September 21, 2007
I find it
kind of serendipitous that the release of “The Assassination of Jesse
James by
the Coward Robert Ford” takes place in the midst of the growing controversy
about the Jena Six. As you probably know, several thousand people have marched
in that small Louisiana
town protesting the draconian punishments meted out to African-American high
school students goaded by racial harassment (including a noose hung from a
tree) into assaulting a white classmate. Two guys drove by the demonstration in a
pickup, also subtly sporting a pair of nooses. They were arrested, and one
apparently is a member of the KKK. Adding to the growing sense of deja vu to
the Jim Crow era evoked these events are other recent, disturbing incidents such
as this and this.
So what does
all this have to do with Jesses James? The noble rebellious soul persecuted by rotten politicians and capitalist nabobs into resorting to a life of crime?
The Wild West Robin Hood betrayed by a quisling he trusted? Such is the Jesse
Jame promoted by a long tradition of Westerns ranging from “Jesse James Under
the Black Flag” (1921) to “American Outlaw” (2001).
Punch “Jesse James” into the IMDB and you’ll come up with over 200 titles in
which he’s played by actors including Audie Murphy, Robert Duvall, Colin
Farrell, George Reeves and Jesse James, Jr. He’s a Hollywood
icon on a par with John Wayne.
But if T.J.
Stiles fine book “Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War” is to be believed, the Western outlaw hero of the silver screen 
was in real
life a racist thug who started out as a bushwacker, a Confederate guerilla
murdering abolitionists, Unionists and African-Americans during the Civil War
and after. He and opportunistic politicians and newspapermen would transform
his image from that of a ruthless thief and killer into a romantic symbol of
the late, great Confedracy. It was part of a successful campaign to undo the
gains of Reconstruction and restore white supremacy to Missouri and the South. In short, he was a
terrorist for a racist, pro-slavery,
anti-Union cause.
Don’t get me
wrong. We don’t look to movies for history lessons, not yet, anyway. And some
of those films were classics, like Fritz
Lang’s 1940 “The Return of Frank James” (though it’s more about Jesse’s older brother), Sam Fuller’s 1949 “I Shot Jesse
James” (though this was more about the
conflicted Bob Ford) and Philip Kaufman’s 1972 revisionist Western “The Great
Northfield, Minnesota Raid” (though this
portrays James, accurately one imagines, as a scumbag).
But “Birth of
a Nation” is a great film, too, and I doubt if many people are still
comfortable with its portrayal of the KKK as heroic crusaders saving the white
south from Yankee carpetbaggers 
and
black degenerates lusting after white
women.
“The Assassination of Jesse James” might also turn out to be a classic — I haven’t seen it yet and
I’m looking forward to doing so. A quick glance at some of the reviews suggests
the film is about legend and myth and celebrity (with James a kind of John
Lennon and Ford a stalking Mark David Chapman?). All well and good, but since this
is the kind of legend that promotes racism and strife and nooses tied to trees
and pickup trucks, isn’t it time that Hollywood reconsidered the legend and
printed the truth?
September 18, 2007
As the media gratefully takes a pass on Iraq, the election or anything else
of depressing substance for the golden opportunity for e
ndless inanity presented by the new OJ case, the
success of the upcoming spate of War on Terror related movies seems in doubt. After all, don’t people go to the movies to escape the troubles of
the world rather than be confronted with them? And when the news itself
doesn’t even want to think of all that bad stuff, what chance does “In The
Valley of Elah” (which I think is a crock, but that’s not my point) have
against, say, “Good Luck Chuck?”
And
indeed, some pundits and critics have already buried the trend before the first films have barely been released.
Asks David
Carr in “The New York Times:” “Are audiences ready for the steady stream of
movies and documentaries that bring a faraway war very close? … historically,
audiences enter the theater in pursuit of counter-programming as an antidote to
reality.”
Also unconvinced
isTodd McCarthy, lead critic for “Variety."
After catching Brian De Palma's "Redacted," Nick Broomfield's
"Battle
for Haditha,” Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah," James C. Strouse's "Grace Is Gone"
at the Toronto film festival, he concludes, “I think I know exactly where
they're coming from and that I'm not going to learn anything new from them… Just
the war sucks, Bush sucks, America is down the tubes.Does anyone in Hollywood think anything different than this? According
to polls, more than 60% of Americans also agree.” The anti-war films, he adds,
are an inverted instance of the gung-ho war movies of seven decades ago: “Just
as, during World War II, Hollywood pictures had a unified aim, to rally viewers
around the war effort and present an image of the Allies prevailing, today they
are also identical in nature, except in the opposite direction.”
But didn’t
those war movies do pretty well commercially? And if they hadn’t be sure the
ever-bottom-line-minded studios would have stopped making them. Then maybe films
reflecting an anti-war mood might draw an audience also. According to
the IMDB, the preliminary box office reports on “Elah” look pretty good.
(“a solid $150,000 in nine
theaters, averaging $17,000 per theater.” )
Since all
they’re getting from the news is fluff and from the administration spin and
lies, maybe the 60+% of the people who think the war might be a bad idea
will show up for films that offer them an escape from make-believe and back into reality.
September 16, 2007
Wrapping up
the Cronenberg interview, a few notes on synchronicity, Soviet motorcycles,
nepotism, Martin Amis and some gratuitous references to Russian literature.
PK: Have you
had that happen before in other films, where the theme or some other elements
of the film suddenly became reflected in real life.
DC: Yeah.
PK: Wasn’t
there something with “Crash” that was going on then.
DC: Yeah,
well, “Crash” — and then even “Dead Ringers.” Suddenly, there was all this
twins stuff happening and there were five twins movies that came out. It was
very bizarre. And with “Naked Lunch”
there
was suddenly all these writers writing and having characters from their books
come to life. Yeah, it’s strange sometimes. It’s as though you’ve tapped into
the zeitgeist somehow and it tends to reflect back on you.
PK: Is that
motorcycle in the movie yours?
DC: No, but
it was certainly my motorcycling knowledge that got it to be a Ural. Originally
he had written it as a Royal Enfield and I thought that for her father, who was
Russian, he should have a Russian motorcycle and I knew about Urals. Sure
enough, they still make them. You can buy a new one in England; in fact, that was a new
one that we aged down to look vintage because we wanted it to start all the
time. But no, that wasn’t my bike, but it is exactly what I wrote the line for
Nikolai to say, “[Here Cronenberg recites in a Russian accent Nikolai’s line
from the movie describing the motorcycle that, like in the movie, I found
inaudible]”
PK: It’s
almost a character in the movie. It’s the only technological item, really.
DC: Yeah, but
you certainly see it’s lovingly photographed.
PK: Do you
collect motorcycles
DC: I don’t
collect them, but I still ride them. I favor Italian bikes, I have Ducatis.
PK: You also
race cars, too.
DC: Well, I
did. I haven’t done that for quite a while. But I have raced them in the past.
PK: All of
your films tend to have a dissection of the family unit--and also, you’re
family is part of your unit making the movies.
DC: That’s true.
PK: Have you
ever thought about what this means?
DC: No.
[laughs] Well, I mean, nepotism is great. It’s wonderful to have your family
involved with you. Certainly movie business is not the only business where this
occurs. It’s sort of natural that your family lives your business with you and
that some of your kids or relatives are going to get into it just by osmosis.
There was a time when there was no film business in Canada. When I started, it wasn’t
like in L.A.
where your friend’s father was in the business if yours wasn’t. But there was
nobody around because there was no film industry, so it’s kind of sweet that
it’s changed in Canada
now. Of course, family drama is one of the dramatic cores--you can’t really get
too far away from it, I think.
PK: This is
your second largest budget yet?
DC: Yeah, this is the second bigges budget. “A
History of Violence” was 32 million and this was about 27 or 26 million.
PK: Having so
much money invested, did you get a little bit of interference from people who
put the money up?
DC: No, Focus
[the studio] were great. And it wasn’t only Focus, but BBC films, of course. It
was very intelligent support and collaboration and the one thing you want to be
able to say, weirdly enough, is “If it’s bad, it’s my fault,” because nobody made
you make it bad. I have to take the full brunt of it. Well, if you don’t like
it, it’s my fault. That’s actually the best compliment I can give to my
producers.
PK: So, next
movies: “London Fields,” “Painkillers,” none
of these came about.
DC: No, you have
to be careful of imdb.
PK: Well, you
told me a couple of years ago that that “London Fields” credits was a possibility.
DC: Actually,
I had Martin Amis visit the set of “Eastern Promises” with his wife, but for
various reasons, at the moment, that’s sort of in limbo. So I actually don’t
know what I’m going to do next.
PK: Do you
like that feeling better than knowing what you’re going to do next?
DC: Each one
has kind of a thrill factor, so I’m okay with either one.
PK: Did I
hear the name Vladmir Nabokov come up as the person who was providing the drugs
from Kabul?
DC: It was
Valerie Nabakov. He was initially called Valerie and I thought we should give
him a last name so, yes, I did give him the Nabokov name.
PK: I think
Nabokov would’ve been happy with that.
DC: I also
gave Nikolai his last name, which was Luzhin. It’s only mentioned once when the
cop comes looking to find him in the hospital, “Nikolai Luzhin, please,” he
says and that’s an allusion to his novel
“The Luzhin Defence.”
PK: Yeah, and
that was made into a movie too, with John Turturro.
DC: Yeah, I
think they just called it “The Defence.”
PK: No
Dostoevsky references, even though I guess both of you have read “The
Possessed.”
DC: Yes,
well, we read the version called “The Demons.” I phoned Viggo and said, maybe
you should be reading this new translation of “The Possessed” which is called “The
Demons” and he said, “I’ve just finished it.”
PK: Yeah, it
was my favorite Dostoevsky book. I wanted to be Stavrogin when I grew up, but
it didn’t work out that way.
DC: [laughs]
That’s a good thing.
PK: I hope
your film gets another fifteen minute standing ovation [as did “A History of
Violence” when it premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005].
DC: Well,
thank you very much.
[“Eastern
Promises” won the audience award at the festival].
September 14, 2007
With two
studio films in a row, is Cronenberg selling out? It’s not the kind of question
you want to ask even when he’s three hundred miles away on the phone. Note
above how I failed to follow up on asking him whether his films have influenced the trend of the “Saws” and “Hostels” (chances
are, however, that his answer would be “no.”). So
after tapdancing around the sell-out question (even if so, or because of that,
they are two of his best movies, we move on to other topics. Is this a gangster
movie? IS Martin Scorsese right and Cronenberg is going to Hell? Is the film
more Western than Eastern? And is he worried Putin might be oputting polonium
in his tea?
PK: You were
writing your own scripts up until “eXistenZ?”
DC: Yeah, it
waxes and wanes. It depends. I’ve done adaptations of plays, of novels, I’ve
written original scripts, and then I’ve worked with other people’s scripts.
I’ve sort of done all these levels. It’s difficult to say, I’m going to take
two years off and write an original screenplay, knowing, that at the end of
that, you might not like your own screenplay, or you might like it but not be
able to get it financed. So you’ll notice a lot of directors who started off
writing their own screenplays — even Coppola and Brian de Palma for example are
in that category — and then as their careers gained some momentum, they stopped
writing scripts. It’s not that they’re not using their screenwriting as they’re
working with writers and so on, and certainly I do the same. But to stop the
momentum for the length of time it takes to write an original script, it’s kind
of hard. It’s difficult.
PK: And also
to get it financed. I spoke to you for your last film, “A History of Violence,”
and you said after “Spider” you
didn’t really want to make another independent movie because of the headaches
in financing. Is that still the case?
DC: Well, I
wouldn’t say never, but I’m sure I said that I couldn’t do that again, the next
time. Because basically, every movie, you seem to seem to start from scratch
with financing, as though you’re inventing the movie business from scratch each
time you do it, if you’re doing independent film. Because money always comes
from different and strange places, and you’re really very much at the winds of
global economy: you know, suddenly, the Noia market in Germany goes belly up,
and that’s where you financed your last film, but now you can’t because it
doesn’t exist anymore. You know, that kind of thing. And “Spider” was unique
even beyond that, because we all decided to make the movie knowing that we
weren’t going to get paid for it. That’s unusual, even on an independent film.
So you work for two years and you make no money. It doesn’t matter who you are;
that’s difficult.
PK: And you
still haven’t made any money on that?
DC: I’ve made
a little money, because it actually on DVD started to make a profit.
PK: So you
started out in horror films, and now you’re — and this is sort of a simplistic
way of looking at it — now you’re going
into the gangster genre.
DC: That is
simplistic. [Laughs] Well I certainly started in the horror genre and then went
in and out of it, many times. Also I guess the sci-fi genre; it depends what
you’re definitions are. And then I did movies like “M. Butterfly” and
“Dead Ringers”
that aren’t really any genre. So I don’t really think in those terms, I must
say. For me the question of genre is really a marketing question. It’s not a
creative one, because when you start to make a movie, the genre thing
disappears. You’re left with the same problems: how do you cast it? What
locations do you get? What costumes? What lens are you going to use? How are
you going to light it? All of those things don’t have anything to do with genre.
You have to solve those problems--or at least, they’re not always problems,
they’re creative decisions that can be quite exciting rather than just
problem-solving. But at that point you’re just making the movie, and the genre
is irrelevant.
PK: But there’s
also a tradition of iconography in other films and other filmmakers…
DC: That’s
true, but I think the trick is to try to ignore them. Without being
disingenuous, if you really feel the weight of one hundred years of noir on
your back, you’re going go paralyze yourself. If you think about not just “The
Godfather” but Fritz Lang’s “M” and “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,” and you
know, you name it, you’ll go crazy. You won’t be able to make one decision
because you won’t know whether you want to connect with that one or disconnect
that one, or follow this convention or try to subvert that convention but not
that one. So once again, I think you’re left…you feel it, you know those things
are there, and you certainly know a cliché when you hear it, one that’s really
clunky. But other than that--and this is my approach, I’m not saying that it’s
anybody else’s--I try very hard to pretend that no one’s ever made a movie like
this before. Without, of course, I’m not claiming complete originality for one
frame, but you have to, in a way, act as though you are.
PK: Your own
movies too…
DC: More my
own movies than anyone else’s. I don’t really think in terms of thematic
connections or even visual ones. I know that making those two or three thousand
decisions a day that I will make while making the movie that are unique to me,
there will be enough of me in the movie. I don’t really have to worry about
putting my snap on it or anything else. I try very hard not to think about
people’s expectations based on other movies that I’m making, because this one
is not those, you know?
PK: I read a
quote from Martin Scorsese, who said that after reading interviews with you, it
was clear that you didn’t understand your own movies.
DC: Yes, he
said that after he’d seen about the first three movies I’d made. But you know,
Marty’s a good Catholic, and he’s an Italian, and he’s an American. All of
those things, I am not. He has his own … I think that my movies, my early ones
in particular, really freaked him out and made him fear for his soul, frankly, which
pleased me to no end. But I am an atheist you see, and I don’t believe in the
soul, not, not in…
PK: Do you
think he’s trying to convert you to the church, and you’re trying…?
DC: Well, I
think his interpretation tends that way, and of course for me, everybody’s reaction to your
movie involves a collaboration. They have a subjective reaction to the movie
that takes their whole life into consideration. And I have no way of
controlling that, nor would I want to, and I can’t anticipate it either. And
so, it makes for some very interesting responses and interpretations, which are
completely legit. I mean, the movie is not an objective thing. You want it to
be organic and to involve an audience. Even people’s perception of a movie shifts
with time. People catch up with it ten years later, their life has changed, and
the way they perceived it ten years ago, suddenly they see it in a completely
different light.
PK: Do you
watch your old movies and come up with different interpretations?
DC: No, I
don’t. In fact, I find it very difficult when I’m asked to do commentary on an
old movie for a DVD, because I don’t really want to do it, but I have done it.
And I find it very strange.
PK: Do you
find it enlightening?
DC: I
wouldn’t call it enlightening.
PK: Has
Scorsese called you on treading on his
gangster turf?
DC: He really
liked “A History of Violence.” We haven’t talked in detail though, but he sent
a note about “Spider” as well. We keep in touch. But I would be very interested
to know in detail what he thought of last two movies, and I really don’t know.
But he’s really not territorial in that way; he’s a very generous guy, really
is.
PK: He seems
to be. So it’s called “Eastern Promises.” I would think it would be called “Western
Promises,” because it’s about this girl who gets lured to the West.
DC: Yeah,
believe me, we went through all of that.
PK: So it’s
not just me.
DC: Eastern
promises made about the West. The promise was made in the East. You know, there
are many ways to look at it. In fact, in England, eastern tends to mean Russia,
whereas in North America, eastern tends to mean Asia, like Japan or China.
PK: We’re
more insular. Eastern tends to mean, like, Massachusetts.
DC: Well, I’m
glad you said that. Absolutely, the east coast. So there were some questions
about how confusing or well understood it might be. But finally, we couldn’t
come up with anything we liked better. It’s kind of a soft title. When I first
read the script, the first thing I thought was--wow, this sounds like some
romance, set in China or Japan.
PK: Well,
it’s kind of a romance.
DC: Yeah.
PK: Were you
aware that the female protagonist is a midwife and the male protagonist is referred to as an undertaker.
DC: Well,
they’ve got everything covered, don’t they?
PK: Yeah, and
the first two scenes are bloody scenes of birth and death.
DC: Well,
yes, as he says, birth and death go together sometime.
PK: I saw a
film recently called Trade, and tat also touches into this really horrible kind of
reality, the sex trade.
DC: Yeah, we
did a certain amount of research. There was a miniseries in England called “Sex
Traffic” and we looked at that and we read some things.
Of course, it’s not really the main subject of the movie whereas it was the
focus of those other dramas and semi-documentaries. It is pretty horrifying and
it’s still happening.
PK: You’ve
said that the biggest fan of this movie might be Vladmir Putin.
DC: [laughs]
Well, you don’t want to give away the ending, but I thought that he would be
very pleased that… [omitted to avoid
spoiler]
PK: Did you
get a call from someone saying unless you want polonium in your tea you'd better… [omitted, ditto]?
DC: Well,
that was happening down the street from us, I don’t know if you’ve heard about
that..
PK: So, you
had radioactivity?
DC: When we
started, the Russian mob in London
was a fairly obscure subject and by the time we finished it basically front
page news all the time. It was literally half a block away from where Viggo,
Vincent Cassel and I were staying. It was a building owned by Berezovsky, the
oligarch, and
we walked by that every day and one day there were cops in hazmat suits and a
forensic van and sure enough they were finding traces of polonium in there because Litvenenko had been there. It
suddenly came close to home, but it was half-way through the shoot when it
started to happen.
PK: Did it
make you feel a little nervous?
DC: Not really,
but it was a little creepy that the sushi place we used to go to eat at was
suddenly closed and had cops standing outside.
PK: Did you
go there after they reopened?
DC:
Surprisingly, they haven’t reopened. They keep saying they’re renovating. When
we left, months later, it still hadn’t opened.
September 12, 2007
Terror can be good for you, or so might argue David Cronenberg.
He should know, having made some of the most terrifying films of the last
thirty years or so, such as “Shivers/They Came From Within” (1975), “Rabid” (1977) , “Scanners” (1981), “Videodrome” (1983), "The Fly"(1986),
"eXistenZ" (1999). He’s moonlighted lately
in the gangster 
genre with his last two films, "A History of Violence "(2005) and
"Eastern Promises," in the gangster genre (though Cronenberg has said the former
is more of a Western). But these too are unsparing as they force the audience
to stare at the cold blade of personal extinction.
I talked with him on the phone last week while he was in Toronto for the world
premiere of Eastern Promises at the Film Festival. Here’s some of our
conversation.
PK: I guess the most squirm-inducing scene is the infamous
bathhouse scene.
DC: Well, I don’t know.
PK: I’ve seen it with an audience, and oddly that scene seems to
disturb women more than men. I’m not sure why.
DC: That scene?
PK: Yeah.
DC: Well, I guess it is like that shower scene in “Psycho.”
You’re naked, you’re wet, and there are guys with knives who don’t like you.
You can’t be more vulnerable than that, I suppose.
PK: But the other scenes of violence, I mean, there are only
three or four real nasty moments, and they’re all with edged weapons too — there’s
no gunfire or anything. But the first moment, the first scene of that type, I
said, “I’ve seen this somewhere before.” And I realized, we had shown at our
website the killing of Daniel Pearl, and you must have seen that…
DC: Well, I haven’t seen that particular video, but I have seen
some--one, it was a guy named Berg. And it was definitely in my mind when I did
that scene. There is now snuff on the web for anybody to see anytime, and this
is a pretty new development. And it’s obviously very disturbing and I
definitely had that in mine when I was doing those scenes.
PK: It’s harder to shock people now.
DC: Well, see, I don’t think that’s true. And you were saying,
“people were squirming.” I think they’re more sensitized, because I think it’s
come much closer to home; I mean, it’s come into your home on your computer. In
the old days, it was all stuff that happened far away, and you heard about it,
or maybe you saw a gruesome photograph, but usually not. And now, you can look
at it at three in the morning if you want, in your house. And it’s American
citizens often, in countries that seem to be unfathomable in some ways, the
mentality that’s involved. And you have people doing these things thinking that
they’re committing holy, sacred acts, and to you it’s like a heinous, hideous
atrocity. And where do those cultures come together? So I actually think people
are more sensitive to violence onscreen now, not less.
PK: But then you have the phenomenon of films like “Saw” and “Hostel”
that people, at least up to a little while ago, have been going to, to sort of
indulge in that kind of sadistic…
DC: Well I wonder — and I haven’t seen them, so I can’t get too
specific — I wonder if that’s not a reaction to that. That you want to confront
what scares you in a controlled environment, which is a movie theater.
Certainly, that’s always been an aspect of horror films. Why do people want to
be scared? Well, there is a need to confront things that scare you, but you
want to walk away from it. Even just scenes of violence on the street, for
example: people read about it all the time and they worry about it, and they
wonder what it would be like and how they would react, if they were in a
situation where a couple of guys came up to them at night on the street and so
on and so on. And the way of exercising that — exercising and exorcising that —
is to see a movie in which there are scenes like that. And you get a chance to
experience it at a distance in a safe way. I think the main reason, really,
that people go to see a movie is to live another life for a moment — not
necessarily a life that you’d want to be your own, but that you’re curious
about. So you become, say, Nikolai this mobster. I mean, to me that’s why I
showed that bath scene, not in a Bourne-movie kind of impressionistic,
quick-cutting way where you don’t really see what’s going on, but where you saw
everything that was going on. Because if you’re going to be Nikolai for the
time of this movie, following this character, or in fact inhabiting him, or as
we used to say identifying with him, I want you to have his experiences. So I
feel like I would be cheating my audience to do it off camera or out the window
or some other way.
PK: So is Viggo Mortensen [star of both “A History of Violence”
and “Eastern Promises”] turning into your alter ego?
DC: Well, we are very close buddies. I have to say we’ve become
quite close friends since working on “A History of Violence.” We do hit it off
rather well. But when you’re making a movie, in a way, you are all of your
actors. Not just the lead ones but all of them, in a way. And I think the
better directors feel that, and the actors appreciate that; they want you to be
them while they’re acting.
PK: So he’s not quite the John Wayne to your John Ford yet.
DC: Well, we’d have to make a few more movies I think. I would
love to — I mean, I’d love if he could be in all my movies, frankly.
PK: He also is kind of your chief researcher. He did a lot of
research on this movie.
DC: Well, he turns out to do that, yeah. He’s incredible that
way, and he does it in such a kind of off-handed, not, there’s no imposition,
he just goes and does it. And it’s there for you to use it if you want or not;
he has no ego involved in it. It’s really lovely research. And the thing is, he
always brings back such great stuff that everybody wants to use it — not just
me as a director but my production designer and the screenwriter as well.
Viggo’s input was very important to shaping this script as we were doing
rewrites.
PK: Was he the first one into the tattoos, or were you already
going in that direction?
DC: Well, they were alluded to in the first draft, but an actor,
his instrument is his body. And so any actor is obsessed with what he puts on
his body or his hair or his shoes, his feet. And normal people think that this
is vanity, but they don’t understand that that is what an actor acts with, is
his body. So anything that’s on it, clothes that cover it, is of great interest
to him. So naturally, an actor who is going to be tattooed for a movie starts
to think about, well, what
tattoos? Why? And where? And where do they come
from, and what do they mean? It didn’t take long for Viggo to find these books,
called “Russian Criminal Tattoos”, that were fantastic. They outlined the
history of the subculture of tattooing in Russian prisons. And he also found a
documentary made by a friend of his, Alix Lambert, called “The Mark of Cain,” which
was a fantastic documentary shot in Russian prisons, with the prisoners talking
about their tattoos and
what they mean. Really fantastic, and it puts you in
such a different world, such a strange and different but well-formed world,
because this subculture has been developing since the czarist days in Russia.
It predates the Soviets by a long time, and continued through the Soviet era
and continues now.
PK: It kind of fits into one of your themes, the intersection
between technology, the media and human flesh.
DC: It does, but as I say, ironically enough, I was working on
the movie, had agreed to do it before tattooing had that sort of central place
in the movie. So it’s kind of interesting how those things just come together.
It was really not preordained, because as I say, the fact that Nikolai’s
character was tattooed was certainly in the script, but it didn’t get much more
detail than that.
Next: mob rule, Martin
Scorsese, birth, death and money.
September 05, 2007
As we continue our conversation, Mr. Gordon ponders the
relationship between gaming and filming, how Secessionist Austrian
art can help shape a film about Donkey Kong, the value of teaching as a profession and the sad fate of Mr. Awesome.
Q. There have been a lot
of changes in the Mitchell/Wiebe situation since movie ended. Are you planning
a sequel?
A. I pitched to New Line that the remake should be a sequel.
Their answer to that was the doc had such an exciting three act structure that
we should follow it. But if the doc gets out there so that the story is so
obviously remade beat for beat we have to change it up some. So much keeps
transpiring. Walter changed the rules on Steve Wiebe yesterday morning at 2
a.m. You have to have a Twin Galaxy [the official game record keeping
organization, co-founded by Mitchell] referee
present when you record a score. It effectively disqualifies Steve going
forward beause the Twin Galaxy referees don’t exactly want to co-operate with
Steve.
Q.There's a montage intercutting Steve playing drums, diagramming how game is
played and playing the game. It kind of orchestrates a symphony of patterns.
A. When I first met Steve Wiebe I was frankly uninterested I
doing anything with him because he was such a nice guy I didn’t think he would
make a good subject for a film. Two things happened. We met Billy, and he
wouldn’t say Steve Wiebe’s name. That fascinated me because I knew how nice
Steve was and the fact he was being written out of history by Billy was really
interesting. And then when I saw Steve play drums, everything changed. Because
he’s so extraordinary at it. And that process evolved through editing where we
couldn’t keep track of how fast the sticks were moving. And someone suggested,
why don’t you trace the sticks as they’re moving. Because people can’t
appreciate how fast it is. And since he’s an engineer and now a science teacher
and probably thinks of everything in terms of vectors I thought I’d ask him to
teach us Donkey King. And he came up with this way of showing us on screen with
a grease pencil.
Q. Is there a connection between his gaming and the process of
filmmaking, finding the big pattern in the midst of details?
A. I guess in the sense that Wiebe’s gifts are about pattern
recognition and taking the simple patterns and overlaying them on top of each
other so that to the outsider it seems like an unbelievably complicated
network. So I guess in making the film it was
similar because we tried to have threads that would run throughout the
story but break it down into scenes and construct that, since these aren’t
actors, from the footage we happened to get. I guess the laying down of
patterns in terms of narrative payoffs is similar.
Q. So you’re still a documentarian?
A. When I first started shooting stuff I didn’t know the
distinction. When I was 17 or 18 I was living in Africa.
I had a camera for the first time and I was a schoolteacher on the Uganda Kenya
border. I was 19, because I’d been to Yale for two years and I felt compelled
to escape. I went there to teach and my dad let me use his video camera. I fell
in love with it. It had one of those screens on the side. And these students,
they didn’t even have electricity, but they somehow understood this camera and
we shot these things. I came back to Yale and D.A. Pennebaker happened to be
the visiting professor that semester. in a documentary class. I had majored in
architecture but my academic plan got completely derailed because I wanted to
tell stories. And as I said I had not even made a distinction between doc and
feature and even now I don’t want to restrict myself to one form because I feel
that 
the story determines the form. I guess that will really be put to the test
when we do the remake.
Q. I read an interview in which you listed your influences. Egon
Schiele? The Austrian artist?
A. When I saw his drawings I’d never seen anything like them.
They were so beautiful and I was totally compelled. I studied architecture and
there’s a way in which you figure your voice in the way you draw. And I found his
voice so original and compelling that I’d consider it an influence. Because I’m
trying to find my own voice. This is someone who really struck out on his own.
And it seems in recent years that the world is catching up. We were at the Leopold Museum
I think it was in Vienna
and now there’s a whole wing of Schieles.
Q: Sex fiend. Dead before he turned 30. There’s a life you should fictionalize.
A. What a great idea. Him and Jorge Luis Borges.
Q. But it would just be Borges reading books in a library. Or not
reading them, since he went blind.
A. His stuff just blew my mind. Did you see “32 Short Films About
Glenn Gould?” I'd do something similar. Borges has these wonderful short stories and it would be a
narrative built of vignettes inspired by the stories and you’d go back and
forth from the imagination of this writer to the difficult political times in
which he was living [in Argentina]. That’s as much of the idea as I’ve gotten
so far.
Q. Could be tough pitching it to, say, DreamWorks.
A. It’s definitely an art house movie.
Q. Are you ready to be corrupted by Hollywood?
A. Sure. that’s all a matter of perspective. If ever you’re doing
work you don’t believe in, you should stop. But there are lots of amazingly
talented people involved in projects that from the outside might look corrupt
but it certainly isn’t true in every case.
Q. Does Roy
Shildt [the record holder in Missile
Command and Billy Mitchell’s bete noir, who has gone insane, apparently] get
his own movie?
A. Totally. I just don’t want him to have anything to do with.
He’s scary. He’s scary because he’s truly sick. It’s really just sad the way
his life has turned out. It’s taken an unfortunate path for all of us. You
witness this guy going crazy and this has all happened since we finished the
movie. Until that time it seemed like he was a guy who created this character
he could have fun with, Mr. Awesome, and he was self-aware. More recently it
seems like he’s taken a turn for the worst . He does deserve a movie.
Q. Do you think the movie alters the reality it records, like the
Heisenberg Effect?
A. For sure. A doc can’t help but influence the story it’s following.
Though we were very careful. But I think it was because we were making the
movie that got Wiebe to fight for his record with more determination and
ferocity. I think he might have packed and gone home because of pressure from
Nicole if the cameras weren’t there.
Q. Just teaching.
A. And his students love him and what they know of the film. He’s
very happy but people keep asking, ‘shouldn’t he be working for NASA?’
Q. It’s a waste of so much potential.
A. I really agree. But the
only counter I have to that is that he really is a kid and he’s great at
bringing ideas to life. I’ve been I his class; he really connects. And that
certainly is an honorable pursuit.
September 03, 2007
Labor Day brings up reflections on how the American
Dream, the myth that hard work and talent will result in success, is often undermined by
treachery, deceit, entitlement and greed. I haven’t seen many films that have
probed that dichotomy as entertainingly as Seth Gordon’s “King of Kong,” which
follows the heated quest of Steve Wiebe, an unemployed man of the people with
extraordinary but otherwise apparently not very marketable gifts, to wrest the
title of Donkey Kong champion from insufferable hot sauce entrepreneur, Billy
Mitchell. I won’t give away the ending, 
but in a sense the American Dream is
vindicated by the success of the filmmaker, whose hard work and talent has
resulted in one of the year’s best documentaries, which in turn Fine Line
studios has green-lighted to become a fictional feature that Gordon will
direct. Here’s a transcript of a telephone conversation I had with him.
Be forewarned there might be a spoiler or two [noted in the text]
in the following.
Q: This film is a microcosm of everything right and wrong with America.
Nonetheless, were you tempted at one point to say to your subjects: get a life?
Seth Gordon: Kind of. There were moments we couldn’t believe how
seriously people were taking the smallest detail. I felt it’s alright to take
the record [score of Donkey Kong] seriously because we all need meaning in life,
but the lengths that they took wereextraoordinary. And pretty dark. I think
that’s where for me it crossed the line.
Q: Billy Mitchell: would you describe him as the Barry Bonds or
Karl Rove of video games?
SG: That’s a hard choice. He’s such an icon, kind of like a WWF
wrestler. The thing about Billy is that he’s a self-created construct as an
icon. I never met anyone like him in my life. It was truly eerie to spend time
with him. Everything was so rehearsed and p.r. savvy. You never got the sense
of talking to a real or complete person.
Q: You had more access with Steve Wiebe than with Mitchell. Did
that influence your sympathies?
SG. I would say that Steve
had nothing to hide, in every way. In retrospect it should have been clearer to
us that Billy really did. It evolved in front of our eyes and grew really clear
in the editing room. When you’re living through it and it’s separated by time
it’s not as staggering as when you have to tell the story.
Q: The story emerged from the facts and wasn’t imposed?
SG: Absolutely not. We recreated an analog of our own experience
of what happened. 
When we met Billy he, was amazing, extraordinary. I had such
high hopes. Such an amazing personality.
He talked in such platitudes and we got so excited. And then as he revealed his
hypocrisy, I wouldn’t say we were disappointed. We sort of were in awe. We
tried to create that same experience for the audience. Every single time
[spoiler] we thought he was going to show up [to play Wiebe one-on-one] we were
desperate for him to show up. And it got foiled continuously. It was so
maddening. Then it took an open mind for us to realize that the fact that he’s not
showing up is not the point.
Q: Mitchell doesn’t look
too good, but with and the fictional remake he’ll certainly get a lot of
publicity. Could that be his ultimate motivation?
SG. There were definitely moments during the filming of this and
when we were taking it to festivals that I thought, you know what? This is
Billy’s plan. We are his agents wheteher we like it or not. We fell into
something premeditated whether we like it or not. I had that eerie feeling.
He’s a master gamer.
Q. He’s sees the grand plan. Has he seen the film?
SG. He refuses to see it. But he’s mounted a counter-attack
through his minions in the press. His association with people in the press.
Often folks want to interview him and some times he agrees to do it and when he
does he tries to debunk. It’s an interesting battle we’ve been fighting in the
last couple of weeks.
SG. Legal action?
A. He can’t actually because before we started in on the remake
we had to have his life rights. In order to get the life rights we travelled to
Florida to
get his signature and we offered him a chance to see the doc and he turned it
town. Part of the agreement to the life rights he can’t officially
counter-attack in the courts or whatever.
Q. The film is refreshing because so much effort is expended on
something other than money. Is there any money in these games? How about in the
films?
SG. No, not really, other than Billy occasionally offering
bounties to gamers to set high scores. Recently he offered $10,000 over a weekend for someone to break the Kong
title.
Q. If this movie or the remake make money do they get anything?
SG. The remake, yes. The doc, no. But statistically the doc is
unlikely to make much money.
Q. Have you cast the remake yet?
A. We talked about it a lot. For Steve Wiebe we’re thinking of
this great actor named Nathan Fillion, from the movie “Waitress.” He played the
doctor. He actually looks a little like Steve and has that same guy quality.
The trickier casting is Billy, because that would take a truly exceptional
actor..
Q.The Tom Cruise of “Magnolia?” He’s a good actor when he’s
playing a scumbag. Or maybe Ben Stiller?
A. We don’t want to shoot for a remaking of “Dodgeball.” I’m a
total geek. I go to The Funspot every summer. So I respect the games and the
gamers. So if we went the route of “Dodgeball”
I think that would undermine that. And I
think that New Line is aware of that and is supportive of something that has
all the heart in it.
Q. On a scale of 1-10, what’s the irony quotient in this film?
SG. Irony? I would say it’s not that ironic. I didn’t intend any.
There shouldn’t be any smirk. If anything the point is hopefully have Wiebe
subjectify what’s happening so you’re along with him in that journey. That is a
very common baggage auduiences bring, though, the expectation that we’re poking
fun. But we worked very hard to set a tone that took the whole thing seriously.
Usually that comes across at the end but that’s not where most viewers start
from.
Q. The tears [from Wiebe when he learns his high score is not
accepted] were not ironic. Was the scene manipulated?
SG. He was totally upset. The question that got him crying, it
was about his frend Mike Thompson who sent him to Fun Spot. The cut was made
from Mike talking about how Steve hated to let people down. And the question
was if you could talk to Mike right now, what would you say. And Steve just
burst into tears.
Q. I also liked the
daughter’s comments about the Guiness Book of Records.
SG. She was such a precocious and hyper-intelligent kid. That was
unprovoked and unprompted and we couldn’t believe she said that. I think it may
be the best line in the film.
Q. What’s your score?
SG. In Kong? About 1/10th of Steve and Billy’s. About 100,
110,000.
Q. So Steve’s son can’t beat you yet?
SG. I’m sure he will once he applies himself.
To be continued in part II, in which for some reason we drift off into digressions about Egon Schiele, Glenn Gould and Jorge Luis Borges.