Outside The Frame

Danny Boyle interview, Part II

Peter Keough — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:43:00 GMT

Meanwhile, the conversation with Danny Boyle, whose “Slumdog Millionaire” now seems to be on every pundit’s Best Picture short list. But there also are some, such as the ever reliable Armond White, who think the film is an exploitative sop to liberal guilt. Here Boyle continues to sing the praises of Mumbai, despite the poverty, corruption, crime, injustice and mutilated children his film depicts.

PK: . ..another horrific thing is the guy who enlists the orphans into begging and then puts their eyes out and the gangsters and all that; as shown in the film it just seems to be kind of dicey environment altogether.

DB: I'm sorry if it comes across like that, although those thing are true, they do happen, it’s actually an amazingly wonderful place to visit I think. And it kind of builds something into your life that will be absent otherwise. It gives you the respect, values that we've kind of lost a bit, I think really.

PK: Such as?

DB: Communal value – there are these extremes there, terrible extremes obviously and it’s one of the reasons that good storytelling can go on there, because you've got these extremes, but they are connected, not separate, like we tend to separate our extremes I think.

And I think it is true that if they build a tower block, at the bottom of it is a slum, where the people live who built it, and the people who live in the tower block don't try to chase them away, they sort of feel connected to those people who live underneath. And like the star of our show, Anil Kapoor, very rich man, very big success story, the responsibility he feels towards the poor, he is very interconnected, it’s not a pr thing or individual moral thing, it's a social thing that they all feel. You know, they all feel interconnected. And I've lost sight of that, but you can feel it, they're very close. It’s an extraordinary thing really. I think it influences this idea they have, destiny, you know - this thing it is written - which can to our eyes can look really passive and very accepting, but it doesn't actually work like that because although you might accept that your hands have been chopped of when you're a kid to make you a better beggar and you see people like that, people come up and knock on the car windows and you can see! Their hands have been cut off! It's not an accident and it’s not a disease, it’s been done deliberately, you can see it. But in that acceptance, you must also understand that, Anil Kapoor [the famed Indian actor who plays the gameshow host in "Slumdog"] has accepted his destiny as well. Which in our eyes is much more glamorous blah blah, but he still feels a responsibility towards that person, he is still connected towards that person, it’s quite difficult to explain, you sense it when you're there, really.

PK: Did he come from a lower level of society?

DB: Anil?

PK: Yes.

DB: Not so much, although he did portray, he is known like that, because he portrayed that in his early films, he was, there is an extra resonance to casting him in this film which we can't appreciate, but they'll get in India, which is that he was, as he says in the film "I'm a slum kid myself, I'm the only one who knows what it’s like to come from nothing and to get everything." He portrayed a couple of people like that in his early films. Although he himself comes from a film-making family. He would never be described as being from a poor family.

PK: Many people have described the film as being Dickensian, I think you have described the film in the same way. But aside from the story telling there is a kind of call out to reform in Dickens, and pointing a finger out injustice and so forth, do you see the film also doing such a sort of thing?

DB: I don't think you can, I was very conscious in going there that I didn't want to bang a drum really, I didn't first of all, want to make a film about white people in India and I also then, as a western director I didn't want to make a film that kind of was objective or judgmental really, to try and make the film from the inside out really, from the view of the people themselves and tell the story that way. So in that sense it isn't. There are obviously some extraordinary things going on there, the police are corrupt, like I say, there is no – the infrastructure is inadequate, there's lot of things for them to tackle.

PK: Poor people are exploited?

DB: Poor people are exploited… Well I have to be very careful in how I answer that because I went to this one place, Dharavi, which is a big slum there, there was this guy and he recycled huge vegetable cans of oil, I mean they've been recycling in a way that we've only begun to recycle, they've always recycled, it’s part of the pattern of life, you see people throw things away, and you think – don't throw that on the street – but they do it because there is a whole other level of people who pick it up and recycle it and they're sort of like, bound together. He recycles these things – the area this was in was just in a shack - when you went in it was like a cathedral, all of these drums everywhere, like, thousands of them being recycled, in different stages of being recycled. And I said please can I come and film here and he said, no you can't because I've let “National Geographic” in here twice before and they've taken photographs — and in fact subsequently I found some of the photographs of “National Geographic on this place, I found them on their website, amazing place.

But he said, “I've asked them twice not to say that we're poor and, he said, every time, they depict us as being poor. So I've decided to stop any filming or people taking photographs anymore. You can have a look around. I don't regard us as being poor and I’ve provided work here for about 25 – 30 people for twenty years.” And he said, "we're very proud of what we do, this is an industry, it’s self sufficient, it provides work, it’s profitable, and it’s doing a good thing. Why should you call me poor?” I was affected by that and that really affected the film, the spirit of the film. It's like I said – you can't take your value judgments there. You can’t just say, they're poor, there's so much poverty here, because they don't see it like that. And they have to solve it themselves. There are over a billion people there, which is enough people to start a planet, never mind a country, it’s like – they will, they have to! And that's what is happening at the moment, the focus is shifting to them sorting their problems out and it’s rather than us coming in, IMF style, and saying: DO THIS DO THIS DO THIS, you won't be poor! You will be fucking poor because we still have poor of our own, in a different way, although maybe they'll be less of you who are absolutely poor. But you have to let them sort the problems out. So I won't argue that I could go in there and be judgmental. I would defend my right not to be judgmental.

PK: The film is not to get people stirred up about how unjust things are in India, but to be entertained by their stories or to be exhilarated by the universal human values?

DB: Yeah, yeah, if you like. I mean the values of the story are universal. His romanticism, his like underdog status, that dream he has that he will fulfill, whatever is put in his way he will go through together.

PK: It’s kind of like “A Life Less Ordinary,” same sort of romanticism.

DB: I guess so, I guess so, I mean it’s made by the same filmmaker, so I suppose there would be.

PK: I thought that was a very underrated movie.

DB: I liked that, not many people liked that. Girls like it quite a lot. I think it’s more irrational than people normally see things as, but in a lighthearted way, not a particularly heavy way.

PK: Then there’s “Millions.” http://www.providencephoenix.com/movies/trailers/documents/04588543.aspThere you have saints appearing. You wanted to be a priest when you were younger?

DB: Yeah, I wanted as a kid. My mum wanted me to be a priest, which is not absolutely the same thing, but -

PK: You didn't have a vocation -

DB: Don't think so, certainly not the way it turned out, certainly not that way inclined anymore. But my mom was a very devoted Roman Catholic and part of the aspiration of being a roman catholic is to get your eldest son to join the priesthood it’s part of like a destiny - so she would see destiny as something like that happening, but it didn't happen.

PK: You didn't have much of a spiritual inclination after that?

DB: No - I mean, I don't believe that things are black and white. Like I've been reading Richard Dawkins's stuff, he's real heavy, he's very heavy against God and he argues it brilliantly too.

PK: A fundamentalist atheist

DB: Absolutely, yeah, he really is. He argues it beautifully. He's sort of covered every corner except that the point about spirituality is that there aren't any corners, that’s the whole thing about it, it’s beyond corners, in a way. You certainly feel that in India as well, where they see spirituality as being everywhere in life. It’s not narrow about God, not one deity - they have lots of deities, they also see spirituality everywhere, they did this amazing thing and I’m sure we used to make fun of them about it because when you go there, they don't knock down trees. If there is a tree they build a building around it . You go in a building and there's fucking trees still in there coming out of the side of the building and they build a motorway but they won’t uproot the tree. It will go around the tree or through the tree, but the tree will stay there protected from the motorway. They did this 20 years ago and I’m sure 20 years ago we would go there and laugh at them for their quaint idiotic ways, but of course now we realize that their values have come into focus in a way, so there is a lot to learn a lot to value. Their respect for life, as a vegetarian society basically — Hinduism is a vegetarian religion, really. It’s the best vegetarian food in the world - boy, if you're a vegetarian...

PK: Are you?

DB: I'm not actually, but you eat very well, there. You aren't eating a lot of meat, most of the time.

PK: Are there cows walking around?

DB: The crew whom I got to know really well said I bet you show cows walking around in your film. They would laugh at me - we'll bet you, because you can see, they're very sophisticated people that work in the film industry, they look at Western films, films that go there and they always show cows walking around the street and so one guy says to me "I bet you're determined not to show a cow walking around the street.” But there are loads of cows and everyone gets out of the way. Traffic, people - everyone gets out of the way.

PK: I do not recall a cow in your film.

DB: I deliberately did want one. There is one wandering through the rubbish, but that’ in the corner of a shot.

PK: No elephants either.

DB: There are elephants. They tried to ban them from Mumbai actually, they tried to take them out, there've been a few violent incidents, but you still see them a bit.

PK: They probably aren't more dangerous than an SUV being driven by an average American.

DB: Especially if they’re DUI.

"Milk" of human unkindness

Peter Keough — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:52:00 GMT

There are two kinds of opportunism. Here's an example of the good kind.

Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” is a biopic starring Sean Penn as San Francisco City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man ever elected to a public office. He was gunned down on November 27, 1978, and so the film opens next week in part to honor the 30th anniversary of that assassination. Given the groundswell of protest aroused by the passage of California’s Proposition 8 on November 4, a bill that would ban same sex marriages (and the passage of similar bills by three other states), “Milk’s” screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, together with Cleve Jones, a longtime activist and protégé of Milk who consulted on the film, recently issued a manifesto on SFgate calling for an ongoing series of peaceful protests beginning on November 27 and continuing until Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20. The film, they hope, will engender more interest in and enthusiasm for these demonstrations.

Sounds like a good idea to me. But Querty.com, a gay website, wonders if this all could be a cynical marketing ploy for the movie. Now I’m as big a sucker for a harebrained conspiracy theory as the next person, but even I balk at this. Wouldn’t it involve Black, Jones and the rest of the “Milk” team fixing the election so that Prop. 8 could win thus giving them this marketing opportunity? Sounds a little twisted and, having interviewed Jones yesterday and seeing firsthand the intensity of his commitment to his cause, utterly ridiculous. If their manifesto serves to drum up a few million more ticket sales for “Milk” on the way to achieving their goal of equality, so much the better.

An here’s an example of opportunism so cynical, venal and hypocritical that it inspires awe.

Alan Stock, CEO of Cinemark, donated $9,999 in support of Prop. 8. He stands to make much more than that by exhibiting “Milk” in his chain of movie theaters. Or will he? The tactic of boycott, so effective in recent years for the religious right, was once also a tool of the left. As can be seen in the film, it was used by Milk with canny success early in his campaign. Why not use it again? Those interested in putting the screws to Cinemark should check out the facebook group “No ‘Milk’ for Cinemark.” (Note: the only Cinemark Theater in Massachusetts is the Cinemark at Hampshire Mall in Hadley -- so this should be an easy boycott for locals to maintain).

Danny Boyle interview, Part I

Peter Keough — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:16:00 GMT

Which Danny Boyle will show up for the interview promoting his new movie “Slumdog Millionaire?” I’m wondering. Will he be diabolical, sardonic and head-butting like his brilliant “Trainspotting?” Nihilistic, mirthfully despairing and flesh-eating like his terrifying “28 Days Later?” Innocent and romantic like his heroes in “A Life Less Ordinary” or “Millions?” Or cowering, defiant and relating the story of his life with hilarity and razzle dazzle like his hero being given the third degree by the cops in his new movie?

None of the above, as it turns out. Just a nice guy, really, who makes (sometimes) great movies, like this one about a Mumbai street kid who wins the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and has to prove he’s not cheating by telling the story of his life. Never was waterboarding so entertaining!

PK: You seem to go back and forth between being optimistic and nihilistic. “Millions” was a film that had this sort of upbeat quality, but then “Trainspotting” or “Shallow Grave” and “28 Days Later.” How do you account for your good spirits in this film, the subject of which is so harsh?

DB: That was India really. I think I'm pretty optimistic anyway, despite sometimes what the stories might say, there’s a spirit in the films, most of them anyway, pretty optimistic. The one that isn't is “The Beach.” wasn't very happy making “The Beach.” I kind of ended up there looking at a bunch of people who I didn’t like. It’s a weird thing, when you find that, I suddenly thought, I don't like all these people and what they're doing here. What am I doing making a film about them?

So I tried to make it a film critical of them, but it didn't work out really. But I think most of the films are quite optimistic. Even if some of them haven't got obvious happy endings, there is an optimistic spirit in them. I find that confirmed in India. I love the place, they had to drag me away in the end, couldn't stop filming. Despite all its horror and there is some of that there, I find it a wonderful place. I love the people, I love the energy. I mean its not so much India, I shouldn't say India because I actually saw very little of India. Such a massive place anyway. But I saw a lot of Bombay. The city where we made most of the film and I really adored it actually and I adored what it did to me as a director as well because it does change you. You can't just wade in there and say here's my next film its going to be like this, you kind of have to go with the place, you have to let it take you over, you can't control it, separate bits of it, you have to just shoot and then see what you've got because you can spend your whole fucking budget trying to organize it, you'll get nowhere because it doesn't work like that.

PK: Do you stick to your basic script?

DB: We got a script and stuff like that which obviously gives you a narrative, but in terms of day to day work, it’s amazing. It has all of these contradictions. It’s very difficult to pin down what they are and yet they're there the whole time and they're either destroying you because you can't cope with it, or you kind of go with it and it eventually gives you back what you need. So we always used to say it was like the ocean, it was like every minute, every billionth of a second it was different. It was moving, changing and yet it’s always the ocean, it’s always the same. It sounds hippieish and it is. I'm not a hippie, I was a punk, but it does lead you towards those kinds of descriptions,. It's the only way your head can make sense of it.

PK: What was your first impression, the first thing that you saw that made you think, oh, I'm in a different kind of place right now?

DB: I guess your first experience is the traffic really. They just launched this car – this Nano car – which is like a really cheap car for everybody, that’s the marketing thing behind it, like a thousand pounds, and its quite a decent little car supposedly, but where the fuck are they going to put billions of them ? I don't know, there's no room anywhere as it is at the moment. The infrastructure is just a disaster. So they're going to the moon, right. and they are like the fifth nuclear power in the world and yet there's no toilets, no roads, no infrastructure, they haven't done anything to the sewers since the British left, it’s like – for God's sake guys – and yet you can't – I mean you do criticize it on that front, but on the other hand you think, that's up to them. What you can’t go there thinking, especially if you're British, "wow, we used to make a good job of running it didn't we." It's like, forget it, they've got they're own pattern and they'll only allow you access to it on their terms only.

PK: It's a work in progress, I guess. For the last 4,000 years. I must say that, after seeing the movie, especially the opening scene with a guy being tortured because he won a TV quiz show, it wouldn't be my first choice as a place to go as a tourist.

DB: Have you never been?

PK: No.

DB: Oh, it’s fantastic.

PK: Do you think you'll have any problems with people in India because of your depiction of some of the more unsavory aspects?

DB: Censors? Yes. We lied about a lot of what we were doing, so we're bound to have trouble, I think. Ironically, the torture scene at the beginning, we didn't lie about it. We asked for permission for that because we needed a police station and you can't be tricky with the police stuff, you got to be careful, get it right, because they can make a lot of problems for you. We showed them the scene and they said it’s fine. You can do the torture scene they said, providing nobody above the rank of inspector is involved, that was their only requirement. It gave you a glimpse of what it’s like in the police station. If you get arrested for anything other than a traffic offense, you have a good chance of getting a slapped around.

PK: But no one above sergeant is involved, that is standard operating procedure?

DB: Pretty much. I mean the local guys we worked with confirmed that, I mean if you get picked up for something serious, you're getting knocked around quite a bit.

PK: The electrodes and the whole bit.

DB: Well they don't see it like that. We were in a few police stations, you can see the equipment there, they're not hiding it. It’s not anything they're ashamed of.

PK: You said there are other things you didn't lie about when making the movie that might be problematic.

DB: We were, what would you call it, flexible, with the description of the things we were doing because they're sensitive about things you can't quite second guess. For instance, the torture scene, which we were expecting them to say no, they they were fine about. But then other things, like a very funny, very innocuous line, where the German tourist says "there's noting about dis in ze gayd buk" about the Taj Mahal and the kid says "Madam, the guide book is written by a bunch of lazy, ignorant, good-for-nothing Indian beggars." They won't let that line through. Because it's the image of the country and things like that. You just got to wait and see what happens.

PK: One of the more striking sequences is where the Hindus stormed the Muslim enclave and just wiped everybody out.

DB: Yeah.

PK: Do you see that as causing a problem with the censors?

DB: I don't think so. Those things actually do happen. I think the biggest problem with that is filming it. You have to be very careful in filming it that people don't get the wrong idea because there are so many people moving around all the time, you can't inform people of what you're doing fully, there's just so many people, and the danger with it is that people get the wrong idea on the day and we were lucky we got away with it, in a way.

PK: People running around on fire must have caused some alarm.

DB: Yeah. People who live there of course, have lived through it, and they regard it as part of the unfortunate history of the place as well, so it’s not like they're trying to eradicate it. You just got to be careful so people don't think something real is happening. Because it can get out of control quickly. For most of the time, considering how intense the population is, the denseness of the population, there is a calmness that is beyond belief, they somehow manage to live together, to live on. Its just so crowded and there are so many people you just wonder how does this ever work! But it does, they find a way. Its quite interesting because though it looks very primitive a lot of it, this is what cities are going to be like. There is no city in the world that is getting smaller, all the cities are growing, just endless growth. It will have to do that, otherwise you will have this incredible demand for scarce resources, like there is there, water and sewage, electricity and things like that. You're going to have to find a way of living together with that many people in that area, which is what they do, they manage to make it work.

Charlie Kaufman interview, Part II

Peter Keough — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 22:44:00 GMT

So we seemed to be going great guns, with Kaufman even tolerating my fey digression about Proust, until I asked a gauche question about Michelle Williams. And then the “M” word. Then it all goes down the toilet. But it neded to be ask. Or maybe not --judge for yourself.

PK: And Cottard is also a character in Proust's "In Search of Lost Time."

CK: He is, yes.

PK: Is that the first page of “Swann’s Way” that somebody is reading ...?

CK: Yeah, oh for sure. When she comes and she asks him to go out for a drink, that’s what she’s reading in the ticket box, that’s what Hazel is reading.

[omitted exchange: embarrassingly pretentious]

PK: ...Have you read Pinter’s screenplay of Proust?

PK: Check that out. It’s really brilliant.

CK: I kinda feel like I want to read Proust before I read Pinter’s Proust. Is that a mistake?

PK: See the movie, then if you like it... The dates, I try to pay attention to the dates the second time I saw it, it starts out in 2005, it seems, like in...

CK: October. No, September, first day of fall. It’s the first thing on the radio, so it’s September 21st or something.

PK: Yeah, and then there is a October 31st and then it’s like November 2 and...

CK: Yeah before that it’s October 15 or something like that, which is actually the day that it was announced that Pinter won the Nobel Prize. It’s the actual day.

PK: .. or died

CK: Right. The reaction that I had when I saw the headline and just thought, I saw a picture of him and saw whatever it said, and thought, oh god, Pinter died. But he won the Nobel Prize, so I stuck that in. But it’s also the day that avian flu was discovered in Turkey and the woman runner died. So those are all real events that happened.

PK: Except for the newspaper and the radio, occasionally, there doesn’t seem to be any connection with the outside world. The TV is on, and is showing these obvious self-referential, well not obvious, obvious after the second time I saw it, self-referential cartoons. Is this a deliberate kind of suggestion that we’re not in the real world?

CK: I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. I’d hate to say that...I think that I used a lot of dream images and dream realities in the movie and this seemed like...I don’t know, I liked the idea of having the commentary taking place in that interaction with the television, so I just figured I’d go for it and do it.

PK: Those paintings, did you assign somebody to make those paintings?

CK: I hired an artist named Alex Kanevsky to do them. ...The paintings aren’t really tiny. That’s a trick. They couldn’t possibly be tiny and look like that, that would be impossible. That was what I liked about them was that they were very painterly. No, the real paintings that Alex did for us -- he’s a really amazing artist, I asked him to do these portraits of the women in the movie and they’re about this big...

PK: That’s pretty tiny.

CK: Yeah but they’re not painterly. You know, they’re very meticulous looking things, you can have obviously small things like that, but they don’t...you can’t do this. You can’t have sort of expressionistic brush strokes. I don’t think you could do it. You know like that guy...the guy who does those little sculptures. You know what I’m talking about? You should look this guy up if you don’t know his stuff. He does sculptures that are, you can’t see them without a...his name is Wigan, I think? I want to say his first name is Willard but I’m not sure, it’s something like that. He does these um...they’re made out of dust and paint, and they’re small enough that he’ll do like the Statue of Liberty that fits on the head of a pin. Or he’ll do Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs standing on a pin, and they’re about this big. You can’t see them without magnifying glasses. And they’re extraordinary, but they’re not, I don’t want to say they’re not painterly, but they’re not very expressionistic. They have to be very precise because of the size of them. So I wanted something that you couldn’t do in this size.

PK: I’m also impressed by the sets in this movie. First of all, I want to say that he really knew how to budget $100,000 grant over 17 years.

CK: Well it's more than that. It's $100,000 a year. It’s for 5 years, but also, it's way more than 17 years. When that actor says that thing that it's 17 years, its not the end of the thing it’s like midway through. But yeah, I read this one review where this guy hated the movie and he said, and it was actually addressed to me, which I shouldn’t even acknowledge this because it’s what he wants I’m sure, for me to say that I read this thing, because he’s talking to me, by the way Charlie, I’ve known people who have won MacArthur grants and it’s $100,000 over five years, you know, or $500,000, you know, and not only that but Caden, based on his work, could never win one. And it’s like well, this is all dreamery, I mean, I like the idea that this is an impossible production that he’s mounting, and that you also can’t build a full-size replica of New York City in a warehouse. You can’t do that. By the way Charlie, you can’t build a full-size replica within a warehouse within a full-size New York City. Yes, I know that.

PK; This was on the Internet that you read this?

CK: Um, yeah. Everything’s on the Internet. I mean, that’s where I read things. I shouldn’t read things but I do.

PK: There are no computers in this movie I don’t think, are there?

CK: No computers where? Oh in the movie? Yeah, no he sees, he goes to Madeleine’s [the self-help therapist and author treating Caden played by Hope Davis] website to see, um..

PK: Oh, right.

CK: “This book will change my life,” is what his quote is.

PK: What’s wrong with her feet, anyway?

CK: Her shoes are too tight.

PK: Is that what it was? I thought it might be that.

CK: Yeah, she’s got all sorts of blisters, and..

PK: ..It looks like she’s got gangrene at the end.

CK: They’re actually kind of prosthetics. They took quite awhile to apply these to Hope Davis’s feet, and she had to be carried into the set, because she could walk with those things on.

PK: So your first directorial effort, it can’t be too bad if you get to work with all these beautiful women.

CK: Well, in addition to being beautiful they’re like, my favorite actors. You know, it was wonderful. I couldn’t ask for a better cast.

PK: Michelle Williams [who plays Claire], had she already suffered her loss, before making the movie or was it afterwards?

CK: [an expression of extreme disappointment and resignation at the tastelessness of the question] I don’t...I’d really rather not.

PK: [persisting boorishly nonetheless] Well, I was just thinking, a movie like this which is so obsessed with mortality, I mean what kind of effect would that have on her...

CK: Yeah. I just--

PK: But she’s really good.

CK: Yeah she is good.

PK: But it seems like all the women are sort of, it's almost like a masochistic relationship that the director has with almost all the women in the movie.

CK: The director meaning Caden?

PK: Yeah.

CK: Um, yeah, well I guess. Is it masochistic with Hazel? She does make him get down on his knees to beg for a kiss. Yeah, I guess there is a lot of torture, but he participates in it, so I don’t find fault with them.

PK: has anyone brought up the “M” word with regards to the women?

CK: The “M” word?

PK: Misogyny.

CK: Oh. Um, god, I mean, you know, the one place I’ve heard that is this guy who interviewed me for “Vice Magazine” said that he saw it with a friend who felt that it was misogynistic and I responded to that, because I was really surprised, you know, I..the response that I seem to get when people respond to the movie, is kind of the opposite of that, you know, people appreciate that I’ve written characters for women to play, as opposed to eye-candy, or...I mean that’s the only place I’ve heard it. I don’t know...is that something you think? It’s misogynistic?

PK: Some of the women seemed to be negative portraits in some ways.

CK: Well, first of all, I don’t agree with that, but second of all, I don’t think they’re negative portraits, and I don’t know what that means so you’d have to clarify it, but I don’t think that portraying somebody with characteristics that aren’t necessarily ideal, is misogyny. I mean I do that with male characters, too. I mean, I’m trying to write human beings, so why is that misogynistic?

PK: Good point.

CK: Yeah. I mean the women I know in my life are people. They have various characteristics that make them human. And they have you know, like anyone else, they have needs and they’re people. I do take issue with it, because I inhabit my characters when I write. I don’t write any character from the outside. And so when I’m having a conversation between two characters in a movie, in a screenplay, when I’m writing this character, I’m with this character and when I’m writing this character, I’m with this character.

PK: Would you agree with Caden that the Maria [Caden’s wife’s lover played by Jennifer Jason Leigh] character is evil??

CL: Yeah, I don’t know if she’s evil, because I don’t know what evil means. I would say she’s kind of, she’s probably, the rotten-est person in the movie. But making a woman a rotten person in a movie doesn’t make me a misogynist. That makes me the writer of a character of a woman who’s a rotten person, but there are women, there are kind of rotten people in the world, of various genders. I didn’t feel that way, you know I didn’t get that response from any of the women who were in the movie, who kinda wanted to be in it, because they were interested in their characters, you know. They felt like they could inhabit them.

PK: Was that scene, in the peep show ... did you see “Paris Texas?”

CK: Yeah.

PK: Is the similarity just coincidental...?

CK: I didn’t remember it at the time, actually, someone mentioned another movie, called “Hardcore,” which I haven’t seen. It wasn’t intentional.

PK: Going back to last night, you mentioned that one thing you have against Hollywood movies is that they presented a sort of stereotype of relationships, especially romantic relationships, that is unrealistic. And it seems to me that this film is a sort of continuation of the relationships in a lot of the other films of yours. It's sort of the Abelard/Heloise sort of relationship, where two people are in love for their entire life, but it's totally unfulfilled. Do you see that as a continuing pattern in your movies?

CK: Yeah I see it cropping up, and I think that can be taken literally and can be taken figuratively, you know. In sort of being at a distance from yourself and not being able to kind of, become whole or complete, but yeah I see that.

PK: Do you record your dreams?

CK: No I often think I should and often kinda get a book and never do it.

PK: It would seem that a lot of your ideas and images come directly from...

CK: [distractedly] They don’t, but I was thinking about dreams when I tried to come up with these ideas. The idea of dreams was a basis for a lot of the imagery and the logic in the movie. But they didn’t come directly from dreams. So I don’t know....I’m still stuck on the misogyny. It’s just a weird thing, it’s like a weird thing. I think people maybe confuse misogyny with I don’t know what....

PK: Maybe I meant “metonymy.”

CK: Yeah. I don’t know if I should be mad about that.

PK: What about Hazel as "Box Office?

CK: What?

PK: She’s referred to as “box office” at one point which is like a synecdoche right?

CK: Oh yeah, that’s true.

PK: So Caden’s love affair with Hazel is your desire really to have a blockbuster movie.

CK: Which is misogynistic.

PK: Or materialistic.

CK: Which is misogyny.

PK: Do you have any other figures of speech that you want to make movies about?

CK: No, but I found a list of them and I found...god I wish I could remember some of them, there were some great ones...

PK: I like “chiasmus.”

CK: What is that?

PK: It’s when you have a sentence where you reverse the terms, like ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. I guess it doesn’t have much movie potential.

CK: Yeah, you can’t do much with that. But there are...if you go on like Wikipedia you get a list of them. There’s some really amazing ones...of course I can’t remember any of them now, but they’re all kind of exciting. They’re like “oh yeah, oh yeah, oh wow, ok...that’s interesting..." things that I never even thought about as ideas, they just sort of wash over you in your whatever.

PK: I think that’s one of the benefits of your movies, it sends people to dictionaries, and to Wikipedia.

CK: Wikipedia’s great.

PK: I never knew about Fregoli syndrome.

CK:There you go. Did you know about Cotards?

PK: I had heard about it, actually there was a murder here in Boston happened back in 2000 where this guy killed 7 people and he claimed that he was dead and he did it because a guardian angel told him that if he killed these 7 people it’d be Hitler and his six henchman that he’d stop the holocaust and be able to go to heaven.

CK: Oh wow.

PK: So, you’ve said this is a horror movie. Did you have plans to have it come out on October 31st?

CK: No I didn’t have any plans. Sony Classics is having it come out when they wanted it to come out. You know it's one of those things that they do based on what’s coming out and I don’t know, you know, what else is coming out. It’s like, oh well, we’re not going to be totally buried because there’s not another movie about a theater director who builds a giant set of New York coming out that weekend.

PK: When you were making the movie, Spike Jonze was one of the producers...

CK: Yes that’s right.

PK: I heard that there was some difference of opinion about something.

CK: No, you know, there’s always difference of opinion. But I had fun (inaudible).

PK: I heard you always were diffident about going on the set for the other movies that you wrote the screenplay for.

CK: I had to go on set this time. I had to.

PK: So this is like overcoming your fear.

CK: Yeah, pretty quickly. I mean, within the first day. I think the first day was very hard, you know to get up and go there, but after that it was like work. It was, the days could be hard, they could be easy but I wasn’t terrified. I mean sometimes, there was a new actor coming along or something, there was a little anxiety about that, but I’ve done these plays and I think that helped me enormously in getting over my fear of talking to actors..

PK: Was one of them “Death of a Salesman?”

CK: No I did this play that I think I told you. and then I did another play called “Hope Leaves the Theater.”

PK: That’s the one where the cell phone rings...

CK: Yeah, did you see it?

PK: No, I read about it. It’s kind of like a radio play. Like Beckett’s.

CK: They’re not really radio plays, we try and distinguish them from radio plays because the visual is very important for me. Or the lack of visual. What’s not happening, what you’re hearing, what you’re not seeing onstage, is a very interesting thing for me.

PK: I imagine dealing with actors must be one of the most satisfying aspects.

CK: It’s the most important thing.

PK: ..and just trying to tell them what character they’re trying to play. I mean, because they’re all characters playing characters in another production.

CK: Yeah, but they all understood that. There wasn’t a lot of explaining to do in that regard. In a way, the only people who had to....well I guess, Diane Wiest and Emily Watson and Tom Noonan all had to sort of play two different versions, but Samantha [Morton] and Phil [Hoffman] and Catherine [Keener] were only playing themselves. Michelle was playing herself, playing herself, but she’s still playing herself.

PK: One of my favorite lines is, “Caden, you’re breaking the fourth wall.” How would you know, at that point? The sets are pretty amazing too. I mean it looks like they cost more than $100,000. What kind of process did you use to create that effect?

CK: Which effect? The effect that the city is in the warehouse?

PK: ...and the warehouse is in that warehouse...

CK: I mean, some of it we built in a warehouse, and then a lot of it, most of it, later on when it got built up was in shooting in New York City and the post-production effects people doing, building, that warehouse structure around the entire city. So we did some computer stuff and built a computer model of this enormous warehouse and they were able to manipulate it and change the angles so we could find the version that fit best with whatever city state we were existing in. So, that’s how we did it.

PK: Do you keep any souvenirs from the movies that you make?

CK: I don’t have much in this one, but I have some of Caden’s theater posters. I have the one...there’s a burnt version of the poster for “Death of A Salesman” which is in Hazel’s apartment when the place is really burned down towards the end of the movie, I have that. I have that painting that was painted on the wall of the kitchen, which is like the woman, I don’t know if you noticed that...kind of a heavy woman kind of painted into the wall.

PK: Was that supposed to be there or was it a hallucination...?

CK: No, it's something that Adele did on the wall one morning. Alex came in and did it. But it was supposed to be just, she paints, kind of free character who can just paint on the walls.

PK: You don’t like talking about future plans.

CK: I don’t have any future plans. I’m trying to write something now, but I have no, I have nothing really developed in any way that’s even worth mentioning.

PK: So you do suffer from writer’s block occasionally?

CK: I don’t suffer from it anymore. I feel comfortable with it now. I feel like its part of the process of letting things gestate.

PK: Are you going to vote?

CK: Am I going to vote? Yes I’m going to vote.

PK: One of the odd things about this movie is that its about a completely interior person, with no regard for the rest of the world, tand it’s coming out just before one of the major elections, one of the major turning point elections in the last 50 years or so. Do you think this is a good time for it to come out? Do you think people will be inspired to become introverted?

CK: I don’t know. I guess I don’t think of him that way. I see him as a person struggling in the world and I think everybody’s internal and everybody’s got their personal self involvement. But I mean I don’t think this is a commercial for that particular form of existence. Its not like I’m advocating it, or its going to look appealing to anyone, so no, that doesn’t...I actually think this movie is a good movie for the time.

PK: A lot of peoplesuggest it is a signature moment when Caden is examining his stools.

CK: Yeah. Weird. It’s weird, the stuff that you don’t really think about and then everyone is saying, like he’s examining his stools means his head's up his ass, or whatever it is that their saying. But there’s a lot of illness in the movie and there’s a lot of concern about health issues and that’s one of the things people talk about when you’ve got health issues and it's one of the things you watch. And I wanted to show it because you know, because everyone has feces, and probably a lot of people look at them. Maybe people don’t poke them apart with bathroom brushes....

PK: I think everyone has done that at one time in their life.

CK: I wasn’t going to make any assumptions.

PK: Present company excluded.

CK: It’s like, come on. I guess, what I’m saying is, I don’t feel that way about the character. So for people to say that’s obviously what I’m saying, that he’s obviously only involved in his own shit, is kind of like, eh, I could do better than that if I was going to come up with a metaphor, you know? Wouldn’t be my choice. It’s fine if people think it, and I’m not gonna disavow them on that.

PK: What about the green poop, you have any thoughts on that?

CK: I do have thoughts on it.

Charlie Kaufman interview, part I

Peter Keough — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 18:32:00 GMT

More so than a lot of filmmakers, Charlie Kaufman really cares what you think. I got a chance to interview him the day after his new film "Synecdoche New York" played at the Harvard Square Cinema the crowd there seemed to really love him when I saw him the next morning sitting in a meeting room in the Ritz Carlton I thought he looked kind of glum and full of doubt, kind of like the character Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who may be his onscreen persona. He looked like he needed a hug (maybe without the beard he looks more fragile). I didn’t give him one, and, as you’ll see later, I think I might have made him feel worse.

Peter Keough: How’s it going?

Charlie Kaufman: Its going ok, hows it going for you?

PK: On the subway coming in I was looking at my notes and it started suddenly and fell onto this woman who was very nice about it. Kind of like the [omitted: spoiler] in the beginning of your film. Has that actually happened to you?

CK: No.

PK: I think that catches everybody by surprise.

CK: That was intentional, that it would catch everyone by surprise, although I think you can’t have a scene with someone shaving without creating a certain tension. Just the idea of someone shaving feels like something bad is going to happen, but not the bad thing that you assume.

PK: It’s never the bad thing you assume.

CK: No. Speaking about the train and the shaving, I went to Yaddo, the arts colony, I had an opportunity to go there and I couldn’t finish this script and I wanted to go away and be able to concentrate, I took the opportunity, and one of the things I learned was that the guy whose estate this is, the family who donated this estate for this purpose, died shaving on a train. The train lurched and he slit his throat.

PK: Straight edge?

CK: Yeah, it was in the earlier part of the twentieth century, I guess when people used straight edge. So there is a shaving accident you don’t want to happen.

PK: You used to have a beard, did you stop shaving because of that?

CK: No no, [laughs], I stopped shaving every once in a while because I can’t stand shaving and then its like, it just gets harder and harder to start again, so I don’t and then I get sick of it and then I shave it, and then I go through the process again and again and that’s the way it goes until you die.

PK: So you’re going to let it grow out?

CK: I let it grow out, I’m doing a month of this, I’m going around the country, so I’ll probably keep shaving until this is over, so it doesn’t look to bad.

PK: Kind of like a baseball player, the superstition?

CK: No, its not superstition, it’s more like I just kind of want to try to look somewhat presentable, which is always difficult, I’ll shave.

PK: Beard growing -- that’s one of those involuntary activities that were shutting down for your character, like with the salivating...

CK: Yeah, the ergonomic functions.

PK: But his beard kept growing. So go figure. I saw the film for a second time last night at the Harvard Square Theatre. How did you think the film was received?

CK: Well, I stayed for the beginning and then I left maybe 20, 25 minutes into it and then I came back at the end and did the Q&A. Judging from the reception at the Q&A and from the very beginning when people seemed to be laughing, I though it did well but I can’t speak to anything other than the 25 minutes I saw.

PK: People were very into the comedy part, which I suppose you appreciate?

CK: I appreciate whatever people want to take from it, if they’re into anything in it, I don’t care.

PK: The first time I saw it I was unable to speak to people for half an hour.

CK: Good.

PK: Is that the kind of reaction you were looking for?

CK: I’m not looking for anything in particular, although I’ve heard that reaction and I think that is pleasing, if there is some kind of effect that it has, but its not a calculated or scientific thing to write this so that people will be silent for half an hour afterwards.

PK: It was like being trapped inside somebody’s mind for their entire life, at its good moments and bad moments,

CK: I guess it is.

PK: The audience at the Q & A, some people got testy when you didn’t give them a certain interpretation of the movie. But basically, I think they were worshipping you. Is that uncomfortable for you?

CK: The worshipping part, I don’t know what it means exactly, so its hard for me to – you were there for the Q&A last night, the thing that the guy said at the end last night – it was nice.

PK: You seemed to be touched by it.

CK: Well it’s a nice thing to have someone say that, especially because I was really depressed last night and I was not looking forward to coming and doing that thing last night. It’s hard for me to be traveling by myself, doing this for a month and I’m exhausted.The reaction to the movie has been - I never know what people will come in and say, people have been really angry with me, or if they’ll be responsive like that guy.

PK: Sometimes it’s the same person.

CK: No, that hasn’t happened, not that I’ve been aware of. I’ve had people actually, I’ve heard, that people can sometimes hate the movie and then can’t get it out of their head, I’ve heard people say that, or they see it again, this is critics, who have seen it at festivals and then they start to feel something about it that they didn’t before.

PK: I have to admit, as much as I admired the movie I didn’t look forward to seeing it for a second time because it is so exhausting, but the second time it’s actually easier because its less exhausting because you’ve already processed a lot of what’s gone on.

CK: I think that’s maybe the reaction that people have, that they’re afraid that they will not understand it, or miss something, there’s a lot of stuff coming at you, you feel you can’t just sort of sit back and relax. I think you can, but people feel that they can’t and that’s what makes it trying to people, if it is trying.

PK: I noticed you didn’t go into the Cotard syndrome [Hoffman’s character shares the name of this psychological syndrome ] question?

CK: It’s a delusion that you’re already dead and your body, in some cases, you feel like your body is actually decaying, it looks to you like your skin is falling of and that sort of thing.

PK: So is he dead?

CK: Don’t know.

PK: Do you know the Borges story, “The Secret Miracle?”

CK: Tell me what its about and I’ll tell you if I’ve read it.

PK: This guy is a playwright, he’s sentenced to die, he spends the night praying to God that he’ll let him finish this play which is his masterpiece that he hasn’t been able to finish, he’s taken out to be executed and it seems like God has let him down [omitted: spoiler].

CK: Oh! That’s cool. I don’t know the story, but it is like that. And you know what it is like, that I read in junior high school that I loved, “Pincher Martin” the William Golding book, do you know that book?

PK: I can’t remember it very well.

CK: Well, I mean when I first read it, it was like, oh God, this is so cool. A guy is shipwrecked, his boat sinks and he is a sailor, he finds a little rock island and he spends the entire book surviving on it, fishing and figuring out how to live, like Robinson Crusoe, at the end [omitted: spoiler] In junior high school, when I read that, I thought it was the most amazing thing, the idea.

PK: It might describe the human condition in a way.

CK: It might.

PK: Did you like “Lord of the Flies?”

CK: I did! I haven’t read Golding as an adult so I don’t know, but I mean when I was a kid, I loved that. I remember my father’s paperback copy of it, with the little red squiggly drawing of a person’s kid, and I carried it around a lot. I mean I loved that book.

PK: So you had good English teachers in junior high and high school?

CK: You mean because they assigned these books?

PK: Yeah.

CK: I read “Lord of the Flies” before I was in junior high school, it was one of those things that was in my parent’s library and I read it. But I think I had the standard, I think I read - I don’t even remember, “Fahrenheit 451” and stuff like that.

PK: I read a number of responses to the film and not everyone seems to pick up on the fact that while this is going on the world is falling apart outside. A bit of a doomsday movie.

CK: Some people have. Well maybe. There’s things that are going on, I think there is a confusion of the interior and the exterior, often, literally. In that this is taking place inside a building, but also the world outside is existing and falling apart, but also that, that destruction starts to enter into the warehouse city, which at first seems like a sanctuary because the guy in the street says, “when can we get in? its bad out here,” but it’s also metaphorically, inside his brain and outside his brain and his life. What’s happening inside Caden or through Caden’s life is also happening in the world outside of him. So I’m, playing with a lot of stuff like that, but yeah, the world is falling apart.

PK: Yeah, just look at my 401k.

CK: I can’t look at mine.

PK: Well you’ve got a family too, you have responsibilities.

CK: I do have responsibilities,

PK: You just had your fiftieth birthday, is that correct?

CK: That is correct.

PK: Did you have a party?

CK: Went out to dinner.

PK: No surprise party?

CK: I’ve never had a surprise party; no one’s ever given me a surprise party.

PK: How sad.

CK: I don’t know if I want one. But certainly, maybe the people I know, know that I wouldn’t want one so they don’t do. Or maybe no one is interested in spending the time that is needed to organize something. I kind of think it might be that.

PK: Turning fifty, is that turning you more reflective? Though I don’t see how you could be more reflective than your movies demonstrate.

CK: I’ve been working on this movie for five years so I guess if it’s made me more reflective it started at 45. So, you know, as you get older, things happen in your life that make you more conscious, or less able to deny the inevitability of the end of your life, I mean, so, I guess that makes you more reflective, I don’t know.

PK: When did you shoot this movie?

CK: [Notices book I’m toting] You’re reading “The Road?”

PK: It’s a real picker upper. Did you read it?

CK: I did read it, I didn’t like it as much as I hoped I would and now it’s a major motion picture which also makes me nervous.

PK: I don’t know if frozen ash and cannibalism are high concept material.

CK: [laughs] Well I won’t reveal the surprise ending.

PK: Really? He wakes up at the end ...

CK: Turns out...

PK: Turns out it’s all a play put on by Caden. What about the Fregoli Syndrome?

CK: You’ve been reading up on me.

PK: There’s a website that is dedicated to you, have you seen it?

CK: To what? To me?

PK: Yeah, it’s called “Being Charlie Kaufman.”

CK: Yeah, I didn’t know they mentioned that on there. What about it?

PK: Could be a demonstration of that symptom in the film, when everybody in the film takes the same person, or different people you assume are the same person [in the film characters are played in the play within the film by actors who are in turn played by other characters and so on].

CK: Yeah, I actually did a play called “Anomalisa” which I wrote under a pen name for various reasons and I used the name Francis Fregoli as the pen name and yeah, it was a play about a man and everybody in his life is the same person. So, it was kind of fun. I like psychotic syndromes.

PK: Do you read a lot of the guy who writes “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat"?

CK: Oliver Sacks. I read that book a long time ago, but no I don’t. I just look things up online and find syndromes. I think I’m out of them.

PK: There’s one more.

CK: Capgras. [the belief that some loved one or close friend has been replaced by an exact duplicate]. Which is kind of a - when he gets the apartment, when he goes to Adele’s [Caden’s wife played by Catherine Keener] apartment, the name on the board outside is “Capgras.”

PK: I didn’t catch that.

CK: Next time! Next time. When you see it again.

PK: Third time it’s a walk in the park. How about Korsakoff’s syndrome? Sort of like “Memento.” http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Korsakoff's-syndrome

CK: That’s related to alcoholism, confabulation and that sort of thing.

NEXT: More literary name-dropping and the “M” word.

The grateful undead

Peter Keough — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:29:00 GMT

President Obama. Let’s just ponder that for a while.

Okay.

As I pointed out a couple of postings ago , all of this was foreshadowed by the switch in Hollywood’s undead preference from zombies to vampires, which should be more than evident when “Twilight” sets some box office records its opening weekend on November 21. Flesh-eating, lumpen proletariat walking corpses are out. Sexy, superhuman, elitist revenants are in.

The McCain campaign tried to smear the Obama team by suggesting that they were vampiric elitists who live off the toil of regular Joe the Plumbers, hoity-toity aristos who believe they are better and smarter and more attractive than everybody else. The problem was that maybe that’s what people wanted. Maybe, they thought, it was time to have someone who was a cut or two above the average rather than below in the White House, given the track record of the past 8 years.

Anyway, as fate would have it, one of the more troubling vampire movies of all time, Claire Denis’s “Trouble Every Day” (2001), is screening this Saturday at the Harvard Film Archive. Denis, who is one of the greatest little known European filmmakers around, will be on hand for the screening to discuss. In a sense, “Trouble Every Day” tends to contradict my undead argument, for although it stars some pretty sexy actors — Vincent Gallo and Beatrice Dalle — it might be one of the worst date movies ever made. One scene in particular will make it very clear why. You might want to ask Denis about it.

And if you’re intrigued and want to see more of her films, and I highly recommend it, the Saturday screening is just part of an ongoing retrospective of Denis’s films screening at the Archive. She’ll also be attending a screening Friday of her rarely screened 1994 films “U.S. Go Home” (a sentiment that might have changed after last night’s election) and her 1991 short “Keep It for Yourself.”

Meanwhile, for those of you interested in seeing some real parasitic elitists, tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre members of the National Society of Film Critics will be conducting a panel discussion of their organization’s new book, “The B List: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love” (remember, a lot of these guys get paid by the word). Brattle director Ned Hinkle moderates and those attending will include Ty Burr from “The Boston Globe,” Jay Carr from NECN, James Verniere from “The Boston Herald” and myself. See you there.

Lance Hammer interview, part II

Peter Keough — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:26:00 GMT

Should a white guy make films about black people? Should independent filmmakers distribute their own movies? Will there be a “Ballast 2?” Discuss.

PK: Did you show the finished film to the participants?

LH: Yeah, all the actors came up to Sundance, and a couple of them came to Berlin, and a few saw it in LA at the festival, a couple of them had been there before, so, um, the Sundance experience was very transforming for everybody. Mike Smith is in Poland right now, representing the film in Krakow. We showed it twice in Jackson, for the cast and crew and friends and family screenings.

PK: Do they plan to pursue careers in movies?

LH: Um, Tara is. She’s been in two films since. A Disney film, a big studio thing, with Alfre Woodard as the star, and an independent she’s done. Johnny McPhail, the white guy, has done another one or two films since (the one professional) and Mike Smith just got offered a job, potentially offered a job, on a very big independent film. I don’t know if he’s doing it or not. He’s not pursuing it, you know, unless someone makes him the offer, he’s not going to go looking for it.

PK: He’s got gravitas, a sort of presence. The reviews have been almost universally positive, except--

LH: There’s been some pretty bad ones!

PK: Armond White.

LH: Armond White does not like the film, I’ve learned.

PK: He’s a contrarian. But if I was Armond White, I would say, and we’ve already discussed this, but you know, how can you be so presumptious, as a white guy to make a film about black people?

LH: That’s bullshit, you know. Should a white filmmaker only make films about white people? Should a black filmmaker only make films about black people? Should a Korean only make films about Koreans? Like, what happens to the poor people who live in Iceland when there’s such a small population? Only make films about themselves? That’s fucking bullshit, I’m sorry, but it makes me angry.

PK: Should I read some quotes?

LH: Oh I read it! I mean, let’s just, come on. I took painstaking measures to be objective. I wrote about grief, I wrote about hope, I wrote about these things that can translate to any culture, to any race, to any gender. And I didn’t make a film about the blues. I didn’t make a film about civil rights. I made a film about grieving. And I made a film about a place that I love and documented it with as much objectivity as possible. And I gave authorship...I sought out people in this region and gave them full control of the language and the ability to manipulate scenario as they saw fit, whenever they wanted.

PK: I find the ending enigmatic [omitted spoiler]...?

LH: Oh, I don’t know where they’re going. I purposely didn’t...[omitted spoiler].

PK: I see a sequel. “Ballast 2.”

LH: No, no I can’t do it. Armond White tells me I cant do it, so I’ve got to go make movies about white people in my neighborhood.

PK: Where is your neighborhood?

LH: I live in Hollywood. I’ll make a film about filmmaking. We need another one of those. That’ll do the world some good, won’t it?

Pk: Do you buy the new American independent film phenomenon?

LH: I believe in the zeitgeist phenomenon and I wasn’t aware of it when I was making it. I mean the things I was aware of was like Bresson, and the things from the 50s and 60s. I was thinking consciously of “Breaking the Waves," editorially. It gave me the courage to cut the film. The thing that’s been identified later, a new American realism, I think it’s a response to the American film market, and the world economy. I can speak for myself, and I assume some of these other filmmakers have experienced the same things, but what happened for me is that I had such a frustration, such a sense of futility trying to make a project in a more conventional way. Trying to get money through the independent channels and being so frustrated by the way that these people who control the money alter your creative content and at a certain point, its like, “why the fuck am I doing this?” I’m struggling for years trying to raise pennies, just to give to give somebody the ability to control what I’m gonna do. Fuck that. I wasn’t thinking in terms of self-distribution at that time, I was thinking the first step was I don’t want anybody involved in my creative process. I’m going to make something inexpensive, I’m going to go to Mississippi to do it, and I’m going to make a film for myself. I don’t care about the market or what anybody else thinks. I have a very strong belief that if you do something for yourself very personally, complete it, and present it to the world, it becomes public property and only if you do something that resonates with you will it have the chance to do that with other people. While you’re making it, you can’t think about anybody but yourself. That’s where great art comes from. That’s a mentality that isn’t compatible with the corporations that have controlled independent filmmaking recently. We just do what we want. It’s just a response to a breakdown of the system.

PK: Do you keep in touch with these people?

LH: Yeah, you see the same people on the festival circuit. Different cities and the same people, and there’s really a sense of like, being a brother in arms because it’s like going to war when you make a film. Somebody that’s done a film from their heart, you feel this tremendous desire to be helpful to them and to bond together and have power in numbers. I’m very supportive of what all of these people have done. Chris Smith, who did “The Pool,” http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0911024/ I saw that at Sundance in 2007, it’s a beautiful piece of work.

PK: Your next movie is with a movie star?

LH: Potentially. I’m going to do it in the same way that I made “Ballast,” which is that I’m interested in that person for that person, not as an actor. We’re going to strip away all of acting and the requirement is that that person has be very naked and expose themselves..

PK: Physically or emotionally?

LH: (laughs) Maybe physically, but I’m not really thinking about that at the moment.

PK: You can’t tell us who it is?

LH: I can’t, right now.

PK: It’ll be a much different experience then, with the ego of the actor, and a larger budget

LH: Ego is not allowed. Its not that kind of person. It’s a person that I respect. An actor is a person first.

Undead reckoning

Peter Keough — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:54:00 GMT

It's the Halloween before Tuesday’s election, so the big question is -- how is the political situation reflected in horror movies? And, specifically, those that deal with that fundamental source of horror, the Undead.

There are basically two types of undead, zombies and vampires (Frankenstein fits in uneasily somewhere), and I think it’s safe to say that up until recently the zombie contingent has dominated the genre. Being the socialist film critic that I am, I would interpret zombies as representing the lumpen proletariat. Thay have been so exploited by the capitalist system that they’re not just downtrodden — they’re dead. But they rise again — the return of the repressed — to destroy and devour those who subjugated them.

In other words, they represent that “redistribution of wealth” that the Republicans are scaring everybody with.

On the other hand, they also embody the Joe the Plumber fantasy that the right wing is trying to sell to the working stiffs of America. The working stiffs, so to speak. Those real Americans that their fellow real Americans John McCain and Sarah Palin want to defend against the “liberal elite.”

In other words, the Republicans are trying to co-opt genuine working class discontent, as they have so successfully done so in previous elections, pretending to be the supporters of the common people when in fact they are those who have victimized them. And movies like “28 Weeks Later” and “I Am Legend” and "Diary of the Dead" are expressions of the masses’ ambivalent fear of and attraction to their potential revolutionary fervor.

But those are the old undead. The trend now seems to be in the direction of vampire, a trend spearheaded by the expected success of the upcoming adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s YA bestseller “Twilight” in which a teenage girl falls for a gorgeous, demi-godlike vampire boy. The trend should gain momentum as we reach 2011 and the scheduled release of Tim Burton’s adaptation of “Dark Shadows” starring Johnny Depp as Barnabas Collins.

And why not? Vampires are sexy. No one wants to have sex with a zombie. If a zombie comes snuggling up to you, you don't want to have sex with it, you want to blow its goddamn head off.

Why is that, political subtext speaking? What do vampires represent beyond confused adolescent hormonal agitation? To find out, I consulted one of my socialist criticism guidebooks, “Signs Taken for Wonders” by Franco Moretti, and his essay “Dialectic of Fear” in which he quotes Marx’s observation: “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

Well, that kind of sounds like the zombies described above. Or maybe it describes the Wall Street parasites responsible for the collapse of the economy. And nobody likes them anymore. There must be another explanation.

So, so much for Marx and Moretti. Could these sexy new vampires be representing neither capital or Wall Street CEOs or the aristocracy but the “liberal elite” that the Republicans have tried to demonize? Could this mean that instead of hating and fearing this elite, regular people might actually be drawn to those who are smart, beautiful, educated and talented? Even if they want to suck their blood?

Beats me. Maybe we’ll know by next Wednesday. Or better yet, on the opening weekend of “Twilight” on November 21.

Lance Hammer interview, part I

Peter Keough — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:06:00 GMT

Wim Wenders’s great 1987 film “Wings of Desire” inspired Lance Hammer to consider a career in moviemaking, but it took a stint at a studio doing set design for blockbusters like “Batman and Robin” to convince him to make films his way. His “Ballast” took years to bring to the screen and involved spending several winters soaking up the ambience of the Mississippi Delta where the film is set and casting non-professional local people and devising a story with dialogue and events that were true to the reality and people with whom he worked. So he doesn’t cotton to those who say that a white filmmaker can’t make a film about black people. Otherwise, he’s a very nice guy, humble, idealistic and committed to his art, or such was the impression I got during the following interview.

PK: Were you here for the Independent Film Festival of Boston ?

Lance Hammer: I was, yeah. We won the grand prize.

PK: And you won at Sundance also. Were you surprised yourself that this film that you’ve toiled on for ten years is setting the world on fire?

LH: It was extremely surprising. I think its very difficult for any artist to have any concept of whether their film is any good or not, .or their poem or their song or their novel, you know, and that’s definitely the case with me. When I finally locked picture, when I looked at the answer print, I just kinda looked at it and thought, all I saw was its flaws, you know, and I was just kind of hopeful that Sundance would see past the flaws.

PK: You’ve worked on fine tuning it for a period of time..

LH: Yeah, like five years. I often think everything I do is pretty bad, you know, so this is no exception.

Pk: so this must be difficult for you to talk about it over and over again with journalists and audiences and so forth

LH: It’s stressful because I’m kind of private, so. There’s about a years worth of time where you have to be very open to everybody, but it’s very important for the film, and I believe in supporting the film and I’m very thankful that people care. The fact that you’re here, and you’ve watched the film...

PK: Twice.

LH: Twice, I mean I cant even fathom why you would do that. I just really appreciate that you’ve watched my film twice, it kind of staggers me, you know.

PK: Part of the reason is the first run through is, not all of it is immediately clear, and even on the second viewing some of the dialogue is intelligible. Is that intentional?

LH: Yeah I mean I think that’s the way it works when you’re in the field. It took a lot of time to figure how much I should leave unintelligible or quiet, either unintelligible because, for example, JimMyron [Ross, who plays the character James, a troubled teenager] doesn’t enunciate a word very clearly, or he’s talking very quietly. But I think holistically, a film is about communicating something through many different ways -- images, sound, words -- words in this particular film are kind of minimal, of minimal importance in many ways

PK: It’s sort of like ambient sound.

LH: Exactly. But then there is some narrative that has to be communicated with words, so its important to make sure that comes through. And I went back a year later to the same houses and brought JimMyron with me, and Mike and we did some ADR in the field in the same places again, for some words that were really critical and had to be understood and weren’t, you know. So it was a careful modulation to figure out how much to show and how much just not to care about.

PK: When people review the movie, are there certain spoilers you hope they don’t reveal?

LH: No, I think it’s basically fair game. You put a film out there to the world and in doing that, you sign an unwritten agreement that people can do whatever they want and say whatever they want. It becomes public property. I get upset when I saw the first reviewers at Sundance giving away the spoilers because I think everything’s a spoiler. To say that there’s geese that fly into the air in the opening scene of the film, is like, ‘oh, don’t say that!’ I don’t mind, I don’t want to be part of that process, it’s your own writing process.

PK: I’ve read a lot of interviews that you’ve conducted about the movie and nobody has asked this question: what does the title mean?

LH: Oh no, that’s the most popular question. Number one question. Do you know what ballast is on a ship?

PK: It’s supposed to give it stability.

LH: It’s also the rock bed that rails lay on, for the same purpose. It’s a word that popped into my head one day when I was writing, I remember when it happened, it was kind of out of reach, and I thought it felt right. Its about people in a state of chaos in their lives, seeking more than anything else, just stability, just looking for grounding. To be more specific, I think they find it in each other, in a relationship with each other. Even more specifically, they find it in being selfless. Lawrence’s [the protagonist] chaos, his un-tethering, is corrected by his realization that he can be of use to a child. And being of use to a child is a purpose to live and that purpose gives grounding. Probably the boy is the ballast for everybody.

PK People have compared your movie to Bresson.

LH: Yeah, He’s my big influence, yeah.

PK: However, you got your filmmaking start working on “Batman and Robin.” Was it the nipples on the batsuit that drove you to make your own movies?

LH: Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that. The truth is that when I was 19 years old I became a cinephile. I went away from my childhood house for the first time to live somewhere else in Tucson, Arizona, and a newfound independence was expressed by venturing to the arthouse cinema I discovered and I saw “Wings of Desire” and was overwhelmed with joy and sadness and I couldn’t believe that film could move somebody in this way, and you could be so poetic and say something important about the human psyche and the existential longing for something you can’t have. And so, at that point I wanted to make films, but I didn’t think it was a realizable goal, so I studied architecture instead, and that kind of led me into art directing. But, all this time I’ve been a cinephile you know. You’re right, as I begin to be fearful for my soul as an art director, working on these industrial films that are totally empty of meaning. I came from watching Bresson and Godard and Pasolini...and they contribute to society in a very important way, in the same that you know, TC Williams’s poetry contributes something, I’m sure its not very profitable for him, but its hugely profitable for the world and that’s meaningful to me. So I started to write, I said “if you really feel this way you better see if you have it in you to make something. If you have anything to say, anything to express.” So I began writing, a lot, for years.

PK: So what happened to the all the writing?

LH: Most of its in the toilet. I had a complete screenplay and I shot some scenes from it even.

PK: Was that that short film that you made?

LH: Its not really a short film, its excerpted scenes from a feature script. I did cut them together in a way that could be somewhat cohesive. It was a device to try to raise money for the future script. That’s why I did it.

PK: In that version of the story, were the characters from a white family?

LH: In that first version? It’s a white family and a black family.

PK: Ok. In the finished version, many of the characters are African-American. Did you feel uneasy that a white man from California probably isn’t supposedly that qualified to make a movie about black people from the Mississippi Delta?

LH: Yeah, I mean, having gone to the Delta now for about ten years, I learned quite a bit, and I became obsessed with learning everything I could, reading everything I could, meeting as many people as I could, spending as much time as possible there. Over a long period of time. I know a lot about this place, but there’s nothing that will change the fact that I wasn’t born there and that I’m white. The reason why I started over, threw away the first script and started over was because at a certain point I realized that more I’ve learned about this place the more I’ve learned how little authority I have to speak about this place. Specifically the most important issue being the African-American and white relationship, which is extremely complicated and nuanced, and steeped in generation upon generation of, you know...one thing that’s clear is there’s a tremendous brutality of whites against blacks.

PK: But in this movie the whites seem very genteel.

LH: Yeah, because this is something that’s also true. All these things exist at the same time. It’s complicated, it’s paradoxical and when you’re from there, you get it. When you’re not, it’s just confusing. So when I realized that, I realized I can’t be another outsider coming in to make a film about the blues, or civil rights, you’re just an outsider trying to say they know how the Delta works. I’m doing the opposite thing. I’m going to take a camera and document the place, as it exists and have no judgment, as much as possible. Most importantly, I’m not contribute the words, I’m going to cast people from the place, we’re going to work together, they’re gonna develop the language themselves, they’re going to choose the words, if the scene structure isn’t working, they’re going to tell me what is ringing false with them. They’re gonna tell me what they would do, and that’s what the script will be. The camera will be detached. I will never be the POV. I don’t know if you noticed this watching the film, but there’s no POV shots. We’re never looking through the eyes of a character. If the character’s watching something, we’re watching them watch something. There’s a dispassionate, objective, detachment.

PK: Like the angels in “Wings of Desire?”

LH: Yeah, I mean it probably comes from that, honestly. But of course that’s complicated too, because I wrote the script, I wrote the narrative. That’s based upon a lot of my experience there. A lot of its based on locations I had found through the years, and they influenced me in such a way that I would write narrative around them, you know, or the manor house, which is across the street from the two tenant houses, that’s part of the architectural history of the Delta and it speaks of..In the final film you don’t really see the geographical arrangement. The white guys house is this 1700s or 1800s manor house and it used to have..you know it’s the farmer’s house.

PK: So it used to be his plantation.

LH: This exists all over the south still, all these tenant houses, which are first, where slaves lived, and then they became tenant farmers and it’s the same system. Its basically the white power structure suppresses, and requires the working force of the black families.

PK: But they own their property in this movie

LH: Yeah and this is a common thing too. I’ve spoken to so many people, and I’ve basically clinched together the scenarios from real stories that I’ve heard from people I’ve met. And the things that I’ve seen there. I brought that script with some of that stuff intact, to these people that actually live here now, and said ‘you are going to be the human beings that populate this landscape. Tell me if this works’. And it took a long time. We edited all of these things out in the rehearsal process, in the discovery process. You know, is this true? Like, the whole thing with the drug scenario thing..

PK: Does that actually happen in that part of the country?

LH: Yeah, and I knew that, so I wrote it that way, and then I went there, and I talked to the narcotics agent of the Delta and then I also brought in a bunch of teenagers, like 20 of them in, and we all sat down together for like a week and talked about the whole situation, the whole drug element in the script, because I don’t really know how it works, you know. And we brought drug dealers in..

PK: Those were actually drug dealers in that scene?

LH: One of them in the film has done that, and I won’t tell you who it is, but the other ones weren’t, but we brought a lot of other teenagers that were, in to talk about it. And the narcotics agent said, ok, I wont be a narcotics agent, I won’t bust anybody, because we’re interested in communicating something truthfully in this film about the way this really works. There was an agreement that there wouldn’t be any of that. All of the language, all of the dynamics of those deals were explained to me by this group.

PK: Never trust a narc.

LH: Right, well that’s what all of the kids told me. Its funny, they all wanted to make a film so they all resolved their differences for a moment. With them, we would turn the camera on when they didn’t know we were shooting. They knew we were going to do that, but we would always be rehearsing with the camera. Half of that was kind of a loose script that we all created together and half was completely candid.

NEXT: Enter the contrarian.

"Postcard" from the edge

Peter Keough — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 14:41:00 GMT

Speaking of repetition compulsion, the conflict in the Middle East shows no signs of a happy ending. The latest major installment was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, a brutal campaign which ended with no clear winners but definite losers -- the people of Lebanon.

Talented local filmmaker Jocelyn Ajami (“Queen of the Gypsies” ) visited the scenes of destruction with a group of American journalists, scholars and politicians six weeks after the cessation of hostilities. Her 35 minute documentary about her experience, “Postcard from Lebanon,” includes shocking images of destruction and heartbreaking testimony from survivors.There is even a terrible beauty in the shots of block after block of shattered white rubble occasionally broken by a stunned looking armchair, a battered doll or a dusty shoe — reminders of the people who once lived there.

But the film has a larger purpose, too. As a UN spokesman explains, the Israeli army’s “unprecedented” use of cluster bombs (notorious for their "dud" rate) blanketed villages in Southern Lebanon with tiny unexploded bomblets powerful enough to blow a child to pieces. They have infested peoples homes, gardens and hang from olive trees like Christmas tree ornaments -- about a million in all, the spokesman estimated.

Ajami hopes the film will encorage people to demand that the US sign an anti-cluster bomb treaty that is scheduled to be ratified December 3. 107 countries have signed already. The US is lagging, and Senators Leahy (VT) and Feinstein (CA) are pushing for Congressional resolution to do so.

“Postcard from Lebanon” screens at the MFA tonight (October 29) at 6:30 p.m. and November 8 at 2:15 p.m. The director will be present and will conduct a discussion.