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March 31, 2007
Blueberry for breakfast: Will Wong open Cannes?
Rumors repeated by Cineuropa's Fabien Lemercier hold that Cannes 2007 will open with Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights and close with Zodiac. Out of competition titles include Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth; the competition is said to include Denys Arcand’s Age of Innocence, Todd Haynes’ fractured Dylan biopic I'm Not There, The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, Ballon rouge by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Gus van Sant's Paranoid Park, Promise Me This by Emir Kusturica, Kantoku Banzai by Takeshi Kitano, Silent Lightby Carlos Reygadas, and new films by Roy Andersson, Fatih Akin, Alesandr Sokourov and Bela Tarr. Yow! [More rumored titles at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:58 AM | Comments (0)
Herzog lifts his large, solemn head: stories and a script [UPDATED]
"Herzog lifts his large, solemn head to explain that he isn’t drawn to excess but that it somehow just happens to find him," writes Brigid Grauman In the FT. " He recalls a surrealist moment last year in LA when a sniper shot 
him while he was being interviewed by the BBC. "The bullet — small calibre, it wasn’t a serious bullet —went through a catalogue that was in my pocket, so I wasn’t seriously hurt,” he says. “Everyone freaked out. I had no problem with it.” He has, he says gently shaking his head, a singular capacity for attracting violent events. Recently, while filming in Antarctica for a television documentary, a snowmobile flipped over on top of him. “Strong bones,” he says with satisfaction at surviving unscathed. “My attitude has always been that certain events cannot be covered by insurance.” ... Herzog has a fondness for dictums which he says are born of lifelong experience. “Those who watch television, lose the world,” he warns, “and those who read, gain it.” The late travel writer Bruce Chatwin, with whom he had “a cautious but very substantial friendship”, quoted with approval Herzog saying, “Tourism is sin, walking is virtue” and made it his own motto at the end of his life. On his deathbed, Chatwin gave Herzog his battered leather rucksack and Herzog now takes it along with him on all his long walks." Plus: a downloadable PDF of Alan Greenberg's screenplay for Herzog's planned next feature, "The Cheese and The Worms." [UPDATE: Greenberg also authored a screenplay on the life of bluesman Robert Johnson, which Herzog has spoken highly of; it's called "Love in Vain," and it's a superb read if you look for it.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 28, 2007
[LOOK] Cinematographer Benoit Debie's showreel
With Julia Loktev's gorgeously restrained Day Night Day Night showing at New Directors/New Directions, cinematographer Benoit Debie's showreel is worth a peek, as well as this excerpt from Loktev's film. [Debie's main page is here; other films such as Irreversible and Calvaire are on show. Up this fall: George Ratliff's daylit deviltry, Joshua.]
Another Debie frame, from Innocence, by Lucille Hadzihalilovic.
Posted by Ray Pride at 07:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
[LOOK] One Perfect Film: Jonathan Demme's Perfect Kiss
Recently, filmmaker Joe Swanberg (Kissing on the Mouth, Hannah Takes The Stairs) told me he thought Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense was as close to perfect as nay movie he knows. Directed by Demme and shot by Henri Alekan, the video for New Order's "Perfect Kiss" (1985) always struck me as a perfect film: the band performing music in a practice room, their activity a cross between daydreaming and operating a submarine, with patient close-ups worthy of Dreyer. It's 10 lovely deadpan minutes; I stood there beside myself thinking hard about the weather... From a 1998 Guardian interview with Demme: "One of my favourite things in watching any performance on film is when there isn't a lot of cutting going on and when you get a chance to become really absorbed in the artist in hand. The same way we do, hopefully, at a concert, when we get a chance to really trip in to something that's happening on stage. Whether the singer's singing, or one of the other musicians is playing, we sort of stay there instead of cutting round with our eyes a lot." (H/T Faisal Qureshi at Screen Grab.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:42 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2007
Images from Thessaloniki's Images of the 21st Century documentary festival
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March 22, 2007
[INTERVIEW] Reign Over Me (2007, ***)
"I WALKED AROUND THAT NIGHT AND THERE WERE ALL THESE PEOPLE CRYING AND YOU KNEW THEY HAD LOST SOMEONE," writer-director Mike Binder says of his experience the day of September 11, 2001 in Manhattan. "A couple of years later, I was in New York with my family, and I just thought, 'There are still people wandering the streets who lost someone that day.' Everyone else has moved on, but these people are still living with it. What's that like?” Earnest research and many conversations resulted in Reign Over Me, a powerful Adam Sandler-starring drama about a widower unable to forget the loss of his family. "We were looking for people who have suffered a loss that was so traumatic,” Binder says, “that they couldn't get off the couch, even after several years.” Like the Detroit-born writer-director’s The Upside of Anger (2005), complicated emotions and generous digressions make for unusually intelligent and involving drama.
Sandler plays Charlie Fineman, who had been a successful dentis, but now lives out his days on a motorized scooter through mostly-deserted Manhattan streets, listening to songs that mattered to him in that time called “before” that he does not want to forget, 1970s rock like The Who’s “Reign O’er Me” (a cover of which by Eddie Vedder provides a drenching crescendo to the movie under the end credits). One day, an old friend, Alan Johnson (Don Cheadle) sees Charlie on the street, a mop-haired, wild-eyed mess, but he doesn’t seem to remember Alan—even though they were college roommates. Alan is married with kids, life seems good with wife (stern Jada Pinkett Smith) despite an unspecified chill between them. Alan has a colleague in the same professional building, a therapist (quietly empathetic Liv Tyler) whom he peppers with inappropriate questions, and later leads Charlie to visit in hopes of coming out of his angry rituals of denial. (Sandler readily goes from shattered to shattering; the wells of emotion in Punch Drunk Love were not an anomaly.)
The two men begin to spend time together, mostly in the deep twilight of Charlie’s life, bounded by his iPod, movies, a videogame filled with battling titans. “To me, the whole movie boils down to a piece about communication and kind of the restoring powers of having someone to talk to,” Binder says, “and the flip side of the damage that can slowly accumulate of not having someone to talk to.” The location shooting is extensive and gorgeous, enabled by the Panavision Genesis high definition camera. Visually, the film swaddles you in Charlie’s closed-off melancholy. The abandoned night streets of Manhattan have a dreamy immediacy: without the need to light as extensively near and most effectively, far, the perspective emulates what you'd see walking out the door of an apartment, a café, a bar. The camera system also favors Charlie’s shaggy, sallow look, the tiny Pinkett Smith's imperious cheekbones and the powder pale of Tyler's skin, a much different manner of stylization than the yellowed, brittle newspaper clippings palette of Zodiac.
“I think not being a New Yorker helped,” Binder says of his perspective when I ask if he was relecting the "We Are All New Yorkers" ethos of the immediately post-9/11 America. “I was in New York that day and I was stuck there for five days after. My sense of the movie… I’ll tell you how this movie came about. I was stuck there. I was actually on ABC with Diane Sawyer doing an interview when the first plane hit. I was sitting next to Sarah Ferguson, Fergie, actually. She said, ‘I just left the World Trade Center.’ We thought it was a small plane that hit. Her office was there. If she hadn’t left to go be on ‘Good Morning America,’ she’d be dead.”
But he took a different perspective when he wrote. “We wanted to shoot the movie from the sidewalk up so you always felt like you were inside a canyon of buildings,” the former comic says, “and you really felt what it was like to be walking the streets. When we found out about this Genesis camera, we did tests and realized that we didn’t have to light blocks and blocks to see blocks and blocks. So we were looking for that, but I just started to like the look. It looked so stark and so much like what it is really like when you’re walking down the street.”
There’s another universal that he insists upon. “We weren't looking in our research exclusively for [survivors of 9/11 victims]. This is historical fiction and we weren't looking for a guy who lost three children. We also wanted the piece to be about people who lost people in Oklahoma City and Katrina. I wanted it to be more about how we all put the spotlight on a tragedy and then the next tragedy comes up and the spotlight goes to the next one and these people are still wandering the streets still living in the first one. We talked to several people. I'm glad we did due diligence because now that we're showing it to people [to whom] this [hits] really close to home. They're seeing it as real and I don't think if we hadn't done the research and hadn't really worked through it, it would have been sad right now because I think there's a chance for this movie to have a real healing effect. I know it's just a movie, but I really do think there's a side to this movie that is beyond entertainment. “
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:30 AM | Comments (0)
Cédric Klapisch: New Europe perhaps chaotic but very vibrant
At Cafe Babel L'auberge Espagnole director Cédric Klapisch, almost the same age as the European Union, reflects on changes in cinema and culture with more countries joining the E.U. "Europe's 
shift towards the ultra-liberal seriously threatens culture. Europe's shift towards the ultra-liberal seriously threatens culture. I've got a habit of saying that Europe is the 'Disunited States', as opposed to the United States. But bizarrely, our strength lies in us being pulled together by our gaps and differences. To have so many different languages, so many different gastronomies, so many opposed cultural habits, so many diverse architectures. tears us apart but also creates dynamism. It's going to be extremely difficult to make the political Europe of the 27 a success, but I think there is a common will to combine Hungarians, Poles, Scandinavians, Germans, and Latins in a common spirit. What will that result in? I have no idea. It is perhaps chaotic but very vibrant."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:32 AM | Comments (0)
March 21, 2007
The Air is on Fire: David Lynch à Paris
Via Italy's Espresso and republished on the "David Lynch Electrical Resource", Dugpa, a passel of pics of Mr. Lynch's gee-wow art lookback in Paris; if you've wondered what the walls the art's hung on looks like, here you go. In New Statesman, Alice O'Keeffe has a keen interview with Lynch about where he stands today: "Though a genius he may be, the thought of Lynch sitting alone in his studio with these images, lopping a leg off here and adding a festering gash there, is not pleasant. "Those distorted nudes thrill me, and I don't know all the reasons why... Sometimes when there's a distortion or a rearrangement it makes you see things afresh, and something jumps. I do like fragments of the human form, and then there's all kinds of variations, and that's interesting. It's like jazz: there's the melody - the human form - and then there's all kinds of variants, and that's real interesting."
Would it bother him, I wonder, if someone got off on them? "Oh no, you can't worry about stuff like that, because you would stop working," he insists, but then says: "There must be some responsibility when you make something. They say for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. There could be something coming back from what we do, but I'm not positive." [On a different note, Lynch collaborator Freddie Francis, cinematographer of The Elephant Man, Dune and The Straight Story, is dead at 89.)
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:57 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 20, 2007
Indie's away: The 9th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, Images of the 21st Century
Observers at a "Just Talking" documentary filmmakers' panel.
Trying to find time to post between movies and panels and spring weather in the north of Greece... Maybe a folio of photos from Thessaloniki in just a bit...
Posted by Ray Pride at 08:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 17, 2007
James Urbaniak: Betty Hutton was Jack Black's spiritual foremother
Actor James Urbaniak recalls Betty Hutton's vivid perf style: "With her super-amped comic energy, musical chops and everygal persona, Betty Hutton was Jack Black's spiritual foremother." Urbaniak finds a YouTube link to " a not particularly interesting novelty number... that nevertheless offers a typical example of her this-one-goes-to-eleven approach to performing... The bittersweet flipside [is] the Preston Sturges masterpiece The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, wherein her boy-crazy Trudy Kockenlocker (!) gets knocked up by an anonymous soldier after a shipping-out party. In that relentless comedy machine of a movie she brings moments of quiet vulnerability that make you genuinely care about her." [More at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2007
[REVIEW] 300 (2007, *** 1/2)
"JOEY, DO YOU LIKE GLADIATOR MOVIES?” Why yes, I do, if they’re 300, with its rich, brute beauty. While keening early reports from a Berlin Film Festival press screening suggested that any woman seeing 300 (*** 1/2) ought to check their male dates for bi-curious pup tents, vet commercials director Zack Snyder’s second feature (after 2004’s Dawn of the Dead) is more than a homoerotic vista of rippling man-bulk. It’s a distinctly otherworldly tapestry, a bloody, violent storybook-look imagining of the 480 B.C. battle at Thermopylae, as well as blunt assertions on the nature of masculinity, war-making and murder. This is grandiloquent, bravura, exquisitely inventive movie-making, but since its subject is vainglorious battle to the death of civilization, one of several tempests in a 
crackpot about 300, highlighted by a thumbsucker in the Sunday New York Times, is the venture that the movie is intended as commentary on the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Get this: war is war. “Remember why we died” is always a statement of sorrow as well as succoring of bloodlust. These figures, too, worried of “hold[ing] our gates” against “Asia’s endless hordes.” (Of course, no modern army would ever go into an incursion so severely undermanned or without necessary protective gear.) And while testosterone and heights of the visceral and viscera and suicidal doggedness are on display, and ideas of patrimony and honor are parsed with copious limb-slicing and decapitation, 300 is ultimately an admirable imaginative feat, drawing for style from Frank Miller’s graphic novel, but also the world of painting, the grammar of videogames, rock-ribbed rhetoric and the possibility of what millions of dollars can wreak out of one director’s mind and thousands of terabytes of computer memory. (Yet I cannot imagine a studio financing this gory work in a less bloody and fearful time.) Images: priests of the gods convening within an octagon-topped knob against a moon hundreds times larger than true. A redheaded oracle, pale beneath shimmers of sheer and smoke, hair the red-gold of koi, writhing to demonstrate both fever and erectness of nipple. Pale hairs on another woman’s belly by reflected blue light of an absurdly bright, near moon. (Female flesh is not neglected amid the sweaty flesh of fighting men.) An orgy by torchlight and hookah under the gaze of Xerxes that seems either a parody or celebration of the multiethnic sex-fray in Matrix Revolutions. Bull elephants twice-three times actual size backed off hillocks to the stony shore below. Golden light blighted suddenly by the rain of a thousand, thousand singing spears. Clouds do not scud but roil, women’s breasts are always in motion, red capes and draping swirl. The landscapes are peopled with taut beefcake bellies, but the 41-year-old writer-director’s camera dwells also on the the taut extension along ribcages as spear- and sword-bearing arms strain upward toward release. Snyder also delivers setpieces of extended sequence-shots that are stitched digitally from myriad smaller bits from cameras clustered near each other at differing focal lengths. You’ve not seen it all until you’ve seen this odd yet exciting effect. Fair history? (Snyder eagerly admits to refashioning of formations and tactics so that the battles would be more vivid on screen.) At the least, fine spectacle, po-faced and only lightly Pythonesque. (This review is of the IMAX version.)
(Ray Pride)
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March 15, 2007
300 in Greece
The Greek poster for 300, Plateaia Odeon, Thessaloniki, Greece. Indie returns shortly. [Photos from the Ninth Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2007
Zodiac (2007, ****)
AS Zodiac BEGINS, FOURTH OF JULY FIREWORKS BURST over San Francisco Bay in an aerial shot suffused with the soft dark of California night; the shot holds for a moment before descending to earth, traveling along a suburban street of elevated banality in the style of photographer William Eggleston, while exploding flowers of skyrockets loom with quiet bursts between ordinary homes. An ideal night to fire a gun and not be heard.
DAVID FINCHER RECREATES WITH RAPACIOUS PRECISION a season of fear in the San Francisco that began when he was 7 years old, a mere second grader. As a grown man, the 
Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards play the key detectives. The editorial cartoonist played by Jake Gyllenhaal shadows a dissolute San Francisco Chronicle reporter played by Robert Downey, Jr. Victims, survivors, other cops, other figures appear. The characters rise and fall like supporting players. There is no leading man, no hero, no antihero, no savior, and evil is not vanquished. The men who are defined by the work know no clarity and find no rest. The acting is stellar in every nuance, an aspect that cannot be understated. The use of high definition video to shoot the movie, instead of film, made production faster and more takes possible. To cite only the example of the always-indelible John Carroll Lynch, who plays a suspect, and who has two fairly long shots in two different scenes where he stares back at other characters staring at him, there are things that flicker across his face that are haunting, damning, human, vulnerable and more than a little epic.
Fincher suggests the grind of work, fruitless work. Men who inhale white-bread sandwiches in between lungfuls of surmise spoken aloud, always at length, nutrition gulped between gasps of human intuition. This is something apart from the reductive psychology to which Hollywood traditionally subjects these kinds of stories. The narrative of the many characters’ frustrations at the elusive object is also a vehicle beyond plot for Fincher to convey dread. The soundtrack is exceptionally sophisticated, combining stylized sound design by Fincher’s colleague since high school, 
Ren Klyce with an ominous score by David Shire (The Conversation, All the President’s Men), which draws literally from the twelve-tone musical score. [Shire describes in detail in the press kit [PDF download].] But it is the musique concret-style score that brands the brain. The sounds of footfalls and floorboard creaks, close, and far, a city’s sirens and backfires. Dogs bay. Sirens howl like hounds. Trucks grind gears. Tires peel and squall. Busses struggle and whoosh. The shards of sound escalate across the years. It is enough to drive you mad, or to empathize innately with the static inside the minds of the searchers on screen.
Late, there’s a burger shared between policeman Ruffalo and now research-mad Gyllenhaal that resembles the diner meeting between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in Michael Mann’s Heat, but there is an extra turn: Gyllenhaal’s stand and pace as he elaborates, reminiscent of a prosecuting attorney making his case to a jury of one. Mann is more steeped in masculine posturing and self-pity, 
but he and Fincher are both controlling. At the risk of neologism, rather than apply the disdainful “perfectionist” to them, I’d call them “precisionists,” artists who in every last film gesture for an equivalence to the literary le mot juste. (A savage instant: we hear the cutting of a key in the background while a suspect and an investigator trade looks in a hardware store. It could as well be saw on bone.)
Zodiac is understated, with only a few bursts of the extravagant side of Fincher’s imagination, such as the Transamerica tower rising to a fog-scoured sky in a thrilling Koyaanisqatsi-style special effects sequence. The city’s ascent suggests the layers of history, the bedrock of architectural and cultural advance (the killings being an Altamont-like signpost of the end of the “age of Aquarius”).
Objects hold power. They way Downey scoots an office chair across the Chron newsroom sings who this newspaperman was (as does the way he fixes an orange #2 Eagle pencil into the spiral of a reporter’s pad, the smallest gesture captured with Gene Kelly-style elan). The cars are an eyeful as well, and these are surely, considering the scads of research done, the cars the characters drove, but Fincher has a way of shooting a period car parked on the street, in medium or distant shot, that matches the style of a pioneering photographer of the quotidian, Stephen Shore: the feigned offhand, the created momentousness of nothing at all. (There is a lingering moment after the first killing when the driver’s-side turn signal of a Corvair continues to Tick. Tick. afterwards.) While damping the ample opportunities to dress the characters in the worst of 1970s fashion, Fincher resists, yet there is one amusing long shot where Elias Koteas’ cop is summoned to open a door, and he approaches the front of the frame in taupe poly Sansabelt slacks boasting a firm outline the length of his cock. Ah, the history of ages past.
Each of the characters hoards information like a squirrel and winter still comes, cold, unforgiving, people age, witnesses forget, times change. They suffer the conceited belief that the more we know, the closer we are to knowing Truth, the single fact that shall set us free.
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:52 AM | Comments (0)
March 13, 2007
[SNEAK] Surf's Up
Jon Heder, Zooey Deschanel and Jeff Bridges at a preview in Culver City for Sony Animation's summer release, Surf's Up, a "Pengu-Town and Z-Boys"-style mock doc about... surfing penguins (its genesis about four years ago was the third, separate, parallel inspiration that also brought March of the Penguins and Happy Feet). Among the inspired comedic touches: actors experienced in improv riffing in the same room together rather than in isolated recording booths, leading to scenes where jokes pile on mercilessly. It's very funny stuff.
[Photo © ray pride 2007.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 11, 2007
DV vs. Goliath: Q&Aing Joe Swanberg's SxSW preem Hannah Takes The Stairs
OUT IN THE REAL WORLD, BY THE GLOW OF WEBCAMS and computer screens, the potential for the average Joe and Jane to chronicle the most intimate moments of their lives is in motion every night and day. Feature films are another matter; studio pictures can’t move quickly enough to encompass what happened five yesterdays ago, let along six months to a year from now at the pace of an iPod-YouTube-MySpace-BitTorrent world. While the culture of surveillance and self-surveillance has begun to prompt and provoke interesting art, one Chicago filmmaker has made the lives (virtual and otherwise) of his friends and himself the center of his work.
JOE SWANBERG TURNS 26 LATER THIS YEAR, he’s shot his fourth feature, a look at long distance relationships, and his third, and most playful, the sunny, Chicago-set Hannah Takes the Stairs, has its world premiere Sunday night at Austin’s South by Southwest festival. Swanberg, whose 2006 LOL and 2005 Kissing on the Mouth also debuted at SxSW, is cautious to a fault about his working method, with his new movie’s “A film by” credit going to eight people, including himself, lead Greta Gerwig, the filmmakers Kent Osborne (Dropping Out), Ry Russo-Young (Orphans), Andrew Bujalski (Mutual Appreciation), Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair), Todd Rohal (The Guatemalan Handshake), and musician Kevin Bewersdorf. While it sounds like a clever-clever conceit, casting actor-directors whom he’s befriended on the festival circuit in a kind of cinematic twentysomething supergroup, it’s central to the film’s success. Swanberg likes to collaborate, and he likes to work with people he likes, which shows in Hannah, which like his earlier movies, captures a tentative intimacy rare on screen but common in life, how two people alone in a room do dances of gesture, with clothes and without, searching for self-definition and happiness, baring scars and kissing for minutes at a time. (While sometimes discomfiting within the context of the characters’ lives, the nudity in his work is handled with offhanded aplomb.) His second feature, LOL dealt with how life spent on the internet can ruin relationships. And: Swanberg’s second season of a web series for Nerve.com just debuted, and several days I spent on the set—that is, in cast members’ apartments—of the first series of Young American Bodies further demonstrated his affably casual, offhanded approach to getting through the day’s notes. [In the extended Q&A below, we talk about his work being a calling card to kindred spirits; how he sold Hannah to its producer in the form of a drawing of a martini glass; the impact of the 1980s American indepemdent movement on his ambitions; why his work is "selfish"; and why Stop Making Sense may be almost as perfect as Kieslowski's Blue and Double Life of Veronique.]
The writer who’s most capably put his finger on what Swanberg’s doing with his tentative, tender impulses, is David Hudson, who collates the daily GreenCine indie film blog from Berlin, but who discovered Swanberg’s work in Austin. Hudson suggests that the 6’3” director-writer-actor-cameraman-improviser is “one of the first filmmakers who's already proven himself in what you might call the traditional theatrical format, that is, feature length, big screen, who actually seems more comfortable, or rather, seems to enjoy working more within the parameters of the current online viewing experience. 
It's not just a matter of length, either, whether it's his shorts or his episodic series. The intimacy of the stories he tells, too, seems intensified by the intimacy of what the experience requires at the moment: one viewer, nose-to-the-screen. Personally, my favorite of his works remains the Young American Bodies series, probably for these reasons.”
Which leads into an uncanny insight that Swanberg offers about his perspective in one of several long conversations about why his process could only work in today’s world.
PRIDE: With such bold, bright frames in his work, both for the Nerve series and in Hannah, what format, what screen are you composing for?
SWANBERG: I actually am not aware of it and try and consciously unaware of it. I would say, realistically, I’m always shooting for an LCD screen. The on-camera LCD [screen], roughly 2.5 inches. That’s what I frame for, that’s what I look through, that’s what I’ve become used to photographing for. So even with the knowledge that Hannah would be showing at festivals in a theatrical setting, I’m still making it look good there and hoping that translates. I’m aware of [future platforms], everything’s getting smaller, and certainly part of me feels that I might as well make it look good here because in five years, that’s how everybody’s going to be watching it.
PRIDE: The first two features were 4:3 but Hannah is 16:9 widescreen.
SWANBERG: Kissing on the Mouth and LOL were both consciously full-frame. The camera has the capability to do widescreen, but I chose not to. And then Young American Bodies was 
sort of my first stab at 16:9, because I felt like it was an environment, where it was this webshow and not having any experience with it and not knowing exactly what would come out of it, that that was a good time to play around.
PRIDE: It’s also below the radar for most people, rather than festival play, which at least exposes you to programmers and distributors, if not a truly wide audience. That's good in a way, experimenting without undue pressure.
SWANBERG: Yeah. Exactly. Which has been the greatest thing about that show. More people have seen it than all of my features combined, and yet nobody’s really judging me on the same criteria, which is perfect. The most invisibility also them most freedom to play, from my point of view. The reason the next two features are in 16:9 is because it’s native to the camera. I think had the camera been native 4:3, then I might have chosen to go that way.
PRIDE: Are you shooting differently, using negative space and so on in the wider format? One of the things I always like is your use of bold color and simple, clean geometry.
SWANBERG: That hasn’t changed. I let [DoP] Matthias [Grusky] go on Nights and Weekends, I said, "Do what you want, I trust your instincts, and I’m going to be acting, so I don’t want to be looking over your shoulder."
PRIDE: But he’d seen your stuff, you do have a style—
SWANBERG: Exactly. Hannah, I shot every frame and it very much has bold colors, simple color palettes. It feels very much like my photography, I think.
PRIDE: Your movies seem like of a calling card more to kindred spirits than to potential financiers.
SWANBERG: Yeah, absolutely. Especially with Kissing on the Mouth, I got asked that [on the festival circuit]. I always joked that Kissing on the Mouth was the anti-calling card. It was basically proof that I would never make any money for anybody and proof that you shouldn’t hire me! But at the same time, yes, I think it’s a calling card to interesting people who want to make interesting projects, that you can come and be safe with us,and you can give us all of that and I will do everything in my power to make sure that you’re not exploited and that your story is told accurately.
PRIDE: But you found an investor anyway, your producer on Hannah and Nights and Weekends, Anish Savjani.
SWANBERG: He’s from Austin. He saw LOL [at SxSW] and he came to the LOL party that night, said, “I like it, let’s talk.” I think three weeks later we were in business. We started shooting a few months after that. It was like a short pitch to him over the telephone and he agreed to do it. And then when I presented him—[Swanberg laughs] Really, I said to him what I said to everybody, which is like, “If you want to help me and you have some money and you want to enable me to make this film on HD and work with the people that I want to work with, then I love you and I think you’re great. But I’m not going to write a script and I’m not going to change the way I make movies.” 
Because I can do it by myself if I want to. So he said, “What’s your idea?” so I told him my idea. What I gave him was a drawing on a piece of paper that sort of looked like a martini glass that outlined the characters and the way the story would progress and potentially split into two different [stories]. That’s what he approved, based on the drawing. It never became anything more than a drawing until the film was finished. There’s one sheet of paper with all the scenes in the movie written out halfway through the production. That sheet of paper had what we had already shot and what we felt like we needed to shoot. That’s all that exists on paper other than that drawing.
PRIDE: These movies could only be made today. This career, your career, could only occur in this precise historical moment.
SWANBERG: Oh, I’m positive of it. I don’t think… [He sighs, considers.] Part of what makes me feel like that is I just don’t think that I would have the stamina or energy to have taken the time to convince anybody to make Kissing on the Mouth had it cost [anything]. Kissing on the Mouth still could have been made… No, it couldn’t have been made at any other time. Because I would have had no idea what to say to everybody, as to how much film stock I would have needed, how much time it would take, what the editing process would be like and it’s not a film that I could have shot all up front and then [go] into an editing room for two weeks and then come out with a finished movie. It had to be a project that was shot a little bit, cut a little bit, shot a little bit, 
cut a little bit. Unlimited potential for tape stock and unlimited time on my hands to finish it at the pace I need to finish. LOL couldn’t have been made without the ability to send large files over the Internet to people in different cities to collaborate with me on the project. Hannah couldn’t have been made if I didn’t have the email and cell phone technology to be in constant communication with people like Andrew and Mark over the course of two years, as my films developed and as their work developed. I couldn’t’ve had met the two of them at South by Southwest in 2005 and then called them in the summer of 2006, and say, remember me from a year-and-a-half ago, well I have this project… It was something that was totally enabled by an ongoing conversation from the moment we met until they actually came to Chicago to make the film. And Nights and Weekends, the whole function of this couple is based on a world in which long distance couples have contact in a way it hasn’t been done before. We never see them in long distance mode. What we did do, which I don’t know if it’s ever been done before, is that there’s the middle section is a phone call that takes place over the phone and I had one crew here in Chicago with me recording my side of it and I had one crew in New York recording her side of it and we acted over the phone for two continuous 40 minute takes.
PRIDE: Lars von Trier made a pact with his actors on The Idiots that he’d strip off his pants if they’d just get on with their nude scenes, and you’ve got a similar thing in your work, exposing yourself, or playing amusing doofuses, like in Young American Bodies.
SWANBERG: Certainly from the beginning I was conscious of the fact that if I was going to ask anybody to do something I needed to be right there with them. I’ve kept that mentality through all of the projects. I’m not interested in pushing people past their limits or coercing someone to do something. I get no kind of thrill from, from, from manipulating a situation to get what I want. If the person doesn’t want to give it to me, I’m not going to be happy with it in the end anyway.
PRIDE: Watching you work, particularly as you all improvise off an outline, I’m reminded in a distant way of Mike Leigh’s devising of scenes—
SWANBERG: I don’t work with actors, though. That’s the other thing. I don’t put myself in an environment where people want to be pushed. I put myself in an environment where I’m surrounded by artists, people I respect who want to help me tell a story. I love working with the people that I work with. I have a feeling that actors with a capital A are my type of people to begin with. Greta gave me everything in Hannah Takes the Stairs. She completely opened up her entire self for that movie. I never had to ask it of her once, but she’d seen my films and worked with me on LOL long distance and over the phone, and on Young American Bodies, so when she came to Chicago and it was time to make Hannah, she knew what I did and she knew what I wanted to do and there was no discussion about it. It was like, if we’re going to do this, I’m going to need everybody to give me everything. But I never had to ask. I didn’t have to ask with Mark, I didn’t have to ask with Andrew, or Kent or Rob.
PRIDE: Some of your colleagues have an interest in the studio system, like you’ve described Bujalski’s interest in being a screenwriter.
SWANBERG: Bujalski actually does have a desire to work inside the system. Maybe not to direct within the system, but he would love to be a screenwriter for hire, which is something I have zero interest in. I feel like the John Sayles career path is something that appeals to him a great deal, where he can make money from Hollywood than use it to make his movies. But it’s not for me. If anything, the thing I would like to do within the Hollywood system is act. Because I’m not precious about my image. I am precious about my ideas and where I choose to put them and how I choose to do so, but I’d act in any old piece-of-shit movie and not have second thoughts about it. But as far as writing something or directing something, that means something to me that’s too much to give away if I don’t like what I’m doing.
PRIDE: So it’s a matter of do the work, keep your head above water, don’t analyze it? But you do read what people write.
SWANBERG: Oh yeah, sure. I’m curious what people think. One of the things that has always been the goal is to make work that resonates with people. If I felt like at any point I was just making some shit simply to amuse myself, and the people in it, I would stop doing it. I personally, when I say that I’m selfish about it, that I feel selfish, I feel like I’m growing as a person and I feel like I’m growing as a filmmaker by 
making these projects, but the desire at the end of the day is always to make a piece of work that affects people. So in that sense, I’m very curious to know what people write about it, I’m curious what people are thinking about it. I want people to like it. Kissing on the Mouth is probably the most challenging of all the work I’ve done, but even that, I made it to be entertaining in a certain sense, for a certain audience. And I would hate to feel like an audience wouldn’t come out of the film excited.
PRIDE: You called your prolific output “selfish.” I’m not sure I know what you mean.
SWANBERG: I guess I don’t feel bad about being selfish, but I would call it selfish because I’m getting as much out of it as anybody is. I’m insisting on that. If somebody came to me with a project and here’s this amount of money to do this project that’s gonna pay you but you’re not going to enjoy, and somebody else came to me with half as much money, I would do the one that I was going to enjoy. Until there’s a reason to change, like, for instance, a family, I feel like I’ll keep that [mindset].” [Swanberg mentions a friend who’s making a sequel.] It sounds like he’s in hell every single day. And it’s like, why deal with it if I don’t have to?
PRIDE: What impact has the history of the 1980s American independent film movement had on your aspirations?
SWANBERG: Reading Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It” journal, here’s a guy who’s roughly the same age I am now, who had to hustle for months and months and months and call up his family members and beg money from them and set up these meetings with investors and beg for money from them and apply for all of these grants, just to do a film with four characters in apartments? It’s just like Kissing on the Mouth. It’s like Kissing on the Mouth 20 years earlier. But the amount of work he had to go through just to make the movie doesn’t exist now. Reading his journal, I sort of know that I didn’t have in myself to do that. It’s not my style to hustle like that. It’s my style to say, “What tools do I have? What can I make tomorrow?”
PRIDE: And tomorrow and tomorrow and the next day?
SWANBERG: I think the way to make [a career happen] is to be productive. I don’t think you can exist that way with one movie every two hours. In order to do it, you have to have a steady income from multiple small movies a year, which is great, because it’s the way I prefer to work anyway. That’s not unlike my vision of how that’s possible. Kissing is available on DVD now, LOL is going to be available at the end of July, and Hannah maybe a year after that, Nights and Weekends a year after that. So eventually, if I’m seeing a little bit of money from all of these films, then that becomes viable.
PRIDE: You spend your nights and weekends making movies about how difficult it is to maintain relationships in the modern age. How do you do it with your girlfriend, who’s also a filmmaker?
SWANBERG: Kris and I have been together for over seven years, and she has always been the first person to hear my ideas and the one who has to live with me while those ideas occupy most of my time and brain function. She has made tremendous sacrifices to make sure that I have both the space and time that I need to do my work, 
whether we are working together on something or separately. Most relationships don't have to make these concessions, and I'm so grateful that we have found a way to be together while also being the filmmakers we want to be. Living with me and dealing with me is not an easy thing to do, I'm sure of that, but she has always been supportive and encouraging, even when I'm driving her crazy.
PRIDE: What movies have inspired you or drive you crazy?
SWANBERG: When I think about movies that I really, really love, that I would defend, the few that come to mind are Stop Making Sense, which I’ve probably seen more than any other film. I think David Byrne gives one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in a movie. I think it does, I think the reason that I like it maybe most of it all is that it does exactly what it sets out to do. I feel like it’s a film that’s completely realized. There’s very little in it that feels left up to chance. It feels like a bunch of artists who had a vision and they told it as well as they could. Breaking the Waves marked a turning point for me. I’d never quite seen anything before that, I saw it in high school, it was my first sense of being put through an experience by cinema. You felt proud when it ended if you’d made it out the other end. You Can Count on Me, Mark Ruffalo blows my mind. I think the whole film, but his performance is what I respond to. That’s one I can go back to again and again. That performance 
continues to inspire me, that’s something I strive for, something as good as that. Medium Cool is a huge influence on me, as far as taking the camera into the riots and putting your actors in a real situation and capturing how they respond. When I heard that for the first time, it totally opened up a new channel in my brain or what was possible and where the lines of fiction and nonfiction could be blended.
PRIDE: You just dipped into the complete Kieslowski retrospective at the Siskel, didn’t you?
SWANBERG: Kieslowski, I can’t remember something I liked as much as I liked Blue. I was sitting there with my hand on my mouth, staring in disbelief at the screen that I could actually be seeing what I’m seeing. Blue and Double Life of Veronique are way at the top of my list of favorite films now. They had the same DP, Slawomir Idziak… but I just don’t know how he does it. Don’t know how he does it. [Two stills from Hannah Takes The Stairs, courtesy Joe Swanberg; all other photographs © ray pride 2007; a different, shorter version appeared in Newcity (Chicago).]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)
March 10, 2007
Kiss Kiss Bang thang: title this
The terrific title sequence for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, by Danny Yount of Prologue Films, via Submarine Channel; h/t Cinecultist. Also: John Furniotis "head credits" Cronenberg's Crash.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:04 AM | Comments (0)
March 09, 2007
Indie returns Monday
Posted by Ray Pride at 11:36 AM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2007
Advanced cricketeering: Andrews on Inland Empire
Another writer makes beautiful sentences out of mad artifact: "How many countries are there in the human mind?" asks the FT's Nigel Andrews of David Lynch's Inland Empire. What does the title mean? "It means the mind. That continent. That imperium. That expanse of broad-flung colonies, most of them at war with most of the others. How do you make a film about such multitudinousness? 
...After half an hour you may be climbing up the wall. An hour, and you may be applying for admission to a mental clinic. (Not another scene in which Laura Dern, a film actress playing a film actress, spooks herself by exploring the “inland empire” that lies behind the soundstage housefronts, an empire apparently including Poland.) Two hours and you will, if you have a soul, fall violently in love with this film’s psychedelic implacability, its lyrical madness." ...[W]here what used to be central-eastern Europe seems now to be part of unmapped LA. It is surely clear that the secondary meaning of “inland empire” is the blazing foundry of European folklore that lies inside Hollywood itself, that “outer” empire founded by transatlantic Jews and gypsies... But that is show business, isn’t it? Lynch is on the money, with both his questions and his hinted answers. For who ever thought Hollywood and the dream life of cinema were innocent? Who ever believed they were not created by a long-term arrangement, at once damning and Faustianly aspirational, between the devil and the deep human mind?" [More at the link; the Inland Empire site is here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:51 AM | Comments (0)
"Stunning Kenya:" c'mon, let's make a movie!
A murky, sleeting, sidewalk-slipping late winter afternoon in Chicago and over the transom, a kind invitation from The Kenya Film Commission to shoot a movie in Africa! "Kenya is a great destination for television wildlife productions. Many award winning wildlife series have been shot on location in Kenya... Hitting top US ratings,'Survivor Africa' showcased the Kenya backdrop and is said to have been one of the most successful in the series. 
The Producers felt that Kenya offers perfect combination of beautiful locale, natural light, an array of wildlife and a beautiful people all set in adventurous territory. Kenya boasts a unique variation in altitude and terrain, with an exceptionally wide variety of locations. These include white sandy beaches, mountains, dense forests, arid deserts, savannah grasslands, lakes and rivers. An aerial view of the Great Rift Valley is simply breathtaking! In a nutshell, this is Africa at its splendid best... The Kenya people are always welcoming foreign film-makers. We are a friendly people; therefore filming among different cultures will run smoothly... For a feature film or drama, submit one copy of the script and the synopsis to the film licensing officer. The license is issued within 48 hours of the application. In case of a documentary; just fill out an application form that the licensing officer will give you. The license is issued on the spot. It's that simple! ... For documentaries, dramas, short features, advertisements and still photography, it will cost only Kshs. 5,000 or US $70. For full length feature films and reality TV shows, it will cost Kshs 15000 or US $210. Filming will only cost Kshs 1,000 or US $14." Low fees, little red tape, now about that budget...
The Kenya Film Commission
The Kenyan landscape has graced the silver screen for over fifty years, from 1950's King Solomon's Mines to the 2005 box-office hit The Constant Gardener. The lush Ngong Highlands, seen in the Oscar-winning Out of Africa (1985) to the arid Shaba reserves outwitted and outlasted in Survivor 3: Africa showcase Kenya's versatile landscapes that offer a great scope of filming locations.
Kenya offers spectacular scenery; directors Sydney Pollack (Out of Africa), Richard Curtis (Love Actually) and Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener) are just some of the award-winning filmmakers who have been more than satisfied with their Kenyan experience.
Also shot in Kenya, Stephanie Zweig's Nirgendwo in Afrika (Nowhere in Africa) was the winner of 'Best Foreign Language Film' in the 2003 Academy Awards. The stunning cinematography seen in movies shot in Kenya speaks volumes on the breathtaking scenery that is unparalleled anywhere in the world.
Kenya is a great destination for television wildlife productions. Many award winning wildlife series have been shot on location in Kenya, including the popular BBC series 'Big Cat Diary'. Hitting top US ratings,'Survivor Africa' showcased the Kenya backdrop and is said to have been one of the most successful in the series. The Producers felt that Kenya offers perfect combination of beautiful locale, natural light, an array of wildlife and a beautiful people all set in adventurous territory.
Kenya boasts a unique variation in altitude and terrain, with an exceptionally wide variety of locations. These include white sandy beaches, mountains, dense forests, arid deserts, savannah grasslands, lakes and rivers. An aerial view of the Great Rift Valley is simply breathtaking! In a nutshell, this is Africa at its splendid best.
The Kenya Film Commission aims to make your experience a pleasant one. We offer detailed information on the stunning Kenyan location—from savannah grasslands to heritage landscapes. We are here to provide answers to your recce needs. We offer liaison services on behalf of the Government of Kenya and work as a go-between for all filmmakers. We will help smooth over all bureaucratic speed bumps.
Amongst our resources is an extensive database that will be highly useful to those looking to source from the vast array of Kenyan talent, service providers and production houses.
Kenya is rich with a vibrant ensemble of locally and internationally trained producers, directors, writers, crew and actors who have created a stir with award-winning productions at International Film Festivals.
4,500 years of migration in Kenya have evolved a unique blend of cultural diversity, ranging from the Coastal Swahili and Arabic people, to a multi-racial community of Asian and European descendants together with Highland Bantus, Lake Basin Nilotics and Desert Cushites.
The Kenya people are always welcoming foreign film-makers. We are a friendly people; therefore filming among different cultures will run smoothly.
Non-speaking roles or extras are available with over half a million foreign inhabitants residing in Kenya. A total population of only 36 million is spread over 582,646 square kilometres, thus crowd control is in check.
Private and government security agents are available to those who wish for additional security in an already secure environment.
Private airplanes and helicopters are available for charter to ease transport logistics
Licensing in Kenya is done by the DEPARTMENT OF FILM SERVICES
What do I do to get a license?
For a feature film or drama, submit one copy of the script and the synopsis to the film licensing officer. The license is issued within forty-eight hours of the application. In case of a documentary; just fill out an application form that the licensing officer will give you. The license is issued on the spot. It's that simple!
How much will the license cost me?
For documentaries, dramas, short features, advertisements and still photography, it will cost only Kshs. 5,000 or US $ 70.
For full length feature films and reality TV shows, it will cost Kshs 15000 or US $210. Filming will only cost Kshs 1,000 or US $ 14.
Immigration
Kenya welcomes as many expatriate crew members and artists as a production house feels necessary for its successful production. They will all be issued with visitors pass are their work permits are being processed. The work permit or 'special pass' is available at only Kshs 2,000 or US $ 28 per person.
Importing Equipment
Though the state-of-the-art equipment is available in Kenya, the Government welcomes importation of equipment at a nominal and non-refundable import duty of only 1% or Kshs 30,000 (US $ 410) WHICHEVER IS LESS on the total quantity of the imported items per container. A list of accredited agents who will facilitate all your filming needs is available from the Kenya Film Commission at www.filmingkenya.com .
For more information, contact:
E-mail: fdp@skyweb.co.ke
Department of Film Services
Ministry of Information and Communications,
Mwembere Road, South B,
P. O. Box 74934 00200,
Nairobi, Kenya.
Tel: 254 20 650120/ 1/ 2, 650501,
Fax: 254 20 553003
www.filmservices.go.ke
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:48 AM | Comments (2)
March 07, 2007
Colour Me deadpan: Kubrick's assistant directs
Colour Me Kubrick, a John Malkovich-starring lark about an unlikely 1980s Stanley Kubrick impersonator, opens March 23. The screenplay's by Anthony Frewin, longtime assistant to the late director, and Brian Cook, Colour's producer-director, also knew him well. "I was his assistant director on Barry Lyndon and The Shining and 
assistant director as well as co-producer on Eyes Wide Shut. I made three pictures with Stanley over a period of some 30 years," Cook attests in the Colour Me Kubrick press kit. "He was really a man unto himself. We worked at the studio but we also spent a lot of time at his home. Especially as he didn't get up early and worked into the middle of the night! He loved that and I don't blame him. I'd do the same thing if I could afford it! He didn't waste time going to the studio every morning. He lived at home with his wife, children and no one else. We only came over to work and never stayed... Stanley stayed up very late in the evenings reading or making phone calls. He never started to work before noon. With age, he'd get up later and later. On Eyes Wide Shut, we'd work from 1pm to 1am, even at the studio. Obviously, when you work with someone for 30 years, certain bonds develop. Extremely loyal to those whose work he appreciated, Stanley systematically rehired the same collaborators. He had surrounded himself with excellent technicians... He himself was a very good technician. Outside the periods of production, we'd sometimes phone each other. I traveled a lot but always dropped in to see him whenever I returned to England. We had a good relationship. I particularly appreciated his deadpan side whenever he'd speak about the motion picture industry. He had a very subtle wit. He knew how to be a hard taskmaster when necessary, but working with him was sheer delight, he was a true perfectionist. His method didn't vary with the films. First of all, he'd write the scene and adapt it according to the actors. For each and every scene, he'd spend hours and hours preparing the set and lighting even before we began rehearsals with the actors. When the set finally suited him, he'd have them come over and worked with them. He never required their presence before the set, props and lighting were ready, all of which takes an incredible amount of time. We'd do as many takes as he wished. We began over again each time by modifying lighting…
It didn't bother Stanley spending time on a film. Many good directors like to keep up a steady shooting rhythm, advancing things without increasing the number of takes." Kubrick "always wanted to try out other options. This was his right and he could afford it, as his films raked in a huge amount of money. No studio would have tolerated his work method if he didn't bring in so much for them. He had lots of success, but worked hard, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It was his whole life. He was a skillful filmmaker who didn't really appreciate the shoot in itself. He preferred by far preparation and postproduction. I loved talking with him. It's such a terrible pity he left us so son. Never again will there be a man like him. Today, directors work at a frantic pace. They have to make films ever cheaper and cannot afford to spend years preparing and polishing up each production as Stanley Kubrick or David Lean would do. All that belongs to the past."
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:34 PM | Comments (0)
Force of Abbas: Kiarostami pictures, Manhattan
"There is a connection between my photography and my cinema," Iranian director-photographer-poet Abbas Kiarostami tells Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door as his work in film and photography gets the NYC retro treatment. "If there was no movement in what I photographed then I would have felt no need to take those pictures. Yet even though you can hear the sound and see the path of the wiper, my photography is capturing one specific moment. The same applies in my cinema: even though it's a moving image, I'm still capturing a specific moment. The same applies in my poems, for example: A white foal/ emerges through the fog/ and disappears/ in the fog. You're reading that a white foal, a baby horse, has come and gone; through the poem you have an impression of the movement. Even though you don't see it, you have an impression of the movement in your psyche. This foal is like the wipers on the windshield. You don't see the actual movement of it, but you see its impression. A moment is suggested through this implied movement." [More at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)
March 06, 2007
[QUOTE] Writing Zodiac: You don't have to kill all the rattlesnakes
Zodiac scribe James Vanderbilt talks "dark" and "messiness" to Denis Faye at WGAW. "Fincher had this saying, like a therapist would say. “You don't have to kill all the rattlesnakes to know where they all are.” And the idea behind it is that, for the guys in the movie, it's more about
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)
[QUOTE]: Larry effin' Clark
Oh, Larry. "Larry Clark is angry... "Fuck the critics" he spits. "Fuck the censors" he adds. Oh, and "fuck the police"... In conversation he might sound like what he is, a 
65-year-old man with a deep, slow motion Oklahoma drawl frequently punctuated by temporarily lost trails of thought, but his words, like his films, are those of rebellious adolescence," writes David Whitehouse in the Guardian. "[T]hese aren't the noises of a man desperately trying to get down with the kids.... Larry Clark is legitimately the oldest teenager on the block" and the "itchiest scab on the arse of the arts establishment." Quoth: "Do I exploit teen sexuality more than the tabloid newspapers who have pictures of famous young women getting out of a car with no pants on? No fucking way. Fuck the critics... I've been working my whole life to get an R rating... It's all to do with the MPAA... those cocksuckin' mother fuckers. Let me tell you about the fuckin' MPAA. They are a censorship board run by the studios to protect their films. So they shit all over the smaller independent films like mine. This means we're allowed to watch Sharon Stone fuckin' the shit out of Michael Douglas before she stabs him, but I can't show what I wanna show. It's the most corrupt system in the world."
[Photo © Leah Missbach Day.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:49 PM | Comments (0)
[QUOTE]: Joe effin' Eszterhas
Joe Eszterhas reviews some of his greatest shit-fits: To Paul Verhoeven. "'If you use that tone of voice with me again, I'm going to come over this table at you." To Disney execs in the boardroom: "Take your hands off my dick and tell me the truth." Why such the hot head, Susan Dominus wonders in the Telegraph's Seven magazine. "I think part of it 
is that I grew up as an immigrant kid feeling very marginalised, kind of like a second-class citizen... [S]creenwriters are very marginalised in L.A., very much like second-class citizens, and I think it's possible that I said, fuck you—not me. It would have been so much easier.' Of course, it's one of the things that makes Eszterhas ultimately likeable: despite all the bluster he was clearly passionate about what he did... Wearing a Hell's Angels T-shirt that says 'Live to Ride', and weighing a good deal less than he did at the time of his diagnosis, Eszterhas still sits heavily... His voice, post-surgery, has a gravelly quality, like Gene Hackman's might sound 20 years from now... Life obviously moves at a slower pace for him these days. Instead of going to see Basic Instinct II at the premiere in Los Angeles, he and his wife headed over to the local [Ohio] multiplex at midday, when they often have the cinema to themselves. ('We like to joke that we have the biggest private screening-room of anyone we know,' says Eszterhas, laughing with a very Santa Claus-like heave of his shoulders.)"
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:03 AM | Comments (0)
[LOOK] An oldie: Titanic 2: Electric Boogaloo
Okay, you weren't one of the almost five million people who already saw this on YouTube, either, now were you?
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)
March 05, 2007
Guy Maddin on transparent dishonesty
"If you’re being as transparently dishonest as most filmmakers—you know, Martin Scorsese having a taller alter ego in Robert De Niro—you might as well just come out and say who it is," explains Guy Maddin of using his own name in his dreamlike feature work, to José Teodoro in the Photography Issue of StopSmiling. "Besides, you have to be pretty sure that your alter ego, if he isn’t named after you, is doing pretty interesting, 
compelling things, whereas I feel like you’re buying a little extra goodwill from the audience by naming the character after yourself. It’s tricky, of course. You’re all of a sudden engaging yourself in an act of masochism if you’re making yourself look bad. You’re really indulging yourself in self-pity if you’re depicting your horrible childhood, and that can only be withstood by an audience for a few minutes before they hurl. So it’s strangely liberating just being up-front about it, saying, “This is me,” because every character in the movie is me anyway. All I can go by is what I myself would do in a certain situation." But are the Winnipegger's dreams anything like movies? "No, almost never. Every now and then I have a dream that I’m watching one of my own movies, and it becomes much better than it really is, and I realize that I should have been a little more daring, or a little more ambitious. There’ll be long tracking shots and I have no idea where they’re going to go. It’ll be really intriguing and the curiosity mounts, and then there’s a great payoff. Rarely when you wake up can you write it down and then act on it, of course. But these dreams remind me to try harder, work harder. I have this longstanding battle with my ambition. Sometimes I get really lazy... I used to try to make Atom Egoyan into a rival, but he’s too nice and makes completely different kinds of films."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
South Asian media money: Screwvala, Murdoch and more
Indian entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala is about to see his name on American screens as co-exec producer of two Fox Searchlight releases: Mira Nair's The Namesake and Chris Rock's I Think My I Love My Wife is also plotting an Indian media investment fund, reports Mark Kleinman, Asia Business Editor of the Telegraph: "Roger Parry, the chairman of Johnston Press, and Ronnie Screwvala, the Indian television mogul and Bafta-nominated film producer, are plotting the launch of a fund targeting India's fast-growing media sector... the India Media Fund, which has set a minimum fundraising target of $150m (£77m)... If it proceeds, the combination of Parry and Screwvala would be a heavyweight dealmaking team. Mr Screwvala is one of India's best-known entrepreneurs, having founded the country's first cable-television operation in 1981.... The fund is likely to consider investments across India's media industry, which is benefiting from the growth in consumer spending power fuelled by the country's economic boom... Mr Screwvala's track record includes engineering a series of deals with global media companies, including News Corporation, through United Television (UTV), the media conglomerate he founded, [which is credited on both Namesake and I Think] which has interests including TV, film and animation." [More at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:37 PM | Comments (0)
[LOOK]: Fincher 666: a tribute
Bloggers Dave and Thomas pay tribute to David Fincher, with trailers from his six features, as well as six favorite videos and six commercials [plus ties and bonuses]. One that was new to me: a video for the Rolling Stones' "Love is Strong." Write Dave and Thomas, "After his troubles with Alien 3, Fincher found solace in his old format of music videos and created this epic piece to help bring the Rolling Stones back to a new generation. This digital masterpiece was shot in the mid-90's, keep in mind, and still holds up today with the band being mixed into the skyline of New York City." [Mostly YouTube links..]
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)
[LOOK] What does Marcellus Wallace look like?
A graphic depiction of the dialogue stylings of Mr. Quentin Tarantino, drawn from Pulp Fiction by Savannah College of Art and Design student Jarratt Moody for a time-based typography class. [It's all in the Intonation; strong language alert.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 05:04 AM | Comments (0)
March 04, 2007
FINDing flaw with LAT's disSpiriting: a reply
Vondie Curtis Hall disagrees with last Saturday's LATimes' slash-'n'-trash piece on Spirit Awards sponsors Film Independent: "The portrayal of Film Independent and the attempt to depict us as somehow undeserving of tax-exempt status displays a shocking ignorance of who we are and what we do. We are a service-oriented arts organization," including the Spirit Awards and the Los Angeles Film Festival. "To criticize these self-supporting events for costing too much completely misses their point. Although the 
Spirit Awards properly provide financial support for programs for independent filmmakers, they are at their core a successful and effective way of promoting the independent film community... The film festival is not, as wrongly stated in the article, a "fundraising vehicle," nor are its expenses properly classified as "fundraising expenses." ... The Spirit Awards and film festival are at the heart of what we do as an organization dedicated to serving independent film. As such, their costs should be included in any calculation of our overall spending, which would bring our program-spending ratio to 75%, not the 50% quoted in the article. None of the constituencies to which we are properly accountable—including our members, sponsors, the film community and the Internal Revenue Service—has ever raised a question about our probity or effectiveness." [Hall is the president of Film Independent's Board of Directors.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 04:13 PM | Comments (0)
QT-Apple pie: distilled Tarantino
Drawn from "Quentin Tarantino Meets Fiona Apple," almost 1,600 words from the gob of QT: "One of my favourite scenes of all time is the opening scene of Pedro Almodovar’s Matador: the guy getting off on slasher films. 
That is a touched-by-God, genius moment. I remember talking to some of the guys I worked with at the Video Archives store and saying, “Man, I’d love to do an opening to a movie like that.” And someone said: “Yeah, they wouldn’t let you.” People have said little things like that all my life. But who’s “they”? I’ve given nobody the authority over me to say I can’t do anything—I can do anything I want or can achieve. I don’t ask permission. I might ask forgiveness, but I won’t ask permission. There is no “they”... You have a loaded gun, and you know you’ve got what it takes to put it in their faces and blow their heads off. It’s about never taking the gun out. It’s about never touching the gun, never raising it, never pulling the trigger, never blowing their heads off. It’s about not going there—but knowing you can." Violence is "cinematic," QT says. "It’s almost as if Edison and the Lumiere brothers invented the camera for filming violence." Pride of accomplishment? "I’ve never done a car chase before, and if I’m gonna do it, it has to be one of the best in the history of cinema... Directors don’t get better as they get older. They get worse—they get out of touch. There is this weird thing about movie-making where you kind of figure out how to do it. You’re just pulled along by the experience—there’s no way you can predict what’s going to happen. And on the second one, you know a hell of a lot more than you did on the first one, but you’re still being pulled along at least 25%. But when it came to the third one, now I kind of got it, and that was scary to me... I like holding on to my amateur status. I wanted to be a professional in all the right ways, but I didn’t want it ever to be a job... Whether it’s hardship or ruin, or hardship or good times, or happy or sad, or profitable or destitute—whatever the deal is, you go down the road today, and maybe your rewards are today, or maybe your rewards will be tomorrow, or maybe in another life, but you’re going your own way."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:23 PM | Comments (0)
LOOK: Planes, Trains and Effing Automobiles
Language! Please! [Courtesy of that dirty, stinking, effing hippie John Hughes, the now-silent man of sound cinema.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)
Glass' house: this American label
This American Lifer Ira Glass gets time in the NYT Magazine, telling Deborah Solomon that the work on the new Showtime series isn't documentary: "We don’t say “documentary” because “documentary” sounds boring. We try to avoid that word... We’re taking the tools of journalism and applying them to people whom you wouldn’t normally apply them to—people who aren’t famous, people who aren’t powerful, people just like you and me... For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It’s a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person and things happen to them and then something big happens and they realize something new."
Posted by Ray Pride at 03:22 PM | Comments (0)
They wear so many hats and it is only one head: today's African cinema
For the Beeb, Orla Ryan reports on the state of African cinema from movie-mad Burkina Faso during the biennial pan-African 
Fespaco film festival, or, "the Oscars of Ouagadougou." "[D]espite the huge love of cinema and the popularity of these films, which tell stories from around the continent through the eyes of Africans, many budding and active film makers still find it hard to raise finance for their films." Plus, "conventional film business models do not work on a continent where there are few cinemas. It is much harder to convince people to back to a film when... a shortage of cinemas make[s] it hard to earn back their initial investment." Says Burkinabé director Gaston Kaboré [pictured], "Directors are forced to play many roles. They are scriptwriters, they are producers, they exhibit, they do promos, they are sellers. They wear so many hats and it is only one head." Senior Senegalese master Ousmane Sembene is on hand: "If you write in a newspaper, people read it and it is finished. When it is on screen, everyone sees it. Lots of people cannot read, everyone has eyes to see."
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:58 PM | Comments (0)
6 years in Harvey's closet: Tears of a Thai director
ONLY RECENTLY FREED of the notorious early 2000s Miramax Shelf of Invisibility, Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah Talai Jone, 2000, ****) is a sui generis mashup, a “Raiders of the Lost Archive,” a strange, fevered, delirious, 1950s-styled Thai western-romance melodrama and a singularity of the highest order. Giddy beyond belief, it embodies an era of Thai genre movies, with florid colors and visual devices that out-spaghetti spaghetti westerns, faded to the turquoise-gold-pink-chartreuse shades of 1940s roto newspaper supplements. The film’s major influence even sounds made up: the films of Thai independent filmmaker Rattana Pestonji, who as the press notes describe, is “unknown outside of Thailand [and] largely forgotten at home, where there is no tradition of repertory or archival screenings of vintage films.” Apocryphal or not, there is much wry, wild and weird in Tears, and its invisibility to northern American audiences for half a decade only adds to its allure. 
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez have said their upcoming Grindhouse will play with making their work look like a battered relic; this gentle yet persistent hallucination was way ahead of their game. Designer cowboys with shoulder rocket launchers? Gunshot wounds that can only be called “meaty”? Blood as viscous and sweet looking as lychee? Textures were created with a pre-digital intermediate process, with a transfer to DigiBeta video, lurid tweaking and then back to 35mm. Look for how many reviews describe this blossoming bruise as “indescribable.” Over at LA Times, the indispensible Dennis Lim shines a light on Miramax's past and Sasanatieng's present. Lim calls it "a delirious pastiche that whizzes through as many incongruous genres as it does implausible plot twists. The movie's real-life trajectory—from festival star to battle-scarred survivor—Is almost as dramatic and convoluted... [I]t's one of the most notable victims of the old, overspending Miramax, which in the Weinstein era was notorious for acquiring armloads of festival titles and sometimes allowing them to molder in the vaults indefinitely... Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures [the film's current US distributor] remembers seeing Tears at its first packed Cannes screening. "The saturated color scheme and the incredibly arch nature of the characters and plot were counterbalanced by a seeming earnestness that just had no precedent for me," he said... The first rumblings of trouble came when Miramax decided to re-cut the film within months of the Cannes purchase. Sasanatieng said he and his producers had been warned of the Weinsteins' penchant for meddling. But, he said, "We were too innocent. We believed that they would respect our work. They told us again and again that everybody at Miramax loved the film so much... They didn't allow me to re-cut it at all," Sasanatieng said. "They did it by themselves and then sent me the tape. And they changed the ending from tragic to happy. They said that in the time after 9/11, nobody would like to see something sad." [Quicktime trailer here [graphic violence]; Now playing Cambridge, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Seattle; March 16 Tucson and San Diego; March 23, Hartford, Grand Rapids, and Columbia, South Carolina; March 30, Detroit and University City, Missouri; April 6, Denver, Atlanta and Nashville.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ishtar unfeathered: defending May
"The Departed is unlikely to make as lasting an imprint on the film community as another high-profile title, now celebrating its 20th anniversary: Ishtar, writes Dalton Ross at EW. "Starring A-listers Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as failed songwriters caught up in international espionage, Ishtar [1987] is considered [by some] one of the greatest Hollywood flops of all time... Time magazine even included the movie on its list of 'The 100 Worst Ideas of the Century'... Certainly one of the reasons Ishtar is so widely ridiculed has to do with the [then] huge cost ($40 million, with only a $14 million return [theatrically, not including an HBO sale or video revenue]) and even huger egos involved, but I'm here to tell you something that many may find funnier than anything in the actual film—it's not that bad... I cackle watching 
Hoffman try in vain to teach Beatty the difference between ''smuck'' and ''schmuck,'' guffaw at the bit about a blind camel, and pause the screen every time that [Isabelle Adjani] flashes her left breast. (I never claimed to be a proud man.) ... [O]ne could even call Ishtar a cutting-edge precursor to awkwardly uncomfortable gems such as "The Office" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm." Jonathan Rosenbaum takes Elaine May's comedy more seriously. May converses at length with Mike Nichols after a 2006 Manhattan screening held by Film Comment in which her former performing partner suggests "you invented the perfect metaphor for the behavior of the Bush administration in Iraq" and May observes, "If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today... [O]ddly enough when I made this movie Ronald Reagan was president and there was Iran-Contra, we were supporting Iran and Iraq. We put in Saddam. We had taken out the Shah. Khomeini was there. I remember looking at Ronald Reagan and thinking—I’m qualifying this, this was just an idea, I didn’t really believe it—I thought, he’s from Hollywood, he’s a really nice man. It’s possible the only movie he’s ever seen about the Middle East are the road movies with Hope and Crosby, and I thought I would make that movie." 
When Ishtar opened, "I left almost immediately for Bali," May says. "The film was political and it was a satire but it was my secret. When these articles started coming out, I thought—only for five minutes—it’s the CIA. I didn’t dream that it would be the studio. For one moment it was sort of glorious to think that I was going to be taken down by the CIA, and then it turned out to be David Putnam. I think this man was unique in that way, in that he was going to redo Hollywood and make it a better place. He was going to work from the inside..." [It's a fascinating Q&A in its entirety, plus, a dialogue transcript.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
March 03, 2007
[LISTEN] Eastwood's work ethic: keep your embouchure strong
"It's just a bit of work ethic," prolific septuagenerian Clint Eastwood tells fellow filmland vet Philip French in the Observer, "It becomes part of my life and, if I have any virtues, which are probably not many, I get fairly decisive about things. When I find something I like, I usually know it pretty soon and I don't have to talk myself into much. I probably 
shoot from the hip a little more than Warren Beatty or other people. They probably ponder things more and I say: I like this, let's go. I don't sit and dwell on it too much. I dwell on it as I make it. I guess everybody's a little different. Warren got up at the Golden Globes and he says: 'How do you it - having to do two pictures in one year?' But when I was growing up, Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh and all those directors made several pictures in one year. There's no big deal. Nowadays, everybody makes a deal that you can't do it, it's an impossible feat. It wasn't an impossible feat. Some of those B movie guys would get the script on Friday night and Monday morning you're starting and here's your cast. They just went with it. It's like being a musician. If you play every day, your embouchure is strong. If you play once every two years, you have to build up all over again." [The complete seventy-three-minute conversation is downloadable here.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 02:43 PM | Comments (0)
Sienna Miller: At least we got a fuckin' bunny out of it
Sienna Miller again proves herself a worthy throwback to the era of the say-anything actor or actress who always speaks their racing mind to Simon Hattenstone in the Guardian. "Mating with your rabbit!" I shout. 
"No! My rabbit with another rabbit. I had this gorgeous rabbit called Daisy and I picked out the one I wanted, got them out of their hutches—it was obviously very illegal to put them together—got them in a travel basket, ran behind the shed, let them do it, got caught... But it was this school in the country, and we had all been packed off at eight years old. At least we got a fuckin' bunny out of it." She though math was pointless. "I'd say, 'When would I use long division?' and the teacher would say, 'When you're in a supermarket and you want to calculate the price of your food before you get to the till,' and I'd think, 'Well, I'd take a fucking calculator, you nob.'" She is surprisingly laddish, with a wonderful knack of putting her foot in it. Take Pittsburgh. When she returned to the city where she had researched Factory Girl, she told Rolling Stone [that] she'd renamed it Shitsburgh. It just slipped out... "Having met me, you'll realise these things just come out. I think it might be mild Tourette's, not to insult people who have proper Tourette's, but I will say the most inappropriate things at the most inappropriate time to the most inappropriate person. Always. Guaranteed." Even now, mid-apology, she can't help digging herself in deeper. She tells me how she and her friends then spent ages renaming other American places. "Massivetwoshits is Massachusetts. Connecticunt, or Connectibutt. We came up with loads..." Of the yellow press favoring her slips and alleging her affairs, she tells Hattenstone, "Yeah! Year of the Slut! Spread 'em! That's my motto for 2007." She stops again, stresses she's joking. "Oh, please don't write that."
Posted by Ray Pride at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)
Zodiac tech: taking a shot
From Paramount's "handbook of production information," director of photography Harris Savides describes in simple tech-speak how the technology used to shoot the vivid, visceral Zodiac works: "The Viper is a high-definition (HD) video camera that captures data raw—meaning the camera outputs the image data off the sensor chips without modification. HD sensor chips generate tremendous amounts of data. Initially, HD cameras recorded to tape—a medium that cannot support HD's high data rate. Camera manufacturers decided to address this drawback by compressing the data and reducing the data rate that the tape mechanism can handle. When the data is compressed, decisions about color balance, contrast, brightness, etc., must be made during the compression process. Once these decisions are made and the results compressed, any subsequent modifications degrades image quality. In effect, the filmmakers must live with what is recorded to tape. The Viper represents a drastic departure from this paradigm. Rather than making image processing decisions and then compressing the data, Viper only captures the data and outputs the unmodified, unprocessed data. Without an onboard recording device, the Viper depends on an external recording device. Filmmakers can opt to record to a tape recorder, like the Sony HDCAM tape system. In this instance, image decisions would be made and the data would be compressed. However, with the availability of S Two digital field recorders and Thomson's Venom data recorders, filmmakers can modify the image as much as they wish without degrading the image.
Plus, filmmakers have access to the full range of image controls available from postproduction tools rather than be limited by the in-camera image controls."
Specs:
HD to film out; 2 Thomson Viper Filmstream cameras; Each camera records into two S Two D.Mag digital field recorder; 2 x Back Focusers; 2 x Astro HD 6" on-board monitors; and 8 x 29volt 18amp lithium batteries. Basic support: clip-on matted boxes/follow focus/baby/standard tripods/hi/low hats; 2 x O'Connor Ultimate 2575 Fluid Heads; 1 x Lambda Head. Basic filter pack: NDs/Polas/optical FLAs/Tiff Diffusions/Diopters. Lenses are all Zeiss digital primes: 5mm t1.9; 7mm t1.6; 10mm t1.6; 14mm t1.6; 28mm t1.6; 40mm t1/6; 70mm t1.6 close focus; and 2 x Zeiss 6-24mm zoom t1.9.
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
AnachrOzNistic: new Aussie silent speaks
Australian director Rolf de Heer has made a silent movie, reports Sydney Morning Herald's Garry Maddox. The Dutch-born Adelaider was given a "the year of Rolf" nod at the Adelaide Film Festival last week and he touted his twelfth feature, Dr. Plonk. "Predictably unpredictable, de Heer has made a black-and-white silent comedy, Dr Plonk, shot with a hand-cranked camera [reviving] 
the slapstick tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the Keystone Cops. When approached to star in it, actress Magda Szubanski thought the idea was so wacky it just might work. "At best it will be brilliant... At worst it will be a brilliant experiment." ... Dr Plonk is a return to innocence, he says. "In terms of subject and feel, there's an innocence about it which I suspect a lot of people really enjoy. They're just not used to seeing it any more. It has to work as a film and as entertainment but if there's anything that's going to get people to enjoy it on a level beyond that, it's this innocence from back then. Cinema on the whole has lost that. And I think we've lost something by losing that." ... Very little about the enterprise was conventional in contemporary filmmaking terms. "It isn't a 1912 silent film," de Heer says. "It's a 2006-2007 contemporary film but there's no real precedent. And it's comedy, and comedy is harder to pick than most drama as you're doing it. Those two things together mean you're going on a wing and a prayer more than normal." [A fair bit more at the link.]
Posted by Ray Pride at 12:38 PM | Comments (2)
March 02, 2007
[TRAILER] Satoshi Kon's Paprika
Sony Pictures Classics releases the eyeball-kick rich trailer for Satoshi Kon's latest anime, Paprika: "Twenty-nine-year-old Dr. Atsuko Chiba is an attractive but modest Japanese research psychotherapist whose work is on the cutting edge of her field," the distrib describes. "Her alter-ego is a stunning and fearless 18-year-old “dream detective,” code named PAPRIKA, who can enter into people’s dreams and synchronize with their unconscious to help uncover the source of their anxiety or neurosis."
Posted by Ray Pride at