January 31, 2007
Had he just made those movies that came out between 1970 and
1975, Robert Altman would still rank as one of the world’s great directors.
Maybe even greater because then he wouldn’t have turned out such clunkers as
“Dr. T. and the Women.” (Okay, so we wouldn’t have had “Short Cuts” or “The
Player” either). The recent retrospective at the Brattle Theatre, “Robert
Altman’s 70s,” reminds me of the late director’s amazing creative
outpouring during that period of eight
masterpieces, from “M*A*S*H”(1970) to
“Nashville” (1975,) and how, at the time, we took it for granted that it would
just go on forever.
It came to a stop on November 20. Sadly, his last film, “A
Prairie Home Companion,” scripted
by and starring Garrison Keillor and adapted from Keillor’s radio show, wasn’t his
best (has any American director finished his career on a high note except for
John Huston with “The Dead?”). But it may have been his spookiest, what with the
plot hinging on the show’s last broadcast and Virginia Madsen as the Angel of
Death 
prowling around backstage.
Last April I was fortunate enough to talk with Altman about that
film, his career, the state of Hollywood
and the Lifetime Achievement Award he just got at the recent Oscar show, at which
he stunned everyone by casually noting he had a heart transplant done eleven
years before.
Here’s a transcript of our conversation. If memory serves me
right I was kind of stupid that day and he was kind of grumpy. So at times it
reads like the disjointed, overlapping dialogue of one of his lesser movies. Had I known he was a goner maybe I'd come up with different questions. Who knows about these things? So not the gest interview, but, like the movie, kind of spooky.
Q: Do you listen to the radio yourself anymore?
A: Yeah. I listen to the radio more than I watch television.
Q: Do you listen to the talk shows?
A: I listen to a lot of NPR. I just listen to radio, I like
radio. I grew up on it and my first professional job was writing an episode of
a thing called “The Man Called X” 
with
Herbert Marshall. Norman Corwin was my idol.
Q: Wasn’t the Oscar winner for Best Short Documentary [“A
Note of Triumph: the Golden Age of Norman Corwin”] was about him?
A: About him, his work. The piece after the war....was just
a genius piece of work. I talked to him just a couple of days ago. He’s in his
90-s now. Shit, I’m almost in my 90s, I don’t have much further to go.
Q: You said at the Oscars that you have another 30 or 40
years.
A: But nobody else knows that, thinks that. Because they
didn’t know that I have this young heart.
Q: That was kind of a shock for people. Anybody know about
it before that?
A: Oh, a few people, but not generally.
Q: Why did you choose that as an occasion to....
A: Well, I’d done it 11 years ago. And I didn’t want it
known then, because there’s such a stigma connected to it. I was 70. And I
thought maybe people wouldn’t hire me. But it just fell into place and I
thought well, it isn’t going to affect me now. And I think it’s important to
get that stigma behind us and know you can have these, these body parts can be
almost harvested and replaced and there’s no, I can’t tell you how many 1000s
of heart transplants around the world and they hardly lose anyone. I was the
oldest person when I got mine, that they would give them to because they didn’t
want to waste the hearts. But most heart transplants go to young people,
teenagers, people who have really defective tickers.
Q: Do you know anything about the person who was the donor?
A: A young woman from Seattle, I think, or Portland. I think it was a woman. They won’t
tell you much.
Q: Did you have curiosity?
A: Ah, mezzo-mezzo.
Q: Sounds like a movie!
A: A bad movie, because where do you go from there? The work
I have done since then, it has no effect on my brain....
Q: Has it touched into your feminine side?
A: I’ve always had my feminine side.
Q: I was looking at your filmography and there doesn’t seem
much of a gap…what was it 12 years ago?
A: The last film with the old heart was “Kansas
City” and then I did “Gingerbread
Man.”
Q: An underrated film....
A: “Gingerbread Man?” Yeah, I thought it was a good
thriller...
Q: That wasn’t your cut?
A: Yeah....everything is my cut.
Q: There is the legend that you have an atagonistic
relationship with your screenwriters sometimes..?
A: Well, that happens. That’s a general given. Because the
screenwriter, they write the thing and they have their picture. And then when
somebody suddenly takes it and makes it into a picture and it isn’t what they
saw — it’s what I saw — it kind of confuses the issue a little, no one knows
what position to take. And there’s too much put on the director and
screenwriter and actors. The actors are the main force in my movies. The
screenplay is sometimes very important, sometimes not important at all. It
changes.
Q: With the screenwriter also being one of the main
actors....how did that work?
A: I didn’t think much about it, we did it. And he had mixed
emotions because he was in it, plus he was the writer and kind of the creator.
I was calling the shots. So there was a little, I don’t quite know what our
realtionship was.....
Q: Creative tension.
A: Yeah.
Q: He’s seen it...
A: Yes.
Q: And happy with it...
A: Yes, I think he’s really happy with it.
Q: And you’re happy with it.
A: I’m extremely happy with it.
Q: Are you more happy with this than other films?
A: Different strokes for different folks.....different
film....
Q: So you’re happy with every film you make.
A: Yes, sir.
Q: You wouldn’t do qualitatively, this one is better than
another?
A: Do you have any children?
Q: No I don’t.
A: Well, that’s the question, which of your children do you
like the most.
Q: So you have 30 children at least.
A: Almost 40.
Q: At the same time you just finished a play in London…
A: Well the play closes in two weeks.
Q: So you did that after you did the film?
A: Oh yeah.
Q: So you did a film about a stage play and then you did a
stage play. Is that confusing?
A: It’s all part of the same...
Q: “Resurrection Blues?”
A: The critics were terrible, but it was great. I had a
wonderful time. Great cast and very happy and proud of it.
Q: One thing that struck me about this film is that there
were no audience reaction shots in the film. Is that deliberate?
A: It was radio. The audience was part of the show and no
more than what you saw, so there was no point in showing the radio reaction.
Q: I kept thinking about the Bergman version of “The Magic
Flute” where he would always cut to the enchanted little girl, which I thought
was a mistake....
A: That’s a different film. Kenneth Branagh is doing that
film right now.
Q: I was talking to a friend of mine who has a much better
memory of films than I do and I asked if he remembers seeing a flashback in any
of your movies. He couldn’t think of any. And it seems like...
A:Is that true?
Q: You don’t believe in flashbacks....?
A: Yeah. I’m sure you’re wrong, I’m sure I’ve done a
flashback....or interrupted time or flashforward or whatever. But I don’t think
of that as....shit happens.
Q: Speaking of shit happens....plot doesn’t seems to be your
priority when putting together a film.
A: Not for me.
Q: As in your film “The Company,” which probaly had less
plot than this. How do you approach narrative?
A: I just do what occurs to me really. And there was ....I
don’t think about it.
Q: Kind of like Mike Leigh?.
A: Not as much as Mike does...he really makes it up as he
goes along.....but they really do a lot of that ahead of time. Rehearsals.
Long, long rehearsal, weeks. And they develop the script from that. I’m a big
fan of his, I think he’s as good as it gets.
Q: So you don’t believe in rehearsals?
A: No.
Q: 25 days shooting for this?
A: 23! We were ahead of time. It was a good experience.
Q: You had PT Anderson serve as your backup?
A: As my shadow.
Q: Is he kind of an acolyte of yours?
A: I wouldn’t say that, it might be the other way. He’s paid
attention to my work and I’d have him as standby...and his girl [Maya Rudolph],
she’s in the picture....and his daughter [Rudolph was regnant in the film]....not
born yet. So he was the perfect guy to do this. Stephen Frears did this for “Gosford Park.”.I don’t think I had anything for “Company....I
guess they just thought if I croak they’s just shut the picture down.
Q: Would you say he’s one of the more promising directors?
A: Anderson?
Oh yeah, he’s ahead of that, I think he’s very...the piece [“There Will Be
Blood”] http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0469494/he’s about to do this fall with
Daniel Day-Lewis, it’s more conventional, oil rigs in the 20s, Sinclair Lewis
piece. He drew this out of. “Oil?” Wasn’t that the book? We don’t talk about
these things, he’s a good friend of mine, we’ll have dinner in New York. But we won’t
talk about his film. What is there that I can talk about? I haven’t seen it!
And he hasn’t made it. But I’m a big fan of his.
Q: Alan Rudolph is another....
A: Alan Rudolph I’m a big fan, I love his work. And he’s had
a tough time, all these guys have.
Q: You’re the maverick filmmaker who beat the system.
A: Well the system beat itself, they just....incest will
eventually defeat it, there’s just too much incest at the studios and you have
to do this and this and this and this. You gotta use this star and you can’t
use anybody else because she’s gotta be in every scene. It’s all out of whack. I did a film with only one actor: “Secret
Honor,” Philip Baker Hall, who was also PT Anderson’s actor, as was John C
Reilly, in Anderson’s
first picture, “Hard Eight.”
Q: This incest will undo the system?
A: It will occur. Just look at the popular films last year,
were all special....”Brokeback
Mountain,” “Capote,” “Crash”.....”Crash,” I’m not a big
fan. I did that 25 years ago. That surprised me. But anyway, it’s all the same
trip, I can’t erase the last film and can’t erase the next one.
Q: I’m not a big fan of “Crash,” I thought it was very
contrived, and “Syriana” also, but isn’t it encouraging that people are becoming
accepting of that kind...?
A: Oh yeah. I love it. “Short Cuts” would be “Duck Soup”
these days.
Q: There’s a short of an elegiac tone in this film. The Angel
of Death appears. Is there a conscious...?
A: Well this is Garrison’s script....
he’s the one feeling
mortal....I’m not. But eventually we all go, so....
January 23, 2007
So my tally this year is 25 out of 30 correct, or 83%. Let’s
say a B. An improvement over a year ago, with
6 wrong. Now if I
had gone with my first choice and the received wisdom and picked “Little Miss Sunshine” for
Best Picture over the long shot “Bobby” that would have brought the score up to
87% and a B+ but then if I got it right I would have looked like a genius…
Okay, enough whiny second
guessing. I swore I wouldn’t go over the might have beens when the Patriots
lost, and that was something really important. So let’s look at the bigger
picture: what does it mean?
It means my basic idea that the Academy makes its choices
partly and perhaps subconsciously based on timid knee-jerk liberal principles
still holds, with reservations. “Letters to Iwo Jima,” 
which I said would be too “real”
for Academy members to endorse as Best Picture, got a nomination. Same for “United
93,” which got a Best Director nomination (remember the nominees get voted on
by the members of their particular branch, and if anyone in Hollywood was going to see Paul
Greengrass’s harrowing film, it would be the directors). So I underestimated the
Academy’s backbone when it came to these two.
But what’s the deal with “Dreamgirls?” Everyone misjudged
this one. Things started looking bad for the film, touted as an Oscar shoo-in
before anyone had even seen it, when Bill Condon didn’t get a Best Director
nomination. True, the film got the most nominations (eight), but none that
mattered. Eddie Murphy 
and Jennifer Hudson got relegated to the traditional
minority ghetto of the Supporting categories, and the rest of the nods were in the
razzle dazzle category of art design, costume, songs, etc. Was this a sign of
the predominantly white and male academy’s understated racism? Or, more
insidiously, its homophobia?
Another surprise is Brad Pitt’s failure 
to gain a nomination
as the privileged white guy who gets a lesson in Third World misery in “Babel.” The Academy
apparently preferred its white guys nominated for supporting roles to remain unpunished
and unrepentant, as with Alan
Arkin’s unapologetically perverse and homophobic geezer in “Little Miss
Sunshine” and Mark Wahlberg’s shamelessly politically incorrect townie cop in
“The Departed.”
Otherwise, “Babel”
and “The Departed,” hold up as top contenders. In the end, this year’s Oscars,
and probably every year’s, comes down to guilt. Which do they feel more guilty
about? Their culpability for a world of injustice dominated by Western greed, indifference and power
for which the phony pastiche of progressive values that is “Babel" provides a
panacea? Or about the criminal neglect of Martin Scorsese, one the world’s
greatest filmmakers, to whom they have never
given an award?
January 19, 2007
So, back to the power of film.
The power of film? Has any movie ever changed anything in the
real world?
Well, you might remember Erroll Morris’s “Thin Blue Line”
getting an apparently innocent man off death row. More recently, Kirby Dick’s
“This Film Has Not Yet Been Rated,” his puckish and devastating exposé of the absurdities
and iniquities of the MPAA ratings system, seems to have had an effect. MPAA
head Dan Glickman and Joan Graves recently have avowed to rectify some of the
more glaring abuses, such as expanding their pool of raters beyond the
self-interested fold of studio employees, clarifying the standards of judgment
and allowing filmmakers to refer to other films when making their case. They’re
also heading to Sundance to discuss with Indie filmmakers other ways of
improving the system.
In the high altitude and thin air of Park City,
they might get more than they bargained for. Let’s just say things get a little racier than
Abigail Breslin dancing to “Superfreak” in “Little Miss Sunshine.”
In his report for the New York Post headlined “Sundance with the
Devil,” reviewer Lou Lumenick describes it as “the most shocking festival
ever.” Among the offerings are “Hounddog,”
in which angelic 12-year-old Dakota
Fanning is raped and is seen partially nude; “Black Snake Moan” in which Samuel
L. Jackson chains Christina Ricci to a
radiator in her undies to keep her from misbehaving; and “An American Crime,” a
true story in which Catherine Keener plays a housewife in 1965 Indiana who ties
up a teenaged female lodger and, with the rest of her family and some concerned
neighbors, tortures her to death over the course of several days.
Ouch! It seems like the bondage, rape and torture of underaged
females might be the high concept of 2007. Meanwhile, Ms. Graves assures film
lovers: “I keep hearing about how many ‘thrusts’ you can have in a film. We’ve
never had a rule about the number of ‘thrusts.'”
January 19, 2007
As a rule I refrain from including in this blog aspects of my
personal life that aren’t film related. But this was just too weird.
When I woke up this morning I heard my cat, the redoubtable
Yodel, 
scratching around at something in the hall of my apartment. I went to
check and he was staring intently at the kepi, a French officers cap, hanging
on the wall (sometimes I like to pretend I’m Jack Lemmon in “Irma La Douce”).
On the hat was a small animal.
At first I thought it was a mouse or even a rat, but it
jumped off the hat and was gliding down
the hall, Yodel in cautious pursuit. The
creature was in no danger: Yodel is a pacifist; he probably just wanted to
start a dialogue, learn about a new culture, exchange ideas. Anyway, whatever
it was had holed up behind a bookcase.
I had a brain storm. I could use the laundry basket (luckily I
had just made my annual visit to the laundromat so it was almost empty) as a
net, set it up on one side of the bookcase and with Yodel standing guard at the
other, I could pull the bookcase away from the wall, shunting the beast into
the cage. I felt like Steve Irwin. Bring on the stingray!
It worked. Nonetheless, as I carried it down the two flights to
let it out the front door, the animal slithered up and out of the basket. Was
it possessed? As it shimmied down the hallway about a half inch off the ground.
I noticed it had membranes stretching from its forelegs to its rearlegs,
allowing it to become airborne. Finally, I coaxed it back into the basket and
set it free; it went like a bullet up a tree.
Turns out the creature was a northern flying squirrel. So I
started the day with a flying squirrel on my kepi. What next, a talking moose?
Has anyone else had a flying squirrel 
in their apartment? Or something
stranger?
Anyway, once I pull myself together, I’ll resume writing about
film.
January 16, 2007
1. Suspended animation:
A comment from John (“animation is my life”) Lassiter, whose
gas-guzzling “Cars” beat out the eco-friendly “Happy Feet” as winner of the
Globe’s new Best Animation category, convinced me that the genre has hit a dead
end. “Life’s about the journey,” he revealed to us (his wife told him this), “not
about the destination.”
2. Iraq
and a hard place:
Peter Morgan, screenwriter of “The Queen,” was cut short before
he got two sentences into a comparison between the demonstrations that
got Elizabeth II to participate in the public mourning of Princess Di with the
lack of the same for “something really important,” presumably the War in Iraq. He just
looked up and maybe saw a couple of guys in sunglasses with shackles and an
orange jump suit and said, “Bye.” Meanwhile, Sacha Baron Cohen, accepting the
award for Best Comedy or Musical for “Borat,” went on at grueling (though at
times hilarious) length, almost as long as the scene in the movie, describing the
anus and testicles (“wrinkled golden globes” ) of his co-star, Ken Davitian.
The conclusion, I suppose, is that a discussion of rancid, thirty year-old
flatulence is more acceptable to the public than comments on the
Administration’s current surge strategy.
3: Award for Best Acceptance of an Award:
Meryl Streep has won so many awards at this point that a small
volume could be published of her acceptance speeches. And it would make fun
reading. Like the one from last night accepting the award for Best Actress in a
Musical or Comedy for “The Devil Wore Prada” that began: “We had snakes -- but
then we moved to the East Coast.” Witty, weird and consummately graceful.
4. Hanks a million:
How many times did Tom Hanks use the word “balls” in his
introduction of Cecil B. DeMille Award Winner Warren Beatty? As often as he
said “Best Newcomer of 1962?”
5. “Babel:”
less alienating?
It might not compel me to watch the film again or reassess it,
but one of the show’s highlights was Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu accepting the
award for Best Picture from Arnold Schwarzenegger and saying, “My papers are
in order, Governor! I swear!”
January 13, 2007
PK: I read
that you had shown The Devil’s Backbone
at the Toronto Film Festival on
September 9th 2001 and then
on September 11th of course that terrible thing happened and then
you realized that you’d have to do another film that somehow reflected that
occasion. Can you talk about that a little bit?
GDT: I
started noticing that the world was becoming a harder place for dissension, for
disobedience. I think that disobedience is key in acquiring responsibility and
consciousness. And becoming somebody.
PK: That’s one of
the parts of the movie that kind of bothered me. It’s when Ophelia decides to
eat the two grapes. They didn’t look that tantalizing to me and then I sort of
realized that it was her way of not being completely obedient.
GDT: Beyond that,
if you remember, the mother sends her the night before without supper, and
tells her “You’ll go to bed without supper” and she spends the next day by
dealing with the near miscarriage so that by the time she goes to bed she has
not eaten for 20 hours at least.
PK: Shame on me for
being a poor observer.
The fawn is a very ambivalent creation. It’s unclear whether
he’s a good guy or a bad guy.
GDT: He’s meant
to be the character that Joseph Campbell calls the Trickster. It’s a character
that’s essentially an untrustworthy guide.
PK: You don’t
ascribe the way that say George Lucas
does to the Campbellian…
GDT: I don’t. I
read Campbell,
I read Bettelheim, I read Angela Carter and I’ve read most of the studies that
deal with myth and fairytale and lore, and frankly I think that a lot of them
become a
little too systematic for me; they become a little bit formulaic, or
at least they are used that way now in the real world. There’s other studies
that have been more useful for me. One of the books I cherish is a book called The Science
of Fairy Tales, and it’s a very exhaustive, very scholarly, but at the same
time very amusing and free catalog of how fairy tale oral tradition was formed.
PK: Speaking of
constraining formulas, you have not had good experiences with Hollywood. In fact you’re quoted as saying
that your experience with Miramax was even more horrible than the experience of
having your father kidnapped.
GDT: Yes it’s
true.
PK: But you are
making another movie in Hollywood:
Hellboy 2. How is that working out?
GDT: I think that
whenever you’re learning to operate a big machine, you lose a couple fingers.
It was learning to operate the machine and it was actually the only experience
– I’ve had three experiences working in Hollywood
and only one bad one. I’m going to chalk it up to particulars. I’m not going to
think of it like that in general. But I also learned a big lesson because with Mimic I was trying to do too much on the
first try. I was very ambitious and I was little by little finding my footing
there, and finding my footing there has helped me find a much more assured step
when I go independent like in Pans
Labyrinth or in Devil’s Backbone.
PK: So the two
feed off each other and you can make your independent films better by working
in studio films and vice versa?
GDT: Yes
PK: What is Hellboy 2 going to be like?
GDT: Well the
idea for me is to try and take Hellboy…through
essentially 3 steps. The first movie is the ideal almost childlike existence of
this guy where he falls in love and declares his love and learns who he is. The
second movie is about him finding out what the outside world is like, a little
bit, and the third movie is sort of the conclusion, and we think a very
heartbreaking little fable at the end. The second one is taking what can be or
could be a series of adventures and trying to reinvent what we got wrong in the
first one and trying to almost amplify and do again what we did right. It’s a
very sharp learning curve with these movies.
PK: Your tendency
to not exactly have happy endings- how does that work with your Hollywood connection?
GDT: It’s been only three experiences, and I think that out
of the three I would say that the first one, Mimic, was very difficult because
the original ending was completely shocking and a down ending.
PK: The insects won?
GDT: Yeah, the
insects won. And essentially not only did they win but they were amongst us and
no one noticed. They were taken to the next level of perfection. That of course
never lived to see the light of a projector. On the second one, Blade II, I came aboard when Goyer had
written the screenplay and part of what made me accept the movie was that
ending where the woman he loved crumbles in his hands. I really liked that.
With Hellboy it’s a very bittersweet
ending. I’m having more trouble with other movies that I’m trying to get off
the ground that do not have happy endings. Like I’m trying to adapt The Mountains of Madness by Lovecraft,
and that has an incredibly bleak and brutal ending but I think that people tend
to forget how it is sometimes the best horror movies, end up not with
salvation, but with an impending sense of doom and tragedy…I hope I can do it
some day.
PK: That
Lovecraft wasn’t exactly a sunny guy.
GDT: Yeah
exactly. It’s like when they ask “Is there a love interest?” I said you’re
talking about Lovecraft here.
PK: Is it true
that you were offered The Lion, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe but you said you would do it only if there was no
resurrection?
GDT: (chuckles).
In so many words. I actually said “Look I’m not the guy because in my version I
don’t think the lion would resurrect.”
PK: Do you think
if they made that film without that ending…that’s the C.S. Lewis ending?
GDT: Yes of
course.
PK: Do you think
it would have been as successful as it was.
GDT: No no.
That’s why I shouldn’t do it. I think that I try to be sincere with the
material I accept. People may be shocked that there is something on Blade II 
that attracts me, but there is.
I love the story of the vampire son and vampire father, and I love the vampire
lord and the biology that we invented for that movie. I don’t fully understand
Blade, frankly, but when I came on board, I knew that Wesley did. Wesley had a
very good sense of why Blade operated the way he operated. I concentrated
myself on creating these horrifyingly disgusting vampires which I love dearly.
PK: And you’re
quoted as saying you wouldn’t have killed them but you would have invited them
over for dinner.
GDT: Yeah. I
really like them so much. When I was a kid I was very interested in animals and
I was very interested in reading about how they functioned and reading about
their biology, and that was the aspect that I felt I could bring to Blade II; a sense of real anatomy and a
sense of real biology to these creatures. Other than that, I threw myself at
the mercy of Goyer and Wesley knowing what made Blade tick.
PK: What was the Outer Limits episode that changed your
life?
GDT: It was
called “The Mutant” with Warren Oates.
PK: Which one was
that? I’ve seen a number of them.
GDT: It’s the one
where they go to a different planet and they start mutating because of the sun
and their eyes become huge. Warren
Oates is this bald guy that has these big goggles all the time, then he removes
the goggles and his eyes are the size of them. And I started screaming like a madman
when I saw that.
PK: So you have
sort of a love/hate relationship with horror?
GDT: I don’t. I
really like horror and I like roller coasters. I like the adrenaline and I like
the fear. Emotions, no matter which ones they are, if they make you feel alive,
they are welcome. I think the thing that makes you not feel alive is isolation.
PK: A lot of the
horror that you’ve experienced has not just been on the screen but you’ve seen
a lot in the streets growing up. Can you talk a little about that?
GDT: Mexico is a
wonderful, violent place. I know that sounds like a contradiction but it isn’t.
I think there is almost an upheaval of life in Mexico, and it’s anarchic and it’s
unstructured and it is brutal, but it is there, and life is out there on the
street. You can smell it, you can feel it, you can be there. And part of it is
violence. I’ve seen more corpses than the regular first-world kid would have. I
saw my first corpse at about age 4 in a highway accident, and I’ve seen people
stabbed, shot, burned to death, and so forth, accidentally, by walking down the
street you see these things. My personal experiences have somehow lead me to –
for example for Cronos, I interviewed
and befriended a few embalmers because I was doing research for the movie. And
I worked as a volunteer at a mental hospital for a little bit, and it was next
door to the morgue, and I would have lunch at the cemetery. So it’s not your
average formative years.
PK: So your
grandmother exorcised you twice?
GDT: Twice- once
in front of my sister and once when I was alone with her.
PK: It doesn’t
seem to have worked very well.
GDT:. She
couldn’t believe that I was….She exorcised me once when I was 10 and once when
I was 12, and the second time she did it at age 12 I started laughing at how
absolutely ridiculous it was for her to think that any misbehaving from a 12
year old would be demonic. She started panicking because I was laughing and she
was throwing holy water at me, but I was laughing at the ridiculousness of the
situation…you have a 60-year-old woman trying to exorcize a 12 year old because
he’s not behaving well.
PK: So that’s
when you lapsed in your Catholicism?
GDT: I lapsed at
a very particular time in life. I lapsed in my early teens, but I lapsed more
out of the most important image in me lapsing was a pile of aborted fetuses in
a morgue, and when I saw that, it was about 5 feet tall. There was an impending
sense of mercilessness that I couldn’t explain. I don’t know what he’d exactly
told me to see that, but I saw it and it made me feel that if there was any
intelligence in the cosmos it was nevertheless a cold intelligence.
PK: An insect-like
one.
GDT: In a sense
PK: You’ve said
that the future of movies is video games?
GDT: I think that
the future of movies includes that platform; I’m not saying that it’s the form
that they’re ultimately going to take. But the discipline of learning and the
interactiveness of it and the sort of multi-branching storytelling – that’s the
future, I believe it. I think that there is a point in which generations, one
or two generations behind us, comes a generation that will not accept passive
storytelling; they will only accept participation.
PK: I can see Pan’s Labyrinth becoming a really cool
video game.
GDT: It could be
a very creepy one. Ever since Mimic,
even Mimic has some influence from
video games. I believe that there is an incredibly strong aesthetic being
shaped in video games that high brow culture is not paying attention to, but
there is a sense of design and sound, immersive sound design, and visual
texturing and design that is incredibly bold and inventive. I can point you to
one video game that if you ever play it you will see how incredibly subtle and
beautiful the storytelling can get. It’s a Japanese game that is available in America called
“Shadow of the Colossus.”
It’s almost like watching an incredibly beautiful
world in a movie that you can get lost in and wonder. It’s amazing.
PK: I’ll have to
check it out.
GDT: Check it
out.
PK: One last
question. The beginning of the film is the ending of the film also. And you
zoom into the eye of Ophelia and then it seems like everything that follows
takes places inside of her eye or mind. Are we to assume then that it’s all a
dream or a hallucination?
GDT: No to me
it’s real, but it’s real in a spiritual sense. I do believe in a quote by
Kierkegaard that say the tyrants reign ends with his death and the martyrs
reign starts with it. I think that it is acceptable for people to hear about
faith in other realms, but not within. People can say “I feel the love of Jesus
in my heart and Jesus lives in me.”
And people will hear that and say “Well I can see how that happens.” Well I
think that fantasy is as powerful and as intimate and as spiritual as that, and
I do believe that everything that happens to the girl is real. I believe in the
dimension - not because… I don’t believe in practical magic, I don’t believe
that you can get to the eyes of a toad and the bone of a mummy and you create
something – but I do believe that
there is a very mysterious part of the universe. I’m an atheist or a lapse
Catholic but I’m not a materialist. I believe that there is a huge spiritual
dimension that is as real as the real material world, and I think she goes
there. I really do. The movie is actually in favor of that hope.
PK: So it’s kind
of a happy ending?
GDT: For me it
is. The movie is like a blotch test on the people seeing it. If you stick to
the fact that the girl was shot in the gut you’re right, but if you don’t see
what happens then – not only that she goes to a place in her heart but also
that the movie then ends with a voiceover and the epilogue that says
essentially that the right tree began to flower again and the insect is there…
that for me is the note of grace in the movie.
PK: Well I thank
you for your time and best of luck with the Golden Globes and I hope the
momentum continues over to the Oscars.
GDT: I tell you,
I’m perfectly satisfied having been nominated. And I will buy the tuxedo out of
faith but I’m not holding my breath.
January 11, 2007
Guillermo el Toro’s “Pan’s Labyrinth” was already building
buzz even before its wide release starting this week. It’s gotten Best Foreign
Language Film awards from the Florida, Washington DC, San Francisco and Southeastern Film Critics Societies, a
Best Cinematography Award from the New York
critics, Best Picture from the National critics, a Golden Globe nomination for
Best Foreign Language Film, not to mention Best Foreign Language and
cinematography awards from Boston.
I think it’s safe to say it’s en route to an Oscar
nomination for Best Foreign Language Picture. I spoke to del Toro on the phone
the day after the Golden Globe nominations were announced. Here’s the first
half of the interview.
PK: Congratulations on your Golden Globe Nomination
GDT: Oh thank you, it was a great wake-up call.
PK: Actually, congratulations also on the Boston award.
GDT: Thank you very much. It’s been
wonderful, and actually, you guys were the first.
PK: We always point the way in these things. Actually
there’s kind of a crummy certificate we can mail you.
GDT: [gives address]
PK: We also gave an award to your cinematographer.
GDT: Send it here; he’s my neighbor (laughs). He’s
expanding, that guy. He’s in Argentina
right now.
PK: Is he Argentinean?
GDT: No he’s Mexican. But he’s shooting a commercial over
there.
PK: What’s going on with Mexican filmmakers? They seem to be
taking over now. Your colleague Alejandro González Iñárritu is getting a lot of attention for “Babel.”
Alfonso Cuaron’s “Children of Men”...well it’s in my top ten list. What is it
about this generation of filmmakers that makes them so influential and
creative?
GDT: I think we always wanted to be, sort of, Mexican
filmmakers that could work in any arena we wanted to and not be limited just by
what we were told we could do. For example, Alfonso always talked about doing
things like a screwball comedy or a road movie. Genres that are normally,
seem…or me with horror. They also seemed a little prohibited for other
generations of Mexican filmmakers and we have this will to work in any arena we
want to and that is what we have in common I think, a real will and a normal
desperate desire to have a point of view that was different from generations
before us.
PK: You also seem to be influenced by a disparate
number of filmmakers. A lot of people have compared, you’re probably tired of
it, “Pan’s Labyrinth” to “Spirit of the Beehive.”
GDT: I think that it’s absolutely beautiful. It’s one of my
favorite movies about childhood. Among them are the “Spirit of the Beehive,” “The Innocents,” and “Night of the Hunter” for
example. And I think that those things are very beautiful for me to hear.
You’re right about it. Our generation – Alejandro, Alfonso and I – were
influenced by different filmmakers and the generations before and I think it
came to the point where we decided to do the things we admired in the genres we
admired and that comes across in Alfonso’s handling of science fiction for
example in “Children of Men,” or Alejandro doing what I think is a very
brilliant… to me his most subtle and beautiful episode in all his dream movies,
which is the Japanese episode in “Babel.”
PK: The two films that you mentioned, “Night of the Hunter”
and “Spirit of the Beehive,” and also in
your own films, one of the themes seems to be children in danger. Can you comment
on that?
GDT: To me “Spirit of the Beehive” was incredibly beautiful
and almost intangible and spiritual in the way it approached fantasy. It was
very tenuous and delicate and I have a will to make fantasy actually, almost
material, much more tangible, and I think that it only can happen in a universe
populated by children. I don’t idealize childhood, as you can see in “Pan’s
Labyrinth” or even 
“Cronos,” but I do think that it’s the time where emotions
are sort of unfiltered and impulses are unfiltered, including faith and belief
and love, for example. In “Cronos” the granddaughter loves her grandfather even
in spite of him falling apart, rotting away. I think these things can only
happen in childhood stories, and that brings me very close to the spirit of
fairy tales, in which brutal things and brutal rites of passage occur to little
children.
PK: You yourself were kind of an imaginative child. I read
in an interview that you actually saw a faun come out of a wardrobe or
something when you were a kid?
GDT: From behind the armoire of my grandmother, but I’m sure
it was a lucid dream or something but the fact is I have a very personal place
for monsters in my life; they are not just creatures of literature or cinema,
to me they are archetypical spiritual beings. I really see monsters as a
representation of things that are very cherished and almost religious for me.
PK: Do you design your own monsters…?
GDT: I try to, yeah.
PK: So you sketch them out in a notebook?
GDT: I sketch them out in a notebook or I doodle them for
the people designing them. I am intimately involved with designing them because
I really believe in them, so its almost like I know how they sound, what they
move like, how they look, what they look like. All these things I absolutely
have an almost religious certainty (laughs). So I have to work on that.
PK: Do they come in visions?
GDT: They come fully formed.
PK: What about the guy with the eyeballs in his hands?
GDT: That was a process. There are several monsters where
you start one way or you start another. But there comes a moment when it all
becomes clear. The guy with the eyes and the hands went through a long process
and actually 2 or 3 incarnations, but when it clicks, it clicks.
PK: I have to say that currently that’s my favorite monster.
GDT: Thank you.
People have taken a great liking to him.
PK: It’s too bad though that people are already familiar
with the image.
I had a friend who came into the screening late and just came in at that point
and had no idea that the creature was going to do that and she said that that’s
the most incredible moment that she’s had in a movie in a long time.
GDT: I think that I agree with you but at the same time I
understand them using it as a promotional image because it’s strong. But I
absolutely agree. The movie is best experienced if you have no knowledge of
what you’re going to see.
PK: There are other motifs besides monsters that run through
your films. In a film like “Mimic” especially, insects are the dominant motif.
GDT: I think insects are as close as we come in the real
world – insects and deep-sea creatures - to having monsters walk amongst us. I’m
fascinated by biology; I always have been since I was a kid; I’m fascinated
with anatomy and how things work from inside out, and it always is very
shocking to me to remember what the insect biology is and how these creatures
have no real heart, they just have hollow chambers, they pump white blood, they
have 6 or more eyes, they have 6 legs, they have a hard shell and have no
skeleton. It’s wonderful. It’s an absolutely incredible design, and in that
they are perfect and that makes them also incredibly scary. When I was a kid I
used to think about archangels, which were the soldiers of God; the tough guys.
They came in and did the dirty job, and I always thought that somehow all
archangels would look like insects if you actually saw them.
PK: Well ,that’s not how it was described in my Sunday
School. But they sort of serve in this way too in this film. Transforming
themselves into the fairies.
GDT: I think that the insects are messengers from really
alien places and I always dreamt as a kid that if there were any magical
creatures they would hide in the guise of small creatures, like insects and
lizards. It’s a conceit that stayed with me until my adult life.
PK: Kind of a combination of Jiminy Cricket and Tinkerbelle.
GDT: Yeah, exactly, but the grungy version of both. What I
like is the idea of the fairies actually being almost like being little dirty
carnivorous monkeys in the movie. Everything in the movie is aworn, almost like
a left out in the rain, fantasy universe. Its grungy, it’s dingy, it’s edgy,
it’s brutal and it’s a perfect reflection of the actual world around the girl
in a way. The mistake I think in a movie like this would be to make the fantasy
world too precious.
PK: The insects bring to mind other filmmakers like Luis Buñuel
who spent a lot of time in Mexico
and David Cronenberg also is a big insect fan. Are they influences?
GDT: Huge influences, especially Luis Buñuel in the way that
he could articulate the world through his Catholic upbringing. Being an
atheist, I am a lapsed Catholic and nevertheless I am taken by the cosmology I
was taught as a child, and I cannot just shake it off. It’s really very
intimate to me and articulated in a language in which I speak. And Cronenberg I
absolutely think is not only one of the great genre filmmakers; I think he’s
one of the greatest filmmakers of the last 20 years, for me. He seems to tap
into a completely different vein than I do; he’s an existentialist, but
curiously enough we share a passion for a lot of the same motifs.
PK: Also tunnels are a big part of your movies. Underground
passageways and realms and so fourth. I understood you played in a lot of areas
like that when you were growing up.
GDT: Yeah, anecdotally, that is true, and it is a very
important part of my biography in the way that I was always exploring those
worlds; catacombs, sewers, abandoned subway tunnels. To me it is all a
compulsion to go within, to go inside. I think monsters live in there.
PK: It’s a symbol of the subconscious I guess and also a
return to the womb.
GDT: Both. I think that it’s not that hard to interpret, but
I really think that if I choose where monsters live, they’d live within, the
appearance of monsters lives within. The monsters should actually be afraid of
living outside.
PK: The real monsters you suggest are the human beings who
cause so much trouble in the world. Your last couple of films have focused on
the Spanish Civil War. What is your fascination with that? What about maybe
some events from Mexican history?
GDT: I have tried to have movies that take place during the
Mexican Revolution financed, and I had no success back then…I’m going to try it
again because I definitely want to talk about it. All fantasy is political, and
all politics are fantasy.
PK: That’s reassuring. Certainly the current President would
agree with you.
GDT: Yeah. He wouldn’t agree but he would be
living proof of it.
January 08, 2007
Some notes on the National Society of Film Critics awards
meeting, which I attended on Saturday.
1,. Sure am glad that it took an hour and a quarter less than
last year.
2. There are 54 members in our society (I think). Some 45 voted.
Of those About 24 were proxy votes of members who did not actually attend the
meeting. After the first ballot the proxy votes are elimated, leaving some 21
or so less members (some had to leave before the meeting was over) deciding the
winners. Only two categories (I think) were
decided on the first ballot -- Best Actress, Helen Mirren, and Best
Screenplay, also for “The Queen.” So the rest were decided by a minority of
voters -- probably about the same percentage as the percentage of potential voters
who elect our president. Or maybe a better analogy is that of the minority Bolsheviks
who took over the Russian Revolution.
3. I was surprsed to find certain members of our group among
those receiving recognition from efilmcritic.com’s
whores of the year awards (only two; they shall remain nameless). As for our
winners, only one received a blurb from one of the honored whores, "An
Inconvenient Truth,” winner of Best Non-fiction Film:
“One of the most important
films ever. If this does not move you to change, nothing will.” So said whore
Larry King.
To which whore Eleanor Clift of Newsweek.com added: “If you liked
March of the Penguins, you’ll love An Inconvenient Truth.”
January 03, 2007
For an industry traditionally unfair to females, Hollywood, some are saying, has turned out this year an unusually large number of meaty women’s roles. Meaning that the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress races will be heated. Meaning that a lot of big name actresses and ingenues have revved up scene-stealing performances of women who either embody the Western ideal of womanhood, a self-sacrificing mother and wife, or its opposite, the malignant, witch-like termagant who spurns her natural place in order to pursue her own perverse ideas of independence, career ambition, sexual fulfillment, or short haircuts.
Why should these two groups be forced to compete against each other? So I propose another Oscar Category, The Hope Davis Award for Best Performance by an Actress in the Role of a Shrew.
And believe me, it’s been a strong year for shrews. It was tough narrowing the field to five. I considered Meryl Streep’s superbitch boss in “The Devil Wears Prada,” but since I only saw the film on an airplane with no sound (the headphones were broken) I decided that would not be fair. Similarly with Jennifer Connelly as the suffocating careerist wife in “Little Children,” since I fled the room after ten minutes of watching the DVD because of the godawful voice-over narrative. Diane Lane as the ballbusting, incredibly needy, wealthy girlfriend implicated in George “Superman” Reeves death in “Hollywoodland?” Perhaps, but not exactly what I had in mind; she’s more the traditional role model taken to hideous extremes. Bonnie Mbuli as “Precious,” the nagging, ultimately treacherous wife of the innocent guy driven by the South African Police into terrorism? Well, the guy did cheat on her, and she was tortured, so her bad attitude is kind of understandable.
Anyway, here are my nominees for 2006’s Best shrews:
1. Annette Bening in “Running With Scissors.” She’s the nightmare version of the empowered feminist with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex, who, in the process of pursuing her manias and pretentions ruins her son’s life and even makes you sympathize with Alec Baldwin.
2. Judi Dench in “Notes on a Scandal.” Not only has she rejected the normal female roles of wife and mother for a sterile career and a malignant spinsterhood, she has apparently dedicated her life to subverting other women who have achieved those goals with her Iago-like, predatory crypto-lesbianism.
3. Katie Holmes in “Thank You for Not Smoking.” I really admire the way this film, ostensibly a satire of amoral p.r. people, instead makes the journalist responsible for exposing the hero into the bad guy; of course, like all women in her profession, she’s basically a whore who seduces men to get her scoop.
4. Angelina Jolie in “The Good Shepherd.” As we all suspected, the reason why American foreign policy has been so screwed up for the last six decades is because the people in charge -- ie, the CIA (or just “CIA” as those in the know put it) -- haven’t been getting any. And the ones to blame, of course, are their neurotic, sexless, ruthless and pitiful wives.
5. Thandie Newton in “Pursuit of Happyness.” Will Smith sure isn’t getting any happyness from this sourpuss.