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Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the directing duo that goes by the name "The Daniels," nabbed some of the most divisive headlines out of the 2016 Sundance Film Festival after the premiere of their comedy "Swiss Army Man," which just opened in limited release this past weekend and goes wide on Friday, July 1st. Stories of walk-outs were overblown and somewhat overshadowed the truth about the response from most critics and fest goers, who loved this quirky, strange, bizarre fairy tale of a film. Paul Dano stars as Hank, a man about to kill himself on a deserted island when the body of a man named Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) washes ashore. Hank and Manny, well, they become friends, especially after the corpse not only starts talking to Hank but becomes a multi-purpose tool to get him to safety. The two playful, brilliant writer/directors sat down with us in Chicago this week to discuss their film, their leads, how people have been responding to it, and how essential music was to the final product.
There's been a lot of discussion of unusual screenings and Q&As for "Swiss Army Man." What's an unexpected response or question that threw you that you found memorable?
DANIEL SCHEINERT: The most unexpected responses are talking to people afterwards. The one-on-one ones.
DAN KWAN: The one Q&A at Sundance, one of the last screenings—the first question off the bat was "Do you believe in God?" Perfect question.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: It was very long-winded, circling around big theme s…
DAN KWAN: … "I guess what I'm saying is 'Do you believe in God?'"
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Fun question.
DAN KWAN: The unexpected ones are the ones that are very thoughtful because most of the time it's "How did you come up with all the body powers?"
DANIEL SCHEINERT: The emotional ones. People will come up afterwards and be smiling, and talking about how much they like it, and, as they're talking, start tearing up.
DAN KWAN: Specifically, as they're talking. They'll start tearing up. It's bizarre.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: That's what happened to me with Sia the other night. She saw it in LA.
DAN KWAN: She's worked with Paul.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: She left right as the credits rolled because I think she didn't want to get mobbed and we were waiting out in the lobby and she was heading out and saw me and Paul Dano, and she was like, "Hi! Guys! It was good! It was SO GOOD!" And she started fist-pumping and tearing up. And giving us hugs. This is the best way to meet one of your favorite musicians. What a fucking dream come true.
What do you think people are getting emotional about? I don't want to put words or thoughts in people's minds but are these lonely, shy people going with the idea of self-expression or bonds of friendship?
DAN KWAN: It's a whole bunch of things. It depends on the person.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Yeah, there's a lot of folks who feel like the movie touches on and validates their loneliness.
DAN KWAN: Their strangeness. Whatever that may be. A lot of the people who come up to us afterwards are clearly different for some reason and it's great to see them feel like this movie, hopefully, feels like a big hug to them.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: I think the movie is about sharing those feelings with someone. It's in some ways an invitation to …
DAN KWAN: … expose themselves to us.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Yeah. The power to share. It's real fun. It's getting a compliment to get a story from a stranger.
DAN KWAN: One of the stories that we've been telling a lot lately—this is a little different than someone who felt acceptance from the movie—there was this lady who came up to us after the second screening at Sundance, and she ran up on stage after the Q&A and she was like, "I know I'm not supposed to be up here, but I need to tell you that I have a friend who can fart in front of me and it's really great, and then I have another best friend who can't fart in front of me and I just feel like if he could fart in front me he'd be so much happier." And then she started crying. Paul went to hug her, and we were all like, "What just happened?!?" But she found a strange metaphor in our movie to be able to pin down why her friend was so unhappy. I guess it broke her heart. That's a whole other reason to be so emotionally affected by this film. In some strange way, our story is touching people. And I think the longer that people have time to process it, more people will realize that there's a strange power in these two characters.
And you talk about strangeness and acceptance and being different—did you approach the film stylistically with that theme in mind? Being different? If we're going to make a film about being different, we have to make a film that feels different, tonally and structurally?
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Not really. The beginning of the process was kind of like an epic cliff jump. We got excited about the premise of the movie being crazy. "That sounds like a challenge. Let's make that movie." Let's jump off the cliff, and on the way down we spent all of our time trying to make it conventional. Not conventional, but relatable. Our worst fear was that this crazy premise would just be a niche film that's crazy. If anything, we spent most of our time trying to make this unpalatable content palatable.
DAN KWAN: That being said, you're talking about tone and execution—that stuff just kind of naturally came out of the story itself. Whenever we started to put our film into a genre box, it would break down that wall itself. It would feel wrong. "Why isn't this working? Oh, because this movie doesn't want to be stuck in this genre. It needs to be two or three things at once. It needs to be gray." The example that was strongest for us, because it was a really big turning point, was the relationship between Hank and Manny. For a very long time, we wouldn't allow them to fall in love, even though as we were writing it, in the back of our heads, "It was like I think they're gonna … no, that's not right. Our movie is weird enough as it is. They're just best friends. This is a buddy comedy. This is about two strangers really connecting." Second-to-last draft, close to the end, we decided these two need each other. We can't label it as anything. It's not that they're gay or "straight guys who decided to be gay." It's just two people who needed each other. That's really cool. There's no label for it, and there's no clean way to draw lines. That kind of bled into everything we did. Everything needed to be a little gray so people could find new ways to redefine it for themselves.
It's a movie that doesn't need rational explanation. It doesn't work if you try to explain too much of it. How early in the process was music such an essential part of it? When I ask about structure being different, that's one of the things I think about it—characters sing along and the music comments on the action. How early in the process was that part of the project?
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Very early. I think before we even wrote the first draft. The first draft had even more meta-filmmaking stuff. He narrated.
DAN KWAN: He would narrate himself.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: He was like overtly puppeteering Manny. From the get-go, we knew that what excited us was that Hank would kind of see his life as a movie. I don't think we're unique because we're filmmakers. We all watch TV and movies and imagine ourselves in our own movies.
Especially nowadays.
DAN KWAN: Oh, for sure. The whole generation has kind of created that.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: So, when being stranded in the woods got exciting to us—we're not survival film fanatics—sticking a human being from today in the woods and having them get songs stuck in their head and score their life and use music to get peace of mind to hike for four hours. That will be interesting. Now I'm excited to shoot a survival film.
And then how do you find the music? How does Manchester Orchestra get involved?
DAN KWAN: They were much later. Music is really important to our process because we come from music videos. And so we had been collecting a massive playlist of references for like three or four years. As we were writing, we kept adding to it, so it was like ten hours long. Music that we knew would be interesting to combine and create what we were going for. So, even as we were writing, we listen to music for references. We didn't know who to go out to. If we went to a traditional composer, I don't know if they would understand what we were going for. A lot of this stuff is very beautiful but also messy, and also kind of stupid sometimes. The lyrics are so overtly dumb, in a very simple, beautiful way.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Eventually, we decided we'd do it in two parts—hire someone to write songs and hire someone to compose the music. The composer will use their songs as inspiration. So, we reached out to Andy Hull because we loved, specifically, his solo stuff, or the more muted Manchester Orchestra stuff. Those melodies would get stuck in my head and he's got such a beautiful voice and he understands melodies. So, all we asked him to do was like send us some melodies. We couldn't even offer him money. "We don't have financing, but would you be interested in spitballing with us?" And we sent him the script and he loved it. He sent us a recorded, mixed song the next day, which is the credits song.
DAN KWAN: That's the exact recording too. That's exactly what he wrote. That melody ended up becoming Hank's main theme.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: He was like, "I just had a baby and I don't want to go on tour right now. I love movies. Please let me do this." And he brought in Rob, who produces the Manchester records, and they kind of aggressively were prolific and passionate.
DAN KWAN: "Don't let anyone else compose. We'll be the ones."
DANIEL SCHEINERT: They became the whole deal. It's their fault more than ours.
DAN KWAN: The funny thing about this movie is that it really does live or die on music. I think for most films that's not a good thing, but I think tonally what we're doing is so specific that we knew to overcome the preconceived ideas of what this movie would be conceptually, we had to slam in with a lot of emotion and force the tone. Allow that cognitive dissonance to play in people's minds. If you watch any of these scenes without music, it's horrific.
Or like a James Newton Howard score. It would be a totally different film.
DAN KWAN: For sure!
DANIEL SCHEINERT: I kind of want to put a feature on the Blu-ray where you can turn off the music. It's a crazy person's movie.
DAN KWAN: It's nihilistic and mean.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Yep. It's a guy looking at farts.
The playfulness you speak about lyrically and musically—calling lyrics dumb—tells us that that film is playful. This is messy. Like I said, put a John Williams score on this and it would be a disaster. So, there's serendipity in him accepting your invitation. There's also a little bit of that in the casting. How do you find the two guys?
DANIEL SCHEINERT: We loved their work, and we had heard they weren't assholes. I don't think we're the kind of directors who could have a good, combative relationship with an actor the way some directors can. I feel like we did just kind of luck into it, but also we went in with a soft touch. We allowed the characters to evolve based on these guys.
DAN KWAN: The moment they got cast, we started rewriting for them. They're such specific human beings. What we had written was so strange and bizarre, but we knew we wanted to be grounded. We just started to allow the characters to become more like the actual actors. Dan Radcliffe is the sweetest, most curious man we've ever met. When we saw that in real life, we were like, "Oh my God, if Manny had a little bit more of that it would be magic."
DANIEL SCHEINERT: It would give the movie a heart. You'd care more about this corpse if we play to that strong suit of Daniel's. We actually kind of like tricked Gap into letting us cast Paul Dano in this commercial campaign we're doing. "You know who would be great for this thing?" So, we got to work with him before we shot the movie, but we had already cast him, and it was great. We got to know him, and see what his sense of humor was like, and kind of his dry simplicity. He's a very funny guy. He's at his funniest when he's deadpan. So, we were like, "Hank should be more grounded, honest, and then the jokes should sneak up on you with Hank." So we pulled back some of the broad …
So, really collaborative.
DAN KWAN: Oh, for sure.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Him especially. He read every draft. He insisted on Skyping for hours after each draft. His preparation as an actor was to understand our story inside and out. Talk it out.
How do you two work together? Does one have different duties, different strengths than the other?
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Yeah. There are certain patterns that evolve but there's never been like …
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Yeah.
DAN KWAN: The longer we work together, the more we kind of learn from each other. When we first started, we were very different. We have very different processes, even now. He comes from improv and comedy; I come from animation and design. We're completely opposite ends of the spectrum, but we happen to have similar senses of humor. Somehow it works. Every step of the way—we're different writers, different in pre-production, we take turns getting stressed out about different things.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Dan is willing to doubt our movie. When it needs improving, he'll hole up and be like "It's not good enough." That scares me, but I love solving problems. When politics are getting messy or people are miscommunicating or a location falls through, I love diving in and being like, "There's a tactful way to approach this and we're gonna solve it quickly." That happens ten times a day during a movie.
DAN KWAN: I get stressed out a lot during writing. He gets stressed out a lot during pre-production. And then we're both stressed out during shooting.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: But in different ways.
DAN KWAN: And then editing, we take turns. Every day depends on your mood. One day, "This scene's working!" The next day, "What the hell is this??!?!? Let's cut the whole scene."
DANIEL SCHEINERT: The other answer to your question is that whatever one of us doesn't want to do on a certain day, we'll let the other one do it. Or whoever is most passionate about whatever, and that will change from day to day.
Not unlike a marriage.
DANIEL SCHEINERT: Right. It really is.
DAN KWAN: Tag team when you need each other.
What's next?
DAN KWAN: We're writing another feature soon. It's going to hopefully be with some of the same producers and financiers. If they were crazy enough to do this movie with us … let's do another one. It's going to be similar tone, but not nearly as crazy. It's really fun to make crazy movies when people are telling you no. Not as much when people tell you can.
You need a little of that resistance to be creative.
DAN KWAN: Exactly. It's gonna be a sci-fi/action movie, but also incredibly stupid.
French director Anne Fontaine is known for her daring portraits of passionate women in films like "Coco Before Chanel" and "Gemma Bovary." So the setting of her next film, "The Innocents," may come as a bit of a surprise: at the height of the Second World War, an atheist French Red Cross doctor (Lou de Laâge) is called in secret to tend to a convent of Polish nuns. When she arrives, she discovers many of them are in advanced stages of pregnancy. The film is fictional, but based on a French doctor's diaries.
Fontaine spoke with RogerEbert.com at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, where the movie had its premiere in January (under the title "Agnus Dei," Latin for "lamb of God"), about the film's painting-like cinematography, its screening at the Vatican, and the juxtaposition of violence, beauty and contemplative silence. (The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
You lived in a convent for a while when you preparing to make the film. Why did you choose to do that?
I went to retreats in Benedictine convents to feel, from the inside, closer to the women, the rituals. I knew that I would shoot in the convent with this story. I met this story through the diary of a French young doctor—the nephew of the doctor had the diary.
When I decided to do this movie, I wanted to film from the inside the life of the community, all the different personalities: who is the Mother Superior? The novices? All the hierarchies? Of course, it's today—but it hasn't changed a lot. It helped me a lot to know how to film the faces, the gestures, the moments when they are in a group, the moments when they are doing things very casually. It was a very interesting experience, and I spoke with them about the movie, about this situation. It's completely incredible to be a nun and to be pregnant and to give life when you are raped, and in these conditions. They all were very touched by the story and they told me their point of view from today. They said this situation is relevant in many countries where there are wars.
Have you heard of stories that are similar since making the film?
I did a screening [at the Vatican] three weeks ago. A bishop spoke after the screening and said that it's a terrific movie for the church, because this story was completely hidden. It was completely forgotten. The movie can touch Catholic, Jewish, Protestant—a person doesn't have to be Catholic, of course, to feel what happens. He said that today there are similar situations in Africa, in countries at war.
So the response at the Vatican was good?
Yes, they were very moved by the film. They said that it's a terrific movie for the church. It's still appropriate. You have to see the truth in front, not hide it.
The film was pointing to something very unjust and disturbing, so I was struck by how beautiful is. It's beautiful to look at.
Yes. It has to be beautiful to support and to tell the violence, the malheur, the despair—the beauty gives a home for the viewer underneath this tragedy, to make them more open at the end of the movie. I referenced paintings from [French painter] George de la Tour, and also really just pictures with the Virgin and the Child. There are many. We worked with my DP [Caroline Champetier] in a very precise way to be strong and beautiful and also very close to their faces, to feel what is behind the faces. To express the doubts, the way they recuperated—each one decidng to be a mother or not, or how they could be a mother after such a strong shock.
The music, as well—
The music is songs, Latin songs. The Polish actresses sing them directly. There is some music from Handel and also a little movie music. But not too much. When you are in a convent, the silence—the noise of the snow—the way you are constantly aware of the silence is very important. I didn't want to put too much music because it would be too conventional. I think you are more moved.
I recognized a Max Richter track.
Yes, at the end. I love that music and it fits perfectly. He's a brilliant composer. He has spirituality inside of his music, I think ... I asked him to do the music but the schedule couldn't fit, but he liked very much script, and for me he is one of the most interesting composers today.
One of the film's theme is doubt—people doubting their vocation. The nuns talk about it, and I also feel like Mathilde is thinking about her vocation as a doctor as well.
It was very important to me to not to create an opposition between different ways to have faith. Mathilde (Lou de Laâge) is a pragmatic, scientific girl, a Communist [her parents were Communists]. She's very young, and she thinks that concrete action is what's important. When she's going to meet the situation at the convent, she of course is not prepared for what she sees. Nobody's prepared ... She has to understand after a while what is underneath the nuns' shock: what is their life, what is their faith. She has to question herself about that.
And that's interesting, because she's not like someone who can say, "Oh my God, now I am Christian." But she understand that as a physical question, in a way, for the first time in her life. And the novice, Maria (Agata Buzek), has transgress. She has to disobey, to present a lie and be concrete about it. Not to be only spiritual.
This creates a strong relationship between these two women and between this young doctor and the community, because they have to work together, in a way. I was very interested by this young doctor that discovered what faith is about, the fragility of that fact that there is God in their lives, and it's cruel to be raped two times as a woman, and as a religious woman.
I feel like filmmaking is both spiritual and material. It's messy and a lot of work. Do you think of your filmmaking as a vocation as well, in that way?
To do a movie is to have a vocation. I decide to do a movie if I have faith in the movie and in the story. I can't begin if I don't have it.
I am not Christian. I was educated as a Catholic; I have a father who is an organist; a mother who does the windows. In my youth I was in the church a lot because my parents were there. But I think that what is important is to have faith in something. That is the most important thing, and not to judge the other faiths. To be open. I think the movie speaks about that.
For me, to be a director is to be in this mood—to be sure that this story is alive. We're going to give birth to the characters. We have to create the truth in the story. When it's on paper, when it's a script, it doesn't exist. You have to be sure that this woman is going to exist with all of her complexity. That's the reason the cast is so important: if you don't have the perfect interpreters, you'll miss the thing you are trying to catch. In each movie, it's another problem to solve.
I was very lucky to have the best Polish actresses. They are really remarkable; they went into the characters so deeply. It was like real sisters. I couldn't imagine that they were actresses. The Mother Superior, Agata Kulesza, is very known in Poland. She's a star there. And Agata Buzek is a sort of Cate Blanchett, an icon of theatre. They have done incredible work. For me, it was also good to shoot faces, but not French faces that I know.
It's a cast of almost all women. And there you are, a woman directing a cast of almost all women, which is still somewhat unusual in the world of film.
And for the story, it was necessary! It was a story about women—but there is also the Jewish French doctor [Vincent Macaigne], who brings lightness and irony into the story. Thirty nuns, one French young doctor: it's their secret ... The movie is about positive transgression: the nun at the beginning decided to go through the forest to find some help. She hasn't told anyone, "Now I'm going to go out." It's a rule in this monastery at this moment, in 1945. It was tougher than today, I think.
And it was unsafe outside the walls.
It was in the middle of the forest, and they were afraid that if somebody knew, they would be killed. They will be shamed for life. The Mother Superior thinks that she's protecting them—in a bad way, but she thinks that she has to be completely closed.
A kind of fundamentalism.
Exactly. It exists, it has existed, and it exists in other religions, of course.
Were there any other films you were thinking about while you were making this one?
I showed my DP three or four movies, very different ones. "Thérèse," by Alain Cavalier, for the lights, for the simplicity of the way the faces are lighted. It's a very beautiful and moving movie. Also Bresson's "Angels of Sin." And Jane Campion movies, for the Romanesque. I've seen "Ida," more because the actress I had [Agata Kulesza] came from it. Another movie—very, very famous in France, I don't know if you know it here: "Des hommes et des dieux" ("Of Gods and Men"), a story about monks that are killed. I watched religious movies to see what I liked, what I didn't like. It's a mixture of many things when I prepare a movie.
I was thinking of "Into Great Silence."
The documentary, yes. "Le grand silence." I have seen it. It's not cinematographic, but it's the ritual: beautiful, because it's very simple, very natural.
It makes you feel contemplative.
Yes. I tried in my movie to be contemplative, but also dramatic. With attention to the inside. It's important to feel true in these moments, because you can fight against violence when you sing, when you pray. It's the way they fight against what happened.]]>
To attempt to describe too much of Nicolas Winding Refn's "The Neon Demon" feels futile. It is a sensory experience, driven by the passion of its fearless filmmaker and a stunning central performance by Elle Fanning. She plays Jesse, the latest beautiful teenager trying to break into the fashion world, where she finds, well, you should really just see for yourself. The co-writer/director, who also made "Drive" and "Only God Forgives," and the star sat down with us this week in Chicago to talk about the divisive response to the film, the purpose of art, and even "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." I found it interesting that the provocateur director immediately wanted to know what I thought of the film, opening a discussion about reactions to it before I could even get my recorder going. He's a filmmaker who wants a response, and he certainly got that at the world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last month.
What was it like seeing the movie at Cannes?
IN UNISON: Amazing. [They laugh]
You watched it, I assume?
NICOLAS WINDING REFN: You have to sit through it at Cannes. They make you. They don't let you walk away. There's no back door.
ELLE FANNING: You're like in the middle. On display.
NWR: If you walk, everyone will see you walk.
Are there nerves? Or do you go in confident?
NWR: [Pauses] Honest answer?
Yeah, I want the honest answer.
NWR: We go in complete confidence because we knew we were the future.
And then the response is divisive and you seem to enjoy that too.
NWR: Well, isn't that the essence of creativity? You don't get far by being nice.
I'm paraphrasing, but you've implied that you would have considered it a failure if everybody liked it.
NWR: Oh, absolutely. I think failure is in if it's just "nice." I certainly believe that creativity must be an experience. If I'm to steal time away from people, we should give them something to react to. That's half of what we do our daily lives—we react to our surroundings. Of course, we have to make it entertaining, and we are entertainers. In the end, we're just showmen. But, I think that it's an important factor. Not to be anything else but clear about that—for me, creativity is an important part of our evolution. Art has probably done more good for the world than war. But they're equally powerful. They both create revolutions. Where war destroys, art inspires. And in order to inspire, you need to penetrate the brain. In order to penetrate the brain, you need something to react to. To have something to react to, you need to get your emotions up and running. To get your emotions up and running, you need to have something that … whatever direction you go in, it has to be a movement between you and the experience.
Within that, how do you avoid "shock for shock's sake"? We've all seen art designed to instigate that's hollow. How do you avoid making it hollow?
NWR: By being truthful in its creation. Nowadays, teenagers are so fast and quick to see through any form of manipulation. Sitting down and just thinking of something is like watching really bad pornography. There has to be some higher meaning to it. That's what people react to. Nowadays, with all of the stuff we have going on in our world, if it's not truthful then there is no reaction. That's the good thing.
It requires a lot of trust on both your parts. How do you trust him that it won't be hollow and shock for shock's sake?
EF: I was always a fan of Nic. With his movie, you know it's "A Nic Refn Movie." I think as an artist that's the best thing you can have—a personal stamp on something. I always respected that and wanted to be a part of his world, but knew he would never make a movie that has a teenage girl as a lead. Obviously not. Then I heard he was and it was in the fashion world. What? Just combining what we think of [with Refn]—masculinity and violence—in his films with that world was so interesting to me.
I hadn't read the script and didn't know the story at all and he asked to meet me, which is another psychic power that we had. I met him in L.A., and right from then we talked about the story. I read the script. What it actually meant. Right away, we talked about trust. The way he films his movies—in chronological order—and you're constantly discovering things and because something happened yesterday we can't do this anymore. We have to change it. You're on this ride together. I felt like I had given so much personal … we would talk about it so much that it was like a baby to me. It was like a team together. We were trusting each other. We were going and pushing. So I never wavered. I never did. Each thing that we'd change it would be like, "Yes! It had to be that way." The character was speaking through me or the story was speaking through him, and it just felt right. And when things got too normal, it wasn't right.
NWR: When it became too much not of itself, you can steer it. It really started with a question that started our relationship. When we met, my agenda was "Get Elle Fanning." I believe Elle's was "Get the role." But we didn't know that.
EF: Right. [Laughs] Yeah.
NWR: It was like playing poker. There was no one else from my side who could play the role. It's not like there were even options. It was get her or there would be no movie.
You created it and wrote it for her?
NWR: Mentally, as it went along, it became … as I was writing it, I had this invincible character that would have to be someone. But once you get down to reality, there's no one to play her and there's no movie. It would be ridiculous. The character requires so many elements. The only one who could fulfill that was this one person: Elle Fanning. So, get Elle Fanning. But I think that now … Elle just said something interesting that made me think of this … what started the process? We didn't know each other when we met. Elle had not read the script. She didn't know what she wanted to do. I was still trying to figure out what the essence of the film was. In order to avoid any shock for the sake of shock, we had to come up with what was the basis of the film. So, very quickly, I remember this in our "hello, how are you" awkwardness, I asked her, "Do you think you're beautiful?" And Elle replied, "Yes." And that was like an ignition. The movie has now begun, even though we hadn't agreed to do the film together. The movie has now started. A year-and-a-half of prep had kind of been wiped out because now the film was going to be created. It was started on a very frank conversation. "Do you think you're beautiful?" And her complete, honest-to-God answer was … "Yes." That, to me, was so refreshing. Then I was like, "I'm making a movie." She's going to guide this movie in a way that I could never imagine. I can do my part of the storytelling. I can carry it. I can paint it. I can maneuver it. I can massage it. But if I don't have anything to work with, then there's nothing. It became like a mutation between us. It became this experience.
Real collaboration.
NWR: Oh, absolutely.
Are you always that collaborative?
NWR: Yeah. I've done it in all my movies, and I think it's part of what I enjoy about the process. This kind of intimacy that you create. Because it becomes very intimate.
Does what the film is "about" change? When you first met with Elle, was it a different film in your mind?
NWR: No. The themes were always there. Very clear.
What would you say those are?
NWR: It's a horror film about beauty. It also happens to be a melodramatic, camp, funny, colorful, suspenseful, existential, vulgar, with a little bit of science fiction.
This is a very strange meeting because the one script that I always thought of while making the movie was "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls." I even showed it to Elle. I said "This is the only movie I can think of that combines everything into this experience." The journey was how do we touch upon all these themes? How does it continue to grow? Evolve? And we could only do that by shooting in chronological order.
And not really knowing the end.
NWR: The end never changed, meaning that how it ended was always the same thing. It was more of a practicality of how to tie up …
EF: … all the girls. Not Jesse.
NWR: Not her. That was clear. But, halfway through the movie, the Jesse character becomes less of the protagonist and more of "the enigmatic." She becomes everyone else's perception of her. It was how to round off all the other remaining characters. What happened was, in the first week of shooting, everything was going great, and a lot of the big opening scenes were between Elle and Jena Malone. Then Jena Malone had to do the big necrophilia scene, which was the only scene that I shot out of order because it was shot at Hollywood Cemetery and I couldn't afford to go back. Jena Malone's scene with necrophilia became such an experience that I was like … I had found the protagonist, but the antagonist was never really clear for me, even on script, even on prep, not even until we shot that scene with Jena Malone. Now, I know who the real antagonist is, and now the second half needs to change in order to fulfill that prophecy.
Amazon is releasing this and I'm curious about your thoughts on them and what they're doing to film.
NWR: For me, Amazon has stepped in and presented the future of entertainment. Obviously, the future of entertainment is going to be on the internet. So, Amazon, being a provider—not just on the playing field—is, of course, opening up a whole new set of possibilities. At the same time, Amazon also understands platforms. For them, theatrical is an extremely important event. I also believe it's the best way of seeing a movie. It's certainly not the only way to see a movie. Theatrical is still part of an old eco-system of film. The problem is just the longevity is continuing to shrink. The digital revolution is forever. They put importance on that option as well. With Amazon, you're getting the best of both worlds, with a whole new playing field.
And a lot of creative freedom.
NWR: They came in and bought the finished film but we're already talking about the future. I've been very, very lucky.
"Tickled" is more than just a story about the world of tickling, but that of all-American bullying. What started as a curiosity by New Zealander journalist and co-director David Farrier quickly wrought a barrage of harassment and lawsuit claims, from who the hell truly knows where or why, simply because he and co-director Dylan Reeve tried to contact them. Obviously, aside from the unusual nature of something like a "competitive tickling" video (involving clothed young men tied up, tickling and giggling) it was a threat worth looking into.
What then resulted is one of the strangest documentaries you'll see this year, a journey into different tickling media companies and the people, including ex-performers and a casting agent, that they have blackmailed and sought to embarrass with public accusations of perversion. "Tickled" takes on many layers, that of advocacy for those abused by such power, a story of violent self-shame about one's own sexual proclivities, and even a type of culture clash between people of contrasting aggression—a vengeful sociopath of sorts (my words, not Farrier's) and the targeted filmmakers from New Zealand who seem to be annoyed by his lawsuits most of all.
The controversy of the documentary continued this past weekend when co-director Dylan Reeve was confronted by lead subjects David D'Amato and Kevin Clarke at a Q&A, who accused the film of falsities and threatened that more lawsuits were coming, nonetheless while surrounded by a crowd of people who had all just seen the film. Clarke even operates a "Tickled" truther website, in which one of "Unethical David Farrier's" subjects has since recanted his interview, along with other claims. (A video from the Q&A can be found here.)
RogerEbert.com spoke with Farrier about his film, its specific balance of comedy and tragedy, normalizing tickling as a fetish, the new controversy raised in part by using the phrase "off the record" in New Zealand and more.
What fascinates you about America?
I like the extremes here. Everyone takes everything to an extreme. In New Zealand we're very low key and we'll just all try and fit in. Here, everyone has got a thing, and then they take it to a whole other level.
What advice would you give us to not be extreme?
Oh, I think "find a healthy medium," or "Don't be scared of being different, but think, 'Have I taken this too far?'"
I'm a big fan of America, I like how keen everyone is. The enthusiasm here is great as well. In New Zealand if you want to get something done, you'll be like "Let's run for a coffee, in a month." And then you'll have a coffee and be like, "Oh, that's a cool idea, I'm gonna think about it and I'll email you, maybe we'll catch up sometime," whereas here if you pitch something [in the US] at midnight the next day someone is like, "Let's try it! Let's make this happen." And that's what I love about America.
Was there originally more footage of you guys in this adventure?
Yeah, we shot a lot of the journey. We always knew going into shooting that it needed to be, because Dylan and I were both drawn into the story and we were both getting legal threats, we had to be a part of it, so we just wanted to figure out how much a part of it we were. At the end of each day we'd just film us chatting about the day and what happened, and as we'd be driving we'd be talking all of the time, but there were more things happening in real time around us, and we'd rather show us than have us in it.
And you wanted a 90-minute cut.
Oh yeah. It's not "Lord of the Rings," or "The Hobbit."
What were some influences on the film when you were making it?
I guess "Biggie & Tupac," I think was the movie I looked for, and I love all of [Nick Broomfield's] stuff. But it's a movie I've always respected because it's a journalist or a documentary maker involving himself in a story and it just doesn't come across as this pretentious, look-at-me fest. I'm a big fan of "The Imposter," it has amazing recreations in there and I hadn't worked with recreations before, and just the way it was shot was a great reference point for our DP as well. These big, beautiful interview shots. And I think all of us are probably obsessed with "Serial" and "The Jinx," but thinking about how to tell a story in a way that's longer than a minute and a half, and the idea of taking the audience on the same journey that we went on. Because the whole thing starts quite light, which was how it started for us, and it just started somewhere very different.
Your DP, Dominic Fryer, did a great job here.
He is great. And he used a lot of Wes Anderson's films as a touchpoint visually. Probably everyone uses [Anderson's] films, but just in the sense that we tried to shoot the cities in a way that hadn't been necessarily been seen before, lots of symmetry going on. "The Grand Budapest Hotel" was a big touchpoint.
Do you think it's an inherently American legal reaction you're finding yourselves in the middle of? Would it be different if D'Amato was a New Zealander?
We don't sue each other in New Zealand. And if we do, there's an extremely good reason, and it's all reasonable, most of the time. But the extremes could only happen in America.
How did the course of events inform the editing process?
Our narrative is the order things had happened in, with some things being tightened into 90 minutes. That in a way was kind of unbelievable, there's a bit in the film where we find these documents, and it's too good to to be true—I feel the same way. But it happened at a time when we needed to find them. And so many things happened like that, just the right time. And a lot of things happened in the last five minutes, and that all happened as it happened.
Tone is a huge thing for "Tickled," because it's funny but you're not turning people like David into clowns.
That's the way I've always treated my TV stories, to be a bit irreverent and to be serious but not too serious, to be funny but not too funny. And so I think that translated into the film. But also, we're all aware that this whole thing started as a bit of a joke. It was in the newsroom when I saw the video. I was laughing, like "What is this? This is the funniest thing I've seen." And then it got darker and darker as time went on, and then when I was in Muskegon, I wasn't finding things very funny and I think that translates in what happens as well.
Some of the notes are not what you're expecting when watching a movie like this.
We weren't expecting that to happen. There are some inherently funny parts, and you have to remind yourself that there are funny parts, but I think the darkness is probably highlighted as well by the humor. It's not like we start in this dark place and end in this dark place, and you leave the cinema just being depressed. I think people go on a bit of a ride.
The scene in "Tickled" with Richard Ivey, a tickling entrepreneur, seems important to the film to not demonize the fetish. And you even provide porn-like music and slow motion during an extended tickling scene.
At some point in the film we needed to acknowledge that tickling was a fetish, and so we met a tickling fetishist. And the intent was to get into his head, and find out why it was interesting to him, and also show that it's fine to be into whatever you're into, as long as you're not hurting other people. And Richard's great. He's been to some of our screenings and people go crazy. They stand up for Richard! He's very mild, he's very normal. We wanted to show that we're okay with it, you should be okay with it. It's not a big deal. Just tickle and be happy. And the tickling community is very vocal. They were like, "Are you out to take the piss out of us? Are you out to mock us?" Very defensive. And that highlighted it for us that we needed to be aware of that, and not demonize them.
I have seen the recent Q&A footage where subject David D'Amato shows up, along with another subject from the film, Kevin Clarke, a producer of the tickling films.
Wild, right? It's kind of a sequel. Having all of the key players turn up and take part in a Q&A and try to discredit us live was absolutely mad. Essentially we were threatened with more lawsuits in front of an audience. We never could have imagined that. Things have been happening the whole time, like Kevin came to Sundance and was taking notes, and there were a couple of private investigators sent to the True/False film festival in Missouri, who were trying to film out of a coffee cup.
Hey, they stole your idea!
Fucking crazy. That's pretty surreal. I just wondered what would happen next. It just opened, we're coming to more and more cities, and I can imagine these people getting more irate about the situation.
And you have that protection of doing this out in the public, where everyone can see everything.
This is a story about bullying. And the whole idea of Dylan and I, part of the reason we made the film was to expose them, and put it out there. So hopefully it will stop. And in being so public about it ourselves, they used to do it to people who were private and shy, but now they've got people like me, you can Google me and there's nothing to be exposed. I can't be manipulated. I think that's a new thing for them. Even today, a lot of the victims are shy and don't want to be seen as gay. A lot of the manipulation that this company does is based around picking on people's insecurities or societal things that aren't seen as right. Where as me, I don't care what people say about me, so I can just proceed.
I take it you've seen their truther site TickledMovie.Info?
Yes, Tickled.Info is amazing. It's like what Scientology has done, they make a website to discredit the films, they're tweeting people and reviewers saying "Look at this, it's great."
You use the word victims, so can I say the word "abuse"?
It's abuse of power.
But you're bringing this to the spotlight, and it is allowing people to be open about it, it's an unexpected layer of advocacy.
When we're putting this out in the light, it's contextualizes it for people who have already been through this craziness, and people have gotten in touch with us and have sent us a specific email: "I feel a sense of closure, that's what has happened to me." And that was fascinating. We hope it will provide a context for people in the video, so if people ask why are you in this tickling video, they can point to the film and it explains this whole thing. They have been tricked and victimized.
We're talking about extremes, and about bullying, so I have to ask. Do you think, as an outsider looking in, that Donald Trump could be elected President of the United States of America?
I hope not. He could. He might. All the steps along the way, you keep thinking, "Oh, he can't. Oh, he can't." He wins every round. Because your political system is very confusing, it's very different to the way we operate. If Donald Trump becomes president, I think America needs to take a long hard long at herself and sort some shit out.
His behavior seems parallel to this movie.
Hey, Donald Trump likes to sue people. Power and control, that was a big theme in the film, and it's funny that we're here putting the film out when Trump is in full swing. I drove by Trump Tower the other day—is it true that the "T" dropped off, and it was "Rump" for ages?
I couldn't say.
That seems too good to be true. A "T" doesn't just drop off! I guess if [his presidency] happens, there will be some sort of wake-up call. If he becomes president, I like to think people would. I'm not going to call Trump [we went off the record] … but if it happens, I would hope people realize their mistake and something changes.
The power of "off the record," is that something you've been aware of with documentary subject Kevin, who claims to have used the phrase in one of your first meetings with him? "Off the record" is like his magic phrase.
Oh, completely. I mean, I'm sorry, in New Zealand we have a one party situation where as long as one of you knows you're recording, you're allowed to record. I'm sorry, but I'm going to record you.
That's such an interesting dynamic, especially when you first meet him, from the beginning he doesn't want to be recorded.
But with Kevin, he's doesn't want to be recorded, yet he's turning up at one of our first screenings in Los Angeles, where there are cameras everywhere. Maybe they're just attention seekers.
Is it a particular advantage to having these lawsuits all out in public?
Definitely, there's nothing I'm hiding. It's just annoying having to deal with them, because it's time. No one wants lawsuits in their life.
Did you have a lot of lawyers vet your different cuts?
Oh yeah, of course, fuck yeah. To get into Sundance, we made sure that we had it all vetted and everything.
There's even the recent question about one of your subjects, Jordan, who is now prominently featured on Tickled.Info "recanting" his interview with you that's featured in the film. What's your official statement on that?
Um, "watch the film, and decide for yourself." You can watch what Jordan told us, and you can watch all of these videos that have been created. It's all there, it's on-screen.
People want to poke holes in your story, certainly. Or, prey upon our susceptibility to not trust journalism.
I'm totally into people trying to poke holes. A few people have said to me, "Are you going to sue this website?" because they said I was smoking drugs and partying while on the shoot. And I'm not going to sue them, that didn't happen. In my mind, if it's all out there, that's the joy of the internet. People can untangle this information and decide what they want to think about it.
And you know what you did is all true.
If you've got the truth on your side, it kind of makes things much easier.]]>
Writer/director Rob Burnett achieves something very special with his new film, "The Fundamentals of Caring." For one, its tale of a newly-trained, emotionally traumatized caregiver (Paul Rudd) taking care of a sarcastic introvert with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (Craig Roberts) answers to its characters' struggles with a refreshing, dark sense of humor. Second, their no-holds-barred repartee makes the road movie concept fun again, as it features the two venturing out to see Americana, while encountering other wandering souls (one played by Selena Gomez) along the way. Burnett's adaptation of Jonathan Evison's novel "The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving" was a great surprise at Sundance 2016 and should continue to be when released via Netflix this Friday, especially as viewers meet a familiar story that stands out for its inviting perspective with gallows humor.
"The Fundamentals of Caring" is Burnett's second film after 2012's "We Made a Movie," which came after years of being a head writer on "Late Show with David Letterman." As for Rudd, one of the most charismatic actors in films ranging from David Wain or Judd Apatow comedies to "Ant-Man," he was recently a punchline in a beer commercial featuring Amy Schumer and Seth Rogen, where they briefly diverged from marketing to say the truth: "Everybody loves Paul Rudd."
RogerEbert.com spoke with Rudd and Burnett about their film, the unique tone it brings to a familiar story, an extended scene featuring Rudd improvising with a Slim Jim, and much more.
Did either of you have interest in the road movie before? Or were you weary of it?
ROB BURNETT: I definitely was weary of it, for a couple of reasons. I think the road movie is challenging because one, production wise it's just hard. It was one of the directors I admire, Alexander Payne, who said, "I'm tired of working on road movies." They're just hard, in that way. And for a small movie it adds budget and it's just challenging from a physical production standpoint. And the other side is that we have seen a lot of road movies. So the test for me was, how could we take something that had clearly been done before and make it funny and entertaining and worthwhile?
PAUL RUDD: There are lots of things that you can go down the list and say, "Oh, these are cliches, we've seen this before, just hits every checkpoint." All of that takes a secondary status for me if I'm reading something and I just really like the characters. If I think it's funny, or I think it's moving, or I think what they're talking about is interesting and what they're dealing with is interesting, I don't really think too hard about it. I don't worry that it's a road movie, per se. I don't even think about what genre it might fit into. That stuff is of less importance to me.
Are there certain genres that you just don't want to touch?
PR: I don't really think in terms of genre, I think in terms of story and character. To me some of the funniest movies would be probably categorized in the dramatic genre, and likewise some of the most dramatic films, or films that have the most dramatic moments, are in comedies. Certainly as an actor, I want to try different things. "Ant-Man" was a genre, I guess, that I hadn't really tackled before. I'm going to be doing a science fiction film down the road, and that's not something that I've really done yet, but I don't really think in those terms. It's all about the character, really.
What truth did this story have for both of you guys, Rob when you were writing it, and Paul when you were performing and connecting with it?
RB: I think for me, when I bought the rights for this beautiful book by Jonathan Evison, there was another movie coming out at that moment, "The Intouchables," which was a beautiful movie.
PR: You know who's great in that? Andy Garcia. [Laughs]
RB: I rushed to the theater to see it, because that movie obviates with this one. But one of the things that attracted me to this particular story is that the typical version is that the irascible caregiver comes and breathes life back into the ill or the injured. And in this story, Paul's character is every bit as injured or more so as Craig's character. And neither of them have any particular interest in bringing each other back to life. They just happen to bond based on their senses of humor if nothing else. And almost in spite of themselves they manage to go from not living to living just a little bit. Because the other aspect of this that I enjoyed the challenge of was that these guys would never be healed. I knew going in that this movie was never going to be something where in the end, everyone's fine. And yet the movie gets pretty big laughs from audiences. It's an interesting mix of genres that I think was worth a try.
PR: The thing that I was drawn to was the gallows humor. That these two guys who were dealing with this trauma and pain could somehow find moments of contentment or humor in their situations and alleviate just a little sadness, even for a little bit, and help each other. I like that, I liked that idea.
That sense of humor feels unique for this type of film. How important is that sense of humor, to laugh with the darkness in our lives?
PR: For me, it's just as important in life. Gallows humor and the humor of it all, if this movie was going to work, I knew that was the thing that was going to make it work, it was the most important thing to me. I feel the same way about life. Humor is the most important thing in life. It trumps everything else and it's the only thing that helps me deal with everything else.
RB: I think Paul and I share a point of view on this. Life inherently ... you're born and you're going to die, that's kind of the premise of it.
PR: Wait—what?!
RB: The thing that I said to Paul in our very first meeting is that a lot of movies of this tone that I've seen, great movies, the comedy is delightful and amusing, but it's not really funny. And I thought, what if, together, we could do something that kept to this tone? This movie isn't "The Hangover" all of the sudden, it's not that tone with giant set pieces and all that. But what if we could do a movie with character and human reality that actually made audiences laugh out loud? I thought that would be kind of good, and of course when you're doing that, then all of the drama lands hard because your people are laughing. That's the hope.
When it came to the rapport between you and Craig, were a lot of the jokes scripted or improvised?
PR: I never really know exactly how it goes. There's some improvisation that we would do, we'd think of something and I think we filmed some long improvisations that are not in the [movie]. But it was scripted. The script was hilarious.
RB: That was Paul!
PR: I felt like it was all there. Sometimes you read a script and it's like, "You'll improv and this is just a blueprint of what the scene could be," and that's never a good sign. And it's never encouraging as an actor to take that on, really. This was a film that I felt that from soup-to-nuts you don't have to improvise anything, and the dialogue is strong and the subtext is so clear that we could just do the script as written. That being said, there were certainly moments when we would play around with it or start to improvise once we did a version of the script, and some of those scenes and some of those lines made the movie.
Paul, you have a scene once the journey gets started where you're just riffing with a Slim Jim. It's a very David Wain-esque moment.
RB: In the script, that was supposed to be just Paul eating a Slim Jim orgasmically in a way. Craig and Paul began doing that and my real fear was the crew was laughing too hard and we wouldn't be able to put it in the movie.
PR: But my fear was that it was going to make the movie [laughs]. Some of those things you do to loosen, I'll do it just to loosen myself up to just get myself out of my head as far as dialogue. When you're playing around and improvising like that, sometimes it isn't the actor's hope that everything you do in the improv makes the movie, you can do it as an exercise to loosen it up an then find the one joke or the one lien that works within the scene or even the character. My fear sometimes is that if I go on a tangent and it doesn't belong with the character or it doesn't belong with the movie ... that's never the intention. That scene in particular was early in the shoot, and it was a fun one to do, because I think it established even a fun rapport between Craig and me, and I think that we locked in pretty quickly after that as far as having a simpatico sensibility towards the material and how we would approach it. I think it was always there, we didn't have any deep conversations like "What do you think the tone is?" I felt like we knew what it was and how we wanted to kind of sell it so that it made sense.
There are scenes where this film has its gravity and its sadness. What was most important for you guys to get right about that traumatic elements of Paul's character, so that the rest could build upon it?
RB: This was really difficult, and one of the hard parts in the adaptation. You kind of feel like you're walking around someone's perfectly furnished home and why should you be touching anything? And at some point, you give over and say, "I've got to make this my home in some way," and in keeping the spirit of what exists, the book is written from Ben's first person. So the author has the luxury and the challenge of being able to write long internal monologues with Ben and dissecting the situation and so forth. A long period of the two of them bonding and the two of them on the road, I had to make hard choices and a kind of strategy to point towards something being deeply wrong with this character, and that they bond relatively quickly as well in a montage, but you could write an entire movie about the first act. These are kind of the choices that you make and kind of go with when you're taking one art form and putting it into a different art form.
That's another area where, I'd written a bunch of stuff, but if you don't have the chemistry between Craig and Paul, you just have nothing. And if you watch the two of them in that, I knew early on when we were shooting this, we just rolled on a lot of that. I knew that it would be visual, all of the stuff in the bathroom montage in the beginning. Boy, it was hard. There was a lot of great, funny stuff that came out. But what I think is really interesting in that montage is a very interesting arc in Ben there that Paul pulls off very effortlessly with really no dialogue. In addition to plotting those characters, we have to move him from being very tentative around Trevor; in the beginning he is jumping through all of the hoops, and in the end he is right with him and ignoring him at times when Craig is trying to do all that stuff. In a beautiful bit of shorthand, Paul does a thing where he's cleaning Craig in the bathroom, and it's the most subtle thing where he spins the toilet paper. When you're looking for efficiency, the idea of, in this minute 40 seconds of stuff, the guy has gone from, "I don't know how put this guy on the toilet" to "I'm spinning toilet paper effortlessly," is very efficient.
PR: I don't know what you're talking about!
Paul, do you see yourself evolving into a more dramatic presence or getting more comfortable with stuff? This movie has moments we haven't seen before from you.
PR: I never thought of myself as a comedic actor. I didn't go to Second City, that's not my background, I'm not a comic, I studied theater and my career when I started was a lot of dramatic stuff. I think I might be trying to do some things that I haven't done in a while in different ways, but I think maybe my own ... I don't know if ignorance is the right word, but I don't think I've viewed myself in the same way that everyone else has based on some of the movies I've done. The last few movies that I've done just happen to be comedies, but I don't differentiate too much as I think maybe some other people. I would like to do some other things that would not be considered comedies.
I am curious about this science fiction thing.
PR: Yes, I'm just as curious as you.
Kartemquin and Gordon Quinn are national treasures. The work they have been doing on behalf of this nation for fifty years helps make it great. These are not just films. They are capsules of humanity that touch hearts and change minds. Matt Fagerholm's interview with Gordon Quinn illustrates why he is still going strong. Join us in celebrating them on June 24th in Chicago. Click here for tickets.—Chaz Ebert
WHEN I SAW Joanna Rudnick's documentary short, "On Beauty," at the Midwest Independent Film Festival last year, I hailed it as "a masterful example of how cinema can serve as a humanizing force in the world." The same could be said of every single film made by Kartemquin Films over its extraordinary half-century-long legacy. This Chicago-based, non-profit production company has made such vital documentaries as Steve James' Oscar-nominated "Hoop Dreams" (1994), David E. Simpson's riveting look at the complexities of conservation, "Milking the Rhino" (2008), Bill Siegel's definitive portrait of the titular boxing legend, "The Trials of Muhammad Ali" (2013), and last year's essential six-part series on our nation's underpaid citizens, "Hard Earned," which was broadcast on Al Jazzera America. A vital creative force behind all of these projects is Kartemquin's co-founder and Artistic Director, Gordon Quinn, recipient of the International Documentary Association's 2015 Career Achievement Award, as well as CIMMfest's 2016 BAADASSSSS Award.
A week prior to Kartemquin's 50th Anniversary Gala scheduled for Friday, June 24th, Quinn spoke with RogerEbert.com about his company's evolving identity, its triumphant battle over fair use rights and the ways in which cinema can create social change.
Reflecting on Kartemquin's legacy, it appears that the Vietnam War played a crucial role in forging the company's signature fusion of art and activism.
You're definitely on the right track. The three founders—Gerald Temaner, Stan Karter and myself—all came out of the University of Chicago. We were very excited by the early vérité films that we had seen. When I saw Richard Leacock and Joyce Chopra's "Happy Mother's Day," I realized that was the kind of film I wanted to make. There was no film production at the University of Chicago back then, and we had a fairly intellectual take on things. We thought that we could begin making films in conjunction with the university, and that never really worked out. Our idea of holding a mirror up to society was detailed in our paper, "Cinematic Social Inquiry." When you show a film, everything that was in the image you recorded is still there, and people will see things in them that you never saw. We purposely made our first film, "Home For Life," in a very well-run home for the aged, because we felt that if you look at a good institution, you will see what the larger social problems are, rather than merely looking at the specific scandals at the location. The film was very successful, but it was used primarily within the nursing home industry to illustrate how to make the institutions better.
As you said, it was the 60s, and there was a lot of social activism at the time. We had been involved in the civil-rights movement, and that's where we initially got politicized. I'm working on a project now that my colleagues and I had filmed back when we were students, "'63 Boycott," before Kartemquin was created. When we realized things weren't going to happen with the university, we moved to a building in Lincoln Park that a whole bunch of us had bought together, and people started coming around. Jenny Rohrer and Sue Davenport had started a film at Columbia College and they were from the Women's Liberation Union and the Women's Health Movement. They were making a film about the struggle to save the Chicago Maternity Center, which was in danger of being closed down, so they brought that to me. By then, Jerry Blumenthal, who is also one of the founders, had joined us, as did Richard Schmiechen, who went on to produce "The Times of Harvey Milk." So we had a mixture of people. Some had been doing union organizing or were teachers. Many of them were connected with various movements, particularly the women's movement. We also had people like Richard who came with an actual film background, and we sort of morphed into the collective.
The early films such as "Inquiring Nuns," "Marco," and even "Thumbs Down" were made with a purist vérité approach and had a fairly intellectual and academic frame. We were trying to make social change, and very early on, we began to realize that if you're not looking at power relationships, you're not really understanding what's happening in the people's lives that you are portraying. The power may be outside of the frame of what you're filming. That led to pictures like "The Chicago Maternity Center Story" and the labor films we did, particularly "The Last Pullman Car," where you'll see they have narration and a driving analytical power to them. We wanted those films to be useful to people. If you're going to fight one of these battles to save an institution that is serving people's needs, you have to understand the forces that you are up against. In the case of the Maternity Center film, you have to understand the medical industrial complex that is pulling the strings in making the decisions.
Beyond all the facts and statistics, what resonates above all in a Kartemquin Film is the intimate connection viewers make with the characters.
After the collective period dissipated at the end of the '70s, we continued to make films about union struggles, but we were also trying to make a living. We were making nuts and bolts films for unions, as well as corporate videos in order to keep afloat, yet we had always been a place where people would come with a project and a real passion for what they were doing. One day, these two tall guys [Steve James and Frederick Marx] came into Kartemquin with the idea for a film called "Hoop Dreams," and very quickly they linked up with Peter Gilbert, who was already associated with Kartemquin and a total basketball nut. In many ways, the film took us back to our roots. A lot of people saw "Hoop Dreams" who would never watch a film about a social problem or an inner-city family. But it was about sports and about coming of age. That film inspired us to return to making vérité films.
One of the best things that we ever did was "The New Americans," a terrific seven-hour series. Steve James, Peter Gilbert and I knew that immigration was heating up as an issue. Everyone was arguing about immigrants, but we wanted to actually tell their stories. It was important for us to show people in their home country before they came to America, and to not just show them sitting there with their bags packed. In the Palestinian story, the woman that we followed was finishing college in east Jerusalem and was engaged to a guy in Chicago. By starting her story in Jerusalem, you would really get a sense of what she was leaving behind. At the same time, American viewers would be drawn into a world where they'd have to figure out the culture, and then when the immigrants come into the U.S., they'd be much more empathetic with their position as an outsider.
At Kartemquin, we don't have the money to fund anything, but we're a collegial place for people to work in a creative atmosphere and receive help in developing their projects. We also help with fundraising and can give filmmakers advice and sometimes introduce them to potential funders. We're always looking for people that want to collaborate with us. A film like "The Homestretch," which deals with homeless youth in Chicago, is a perfect example of that. It was a real collaboration with the filmmakers.
Cultivating a network of collaborators has certainly been a key part of Kartemquin's legacy. When I interviewed one of your former interns, Rebecca Parrish, she told me about the guidance you provided her during the production of her feature debut, "Radical Grace." She referred to you as a "documentary Buddha."
We have a new tagline at Kartemquin: "We make documentary films and documentary filmmakers." We're producing the next generation here and that's an important part of our mission. Now we have transformed ourselves into a full-blown media arts organization. Chaz Ebert has been very supportive of what we've been doing over the last few years and has come to speak at our events. We also have a very robust intern program, and we'll often have 70 applications for six slots. Each week, the interns get a two-hour workshop on everything from cameras, sound, editing, producing and budgeting to outreach and engagement. I will talk to them about fair use, intellectual property or documentary ethics, depending on what their backgrounds are. Many of the interns wind up working here. Justine Nagan, who now works at POV, started here as an intern. We also have KTQ Labs, which is a monthly program where anybody can come in and get their film critiqued by the Kartemquin creative team. It's a chance for them to show a work-in-progress in a very constructive but pull-no-punches kind of atmosphere.
We are currently in our third year of the Diverse Voices in Docs program, which we do in conjunction with the Community Film Workshop on the South Side. It takes place on one Saturday per month for over six months, so working people can come to it, and it's for minority filmmakers who have probably gone to film school or have already made a film. It's not a beginner's workshop. When we were adapting the program to suit the students' particular needs, we realized that what they needed, above all, was an understanding of how to get a film funded and how to pitch it. We work with them on their demo reels, on their proposals and their log lines, and everything they need in order to show people that their film in development is worthy of the necessary money. At the end of that program, they will pitch their film to actual funders, some of whom got to come in from ITVS. So now, Kartemquin is a media arts organization that has these various missions at different levels of trying to develop filmmakers, but also a place where filmmakers are welcome to come in and collaborate.
The next two films following your debut, "Home For Life," were 1968's "Thumbs Down" and "Inquiring Nuns," both featuring people of faith in the city.
We were commissioned by the Catholic Adult Education Center to do a series of films that would get people in Catholic churches all across the country talking about what was then called the "generation gap." "Thumbs Down" was about a youth group in a Catholic parish on the northwest side of Chicago where the firemen and the policemen are. It was kind of a conservative neighborhood, but these kids were being influenced by the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement, and the film builds up to the youth mass held by these students. Gerald and I were a couple of nice Jewish boys who were interested in vérité filmmaking, and we decided that we would just convince these guys that our approach was what they needed. "Inquiring Nuns" is really an homage to the scene in Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's "Chronicle of a Summer" where two women go around, asking people if they are happy. That inspired us to have two nuns asking people that same question on the streets of Chicago. The most difficult part about that film was finding the two nuns. We talked to a lot of nuns in order to find the right two that we felt had the potential to be really good interviewers, and they were terrific.
"Radical Grace" seems to echo the essence of those pictures, in how it uncovers a little-seen, more progressive side of the church.
Exactly, these were progressive Catholics, and the people who were funding us were progressive Catholics as well. Neither of the women who were in the film are nuns anymore. They left the order a long time ago but those social values remained a central part of their lives. On the DVD, we include an interview with the nuns 40 years later. One went on to work in education, and the other was in social work. I don't think you could make the film now. If people were approached by a pair of nuns and a cameraman today, they would think that it's a put-on from Jay Leno or Saturday Night Live. No one would take it seriously. But in 1968, the nuns were taken for precisely who they were and people responded to them sincerely.
The themes of race and gentrification in your films "Winnie Wright, Age 11" and "Now We Live On Clifton" are as relevant today as they were in 1974.
The irony is that, as relevant as those film are today, they no longer reflect the neighborhoods in which they are set. "Now We Live On Clifton" took place over by DePaul when it was being gentrified, and "Winnie Wright, Age 11" is near Marquette Park. We made those films at the height of the collective. We got a little grant and we wanted to make films about white working class kids growing up in urban environments. At that time, everyone thought of the inner city as being comprised of black neighborhoods, and we wanted to show that there are white working class kids growing up in the city. We weren't looking for the racists, we were looking for kids who had black friends and who were progressive. Our goal was to look at race and gentrification through the eyes of kids, and what it means to kids when their neighborhood starts to change.
Since you've played multiple roles on various documentaries, what would you consider your favorite part of the filmmaking process?
It's complicated since I've done virtually everything. I began doing sound, and then I was an assistant editor for several years before "Home For Life." I continued to make my living as an editor for a few years after that, but what I found was that if you look at those early films, you'll see I wasn't very good at editing my own footage. By the time we got to "Golub," Jerry was really becoming our editor. I taught him editing, and then gradually sort of phased myself out as an editor, particularly on my own films, because of my inability to be brutal with my own footage. You have to be willing to take a great shot and cut it up into little pieces. But I love being out in the field shooting, and still do some of that. I also enjoy being in the editing room with the filmmakers that we're working with, and really getting into the nitty gritty of storytelling and structure. Fundraising has always been a painful process.
What inspired you to make two films about the artist Leon Golub, first in 1988 and then in 2004?
Jerry Blumenthal, Judy Hoffman and I made a film about this artist, who came out of Chicago but was based in New York. The film was really good, and we became friends with Leon and stayed in touch with him. Quite a few years later when he was considerably older and facing issues of mortality, Jerry really drove the idea of a follow-up project that revisited Leon and saw how his work had evolved. It was going to be a standalone half-hour film, and at a certain point we realized that it would actually be much more interesting to see the two films together. We shortened the new footage a bit and added a title that reads "13 years later." Then we released it as a new film and showed it in festivals and on TV. Everyone treated it like a new film, which was fine with us.
Golub often portrayed imagery that was culled from the news, immortalizing real-life events much like a documentarian does.
Right, and of course we use tons and tons of images from the news and other sources in that film. We ended up getting involved in the fair use battle, and ultimately won our fair use rights back. Over the years, Kartemquin has been engaged in media advocacy, standing up for our field and fighting battles that are going to affect everyone in our field. We were the midwest representative in the group that lobbied for ITVS. We made "Golub" before we had won our fair use rights back, so we were shooting images crudely off a video screen and you could see the scan lines. Jerry and I figured that since we're talking about an artist using images that are out there in the world, the scan lines totally work since we don't want that footage to look like everything else that we had shot. That's how we released the film and that's how it was broadcast. When we made the DVD and the film got digitized, the scan lines were not as pronounced. I actually liked it better when you could clearly see the big black line moving through the frame. No one ever bothered us about the footage partly because it was so transformed by what we had done.
But with "Hoop Dreams," we had to license "Happy Birthday" when the family sings "Happy Birthday" to the boy. In the scene where William [Gates] is having his knee operated on, there is Muzak coming out of the speakers in the hospital, and we had to license that music too, not because we thought we had to. We had to because of the gatekeepers: the broadcasters, theatrical distributors and insurance people. They were like, "Everything needs to be licensed." Now we have essentially won our fair use rights back by getting our field organized under the leadership of Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi from American University, who published the Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practice in Fair Use.
The big rights holders never sue you because they would lose and it would set a bad precedent, but they threaten everybody. You get a letter from Sony or Disney and you go, "I can't stand up against them," but now we can because the field has spoken and published this statement. We're not saying that everything is okay, we're saying that we're rights holders too and that we're on both sides of this issue. Peter, Pat and a core group of us spent years speaking at lawyer conventions, explaining fair use and how it was being taught wrong in school. Not only did we get our fair use claims broadcast, we also get insurance for it. So it's been a huge sea change in terms of what documentary filmmakers can do. It was there in the law all along, but people were intimidated from asserting their rights. A lot can change when you stand up together as a group.
I know many colleagues who are facing claims regarding their video essays on YouTube.
That's absolutely fair use. Film criticism is one of your strongest uses. Everyone has followed in our suit. There's one for poetry, one for visual artists, one for digital media, even one for dance archives. If people are taking down your videos, you have to push back, and by pushing back as a class of people, we were able to make them understand that. Make the gatekeepers understand that you're not going to be intimidated.
What was it like collaborating with a journalist, Chicago Tribune jazz critic Howard Reich, on the film "Prisoner of Her Past"?
We did two projects in which the Tribune was involved. Steve James and Peter Gilbert's film about the death penalty, "At the Death House Door," was based on Tribune stories and the reporters appear in the film. "Prisoner of Her Past" emerged from a meeting between John Callaway and Howard Reich, who had written these articles about his mother, a childhood Holocaust survivor. Howard had approached WTTW with the material, and John told him that he should really talk to Kartemquin and to me. I had never been interested in doing a film about the Holocaust, but Howard's story of his mother's post-traumatic stress and survival during the war was enough to motivate me to do the film. In her old age, Howard's mother was thinking that people were trying to kill her. She had to be in an institution and she ran away while reliving these traumatic experiences she had as a young girl. We went back to Ukraine, to the village where she had grown up and found her house.
I wanted to give the film a contemporary frame. Howard and I were looking for a story set in a place like Sudan, where children were working through their trauma after having experienced something horrible. Then I got a call from Howard, who was in New Orleans covering the post-Katrina impact on the local jazz community. He ran into a whole team of psychiatrists who had been working with traumatized school kids from Katrina. I said, "Say no more, we're on our way." It turned out that we didn't have to go to a foreign country in order to find traumatized children. The story was basically around the corner.
One of my favorite Kartemquin filmmakers is Maria Finitzo, who made "5 Girls."
Maria Finitzo has a new film out called "In the Game," and it's really good. Not only is it about the importance of team sports in young women's lives, it's about a regular Chicago high school—the kind of school they want to close. Charter schools are being built all around this institution that has deep roots in the community. Everyone is arguing these days about schools and test scores, and we wanted to actually look inside one of these schools and spend time with the people that work there and are enrolled there. Let's spend a couple of years there and see the impact that this kind of school is having on kids' lives.
That film is especially vital at a time when our own governor is referring to Chicago's schools as "crumbling prisons."
Someone challenged him once and asked, "Well, could you be more specific? Can you mention a school that you have actually been in?" And he couldn't. He's a joke.
Another timely Kartemquin title is Brad Lichtenstein's "As Goes Janesville," in which Wisconsin emerges as a microcosm for the entire country. Lichtenstein told me that he wanted to give viewers the opportunity to connect with characters whose beliefs may be different from their own.
I don't think we, as filmmakers, are ever objective. You point the camera one way rather than another way and you've created a point of view. If you're filming a demonstration and you're standing behind the police lines, that is a point of view. If you're standing with the demonstrators, you've got a different view of what you're seeing. I don't think any of us really claim to be objective. The point is that you want to get the different sides of the story and you want to be fair to people. Here is a wonderful example from another one of Maria's films, "Terra Incognita," about stem cell research. With all this controversy about the issue, we really wanted to show the other side in a way that was fair rather than demeaning.
Maria went to film a discussion about stem cell research at a church where adults were sitting in kids' desks while being preached at. We couldn't use the footage because they looked absolutely ridiculous. So we kept trying to find a way to show the other side with respect and basically failed. The priest that we ultimately got an interview with was more of a professional spokesman and he was a lunatic. He compared killing embryos to slavery. Sometimes it's really hard. Steve is a master at finding a way to take a balanced view. The central character in "At the Death House Door" had presided over 99 executions, and then realized that the death penalty was wrong. He told us, "Look, I'm to the right of Attila the Hun. I'm a very conservative guy." His perspective provided a way in for people who may not normally be sympathetic to the film's subject.
This again illustrates Kartemquin's uncanny ability to break through societal barriers and find the humanity within any given topic.
You have to go where the story takes you. In the case of "Happy Mother's Day," the filmmakers had been sent to North Dakota to make a film about the birth of quintuplets. In the '60s, that was international news, since it was before fertility drugs. What they found was a very quiet farm wife who the town was trying to turn into a movie star. The town fathers were like, "This is going to put us on the map, and all these tourists will come," while the wife and her husband were like, "We just want to go back to our real life." That's what the film is about, and the filmmakers obviously hadn't been sent there to capture that story. PET Milk was behind the film, and when they saw it, they were horrified. Footage ended up being cut from the film prior to it being broadcast.
One of our core values at Kartemquin is that when we go into a situation, we must observe what's happening there. "Stevie" is a great example of that. We did not set out to make a film that was a portrait of a troubled young man who molested his niece. It hadn't happened when we started making the film, it happened while we were making it. Another example would be the most recent film I directed [with Bob Hercules], "A Good Man." It's about Bill T. Jones, the most important modern dance choreographer in America today. He's African-American and Lincoln is his hero. As he's working with Janet Wong, his associate artistic director, on creating a piece in honor of Lincoln's Bicentennial, they discover texts in which the president voiced racist beliefs about black people not being equal. Bill is like, "Lincoln said that?" You can't prepare for moments like that. You may have strategies about what you might find, but sometimes the story goes somewhere you never expected it to, and it becomes a different movie.Kartemquin Films' 50th Anniversary Gala will be held on Friday, June 24th, in Chicago. For information and tickets, visit the official Kartemquin site. Click here for highlights of various upcoming anniversary events. ]]>
Veteran director Brian De Palma is the subject of the new documentary "De Palma," a film by directors Jake Paltrow and Noah Baumbach that opens Friday. We spoke to him about his career in movies, the controversy over his depiction of violence and women, the question of whether TV is in the new cinema, and whether any great popular art has been made in the superhero movie genre.
Matt Zoller Seitz: What made you decide to participate in this documentary? I'm sure you get a million requests to do very long interviews.
Brian De Palma: Well, it didn't start as a documentary. It sort of evolved because of the many dinners that [Baumbach and Paltrow and I] had together, talking about the kinds of things that directors talk about at dinner, in relationship to the movies they've made. And Noah and Jake were interested in a new digital camera, so they bought it, and they thought it might be interesting to record some of the stories I had told them over dinner.
So we went back to Jake's apartment, and Jake operated the camera and Noah did the sound and they just basically asked me questions, recounting things that had had happened to me throughout my career.
I think they did a very good job illustrating what I was talking about. I did those interviews over five years ago, the footage sat around for a couple of years while [Jake and Noah] were making movies. And then they had some time to get back to illustrating what I was talking about, and did kind of a remarkable job. I don't know if it's good because I'm pretty honest about what happened to me, and I guess it's very instructive to people getting involved in making movies, in Hollywood and elsewhere.
In the film, you talk a lot about the reception that different films of yours received, and also how well you thought they worked as movies, how good you thought they were. And two of the films that you seemed particularly proud of were "Casualties of War" and "Carlito's Way." I was heartened to hear that you think those movies are as good as many of your fans do, even though they weren't necessarily your biggest hits.
Well, "Casualties of War" took, I don't know, a decade to get made. I read the story in the '60s and was later given the option to develop that turned around, and an option to develop that turned around. And it was only after the success of "The Untouchables" that I was finally able to get control of the property. It was the best story, it illustrated a tragedy in the Vietnam war, and I was very fortunate to have a very talented screenwriter, David Rabe, who also had been fascinated by this story that he had read in The New Yorker, as I had, 20 years earlier.
And I had a lot of power because I was coming off a huge hit, and we were able to put together this cast, and because Dawn Steel, who had left Paramount and gone over to Columbia, wanted a prestige movie, we were able to get a studio to finance it, and made a very good movie about the Vietnam War. Unfortunately, it was not well received, it was maybe too late. There had been many Vietnam movies, and it was a great personal tragedy for me, because I spent a long time trying to get it made.
And "Carlito's Way" was again, treated like another Al Pacino gangster movie kind of business. But it was really a great script, based on two novels written by Edwin Torres. Again, at the time it came out, not much attention was paid to it, though I thought it was a very skillfully made movie from a very good script.
You talk a little bit in the documentary about the controversy that greeted some of your films—in particular, the idea that you like to put women in jeopardy. You talk about how it's just more interesting for you to see women in jeopardy because they're more physically vulnerable than men. I wonder if you think that some of your films that were criticized as sexist on those grounds, like "Dressed to Kill" or "Body Double," could be made today, released today, with people being so much more sensitive to things like that?
Oh, I don't know. They make a lot more violence in terms of torture porn, putting women in excruciatingly painful situations. I just was making those movies when women's liberation movement was at its political peak, and they focused on violence in particular. It's a kind of basic element of the genre, and just because the political atmosphere changes doesn't make it any more valid.
I recently saw "Blow Out" again, on a big screen, at Roger Ebert's Film Festival, and Nancy Allen was there, and I was struck by the John Lithgow character—not just how sadistic he was, but the really unsettling way that you portray him. He really gets off on terrorizing women. The movie doesn't, though; the movie is appalled by him, I think. You have a lot of men in your movies who are macho, who are very macho, who are very often military, or they're cops, or they're a hyper-masculine sort of role model, and you seem really, really disgusted by their conditioning, by their behavior. Is part of your movies kind of a critique of the sorts of masculinity that other movies celebrate?
I don't know. I don't know if you can make a sweeping statement about these types of characters. John Lithgow's character was very much based on G. Gordon Liddy. That was a very specific reference point, and I don't think I ever had something quite like that again in a movie.
But in "Casualties of War" and some of the characters in "Carlito's Way" and certainly in "Scarface" you see a kind of a ridiculousness to machismo.
They're gangster movies; they're war movies! Movies like that tend to be very masculine.
But you don't glamorize them, even though you sometimes find them funny or horrible. I was just curious about that, because I have read a lot about your work and have seen a lot of critiques of the kinds of stories you tell, and that's one aspect I've always wondered about: your attitude about machismo, which feels like it's related to the way men terrorize women. You seem like somebody who is maybe not a political filmmaker in a way that some filmmakers are, but I wonder, could there be a political aspect to the way that you portray men and women?
It all came from the genre! You know? I don't think there's any through line, basically. I'm basically interpreting the material.
The movie opens with Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and returns to Hitchcock, many, many times throughout its run. You talk about yourself as a filmmaker who speaks in Hitchcock's vocabulary, and you seem to wonder why more people don't.
It seems quite obvious to me, but I studied Hitchcock's movies and some of his techniques and vocabulary because they're so cinematic! He had some excellent ideas, whether it be with "Rear Window," of a guy watching somebody across the yard in the apartment, or the crop duster in "North by Northwest." These are stunningly visual ideas. These types of things excited him because they're so cinematic. And a lot of that is sort of banished is present day filmmaking, because a lot of stuff is driven by dialogue scenes, and the screens have gotten smaller. This kind of visual storytelling has kind of gone out of style.
Do you think that it's harder for people like you, of your generation or your sensibility, to get well-budgeted personal films made in the system, than it was when you were starting out, or even than it was five years ago?
Well, it depends on what film you're going to make. If it just requires a couple of people in live locations, and you don't require too many elaborate visual sequences, sure, it's a lot easier to make movies like that now, because you need [a lot of] equipment, and what you're shooting on is so inexpensive. But it might be harder if you're going to make elaborate visual sequences, and you need all that stuff that larger budget movies give you.
Have you thought of going to television? Does that interest you?
No. I worked on a project once for HBO but it didn't work out.
There have been people in the industry who have made rather extravagant claims for television, and said things like "television is the new cinema." What do you think about that?
Television is not cinematic. It's shots of people talking to each other.
Is it possible that the kind of language you define as cinematic could exist on a smaller screen, though? Has it ever?
It would be difficult, because television is basically controlled by the producers and the writers. The directors are brought in to a series or a ten-part story, and the template has already been set. It's shot very quickly, and you don't have the time for sort of elaborate sequences, you can only shoot so many pages a day, the characters are all set, the story lines are all plotted out for the next four or five years, it's like the old studio system.
Is there a movie of yours that you feel has still not gotten its due, that has still not been discovered or appreciated in a way that you would like?
Well, it's hard to say. The way they land, where you see them after they have been initially been, really—a lot of my movies appear in retrospectives and on television. So: which ones appear over and over again? It's "The Untouchables" that seems to be playing all of the time somewhere. That's basing the power on being seen a lot, and enough movies seem to be confidently being viewed in one form or another.
It almost sounds like you're saying the audience makes its choice, and you're OK with it?
A movie is a work of art. It either exists and people keep looking at it, or it vanishes. So, I have very little to do with it, and a movie has basically got to find its own way. And many of my movies, people are still looking at 30 or 40 years later, so I guess there's some value in it, because they've existed through the ages.
Do you still feel like a low-budget filmmaker sometimes? You've made some very big productions but the way you talk about them, I don't necessarily see money playing a whole lot of role into the difficulties you face creatively.
Well, the bigger the budgets, the more meetings you have. And if you have a very small budget you have a lot of control, and you don't have any meetings. So, it depends on the material and what you need in order to make the story effective.
Are you actively working on a movie now, or more than one movie?
I am developing material, and you get to an experience where you've done the script and it's in pretty good shape, and you go out and try to get a cast and then you try to get it financed.
What was the first scene that you directed where you were 100% happy with every aspect of it?
I don't think you evaluate your work that way. You try to do the best you can under the circumstances it's intended with. And if you're fortunate, and if everything is clicking that day, you might come up with something remarkable. I can't think of many instances where I left the playing field and not accomplishing what I set out to do.
Do you think that there's anybody out there working in the suspense or thriller vein whose work is really top-notch? Somebody who is new, who has come along in the last five or ten years?
Nothing springs to mind.
Do you go to the movies a lot?
I go to film festivals and see movies, and I watch a lot of stuff on TCM, and I'm exploring an actor that I might think might be right for something I'm working on, I go and look at all their movies.
Do you write for particular actors?
Well, when I was doing for "Dressed to Kill" and "Blow Out," I wrote those girl parts for Nancy. And when I did "Sisters" I wrote the parts for Margot [Kidder] and Jennifer [Salt].
What do you think is the most useful advice you can give an actor who wants to act for the camera, to be a movie actor as opposed to a stage actor?
It's very difficult, because actors are all trained very differently. And it's difficult to get a handle on what exactly works on film. A lot of the times, because so much of film is a cult of personality, I don't think anybody had to give Steve McQueen any acting concepts, he was just a presence. And a lot of that works in cinema, when you crowd material around a certain movie star.
But you have to be very patient and loving with your actors, because they're putting everything on the line, and you have to try to get everything out of the way to not hurt their performances or distract them.
Your films are often remarked upon as examples of extraordinary control over image and sound, but throughout this documentary you also talk about the things that are not in your control: when a movie is shot, how much of a budget you get or don't get, things that go wrong, actors that maybe you're stuck with even if you know that they're not quite right for the part. Do you think there's some truth to this idea that part of what a director does is preside over accidents? Or at least manage things that aren't in their control?
Well you have to be incredibly prepared, because you have to have a plan when you go to shoot. But things happen: the weather, how the actor feels, what somebody ate the night before. You have to be aware and you have to be able to improvise, depending on what is happening in the moment.
There's nothing like preparation for dealing with situations like that, so that you can shift from one thing to another painlessly.
Can you give me an example from your movies of something not going to plan, that satisfied you? Where you didn't get to do what you wanted to do, but you still liked the result?
For "The Fury," there was a very complicated panning shot that Carrie [Snodgrass] didn't want to do, because she had to hit certain marks for it to work. She just couldn't get her head around why she had to be at a certain place at a certain time, because it didn't seem natural to her. So I had to sort of carefully adjust the shot to something that she understood in order to make it work, so that what I wanted to do and what she wanted to do was in harmony. And it all worked out fine. And she didn't quite understand it until she saw the rushes.
The great disadvantage of directors of my generation, as opposed to directors working in the studio system, is that you don't get to direct as many movies as they did. They were under contract, they were directing 52 weeks out of the year. So we think about what we're doing and maybe get our chance out and do it once a year, if we're lucky. Sometimes many years pass before you are directing [again]. You can learn a tremendous amount by just practicing your craft. And obviously the great directors of the generations before, either Hitchcock, Ford or Hawks, directed a tremendous number of pictures, nowhere near the number that we'll ever get a chance to do.
Are there moments in which you wish you were directing in the 1930s or 40s, where you'd have that opportunity you describe, to direct three of four films a year, under contract?
I don't know. It was a different time and a different system. I'm sure there are directors that are doing hour-long television series that are directing all of the time, too. And the directors of the television generation that came before I did, who did a lot of television, had a lot of experience in directing live television shows, like Sidney Lumet. So, it's hard for me to say.
I just know that you should practice your craft as much as possible, and not just be sitting around waiting for the time when you get the cast and the money together, so you can go out and make the film you've been thinking about for three or four years.
Is there anything that you think can be done to make film more hospitable right now, to artists or people who have an idiosyncratic sensibility, so that they could make more movies?
Well, there are a tremendous number of movies being made, but at a certain budget which limits them. And there's a tremendous amount of television being made. Big movies that require a lot of digital design are basically comic book movies now. Or they have the kind of budget that you need to carry out these incredible suspense sequences, like in "Mission: Impossible," stuff like that.
Have there been any movies made in the superhero genre recently that you thought were artistically interesting?
I was never interested in comic books. This whole sequel-and-comic-book era of movies doesn't really interest me much. But, you know, I'm in my 70s, why should it?]]>
In "Now You See Me 2," the flashy, heisting magician quartet The Four Horsemen (Jesse Eisenberg, Dave Franco, Woody Harrelson, new addition Lizzy Caplan) are put back in action when threatened by a tech genius played by Daniel Radcliffe, while also being pursued by a magic debunker played by Morgan Freeman. Expertly tossed cards, multiple identities and large-scale magic tricks abound, the latter presented as a public phenomenon whenever the group has a large audience (their heists are magic shows for everyone to see, and to see how they pulled everything off). Taking over from original director Louis Letterier is pop filmmaker Jon M. Chu ("Step Up 3D," "Jem and the Holograms"). Mark Ruffalo, Michael Caine, Sanaa Lathan and Jay Chou co-star.
After his first film role in 2007, Franco made a name for himself with scene-stealing supporting roles, like in the successful comedy blockbusters "21 Jump Street" or "Neighbors." His upcoming projects include a part as Montgomery Clift in the Hollywood story "Zeroville" and a lead performance as "The Room" actor Greg Sestero in "The Masterpiece," both directed and starring by his brother James.
RogerEbert.com sat down with Franco to discuss "Now You See Me 2," what he thinks audiences respond to most about the now-franchise, putting a lot of work into a little screen time, why he thinks "The Masterpiece" should win awards and more.
Thanks for talking today, Dave.
No pressure, but every interviewer in Chicago has been amazing. You guys have clearly done the research. I'm hearing different questions and for the past three days I've just been answering the three questions over and over. Again, no pressure.
I'm trying to figure out whether to start with a really dumb question now or not.
Anything. Give it.
Your first film role was in "Superbad," where you played a high school taunted for peeing his pants years before …
Yes. Luckily I have worked since, because after that movie came out for a long time I had people yelling "Why don't you go piss your pants?" at me. And if I never worked again, that would have followed me around my whole life. It's one of those things where I'm in the movie for seven seconds, but the movie's so ... it's just this iconic movie that has caught on, that again while I was filming it you could never anticipate that. I'm just happy to have been a part of it, and happy to have infiltrated that world of comedians even in the slightest way.
With the "Now You See Me" franchise, what do you think audiences most respond to about an ensemble action movie not about superpowers, but a Robin Hood idea too?
There's obviously so many superhero movies, and sequels and remakes these days that it is refreshing when there is a movie that comes out and works and that has its own tone. I think the tone is what people most respond to. Even if you don't love these movies, I think everyone has to admit they're a good time. I guess it's just the mindset you have going into the movie. If you come in and you want to pick apart every little moment and question the logic of every scene, then you might not love the movie. But if you sit back and enjoy the experience and let it wash over you, you're gonna love it and say that was an incredibly fun time.
There's that balance of incredulity and believability. Like, "Maybe they could pull that off … but it's a striking visual too."
It's a fine line. And what we try to do on our end is, we make sure that every trick in the movie is something that a real magician can feasibly pull off, even some of these crazier visuals like Jesse with the rain. That's a real trick-- obviously it's on a grand scale in this movie and it looks insane, but that is based on a real trick, as is every trick in the movie. We wanted to keep it grounded in that sense. Obviously you need to rely on CGI to make it a spectacle. That's the difficulty about making a movie about magic! You can use so many camera tricks obviously, but we as actors try to learn as much magic as we could, so that whenever possible we would be performing certain tricks on camera so we wouldn't have to rely on CGI.
Watching these films I am reminded of the Alliance of Magicians from "Arrested Development," who viciously ex-communicate anyone who reveals how tricks were done. But it's something you guys have to do for your audience.
Exactly. It's a fine line. It's a weird balance where these movies shouldn't work, and have no right of working, but they do. And I think a lot of that is that we don't take ourselves too seriously in it, and if it was this extremely earnest movie about magicians, I think it would fall apart immediately. I think most people are walking away probably talking about how much they enjoyed the chemistry between everyone, because we all genuinely love each other, and we hope it comes through on screen, and I think that's what provides a lot of the fun for the audience.
So when you do get the call a few years back to make a sequel to "Now You See Me," you're truly excited.
Absolutely. I'll do "Now You See Me 37" if they let me. I'll continue to do installments of this movie because I want to hang out with people from this movie as long as I can.
Let's talk abut director Jon Chu. He's one of the pop-iest filmmakers out there. What is it like to be on a Jon Chu set?
I genuinely love Jon Chu. The main thing I think about when I think of Jon is his energy. He's so calming and mellow, which is so important for a movie like this. The nature of this movie, there's so many actors in it, you need to get so much coverage. There's these huge set pieces, these extremely long days, and you have someone like Jon Chu at the helm, who just makes sure that everything goes smoothly and that no one is spinning out of control. And he's an extremely visual director, and what I love about him is that he really cares about the characters. And in this movie, I think even more so than the first one, you get to know who these magicians are and you get to see them behind the scenes and see them at a little more vulnerable and a little more human. And I respect Jon for allowing a handful of moments where you get to really breathe to get to know these characters. Even with his Justin Bieber movies, he took this movie that a lot of people would think "I would never see this movie," but he turned it into something really interesting.
He gave the Bieber movies a huge scope, which seems to be what he brought to this. Or visual intricacies, like the scene here in which you're all throwing around the same card.
Yeah. And it's not an easy movie to pull off. It's a really specific tone, balancing comedy, action and some serious moments. And I give him a lot of credit for walking that fine line and making it work.
Taking place not long after the original, this movie didn't feature Isla Fisher from "Now You See Me," but it did bring in a new talent, the often hilarious Lizzy Caplan.
She was the perfect addition to this cast. She is absolutely fearless. If I were her, coming into the second movie as the new kid, I would have reverted into myself and kept my head down and tried to get through the day without anyone noticing they made a mistake by casting me. But she came in swinging. She honestly made us all raise our game, she came in with this fresh energy and was improvising all over the place and made us all have a better time on set.
Can you toss cards? What practicing have you done?
I'm weirdly good at throwing cards now. In the first movie, I used card throwing as a weapon to fend Mark Ruffalo off. And if I didn't become proficient at throwing cards, then I would have just been fluttering these cards in front of his face and it would have been a joke. But I really put in the time on the first one during my free time. I'd be in my apartment in New Orleans with stacks of cards, literally throwing cards against the wall until my arm went dead. So in this one, it's like there's more card throwing and I wanted to up the ante a little bit, and a few different ways to throw a card. I can now with a full deck in my hand, I can use my thumb to propel cards off the top of the deck where it spins at you. I can spin it in the air and catch it in my mouth, skills that I'll never use again in my real life, but hopefully they look cool on screen. I spent so many hours learning how to flip a card and catch it in my mouth, and it's on-screen for point-six seconds.
What energy did Woody Harrelson bring to the movie? This time he's playing two characters, which gives the movie an unexpected oddball nature.
You put those fake teeth in his mouth, and he just goes crazy. It makes him kind of want to just embrace the grossness of the character. He would really do whatever he could to gross us out with the teeth, where he's just running his tongue back and forth across them, or chomping his teeth down mid-scene. I think they cut a lot of that out, but Woody Harrelson is legitimately one of my favorite actors. He can do it all.
Do you prefer his crazier side or the "True Detective"-like side?
He can do no wrong in my book. With "True Detective," he's brilliant in that role. And the whole time I was watching it, I was wondering what it would have been like if [Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey] switched roles too, and I think they would have killed it the other way. But then you think of Woody in "EdTV," and he kills it. Woody can do no wrong.
In the upcoming Hollywood drama film "Zeroville," directed by your brother James, you're playing Montgomery Clift. Did you have to study a lot of Clift films for the part?
Yeah, but it was tough because I was only in ["Zeroville"] for maybe two minutes. But I wanted to do justice to who Montgomery Clift was, so I watched all of his movies and did as much research as I could and read his autobiography, all for this two-minute role. I might have put too much pressure on myself, I don't know how it turned out.
Do you normally like to prepare for a role? If it's a movie that can be prepared for.
If there is room to learn about the character that you're going to portray, absolutely. I want to feel as prepared as possible. It's almost for your own mentality. You come in thinking, "I know I've done the work I can," and then in most cases I'm going to forget it all. But it just makes you feel comfortable and safe, and it ingrains itself somewhere within you.
Are there any characters from your past that you think about more than others? Or you look in the mirror and you think, "Oh, I remember that?"
Um, not really. I'm not the type of actor who goes home at night and can't get rid of the character. I'm pretty good at turning it on and off.
Do you think with a really dark role, that would be the case?
Who knows. That's something that I'm interested in, doing something more serious. But that being said, I don't want to have my next five movies be these serious movies and then all of the sudden [I] become this dramatic actor who's crying through every movie and who is having to just work themselves up before every scene. That just doesn't sound as fun to me as coming to set and trying to make each other laugh.
Do you kind of have a constant idea of what your image is as an actor?
Well, from an outsider image, how would you describe me as an actor?
Well, I think you're pretty funny, like in "Neighbors."
But could you--this might be tough for you to answer in front of me—but do you think it would be tough to accept me in a serious role?
And I hope this is the reason for it, that with my brand of humor, it's not like I'm the super goofy broad comedy guy. My humor comes from just being put in a bizarre situation and playing it as real as possible. So in my mind, I think I can make that leap. I just don't know what audiences will think. That being said, I have this movie coming out at the end of the summer called "Nerve" that is definitely more serious, and I don't think I'm funny at all in that movie, and hopefully people can accept that. That will be the first test. As much as I do love doing comedies, I do want to explore other genres too, which I have been recently. It's fulfilling for me and the audience as well, where I can do things outside of comedy.
I have to ask you about another upcoming lead role for you—"The Masterpiece," James' film about Tommy Wiseau making "The Room." I need to see this movie.
Dude, it's good. It's unbelievable that they allowed us to make this movie. And this one isn't an easy one to make. Because you want to make it in a way that super fans [of "The Room"] will love it and be able to take away these tiny moments, that you can only appreciate if you've seen the movie multiple times. But, you want it to be accessible enough for people who have never even heard of "The Room," and so it is this weird balancing act. But I'm telling you, I saw a cut of it recently, and it works. And my brother should win awards for this role. And like, we treated it very seriously, we didn't want to make this broad comedy, we wanted it to be true to the story. And it's weirdly touching and inspiring.
How many times did you watch "The Room" to study for it?
Many times. I read the book a couple times, met with Greg Sestero as many times as I could.
When is it coming out?
I think we're aiming for Toronto or Sundance.
To put all of that emotional perspective to the Tommy Wiseau myth is exciting.
And my brother really humanizes Tommy in the way that you feel for this guy and you're rooting for him and you hate him at points but you love him. It's tragic ... this role is tragic. You're gonna love it. I give the studio so much credit for not only letting us do it, but be hands off and allow us to make this weird movie that thank god it works.]]>
In his memoir, "It's So Easy and Other Lies," rock icon Duff McKagan shared a saga that started with him as just another struggling musician on the L.A. punk underground scene in the early Eighties, found him playing bass with two hugely popular bands (Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver) and saw him nearly succumbing several times to the temptations of booze and drugs before finally pulling himself together and reuniting with the other members of Guns N' Roses, more than twenty years after they self-destructed for a tour that is sure to be among the biggest of the year. With a recent rise in interest in documentaries about the personal and professional lives of musical performers, it is perhaps not surprising that someone would get the idea of bringing that best-selling book to the screen but the film version of "It's So Easy and Other Lies" is not the straightforward doc that some people may be expecting. It blends together footage of McKagan doing readings from his book on stage in Seattle, talking head interviews with friends and colleagues including Slash, Nikki Sixx, Mike McCready and Benny "The Jet" Urquidez, archival footage of McKagan on and off the stage and even some animation here and there. Directed by Christopher Duddy—who worked in the visual effects department on such classics as "Innerspace," "The Abyss," "Total Recall," "Waterworld" and "Titanic" before branching off into directing—it's a visually striking and inventive work that is pretty much a must-see for fans of McKagan or those curious about the history of hard rock.
Via e-mail, Duddy talked about the film, his relationships with McKagan and the punk/hard rock scenes and being privy to the surprise GnR reunion.
What was it that first got you interested in filmmaking? Was there a particular movie or filmmaker that had a significant impact on you?
When I was young I was really fascinated by cameras. There was something magical about looking through a viewfinder. One of my earliest memories as a kid was on summer break and my mom would drop me and my brothers and sisters off at the matinee. We would be there all day watching movies. I was a teenager in the 70's and early 80's and there were several movies that came out that really affected me and inspired me in a profound way. Movies like "Star Wars," "Jaws," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "The Exorcist," "Dirty Harry," "Blade Runner" and so many more. I just had this burning desire from a very young age to be a part of that world and to be a storyteller.
You first made a name for yourself working in the field of visual effects. When you were working there, was directing something that you were always working towards?
My first job in cinema was at ILM in the camera department working on visual effects. I was like a sponge working there. I wanted to learn everything from model making to matte painting and the various techniques. I had to be behind the camera and then ultimately I wanted to tell my own stories and there was an organic and natural progression for me into that from behind the camera as a cinematographer into directing.
How did directing "It's So Easy and Other Lies" come about?
Duff and I had been friends/neighbors—we met walking our kids to school—for a long time before he wrote his book "It's So Easy and Other Lies." He asked me to read it and I was really inspired by his ultimate survival story. I have had a near death experience as a survivor of a helicopter crash inside an active volcano and trapped for two days and I think what Duff went through with drugs and alcohol is very much like crashing and being trapped. So in that regard I think we related on a higher level and he trusted me to tell his story. Growing up being very much influenced by the cinema, hero arcs always resonated with me so now, as a filmmaker with a voice, I think that it is very important to make films that inspire and lift people, especially with society's acceptance of mediocre pop culture that we are experiencing right now. After I read his book, I approached him with the idea of making a documentary to really inspire people and, after much persistence on my part, he finally agreed to make it.
I started going with him with a camera when he was promoting the book when it was released as a New York Times best-seller on paperback. Then the defining moment came when he asked me to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction of Guns N' Roses. The night before the ceremony he asked me to go with him to shoot B-roll at his book reading show at the House of Blues in Cleveland. I had never really seen anything like that before. It was incredibly powerful and affected me in a way that when we got back to L.A., I pitched the idea to Duff about using the book reading show as the catalyst or device in the movie to propel the storytelling. We designed a bigger show for the movie that he performed in front of to a sold out show at The Moore Theatre in Seattle where Duff grew up.
The film employs any number of distinct stylistic choices throughout—footage of Duff doing readings from his book on stage, talking head interviews, archival footage and and even pieces of animation. Can you explain a little about the ideas that you developed as a way of bringing the book to the screen?
Duff and I really set out to make something different here, not just your standard cookie-cutter documentary, but something out of the box. So really, it's more of a concert film with storytelling. I wanted to shoot flashback-style sequences in reference to some of the stories, but Duff pushed me instead into using animation and I think it was a great choice to mix it up for the audience experience. Duff is all about the music, so the film is wall-to-wall music with the live show orchestration of some classic Guns N' Roses, Velvet Revolver and Loaded songs that are accompanied by a string quartet and a steel slide guitar. It is an amazing soundtrack.
The film also serves as a mini-history of the punk and hard rock music scenes from the beginning of the Eighties on, ranging from his early days as a punker to the massive commercial successes of Guns N' Roses and Velvet Revolver. Was this a musical culture that you had any previous affinity for before working on this project?
No, I was not a punk guy growing up. That is the beauty of making documentaries. It is really an investigation into the subject matter. I didn't know much about Duff pre-Guns, so it was a very interesting journey for me to investigate where he came from musically in his teen years growing up in Seattle where punk and metal collided that later morphed into grunge. Seattle was a spawning ground for music back then and so many great musicians came from that era. It was fun for me uncovering and pulling back the curtain on that.
Having presented his story on his terms on page and then on the stage, did Duff have any apprehensions at first about placing it in your hands and putting it through your artistic sensibilities?
Of course Duff had reservations about me making a movie about him. It can be a very daunting place to have to open up to and put yourself in. So as a filmmaker, I was incredibly sensitive to telling his story honestly and honorably. Most people only want you to know the good parts of their life, but when I read his book, one of the reasons I wanted to take this on and make this movie was because of his genuine honesty about his dark journey and revealing his darkest secrets about drug and alcohol addiction that almost took his life at a young age. He overcame those demons and now enjoys years of sobriety and clarity. It's an incredibly inspiring film especially for people who share those similar experiences.
Was it easy to recruit the other interview subjects or were there any that you tried to involve but who refused to participate for whatever reason? (This is, as you can probably surmise, my slightly obtuse way of asking if Axl Rose was asked to take part.)
It was not hard to get his musical colleagues to come aboard. Duff is genuinely loved in the music industry. Everybody that we asked said yes. I'm not going to get into the Axl thing, I will say that while we were making the film, they were just starting to discuss the reunion tour and we didn't want to be a distraction or disruption to that whole thing. We did gently reach out to his camp but didn't push. Look, yes, Guns was a big part of Duff's life and story, but ultimately this movie is about Duff's whole journey which is very multi-faceted and interesting in itself besides his tenure in Guns.
Having directed both a narrative film ("Cougar Club") and a documentary now, do you have any preference between the two forms as a filmmaker?
I have directed both narrative films and documentaries and honestly I love both forms of storytelling. I think they are both equally difficult to make especially when you are producing as well. In my case, I have produced everything I've directed so it can be very challenging. I think actually documentaries might be harder because they take a long time to bake and get right. Narratives more or less have a set schedule that you have to keep to. This film took three years to complete where most narratives take less than a year by the time you have a shooting script.
The film is coming out just before an event that few people could have possibly anticipated ever happening—a Guns N' Roses reunion tour. When you were making the film and working with Duff, did you have any inkling that something like this might be in the realm of possibility or were you as surprised as the rest of us?
I mean, I was sort of privy to the idea of the GnR reunion tour. Like I mentioned before, all those discussions were going on while we were making the film so I wasn't surprised when it was finally announced, but not in my wildest dreams for the movie did I think we would be releasing the film the same summer as this monster reunion tour was happening. I mean are you kidding me? Come on, pinch me. Even the most savvy studio marketing wizards couldn't have planned this better.]]>
Thea Sharrock's "Me Before You" is a film that feels rare today—an unabashed romance for the multiplex, one that doesn't come with a cynical Nicholas Sparks manufacturing label. Written by author/adapting screenwriter Jojo Moyes, it's a tale of opposites, of a working class, sunny young woman named Lou (Emilia Clarke) who is the caretaker for a wealthy, dour quadriplegic named Will (Sam Claflin). The log-line gets a great deal of charm from Clarke's hilarious, sparkling performance (akin to Sally Hawkins in "Happy-Go-Lucky") especially as she begins an (initially) platonic relationship with a recluse who has removed himself from life's various joys. It's one of the summer's biggest surprises so far, not just with its emotional gravity but for how it introduces viewers to a whole new kind of magnetism that Clarke could be creating for decades to come.
Along with playing Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons on HBO's "Game of Thrones," in a short amount of time Clarke's ascending career has included adapting numerous respected fictional characters, from Holly Golightly in a 2013 production of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" on Broadway to Sarah Connor in "Terminator Genisys" in 2015. Moyes makes her screenwriting debut with an adaptation of her 2012 book "Me Before You," one of many books she has written, along with her work as a journalist.
RogerEbert.com spoke with Clarke and Moyes about respecting quadriplegics and caretakers with this film, the creative release that came with being funny, farting, the "Friends" character they identify with most and more.
Do you consider yourselves glass-half-full or glass-half-empty people?
JOJO MOYES: I was a glass-half-empty person, and as a result of this story I'm a glass-half-full person. It actually changed me. I had to fundamentally change my views on life. I was fearful, and now I'm not fearful, because amazing things do happen. I wrote this book when I was out of contract, I wrote it because I felt I had to write it, and from the moment Penguin picked it up and put it out there, it started to roll, and amazing things started to happen. And then it became a best-seller, and then it became a best-seller in more than one country, and then it became film and I got to work with all of these guys and then I got to write the film, and now we're sitting in this lovely suite in Chicago and the film is about to go out. You can't be fearful, you have to just grab the opportunities and run the risk of failure and do it.
EMILIA CLARKE: I was born and raised as glass-overspilling [laughs]. It can be a flaw sometimes, trust me. people are like, "juuust be miserable."
JM: "Just turn it down!"
EC: No, I get that a lot! I have worked with people, who shall remain nameless, who have said, "Your smiling is just … no one likes it," truly. And I'll say "OK!" They were mean.
JM: That's so interesting, because I was just listening to a podcast about Julianne Moore, talking about how she likes to chat with people to and from her trailer. And one day, the guy said, "Ms. Moore, could you just not talk so much?" Everybody thought she was too chatty. Emilia can get chatty, and she's got a great smile!
EC: I can get grumpy! I can throw down! But just whilst being angry, my glass is full about being angry.
JM: We had long days on set where we were making this girl cry, we were dragging her down, at one point she had a fractured hip. And she was still smiling. She's more than a glass-half-full, she's like a bartender's-stock-of-glasses-full.
EC: It's because we were all having such an amazing time, that's why. We were all just hanging out and we were mates and there just happened to be a camera somewhere in the room.
Emilia, why do you think you're that way?
EC: I think there's a lot of things that people are born with, and a lot of things that people aren't, [that] you develop as a person. The experiences shape who you are. But for me, I was told, though I look back at videos and it's like, "Obnoxious ISN'T glass-half-full!" [Laughs] My parents said I was happy and always smiling, and I'm like "Yeah, because I wanted the attention, probably." I've been told and I feel very much like glass-half-full, like Monica from "Friends." You know what I mean?
JM: You are so not like Monica from "Friends."
EC: No, I'm nothing like her [laughs].
Jojo, who's your "Friends" character?
JM: Phoebe.
EC: Yes, I was so hoping you'd say Phoebe!
JM: I think "Smelly Cat" is one of my favorite songs.
EC: I feel like I couldn't say Phoebe, but I'm glad you did. She's the coolest.
JM: You're like Jennifer Aniston-Cox, you know. But cheerier. No one's cheery enough.
EC: Goddammit, "Friends"! Joey! Can I be Joey? Yay! I'll be Joey. [Laughs]
Who were some comic influences for you? Your script is funny, Jojo, and you're funny in the film, Emilia.
JM: I love everything from "Airplane!" to Nora Ephron. I like dark humor. In England, we're like raised on Monty Python. But "Me Before You" is actually the first book I've used humor in. None of which had trouble with the best-seller charts, and none of which were remotely funny. So, I think that probably tells me something.
Was it a release then, to write something that was kind of funny?
JM: It was because that I knew the subject matter could be really dark, and I felt that the only way I could write this and make people not want to go away and stick their head in an oven is to—can I say that? That's really bad.
EC: You can!
JM: In my experience, and we were talking about this, is that the dark is always interspersed with light. It's like, the emergency services always have the best jokes, right? And I have disability in my family, and we have a lot of bad jokes that possibly outsiders would not understand, about disability, and we all laugh because that's how, if you're a certain kind of person, especially a certain kind of British person, you deal with tragedy and bad luck.
EC: By trudging on, and having a good show of it.
And for you, Emilia, who were your comic influences?
EC: Lucille Ball. I grew up watching her show when I was like four or five.
JM: You should play her!
EC: And my granny loved Lucille Ball. And I used to go visit my family in New York, and I'd have this jet lag, and stay at my cousin's bedroom and literally from the age of four I would just watch Nickelodeon after hours, obsessively. I think that's where I absorbed the eyebrow stuff, do you know what I mean? You can move your face, it's allowed! I love a good sitcom. I'm not ashamed to like the old school and far -
JM: Fart jokes?
EC: Flatulence, no? Just farting. I love farting! [Laughs]
JM: Have you seen "Angie Tribeca" [on TBS]? It's amazing. With Rashida Jones doing really "Airplane!"-like gags. It's one of my new favorite shows. You'd love it. You could totally do that.
EC: Well, here we are. Done! Write that one down! [Laughs]
There's an intriguing dynamic of opposites, of class, optimism and pessimism in the film. Do you believe that opposites attract, or that people are similar and just don't realize it?
JM: For me, it's almost a technical thing, which is all good stories thrive on tension. So you've got to have the tension between the rich and the poor, the different outlooks on life, and that's what makes it funny when people just don't come at each other from the same direction. But I'm married to a geek. He probably isn't going to love me describing him like that.
EC: That's alright!
JM: Geeks are sexy now, right?
EC: No, it's good to be geeky now!
JM: And I'm like a total doofus around technology.
EC: I don't understand Snapchat! I'm just behind.
JM: I want pictures of her trying to do Twitter.
EC: I can't, I can't. There's not enough words!
JM: You can! You just came out of a fire naked.
EC: I should be on Twitter now! [Laughs]
JM: You've seen her Instagram, right? She's not just mother of dragons, she's mother of all hashtags.
EC: I like a long hashtag. I like a super, duper long hashtag.
There's also an interesting element to the movie where you play it platonic for a long time. Despite their eventual attraction, we spend a lot of time where it's not her smitten with him, or him being smitten with her.
JM: It needed to be more organic. For me, everything comes from character. And, you would not have believed that relationship if those two people came from those two disparate places at the start,and then suddenly gone, "Oh, I really fancy him. I might just saddle up to him now." That's not going to happen. He's an ass in the beginning, and she's just too weary of him, and it's only really once they start butting heads that they have the meet-cute. There's a lot more for them to overcome. She's in a relationship, and she's a good person, and we realize that she's in love with him long before she does. But I wanted it to be not obvious.
EC: When I'm reading scripts, because I'm … lucky enough to read a few! That's the worst bit. It's like, "Oh, god, no! That's not how people meet." And it's like, "How do I act that?" And that was never a thing with this.
It's nice to see men and women simply be friends for a long time in a movie.
EC: "When Harry Met Sally …" it's possible! [Laughs]
JM: Nora [Ephron] is always right.
EC: Nora is always right!
With Lou's outfits, even her coveted bumblebee tights, costume design is a huge part of this character.
EC: So, Jill Taylor is our costume designer and was an absolute genius, but was also incredibly collaborative. So the costumes are so much a part of Lou, and it was really very early on was just me sitting back and going, "Okay, what are we doing?" And then after a while she would be asking me what I was thinking, and I would be grabbing the belt and putting a weird bag on it, and "Can I get this?" It was a wonderful experience.
Jojo, this was your first screenplay experience. What was it like, diving into that?
JM: I couldn't really believe it when MGM asked me to do it, because as we know it's often a studio's worse nightmare. So, I felt a huge responsibility to get the script right and to just not be an ass. If I'm frank, yeah. And perhaps to blaze a trail for future writers on set. But these guys were really nice, and luckily we all had the same vision for the movie, so I just didn't hit any of those huge obstacles that a lot of writers hit in Hollywood. I know that's going to make a lot of people want to kick me in the head, but it was a journey, as these things always are. But Thea, from the start, got the book and if the writer and the director are on the same page, it makes life so much simple. We were basically tweeting, not butting heads.
EC: Mum and dad weren't fighting, which so often happens on set.
Emilia, you have adapted a lot of characters, like Holly Golightly or Sarah Connor.
EC: Yes, I take them off the mantle, and put them in my hand. "Muahaha! How can I mess this up? Let me find the ways!"
Do you prefer to work with the way that it's written, or go into it as a separate entity?
EC: It's weird. With the stuff that's dusty on that shelf for a while, that's been sitting there and endowed with a lot of love before I massacre it, there's a lot more of how can I interpret this? It's been interpreted by so many people before me, by people or writing or whatever it is. With those, it's a different path completely. But with this, this was ... I innately understood Lou from the first page. It was never a "How can I interpret this?" It was just that I totally understood her. This was the most lovely collaborative experience, that there ever was, amen! [Laughs]
You were becoming that character, or can really identify with her.
EC: Yes, that's what I mean. That's why I was jumping up and down in my "Terminator" outfit! "Yes!!!" [Makes a motion of firing a giant rifle in the air]
"I'm going to smile again!"
EC: That was it! I'm like, half-crying and laughing reading it like, "Yes!!! Move out of the way Arnie. I'm outta here."
Was this something you were looking for, a script like this?
EC: It found me. I didn't need to be brave or bold and it sort of happened. No, my agent sent me the book and said, "I think you're gonna love this." And yeah. This ONE time, he was right.
JM: I have to say that I was surprised when they said that [Emilia] was one of the people they were looking at. I assumed she was blonde, and scary and kind of forbidding. And then she walks in and kind of runs away with the audition, and you go, "Should we send everybody else home now?"
And she's not scary.
EC: Not scary, not scary!
JM: She's not scary, what she is is Louisa, with better shoes.
In writing this story and then performing it, how did you want to respect the experience of quadriplegics and their caretakers?
JM: The nice thing for me is because I've had a couple of years of responses under my belt from caretakers, and families of people who had been in similar positions. Two things I took from it, one is that I felt we had got the portrayal pretty well right, and we had the Christopher Reeve Foundation contact me via the publishers to say that while they have no opinion on one of the issues in the story, they really felt that it was a good three-dimensional portrayal of what it's like to be a quadriplegic. But most of all, what they liked is that here is a man who is super sexy, who just happens to be quadriplegic. That was the key thing for me, was that I want people to see the disability as the least interesting part of somebody. And the thing that's lovely in these early screenings is that the women walk out of the screening saying, "How can I live without Will Traynor?" Because it's not about the disability, it's about the man. Too often as a society, we just look away, or we look too hard. And we need to just grow up, I guess.
EC: I think in the filming of it, we were incredibly respectful. We had a lady who works full-time with the spinal cord injury clinics in London to make sure that everything that Sam, who plays Will Traynor, was accurate and respectful and true to the situation. And we did a huge amount of research, and I went on message forums and we really ... Thea, Sam and I would send each other articles, and things that we'd read recently.
JM: And we had a quadriplegic on set for a while as well, which was wonderful, who actually knew the person who inspired this story.
EC: There were a huge amount of things that we were taking into consideration when making it.
JM: And Thea was asking the questions all the time: "Was this honest? Is it true? Is it correct and is it respectful?"
EC: So to have achieved that, I think is the … cool thing that we did. That you did. That I turned up for!
Favorite romance movie?
JM: It's probably "When Harry Met Sally … "
EC: I was just about to say that!
JM: We can both have it. It never gets tiresome.
EC: Meg [Ryan]! Oh, Meg! Or "Sleepless in Seattle." Helping her out of her car!