitfalls caused by the enormous changes of the last decade. Bob Berney, the president of Picturehouse (Pan’s Labyrinth, La Vie en rose, El Cantante) confirms that the issues at stake this year are highly volatile. “There’s shrinking revenues everywhere,” he says, referring to the nationwide decline in box office and DVD sales. “No one knows which of the new revenue streams will become lucrative.” These realities paint a grim picture, but as mentioned before, some see a silver lining (at least in the short-term). By mid-February ev see page 107
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PLAY AGAIN Head Trauma director Lance Weiler on gaming and worlds beyond independent film.
The Evolution Over the last six months, I’ve been experimenting with a collision of gaming, movies, music and technology know as a MIG (media-integrated game play). The MIG is a way in which the audience can experience a story across multiple platforms and devices. Characters from a film interact directly with an audience via live encounters, phone calls, text messages and e-mails. These interactions lead to clues consisting of hidden media, sites, blogs and social networking pages, all of which extend the film’s storyline and provide life for its characters beyond the screen. The driving force behind my experimentation is my constant quest to reach audiences in new ways. The advent of DVRs (digital video recorders), portable media players and an increase in connectivity has enabled a new exchange of media that is social and places the power smack in the palm of the viewer. A rapidly expanding on-demand culture offers independent filmmakers new distribution outlets, modes of interaction, promotion and revenue streams.
Beyond The Console
The Value Hope is Missing is a MIG that my company, Seize the Media, constructed to assist with the promotion of Warner Brothers’ VOD (videoon-demand) release of my independent film,
Head Trauma. At the heart of the MIG is the story of a young journalism student named Hope who returns home to find her mother exhibiting strange nocturnal behaviors. As she digs deeper she uncovers what is causing these behaviors, but before she can notify the authorities, she is abducted. The narrative and game play are lead by Hope’s fiancé, who is desperately searching for her. This storyline then begins to blend in elements of Head Trauma until the two become directly intertwined. The Hope is Missing MIG consists of the following components: MOBILE DRIVE-IN (mobmov.org screenings): Characters lead audience members to secret screening locations with phone calls and text messages. During screenings audience members can use their phones to interact with the film. WEB SERIES: A four-part Web series is released weekly. In each episode a number of clues — “rabbit holes” — lead players to hidden media and sites across the Web. REMIX: Through a collaboration with eyespot. com we built a special promotion that allows players to become contributors. As players remix media they unlock a series of hidden clues. LIVE GAME BOARD: A map mash-up tracks see page 107 PHOTO BY: (LEFT-RIGHT) WEILER PRODUCTIONS LLC; 1-18-08.COM
Often the term gaming conjures up the image of first-person shooters like Halo, or old-school console games like Donkey Kong. But the con-
ventions of play are changing thanks in part to an emerging independent gaming movement. From the ITVS-funded political ARG (alternate-reality game) World Without Oil to the controversial RPG (role-playing game) Super Columbine Massacre, games are tackling important social issues. In other cases, ARGs and MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) have become hot new promotional and advertising platforms for Madison Avenue and Hollywood. TV shows like Lost and Heroes have employed ARGs to expand the reach of their series beyond the set, and upcoming releases by J.J. Abrams (Cloverfield) and Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight) are using ARGs to promote the films far in advance of the theatrical release. When it comes to massive multiplayer online games, James Cameron and Steven Spielberg are creating whole worlds around their films complete with virtual currencies. But the above are all studio-funded ventures. What can independent filmmakers gain from this convergence?
(left-right) lance weiler’s hope is missing MIG; j.j. abrams’s cloverfield ARG.
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SUPPORT GROUP SCOTT MACAULAY recaps the 2007 IFP Narrative Rough Cut Lab.
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domestic sales landscape. Shooting People’s Ingrid Kopp and indieWIRE’s Brian Brooks discussed social networking publicity strategies. And, finally, editors Sabine Hoffman (The Ballad of Jack and Rose) and Kate Williams (Interview) watched all the rough cuts and tendered specific editorial advice. From the IFP Amy Dotson (Producer and Managing Director of Narrative Programming) and Jihan Robinson (Coordinator of Narrative Rough Cut Lab), produced. After the Lab I asked the participants to jot down a few notes on their experience — specifically, how their thoughts on their films have changed after attending. Here are their replies. Jeffrey Jay Orgill’s Boppin’ at the Glue Factory is the story of a strung out male nurse at a convalescent home and it’s told with a vibrant, kinetic visual (and aural) style. Appropriately Orgill, who has been editing his film for two years, describes the Lab as “rehab.” “I just couldn’t ‘see’ the film anymore,” he says. “I was ‘blind.’ As quickly as I’d make a discovery, I’d get bored with something that was working fine and cut it up or cut it out.” He credits Williams and Hoffman with telling him to “trust your performances, stop overediting and let the story unfold,” and he has now locked picture. Sergio Palacios and Damian Rodriguez di-
rected El Coyote, a heavy metal scored revenge drama set in a ghost town. Rodriguez also credits Williams and Hoffman with helping solve a seemingly insurmountable problem: a slow opening. “With just a few key suggestions they solved what we had been laboring over for months,” he says. “After we made a few edits and replaced some title cards with a voice-over, it really changed the pace of the cut. After watching our film so many times, it suddenly felt new and alive again.” Junko Kajino and Ed M. Koziarski directed the ambitious The First Breath of Tengan Rei, a drama about a young Okinawan woman who travels to the U.S. to confront the two Marines who assaulted her a decade earlier. Comments Koziarski: “Through a thought process that begun at the Lab, we recut our film, resolving to trust our audiences’ intelligence and the strength of our core material. We pared away unneeded footage that we were relying on to spell out the story and had renewed confidence that our target audience wants to be challenged. Indeed it is our responsibility to our audience to challenge them. Likewise with music, we learned not to rely on score to emotionally ‘wrap up’ difficult scenes and thus risk softening their impact, but instead to let the score mirror and see page 108 PHOTO BY: STEPHEN LOVEKIN/WIREIMAGE
Three years ago the IFP and I developed a program called the Narrative Rough Cut Lab, a sort of intensive mentorship in which filmmakers who have shot but not completed their films receive advice about the stages of the filmmaking process that lay ahead of them. Completing edits, sound design, festival planning, marketing and publicity, obtaining a producer’s rep and even DIY and self-distribution strategies are all discussed in a three-day series of small-group meetings led by myself and, this year, producer and HDNet Films exec Gretchen McGowan. The idea for the Rough Cut Lab came from the realization that while there are several labs and seminars devoted to projects at the script or financing stages, there are none devoted to projects entering that often most crucial phase: post production. One of the many luxuries studio films have that independents usually don’t is the budget for test screenings, recuts and reshoots. If a studio film doesn’t work, you can rest assured that a team of people are busy figuring out why and how to fix it. Independents, however, have to gather their small teams of friends and colleagues and figure out how to address the issue with minimal resources. And while seasoned producers know how to plan for their optimum festival premiere, too many beginning filmmakers accept their first invitation and blow their shot at a potentially stronger platform for their domestic or foreign sale. This year the Rough Cut Lab took place in June and to help filmmakers make sense of it all were a great roster of industry advisers. To discuss distribution options were Melissa Raddatz of Truly Indie and Ryan Werner of IFC First Take. Composer Mychael Danna (Little Miss Sunshine, Capote) listened to all of the participating filmmakers’ music choices and offered guidance on scoring. Scott Young, Independent Liaison from the MPAA, talked about the rating system. Filmmaker Lance Weiler discussed DIY distribution and marketing. Producers Karin Chien (The Motel) and Joshua Zeman (Mysterious Skin) discussed festival strategy. Publicists Jeremy Walker and Susan Norget offered advice on indie film publicity. Music Supervisor Tracy McKnight and BMI’s Doreen Ringer Ross talked about licensing music. Dana O’Keefe and Sarah Lash from Cinetic Media sketched out the current
The IFP narrative rough cut lab fellows with john sayles (center) and maggie renzie (holding poster).
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The Overachiever
from page 45 You know, to me editing is screenwriting with permanence. In the initial script writing stage every idea in the world is available to you. You can be overwhelmed by the fact that there are no limits. In the editing you are limited. You have the footage that you shot. That’s it. But within that limitation you have so many permutations and possibilities of arranging things, rearranging things, restructuring and literally rewriting with the cut. And so I think every film ends up being somewhat rewritten in editing. And then locked. And then it’s its own thing. Forever. I know that you have come in and rewritten other writers’ scripts. How does that work? It’s always a weird thing to come in and rewrite someone else’s screenplay. It can feel uncomfortable, especially when you know another writer has been fired or somebody has reached a dead end. I just finished a script where a writer basically worked for a couple of years on his own idea. It was a spec script that got bought, and he was working with the producers, and was rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, and they came to a mutual agreement that he’d reached a place where he couldn’t go any further in terms of what’s needed for the director. So they called me in, they said would I be interested, and my first question was, “Well, how does he feel about it?” Because even though it’s a Hollywood project and you don’t owe anyone anything, it’s done all the time, and the Writers Guild has strict rules about how to do it properly — I would feel very awkward going into a script where a writer has been pulled out kicking and screaming and the producers are upset and everybody feels like they’ve wasted time. It’s not a happy place to visit. Did you ever see that film The Five Obstructions? Yes I did. What do you think about the concept of that film? Do you agree that when you give yourself parameters it forces you to imagine ways out of them? I think limitations are essential. I like working with rules, even if the rules are “to go crazy” or “to be as austere as possible,” which never happens, by the way. Like what kind of limitations, for instance? Like, say, “Okay, this is how we’re approaching the film, this is how big it is. This is the style. The aesthetics. The way these characters talk.” The period of a film, is that a limitation? Absolutely. What about the fact that you’re not from America but you write American movies? Is that a bit of a limitation? I remember once
talking to an Israeli actor who said, “I’m a really good actor here, but I’m not good in the States.” There were characters and certain kinds of people that he’d been studying his whole life who were specific to Israel and who Americans would never understand. He could only play a few types of people here so he feels limited. That’s a great point. I’ve been here for almost 20 years, but there is still a limitation of being “the outsider.” But it’s also a very liberating limitation. I think that probably my limitation as a writer who didn’t grow up speaking English is that I know fewer words than most American screenwriters, so I don’t need to get lost in trying to find a great sentence. I just write down what I know. Which is very limited. [laughs] You know more words than me which is embarrassing, but… I think it’s true that this is not my culture, although now [American culture] is everybody’s culture one way or another. But being an outsider is a very helpful limitation. It seems to work that way. Every film is made with an incredible amount of limitations, and it starts with the basic limitation of the screen, this rectangle that we can’t really go beyond. Then there are the limitations dictated by the budget. That’s a big one. The amount of shooting days and the like. Limitations are not really talked about in film reviews because people like to watch movies and accept them as the filmmaker’s ideal vision, or sometimes a product of a certain powerful producer. But in general, the limitations of budget and the economic structure have a huge influence on the aesthetics that define the filmmaker’s vision. It’s not as if the director gets to play out everything the way he wants. He works within limitations, and fights against them, and they end up shaping his vision. I think what ultimately happens is that people become very creative in working with their limitations. They are not allowed to shoot in a certain place that they really wanted or the day is over and they can’t go into overtime or they suddenly can’t afford a crane for the shot they designed — all of a sudden they come up with something else. Something inventive. Of course, limitations can also be enormously frustrating. It’s like the beginning of film: People were trying to push the boundaries. There was no sound, so then we were trying to figure, how can we have sound? Everyone’s talking into flower vases because that’s where the mikes are, and then that’s not enough — we want to move the camera, so let’s find a way to move the camera and have sound. Then we
don’t like the fact that the image is just blackand-white — let’s make it color. And then we don’t like the fact that it’s square, so let’s make it wide screen. There was a period of time when we were experimenting like crazy. We’re not really doing that anymore.Well, in a way we are, I think, because there are two separate issues. There’s the technology part of it, and then there’s the creative part of it. I think technology always wants to be new. There’s always a drive to come up with new things and invent new gadgets, new formats, and excite people in new ways. That’s human nature and that’s also business nature. But I think that in terms of experimentation in movies, in terms of content, in terms of what people are doing in movies structurally or even in terms of acting, in terms of visuals, and how everything pertains to financing, the limitations are becoming harder and harder to navigate. It does feel like there is a certain sensibility, a certain abstraction in movies of the ’70s that a lot of people, including the people who get to greenlight films, liked and loved when growing up, that the marketplace, whatever that is, is not allowing right now. Earlier we talked about Alfredo Garcia. I mean, Sam Peckinpah — can you imagine him trying to make films today? I guess at the same time you could say, could you imagine somebody trying to make a Bob Dylan movie where six people play him? That’s basically a big studio experimental film. Well I think that’s kind of a miracle. And it’s not a true studio film. Talk to me a little bit about your film. My film? Well this brings us full circle — directing. I started out trying to direct a film that collapsed and broke my heart and gave me writing opportunities. And now the writing may open up opportunities for me to direct again. For a while it sort of became my hobby trying to put a film together. A very serious hobby. Looking Glass. Then another called Cordless. And now it seems to be coming together and I will be directing a film soon. But then again, you never know, I’ve been here before. Do you want to talk about casting? Why don’t we not talk about it? I started approaching actors. But nothing is solid yet. You know how actors are. Oh man, they are flaky flakes — can’t trust ’em. Oh, but you’ve got to love ’em. [laughs] Well, I can’t wait to see your movies. And I can’t wait to be in ’em. Mmmm. Well, that’s gonna make me cry. I heard and I read somewhere that you’re working with Ryan Gosling. Oh, that’s uncomfortable — that’s me. That’s a little unFILMMAKER FALL 2007
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comfortable. I don’t mind talking about it because I don’t think he’ll ever read this. [laughs] Yeah, we’re working together on the film about child soldiers in northern Uganda. Absolutely, and you’re my director, and I just watched a bunch of stuff that you shot over there which I have to say is absolutely gorgeous. Yeah, it’s kind of cheesy though, don’t you think? The footage is nice but we were trying to get money for it so we cut it into kind of a cheesy trailer. I didn’t think it was cheesy. Why do you think it was cheesy? Because it’s not trailer material. It’s just to give you a sense of the life. It really should just be watched without music and without any cuts. It’s just something that’s supposed to give you a sense of the place. To cut it up and put music to it is really not what it is. It brings us back to the fact that there are all these kinds of very worthy films, films that could be really important, innovative, or just interesting and eye-opening, but they’re not pitchable. You can’t make a trailer and sell them. So hopefully there are other ways to get them financed, other ways than just studios and mini-majors and traditional models of film financing. Finding the alternative sources, finding new and innovative routes that are more independent by nature, I guess, if that’s a word we can still use, to make these movies. Well, then, Mr. Moverman. Yes, Mr. Gosling. Thank you very much. Thank you. I hope I’m Not There and Married Life are the biggest hits of the year. Thank you. And good luck to you and your directing. You too. And I’ll talk to you as soon as we hang up. I’ll call you when we’re not being recorded.t
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SENIOR MOMENTS
from page 51 that’s what people are going to do. It helped me when I got stuck to just pretend it was just a novel, to just keep going and write this stuff that I eventually would rip out, stuff that had to do with describing internal states — things that you would never really be able to have in a screenplay. And it was really long — the first draft of the script was 200 pages. In a weird way, I felt like I wrote a novel and then had to do an adaptation of the novel to turn it into a screenplay, which brought it down to 120 pages. I spent a year going from 200 pages to 120 pages, and it took me years to get to the 200 pages. So a year to kind of, what’s it called, reduction? When they do that to a sauce, the reduction sauce? What you’re saying about changing forms is interesting. You were tricking yourself. It really helped me. It freed my friggin’ brain. A screenplay is a distillation of this other thing. It would be writing the essence of something before you know what the something is. If you don’t know what it is yet, let it just be fat and sloppy and not the distillation, and then find what you really [mean]. It’s a slow [process], though. Keith Gordon says he considers his job to be a fund-raiser and every five years he takes three months off to shoot a movie. Yeah, it’s really hard to get them made. It’s demoralizing and exhausting. You’ve got to be a real lunatic. There are moments when it’s pretty bleak out there, especially when you really are committed to one [project]. The first person at the company likes it but then it has to go upstairs, and then it’s like, “Well, he didn’t like it,” and then you go to the next one. It’s just so much of that: “We sent it, we’re waiting, so and so really
liked it, but the guy upstairs….” I don’t know if and when it gets easier. I guess you have to make something that really makes some dough or something. You have to be such a dog with a bone about it that you must be strange — I mean, I think filmmakers are pretty strange people. There’s something about when you’re tenacious and intrepid and probably bizarrely so. Like a normal person would take the hint that this isn’t happening, but no, you don’t. I mean, is it delusional to be running around and trying to get your screenplay made for a couple of years, or is it just that it’s so hard to get these things made? I live in the East Village, and I’ve lived here for a really long time, and I guess [the character of ] Wendy was some sort of riff on people who come to New York City and have to do something to support themselves but [still] have these dreams of making it in the arts. How long can you sustain that double life when it’s not really happening? You worked on the script for a long time and then suddenly you are making the film. Tell me about your shooting schedule after all that waiting. It was very short preproduction, six weeks. That’s all we could afford to pay people. Then we had 30 days to shoot. The irony is you work on a script forever and try to get it financed forever and then you have to do it NOW!!! We got the film financed in January and then we shot at the end of March. We needed to shoot quickly because it needed to look like winter in New York City and in Buffalo. We shot every exterior first to avoid foliage, green and [signs of spring]. We were very lucky — it snowed in April in front of the nursing home in Buffalo! So we managed to have a winter movie in April and it worked out okay. The 30-day aspect of it wasn’t fun. Five more days would have made life easier. But the adrenaline [needed for that shooting schedule] can be kind of great. Sometimes pricey Hollywood movies, they’re D.O.A. They are too prepared, and there’s no energy. As much as I can complain and wish I had more time… there’s something about that capturing of [real] life [on a quick shoot], and that’s the most important thing — that sort of lived-in feeling among these characters, a messy, imperfect aliveness. Just having it feel alive. When you see it in a movie, a flicker of life, it’s so startling. Oh my God! That’s life, actually life as it happens! They’ve captured something human! It’s not part of the repertoire of things that we think are real because we’ve seen them in movies. How did you talk about color and framing to your d.p. and production designer? Are
you a look-book person? A friend had given me a book by Larry Sultan, this great photographer, called Pictures from Home. It was for the Arizonaish part of the movie. And I also found that scouting and taking digital photographs myself was a huge aid in figuring out how the movie should look. I had gone scouting in Buffalo prior to meeting a d.p. and I had taken tons of pictures of branches against the sky, heavy clouds, traffic lights. They show up in the movie when Phil’s character is driving on Percocet — there are these loping low wires and bare trees against the sky. I took pictures like that while we were in the location van driving around. Everything I saw out of the corner of my eye became a reference. Location photos are usually like a picture of a room, but these were like my periphery, this track that was running through my mind that I documented with this little cheap camera. I took pictures constantly of anything that was interesting. It could be an abandoned hospital where left on the bulletin board would be a Christmas ornament or a horn of plenty. These little details — leftover, found things. Were there any films that you looked to for inspiration? There’s a movie, I don’t think we utterly achieved the look of it, The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Such a good film. It’s a very specific kind of handheld-looking movie. It’s available light, and it goes dark [at times]. There’s something about its organic [quality] and the way the camera [views] the bodies of the actors. We achieve [this quality] in certain places, I think. We had a really great camera operator, Peter Agliata, who handheld a lot of the movie. When he would swing from one head to the next [during panning singles] in a dialogue scene, he had this enormous intuition about the drama of the scenes and a great sense of when [the camera] should swing [to the other person]. It was like he was in the scene with them. He would sit there and read the scenes really closely, studying them so he knew where the dramatic points were, and he really paid attention during rehearsals. He was an enormous asset. The opening of the movie sets a tone that’s quickly belied, with all the elderly people doing what’s almost an old-fashioned TV variety-show number. I understand that a chunk of that scene resulted from necessity rather than planning. We never found a location [for that scene]. There was this weird band shell in Sun City [that we wanted,] but they refused to let us use it. We were only in Sun City for a very short time and we madly tried to book these clubs [of senior citizens] — water aerobics people, golfers — and coordinate
[their schedules with ours]. [While shooting] we had our trucks parked by a church we were using for a home base, and I turned around and there’s this crazy hedge! I thought, what if [the senior citizens] come out from behind it? I dragged my d.p. over and I hid behind the hedge and appeared, and [the scene is] now so much better than what it would have been. It looks like something you’d art direct, but everything was really found, as eccentric as that looks — the hedge, the women’s costumes, the 90-year-old woman tap-dancing on the asphalt. I guess that’s a big directing thing — you get something in your head, a location, and it just doesn’t work out. Sometimes something’s sitting right in front of your face and you don’t think about it until some limitation is placed. Orson Welles once said that a director doesn’t take advantage of accidents, a director presides over accidents. There is something to that, something about the balance between aggression and passivity. Aggressively trying to get everything you need, and then being able to sit back and let things happen. Finding that balance — it’s like a Zen state. I think it’s an ideal state in life [laughs] and directing. And I think the more you direct, the better you are at that. My [student] short films are these tight, controlled little things. These perfect little frames. I like them
very much, but they’re stylized tableaux. They’re very theatrical. They have a certain esthetic and whatever, but as you grow up, you start to figure a way of letting go while keeping your eyeballs open for things that crop up. You’re also keeping the writer locked up back in the writing room. It’s the director’s job once you’re on the floor. It’s interesting where you let go and how much without losing control. Working with actors, [what is] the balance of bugging them and getting in there, and just seeing how something evolves and having the courage to shut up? It’s like, you’re called a director, I guess I should be telling people what to do all the time, but being okay with not talking is pretty important, too. The second time [the actors] do a scene, it might be twisting and changing and growing organically. If you just shut up and let it happen a couple of times, it will emerge. I’m not that great at it, but it’s something that I can see is important. Stephen Frears has said the key thing he learned on his first shoot was to make a choice, the blue shirt rather than the green one, say. Even if you make a choice and then change it later, it’s good for the crew to see that. That exhibits confidence? I wish I’d had that anecdote under my belt! I don’t know if it’s a gender thing or not, but I do feel like being
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able to change your mind in front of a crew or be unsure until you’re sure [is important too]. I feel like a lot of stuff was very visible in terms of the making of our movie. I sat there, people could hear me talking to my d.p., changing my mind, and I wonder… maybe Stephen Frears was right, it makes you look weak... I think he was saying the air of decisiveness was the strength... But the irony is, it might be perceived as a weakness from the outside if someone sees that Stephen Frears doesn’t know what color he wants, but the fact that he’s open to changing his mind is brave. I hate to say this, because it sounds so… but I’m a woman, I’m making a movie, most of the people who are making the movie, the crew, are men. There can be a difference in the way your authority is perceived if you [publicly] exhibit [your decision-making process]. It’s weird to be watched. It’s such a public job… to be thinking out loud in front of all of these people who are waiting for you. If you are writing, there are not 20 people waiting to take the next word and lug it across the room! You’re making decisions constantly when you’re writing, but no one’s watching. Film directors generally don’t have the chance, the leisure, to watch other directors at work, and like Mike Nichols... Is he the one who said directing is like sex? Yeah, you’re always wondering how the other guy does it. You never know how good you are because you never see anybody else do it! Exactly. Crew people and actors see [other directors], but unless you’re hanging out on sets, you really don’t. You have your own weird, idiosyncratic way of getting your way. Some people probably have a more strong-armed way, others have a more roundabout passive way of getting things. [Jim Taylor enters; they say hellos before he goes to another table.] I guess we can talk about what it’s like living with another writer now, being mar-
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ried to another screenwriter? Just don’t take pictures, the place is a mess! When you were asking about a community… it’s interesting living with a writer. He was a great ally on so many levels with the movie, and when I was going from the 200-page version of the script to the more presentable 120-page version, he read everything. [Screenwriting] is also such a lonely, grueling process, although he doesn’t have that because he writes with a writing partner. They have a great thing, but when you’re alone writing, it’s friggin’ lonely. So Jim was more like an editor? Yeah, he was a great eye. And Alexander [Payne] too. They showed up at various stages of the editing process. And also just like the moral support of it all. When Jim and I met, I went to graduate film school at NYU, but I was leaving NYU when he was entering. His version of the story is that we met for 10 years. He’d introduce himself to me over and over again for 10 years, and I never remembered who he was. And eventually, whatever, we got married. Now that’s a montage. His version of the story is that he’d seen my NYU student short, which had won prizes at school. When people were applying to school, they would give them examples of the work that students were doing, and he said based on that short that he saw, he decided to go to NYU Film School and he had a crush on me. It was a film crush, which is cute. That’s a rarefied love story. It’s totally rarefied. I dunno, writing is weird and lonely and makes you grumpy and strange, and it’s nice when somebody understands that. I also have a dog. That helps. Makes you go out into the world. Then your dog’s like, “Okay, I have to walk you.” There’s something about moving and thinking. A treadmill, working out, and your brain just kind of makes connections. Moving — being in cars, trains, being on treadmills, they’re all really good for the writing brain. But I haven’t written in a long time; I have to start writing. To write you really should be writing
every single day to keep the muscle going. But then if you write and make a movie, the year of working on the movie goes by and then you’re supposed to start writing again and you have kind of forgotten how. So I have to start writing. I have to buy a new journal; I have to get some nice pens.t
PRAY FOR ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
from page 59 on a Harley pulls up in front of me. He’s the archetypal biker, which is why I cast him in a bar scene a few days earlier. He asks if I need a ride. Grateful, I hop on and beg him not to go too fast. We pull up to the location, a local restaurant, and the ubiquitous crowd is forming outside. Since Eagle Pass has a depressed economy, the jobs I offer to extras are some of the best gigs in town. Each shoot day a small crowd assembles to see if I’m going to need extra help. We have our own traveling day laborer site. So we roar up on the Harley and the crowd starts laughing and cheering. Look! The casting person on a motorcycle, riding with one of the town’s scariest looking guys! He smiles and waves, enjoying a moment of minicelebrity. I hop off, pass the breast pump along and the shooting continues. Eagle Pass is an amazing history lesson disguised as a sleepy, dusty border town. From the outside it looks like another small town whose center was abandoned after the local Wal-Mart opened. A town one thinks is almost 100 percent Mexicano. But what I find surprises me. There are Kickapoo whose children migrate with the crops. There is a settlement across the border of freed and escaped slaves. They’ve been there for generations now. There’s also a settlement of Japanese from Okinawa who came after World War II. All these people have blended together. The local cemetery is testament to their lives crossing, as names blend and combine to form new generations of people.
Local casting gives life and authenticity to a film. Creating a relationship with the community in which you are filming adds a level of richness to a story. When many people feel as if they are collaborating on something that is important to them, the product is filled with a palpable spirit. The community respects the film and in turn, the crew learns from the people of the town or country where the movie is made. Everyone walks away a little wiser, a little more full. In my 10 years of grassroots casting for Sayles I have had many intense, bizarre and touching relationships with the people of each community in which we have filmed. I have been serenaded in my office and stalked (three times). I have been asked for my hand in marriage — once by a man with five other wives. I have been given many gifts — a freshly killed salmon (slapped onto my desk, twitching), original artwork and homemade jam. I have taken care of many children and had someone name a child after me. I’ve been on cable-access call-in shows and I’ve spoken at city council meetings, bingo parlors, classrooms and tribal meetings. I’ve encouraged and cajoled people. I’ve held the most fragile ego and drawn out the shiest person. For everyone, I’ve wanted their experiences (first and probably last) with a film to be a good one. For them to feel proud of what they did and of how they tried. I wanted them to feel part of the story being told about their people or their town. I hope to have always done right by them. John Sayles’s films speak to people. Political activists love how Matewan contextualizes history. Gays and lesbians felt their story was finally and honestly told in Lianna. For many African Americans, seeing The Brother From Another Planet was a seminal moment. For me it was City of Hope. Sayles sank a hook in me and shook me awake. I
thought, this film is about power and how it works. Sayles’s films mark our path as we move through the process of being human. They capture single moments, periods in history and geographic transformations. They take a small relationship and show us how it is connected to the larger narrative of life. In this sense, he shows us again and again, how we are, all of us, no matter how small, part of the same story.
MEN WITH GUNS
I’m in a minibus full of children from San Juan Babilonia. We are driving them to a nearby location to film a scene where they mourn the deaths of their town leaders who were killed by the army. The kids are excited to be winding through the mountains in this bus, and have their faces pressed against the window. They are dressed in traditional clothing and speak to each other in Chol, the language of their people. At moments, in the music of their unintelligible words, I hear my brother’s name. They are talking about my brother David. They love him. They hang on him and follow him around their village. I turn in my seat. “Sing a song for me,” I say in Spanish. “Sing a song for me in your language.” They giggle and talk to each other. Then they start to sing. I have never heard anything so beautiful as their small voices, the singsong pattern of their words lifting us up over the green jungle as we rise out of the clouds and toward the mountains of Chiapas. They sing the song over and over again until we arrive.t
SOMETHING MUST BREAK
from page 77 Annik, did. Yeah, Annik said to me that she thought that was the most beautiful thing about the film, that in the afterlife, her character and Ian Curtis’s character fall in love. That happened after the film. They’ve [been] a couple now for a year.
Did you prepare especially for the aspects of directing you were not so familiar with, like dealing narrative concerns? Well, in photographs you tell a story too and in my little [promo] videos I often make a little story. So I think that’s something that I’d had some experience with. How you tell the story was the most important thing to me, and that was through the actors and of course your choice of framing and these kinds of things. But that’s something I do quite easily, that’s not such a great achievement for me. If I do [the visual side] well, it just comes very natural and, of course, [cinematographer] Martin Ruhe did a fantastic job. The other things I really had to work on and I find that a much bigger achievement for me. To get the actors to do well, that’s a very proud moment for me. How did you decide on the look of the film? At what stage did you decide to shoot in black and white? Very early on. My own memory of Joy Division is very black-andwhite because that’s all I shot in those days, and also the album sleeves were in black-andwhite. The only magazines that published anything on Joy Division were black-and-white magazines because Joy Division were a cult band. They didn’t appear in color magazines. Were you concerned that people who didn’t know Joy Division’s music wouldn’t appreciate the film so much? No. The thing is it’s not made for Joy Division fans. I was telling Ian’s story and Joy Division is connected to that. I thought if I do justice to Ian it’s going to be fine from every angle you look at it. I feel it’s a much broader film than just for people who like Joy Division’s music. It’s a sad, tragic love story. You said before that you’re perceived as “just a rock photographer,” but how big a passion has cinema been in your life? I’m a photographer and as an artist I make little films and do graphic design and some stage design and my photography is quite broad. I’m interested in
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artists, whether it’s musicians or painters, actors or directors, but I’m interested in people who make things that I like and rock photography is limited by what’s in the picture, not how you photograph. [As for] cinema, I don’t think I’ve seen a massive amount of films in my life. I don’t really know a lot about film but I’ve always liked [Andrei] Tarkovsky and I also like [ Jacques] Tati. The Big Lebowski is one of my favorite films of the Coen brothers. I like Fargo, I like Blood Simple. I like the Italian movies of [Federico] Fellini and [Michelangelo] Antonioni, and John Cassavetes and [ JeanLuc] Godard. I like Martin Scorsese — Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull — the films of my generation, as it were. Were there any films that were particularly an influence when you were making Control? No, not really. I didn’t watch any films except for Ken Loach’s Kes before I made this. I was quite adamant about not seeing films that I thought might influence me because I didn’t want that. I think unconsciously [I was] probably influenced anyway by some of the people I mentioned, but then it’s dreamlike. I don’t think I’ve seen a Tarkovsky movie in the last 10 years, but maybe something of that creeps into your work. The film won three prizes when it premiered at Cannes. How have you reacted to that success? Well, I bought a smaller car! I bought a hybrid car instead of a big 4x4. But mentally it’s been great because as much as I was focused on making the film, I think I was very unfocused on what happens once you finish the film, a little innocent to what was to come. So to be asked to open the Quinzaine [The Directors’ Fortnight] at Cannes was amazing, of course, and then to get the reaction [the film] did was unexpected for me. I had no idea that film was such a massive industry. When you walk in Cannes... in photography that does not exist, let’s put it that way! So that really overpowered me, and it’s just been beautiful. You make the film you want to make, so you love what you’re doing, and when you send it out into the world you’re just lucky that people want to see it and react as well as they do.t
THE HOLLYWOOD LIFE
from page 79 Edge. I was suffering from hypothermia from being in the lake, I didn’t want my body temperature to drop and I started replaying in my mind the journey on the road, two days before, as I was driving up to Canada to make the film. I slipped back into the minutes of that day. To 106
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lose contact, to lose one’s mind in that way is a horrible feeling. What sort of direction did you give your d.p., Dante Spinotti, on this film? Did you work together with him to create a visual language? Well that was the lucky stroke. He came on board with such enthusiasm. He decided that he wanted to [shoot it] digital in high-definition, and it was quite extraordinary. I’d come up with my camera shots and he’d looked at them and smile and say, “Well I think we can do a better shot here.” So I let him do his thing. And then, in fact, it was quite interesting because on the third day of the filming I tore my Achilles tendon. You know the scene when I’m running around the corridors of the hospital? Yes. Well I ripped my Achilles tendon, and I was in a wheelchair for quite a bit of the film, until it started to heal. At that time, I thought, these guys know exactly what they’re doing, so I’ll just leave it to them and I’d just come up with some shots. How did you approach the financing of the film? We filmed it in two pieces in fact: The scene in the desert when I meet Kevin McCarthy, we filmed that previously, a year ago last February, because we had a producer who said that he wanted to put up the money and then changed his mind. So my wife and I decided to put up some cash to shoot that week’s filming just because Kevin is in his nineties. And then after the wrap, we thought, where do we go from here? We went through about three or four different sources of money, producers who gave us a smile and then said they wanted final cut and they wanted to talk about the script. I said, “No, absolutely not.” I got tired of talking to those guys. We managed to get some private financing. Enough said. How much of the visual scheme of the film, particularly the optical-dissolve work, and visual effects, was built into the script? Well I planned most of that. I wrote copious notes about what I wanted the effects to be, to flash back in time, to have 3 or 8 or 25-frame cuts, and I had an idea of where I was going to insert them. I spent four months with Michael Miller in the editing room, and Michael, who has worked with Woody Allen, is a really fine editor. I said to him, “You have to warn me if I’m going too far into your ethics and your integrity as an editor. I don’t want to do anything to damage your reputation.” He just said, “Whatever you want to do, let’s go for it.” So we worked together. I said, “I just want to knock everything on its head, want to tip everything on its ass.” We had a great time.
Now that you’ve finished the film, what has the completion of it meant for you, sort of creatively? What has it meant? Yes, I mean it’s a huge accomplishment to direct a film, particularly one that’s not a conventional film. What does it mean for you that Slipstream now exists in the world? As I was writing it I thought, “Well, this is impossible. Nobody’s going to make a movie like this. I’m living in a fool’s paradise.” And as I kept going through it I thought, “Well there’s nothing wrong with it, I’m just doing it my way. I know people are not going to understand it.” I sent it to the various actors, and people still didn’t get it. Christian Slater got it, and John Turturro, I think. It was my wife Stella who said, “Let’s not give up on it.” So to have accomplished it and to have finished it, I feel very pleased because it’s my movie. I think, “Well, we did it.” And I’m thrilled. I did it for my own pleasure really — for my own insightful pleasure. Slipstream is my view of the world.t
...AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH?
from page 91 these attacks still sting to this day. “Kael’s review was terrible, terrible,” mutters Maysles. “The whole basis of the article was that everything in the movie was staged. And in trying to support that argument, which is unsupportable, by the way, she also said that Paul Brennan [from Maysles’s Salesman] wasn’t really a Bible salesman. That we got him to play the part. And that’s just provably false.” Kael’s attacks are hauntingly similar to those absorbed by Jennifer Venditti almost 40 years later. Because the Rolling Stones had paid the Maysles Brothers to produce a concert documentary, she assumed they were intimately related to the events themselves: “If events are created to be photographed, is the movie that records them a documentary, or does it function in a twilight zone? Is it the cinema of fact when the facts are manufactured for the cinema...? It doesn’t look so fraudulent if a director excites people to commit violent acts on camera.” The ironic thing is that in the end, documentary filmmakers are very much like writers, some hewing to a more formal nonfiction style like Ken Burns, while others join Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me) and Ross McElwee (Bright Leaves) on the New Journalism train. Both writers and doc-makers take material from real life and observation and cull out the moments that resonate to them in some way
and then situate those moments in a story. In fact probably the most interesting rumination on documentary film in recent times was the film Capote, through which Truman Capote’s relationship with a killer delved into all of the internal conflict and subsequent external attacks a doc-maker braces themselves for. Judy Irving, the director of the antinuke doc Dark Circle, which spent several years blacklisted from PBS for its “subjectivity,” has another take on credibility attacks: “When someone throws that at you, like that your film does not have journalistic integrity, or it’s not objective, what they’re really saying is ‘I don’t agree with you. My subjectivity is different from your subjectivity and I wish you had portrayed what I feel about the subject rather than what you feel.’”
Red Herrings “I’m not a journalist, I’m a filmmaker,” says Irving. “I’ve got a strong point of view, and I got that point of view by studying the issue of nuclear power for 10 years, for God’s sake. If you don’t develop opinions about issues, you’re brain dead.” I remember one otherwise positive festival review of Girls Rock! said pejoratively that “Filmmakers Arne Johnson and Shane King have an agenda,” and I wondered at the time how to make a film without one. Were we always going to dance between people who felt we were hiding our agenda and others who felt it was too open? That doesn’t mean, of course, that Shane and I won’t always make films with an eye toward truth and accuracy, because that really IS our agenda. “You are trying to create a truth on film,” says Irving, “but it’s a different kind of truth from the mundane minute-by-minute truth we all live. If we had to watch that on the screen, we’d all go nuts.” “With all due respect to Haskell Wexler,” says Green, talking gingerly and thoughtfully through this philosophical minefield, “I don’t agree with the notion that it’s all fiction. That might be the way media-savvy people think of them, but that’s not the way audiences watch documentaries. People think they’re true. And I do feel there are certain kinds of truth that are important for society. Those kinds of truths were ignored in the run up to the Iraq war, and look what happened. The postmodern idea that there is no truth, I don’t agree with that, and it can lead to terrible things. There are things that are true, and the stakes are really high.” “At the end of the day,” says Morgan Spurlock, “ethically, you have no one to see in the
mirror but yourself. The more you can be honest with yourself, the better your movies are going to be.”t
CAMERA TEST
from page 92 In retrospect, as happy as I was with the end result, the HPX was probably the wrong camera for what I did — it’s just too big and heavy. A shot like this would’ve worked better with an HVX. But, I suppose, since they both record the same P2 DVCPRO HD, the ideal independent production might involve both cameras. The HPX, with its adjustable lenses, might make better sense for the bulk of principle photography on a project, with the HVX picking up the slack where greater mobility or guerrilla methods are required. Although the HPX, with its four 16GB P2 slots, has plenty of storage capacity, during the shoot I kept wondering why P2 cards are even necessary and haven’t been replaced by internal hard drives that can offer even greater memory. To answer that question, four days after the shoot, I retired my old DVX for a brand new HVX — only instead of getting it with P2 cards, I opted for a 100GB FS-100 FireStore drive. Aside from the extra memory, the FS100 allows me to record my footage directly to Quicktime without any translation; it plugs into my Mac as any FireWire hard drive would, and I can simply click and drag the QT files right into a folder on my desktop. Now I just have to arrange for UPS to pick up that big-ass metal case from my floor. See Jamie Stuart’s test footage from the Panasonic AG-HPX500P at filmmakermagazine.com/cameratest.php.
THE POWERS THAT BE
from page 94 ery studio will either be in production or about to go into production. Actors will know their schedules. As the spring unfolds, actors will become available again and, if a strike is still on the horizon, there won’t be new studio productions for them to move onto. Indies — especially those with brave private financing and without bond companies worried about schedule overruns taking the shoot past the strike date — could make actor offers in March and be pleasantly surprised by the results. If, after going down to the wire, a strike doesn’t happen, or even if it’s over very quickly, all the studios will have blown their annual budgets by the deadline. Indie producers might be the only ones fishing in a suddenly flooded talent pool.
Even if there is a strike, there may even be opportunities for indies able to play fast and loose with their schedules. Levy-Hinte remembers producing Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon in the midst of a previous SAG strike in summer 2000. Levy-Hinte brazenly scheduled the film to start that September. “We figured that the strike would be over by then, and of course no studio can take that kind of risk. Consequently we got the absolute best crew in Los Angeles for that movie.” As always, creative producers will find a way to find water in the desert. And even several months of work stoppage won’t shut the movie business down forever. But what the unions and the studios are (and should be) worried about is how the majority of workers in the film industry are going to earn a living in this new media world. Bob Berney observes that this strike is just the first spark of a much bigger fire: “Everyone learned from VCRs and DVDs that you can really miss out if you don’t try to control the universe.”t
PLAY AGAIN
from page 96 elements of the game play and also holds a number of hidden clues. MOBILE COMMUNICATION: Characters call and text audience members. The Hope is Missing MIG was developed for less than $1,000. It started by crafting the game play and pitch. We built a pitch deck to convey our concept and then targeted outlets that could assist us with reaching a wider audience. To view a version of the Hope is Missing pitch deck visit workbookproject.com/mig. In the end we assembled an impressive number of outlets and promotional partners: MySpace, Stage 6, Xbox, Eyespot, Twitter and Opera Mobile. This not only increased our reach but also created an effective national promotion for Head Trauma. VOD releases tend to be fragmented due to the number of varying outlets. A unified promotional push can be difficult and costly. The MIG concept will allow us to reach an audience of more than 30 million people, and our promotional partners provided over $400,000 in placements across their networks and sites. Once we had the commitment from the promotional partners we were able to leverage additional deals for the film and better placement within VOD catalogs. Over the coming months we will have a better understanding of the exact conversion rates of players to VOD purchases but we are seeing value from our efforts already. FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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New Streams Of Revenue The other element of a MIG that is exciting for independent filmmakers is that you can creatively build a game around your film, building and testing new storylines and properties in the process. For instance the Hope is Missing MIG has lead to a number of highlevel discussions about turning the concept into a fully funded, ongoing Web series. After the Head Trauma cinema game experiments my whole focus around story has changed. I am now considering creating a world around each of my works — worlds that can cross devices, platforms and audiences. In fact, I have been writing game bibles (which overviews games and their rules) at the same time that I am scripting. SAMPLES: Hope Is Missing (hopeismissing.blogspot. com): Promotion for Head Trauma. ARGnet (argn.com): A comprehensive site covering all things ARG. World Without Oil (worldwithoutoil.org): Ken Eklund’s social conscious ARG about an oil shock. Super Columbine Massacre (columbinegame.com): Controversial RPG. Cloverfield (1-18-08.com): Promotion for the upcoming J.J. Abrams film. Eldrich Errors (eldritcherrors.com): Interesting horror ARG. Perplex City (perplexcity.com): Immersive ARG dealing with murder, intrigue and conspiracy. The first season concluded and a second season is in the works.t
SUPPORT GROUP
from page 98 emphasize the emotional discord of those scenes. Three months later, we have a cut that is tighter, more focused, more uncompromising in its vision and in a better position to represent its distinctiveness in the marketplace.” Alex Karpovsky directed General Impression of Size and Shape, a genre-challenging story about the hunt for The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in eastern Arkansas. Editing issues were also paramount for Karpovsky as he and his editor had been wrestling with “act two issues” for months. “My editor and I had slipped deep into the murky twilight where perspective and conviction begin to fade,” he said. “Having two great editors at the Lab lend fresh eyeballs and neurons to our little struggle, we were able to talk specifically and tangibly about ways to 108
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feather the birdwatcher into our story. Basically, we broke down the main birdwatcher’s character arc into very broad and simple steps — a process that, again, my editor and I had trouble doing because of how close we had gotten to the footage. Then we outlined the main beats of the plot and discussed it. In a way, it was kind of like psychoanalysis. Instead of unloading a bunch of new ideas on how to actually implement this or structure that, it was more of them breaking things down into very clear and straightforward terms and allowing us to view them from a new and less cluttered perspective; one that was much lighter on associations, stress, fatigue and doubt.” Marco Ricci and Michael Canzoniero directed The Marconi Bros., a comedy about two carpet installers who “escape” the family business for the comparatively more glamorous world of wedding videographers. The Lab helped them resolve issues brought up by an overpowering temp score. “By removing the temp score, we noticed audiences beginning to discover our characters in a much deeper way,” Canzoniero says. “As it often happens in the post production process we had become so familiar with our dailies that we assumed that everyone was catching all the comedic nuances in Dan Fogler’s performance and yet, as soon as we removed the music, test audiences were catching beats that previously had been lost in the pace of the score.” Chris Bower’s Moon Europa is an intriguing and visually arresting science-fiction tale set in a ravaged, depleted future. “I finished the IFP Rough Cut Lab on June 14 and locked picture on August 31,” he says. “It was sad to let my film go, make that final edit.” A fan of composer Danna’s work before entering the Lab, Bower says his guidance was invaluable. “Moon Europa is unique in that we have multiple composers attached to the project,” he says. “Mychael took the time to help us focus on maintaining creative continuity throughout the entire picture and offered suggestions on which composer should take the lead. After the Lab we took his insights into our process and moved forward with finishing the composition.” Philadelphia-based Tom Quinn directed The New Year Parade, a drama about the effect of divorce on adult children set against the backdrop of the city’s annual Mummer’s Parade. Again, Hoffman’s and Williams’s help in clarifying storytelling goals was the director’s big gain. “Essentially, The New Year Parade is built on five elements: son, daughter, father, mother and Mummery, one of America’s old-
est folk traditions rooted in Philadelphia,” Quinn explains. “Kate and Sabine correctly defined the parents as ‘triggers’ for the son and daughter’s conflicts. While this may seem obvious, and was of course designed in the writing process, I learned the importance of boiling complex story elements to a carefully chosen word. In his book Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films, Jeff Young suggests Terry Malloy’s objective in the first scene of On the Waterfront is to get Joey Doyle on the roof. Kazan corrects him, stating his objective is to follow orders. That seemingly minor shift reframes the whole scene for an actor. Here too, by defining the parents as ‘triggers’ I could better decide which moments were most important and how to weave them around the son and daughter.” Oklahoma-based Beau Leland and Kevin Ely directed Rainbow Around the Sun, a fullon musical centered around a hard-drinking, talented songwriter dealing with the impending death of his father. Leland says the Lab helped the two of them to figure out how to unite the musical and dramatic sections of their film. “We were advised by Danna to lay a continual bed of underscoring in between musical numbers so that the presence of music was constant,” he reports. “We took this advice and hired the original arranger of the film’s source music to create original scoring appropriate for each dialogue sequence.” Adds Ely, the criticism the two received at the Lab ‘was tough to hear,’ but the feedback resulted in two newly written and shot scenes and a “more cohesive film.” Jason Cuadrado’s Tales from the Dead is a Japanese-language horror anthology made, ambitiously, as an L.A. independent film. Cuadrado says that the Lab helped him “inspire a post strategy.” He relates, “We probably made more mistakes that anyone else when deciding how to complete the film with no money. We had tried to partner with a production company/distributor to pay for post in exchange for a percentage of the film’s ownership. That didn’t work. Then we attempted to partner with a post house offering the same deal. No dice. It was only after the Lab that we went across the street to eat tapas and sketch out a plan to do it ourselves. Within two months, we had raised just enough money to hire some very talented, very generous artisans to give it the kind of polish the rough cut needed to look, sound and feel like a solid film.” Finally, Georgina Lightning’s Older Than America, a tale of the supernatural set in a Na-
tive American boarding house, used the Lab to strategize festival strategy as well as the DIY outreach possible for a film with strong Native American subject matter.t
INDUSTRY BEAT
from page 24 she says, will admit that 14 theaters in 10 cities is a lot to commit to. There’s also the ongoing question as to which venues are eligible for the rollout. Academy rules state that theaters must “show new releases,” “charge admission” and “generally run films for three to seven consecutive days, with multiple showings daily,” but such regulations are still vague enough to cause confusion. “They’ve set up an impossible system in which it is up to filmmakers and venues to determine whether or not a particular venues meets these criteria,” says documaker AJ Schnack, who is qualifying his doc Kurt Cobain: About a Son. “A far better system would be for the Academy to officially recognize certain venues and to post these locations publicly.” Another challenge is that docs who make it as far as the Academy shortlist must also supply two 35mm prints just two weeks after the announcement is made. “It’s a big rush,” says Stern. “At a minimum that is going to cost you $35,000 to $40,000.” “This is clearly meant to eliminate films that are primarily broadcast in their origin and their expected destiny,” says Urman. But the irony, he points out, is that “broadcasters are so rich that they are among the few that, without regard to box office, can underwrite this.” Therefore, he argues, the new regulations actually make it especially difficult for small theatrical distributors — the very folks that put docs in theaters. “I can play the majority of the markets and a greater number of secondary and tertiary markets without ever going to 35mm. To be forced to do so, at a point where you don’t know anything, is onerous.” Another oft-cited catch-22 is the fact that broadcasters, who require broadcasts that would disqualify a film, are the backers of most documentary films. This year, one muchloved documentary, Pernille Rose Gronkjaer’s The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun, for example, winner of Grand Jury Prizes at both IDFA and Full Frame, has been disqualified after a broadcast on Belgian television. Despite all these Byzantine rules and limitations, however, documentary makers say they’re still going “to go through whatever hoops to qualify,” says Leifer. “We feel that the Academy is a real useful tool. It’s a long FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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shot, it’s high-risk and it’s expensive, but it’s worth it for the cause and the kids.” As IDA’s Ruchs says, “Filmmakers who decide to do nonfiction are unstoppable.”t
FEST CIRCUIT
from page 29 Paranoid Park, a combo of a skateboard movie
and coming-of-age film with a soupçon of thriller, is a wondrous, dynamic collaboration between the director and Hong Kong-based d.p. Christopher Doyle. I have never seen a film like Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’s sublime Silent Light, a modern-day version of The Scarlet Letter set among the antimodern Mennonites, Europeans who inhabit a sizable portion of Chihuahua, Mexico. Guy Maddin’s fanciful My Winnipeg, in which he projects all his feelings about his Canadian hometown and family onto hilarious mythic, scatological, and historic imagery, is anything but a conventional documentary (Canada’s Documentary Channel funded it). And the hypnotic I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s impressionistic survey of Bob Dylan’s life, is like no other film I’ve ever seen. Six actors successfully play the musician’s various personas. Damn, I did not accomplish my task of imposing an order on the films I’m writing about. Guess that rules out a burger — and a freshly grilled one at that. On the plus side, however, part of the fun and the challenge of a festival as large and diverse as Toronto lies in discovering movies that you can not totally wrap your head around. That’s what makes the journey especially worthwhile.
Venice Film Festival Belle N. Burke
One of the best things about the 64thVenice Film Festival (August 29 - September 8) was its selection of films examining humankind at its worst, a subject that’s usually anathema at the box office. Among U.S. entries in competition, Redacted won both audience applause and the Silver Lion for best director to Brian De Palma, and a collateral award went to Paul Haggis for In the Valley of Elah. Both films open a window onto the horrors of the war in Iraq. Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World..., about the exploitation of illegal immigrants in England, won for best screenplay. La Graine et Le Mulet, by Abdellatif Kechiche that was considered a front-runner for the Golden Lion, deals with the difficulties faced by a Magreb family in the south of France and features an appealing newcomer, Hafsia Herzi, who won the Marcelleo Mastroianni award for best young actor. But giving Ang Lee his second Golden Lion in three years for Lust, Caution, an extremely unpopular choice, was difficult to understand given the quality of films seen here. 12, the latest film by the great Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov, based on the same theme as Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, was so impres110
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sive that many thought it deserved the Golden Lion. Instead a Special Lion “for his entire body of work” was created for the director. Even Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream (shown out of competition, standard practice for him) is dark, as were many others, from Kenneth Branagh’s new version of Sleuth to Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, a grim story in which George Clooney plays his first bad guy. Rodrigo Plá, making his directorial debut with La Zona, about what ensues when some poor kids get into a locked and guarded enclave for the rich in Mexico City, delivers a powerful message about the price of privilege. The much-touted The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford fell flat for its static quality, length, portentous voice-overs and overreliance on scenery. Brad Pitt was not a popular choice winning Best Actor at the fest, while Casey Affleck as Robert Ford was hailed enthusiastically as a new discovery. Cate Blanchett won Best Actress for portraying a Dylan-inspired character in Todd Haynes’s film I’m Not There. Speaking of choices, the festival jury was composed entirely of directors, which raises an interesting point: Would they have been apt to sympathize with the directors of films they were judging, or was there more of an “I would have done that differently” attitude? It was a high-level serious jury in any case, deliberating the award selections for nine hours. Amid the many interesting sidebars, retrospectives and tributes: Bernardo Bertolucci, somewhat infirm but with wonderful memories of past Venice festivals, was present to receive a special Golden Lion for his career, to see several of his films screened and to present awards to directors Abbas Kiarostami and Jonathan Demme (here with Man from Plains, shown in the Orizzonti section). Tim Burton, one of the heroes of the festival, was the recipient of a career Golden Lion presented by Johnny Depp. Quentin Tarantino, who appeared in Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django, was the subject of constant rumors about his much-awaited arrival in Venice, where he is greatly admired — he’s coming, he’s not coming — until he sent his regrets due to illness. One of my regrets is that there was too little time to catch up on the retrospective of the Spaghetti Westerns, narrowed down to 32 titles chosen by various directors, as well as the opportunity to see the final cut of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. There may have been no uncontested masterpieces in Venice, but the choices made this
year of new films from Eric Rohmer (Les Amours d’Astree et de Celadon), Claude Chabrol (La Fille Coupee en Deux), Peter Greenaway (Nightwatching), Wes Anderson (The Darjeeling Limited and companion short Hotel Chevalier), Julian Schnabel (Lou Reed’s Berlin), Amos Gitai (Disengagement), and old films ( John Ford’s The Iron Horse, for example) produced a serious festival which did not make concessions to the flavor of the month or ephemeral glamour, as indicated by the preponderance of male actors and the lack of standard love stories. Though the three Italian films entered in competition failed to impress even the Italian critics, there were no recriminations. Venice appears to be on a good track, with nothing to fear from the new Rome Film Festival (the second one will take place in October) or Cannes, and is poised to continue growing, indicated by a symbolic wrecking ball on the front of the Palazzo del Cinema as a sign of the larger, improved facilities to come.
Edinburgh International Film Festival Nick Dawson
Though Venice and Cannes are older, the Edinburgh International Film Festival (August 15-26) has the distinction of being the world’s longest continually running film festival. It has always been a vibrant event taking place each August, a time when Scotland’s capital is already buzzing with the presence of the International, Fringe, Jazz and Book festivals. Greatly loved by both filmmakers and ticket buyers, the question in recent years has been why EIFF’s profile as a film festival has not been greater. Some years ago, the answer was that stars were unwilling or unable to make the trek to Scotland. More recently, the revival of the Cambridge Film Festival, with its July slot, and the London Film Festival’s move from November to October further limited the ability of Edinburgh (already right before Telluride, Venice and Toronto) to get the films it wanted. It was therefore totally understandable that, just before this year’s 61st edition of the festival, new artistic director Hannah McGill announced that the festival had decided to move to a slot in June. McGill explained this change would “give us the breathing space to expand and create our own distinct identity, allowing us to further develop our reputation as one of the world’s most innovative, cutting-edge and challenging annual film events. Logistically, a June event is also better placed in the evercrowded international film festival calendar.”
Edinburgh has always prided itself on championing new British talent and premiering a slew of both commercial and more left field movies by U.K. filmmakers, but this year’s selection was the weakest in memory. Anton Corbijn’s superlative film about Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, Control, stood head and shoulders above every other homegrown entry and rightfully took home the awards for both Best British Film and Best Performance, which went to exceptional debutant Sam Riley for his turn as Curtis. Scot David Mackenzie’s spirited Hallam Foe opened the festival with aplomb, but the only other British film (of the 12 there) that really stood out was the unsentimental but highly affecting doc, We Are Together, about a home for AIDS orphans in South Africa. Directed by first timer Paul Taylor, it played late in the festival and stole the Audience Award out from under the nose of Brad Bird’s Ratatouille. The heartening thing is that next year, McGill and EIFF will have two months more of British films to choose from in order to strengthen what was the only weak strand of this year’s festival. Edinburgh has always catered to all tastes, putting starry gala lineups alongside a large selection of films by first- and second-time directors, new films by old masters, a strong documentary selection, experimental and music-themed strands, a retrospective (this time of Anita Loos movies) and special events (the screening of all 14 hours of Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz was the highlight of 2007). Edinburgh has also always traditionally been a place for stumbling across great undiscovered or underappreciated treasures. For example, In Search of a Midnight Kiss (directed by one of our “25 New Faces,” Alex Holdridge) was a surprise hit, and even sold out its Best of the Fest extra screening ahead of heavyweight encore movies like Death Proof. Equally, Canadian Catherine Martin’s brave, beautiful take on urban malaise, In the Cities, was a revelation, as was the playful and profound literary confection Lovely by Surprise, a brilliantly original debut by Kirt Gunn, one of the most exciting prospects working in American indie cinema. Other debuts that had already won high-profile festival awards, Jennifer Venditti’s SXSW-winning doc Billy the Kid (another 25 New Face) and Lucia Puenzo’s XXY (which won the Grand Prize at Cannes’ Critics Week), also took home prizes here at an awards ceremony marked by enthusiasm and optimism for the future. Next year, Edinburgh’s new time slot should provide a stronger lineup than ever.t
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PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.
parting shot
JAVIER BARDEM
We always knew Javier Bardem could immerse himself in a character. In his Oscar-nominated performance as the gay Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls he seduced us with a sense of revolutionary abandon before devastating us with his forceful yet futile battle with death. As the quadriplegic Roman Sampedro in The Sea Inside, he gave one of the most moving and heralded performances of 2004. But playing Anton Chigurth — a sadistic killer who literally plays heads or tails with his potential victims to decide their fate in the Coen brothers’ latest No Country For Old Men — Bardem puts aside his good looks, glowing smile and normally friendly persona. As a dead-pan psychopath out for blood money, Bardem’s tour de force performance arguably creates the most deranged character in any Coens film to date. And Oscar just may be eyeing him again because of it. — Jason Guerrasio 112
FILMMAKER FALL 2007
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