February 29, 2008
I had intended to post a transcript of a fascinating (if I do say myself) interview I conducted with the three directors of “The Signal,”
which is a thriller about a mysterious signal broadcast over every media that
drives people into a murderous frenzy. Frankly, the same thing happens to me
when I see a Head-On or Bob’s Furniture commercial. Anyway, as I was about to
rewrite all my questions so I didn’t sound like a blithering idiot, I noticed
that “The Signal” was -- gone! Pulled from all the theaters after a week. Even
“The Hottie and the Nottie” held on longer.
It wasn’t a great movie but
it was provocative and entertaining and a lot of critics liked it so I can’t
believe it tanked THAT badly at the box office. Why did they cut “The Signal?”
I can’t help wondering if a news story I
had read a few days ago about some guy who stabbed a couple of people in a
movie theater where … “THE SIGNAL” WAS PLAYING! Could the signal in “The
Signal” have caused this act of violence? (It gave me a mild headache). Or was
it because the culprit had been drunk all day and had already been tossed out
of the theater a few hours earlier?
If the former, then the Democrats might have a problem. Because I
also read this story http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/02/25/democratic-house-divided-pa-man-stabs-brother-in-law-over-election/about
two brothers-in-law in Pennsylvania, one for Clinton and one for Obama, who got into a
political discussion and well, one thing led to another and the Clinton guy
stabbed the Obama guy. Now if it turns out that the Democratic primaries are
also causing people to stab people, will they cancel them too? And what is the
relationship between the Democrats and… “The Signal?”
So far, no reports about any rage related incidents connected
with the McCain or Huckabee campaigns. Except maybe for Bill Cunningham, but I guess he’s always been a little funny in the head.
February 25, 2008
I think we can safely say, after watching last night’s Oscars,
that Barack Obama will defeat Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Presidential
nomination. Otherwise, how else account for my incorrect prediction in the Best
Supporting Actress category? And there are other reasons as well.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let me show how the Oscars
unfolded for me and for my guest “YH,” with our observations and conclusions. Note
that all comments by “YH” will be indicated by: “YH.”
Pre-Oscar Red Carpet show.
Samantha Harris interviews
John Travolta. YH: “Has his hair been put on with a Sharpie?”
Harris, interviewing Ellen Page, observes that “Juno” “Is the
little Indie film that could.” A statement that will be repeated with different
variations and is false in just about every element.
Regis Philbin, interviews Helen Mirren, who comments on the
performances in the male competition and laments that the women, as usual,
haven’t been given such striong roles. Philbin quickly changes the subject to
what Mirren is wearing.
Harris interviews Hilary Swank. YH: “Her forehead is just not
right.”
Philbin wraps up the Red Carpet show by pronouncing Javier
Bardem’s first name “Ex-avier.”
Oscar Broadcast.
Monologue.
Jon Stewart emerges from what looks like a giant silver toilet
paper tube. Requisite writers strike jokes eliciting little response. YH: “I’m
not laughing yet.”
First laugh: Stewart’s description of “Atonement” as
a depiction of “the raw sexuality of Yom Kippur.”
Stewart trots out the
requisite “exotic dancer” attribution for Diablo Cody. Shot of Cody. YH: “She’s
dressed like Wilma Flintstone.”
“Gadolf Titler” gets a laugh.
First Best Song peformance. Catherine Heigl bravely takes on “Happy
Working Song,” the first of three from
“Enchanted.” YH: “I don’t think this
song is going to win. It has the word ‘toilet’ in it.”
The Rock presents the award for Best Visual Effects. Makes reference to melting face in “Indiana
Jones and the Temple of Doom,” which,
after Barbara Walters's earlier “interview” with Harrison Ford and several subsequent gratuitous Spielberg references
in the course of the ceremony, makes the whole shebang seem like a big plug for the
upcoming “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” The utterly inert
“Golden Compass” wins the award. YH on the Rock: “He’s got a Sharpie head, too.”
Bardem gets Best Supporting Actor. Yes! My first prediction
right. The whole speaking to his mother in Spanish bit makes us cry! Stewart confirms that it “was a [Oscar] moment.” Good call, Jon.
Owen Wilson, suicide survivor, presents an award for something or
other, without any visible stir from the audience. He is just too pre-Heath
Ledger.
The “little Peter” marionette carried by the filmmaker who won
the award for Best Animated Short for "Peter and the Wolf" is very disturbing. Didn’t somebody do something
like that last year with a toy penguin? Bad trend.
Best Supporting Actress award won by Tilda Swinton for “Michael
Clayton.” I mean, I admire Swinton and believe she’s one of the great
unrecognized actresses but this has got to be her most demeaning role ever, a
female Uriah Heep with damp armpits who embodies all that is venal and
destructive in today’s universe.
It’s my first failed prediction, and it’s not like I wasn’t
warned. My theory on Swinton winning? I think
it’s a reflection of Hollywood’s
regard for powerful women in professional positions, i.e., Hillary Clinton. Such
women are regarded, in short, as evil incarnate. And so in the big picture, this is a vote
for Obama.
Coens pick up Best Adapted Screenplay. Ethan, after much delay,
says “Thank you,” and nothing more. How long can he keep up the enigmatic,
flaky persona with all this exposure?
Infomercial about Academy voting procedures, another symptom of
the sparse material available for the program due to the just ended writers strike.
YH on Travolta comment: “Did he just say ‘hither’”? Another symptom of the
strike is the belabored Seth Rogen/Jonah Hill //Halle Berry/Judi Dench routine.
The real Berry
and Dench would have been funnier.
Colin Farrell introduces the Best Song nomination from “Once” --
“the little movie that could” -- Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard perform “Falling Slowly,” which ranks up
with Bardem’s mother as the best thing in the show so far.
Best Foreign Language Oscar goes to “The Counterfeiters,” which
is the only film among those nominated that I have seen. I can’t imagine that
the others were any worse. It makes me think that even if “4 Months 3 Weeks and
2 Days” got nominated it wouldn't have stood a chance against such entrenched mediocrity.
“Once” wins Best Song. A blushing, humbled Hansard says how tiny
the movie was and how awed he is to be there and how it proves that dreams can
come true and so on. Yes We Can! Obama could not have put it better, which is
another indication that Hillary is not going to fare well, at least among Hollywood voters. Stewart gets one of
his biggest laughs by remarking afterwards, “That guy is so arrogant.” Scores
more points by bringing back Irglova who was shunted from the mic before
she could give an acceptance speech. An Oscar first, maybe. At least another “Oscar Moment.”
Here’s what might have seemed like a good idea that didn’t work
so well. Live from Baghdad, US troops introduce
the Best Documentary Short nominees and present the winner (too bad the winners didn’t
go to Baghdad
to pick it up; one of them was a gushing basket case who was excruciating to behold). Next, Tom Hanks announces
the Doc Feature nominees, which include two films critical of the Iraq War
(“No End in Sight” and “Operation Homecoming”) and one about torturing
prisoners (“Taxi to the Dark Side”). “Taxi” wins.
Now that all the songs and bogus montages are done ,the awards are
coming out like clockwork. Marion Cotillard for Best Actress? Who knew? My
colleague Jim Verniere at the Herald, for one. I’ll never hear the end of it.
As YH notes, it's No Oscar for Old Women, except when assisted by Oscar winning make-up effects
(that award should have been the tip-off). But I’ve got my own explanation for why
Christie lost; she blew it at the SAG Awards when in her acceptance speech she said that if she forgot to thank some
people, then it was because she was still in character. That’s the kind of remark the
Alzheimer’s people don’t forget. And another Obama note -- the flashback to this year's Best Actress
presenter and last year’s Best Actor winner Forest Whitaker’s acceptance speech
and his moving comment about how a kid from South Central could, etc. Yes We
Can! in other words.
Best Actor: Daniel Day Lewis, as expected. Ditto Cody for Best
Original Screenplay (among the things we have decided should no longer be joked
about, including George Clooney’s Batman suit nipples and Angelina Jolie, is
Diablo Cody). Coens for Best Director (Ethan: "I have nothing to add to my
previous comments”). And of course Best Picture for "Old Men".
So, four out of six. Or six out of eight, including those
casually tossed out.
Maybe I’m just predicting the wrong categories. During the broadcast
I predicted off the top of my head the winners in Sound Editing, Sound Mixing,
and Editing.“The Bourne Ultimatum” won all
three. Come to think of it, why wasn’t “The Bourne Ultimatum” nominated for
Best Picture? Then people might have actually been interested in seeing the
show.
February 21, 2008
Alain Robbe-Grillet has passed away. Or has he? Given the fluid nature of reality in
his books and films, the permeability of all times with eternity, the
interconnection of every consciousness and fate with one each other and with
none in particular, he may just have moved on to another scene or narrative
line or another movie. Like the resistance hero played by Jean Louis
Trintingnant in his 1968 film “The Man Who Lied,” who gets gunned down by the
Nazis at the beginning of the film but
rises from the dead to tell at least two separate and contradictory stories of
his life. Or the incubus-like phantom lover of “La Belle Captive (1983),” who
comes and goes and might be just a figment of the imagination of the film’s
secret agent protagonist. “I'll find you if I need to,” she tells him
unhelpfully. “Maybe tonight. Maybe never. Or 
maybe yesterday. Time doesn't
exist for me.”
Assuming, however, that time does exist for the rest of us, and that for Robbe-Grillet, at least, it has run out, what will he be remembered for? Perhaps
his revolutionary literary efforts, as announced in his manifesto “For a New
Novel" (1963), in which he declared that literature that indulged in the
illusion of psycholgical depth and non-literal meaning was obsolete, that
instead fiction could only engage with surfaces described and redescribed with
obsessive scrupulousness and from every angle. This theory was embodied in
novels such as “The Erasers”(1953) and “Jealousy” (1957) which included pages of descriptions detailing tomato seeds
and banana plants (he was, after all, originally an agronomist).
So maybe the New Novel itself is a little passé. How about the
New Wave? It only made sense that an artist preoccupied with surfaces might
flourish in a medium that was utterly two dimensional and illusory. “Last Year
at Marienbad” (1961; playing at Brattle Theatre February 29 to March 6), which he wrote and Alain Resnais directed, became,
especially for those who never saw it, a
synonym for all that was enigmatic, pretentious and opaque in foreign cinema.
It’s also pretty funny, and absurdist humor might be the key to that
and Robbe-Grillet’s subsequent films. “La Belle Captive,”
in particular, draws
on the unnerving hilarity of surrealists such as Rene Magritte, painter of the
nightmarish canvas the movie is named after. It also is visually stunning, diabolically cryptic and filled with beautiful
naked people.
He’d make only two other films in the 25 years after “La Belle
Captive.” I saw “The Blue Villa” (1995)
at a film festival somewhere and I don’t remember much about it except for flashes
of absurd humor, diabolical crypticness and naked people (jet lag, I suppose).
“Gradiva” (2006) never made it to America. It’s another tale of an
elusive, perhaps imaginary, definitely unattainable and frequently naked (and
whipped and tied up ) beauty, and the French were frankly getting tired of it.
You can get a sense of the film and the octogenarian filmmaker in this
interview done in the “Guardian” after the film opened in Britain. As you
might imagine, Robbe-Grillet is quite a handful -- enigmatic, pretentious,
opaque, with a weak 
bladder and mad as a hatter (sample quotes: “Similarly, lots of my books feature
13-year-old girls getting fucked. That doesn't mean I have done so… But if you
are asking me if I have chained a slave to a bed in a room in Marrakech, I
would say your question is ridiculous." And: "I have to pee.")
So, now he is gone. Or perhaps not. Some of his antic spirit
lives on in directors such as P.T. and Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers, Spike
Jonze, Richard Kelly and others. Like Marienbad, we haven’t seen the last of
him yet.
February 14, 2008
Before George Romero, (with a nod towards Richard Matheson’s 1954 sci-fi novel “I Am Legend”) zombies were
just bit (no pun intended) players in the horror genre, inert, usually
voodooized automatons that with few exceptions (i.e, Jaques Tourneur’s “I Walked
With a Zombie”(1943), scheduled for a 2009 remake left little impression. George Romero made them an icon, indeed, an industry.
He also showed the potential of graphic gore. So you might say he’s responsible
for about 90% of the horror industry since 1968 when he made his debut, “Night
of the Living Dead.”
Not that he’s profited much by it. Though hundreds of millions or
more have been made on films inspired by if not directly imitative of his work
(including remakes of all of his “Dead” movies to date), he has yet to make a
big killing from the property. Maybe it’s because he has too much respect for
the dead. Each of his “Dead” films aspires to social commentary, even
philosophical profundity. His latest, “Diary of the Dead,” is no exception,
commenting on a voyeuristic, solipsistic culture of self-devouring media.
Well, let him explain it. I talked with him on the phone
last week. As usually happens, I was starting to warm up to some of what I
thought were the more interesting questions (Did he think his own films could
be responsible for the current fad of torture porn? What would he do if he were
indeed president, as a cult T-shirt suggests? What’s
his cat’s name?) when unseen powers cut me dead.
PK: Did you ever have any idea years ago when you made “Night of the Living
Dead" that this concept would catch on as it did?
GR: Absolutely not, no, not at all. I was amazed even when
the first film…You know it was a little film we made in Pittsburgh, a bunch of
young people, that, you know, we had a commercial production company, doing
beer commercials and industrial films and the like. So we had the equipment
and lights and camera and so we tried to make a movie. All the sudden it went
out, became a movie, it was “Night of the Living Dead.” 
Not all of a sudden
actually. Initially, you know, it went to drive-ins and neighborhood theaters
for 6 months and then it was gone. We thought that was the end of it. It did
return some money, and we were working on our third film before the French
discovered it and brought it back from the dead. I resisted doing another one
for years until I had another idea. I mean there was such high-minded talk
about how it was such a political film and I was very reluctant to try to
tackle another one until I had an idea that was interesting enough, something I
wanted to tackle.
PK: Were you worried also, you didn’t want to get stuck in
the rut of making the same movie all over again?
GR: Yeah, I wasn’t so much worried about being stuck in a
rut. I love the genre, I grew up on EC comic books and I love doing it. I had
this conceit that it would have to be about something, have at least some
social satire. It wasn’t until I socially knew some people developing this
indoor shopping mall around Pittsburgh,
that was the first temple to consumerism in the area. That’s what gave me the
inspiration to do the second film. All of them have been motivated about what’s
going on in the world, rather than, oh I gotta make another zombie movie.
PK: It seems like every incarnation confronts some kind of
topical issue of the time. How would you describe the issue that is behind
"Diary of the Dead?"
GR: I just was starting to get concerned, noticing this
media explosion, alternate media, the blogosphere and all that, and it just
occurred to me that there’s some dangers lying here potentially hidden. It just
really struck me that this was what was going on in the world now, everyone’s a
camera, everyone’s a reporter, and people seem to be obsessed by it. And you
know that tube has a sort of power, and people believe and buy in to what they
heard. People that tune in to Rush Limbaugh already know what he’s going to say
and already agree with him. A lot of these blogs that are going up, the people
that subscribe to them are already believers and it strikes me as creating new
tribes. It seems to me any lunatic could get on there and suddenly have a
following. I’ve joked about it, if Jim Jones had a blog, we’d have millions of
people drinking kool-aid. Or if Hitler was around, we wouldn’t have to go into
the town sPKuare; he could just put up a blog. If it sounds at all reasonable
to enough people, all the sudden you have all these followers.
te —
PK: There seems to be a conflict between the legitimate
media — which you have in the background
of all the Dead movies, the TV and radio, which are giving reports and getting
more despera and then you have the blogosphere or the Internet. Your
feelings about both seem to be ambivalent. Can you talk about that?
GR: A bit. The character in the film is obsessed with what
he’s doing, so obsessed he forgets about his own survival. I find that the line
in the film, if we see a terrible accident we don’t stop to help, we stop to
look. I’m not ambivalent to that. Maybe he started out well-intentioned but
forgetting about your own survival, it’s a bit too late to be helpful in that
way. It strikes that everyone is just out there looking for a shot. People are
invited too. The set of tornadoes, last night on CNN, they’re saying, be
careful, but if you can get a good shot, send it in.
PK: They don’t want to get paid for it, they just want the
notoriety.
GR: Yes, it’s a kind of graffiti. I think this whole
blogosphere is a kind of graffiti. It’s impersonal, identity, some sort of quest
for personal identity. The problem is all the sudden people jump on it and a
lot of people are listening to you.
PK: On the other hand, it’s suggested, at least by the Jason
character, that the legitimate media is covering things up. It presents the
blogosphere as an alternative way of getting to the truth, and that’s his
purpose for doing what he’s doing.
GR:Yeah, but that’s what’s happening, right? In the world,
there used to be three networks, and everything I’m sure was being controlled
and spun. And now there’s all this freedom but now there’s no management and
it’s not even all information, a lot of it is opinion, viewpoint and I don’t
know, which is worse, I certainly don’t have any solution. It strikes me as
being one great big muddle. I don’t know if people are ready for it. People
should take the responsibility to dig into things a little bit but they’re very
happy to keep on dancing and have a beer and listen to what someone has to say
on that tube. And follow along, instead of doing any real investigation, or
digging, or finding out about the issues.
PK: So you think it’s a culture of hedonistic voyeurs with a
short attention span?
GR: Yeah, I think so, for sure. And a perfect willingness to
follow whoever stands up and takes the reins.
PK: So it’s even more pessimistic than “Land of the Dead”
where there’s a sense of proletariat uprisings. Are you more pessimistic now
than when you made that movie?
GR: I don’t know if it’s pessimism. I think all of my zombie
films are just sort of snapshots of the time they were made; I don’t expect
them to be much more than that. I guess I have launched some criticism of the
way certain things are done, the government, some institutions, but they’re
really just snapshots of what’s going on. And it does strike me as a mess, the
whole world just seems to keep chasing it’s tail and eating itself up by its
tail.
PK: I read somewhere that you said the whole Dead series
could be seen as a secret history of the country for the past four decades.
GR: Yeah, not so secret. If there’s anything that I feel
sort of proud of, it’s that I’ve been able to take genre stuff and still sort
of express myself a little bit. We do these little snapshots of the era, and I
try to do it stylistically with the films as well, I try to make them look like
films of that time. And so this one fell right into place that way. The subjective camera and everything. It’s part of the collective subconscious
these days, everyone seems to be doing it— “Redacted,” “Cloverfield,” “Vantage Point.” I think there are several
others as well.
PK: You must be a little irritated by “Cloverfield.” You had
the idea first, do you feel like they’re usurping your notion?
GR: You know it was surprising, that someone else was doing
it, I didn’t think it would necessarily hurt us. I mean that’s a big film, I
have this niche, we’re not competing against that, the 4000 screen
blockbusters. Again, it’s a smaller film. My fans, and those interested in
stuff I’m doing, will hopefully go out and see it. But you know, I’ve never
felt competitive with the big Hollywood stuff.
PK: This one was a real return to your independent roots.
GR: I wasn’t frustrated during the making of “Land of the
Dead,” I just saw it getting too big, approaching “Thunderdome.” It had lost
touch with its roots. Its roots were us in the ‘Burgh, making a little film. So
the characters in this film remind me of us, so there was a certain sort of
nostalgia, going back and doing that. But it was also great, working on a
low-budget, we only used as much money as we absolutely needed. And I was able
to make the film I absolutely wanted to make. Luckily, thanks to the Weinstein
company, they thought it would get distributed. Initially, I was ready to knock
on doors and try to raise a quarter of a million and shoot this at a film
school way under the radar and then the people at Artfire saw the script and
they said, let’s do it union, and get a theatrical release. Because of the
amount of money involved they gave me the same freedom.
PK: What was the budget?
GR: Under 4.
PK: You sort of set it up for a sequel at the end, it looked
like.
GR: I mean, not intentionally, maybe there’s going to be,
since “Night of the Living Dead” all have been set up for sequels with
survivors but I’ve never done a direct sequel from one to the other. In this
case, if it happens, it will be quickly, it probably will be that, continuing
on with the same characters. There’s a lot more I could say about the emerging
media, a lot I didn’t get into. You just never know.
PK: It also draws on the first person shooter games. You get
the sense you’re going into all these situations where you have to confront
them, except with a camera and not a gun —
GR: That’s part of it, too. There are times when he’s
shooting, particularly in the end, why don’t you just help him? But he’s
completely lost in it, to his own downfall.
PK: What do you think of all the remakes that have sprung up
over the past decades of your films? All of the Dead films have been remade.
GR: That doesn’t give me joy, but I really don’t care, I
don’t have regret. My films are my films. If they want to remake them, that’s
fine. I’ve been in interviews with people quoting remakes to me.
PK: Do you get any money from it?
GR: No, not involved at all. In “Dawn of the Dead,” I have a piece of the
action there, but it never brings in anything substantial.
PK: You know in the DVD version of that, one of the extras
is a video diary of one the survivors. Have you seen that?
[Interrupting publicist]: Sorry! We’ve got to stop now.
We’re out of time.
PK: What? We’re done?
GR: I’m sorry, I could talk all day…
IP: We’ve got a crazy schedule.
PK: Okay. Thanks.
February 12, 2008
Yesterday I received a Brigham’s chocolate milkshake (or “frappe,”
as they are properly called in these parts) as a promotional item from the
“There Will Be Blood” people. Coincidentally, as I sipped it I was looking
over the
“50 Greatest Movie Quotes” as determined by the market research
company “onepoll.com.” So I asked myself, does “I drink
your milkshake (or frappe)" deserve inclusion on such a list?
It can’t be any worse than a lot of the winners this
bunch came up with. I mean, number 3 is
"I like you just the way you are," that deathless phrase uttered by Colin Firth
in “Bridget Jones's Diary” (2001). And three quotes from “Forrest Gump” (1994)? Are
they kidding? To quote a great movie line
not included on the list, “what we have here is a failure to communicate.”
I think the key to this list, which “onepoll.com” claims to have
compiled after interviewing “10,000 movie buffs,” 
is that 20 of the 50 are
from films released after 1990. True, there are some classics cited like “Frankly, my
dear, I don’t give a damn” (Number 1, as it was in the AFI poll in 2005) but
that and the other oldtimers are chestnuts that have entered the public domain
and would be familiar to “film buffs” who didn’t even see “Gone With the Wind" (1939) or any other movie made before "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" (1991). And the rest of the quotes pretty much consist of lines from “Star Wars”
episodes or various Steven Spielberg movies.
This serves as a rebuff, perhaps, to the pointy-headed
intellectuals of the AFI survey of “1,500 film artists, critics and historians”
(they sent me a ballot but I lost it) who only cited one Gumpism (“Life is like
a box of chocolates..” ad nauseam) and only chose 11 post-1990 quotes among the
100 listed. It's also a depressing cross-section of mainstream film
illiteracy, ignorance and vulgarity. And you can quote me on that.
February 11, 2008
Friends and family said farewell to Heath Ledger in a
private memorial and funeral service in his hometown of Perth, Australia,
over the weekend. Most of us will remember him for his consummate performance
as the repressed ranchhand suffering an unfulfiiled lifelong love affair with a fellow cowpoke
in Ang Lee’s "Brokeback
Mountain." And at least
according to the good people of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, who believe that Ledger is “in Hell” (because he “got on that big screen with a big, fat message:
God is a liar and it’s OK to be gay” ) and who threatened to 
demonstrate at his memorial service in LA, not to mention the boorish
Fox news creep John Gibson, who observed that “Well, he found out how to quit
you,” the apparently heterosexual Ledger has become a kind of gay symbol. Indeed, many
who were moved in a more positive way than the Westboro folks and Gibson (as if they even saw the movie) by Ledger’s role, myself included, thought the
film might be a breakthrough and lead to more films on the subject. So far, 
by
my latest count, the number of such
films is: zero.
Why is this? When I interviewed Ang Lee a while back for his film “Lust
Caution," he also expressed bewilderment and dismay at Hollywood’s failure to follow up.
“Maybe they’re waiting for a good script,” he suggested, unhelpfully.
Maybe that's about to change. In Gus Van Sant's upcoming film "Milk," Sean Penn 
plays the openly gay San Francisco city supervisor of the title (first name Harvey ) who was assassinated in 1978 -- much to the rejoicing of the
good people of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka -- and is currently
burning in Hell with Heath Ledger. On the other hand, maybe the cause of gay characters in
movies will be irreversibly set back by Woody Allen’s new movie “Vicki Cristina
Barcelona,” in which the former auteur and aging perv will be filming some
girl-on-girl action
between his current fetish, Scarlett Johansson, and Penelope Cruz, followed up by a threesome including Javier
Bardem.
February 05, 2008
Much like a Mungiu movie, my conversation last time ended in
the middle of something unfinished. We
were discussing a dinner scene in “4
Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days” in which the protagonist, Otilia, is stuck at a
torturous dinner party 
with her boyfriend’s crass bourgeois parents at a time
when she would much prefer to be somewhere else, however awful. Naturally I
took this as an opportunity to gratuitously name drop some famous film directors
PK: The way the
dialogue overlapped and you had so many things going on at the same time this
was like something Robert Altman would have done. Is he an influence of yours?
CM: As I was saying,
I’m trying to copy and imitate and understand the principals of life. I’m not
trying to get inspiration directly from films. So for example, I started
directing that scene with a very stupid communication. I told people, ok so you
need to speak at the same time, because I wanted to recreate that feeling you
have if you are participating in a dinner like this, where everybody is
speaking at the same time and you don’t, you know, nobody really listens. But
of course when I said this, you couldn’t understand anything. So we had to had
to learn to hear the words speaking at the same time in filming, and little by
little, I had to teach the actors to start their own lines on the last syllable
of the person who spoke before them, and it was, I don’t know, like music in a
way, like conducting an orchestra because it’s a very detailed script, nothing
is improvised. But yes, I like Altman, I have to say it, it’s not like I
watched any Altman films before this one, but I like Altman, he’s one of the
important directors that I like.
PK: I read, that one
reason you decided to become a filmmaker is because you had been watching these
Soviet socialist realist films when you were growing up and you saw how phony
they were so you said “I can do better than that.” Were there any other
influences, more positive influences, in your developing as a filmmaker?
[The call is dropped. I should note here also that each
question and answer is followed by a delay of several seconds like on those CNN
stories transmitted by satellite where the correspondent looks like he or she
has narcolepsy]
PK: [the connection is restored]I was asking you, when you
were growing up you saw these Soviet social realist movies, and you said, “oh I
can do much better than that, this is so phony,” but did you have any other
influences that weren’t negative, that were positive influences, other
filmmakers that inspired you?
CM: Well yes, there
were a lot. But I wasn’t involved with one specific director or period , but,
for example, I 
discovered Milos Forman in a
very special way. First of all, I saw his American films and I liked them a
lot, only to discover later on that what is really very close to me are his
Czech films, the films he made before he left in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. And
then during that period I think I also discovered Kieslowski. It’s never that I
liked everything he made, his methods entirely, but there are things that I
always felt, you know, are really close to what I wanted to do. Then later on,
but still before film school, I’ve seen lots of Italian neo-realism and it was kind of close to what I wanted to do, but
at the same time you know as a filmmaker and especially when you’re young, your
taste will evolve and will vary a lot. I was a big fan of Fellini when I was
twenty, but I can’t watch Fellini now. It’s not that I don’t appreciate Fellini
but it’s too complicated and too heavy for me to watch now. Now I prefer to
watch simpler things and I’m trying to learn the most difficult thing for a
director to be simple. And today, for example, from the people that live today,
I prefer to watch, I don’t know, Jarmusch, from the States. I watch very
different films. I enjoy a small, I don’t know, Argentinean film as much as a
Korean film or anything else.
PK: Yeah, the
Kieslowski influence really struck me, and the Jarmusch, the long track – well,
I guess you don’t use a track or a dolly, do you?
CM: We have a mobile
camera to avoid using the tripod, but not to have, for example, a steadycam,
because we felt like a steadycam is too smooth, too nice, and the whole purpose
of this film is not to be necessarily likeable, not to be spectacular, not to
be beautiful, not to be commercial like. And then we found, we discovered
something which was really very useful for us. It’s not necessarily hand-held,
there’s something called an “easy-rig,” it’s a way for the cinematographer, for
the cameraman to have the camera right in front of him standing on a rig.
PK: How did you go about recreating the sense of time and
place?
CM: We didn’t have snow, so we had to add all the snow you
see in this film. But we wanted to shoot at the time for the light. There’s a
different light, and the whole purpose of recreating the atmosphere of the time
was to make people experience the feeling of living then, not to give
information about the period, because I really don’t think films should be
history lessons, and 90 minutes of a film are not the right place to inform
people about what’s happened. This is for a different kind of media, not for
film. But we wanted very much to recreate the atmosphere and the feeling, and I
think you get this lack of hope that people experienced, and this kind of
permanent fear and this feeling that you are being aggressed all the time by
somebody who’s abusing his authority.
PK: I’m assuming that
things have improved since then.
CM: Well it depends
on to who you talk. (Laugh) No, I’m joking. Yes, very much yes. It’s a big
change, and especially it’s a big change because it’s a free country, and
everybody can decide upon his own fate in life, so in the early ‘90s, for
example, a lot of people have immigrated or just decided to work someplace
else, which is also happening now. And that little by little people got this
feeling that it’s not that easy to necessarily get adapted someplace else so
they just leave to work for a while so they will be better paid and they just
get back home.
PK:Filmmakers are heroes now in Romania. Didn’t you get a medal?
CM: I think they are more heroes if you watch from across
the ocean. We are not at all regarded as… heroes here. There are people
appreciating how much we influence for the better the image of the country but
it’s not like we’ve been given any kind of extra attention when we got back
home. After Cannes, everybody thought that the whole environment, the way in
which we make our films here is going to be influenced by the success, but
actually nothing much happened.
PK: You’re probably
tired of questions about the so-called Romanian new-wave but it’s hard to deny
that there’s a rise of filmmakers of a certain age that make films that have
certain qualities that are common: that they all take place in one day,
generally, they’re very realistic, and they deal with people in ordinary
circumstances. Do you think this is all a coincidence, or has there been some
sort of movement gathering?
CM: It’s always this
is happening, it’s just that I’m not seeing so many common things in these
films. It’s always that it’s a generation, biologically, because we’re all
people in our late-30s early-40s, and we got this international recognition at
the same time, and it’s always at a bad moment in the history of the Romanian
cinema. And we share some values, if you want, in common, but I don’t think we
share enough values to mention this as a school. This the only thing I am
saying. Maybe it’s a wave, because a wave is something that’s not necessarily
very clear and precise, but it’s not necessarily a school, and I think that
there are a lot of differences at the same time between these people. And this
is something very good for me regarding this Romanian new wave, that it’s quite
diverse, and apart from the three films that everybody has seen in the last
year, there are a lot of other interesting films that do not necessarily
respect this idea that they happen in the same day, or something like this. And
we’re really very appreciated at the same time. So from my perspective, apart
from the language, and from a certain sense and sympathy for realism and a kind
of simplicity, it’s very difficult to find common traits which are – you can
take in all these films.
PK: The three you’re
talking about include “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu”
CM: Right – and “12:08 East of Bucharest."
And there are some films which
try to be as simple as possible and follow a very short simple narrative which
happens in a couple of hours to one day, but it’s just part of this way.
PK: You’re also
against the use of metaphor…
CM: It’s not that I’m
against – I don’t use it, I don’t need to use it for the moment. I think that,
and you know, it depends how you use it. For example, if you consider “The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu,” it’s a film about death in general, and his name is
“Lazarescu” coming from “Lazar,” that’s a metaphor that I can understand. And
for me, it’s not a film about the health care system in Romania by no
means. And it’s such a subtle metaphor in that film that people won’t
necessarily get it. 
What I’m talking about is that kind of metaphor, that when
you go in Romanian filmmaking in the late-80s, early-90s, where, I don’t know,
a fish drawn on the sand would mean Christianity, this is…. You know, I don’t
get this. And we had some films in the early 90s with a very metaphorical style
trying to talk about dictatorship and communism, but you know I don’t understand
this. It’s not my taste, you know. They were very intricate, complicated,
difficult to say what they were speaking about. They were just complicated.
PK: My editor
insisted that I ask you this question: he saw “Juno” and your film in the same
week and he noticed that in both films, orange Tic-Tacs play a prominent part,
or at least they come up in both movies. Can you explain that of uncanny
coincidence?
CM: Orange
Tic-Tacs?
PK: Yes. She buys
them at the commissary.
CM: Yes…unless, you
know, pregnant women crave for orange Tic-Tacs, I don’t have any other
explanation.
PK: Ah, that’s a good
point… I was surprised that Kent
cigarettes are chosen over Marlboros, which is like the signature cigarette of
the French new wave. Were you making a point about Jean-Luc Godard?
CM It’s not coming from the New Wave. It’s coming from the
Romania in ’81, if you can imagine even today, the cigarettes are still special
and they remained as a gift for the doctor, especially if you go, even if today
they don’t mean anything, it’s like two-dollars-a-pack. But it’s more than a
pack of cigarettes during that period, they were like social signs during that
period saying that you can afford the service that she was asking for. And it
was inconceivable for somebody to go to a doctor unless he was giving him
something, and very often this. And the same thing with the
hotels. I can’t,
you know, nobody really knows what it was about Kent cigarettes but probably
because they look a little bit, the front, aristocratic. They are white, they
are different than any other kind of regular cigarette you can find on the
market. Finally between a Marlboro or a Camel and the Romanian cigarettes, the
apparent difference wasn’t that big. But we never had completely white
cigarettes. I don’t know if this is explanation or not, but anyhow it was much
more than the scent or the taste or anything like this. And the cost was
similar, it’s not about the cost. It’s the way this brand presents itself as a
sign of wealth.
February 02, 2008
After living
through the Ceacescu dictatorship, Cristian Mungiu probably finds the stupidity
of the Motion Picture Academy’s Foreign Language committee a minor nuisance. Nominated
by Romania as its candidate for the Best Foreign Language film, his “4 Months,
3 Weeks and 2 Days,” a stark, subtle and devastating depiction of
the travails of two young women seeking a solution in a society in which
abortion has been criminalized, was totally ignored by whoever the clowns are
that make that determination. Maybe he felt vindicated by the film’s opening
weekend in New York
which took in some $25,000 a screen. But I’d be lying though if I said it
wasn’t on his mind when I talked to him
on the phone long distance to Bucharest
a couple of weeks ago.
PK: How are things in Bucharest?
CM: I just got back last night from a very long
flight. It’s snowy.
PK: Here in the United States, a lot of people are
embarrassed and angry that your film not only wasn’t
nominated but also wasn’t
even
on
the
short list
for
Best
Foreign Language film. What
are
your
feelings about it?
CM: Well, we had this expectation because we had
this wonderful response from the Cannes
Film Festival.
And because the film was very well received in festivals and
because we got a lot of nominations and awards from different critical
associations in the States, we had these expectations and we thought it was
maybe likely that the voting members of the Academy would have the same
opinion, so we’re
disappointed, to be honest. It’s alright
if
these
people
have a different taste, there’s nothing to
comment about
this,
if
Academy
members
have different taste, it’s absolutely all right. The problem is that it’s
not
very
fair
if
the
group of people
who
vote
for
this don’t represent the
taste of all the members of the Academy, and it’s frustrating not
to
know whether this
is
what they
would
chosen.
PK: At least it will bring about reform in the
voting system, one would hope. On the other hand, another film which is about a
very similar subject – a young
woman
having an unwanted pregnancy, “Juno,”
- won tons of nominations. Do you have any thoughts about that?
CM: Well honestly, I haven’t
seen
the
film.
And
then, you
you
can’t
really compare a film spoken
in
Englsh with a film spoken in some
other
language. It’s normal that
in the U.S.
most of the attention will be on English-spoken films, which is very
understandable.
PK: Do you plan to see “Juno?”
CM: It’s not
like
I
plan
to
see
this
movie
more than
some
other
movies.
I
plan
to
see
all
the
movies
that I
hear
a lot
of
good
things about, but not necessarily this one.
I
don’t feel like we were competing or
anything like
that.
And there’s
no
indication for me
that the
vote
of
the
members
of
the
Academy
was
connected
with
the
subject,
I
don’t know. I
have no idea
about
this.
Who
knows?
PK: There have been a number of movies that have
come out in the past year that have been comedies about women in that
situation, which they almost never mention the word “abortion” and
nobody ever resorts to it. There’s “Juno,” there’s
“Knocked Up,” you may
have heard of that, and “Waitress,” to name a few. Do you think Americans have
a kind of unrealistic attitude toward this issue? And do you think a comedy is an appropriate genre for confronting it?
CM: Well, honestly, I don’t
think it’s
okay
to
judge
and
generalize and
say
what kind of
attitude
Americans
have on the
basis
of
the
vote
of
a few
hundred
people
or
some
tens of people. You can’t
really say this.
It’s
obvious this subject
is
difficult
and
polarizing, that’s clear for me.
But
what was
really important
for
us
all
around doing the
promotion of the
film
in
the
U.S.
is
that we
finally thought it became
clear
that the
film we screened doesn’t carry any kind of
message, neither for or
against
abortion. It
presents a story