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May 01, 2006
Travolta, Malkovich and 'The Bridge': The Weekend in Tribeca Press Conferences
The first weekend of the Tribeca Film Festival closed out with an army of film journalists sleepwalking through the motions--primarily at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, where The Reeler caught up with the press corps covering popular titles like The Bridge, Lonely Hearts and Colour Me Kubrick.
The Bridge director Eric Steel (L) with documentary interviewee Richard Waters and editor Sabine Krayenbuehl (Photos: STV)
Filmmaker Eric Steel made his way to the dais Saturday afternoon to chat about The Bridge, his mightily controversial documentary about the lives and deaths of people who committed suicide by leaping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Without hesitation, I would say that Steel's film reflects the poetry of San Francisco's landscape as beautifully as any film I have ever seen; his images of falling men and women (as well as at least one matter-of-fact rescue) haunt and enthrall even as they terrify with their gravity. That said, you have heard or even lived these stories before; their highs and lows belong to many of us or those close to us. Only the singularity of their actions stands out, and after about 30 minutes of bearing witness to it, I frankly stopped caring. Suicide bored me.
Others have raised more pointed arguments against The Bridge--namely that Steel's year-long filming routine and subsequent film crosses the line into exploitation. Steel disagreed, saying he alerted authorities when it appeared somebody he was filming might be of a mind to jump. "I don’t think I was really worried about it being exploitative," Steel said. "I knew myself well enough before I started. That was really never the goal. I think I'm a pretty sensitive person and a pretty empathetic person. I think I understand the dimesnions of loss well enough to know that it's difficult for people to share their stories, and it's difficult to put them on film. You really have to be careful and be very sensitive. I guess if there was something I was afraid of, it was that word would get out in the public about what we were doing, and that someone who was unwell or not thinking clearly would--if they knew what was going on out there--choose to go to the bridge and jump off in order to be immortalized on film. And I think there's a very big difference between being a witness and bearing witness to things at the bridge and being an agent of provocation."
Things got considerably lighter following a screening of Todd Robinson's film Lonely Hearts, which features a scowling John Travolta as a homicide detective on the trail of the 1940s' notorious "Lonely Hearts Killers," Ray Fernandez (Jared Leto) and Martha Beck (Salma Hayek). The film marked another beautiful aesthetic exercise with little redemptive dramatic value; the problems start with the woefully miscast Leto and Hayek, then trickle down from there as nearly every scene in Robinson's script disintegrates in a whirlwind of melodrama and cornball dialogue. Travolta does what he can, as does James Gandolfini, who portrays the detective sidekick who conveniently narrates the less sensical sections of the film with all the inflection of a C-grade noir.
The Lonely Hearts Trio: Writer/director Todd Robinson with James Gandolfini and John Travolta
Gandolfini and Travolta appeared with Robinson after the film, with the latter actor framing a sort of psychic backstory that predated the three films he has made with Gandolfini since 1995's Get Shorty. "Jim's dad used to buy tires from my father in New Jersey at Travolta Tire Exchange," Travolta said. "When James would come to the store, I guess he would see a picture of me from some movie. What was it? Saturday Night Fever? Welcome Back Kotter?"
"I think it was Saturday Night Fever," Gandolfini said.
Travolta nodded, continuing, "And he decided that if I could do well at it, then maybe he could too. Therefore, there was a history. And then when we met, it was love at first sight. I've been truly fond of James form the moment I met him, and having that history was just an added bonus."
Gandolfini corroborated the events in a little less homoerotic terms. "When I saw that poster," he said, "I was pretty amazed that was his father, because both of our fathers were these smaller wiry guys. I did think that if he could do it, I could do it. And then when this came along, this kind of part was kind of a sidekick to him, and it's kind of what I felt like for a long time--kind of in his shadow, and you know just looking up at him. And I think it worked for me in the film. It helped me a lot."
Tribeca Film Festival executive director Peter Scarlet (L) joins John Malkovich and producer Michael Fitzgerald to discuss Colour Me Kubrick
Finally, Colour Me Kubrick chameleon John Malkovich joined producer Michael Fitzgerald on Sunday to chat about Alan Conway, the infamous impostor at the center of their delightful biopic (check my write-up here for a bit more background). I asked Malkovich about the research that prepared him for such a messy, marvelous role. "There was a lot of it in the script," he said, "because Tony Frewin, who wrote it, of course, had been Stanley Kubrick's assistant for 25 years and had been sort of charged with handling this and sort of dealing with it and reacting to it and spinning it and blah blah blah. So he knew quite a bit about it, and there was a lot more in the original script. But also, there were several articles written about him, and as I said, the English did a TV show on him, which he starred in."
Fitzgerald jumped in. "Because he, of course, became a celebrity after this, and lived at the public expense in great style," he said. "But also, many of the actors who were in the film had encountered him. Jim Davidson, who plays his love interest, so to speak, the end of the film, had encountered him and had thought him Stanley Kubrick. This guy had really gotten around."
Another journalist followed up by asking if Davidson actually fell for Conway's act. "Of course!" Fitzgerald replied. "Of course. Everybody believed him. Stanely Kubrick's wife Christiane still now gets letters from the parents of young men who were..." Fitzgerald paused, smiled and turned to Malkovich. "What's the word?"
"Buggered," Malkovich said.
"(The letters started) by sort of regretting his death," Fitzgerald continued, "but saying that he had done unspeakable thing to their children or one thing or another. And this was all Alan Conway. The repercussions of his life in her life were somewhat dire."
Posted by stvanairsdale at May 1, 2006 10:52 AM
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