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"I'm freaked out by you kids. I hope I die before meeting one of you in a job interview," says Roger Greenberg, memorably played by Ben Stiller in Noah Baumbach's acclaimed 2010 film, "Greenberg." Five years later, the actor and director reunite in "While We're Young," a film that, in some ways, takes Greenberg's morbid fascination with modern youth as its jumping-off point. Stiller plays Josh, a middle-aged documentarian still working on a long-delayed project, much to the chagrin of his wife, Cornelia (Naomi Watts), and her father, Leslie (Charles Grodin), a revered, Maysles-type filmmaker. Josh and Cornelia's lives take an unexpected turn when they befriend a younger couple, aspiring filmmaker Jamie (Adam Driver) and his hip-hop-dancing girlfriend, Darby (Amanda Seyfried). Suddenly they find themselves engaging in activities that are less-than-age-appropriate, leading them to feel much younger than their years. This leads to some priceless exchanges, such as when Josh is informed by his doctor that he has arthritis in his knee. "Arthritis-arthritis?" Josh asks indignantly. "Yes, I usually say just say it once," the doctor replies.
Baumbach spoke to RogerEbert.com about his methods for crafting authenticity onscreen, his excitement over the work of indie filmmakers like Joe Swanberg and why he wishes he didn't have the Internet on his phone.
From the father and son competing for the same young woman in "Squid and the Whale" to the adult heroine unwisely climbing a tree in "Margot at the Wedding," your characters have often been prone to acting younger than their age.
They also tend to be cerebral and inarticulate, and so when they do those things, it's kind of a source of humor. It's funny how people can be so self-knowing in some ways and totally off-the-mark in others. The idea that you can analyze the people around you but can't see yourself is an age-old one, but it is interesting to me. As you point out, the adults in "Squid" and "Margot" are doing more overtly childlike things. Both films are also about family. No matter how much you may feel you've evolved, you tend to fall back into the same patterns when you're around your family. You're still jockeying for position. In the case of "Margot," the sisters are still competing. With "Squid," I was interested in the things parents feel that they can get away with around their kids. They think they're getting away with them when they're not. Some of my characters are old beyond their years and some are regressing as they get older. "While We're Young" is a more overt exploration of what it means to be in your 40s and whether you ever really feel like you're an adult.
There's a rumor going around that Jamie and Darby's characters were somewhat inspired by the real-life filmmaking couple, Joe and Kris Swanberg. You produced Joe's film, "Alexander the Last," and Kris (like Darby) had an ice cream business.
I wonder where that started. Somebody brought that up to me not long ago, and I had never heard it. I guess it's intrigue on the festival circuit. [laughs] As for Darby's job, I wanted it to be an artisanal thing, which I thought felt right for the character.
What initially drew you to Joe's work?
I came to Joe's movies at the same time I discovered the work of Andrew [Bujalski] and Aaron Katz. For whatever reason, I became aware of a bunch of those movies around the same time. I thought it was exciting that people were taking advantage of new technology and just making their own stuff and doing it well. The films didn't try to hide what they were. There was a kind of sophisticated amateur quality about them. They were acknowledging that they didn't feature real actors in a lot of cases, and I thought they had a kind of real energy that was exciting. Obviously, a lot of those filmmakers have continued to work and thrive. I actually thought "Computer Chess," Andrew's last movie, was particularly good. It may be my favorite one of his, I thought it was really great.
Those films take a more improvisational approach to their portrayal of inarticulate characters.
The fact that they felt improvised was part of what interested me about them. I write very fixed dialogue that sounds somewhat like a fabricated improvisation. What I'm aiming for is naturalism.
There's an extremely topical debate in your film regarding intellectual property rights, where Josh accuses Jamie of "stealing."
Once I settled on documentarian as the profession of these characters and the movie started to take shape, I entered into these arguments with the knowledge that I wasn't going to solve anything. When I wrote Josh's side of it, I felt very invested in what he was saying. When I wrote Jamie and Leslie's responses, I was equally invested in what they were saying as well. I don't mean that as a cop-out, I just think the debate is complicated. Following the tradition of comedy, my responsibility was to resolve the marriage, because that was the main focus of the story I was telling. These debates were really for the characters to have. My job was to give each of the characters as much of a fighting chance as possible and see where it landed.
Video essays are increasing in popularity online as a form of film criticism. Would you consider an essay that incorporates your own work an act of theft?
I don't look at a lot of that stuff, so I don't know how I would feel. I guess it would depend on what it was and how it was being portrayed. I've seen some good videos, though. There were some that I saw about the work of older filmmakers where the [editor] takes certain shots that may be prevalent in their movies and strings them together. It can be very arresting to see those images all together.
Speaking of juxtaposition, I loved the sequence in "While We're Young" that cuts back and forth between both couples, illustrating how the young people embrace outdated technology like VHS players while the older people are hopelessly addicted to modern gadgets.
That came from my own observations and it seemed like a funny idea to me. I felt that it deserved to be highlighted as its own [sequence], which is, in a way, sort of like the video essays that you're talking about. I don't know if I've really done something like that before, but I felt like it was a good enough idea that it should be carried through. I'm obviously commenting on a very specific type of young urban couple.
I grew up with records and cassettes and in my teens, I was told to get rid of it all and start again with CDs. Then as an adult, I had to start again. When I began visiting younger people's apartments, I'd see them filled with all these records. I did keep many of my records, so I do still have a bit of a record collection. But when I saw that people were collecting records again, I was like, "Why did I get rid of all that stuff?" [laughs] At this moment, I really don't know how to collect music anymore. I'm totally baffled. I just got the battery fixed on my iPod because I couldn't buy a new one. It's all streaming now.
A lot of these new gadgets are great, but what you lose is an attachment to a thing, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But I like having collections of books and records on my shelves. I still have CDs, though I don't know what to do with them. They each stand as a reminder of the time in which I got them. Even reissues date themselves. [laughs] I remember that first reissue of the Bowie records and I still have the Rykodisc that came out before they were reissued again. Those records bring me back to a particular time in my life, which I like.
Though your films aren't documentaries, you do blend reality and fiction, such as when Frances (Greta Gerwig) visits her parents in Sacramento in "Frances Ha." The scene became all the more poignant when I learned that it was shot in Gerwig's actual hometown and featured her own parents.
It's interesting because my movies are very structured and scripted, but I often like to place their fictional content in real situations. I like putting my characters in real New York locations, such as when I put Ben Stiller in roller blades on the real subway. When it's Stiller, it becomes more of a challenge, but we still come up with ways to make it happen. One of my favorite shots in "While We're Young," just because I like that we pulled it off, is the wide angle of Jamie psyching up Josh for his pitch while crossing Park Avenue. We staged the bike that nearly hits Jamie, but everybody else is real in that scene, and it really is filmed on Park Avenue. I love how fewer things were controlled in the environments of older New York movies. There's an engagement in the chaos of the real world. It's true that we filmed that sequence with Frances's parents in Sacramento, but everything that occurs in it was scripted and staged. It's not a documentary, though it is aiming for a kind of authenticity that brings something real to the shots that they wouldn't have had otherwise.
Was Frances's memorable dance down the street to Bowie's "Modern Love" filmed in a similar fashion?
Yes, we were pretty visible. We were filming Greta on a flatbed pickup truck or something, but we shot it kind of high so that pedestrians wouldn't look at us as much. A lot of people weren't even noticing us on the sidewalk. Usually in street scenes, particularly those set in New York, I try to use as much real stuff as possible. It's frustrating because people ruin takes all the time.
In "Greenberg" and "While We're Young," your adult characters have a complicated view of future generations, epitomized by the scene where Josh and Cornelia regard the unsettling sight of a toddler navigating the use of an iPhone. Do you share in their anxieties?
I've got no problem with technology. I find the accessibility of the Internet in our lives troubling just because it's such a distraction, particularly if you work on a computer. It's like working on a television screen. It would be very hard to get anything done. A computer may be worse than television because we can actually control it more, or we think we can control it more, but we really can't. It's a personal thing. I kind of wish that I didn't have the Internet on my phone. The distraction that it provides isn't nourishing. But it is what it is. There are times I'm glad that I can check where a restaurant is and things like that. I've totally gotten used to the convenience of it. That's me being cranky, I guess. I'm not worried for our children because of technology. Climate change maybe, but not technology.
Perhaps that's why I still haven't thrown out my 11-year-old flip phone. As a writer, I'm often in front of a computer, so it's nice to escape the Internet on my phone.
That's smart, and yet I'm sure there are runarounds you have to do. [laughs] I would like if technology was evened out in a way that would enable those phones to come back.
Continuing its expansion into Chicago this weekend, director Kirby Dick's necessary documentary "The Hunting Ground"exposes the neglected sexual assault epidemic occurring on college campuses across the nation, and its horrific responses in particular from image-anxious school administrations. While many colleges express in press releases that they take the incidents "very seriously,"statistics concerning the one in five women who will be sexually assaulted (with only five percent reported), along with the estimation that 100,000 college students will be assaulted in the upcoming year, paint a disturbing, unmistakably different picture.
Engaging viewers with the stories of survivors who put a name, face, and experience to a slew of statistics, the film also follows the activism of Annie E. Clark and Andrea Pino, co-founders of the End Rape on Campus organization, as they discover a way to hold the colleges that they love accountable for their disturbingly poor response.
A must-see for students as much as their parents and college administrators, "The Hunting Ground"has the powerful ideologies within its outrage to change the nation's muffled discussion on the issue, including the forfeit of the disgusting practice of victim-blaming, to encouraging campuses to acknowledge these events, and even more so, to act upon them.
On the day of the film's opening in Chicago, RogerEbert.com sat down with Dick to discuss his riveting film, the way that students and activists influenced its filmmaking, his choice to feature the names and stories of assault survivors, and more.
When crafting this and interviewing these subjects, do you have to become more detached as an editor?
KIRBY DICK: Yes and no, I guess I would say. I mean, obviously you have to maintain an objectivity to this material, because you're trying to construct something and you have to sort of be outside of it to construct it. But on the other hand, you have to still be emotionally affected by this because if you're emotionally affected, you know that audiences are very likely going to be as well. I won't say it's schizophrenic, but you're kind of looking at things from both perspectives at the same time. I think that's true in many ways about any artist making any piece of art.
Especially when you're done making films like "The Invisible War" [about sexual assault in the military] and "The Hunting Ground,"are you able to separate yourself from the material, or is it always rattling in your brain?
Yeah, it becomes a part of who you are every time you make a film that this is such an intense subject and intense experience. And even in screenings, people are standing up and saying that they went to school thirty years ago and they say something happened to them, and they're talking about it publicly for the first time and breaking down. Or, people come up to you afterwards and you can just see in their eyes. But if it's affecting people that way, hopefully it will help to make change.
Was the film always planned to use the names of survivors, and feature their stories concerning incidents on campuses?
Yes. But we actually did some interviews where we interviewed them both in focus, and then we had this sort of out-of-focus idea with the background in focus. I had never seen it before, and we were thinking that if we ended up using those interviews, it will be kind of novel, instead of [using] shadows. But we had so many people, sadly, who had been assaulted and we didn't need to use that tactic. I think that's there's something about having the name and the face that I think means even more to audiences. Because not only can you see them, but also you acknowledge the courage and the risk that these people are taking to help, not only to be a part of the film, but to address these issues to society.
How did you pitch the film to your subjects before interviewing them?
Well, Amy Ziering, the producer, did the interviews with the survivors.
Was that a specific choice?
Yeah, we did the same thing with "The Invisible War,"I mean partially because most of the survivors we were dealing with were women, but also because she has an excellent interview style to begin with, even for people who aren't survivors. She's very empathetic, and very warm. She's a mother and she has three daughters, and she's able to create a really safe space for them. We say that their health and well-being is most important, and that they could start and stop, and anything that they don't want to say they don't have to. We really want people to feel protected, and I think they do.
What challenges did you face in filming on the college campuses where survivors had been assaulted? Did you have any problems with security guards, or getting permits, or anything like that?
In most cases, we didn't get permission because schools were not going to grant that. In many cases, students on that campus were doing the filming, particularly at the protests. There's a number of reasons. We're dealing with thousands of campuses, and we were monitoring hundreds of campuses, and we couldn't be everywhere. But secondly, students are able to get places with cameras that even we couldn't because we'd have to get in permits. In some ways, the film was crowdsourced. Not only were we working with the hundreds of survivors, but we were interacting with dozens of student filmmakers.
Did you reach out to film programs?
Yeah, film programs, or the activists would know somebody who was a filmmaker. It was the entire range. With the quality of the equipment that has become available and just sort of the experience, I think that people in college making films, they're oftentimes making them for as long as ten years, the craft level of students is really quite remarkable, and has gone way up. So we were very happy to work with them.
The film spends a fair amount of time with subjects Annie and Andrea, who have co-founded the organization End Rape on Campus (EROC). When did they get involved with the filmmaking process?
They came in very early on. I think we were in contact with them in March of 2013, and I think they filed their Title IX complaint in January of 2013. They were just beginning to speak about it as a national issue, and we were following many stories and other activists, but we thought that this would be a good story to follow. And we thought that maybe it would become one of the stories. We never thought that it would achieve in so short a time what they have been able to achieve: visiting the White House, getting involved with the writing of legislation, helping to file dozens of Title IX complaints, but everything has shifted so fast on this issue in the last couple of years.
Did they influence how you wanted to make the film, and change any part of your perspective?
In terms of understanding the issue, yeah. They were so essential to that part of the process. You can't understand this issue unless you talk to survivors, and talk to activists. They're there on the ground, they've had the experience. They've been extremely helpful. And they had some ideas that were good. For example, I think I was thinking that you see all of these press releases from schools, and they're always avoiding talking about the issue. I said, "Let's look for one term, or one phrase and see if it can be repeated."And I think it was either Annie or Andrea who was in the office at that time, and she said "They all say, 'we take this very seriously.'"So, we started to look for that phrase and bam! It always came up. But I really like to work with subjects, and include them into the creative exploration of the process.
Does that include showing them different cuts?
They saw it in the later stages, but they had ideas that were helpful. They know the issue backwards and forwards.
Did you have a set idea for what you wanted the tone to be of this movie? Or did it evolve?
It evolved. We didn't think that the story of Annie and Andrea was going to be so rousing at the end. That shifted. But yes and no. If things aren't changing, you're not improving.
With this film and after making "Invisible War,"did you have a more set idea of what viewers respond to, especially in terms to any stigma of making people engage with an uncomfortable subject?
Yes, absolutely. Certainly in regards to how to fashion a survivor's story, to the extent of how detailed to go, and to what level of detail you go into a sexual assault's description. The sad thing is that if we put in their whole stories, it would be too much for people to bear. It's the shading of that.
"The Hunting Ground" opens up the idea that college is indeed a great experience, but that these events are a tragedy.
Yeah. It's amazing to watch these survivors and activists, as they're still wearing the sweatshirts with their school logos on them, even when they're not in the school. There is a profound love of the school from these activists and survivors, and I think they're trying to change their school.
When making a film like this, are you thinking about the people who may not initially agree with the film's perspective? Are you concerned with that? Or do you want to just make the film, and then get it out there?
Oh no, you think about audiences. We want this to appeal to a range of audiences: Students, alumni , administrators, the public, politicians, and even people who may come to this film with a different perspective on this issue. I think it is hard for people to watch this film —and I've kind of seen this —for people to walk away and not feel transformed. Because when you hear the voices of survivors, and they talk about their experiences, it is a lot different than reading about it. It's completely different. But I think about a range of audiences, and I think you have to when making a film.
I was at Sundance this past year, and I saw director Jennifer Siebel Newsom's "The Mask You Live In,"and I know she's a producer of this film. Is there any relation to this film from that film? They'd play nicely together in a double feature.
They play very nicely together. I think that with Jennifer's two films (2015's "The Mask You Live in"and 2011's "Miss Representation"), the reason that they've made such an impact is that she has gone back to the sort of issues that I think this country has …how do I say this? She's able to get down to the real core issues that this country has thought we've dealt with, and in fact we haven't. And she's gone down just right to the core and grabbed these underlying issues, and certainly the way that boys and girls are learning about these issues. There's something extremely insightful and fundamental about these films, which is why they're getting such an incredible response.
When you're watching documentary films, what do you want out of them? Do you believe in the idea that it's hard to get people to see certain films?
Well, yes. You're trying to make a filmmaking experience that's rich and emotional and memorable. But when I'm watching films, I look for risk. And that can be in any kind of form, that can be in a minimal, sort of observational kind of art film, or it can be in a veritéfilm where somebody is in a very emotional, personal situation, or it can be in an advocacy film. The films can be all of the above. But I'm interested in people who go into material that hasn't been covered in a film before, or even in books, where they're sort of the first one there, certainly "The Invisible War"is like that, not to say that there weren't a few books. My feeling is that if there's not a risk of failure, you're limiting the potential of your success.
Can you think any film titles off the top of your head that particularly intrigue your interest in risk?
In a political stance, there was that documentary on fracking, 2010's "Gasland."And of course, ["Citizenfour"director] Laura Poitras has been working with that element in every one of her films. She's working in the axises of the personal and the political, and they both had risks. And I think Steve James is amazing. "The Interrupters,"and his whole project around race, is just amazing. He is so insightful and thoughtful. And "The Interrupters,"talk about risk. Not only are you in that environment, but there's also, there's no clear answers. And also, it becomes much riskier to make a film when there are not clear answers. In a way that is different than Jennifer Siebel Newsom, he brought up something that the country is just not thinking about.
I believe "The Interrupters"could very well change the world, and I see your film side-by-side with it in that sense. But related to that, what change have you seen from your previous documentaries, and even now with "The Hunting Ground"?
Well, with "The Invisible War"there were quite a few reforms that came. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand led the charge on a lot of reforms, and became involved [with the issue] after seeing the film. We're seeing colleges and universities programming ["The Hunting Ground,"] and we've got more than 125 schools, and that's a very good sign. There's so many people within the administrations that just want change, and just like in the military for "The Invisible War,""The Hunting Ground"is being programmed by those administrators. I think it's happening. School-by-school, it starts a movement towards reform.
In the international action thriller "The
Gunman," a scrappy, bulked-up Sean
Penn plays Jim Terrier, an ex-special forces government contractor whose hired
assassination of a mining minister in Congo sent him into hiding, and also put
the nation into chaos. Years later, when a group of men are sent to kill him,
Terrier emerges from his anonymity and reconnects with his old war comrades
(played by Mark Rylance and Ray Winstone) in hopes of finding out who's trying to clean house. During his international game of
cat-and-mouse, he discovers that his old friend Felix (Javier Bardem), who
assigned him the life-changing mission, is now married to Annie, the woman that
Jim had to abandon, as played by Jasmine Trinca.
As Terrier wades through a sporadic onslaught of mercenaries with a mysterious employer, he receives a little help from an interpol agent named DuPont (Idris Elba, whose spare time on-screen hopefully means there'll be much more in the possible sequel). And along with Terrier's PTSD, the vicious ex-warrior suffers from a vision-impairing head condition that could render fatal with the wrong blow, raising the stakes of his physical vulnerability.
The film is directed by Pierre Morel, who has experience in modifying dramatic middle-aged actors into action heroes, having reinvented the world's appreciation for Liam Neeson's phone usage with the 2009 thriller "Taken." Before that movie, Morel also directed the high-flying parkour action movie "District B13," which received a sequel ("District B13: Ultimatum," directed by Patrick Alessandrin) and an American remake (Camille Delamarre's 2014 "Brick Mansions," starring the late Paul Walker).
In an interview held a couple of weeks before the film's wide release on March 20, Morel shared his perspective with RogerEbert.com on creating "The Gunman." We discussed his beliefs concerning the presentation of violence, why he had Sean Penn walk through a wall of flames, his upcoming project about whale wars, and more.
What new challenges did 'The Gunman' present to you, especially considering all of your experience with action films?
PIERRE MOREL: Well, I think I'm not just making movies about action. What's interesting about ["The Gunman"] is that it is more than action. Obviously there's a more complex plot, with more layered characters and depth than the previous ones. But it's also an ensemble, there's such a great cast. So it was all that. But everything was a new experience. You keep on learning. I wouldn't be able to pinpoint one specific moment, but I am always trying to improve.
When you make your films, do you think within genre?
I don't do genre, I just do movies.
That just have shootouts and fight scenes in them, sometimes.
Yes [laughs]. But it's not about guns, I always say that. If it's action for action's sake, I am uninterested. As a viewer, I am happy to go see it, the purely entertainment. Like "The Expendables"— nothing serious about it, but it's so much fun. As the cinematographer that I was, and as a director, I think I'm more interested in the story itself, and that the movie is driven by the story. And if the story leads to action moments, then I'm happy. If it's too heavy and story-driven, then it becomes drama. But then it's too action-y driven, then it becomes genre. So I like to be in the middle, where you get the best of both worlds.
Were there discussions about the violence within "The Gunman,"especially concerning its presentation?
It's not about violence. As long as the violence is coherent to the story and the character, it's okay. I think, or what I always try to do, is not to glamorize or glorify violence. It hurts, and it hurts for a reason. Because in real life if you hit someone it hurts, and if you stab someone it bleeds, and if you kill someone, it's dirty. And if you film it in a graphic way just to make it look cool? No thanks. So if it's part of the subject, and if it's not gratuitous violence and it makes sense, then there's no resistance to have. It's just that it would make sense at that moment in the story that the character would do this. As long as it is coherent, the actors are okay.
Do you think it is possible to make anti-war film that has violence?
I'm afraid violence is a part of our world. And human beings are a pretty violent species, we're not the kindest species on earth. So without glorifying that, you have to accept that. It's not about too much or too little, it's just that we live in a dark, gray world, with dark, gray characters. But we tend to like gray. But overall, it's pretty dark gray.
There's an inherent darkness within the lead characters of your films. Liam Neeson's on-screen daughter is kidnapped by sex traffickers in "Taken," and in "The Gunman," its inciting events involve a war-torn Congo.
Yeah, I like to set the action of the movies in real situations, with real issues. For "District B13," it's cartoonish and its fun, it's not a serious matter, but it does take place in that ghettos around the suburbs of Paris. There are no walls around the suburbs down there [as in "District B13"], but there is a weird ghettoization in a sense; it is relevant. "Taken" obviously is very relevant, [as] human trafficking is huge, and it only made sense to set [the film] in that world. And the violence inherent to that is coherent, and it makes sense. Same thing for this one, with what's going on in the black ops of the global economy, which is not clean, I'm afraid.
Penn's character in the film has a very debilitating head condition, which makes him extremely mortal but even forces the audience to readjust their expectations for action. What intrigued you about pursuing this character trait?
I don't do superheroes. But even superheroes have flaws: Superman had kryptonite, there's the heart thing for Iron Man. They all have flaws. I think it's very interesting. And one of the early things that we did with Sean [Penn] when we discussed the movie was that we both liked characters that had some kind of flaw, some kind of weakness at some point, whether it's physical or mental, that will impair their capacity to fight back. And that's more interesting. Because if you know he's going to win from the get-go, then what's the point? So it's interesting to have his condition because of his past activities, than it can strike and make it impossible to fight. You can relate to characters with flaws more. I love humans. Super-humans, as a moviegoer I love [them], it's entertaining, but I love humans.
And is it a coincidence that you've made another film with a middle-aged lead character?
Coincidence, I don't know. I'm that age now too [laughs].
When you compose scenes of combat, you're using lots of quick cuts with a great amount of of close-ups. What's your interest in this type of filmmaking?
When it comes to action, it is very technical. You need the hits to be efficient. Even if you take a few frames off in the middle of shots, just to make it, it needs to hurt, basically. And then the pacing of when you cutaway, when you go to the drama and the dialogue, it's all about the relationship between the characters. I am not specifically for or against pacing, it just needs to make sense. But then it's all about the global pace of the movie. If you're pre-paced all the way through a piece of the movie, and when you slow down, it has an impact. And you need to know when to do that, and not make it too long, so that when you start again it just has another impact. It's all about riding waves, we're always trying to do that. And I've been working with the same editor [Frédéric Thorval] since "District B13," and we have that synergy with pacing.
What do you feel is the action director's responsibility in terms of providing a full picture during such claustrophobic confrontations?
There's two things. When it comes to action at least, what I like about movies, and action scenes, is when I understand what is going on. And there's lots of movies where you don't understand what is going on, because it's just one big shaky thing and to me you actually lose energy by trying to add energy. If you shake the camera just to hide the lack of energy of what's going on for real, it doesn't really work. So you really need to have the right things going on on-screen, and then capture that. And then you need to see what's going on, and breathe a bit. So it's like, "this is where they are geographically, they're going this way." You can't cheat that. It's filmmaking vocabulary. Like, "This is where they are, this is what they do, and ding, ding, ding, ding, and then you pace up and cut to the hits." And there's no magic. If you want the hits to look good, there's one angle to choose, not two angles.
How did you develop your eye for action, especially in a compositional sense?
I learned that from the Chinese. When I was DP-ing, like on the "Transporter" movies, I worked with Corey Yuen, who was a Chinese director, and I learned a lot from looking at how he shoots every hit in a specific way. Which I adapted, because I'm not making Chinese movies. And same with Woo-ping Yuen, who did some stuff with Jet Li. Martial arts movies are their specialty, so they have a very specific way to shoot action. And it's very interesting to learn from them, and digest it and use it for a more western fighting style.
What's your personal stance on practical filmmaking?
Well, there are a lot of visual effects shots in this, 600 of them, but the idea is not to see them. I try to keep things practical as much as possible, until the limits of safety. I like when there's an interaction for real. And then you can enhance them with on-set impact, on-set fire. I think it does create an energy that the actors can use, rather than faking everything. I need that, that energy.
What's an example of how that influenced Penn's performance?
I always ask the actors to do everything themselves, and Sean did everything himself. The audience knows now that they can't be fooled, it can't be that whole "this is a wide shot with a stunt guy, then get a close-up of the real guy…" Come on. We all know. It's good to have the actors to do everything and it shows, because then you cannot cheat. And even with this movie, we had Sean walking through a wall of flames. And you have to make it a controlled environment, but with the right people. When you have the DVD of "The Gunman," you can zoom in and see that it's his face in the towel.
Did this appreciation for the practical spur from your work on "District B13"?
Yes. [The work] shows. It's a real guy jumping from here to there, and you see it in the same shot, there's no cutaway.
What's interesting about parkour, despite offering such exhilarating stunt work, is that Hollywood hasn't embraced it as much as other countries.
There's so many constraints. There's safety issues. That's something that productions need to take into consideration. You can't jeopardize a production just because you want the guys to do the action themselves. If the guys break a leg you're in for millions. That's pure production. Even for "District B13," it was a movie where nobody got hurt, but we had to be prepared and do the most dangerous pieces at the end, almost [laughs]. So that if anybody got hurt, it wouldn't stop us from shooting. And you can't do that in the states, I don't think they will let you do that, it's too dangerous.
As with "District B13" and "Taken," you've started a lot of franchises but haven't made any of their followups. Are you particularly interested in breaking that trend by making a sequel to "The Gunman"?
I tend to do new things. I just want to be compelled by the story. If this one is successful and they write another one and I like the idea, then of course, why not.
One potential project you've got listed as upcoming is the very intriguing whaler story "Sierra." What can you tell us about that?
It's about Paul Watson, one of the founders of Greenpeace, who is an ocean warrior. Have you seen "Whale Wars" on TV, where they're fighting the Japanese whalers? We're trying to put together a movie about the early days of this guy, because he got kicked out of Greenpeace basically because he was too proactive, and there's the first couple of months and years when he got kicked out Greenpeace and rammed and sunk a whaler. He's a crazy guy, but a really fantastic character. It's not a biopic, it's just about this moment, but he's a really hardcore eco-warrior. And he succeeded, as the quotas of hunting are lower and lower. We may end up saving the whales, but the damage has been done, unfortunately. He's a very good subject. You can get both action and content. With real issues, in the real world.
With writing credits that include Pixar's hit, "Cars," Disney's rollicking faerie tale, "Tangled," and the delightful all-star comedy, "Crazy, Stupid, Love," Dan Fogelman has chosen rather unexpected subject matter for his directorial debut. The R-rated dramedy, "Danny Collins," stars Al Pacino as the titular rock star who hasn't written a song in decades, coasting on his past successes by croaking out old lyrics at sold-out venues. When his manager, Frank (a wonderfully crusty Christopher Plummer), gives Danny a recently discovered letter written to him 40 years ago by John Lennon, the musician suddenly ponders what his career would've been like had he received these words of encouragement at an earlier age. He decides to rebuild his identity from the ground up, entering the life of the adult son (Bobby Cannavale) he never met, as well as the man's wife (Jennifer Garner) and adorable, ADHD-addled daughter (Giselle Eisenberg), while pursuing a possible dinner date with a witty hotel manager (Annette Bening).
Using the real-life letter written by Lennon to folk singer-songwriter Steve Tilston as its inspirational jumping-off point, Fogelman's script is uplifting without ever succumbing to schmaltz, partly because there are no easy answers for any of its characters. It gives Al Pacino his best big-screen showcase since 2004's "The Merchant of Venice," and is sure to please countless crowds during its theatrical run. Fogelman spoke with RogerEbert.com about rehearsing at Pacino's house, his careful use of classic Lennon tunes and his insistence on making sweet films in an industry where sweetness is deemed uncool.
Both "Crazy, Stupid Love," which featured three of this year's Oscar-nominated actors, and "Danny Collins" make excellent use of their accomplished ensembles.
"Crazy, Stupid, Love" may be a good model for this film, since Steve Carell centers everything with his performance. Al's in every frame of "Danny Collins," and a cacophony of different people are always coming into and out of his life. I've learned that if you can fully form a character, even if they're not entering a script until page 30, or if the [actor playing the part is] not getting as much screen time as they normally get in the movies and TV that they're starring in, they'll do it if it's a real part. Having Al at the center of it doesn't hurt either. In the case of "Crazy, Stupid, Love," everybody wanted to work on a comedy/drama with Steve Carell. When he signed on, it made a big difference in terms of what people we could get involved.
One of my favorite sections in "Danny Collins" takes place in the middle of the film. The first twenty minutes of the picture are a quiet start to the story. Al's character is in a really low place, and you need to sell how alone and depressed he is. It's funny but it's not as energetically funny as the movie gets. He goes home to New Jersey and there's a sequence where Danny literally gets passed off from one great actor to another. It goes from Jennifer and Bobby to a night with Annette Bening, and right before that, Chris Plummer has a great scene with Al. In twenty minutes, you meet four different characters.
Ultimately, I've been very blessed. There can be terrible people in Hollywood. I write stuff that's sweet and hopeful, and it helps when you cast actors who are heartfelt people. When you tell me that you like this film and "Crazy, Stupid, Love," it tells me a little bit about who you are, just instinctively. You like things that make you smile or make you hopeful instead of hopeless. The actors were like that too and that's the energy you're feeling with them. It felt the same way when we did "Crazy, Stupid, Love." I was surrounded by all these famous people who were so incredibly talented, and I was struck by how kind everyone genuinely was. I enjoyed hanging out with all five of the actors in "Danny Collins" outside of the movie.
What a thing for Jen Garner to be going toe-to-toe with Al Pacino in a three-minute monologue. Bobby and Al are so close in real life, and it was great to see them pass off that torch in their mano-a-mano scenes. Annette and Al have never worked together—they know each other very well socially—so that was such a fun experience to pair them onscreen. There's a "Crazy, Stupid, Love"-style montage where they're falling in love over the course of an evening together, and we did a lot of playing around with improvisation. It was one of the most exciting things I've ever shot on a set with these two, going untethered at one another during this charming, romantic evening.
I was struck by how relaxed Pacino appears to be in this film. When his character is caught in tense situations, you expect him to explode, but he subverts the audience's expectations at every turn.
Al is so well-known for being such a big, expressive actor, because he's been in iconic parts that are, by their nature, gigantic. But he's a stage actor. His work is so contained and small in films like "You Don't Know Jack" and "The Humbling" that you feel like you're watching it in a really tiny theater in New York. So it's not that Al isn't great at doing that sort of work, it's that he got incredibly well-known for doing something else. That's what's exciting for me about my film. It plays into all of the ways that Al is fun and charming without ever getting gigantic, and it allows him to do some heavy duty stuff—quietly, between the words—as well.
How had your previous onset experiences enhanced your approach to directing your first feature?
They were everything. Whether or not all of the films have completely worked or not, I've been a part of many movies that have gotten made over the last couple of years, and I've been blessed with the number of times that has happened. So many great scripts don't get made because the pieces didn't come together at the right time. Because of my success, I've been able to be on a lot of sets, and it's kind of a smorgasbord. You go, "I like the way that guy works with the actors" or "I like the way that guy talks to his DP" or "I like how she does rehearsals." Growing up in Pixar was essentially film school for me. You're watching every frame of a movie being created by the best. John Lasseter became my first mentor. He and his storyboard artist, Joe Ranft, who passed away, are legendary guys. I had no training in screenwriting and I got the job writing "Cars" on a freak whim. You just learn a little bit from everyone. Sometimes you go, "I don't like the way they do x, y or z, I'm not going to do that when I direct," and you develop your style before you're even directing.
You've said that your films are not for cynics, and that their tendency to wear their heart on their sleeve may be considered unhip in today's movie marketplace.
Yeah, anytime you're in the territory that we're treading here, you become ripe fodder for cynics. I'm a film buff and a director, so I love all movies. I go to a lot of [For Your Consideration] screenings around awards time, and oftentimes, especially over the last five years, they've become a bit of a depressing slog. You hit a point where you're like, "Oh my god, I can't do it." It's not that I don't appreciate them, but sometimes I think, "Where are the movies that are lighter and still weighty, in that they're about something?" I'm not walking out of these films going, "I had such a good time at that movie. I enjoyed that so much." I appreciate all of them and I love many of them, but it feels like the currency of laughs and smiles and a good kind of cry has become uncool somewhere along the line. I don't know why that is.
With animated fare geared toward children, you're awarded more for that type of tone. For my money, I thought Steve Carell should've gotten an award nomination for "Crazy, Stupid, Love." What he did was so hard to do, that kind of comedy mixed with heart. That's not the type of movie that gets attention during awards season. Even audiences, to a degree, are more comfortable with that tone in an animated film. They allow themselves to be overwhelmed by it. Cynics aren't hating on the heart in a Pixar movie. Right now, Disney is hitting one [home run] after another. John Lasseter went to Disney Animation, and the results were "Frozen" and "Big Hero 6."
What was the process like of weaving the Lennon songs into the narrative fabric of the film?
We had two or three songs placed in the script that stayed where they were in the movie. The ones that are most literal, where you're noticing the action, are probably the use of "Working Class Hero," "Imagine" and "Beautiful Boy." The rest we found in the course of editing the movie. We had nine Lennon songs, and we didn't want them to be on-the-nose. Every time someone is sad, we didn't want to simply use a song about someone being sad. It was more about feeling. We allowed ourselves, in a couple areas, to be more literal and make it effective. If you did it every time, the audience might start rolling their eyes, no matter how good the music is.
When Al's character has a kind of collapse late in the film, we used "Cold Turkey," which has a music bed that is really dissonant. You don't even notice necessarily that it's a Lennon song, it sounds like we're just scoring dissonance. The song is actually about a lot of things that are relatable to that scene. It's almost as if it was just kismet the way some of the songs fit in without being too obvious. It felt like Lennon wrote them for this movie. [laughs]
One person who deserves awards consideration for his work in "Danny Collins" is Bobby Cannavale. His scene with Garner towards the end of the film is brilliantly acted.
This is one of those things that you find. He recites a little nursery rhyme to his daughter at the beginning of the movie that was scripted to get her [to calm down]. When we were reading it in Al's backyard, I said, "This is going to resonate, I think people are going to remember the words," because something stuck out about the way Bobby was delivering them. As his character is leaving the house, toward the end of the film, I said, "Jen, what if you recited the rhyme to Bobby right now?" We did it on the fly, along with the shot itself. It's a single tracking shot that carries Bobby from the piano over to her, where it kind of rests in a two-shot. That was something that my DP, Steve Yedlin, and I came up with on the day. Our first take was the one we used in the movie. I actually never get like this, but I was getting emotional behind the monitors and I said, "Jen, do you want to do one more for safety?" We did only one more take, but it was almost too emotionally exhausting on the actors.
There's an equally devastating moment where the camera simply rests on Cannavale's face as he watches his daughter frolicking in the backyard.
That scene has my favorite use of a Lennon song in a movie, "#9 Dream." I was behind the camera, we were on a long lens, and that girl was in the foreground. Bobby was looking at her, and I saw that he was staying [in character], so we just kept rolling. That little girl—we weren't even directing her—just kept jumping in and out of the frame and it worked great. Sometimes that stuff just happens and you get lucky. It wasn't planned. That's what is most exciting about making a film.
Garner reveals an emotional depth here that she rarely gets to display elsewhere.
Jen is so likable as a human being, and she's so beautiful and accessible. That shouldn't be a quality that keeps her from getting weightier parts, and I don't know if it does necessarily, but I think she's the real deal as an actress. That's why I was excited to get her. That scene with Pacino was one of my favorite things to shoot because I knew that Jen was going to kill it. It's a long monologue to give an actor and it's all Jen. She's just very lovably beating the crap out of him. It's heavyweight stuff, and I'm happy that she gets to be seen in that way. I like movie characters that are recognizable versions of ourselves but they're also a little bit prettier, a little bit smarter, and can deliver perfectly timed one-liners. You need actors to pull off that dialogue to make it feel natural, because it's all a little heightened.
One actress who has recently emerged as an utterly captivating screen presence is Melissa Benoist. I thought it was funny how in both "Whiplash" and "Danny Collins," she performs most of her scenes from behind a booth.
She does good booth acting. [laughs] She's got such a face, she's going to be a gigantic star. She was cast as Supergirl not long ago. Once all of the big actors came on to the project, we knew that we needed someone to be in a lot of scenes with Al and Annette. Every young actor in Hollywood was coming in to audition, and Melissa came and got it. She's going to be very, very famous. She and Josh Peck, who plays the valet, came over to Pacino's house and were rehearsing in his backyard. I was like, "This is weird, huh?" and they were like, "Yeah." But these young kids in their early twenties were so good and they didn't allow their work to be overshadowed by fact they were acting opposite Al Pacino and Annette Bening—not on day one nor in rehearsal at Al's house. I was very proud of them every time they would finish a take.
Rehearsing at Al's house must've contributed to the family atmosphere onset.
Yes. I was there an awful, awful, awful lot. [laughs] It was great. This movie didn't have a big budget. Though it feels like a commercial film, it was done very independently, and we needed that time to work through scenes together. If it weren't for Al allowing us to rehearse at his house, I don't think the film would've been as good.
Do you personally relate to Danny's struggle to maintain his artistic integrity in the face of market pressure?
I think we all do in life. Nobody goes to their job and says, "I want to be the hackiest version of myself." That's especially true in the case of art versus commerce, but it also applies to anything we do. Nobody sets out to be a bad person. Even though being a famous sell-out musician rock star isn't a very relatable character, his journey is what makes him relatable. We all wake up making that New Year's resolution to be the best version of ourselves, and usually we fail by the end of the day. Then we wake up the next day saying, "I'm going to be a better father, a better husband, better at my job, I'm going to be nicer to my boss or my employees." We all set out to do that, and we often fail, but it's the attempt that I think is heroic. What I love about this character and what I find relatable for myself and my own career, is the effort he puts forth to do the right thing. He's really trying, he just doesn't have the tools. He's a bit of a lovable putz. It's not until the very last scene of the movie where he's stripped away all the artifice that he has a chance to be a fully formed human being. We leave him with that chance and I think that's hopeful and real.
Are you planning to direct more of your scripts?
I'm a writer first. When it's a movie I feel impassioned about and I can't imagine someone else doing it, I'll direct it. But I just produced a film with an amazing director [Alfonso Gomez-Rejon] that just won all of Sundance, "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl." It was so inspiring. I didn't write the script but I worked for a long time with the writer [Jesse Andrews] on it. I love that kind of partnership. To see someone take the material and put their own twist on it was a really fun thing. As a writer, I don't have to get up early and I can get to set late. My friends [Glenn Ficarra and John Requa] who directed "Crazy, Stupid, Love" are brilliant filmmakers, and I loved working with them. But there are some movies that I imagine I won't be able to let go, like "Danny Collins."
"From my earliest theatre going days I have been a lover of Grand Opera. The physical drawbacks of the average operatic production have often bothered me ... The only satisfactory frame of mind to bring to the theatre was to say to oneself, 'Well - you can't have everything.' Your production of 'Tales of Hoffman' has proven that you can have everything." - Cecil B. DeMille, letter to Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, February 29, 1952
The movie that inspired such diverse directors as Cecil B. DeMille, Martin Scorsese, and George Romero, "The Tales of Hoffmann," directed by partners Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a dream of opera fully-realized, utilizing dance and music and extraordinary production design in ways that still seem radical and unprecedented. Based on composer Jacques Offenbach's final opera from 1881 (which was, in turn, based on three stories by the German Romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann), "The Tales of Hoffmann" tells the sad story of the loves of a man named Hoffmann, and his journey through an increasingly decadent and disturbed world. Powell and Pressburger were inspired by the story, and inspired by the challenges of filming an opera. Much of the team for "The Red Shoes" was re-assembled for "Tales of Hoffmann": Moira Shearer, Ludmilla Tchérina, Robert Helpmann, and Léonide Massine, all in crucial roles, with choreography by Frederick Ashton, and conducted by Thomas Beecham with the Royal Philharmonic orchestra. Hein Heckroth won an Academy Award for the Art Decoration in "The Red Shoes," and he designed "Tales of Hoffmann" as well (for which he was nominated for an Oscar.)
As Martin Scorsese observed, "'The Red Shoes' is filled with music and dance. 'The Tales of Hoffmann' IS music and dance." George Romero said of the film, which he first saw at the age of 12, "It was really a movie for me, and it gave me an early appreciation for the power of visual media - the fact that you could experiment with it.... That made me feel that, gee, maybe I could figure this medium out."
"Tales of Hoffmann" was filmed to a playback of the score, with dancers lip-synching to previously recorded songs. With the obligation to synch up sound eliminated, Powell and Pressburger were set free visually. From the first shot to the last, the film immerses the audience in a perfectly melded world of camera movement, dance, and production design. There are many extraordinary sequences: a gigantic staircase painted on the floor, with two dancers running up and down the "steps," shot from above; a thrilling duel in Venice; an entire scene with dolls come to life, mechanical and awkward; weathervanes spinning this way and that, the fairy-tale-like shot that opens the film. Seen on a large screen, "The Tales of Hoffmann" is overwhelming. Pure cinema. The film stars Moira Shearer, the superb Robert Helpmann in multiple roles, and handsome Robert Rounseville as the melancholy hero Hoffmann, who tells his "tales" to a debauched group in a tavern during an intermission of an opera production next door.
Thelma Schoonmaker, Oscar-winning editor for Martin Scorsese (and wife of the late director Michael Powell), supervised the new 4K restoration of "The Tales of Hoffmann", through the Film Foundation and the BFI National Archive, in association with StudioCanal. The restoration includes some never-before-seen footage, rediscovered through the restoration process and put back into the film. "The Tales of Hoffmann" is a spectacle, meant to be seen on the large screen, and it will play at The Film Forum in New York starting March 13, introduced by Schoonmaker via Skype.
Schoonmaker took time out of filming in Taipei (where she is on location with Martin Scorsese), to speak with me about "The Tales of Hoffmann."
You have spoken about how Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger filmed "The Tales of Hoffmann" essentially as a silent film. That approach gave them a sense of freedom in terms of the choreography of the camera. I would love to hear a little more about that.
They used a big old studio on the Shepperton lot which had been used for "Things to Come", a famous futuristic film done in the 1930s. But they didn't need sound so much back then so it wasn't sound-proofed. Since they shot ["Tales of Hoffmann"] to the playback of this wonderful score, Michael Powell said, "Great, let's just shoot it like a silent film." The Technicolor camera had this huge blimp around it to deaden the sound of the three pieces of film going through it. It was so big they called it "The Enchanted Cottage." [laughs] Because they shot to the playback, they were able to take that blimp off and that freed up the camera so that it was about the size of a camera today. Jack Cardiff was able to do that in "The Red Shoes" at one point: he put ropes around the camera, and he and his assistant swung the camera physically back and forth for those wonderful shots of the ballet in "The Red Shoes". And that's what they were able to do with "Tales of Hoffmann." As Scorsese says, the camera just dances.
Hein Heckroth [production designer] had actually done three productions of "Tales of Hoffmann" as an opera, designing the sets back in Germany. But here he was able to just fly with his incredible ideas. Every time I would go back and forth during the restoration and look at things. I would see another detail, like the eyes on the back of Robert Helpmann's coat... I never got tired of watching it.
I also think the fact that dancers were used instead of opera singers for most of the parts ... of course Robert Rounseville and Ann Ayars are real opera singers ... but that was a very gutsy decision to use dancers. In fact, it works like crazy, because instead of the singer standing there singing, you've got movement, dance, wild things going on, things they could never do in an opera onstage. That was such a brilliant decision. Ballet dancers really know how to enter a room.
One comment really struck me from Scorsese's introductory words about the film, shown before the screening. He says, "'The Red Shoes' is filled with music and dance. 'The Tales of Hoffmann' IS music and dance." It's wonderful context, that introduction, because then the first thing you see onscreen in "Tales of Hoffmann" is those twirling weathervanes. And there it is, there's exactly what he was talking about.
Isn't that a brilliant idea? Scorsese, of course, when he first saw the movie and started becoming entranced by it - that was the first thing that grabbed him, too. George Romero is as obsessed with the film as Marty is.
I love the stories of the two of them passing the print back and forth between them because there was only one print available.
I was a witness to that. It was so funny. Marty would say, "Why do I have to give up this print?" Because George wanted to see it again! And you know Marty would thread the print himself because there was no video available at that time. He'd thread up the print over and over and over again, and watch it obsessively, because it was teaching him so much about how to make the camera fluid, how to bring emotion out.
William Germano has written a wonderful little book about the movie that's just out by the BFI and he noted that in the opera when the doll is torn apart, it all happens offstage, and they throw her limbs back out onto the stage. But in the film, you actually see her getting torn apart, and it's so shocking. Michael always wanted to thrust his visual effects into the audience's eye and not be afraid of them. He wanted to make you believe. That is such a shocking sequence.
Her leg is still moving!
Yes, her leg is still moving! With the black velvet around it. It's shocking.
In regards to the restoration of the film: There's some footage you discovered that you put back into the film in this process?
Yes. In the third act, there's an additional 6 minutes, which shows the father getting angry at his daughter because he's afraid that the influence of her mother is going to make her want to sing again and he knows that if she sings she's going to die. That part was removed from the original film, and I think it weakened the third act a lot. I showed "Tales of Hoffmann" at Lyon in the festival last year, and Bertrand Tavernier, the great French film director, said that the new footage really restored the third act for him.
I think the anger of the father gives you more of a sense of the peril she is in. And [Alexander] Korda had made them cut it, and my husband was very angry about it, so we were delighted to put it back.
And then, at the very end, the introduction of the cast members was also restored. I saw it as we were restoring the film. We got to the end and all of a sudden this little scene came up and I said, "What is that?" And they said, "Oh, this is something we don't have the sound for, so we're not going to restore it." I said, "Oh my gosh, yes, we are, it's so brilliant!" I created the sound for it with music and applause. No one has ever seen that footage before. It wasn't even in the initial release.
It's so beautiful because then you get to see who's been doing all that singing. And there's an old-school humility about it, too, dancers bowing to the singers, the singers bowing to the dancers. It's so theatrical.
Yes! There's that scene of Moira Shearer as the doll dancing, and there's an incredible piece of music there, very hard to sing - and so to finally see the person who sang it! And then the wonderful Ludmilla Tchérina who played the vixen in Venice, so sexy, and then you see the woman who voices her is wearing this dowdy pink dress. It's wonderful, she had such an incredible voice! The whole scene is framed in the magic spectacles, also such a brilliant idea, and obviously Korda must have said, "The film is too long. Cut it" and so nobody ever saw it. But there it was on the original negative. It was a thrill, I can't tell you.
I loved that final moment because you got to revel in what you just saw. It gives you that moment that you have at the end of a live performance, where you get to acknowledge the cast by clapping for them.
I'm so glad you responded to it like that.
There were so many extraordinary moments of filmmaking and design and movement. The overhead shot of the staircase painted on the floor and the two of them running up and down the steps.
They didn't have money, and they were told it would cost £8,000 to build the stairs, so Michael said, "Well, let's just paint them on the floor, we've been painting everything else." And of course the dancers never could have danced down a set of stairs like that, but when they're painted, they can! There's also the beautiful painted lily pads, in the very beginning in the Dragonfly Ballet. I love when you realize Moira Shearer is dancing on a lily: it's painted on the floor but it has a 3-D feeling to it. Hein Heckroth was given the credit "Designed by Hein Heckroth" - because both Michael and Emeric felt that he was so much a part of it that instead of "Art Direction" or "Set Direction", it's Designed by Hein Heckroth. And boy is it.
Has "Tales of Hoffmann" influenced you in your work as an editor?
Yes. Definitely. Powell and Pressburger never worried about lack of continuity in their movies and that's something that Scorsese and I agree with. There are people who spend their lives sitting in front of a TV with a remote, saying, "That's a bad cut there because this doesn't quite match." Well, movies for 100 years have had bad continuity and it doesn't matter. So that attitude has encouraged us a great deal.
But I think in terms of editing: the duel sequence in Venice is one of the most beautiful pieces of editing I have ever seen. I could watch it over and over. It is stunningly edited. I don't know whether Michael had that in mind when he shot it, or whether Reginald Mills, the great editor, was responsible, but I have a feeling Michael had it in mind the way he shot it. Scorsese said to me, "You realize there are no sound effects in that duel." You don't hear swords clashing. Again, the silent film idea - because it's the music that matters and the visuals that matter. That is a perfect example of how they made it as a silent film. When you see it again, watch the editing in that duel sequence.
I will.
Scorsese, of course, was so influenced by Robert Helpmann's eyes in "Tales of Hoffmann." You can see that influence in the eyes of De Niro in "Taxi Driver", seen in the mirror in the cab.
That's amazing.
Those eyes, De Niro's eyes, are directly influenced by Helpmann and "Tales of Hoffmann."
The new restoration of "The Tales of Hoffmann" will run at The Film Forum in NYC from Friday, March 13 - Thursday, March 19. On March 13, Thelma Schoonmaker will introduce the film via Skype. On Saturday, March 14, George Romero will be there in person to introduce the film. Information here. It will also play at the Cinefamily in Los Angeles, starting March 13th.
After her Oscar-winning role in "Still Alice," Julianne Moore turns in another dynamic performance as the narcissistic actress Havana Segrand in David Cronenberg's skewered portrait of Hollywood in "Maps to the Stars." Moore picked up Best Actress in Cannes last year for the role. She sits down with Katherine Tulich to discuss her role and working with the iconoclastic Canadian director for this video interview.]]>
In 2014, in his 17th season at the Stratford Theatre Festival, veteran stage/film/TV actor Colm Feore tackled one of the most difficult roles of any actor's career, William Shakespeare's King Lear. It came after already claiming his place among the theater greats after playing title roles in "Macbeth," "Hamlet," "Cyrano de Bergerac," "Coriolanus," "Romeo and Juliet," "Richard III," and many more. Hailed by the Toronto Star as a performance that catapults him "into the ranks of the world's greatest living actors," the performance is now being used to launch a daring initiative on the part of Stratford not just to bring the festival to people who can more easily get to a movie theater than Canada but to capture all of Shakespeare's plays on film over the next decade. The first installment of "Stratford Festival HD" plays at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago on Wednesday, February 25th, and Feore sat down with us to discuss "King Lear," the importance of theater in his life, and the toll the emotional process takes on an actor.
You told The Toronto Star that this was "the hardest part to play." Could you elaborate? Why is King Lear the hardest part?
It's the hardest part I've ever played because I knew that going into it in order to make it worth people's while—to ask them to come and be worth the price of admission—I had to give them everything I understood to date about how to do Shakespeare properly. I've done an awful lot of it. I should know how to do it. The thing that's hard is that I discovered that instead of it being the best version of what I had learned how to do, it was the "least encumbered" version of what I had learned how to do. I broke through something that suggested I should chuck all the stuff I thought I knew and I should just do this part simply. Let's just do this play. Forget about what you think you know about Shakespeare, and let's see if you can learn something about who this guy really is. Trust Shakespeare. If he's an asshole in the first scene, just be an asshole. There was no place in that journey to "plan" or "orchestrate." I finally realized that that's not going to help me at all. I had to just show up. The terrifying part of it is that I didn't know if that would work.
It comes through. I've seen and done a lot of Shakespeare, and the first thing I thought when I saw this was that it was a very visceral take on it. Words like anger or rage. People associate flowery language with Shakespeare but in your very first scene, you are RAGING to the back of the theatre. It's a more primal take. How do you build up to that right from the beginning of a three-hour play?
There IS NO build-up. Right from the beginning—the youngest daughter says nothing and it's all over. But if he doesn't behave what appears to be irrationally, foolishly, outrageously, all of the other actors are screwed. Not only do they have nothing to act but their next lines are, "Have you ever seen him this irrational?" "I've never seen him this crazy." "I think he might be nuts." And so, the challenge is that it's GOT to be that crazy. The audience thinks "It's Christmas." (Big smile.) And before you know it, it's "Off with your head!" They have to be thrown back in their seats and think this is nuts. The whole premise of the first scene doesn't make any sense. He's divided a kingdom that he's already divided back stage. Everyone knows it's going to be divided. Then he says he's going to give a "bigger third" to one but, of course, a third is a third is a third. One might be slightly bigger or better or different. But the math is absurd. Really, it's just a game. "DO YOU LOVE ME? Which of you loves me more? I need lots of love and I need it now." The real love comes from the daughter who says, "You're being an ass. Don't do this daddy. It's dumb." And had she had that conversation with him backstage before they came on…but she does it in public. And she embarrasses him. And she exposes him. And he simply loses it. I couldn't find a poetic way to do it. An arty way…
We've seen a more cerebral take on it. This is more primal.
Yeah. I thought the play was very primal. I went backward from the ending. If, then. If Shakespeare wants us to feel anything for this guy in the last moment of the play when he comes on carrying his dead daughter, before he says a word, we have to have a gut response. This is not good. We've seen the front cover of The New York Times and someone in the West Bank is holding a dead child and your heart stops. You tear up. You think, "How do you cope with this?" Our feeling is engaged immediately and it short-circuits that cerebral response. "Lear," the play, is all about an emotional response. That's the best way to get to us. We can discuss the themes later and the framework, but the success or failure of the play comes down to that rooted emotion. So if Shakespeare wants us to feel for him at the end and he's behaved so abominably at the beginning, what happens in between? I took those two as my cue. I would give the other actors as much as I could, so they didn't look like bad people. His daughters are sometimes the "evil sisters." They're not bad people. I make them behave badly. "I hope your womb dries up and falls on the floor." Dad, did you really say that? And, so, it takes horrific turns. And, yes, he thinks he's justified. And, so, the audience's view is compromised because they can see it from the angle of different characters. They begin to see the cracks. They know where it goes wrong. Who really loves who and who doesn't. That evolved slowly as this guy pushes people to extremes. They don't force him into the storm, he CHOOSES to go.
It also looks exhausting to me. It brought to mind a recent appearance by Ethan Hawke on "The Charlie Rose Show" in which he discusses Robin Williams and Philip Seymour Hoffman, two men he worked with, and how they put so much into what they did that it left a bit of them there. He could see that they would put all this emotion into a scene that it would leave them drained, it would take a toll. Does doing this take a toll on you?
Yeah. I was shattered in the end. The voice was ragged. The body was tired. But it was exhilarating at the same time. If you can make it through, this is a marathon of feeling. I'm convinced that anything less just wouldn't work. The great advantage I had is that I didn't have to do it 8 times a week. Because of Stratford's repertory system, I could do it like opera. I could really chuck myself into it, leave everything there on the floor, and walk away secure in the knowledge that I really didn't have anything else to say about it or give to it. I think Ethan's right. Those actors are way more engaged—God rest both of them—than I am, but it's a mad pursuit to inhabit other creatures.
Especially the dark ones.
Well, the dark ones are the most interesting. It's very therapeutic. You tear yourself apart trying to meet the demands of that particular character. And if you throw yourself into good writing, it pokes all the right holes in you and you find that you're messed up. I had to cheat with myself. I would be backstage trying to prepare the last scene. I knew that I had to not think about the things that I had thought about before the light went off and I was to go or it would be too soon and I would peak off-stage. I had to think about the weather or something else and then I would need a few zen moments to go, "Now. I'm ready." I would know what breath to take. I didn't even plan the sound I would make but I planned to have a thought that would trigger a sound. I planned to have an emotional response. Every night that image in my head would change. And that image would have to be fresh. So I would take things from the headlines. Anything that was going on in our real life at the time that really did push people to the edge.
It would be different each time to provoke a more instinctual response?
Yeah. Now that's it over, I can tell you one that I had difficulty with. There were three Israeli kids killed by someone, and, in retaliation, the Israelis grabbed a kid, a 16-year-old, and burned him alive. When I heard about that, I got choked up. Obviously. I have children. I imagine the child's father when the authorities came to the door and said, "This is what's left of your son. This is what's happened. And this is how it happened." Imagination is the only tool I got but I could only imagine the despair that this man felt. And I had found over the course of my research a lot of wonderful poetry. Lines that would bubble up…I tend to think things happen for a reason. If something floats into my consciousness, I'll write it down. I just became aware of that and I might need it. There was some line from a famous poet…it might have been Cervantes…it was about the wasted tears of a man who sees his child hanged. This is what Lear's going through. This is what he's trying to explain. You let this happen. I couldn't stop it. I killed the guy who was doing it. Even at my advanced age. You need to reinvent the wheel and reinvent the things that get you going.
It's fascinating to me that it's from such a variety of places—news stories, poetry, theatre.
And I have an 18-year-old daughter. Beyond imagination, that, like any muscle gets fatigued. You have to find a way to rest it and rejuvenate it. Like Pavlov's Dog, I trained myself to be at a certain emotional pitch at the entrance JUST before I would go on.
Have these tools served you well as a film and television actor as well? Are you different in those fields because you're such a vital theatre actor?
I think so. I also took up cameras and photography because I was trying to figure out what would be seen in 35mm, etc. What kind of information is being captured, and, therefore, what kind of acting do I have to do? Building this "technical facility" using myself as the raw material—I'm still controlling the experience—which goes back to the first question: The reason in "Lear" it was the hardest thing is because it was the "purest" thing. I'll learn it all. I'll plan what I can plan. And then I'm going to go out and not know my first line. And I'm going to take a deep breath and see what happens. I'm just going to be here and listen. Well, that's the best thing for film. Just be and let the cameras capture what's going on in your head. I found that all of these experiences have cross-pollenated and helped each other—certainly in giving me confidence to do it. When I went away from Stratford in the early days and tried film and television on for size, I learned things from great directors who guided me to simplicity. Don't do so much. Be simple. I took that simplicity back to the theatre. It created in me a kind of stillness and a centeredness. Just do one thing that makes sense and is organic, rather than play-act. "Lear" ended up being both the hardest and most exhilarating thing that I did.
Is this version people can see in theaters a "typical night" or does the process of filming change it?
It has the added excitement in terms of the audience and the actor's expectations. We know there's a certain historical, archival quality. "Oh my God, we've got one take." But we've also always got one take in front of an audience that's paid. It's the real deal. It's really like being there. I just figured the camera was like another audience member who happened to be holding a camera. My knowledge of cameras helped. Knowing where cameras were placed and how to use them to my advantage. But we didn't change anything else. In order to get over the nerves and terror, I was very much encouraged that the company had gone with the notion that every day we'd try something new. That stage is very organic. It's very three-dimensional. If I go down right, my friend would go up left. We'd do this deliberately—we'd just change the blocking. We always knew how we needed to end up. It gave it a thrilling, organic spontaneity. It frightened us into a new freshness.
"The Fisher King," "A Little Princess," "The Bridges of Madison County" and "The Horse Whisperer." These are a mere sampling of the terrific films written by Richard LaGravenese. His screenplay for "Fisher King" earned him an Oscar nomination, and with his fifth directorial narrative feature, "The Last 5 Years," LaGravenese makes a considerable artistic leap forward, proving himself as much more than a gifted writer. Adapted from the stage musical by Jason Robert Brown, this bittersweet romance explores—in an inventively nonlinear fashion—the love that blooms and fades between Cathy (Anna Kendrick), a struggling actress, and Jamie (Jeremy Jordan), a successful writer, over the course of their five-year-long relationship.
Prior to the picture's screening at the Chicago International Film Festival last October, LaGravenese spoke with RogerEbert.com about how this movie strengthened his approach to telling a story visually, his collaboration with masterful cinematographer Steven Meizler and his memories of making the modern holiday classic, "The Ref."
From "The Bridges of Madison County" to "Behind the Candelabra," your films have often revolved around a love that is not everlasting but has left an indelible impact on those who have experienced it. What attracts you to this material?
I don't think it's a conscious thing, but now that you mention it… [laughs] I don't know if I believe that love is a long-term experience. It's something that comes to us if we're lucky. It flares up, and, to me, it's more about the individual evolving. We have people in our lives who help us evolve along the way. If you're lucky, you find someone who evolves along with you, and that's what you call a long-term relationship. Love is this amazing experience that we're given to find out about ourselves, in a way, and sometimes it can stay, and sometimes it can't, depending on the journey of each individual. I'm not really a believer in romantic, happily ever after love stories.
It's certainly more relatable than a typical Hollywood fantasy.
I think so too. The play, "The Last 5 Years," was inspired, in a certain way, by the experiences of its composer/lyricist, Jason Robert Brown. His lyrics are just so insightful. I listened to them over and over when I first heard the score. I couldn't stop listening to them because they were so honest.
How does your adaptation differ from the stage version?
In the musical onstage, the characters never sing to each other. It's a monologue play, so each character sings to the audience, and they only ever sing to each other during the scene in the middle of the play, when he proposes. I had never seen the play, I had just heard the score, and I couldn't stop imagining it with two people as a playable scene. To me, the characters' reaction to each others' words added a whole other layer to the story. Consider the song, "If I Didn't Believe In You," which is a song that is performed all in one take and shows the couple, now married, having an argument before a party. He starts off very supportive and he winds up losing his temper and saying something very cruel. Without her there, you would experience the song from only his point of view. With her there, you're seeing the impact of what he's saying on her face. That adds a layer of richness to the score.
What initially brought you to the play?
It started with Todd Graff, who is a very good friend of mine. He wrote and directed "Camp," which Anna Kendrick was in. He introduced me to the score about 8 years ago. The play had come and gone, it opened in 2002 soon after 9/11. It was down in the Village, and it never made it uptown. But everyone—musical theatre fans, geeks like me—know the score, and for us, it's a classic score. It's one of our favorites. It's done all over the country and all over the world—there have been productions in Europe and Korea. Over the years, whenever I would fantasize about doing something for myself instead of just doing work for other people, I'd put on this score and fantasize about making a little jewel of a movie—very inexpensively, very simply and with no Hollywood involvement.
When was I was casting for "P.S. I Love You," Sherie Rene Scott came in to audition. She was the original Cathy in New York, and she is the actress on the CD. Her husband, Kurt Deutsch, is the head of a business they both run that produces soundtracks. She introduced me to Kurt, and he introduced me to Jason. Over the years, I would write drafts, and by writing, I mean I would write how it would be shot and how it would be staged. I added a backstory to Cathy to make her a little more dimensional. When I got onset, I would have the actors improvise based on what I had written. In the argument that happens right before the song, I just had them fight for fourteen takes, and they really got into it. There is dialogue that I wrote here and there as transitional lines, such as when she's coming out of the theatre or after the audition.
Other than that, it's all Jason. He's one of the smartest, funniest people I know. Neither one of us thought this would ever happen. I was doing this just because I loved it. We got Kurt involved as well as a producer/friend of mine, Janet Brenner, and another producer, Lauren Versel, who had produced "City Island," "Arbitrage" and a number of other indie films. She brought all of her indie producing experience to the table, and each one of the producers raised outside financing. They had nothing to do with any studio or Hollywood producer, and shockingly enough, all of a sudden they said we're ready to make this movie. It was amazing.
This is the first feature with cinematography by Steven Meizler, and his work here is remarkable. What was your collaboration like?
Steven is a god among camera people. He was the AD for Janusz Kaminski from the late '80s all the way through. He was with him from "Schindler's List" through "Saving Private Ryan" and "War of the Worlds." Then he was with Fincher and Soderbergh and many others. I got him through Soderbergh. I told [the director] that I was looking for someone who he thought was creatively hungry. I didn't want to hire someone for whom this would just be a job or a gig, and he said, "Steven's ready," and he was. It was the best relationship I've had with a cinematographer in my entire career. We started shooting in June. In May, we did five days of rehearsals in a bare room with a piano and blocks. Steven brought his camera.
I had ideas about staging but I also wanted things to be discovered. In this case, I told the actors that there would be a bed and I knew that we were going to shoot in a brownstone apartment. But I told them, "I just want to see you guys argue. Go wherever you want and we will follow you." Take after take, rehearsal after rehearsal, we came up with that staging. During the editing process, I would have many screenings for both musical theatre people and nonmusical theatre people, and everyone in the audience had a different point of view. Sometimes they were on her side, sometimes they were on his side. Some of the women said she should've put on the dress, and others said she was right to walk out of the room. I really wanted to make it as balanced as possible.
One the funniest numbers in the film is "A Summer in Ohio," where Cathy recounts her quirky off-off-Broadway experiences to Jamie via Skype.
I always wanted it to be onstage. Since this is a musical, I wanted there to be one number where you actually see a stage and dancers, but it has to be second-rate and amateurish. Nowadays, Skype is a generational way of putting both people oncamera at the same time. In the play, she's just writing a letter. I brought in a choreographer, Michele Lynch, who did a wonderful job. We had a beautiful theatre that we found in Staten Island. It's the second-oldest concert hall in America after Carnegie Hall. Once we got in there, we just had this idea of showing the span of time by cutting between her doing this number onstage and all the different bits that the song refers to. Originally, I had her in a sort of dorm room and the staging was more confined. Then once I saw the location, I had many more ideas.
I found myself applauding Cathy's tour de force inner monologue that she spills out during an awkward audition. She comforts herself by saying, "These are the people who cast Russell Crowe in a musical." Where did that line come from?
Anna. The original lyric was, "These are the people who cast Linda Blair in a musical"—remember this was originally written 13 years ago. Jason updated the script recently, but he and Anna came up with that reference because of recent events. [laughs]
Was it a goal of yours to keep the film grounded in reality throughout?
Because I'm asking an audience to suspend their belief in a world where the characters sing 95 percent of their dialogue, I wanted to make it as organic as possible so that everything felt real. The best compliment I've heard so far from audiences is that they eventually forgot the actors were singing, because they were such playable scenes. I didn't want lip-synching. There are 14 songs and 11 of them were all live. Two of them are lip-synched because I was jumping between locations and one of them is a combination of lip syncing and live performance. That was very, very important because it's such an emotional score. This was before "Les Mis." I always thought that if you don't feel the breath in the actors' bodies, you lose all the intimacy and truth.
You worked with Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant in your short film, "Pigalle," featured in "Paris, je t'aime." What was it like working within the structure of that piece?
I wish that I had been more of a rule-breaker. I was too good at school, so when they told me that my short had to be five minutes and that it had to be in on a deadline, I paid attention to all that. I wrote it in about ten minutes and they gave me the arrondissement, I didn't pick it. I had an extraordinary experience. We shot it in two nights in Pigalle and then I edited it for three weeks, all the while being in Paris. It's such a beautiful city. I never felt comfortable there, but I really came to love it. My entire crew was French, and Bob and Fanny were marvelous. After it was all over, Fanny Ardant took me to this cafe in the Louvre where you sit outside. She took off her shoes and she had a little puppy that was at our feet. We sat there for three hours talking about movies and Truffaut, and I was like, "Oh god, somebody pinch me. Am I really here?" [laughs] The funny thing was that we were shooting at night and it was during "Da Vinci Code." They had every cop and every security person, and we had nobody. We were at this beautiful corner and there was a bar across the street. Just to f—k with us, every time the people at this bar heard the word, "Action," they would blast Barry White on the jukebox and then we couldn't use the take. [laughs] It was insane.
A film of yours that I watch every year around Christmas is "The Ref," starring Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis as a bickering couple taken hostage by a burglar (Denis Leary) who ends up becoming their marriage counselor. You wrote the script with Marie Weiss.
Marie Weiss is my sister-in-law. She was married to my wife's brother and was a burgeoning screenwriter. I had a deal at Disney and I had one job left where I could bring them something, so I guaranteed the script. She wrote the first and second drafts, then I took it over and I rewrote it. I was onset the entire time because I also produced the film and I kept rewriting it during production. So there are moments and ideas that are all Marie and there's stuff that's all me.
How challenging was it to work on the script during production?
I loved being in the huddle with Kevin and Judy and Denis and just churning out pages. I remember after the reading, the script had gone very far off course after [producer Don] Simpson and [Jerry] Bruckheimer came on. Don Simpson was a character, god bless him. I really liked the guy, but he made me take the film in a direction where it became all about the couple's son who no one really cared about. Judy Davis's character changed and I remember her being very angry—and she was right to be angry—at the reading. I said to her, "Don't worry, I'm very fast. I can rewrite it because I agree with you." All that funny stuff was getting drained out of it. We started on a Monday and in three or four days, I rewrote the entire script, bringing in 30 pages a day. We'd sit down and it was Denis, me, Kevin, [director] Ted [Demme] and Judy, reading it, and then I'd go home and kept rewriting it. I've known Denis for years ever since Emerson College and one of the most satisfying things, as a writer, is to make a great comedian laugh. He was reading it for the first time and there were certain lines that made him stop and laugh.
Which ones?
One was during the scene where he's going up the stairs with Judy and she's talking about her marriage and he stops and goes, "What are we, girlfriends?" It just got him for some reason. And the other line was, "Who am I? Oswald?"
My favorite line is delivered by Spacey when he finally stands up to his manipulative mother: "You know what I'm going to get you next Christmas, Mom? A big wooden cross, so that every time you feel unappreciated for your sacrifices, you can climb on up and nail yourself to it."
That's my Catholic guilt. The line came right from my life. [laughs]
This sort of onset collaboration must have prepared you somewhat for direction.
That happened on "Fisher King" too. I was onset the entire time and that was my first movie, so I was spoiled. It depends on the director, of course. Working with actors is my favorite part of directing. I'm still learning and I don't consider myself a master of the skill yet. My DNA is that of a writer. I know that my imagination doesn't naturally go to the visual elements in a scene, it goes to character. Making "The Last 5 Years" is the first time I feel like I've learned more about camera than I did before—what you can do and not do, what you can show or not show. It's about simplicity, leaving the lights on the truck and letting the camera observe and not get in the way of the characters and the story and the performances. One of my weaknesses that I don't like about what I do is I can sometimes be too literal, and Steven was very good at calling me out whenever I'd get like that.
Coming of age films featuring young black girls tend to be a rarity in Hollywood. Gems like "Pariah," "Crooklyn" and "Beasts of the Southern Wild" tend to be few and far between. In "Girlhood" French filmmaker Céline Sciamma explores the journey from adolescence to womanhood with a group of young black girls with a tender and sympathetic eye. Karidja Touré stars as Marieme, a teenager who escapes the confines of her oppressive home life by joining a girl gang run by the tough and charismatic Lady (Assa Sylla). Marieme soon changes her name to Vic (short for "Victory") as she finds strength and a newfound purpose amongst this new sorority. "Girlhood" skillfully weaves the intersections between race, gender and social status, as well as wonderfully nuanced commentary and shifting identities in public vs. private spaces for young women.
After glowing reviews at its 2014 Cannes premiere, "Girlhood" has gone on to receive four César (equivalent to the Oscars) nominations, including a Best Director nod for Sciamma and Best Breakthrough Performance for Touré. This week they were honored with the Special Jury Prize at the 20th annual Lumiere Awards in Paris.
We spoke to Sciamma about her inspiration for "Girlhood," securing the rights to one of Rihanna's biggest pop hits, and the lack of diversity in French filmmaking.
What was your inspiration behind "Girlhood"?
I wanted to do a more contemporary film. With my other projects, you really can't tell when they are set. I wanted to have a more modern heroine and talk about friendship and sorority. The whole project has a classical element like an emancipation novel, a heroine who has to face the time and place she lives in, but I wanted to give it a new face.
Karidja Touré and Assa Sylla are so wonderful in their roles. How did you find these two actresses?
For the Vic character, we were looking for the Holy Grail. It's a very challenging role and the performance had to be solid, with the character going through so many identities. We did street casting and with Karidja she wasn't trying to show me who she was, she really became the character. I thought to myself "I can work with this girl and build this character together." The camera loves her and she just has that beautiful face that you can forgive, which is so important.
Lady is the leader of the group and I wanted to cast a non-leader in real life that could play a leader with a weakness she's trying to hide. Assa just gave it her all; when the cameras stopped rolling, she was this really shy and sweet girl. She was very committed to the role. You pick the actors, but they also pick you. That played a huge role in the casting.
One of the most powerful and emotional scenes in the movie is when the girls lip-sync to Rihanna's "Diamonds In The Sky" in their hotel room. Why that particular song and what steps did you have to take to be able to secure the rights?
"Diamonds In The Sky" was released around the time I started writing the screenplay and I really fell in love with the song. That was actually one of the first scenes I wrote. I chose "Diamonds" partly because it was a huge hit but also because of the lyrics; imagining those words in the mouths of my characters. It was an anthem of sisterhood and friendship. We had a really modest budget, so we went to the record company to secure the rights. During the editing process we found out we couldn't get the rights unless we got Rihanna's consent. So we sent a clip of the scene to her and her management team and they said it was beautiful.
One of the recurrent themes I picked up in "Girlhood" was the presence of male authority and how the female characters react to that dominance.
There is no safe space for girls. The neighborhood outside and even at home, the men make the rules and there is an authority the girls have to live by. But when they go to a public space like in the city, it's kind of a stage where they get to perform and be better versions of themselves. For the intimate spaces, they have to rent a hotel room so they can be who they truly they are.
It's not about men being the villains. They're kind of objectified; they're an archetype much like the femme fatale in film. But people may have a problem with that because men are rarely objectified. It's about who is dominant. With Vic, the movie shows how women can sometimes reproduce the very societal pressure they're trying to escape from.
This year's Oscar nominations have been heavily criticized for their lack of diversity in the acting and directing nominations. You are the only woman director nominated for a César this year. Is there also a problem of diversity in French filmmaking?
Omar Sy ("The Intouchables") is only Black actor to win in the history of the Césars. Karidja is the second Black actress ever to be nominated for a César. Yes, we do have a diversity problem in the industry. I mean, we do have a lot of younger women directors in France. There are very few Black French directors or screenwriters, so we are still working on that. We have the same issue but with a different history.
On Saturday night, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon earned the highest honor in American independent cinema as his highly-regarded second feature, "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl," captured the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film festival.
It completed a remarkable week for the Texas-born filmmaker. His stylistically audacious feature, an adaptation of the novel by Jesse Andrews, thrilled with its deft mixture of tones, suggesting an heir to the works of Ernst Lubitsch in how he worked in the darkest of themes and subjects with a glancing light touch.
In a lovely and fitting touch of a film boasting an encyclopedic range of movie history, the actor (Thomas Mann) playing the lead has the same name as the great German novelist. Greg, a quiet and withholding high school senior, is baited by his mother (Connie Britton) to befriend Rachel (Olivia Cooke) after she has been diagnosed with leukemia.
Greg's only real confidante, or "co-worker," as he calls him, is his classmate Earl (the superb RJ Cyler), his collaborator on a series of short films riffing on movie history given parodic names, like Visconti's adaptation of Mann's "Death in Venice," called "Death in Tennis."
The formative influence on Gomez-Rejon is Martin Scorsese. The filmmaker worked as Scorsese's assistant from "The Age of Innocence" to "Casino," and also worked with Nora Ephron and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Greg has a "Mean Streets" poster in his bedroom, and we see an extract from "Taxi Driver," and hear Scorsese's voice on his commentary track of the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger movie, "The Tales of Hoffman."
In an interview recorded before the awards, Gomez-Rejon talked about art and influence and the tribute to his late father, a doctor to whom the film is dedicated.
This feels like a first movie, or a memoir, in how you are able to stuff all the personal details into the architecture of the film.
ALFONSO GOMEZ-REJON: I'm really proud of my first feature, "The Town that Dreaded Sundown." I love the performances, and we had a good time making it, like the dinners with Edward Herrmann, where I could sit and talk with him about "Reds" and Warren Beatty. It was worth everything. It was sad that nobody saw the film. There was my great fear of somebody who wanted to make films his whole life of having the possibility that I'd never work again because it wasn't received well or considered successful.
Luckily when this film came together, it was all heart. I had to treat it as if it was going to be my last film, and make it for my dad. It was pretty clear that is the reason I was going to make a film for him the way that Greg makes one for Rachel.
Also, I had a way in to make a film that says thank you to all of my heroes and mentors in a way that was appropriate to the characters. I'm not sure I'll ever have the chance again to pay homage to (Scorsese's editor and Powell's widow) Thelma Schoonmaker, or of course Michael Powell. Marty (Scorsese) is everywhere. Nick Pileggi and Nora Ephron are linked, their scripts of "Casino" and "Heartburn," are stacked opposite each other next to the computer. It was an opportunity to say thank you to everyone, beginning with my dad, and share that love for them.
For all the stylistic flourishes, this film is ultimately dependent on the actors. Every single part seems right on.
First of all, I had to have my version of Greg. What I loved about the humor is that it wasn't cynical. It was something I identified with, even though he's 17 and I'm not. I wanted to be able to bury myself with this guy and take that journey with him. It was this brutal honesty people have in a way with the words and language, the way people actually speak, and not movie dialogue, where everybody is clever, smart and honest.
It was refreshing that Thomas had a way to make the words his own. In every audition scene with Thomas and Olivia, even the heavy scenes never felt melodramatic. They just wore the words so well, and they were so honest and she added such dignity that nothing felt melodramatic, which was the great fear.
RJ came in at the very end, maybe two weeks before we started shooting. We were struggling to find the right actor. I saw a lot of wonderful actors for the role. You had to think of them as this triptych and everybody had to complement each other. They all were honest. The kid (Earl) who had to be more of an adult, and she becomes one and then he's the last one to join them at the end. Eventually, RJ's audition was so beautiful and confident for a kid who'd never done anything.
And the adult characters, who likewise are never condescended to or ridiculed.
That came together. You can't make a movie with just the kids, or you can't finance it with them. I knew Connie Britton from directing "American Horror Story," and she wanted to play the mom. It was a small part, but it fit her hiatus and she wanted to work with me. Once you had Connie, the rest just really started to come together. Nick Offerman got involved and now it's a real movie with them playing the parents. Then you get Jon Bernthal (playing the sympathetic history teacher) and then Molly Shannon, whom I've always loved and who has this capacity for great dramatic work.
All of a sudden the movie became real. The adults were always my first choices. Thomas and Olivia auditioned for more than a year because the move came together, then it fell apart and and then it came back together. They were still perfect for it because the chemistry was so beautiful and unique, not unlike "Harold and Maude," because of the deep understanding.
What about your collaboration with the writer Jesse Andrews, who adapted his own novel. What was the process of transforming literature into cinema?
The screenplay was in very good shape when I read it. I discovered the novel after. It was more about streamlining it to give the shape of a movie that we could realistically make. It was about exploring some of these nonverbal sequences that I really wanted to have, these montages and the end sequence, which is all music. With Jesse, there was immediately a trust. I was very clear why I wanted to make this movie and why I wanted to interpret this script and do something personal with it. It was something I was aching to do. I really wanted to do it because I'd hit a wall personally, just struggling to express grief and incorporate it and move on. I just couldn't because I was that close to my dad. He was the funniest person in the world, my father was.
With Jesse, I was very upfront and I told him this is why I wanted to make this movie. He had absolutely no ego when something didn't work. We tweaked it or when I wanted to explore a new idea and we did it. He's quick and brilliant, and he made it better. Then it was about expanding the films within the film. A couple of them were already scripted. There was definitely an opportunity for montage because you have to honor all of these guys. You can't do that without doing (Luis) Bunuel. It became this list that we we worked on over and over again. It held up all the departments because we had this list, we needed costumes, little sets and locations and it became a whole little thing.
Finally it meant coming up with these references and the clips within these films, Jesse would come up with hilarious titles, that again were perfect for 17-year-olds. They had to look as if they were made by 17-year-olds. It was like going back to day one of film school at NYU, when you'd have a Super 8 camera and you were an auteur for the day. It was about finding that energy again and it really reminded you why you made movies. That spirit is something we tried to maintain throughout. The relationship with Jesse was extraordinary because he's a beautiful person, a great writer and he tapped into something deeply personal to me.
It's not just the observational manner of the script but the profound sense of recognition.
It was like the first time I saw "Mean Streets," when I was 13, in Laredo, Texas, on VHS. Somehow it was not about me. I'm so not New York Italian-American in the 1970s. I realized It was about brothers, and I could identify with it. I felt I was the only one who got it. I was the only person who could possibly tell this story because I could turn it into something personal. Once I got the job, we were inseparable. Jesse was on the set all the time. If we had to alter the (narration) there were no complaints or ego. He wanted to be the best person possible. He really respected what I wanted to tell. My version of Greg might be different than his, and he was fine with that.
How did you conceive the movie visually?
Chung Chung-hoon shot the film. One of the reasons he wanted to work on this film is that he loves comedy, he loves coming-of-age stories, he loves John Hughes, and nobody associates that kind of stuff with him.
There were two things. We had a color palette for every character. I knew the high school had to feel institutional and prison-like, and we used a lot of wide lens, up to 10mm, so that it's easy for Greg to get lost. He's all about coasting through life, and being as invisible as possible with the least amount of social interaction. We had very aggressive editing patterns, (camera) moves, that was almost playful and childlike.
Once you cut that and juxtapose that with her world, it's calmer and warmer, but still playful angles really stretching the frame, showing how separate they are. In doing that, not leading an audience into thinking or expecting a love story, you start to do the dialogue scenes with these two kids in more classic coverage and people start to assume they're going to fall in love at some point.
It's about separating them and then earning the two shots that come later. The movie becomes quite still, the lenses become much longer. There is that, playfulness to stillness, earning the two shots so by the time we got there people weren't expecting a love story and a frenetic pace calms down and it becomes almost dreamlike.
Would you agree to a heightened lyricism, like the way you stage the class and social stratification at the school or the first time Greg is in Rachel's room underlines his alienation?
Yes, and also in those wide shots you get an opportunity to reveal characters and clues, like the wide [shot] over to him in the foreground, or her carved books and in the reverse [shot] with all of the headroom you see the scissors, or behind him is the wallpaper because he hasn't stopped talking or looked closely enough to see what's in front of him. That's why in one shot he walks into the room and it's a very slow pan, forcing the audience to see but not understand why, they didn't look close enough like Greg.
Probably going back to "Lord Love a Duck," the high school movie had become its own genre. Was there a way to alter or subvert the form?
One of the big challenges I had was how to shoot it without looking like a high school movie. I scouted 10 high schools in Pittsburgh and in the surrounding areas and they all looked the same. I loved the size and scope of the school we used, with its neoclassical, 20-foot ceilings. I can shoot in a way that hasn't been done before. It was aesthetically how do we shoot a world that we've seen a thousand times. It was ultimately about that relationship, it's not a love story, fall into that trap and expect it.
What is the most important quality you learned in the three years you worked for Martin Scorsese ?
I don't think he has any idea how much he means to me. He's seen the movie actually, and he liked it quite a bit. I hope there's a way to express my gratitude. Everything I learned and everything I do, I always wonder what he's going to think. I respect his body of his work. I respect how he's been able to do personal films within a Hollywood structure. I respect how generous and humble he is and how he can't talk about himself without mentioning 10 masters that came before him.
When I was working for him, we'd watch movies together on Saturday often, just me and him. He has this deep appreciation for the past, and his insatiable curiosity and the why to make to movie. I finally got that, and how to tap into something personal and explore that, and it's a different high. You start to maybe find your point of view and why you're making movies.
The how is your own unique process. I'd never want to make a movie where he thought I just copied him. There's so much love on screen in what he does and it's so infectious. I think for the first time I got a taste of that, doing something personal from the heart and also give you a chance to bury yourself in the work. Also I hope this movie gives you a chance to turn on whoever watches the movie to the films of Powell and Pressburger, to Herzog. There's a great giving back and I wanted very much to continue that tradition.