Director’s Cut: Joshua Oppenheimer (‘The Act of Killing’)

Since 2001 Joshua Oppenheimer has been investigating the mass-killings that happened in Indonesia during 1965-66 where between 500,000 and 1 million people died and have never been fully told to the world. Through a combination of a cover up by the Indonesian government, and in effect the rest of the world ignoring this horrific moment, it inevitably became in Indonesia, Oppenheimer says, “the heroic yet mysterious chapter in their nation’s past.”

Following his film “The Globalization Tapes,” which looked at worker oppression in Indonesia, Oppenheimer gradually gained the trust of mass-killing survivors and their families and attempted to interview them for a film. The Indonesian government quickly thwarted his attempts, tracking him and arresting anyone who would talk on camera. This lead to one of the survivors giving Oppenheimer an unconventional suggestion that would soon lead to the creation of a new film, one that would showcase the atrocities that occurred through the eyes of the perpetrators, literally changing Indonesian’s perspective of their history.

“The Act of Killing” has become one of the most anticipated documentaries to hit theaters this year after wowing audiences at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals last year for its unique telling of the mass-killings: told through the killers who did it as they reenact some of their handywork through a film genre of their choosing (read our review of the film here). “I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade,” says Werner Herzog, while Errol Morris writes in a piece on the film for Slate, “Oppenheimer is not offering a historical account of what happened in Indonesia, but rather an examination of the nature of memory and of history.” Both doc icons came on as executive producers after seeing the film.

Here Oppenheimer tells Film.com his journey making the film, how during shooting he and his crew almost had to flee the country after showing footage to one of the legendary killers, Anwar Congo, and why at the end of the day “The Act of Killing” is for the Indonesian people.

FILM.COM: Is it true that one of the survivors you were trying to film was the one who suggested you interview the killers?

JOSHUA OPPENHEIMER: Yeah. 2003 the film “The Globalization Tapes” came out, then I went back and started working with the survivors and I actually stumbled across a neighbor while making “The Globalization Tapes” that killed the aunt of the woman that made the suggestion that I interview the killers. He had boasted how he had killed all of the communists in the plantation. And I said, “Who do you mean?” And he said the union members. 200 people. By beating them up until they were unconscious, drowning them in irrigation ditches and just laughingly showing me how his muscles are still pretty strong, maybe he can still do it. All in front of his 10-year-old granddaughter, who watched on and looked bored, as though she had heard it many times before.

And so I already had this sense that there was something very rotten here and then started filming, as we were getting arrested for filming with the survivors. I felt I had wondered into a situation where, like going to Germany 40 years out from the Holocaust and finding that the Third Reich was still in place. I felt this situation demands whatever time it takes of me. Starting from this little entry point I will have to film and explore and investigate whatever is needed.

Actually, the day that I premiered “The Act of Killing” at Telluride, I got a call from that village saying that the woman who you are talking about, who suggested I talk to the killers, that she died from liver damage.

So this has been a story you’ve been telling since 2001?

Yes. When I couldn’t interview the survivors we all flew to Jakarta—myself, the survivors, my core collaborators—met the human rights community there and asked if this was a bad idea, and everyone said, “No, you’re onto something. Keep going.” And their the woman said, “Why don’t you continue filming the perpetrators?” Because she knew I’d stumbled across this neighbor of mine. I filmed all of the perpetrators I could find in the region. Found they were all boastful. Found into addition to them being boastful they would take me to the places where they killed, which I wanted to do because no one knew what had happened. I felt I have to film everyone involved who was still alive, and I must film where they would do the killings because these are stories of how perhaps hundreds of thousands of people in this province were killed. No one knew. No one had investigated it. So it wasn’t like someone had researched this and then I went in and made the film. I was doing all of it.

So first I felt I was gathering evidence on behalf of survivors for a film, then I started to realize that by filming the perpetrators I can somehow expose, especially for Indonesians, I can unmask the whole regime, which will then create a space for Indonesians to challenge the official story and remember what really happened and talk about it. I’m making this film for Indonesians.

So gradually as my questions became more about how the perpetrators want to be seen, how do they see themselves, I started being very straight with everybody. I started saying, “Look, you’ve participated in one of the biggest killings in human history, your lives are shaped by it, your society is totally based on it, you want to show me what you’ve done, I want to know what it means to you and you’re society, so show me what you’ve done in any way you wish, I’ll film the reenactments.” I wasn’t expecting these dramatizations yet.

Very quickly with Anwar [the main killer highlighted in the film], he and I became pretty close and I was able to be very honest with him. So the method was not a lure to get them to open up, and they’re not making their own film, ever. The form of the film consequently is a response to their openness and my effort to understand its nature and its functioning effect.

I was asked today why did the perpetrators, knowing you were working with the survivors, still want to be filmed? And I think it’s because they being old and retired didn’t necessarily know what we were doing, the police and the military did, but because their status is so respected in society that once they were on board the military people who were moderating me and thinking about what I was doing didn’t want to make waves, they didn’t want to ask questions. I had a seal of approval from people more senior than them.

So at a point in your discussions with the killers they decide to film certain incidents in a genre of their choosing?

Yes. I think in hindsight—I don’t think I could see this at the time—what was fueling that process was actually Anwar’s conscience, his desire to run away from the meaning of what he’s done. As he says in the longer version of the film, “I want to make a beautiful family movie about mass killing.” As though if he can make it beautiful, perhaps he can make it okay for himself. There’s this little passage early in the film where Amor is on the roof and he shows how he kills, he then actually shows how the victims looked when they were killed. He says he’s a good dancer because he’s been trying to forget what he’s done—drinking, taking drugs, going out dancing.

So even as he’s offering us this outrageous metaphor for impunity, him dancing on the roof is precisely not a symptom of his lack of conscious it’s the opposite. It’s some kind of self-protective assertion. To dance on the roof where you killed a thousand people is to deny the moral meaning of what happened there. And he is insisting on that denial.

I think I felt that and I wondered if I screened this back to him would he recognize himself in the mirror of the film? So I showed it back to him, and it may have been the second or third thing I filmed with him and I’m fully expecting him to say, “That’s it. I look bad. Call the military.” So I had my production manager at the airport with all of our bags packed, with a lot of cash ready to buy tickets for all of us to leave if there was not a text message saying everything is okay. Anwar watches, he looks disturbed and I think genuinely he is disturbed and he’s disturbed by what happened on the roof, but he doesn’t say this makes me look bad because to say that would be tantamount to admitting for the first time that it was bad, which he’s never been forced to do.

So instead what does he do? He takes all that unpleasantness that he must be feeling and transposes it onto his clothes. He says, “I look like I’m dressed for a picnic. I should dye my hair.” Because he doesn’t want to acknowledge what is really disturbing him. So I followed in his process and there’s a tension there between my project—exposé—and Anwar’s project—which is running away from his pain. In a way I think that’s the tightrope the film walks. There’s an empathy with a man struggling with his pain and there’s repulsion in what he’s done.

Talk about your co-director, who you’ve credited as Anonymous to protect his identity.

He was never there as the director of “The Act of Killing.” He was there as my production manager, my assistant director, my second cameraperson, my sounding board, my best friend. I think that though the reason why in the end instead of just giving him all those credits I felt he deserved to be named as a co-director was because one of the things I’m most proud of with the film is that it’s been welcomed into Indonesia as an Indonesian film, a work of Indonesian cinema, not a foreigner coming in and saying something. It’s actually Indonesians themselves holding a dark mirror up to themselves. My big hope is that one day, with the help of the film, there’s sufficient change in Indonesia that we can take off that credit role and put on a new one with everyone’s name on it.

It seems that through showing the film numerous times in Indonesia that the way Indonesians think about this part of their history is starting to change.

The film has come to Indonesia like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Pointing at the King saying, “Look, the King is naked.” Which is what I hoped it would do. It’s said so emotionally, and by the perpetrators themselves, these men who aught to be enjoying the fruits of their victory are in fact by the end of the film have escaped justice but not punishment. Anwar is a mess by the end of the film, as he was before, I don’t think he’s doing any worse now than he was before I met him, but you see what a mess he is. And Adi, who sleeps easily at night, is this hollow shell of a human being.

The Indonesian media, as a result of the film, have produced a special double edition of Indonesia’s main news magazine about the film but also 75 pages of boasting perpetrators from around the country basically showing that this is systemic and it’s about their whole country. So the film is helping to create a sea change in how the country talks about its past. As of the first of April there have been 500 screenings there, ranging from 30 and 800 people in 95 cities. I think that yeah, the media has finally ended its 47-year silence. And perpetrators no longer boast. You couldn’t go there now and find a man like Anwar to talk that way anymore because of the film.

Did Werner Herzog or Errol Morris give you notes after seeing the film?

Werner gave notes in the very final stage of making the director’s cut of the film and he gave notes during the cutting down. Errol gave a lot of feedback on rough cut scenes but not on the actual going from rough cut to finished film. Both of them have been tireless ambassadors of the film since then.

With the way this film is told, were you able to find the story you wanted to tell while shooting or did you not know until post?

I think I never know where my films are going. I think it’s really important for me to treat the shooting as a process of exploring something that matters to me as deeply as possible, guided only by a method, a group of characters and a central metaphor, and then the editing process is not about presenting what I’ve shot but also analyzing all the layers of meaning and interconnectedness within the material that you can’t see when you’re shooting.

When Anwar plays the victim, it’s a touching scene of a victim being tortured, it’s also a double take because the victim is the killer, plus it’s stylized as film noir. So there’s all these layers which you can’t see when you’re shooting and unlike fiction you have the actor and you watch on a playback and you have someone do it again and again, the subtext in the person’s face you don’t see until you’re editing and it’s that that I’m really looking for in the editing. It’s the little turn in the corner of the mouth that shows disgust or the little squint in the eye that shows doubt or the little pause that shows fear.

How have the killers reacted to the film?

Herman, the next generation of the killers, loves the film. Adi has only said, “I didn’t get rich making the film,” his reaction of the film is in the film where he says this will make us look bad. And then the high-ranking politicians all hate the film as they should and feel angry about the film. If they didn’t I would have failed in my job. [laughs] And Anwar’s reaction is he’ll stand by the film and that it’s honest.

I don’t want to give away too much of the last scene, but I have to know, what was it like being there and filming it?

It was this terrible moment. I had been trying to get back in that office from the very first day I filmed there. Because Anwar reenacts all these horrible things that happened in the office and the only time I had been able to get him there was the first day I met him and I didn’t know what happened there then. So I was thinking it would be extremely useful for the film to get back in there and have him take me through. We could never get permission to get back in there. Never. And I don’t think it had anything to do with the killings, it was just some superstition about photography by the owner of the shop. We had gotten in the first time because the owner was away. In the final shot of the movie you see a bouquet of flowers next to Anwar when he’s leaving. That’s because a new tenant had moved into the shop two days before and she was fine with us filming there.

That was the last days of the very final shoot. It was 6 months after what I thought would be the final scene in the film, which is when Anwar watches himself play the victim with his grandkids. His hair has grown out—it was black and now it’s white again. I never thought it would be the final scene of the film, I thought it would come much earlier. He’s walking and trying to do what I asked and suddenly his body is no longer cooperating, it’s not going along with the words that he spoke. And he’s still trying to carry on, because again, to admit something is wrong is to admit everything that has happened.

So he’s trying to carry on and I could see what was happening to him and I wanted to put my arm around him and say it’s okay, but I’m realizing that he knows it’s not okay and will never be okay and just as he’s had to deny the meaning of this whole thing to get back up on that roof and to live with himself every day, I’ve had to deny the meaning of this whole thing to bring him back to the roof and expect that he could do this again. So I stood there and I don’t get close because the space between him and me is the space of the dead, of the victims that died there. I don’t want to step on the dead and trample on them the away Anwar was doing in the beginning of the film when he was dancing on this very roof. And I don’t want to zoom in on a sentimental close up showing his pain because what matters is I’m just witnessing.

Can you talk a bit about the follow up to “The Act of Killing”?

I’m in the editing, the working title is “The Look of Silence.” It’s about a family of survivors who have been living traumatized by what happened to them ever since the mass-killings and the youngest son is determined to somehow break out of that fear by seeing if the killers living all around him take responsibility for what they’ve done and feel remorse about it. He approaches everyone involved with his brother’s death and it’s unimaginable for that to happen in Indonesia. Through the breaking of these taboos you feel exactly what it feels like, all of the constraints that a survivor would live under and you feel exactly what it would be like to be a survivor in the world of the act of killing.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Documentary, Drafthouse films, Errol Morris, Interview, Jason Guerrasio, Joshua Oppenheimer, The Act of Killing, Werner herzog

Director’s Cut: Nicolas Winding Refn (‘Only God Forgives’)

While Nicolas Winding Refn was editing his first film, 1996's crime drama “Pusher,” his father Anders was cutting fellow Dane Lars Fon Trier’s “Breaking The Waves,” one possible prompt for their professed animosity: in public at least, the two tend to profanely insult each other. Though their films have little in common, in interviews they share a provocateur/prankster streak. Talking about his newest film “Only God Forgives,” Refn’s showily announced “I am a pornographer” about his draw towards super-violent imagery. When I showed up to interview him, Refn seemed possibly tired or simply uninterested in making similarly broad statements again.

Reportedly booed vociferously by the Cannes press corps and scathingly reviewed after its world premiere (read one Film.com critic’s pan of the film here), the film has Ryan Gosling wandering Bangkok in a homicidal fever dream, caught in a web of violence initiated by his prostitute-killing brother and fearsome mother (Kristin Scott Thomas). The second critical wave has contained more qualified and all-out raves responding to Refn’s red-saturated, uber-bloody hallucination of revenge and bad incestuous vibes. In a brief interview, he touched on the logistics of shooting in Thailand, the art of Muay Thai and his appreciation of “Saw” director James Wan.

Vadim Rizov: A lot of your characters seem to find violence funny. Do you think that when you push violence to an extreme it’s funny?

Nicolas Winding Refn: Not consciously. I certainly don’t find violence funny, even on-screen. I guess when I was younger I was more hardened, but now that I’ve gotten older and have children I’ve gotten much more conscious of the effect it has on a viewer. But I don’t consider violence in any way amusing. Of course the most extreme it becomes, the more your instinct in order to process it is to either react with shock or laughter. That’s the extreme case of a reaction. To me, it makes no difference how people react, one way or the other it’s equally satisfying.

VR: Thailand has a government censorship board that’s very restrictive about what their own filmmakers can shoot and show. To what extent were you aware of that when you started shooting in Thailand and did it affect your decisions of what to shoot?

NWR: No. There were certain things I knew you were not allowed to do, but those were elements I didn’t have. Like, you can’t in no way offend the king. Otherwise, besides that I didn’t feel there was anything that we were doing that had any censorship issues. The death of the girl that Julian’s brother commits at the beginning of the film, they were very worried that she be either 14 or 16, which is kind of absurd. So she has to be 16, not 14. And it was like, “OK, well, I can make that work.” It was something I’d already been told through the Film Board [Thailand Film Office], because you have to be approved by them to shoot there.

VR: Before you started shooting, did you have a lot of interest in Muay Thai or martial arts films in general?

NWR: Not really. Of course, like everyone else, I like my share of fight movies and so forth. I’m not an expert in any way on who’s who and what type of martial fight these people are experts at. If it’s well done, I certainly enjoy it. I became very fascinated by Muay Thai when I was in Thailand. I found it a very interesting fight because in a way it’s so primal and the endurance is amazing. It is probably designed as the hardest shield that Muay Thai fighters create. There is a westernized view of it, and there is a Muay Thai view of it, and I was very interested in the Muay Thai view of it.

What was interesting was that when they would show me fights from the rural areas, when there were no tourists and it was purely a Thai match, the length of the match was no more than a couple of minutes. It was all about that one impact that would settle the fight, and I found that very interesting. There was no showmanship in terms of the westernized arena of sports being masked, it was purely about how little, how fast, how efficient.

Were you editing the dailies on a daily basis at the beginning of your career, when you were shooting on film?

“Bronson” was shot on Super 16 and we were doing the edits no more than a day after. The digital revolution in terms of editing came in terms of digital editing facilities, and I never edited on film. I’ve always edited on digital. When I edited my first film, “Pusher,” Avid was really becoming the way of editing. The digital revolution had started already, so I grew up on Steenbecks — my father is an editor — but I myself have only done it on a computer. I only know that language.

VR: When shooting a film like this or “Valhalla Rising,” which is intended to disorient, do you try to disorient yourself?

NWR: No. What I do with Matt Newman who edits the films — he’s probably my consistent collaborator from beginning to end when I edit a film, we’ve done four movies together now. What we try in the editing room is to put the film together in a thousand different ways, to see what will reveal itself, and it’s not until we’ve exercised all options that we put the film into what it has to become.

My mother’s a photographer, and my father’s an editor. The image is something I was brought up with very early, and the positioning of images. That’s in a way what my first introduction probably was, and being dyslexic, and coming to America at the age of eight, not speaking a word of English and being an alien in a stranger’s land — images become your main source of communicating.

VR: When shooting in Hollywood in “Drive” or Bangkok in “Only God Forgives,” do you have a kind of mental image of where you’re shooting you’re trying to convey?

NWR: “Drive” is very much that fantasy world of Hollywood, that Hollywood is this dream factory that creates illusions. Bangkok at night becomes very magical and superstitious. You use those inspirations to make the film.

VR: Given your diverse soundtracks, do you spend a lot of time seeking out new music?

NWR: Not as much as I used to. A lot of it is people sending me a lot of experience opportunities. I’m not really a person that sits down and searches. I guess having two kids and a wife eliminates a lot of the time to have that possibility. It’s really a lot of the time a combination of discovering things in odd ways. I am an avid music listener at all times, I’ve probably done every single phase of musical enjoyment from every genre. There was a music teacher in high school who said to me that the pleasure in music is finding beauty in all types of music.

VR: When shooting ads, do you try things you can use in your own work or just stick to client needs?

NWR: I really enjoy advertising. I’ve been very lucky to work with some great projects. I find it a lot of fun. There is, of course, a specific need from the client in terms of what they’re looking for, but I’ve met with a lot of creative people through that process. It’s not something I do very often, I’ve only done it a couple of times. I very much like working in fashion, I find that very inspiring.

VR: When your camera edges towards a darkened doorway and you’re verging on horror movie jump scare territory, do you enjoy toying with audience expectations?

NWR: What’s great about the language of heightened reality and stretching the reality of horror films is that it’s purely based on visual aesthetics. That’s a great medium to work within in terms of filming, it’s all about emotional impact and you can bend and twist logic as much as you want. It goes deeper than just authenticity. It would be fun someday to do what I would call a teenage horror film. I like those kind of films, I find them very radiant.

VR: Do you mean an ’80s teen horror film or a ’90s teen horror film? Those can be very different.

NWR: I like all kinds of those kinds of films. Of course, the ’80s were more my age of youth, when I was a teenager, but I’ve certainly seen great films of these types ever since that I find very inspiring. I really like that director who made the original “Saw,” James Wan, I think he’s a terrific filmmaker. I’ve seen a couple of his other films and I really enjoyed them.

“Only God Forgives” arrives in theaters and on VOD on Friday, July 19.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Director's cut, Interview, James Wan, Nicolas Winding Refn, Only God Forgives, Ryan gosling, Vadim Rizov

Director’s Cut: Alex Gibney (‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’)

“The Internet is not a good place for secrets.” That’s how Alex Gibney puts it in the beginning of his latest investigative documentary, “We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks,” which is as much about the rise and fall of the whistleblowing site as it is of its creator, Julian Assange.

“We Steal Secrets” chronicles the overnight stardom of WikiLeaks and Assange after the site—essentially an anonymous drop-box for secret information and news leaks—published documents exposing highly classified military materials, including the “Collateral Murder” video (footage from a 2007 airstrike in Baghdad where two Reuters journalists were mistaken as insurgents). That same information was also printed in major newspapers around the world like the New York Times and The Guardian, which teamed with WikiLeaks to distribute the information.

What should have been a monumental moment in transparency and free information led to the government playing the “power of nightmares” card, making the American public believe that this information was harmful out in the pubic, while also tracking down the whistleblower, Private First Class Bradley Manning, who will soon stand trail for his alleged leak of the most classified documents in American history. Assange, on the other hand, grew out of control with power and for close to a year has been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London as police wait to arrest him outside the building for questioning from Swedish authorities on sexual acts with two women.

What makes “We Steal Secrets” quite an astonishing work is how compelling it makes out Assange and Manning even though Gibney was never able to interview either on camera—Manning is in a military prison (allegedly enduring torture tactics) while Assange would not talk to Gibney unless the director paid for the interview.

Here Gibney talks to Film.com about following the story and if we’ll ever see a site like WikiLeaks again.

FILM.COM: A big thing I took away from the film is that if Julian Assange were not so self-destructive we would have a completely different view of WikiLeaks and its importance. Do you agree?

ALEX GIBNEY: I agree. To be honest going into the project I thought it was a simple David vs. Goliath story. I had read the Raffi Khatchadourian piece about Julian in the New Yorker and I thought, wow, what a fantastic and interesting character, and even prior to the Afghan War Logs I’d seen “Collateral Murder” online and I thought this is really impressive. But the more I dug into it the more it seemed like a great ongoing opportunity was lost. It’s tricky because the leak of those documents was I think a tremendous boon to understanding a lot of things. And they were very important. But there was a moment there when the whole kind of moral balance of leaks could have been pushed into a different direction if Julian hadn’t been so unable to listen to other people. And frankly if the journalists had been a little bit more adult in terms of trying to work with Julian. But there was a moment that was lost because the alliance between Julian and WikiLeaks and these mainstream news organizations blew apart when the politicians in Washington were able to separate Julian from the rest of the crowd and that was too bad. And I think the media deserves some of the blame for that, but I think Julian also.

You’ve said in the past that you can’t go into these movies relaying on getting a key interview, you have to go where the story takes you. Like in Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room and Casino Jack and the United States of Money, you don’t bag the big interview but still find a way to give us an idea of who the main players are.

You have to stick with where the story takes you. You can’t pretend that access is necessarily the only thing that matters. I think that Julian though that access was the only thing that mattered because early on when he became famous a lot of people were coming to him and asking for access and Julian was setting very steep terms for access. I told Julian from the beginning that I was making the movie whether he gave me access or not and he said to me that if I don’t give you access your film will not be legitimate and I found that bizarre. It’s like I did a film on the Vatican, the Pope didn’t give me access! [Laughs] And that’s the relevant comparison with Jack Abramoff, I tried very hard to talk to Jack and I did talk to him in prison but I wasn’t able to film him. At the same time you have to keep pursuing the story and find a way to tell it that seems right. You have to live with the constraints as well as the opportunities.

And you note in the movie that you and Julian did have a big sit down. Was that basically just a way for him to negotiate with you?

Yes. It was a way to negotiate something out of me and to see if he could get more “intel” as he always called it, when I refused to put up big money for an interview. And I joked with him, I said, “You say that the market rate for an interview is a million dollars, I must be the only person on the planet who hasn’t interviewed you.” I don’t pay for interviews. So then he asked me if I’d gather intel on all the interview subjects, in other words would I spy on them for him? I found that a really bizarre request from a guy running a transparency organization that’s supposed to be speaking truth to power.

How long were you and your team trying to get him?

A long time, we tried right until the very end. We kept trying to get him to talk, so this was over the course of two years. Look, I met him early on when we first started, I liked him when I first met him, it was for his 40th birthday party and finally we had this other meeting. And there were a lot of intermediaries who were trying to go to him on my behalf telling him that it’s a good idea that he talk. We tried everything. But at the end of the day Julian wants control, he’s a spin doctor and he wants to believe that he’s the puppeteer pulling the strings of everyone.

And it was a completely different animal to try to get to Bradley Manning.

It’s impossible. The government had him under lock and key. If there was a journalist that ever got to Bradley Manning I didn’t know about it. But it’s a peculiar thing from a filmmaking standpoint, I can’t get to my two main characters. So what do you do?

I think that’s what makes the Mark Davis footage you show very important to your film.

I learned very early on when I was making “Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room,” I tried very hard to get to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling and I didn’t get to either of them, but there’s always a way to tell a story and you just keep digging, asking questions, going to as many people as you can, and you hope you find a way and then cinematically you have to find a way to represent things that you end up knowing in ways you may not be able to put on the screen. I wanted to know more about the Julian Assange before he got famous, because I talked to a lot of people about that person.

I saw an Australian documentary that was done by Mark Davis, who is a wonderful filmmaker and journalist and does exactly the kind of thing that you should do, just go out and see if you can find Julian, and he found him and he started hanging out with him and starting shooting footage of him. And ultimately I was able to make a deal to license that footage, so you get a sense of Julian before he gets famous, who I think is a more interesting character and frankly the first half of the film you’re thinking sign me up for the Julian Assange crusade. He’s very engaging, self-deprecating, interesting, very smart. So I think that Mark Davis footage was a wonderful way of showing the tremendous qualities of his character. There was an aspect of Julian that was fantastic and then there was another side.

Is the footage we see also in Mark’s film or outtakes?

Both. And Mark is a big defender of Julian and I put him in my film because he brought a lot of balance to that key point in the story surrounding the Afghan War Logs, where a number of journalists said Julian didn’t care at all about the harm that might come to informants and Mark Davis says forthrightly in the film, “No he did cared very deeply.” So that is important because it gives a more balanced perspective of Assange.

And with Bradley Manning you use the online chat he has with hacker Adrian Lamo.

They were published in Wired and when we started making the film some of the chats had been published but not all, then the full batch, as far as we know, were released and it really gives you a portrait of a man that was really extraordinary, and a portrait in his own words. We reckoned for a long time what kind of cinematic tricks we would use, would someone read them? Ultimately we decided that the text is how he presented himself, so this is how we should present him, through text.

By the end of the film I felt Julian Assange was more into the thrill of the “hack” than allowing information to reign free through WikiLeaks. How do you feel?

Well, he says early on that his motivation is “crushing bastards.” Well, that’s a peculiar statement. You don’t want bastards but crushing bastards? That’s the idea? He wants to crush them? He wants to do what bastards do? So that’s a peculiar statement. But there’s also a lot of the idealist in Julian Assange and nobody should forget that. The problem is, yeah, he was one man against the world and didn’t have a lot of opportunity, nor did he allow himself the humility to learn about how he should have been publishing this material in a responsible way.

I don’t think the whistleblower will ever go away, but can something ever like a WikiLeaks be created again?

The New Yorker has now established an electronic drop box for anonymous leaks, and it was designed by Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who recently committed suicide. It’s a powerful precedent, WikiLeaks, that will continue to live on but it doesn’t have to live on only at WikiLeaks.

Before we go, what’s the latest with the Lance Armstrong film that you’ve been making for years now it seems?

Yeah. It should be finished editorially soon and it will probably show up in the fall.

Has the structure of it changed since Armstrong’s admission of using performance-enhancing drugs?

You can figure that since I’ve been working on it since 2008 a lot has changed over that time. [Laughs]

“We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks” is in theaters today.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Alex gibney, Bradley Manning, Casino Jack and the United States of Money, Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, Julian Assange, We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks

Director’s Cut: James Marsh (‘Shadow Dancer’)

When I met James Marsh in the lavish basement of Manhattan’s unfailingly hip Crosby Hotel, the energetic 50-year-old filmmaker was crouched over his iPad with the wide-eyed fervor of a child consumed by his Game Boy in the backseat of the family car.  Marsh, it turns out, wasn’t in the throes of a spirited Pokémon duel, but rather negotiating the finer points of his next project. Of course, this just made things that much more terrible when I promptly spilled my coffee all over him and his device before I could even say “hello.” Awesome. What made this naturally awkward situation even worse is that the world could really use another James Marsh film, and the last thing I want to do is get in the way of that happening as soon as possible.

“Shadow Dancer,” the latest “narrative” film from a director who alternates between fiction and documentary modes in such a way as to reveal the uselessness of that strict dichotomy, premiered at Sundance all the way back in January of 2012, and is only now reaching American audiences in theaters and on VOD. Set amidst the dwindling Troubles of Northern Ireland circa 1993, “Shadow Dancer” is a wrenchingly tense drama about a mother (the suddenly ubiquitous Andrea Riseborough) who, after botching an IRA plot to detonate a bomb in the London Tube, is caught by the British authorities (as embodied by Clive Owen and Gillian Anderson) and given an impossible choice: She can either be imprisoned for life, or return to her close-knit terrorist family as a government informant. A far cry from the inspired fantasticality of Marsh’s Oscar-winning “Man on Wire,” “Shadow Dancer” is a spare and severe piece of work about betrayal, inherited violence and the politics of trust (read our full review here).

When Marsh returned to the table after cleaning himself off (his iPad was unharmed, and he couldn’t possibly have been nicer about my little mishap), we chatted about the divide between the personal side of politics, the influence of Robert Bresson on his work and whether or not heavily accented English-language films should be subtitled for American audiences.

FILM.COM: “Shadow Dancer.” There’s a scene in the film where Collette is told that a volunteer is never off-duty, and she responds that a mom is never off-duty, either. And it reminded me of this Julia Hallam quote, where she writes: “It is now less clear what does and does not constitute the category of ‘politics’: if the personal, the cultural and the social are all included within the political, then all texts are political in some sense and none are specifically so.” And I was curious if you think that “Shadow Dancer” is a political film, or if you think that such designations are ultimately useless. 

JAMES MARSH: In the sense of that quote, “Shadow Dancer” is a political film. But of course, the given is politics in that situation. What I wanted to do was to take overt politics out of the script that I was given, and make it much more about the psychology of a family and the psychology of betrayal – how spying on your own family would feel on a day-to-day basis. The situation in Northern Ireland was by its very nature political, and now thank god is more political than anything else. But certainly what I didn’t want to do was take any sides in this film, neither side is “right” and both have their grievances, and during the time the film is set everyone has been tainted by what’s been going on for 30 years.

Her life is like a weed that grows around this conflict.

Indeed. You’re born into this conflict, you don’t get to choose what side you’re on. If you’re born in a certain part of Belfast, you will be on one side.

And of course how the film opens reflects that, in media res into this divide. I can only speak for myself, but I feel like many Americans understand the violence of the Troubles, but not its root cause. 

Not many people do, quite frankly. Not even many of the people involved.

And in the film, the violence is just a part of Collette’s DNA, a part of who she is. She doesn’t have an opportunity to live any other way. 

What’s remarkable about so many conflicts is that, without them, these same people would probably be reasonable and decent people, and yet it’s the circumstances that brings out the beast in us.

And, to go back to something you said that I found illuminating, the hope is that it becomes even more political so that it can become less… human. 

Politics is about negotiation and dialogue, insults and blackmail and everything that goes along with it. But it’s not about bloodshed.

I thought it was really interesting that this story, which is based on the fiction of a novel, is about a woman. I’m wondering how integral that was to the story, and how gender plays into ideas of trust. 

Well, that’s a very interesting set of questions and speculations. The script I got was much longer and more complicated and had much more politics in it, and it was my instinct to go and make Collette the protagonist of the story, and therefore to enter the conflict through a female point-of-view, and also a mother’s point-of-view. The generational aspect is significant so far as the story plays out. That was one of the appeals to me, that you could do this, that women were involved in this very actively in many ways. How it plays out… Collette and the women have much less power than the men, part of gender identity I guess, and the fact that she has the least power makes her have the most appalling choices. But those choices eventually empower her in some perverse way.

Well, I was going to say, I understand what you mean when you say that she ostensibly has less power than the men – 

– Less given power.

Sure, but she and her mother are uniquely endowed with a power that the men in the story can fathom and suspect, but not wield. 

A power available to them in part because they’re mothers. Collette can only do what she’s doing based on the defining principle of her motherhood. That’s the bargain she’s offered: Your freedom relies on you snooping on your family to save another part of your family.

Also Check Out: An Exclusive Clip from “Shadow Dancer”

And then we return to the notion of how dangerous it is when the domestic and the political become inextricable from one another.

And that’s exactly what plays out in Northern Ireland. And you see it in neighbors. Your neighbor over there is your enemy because of certain circumstances, and not because there’s any good reason for them to be your enemy. And that’s scary stuff.

Absolutely. And I wonder… so far as the end of the film is concerned, and I hate to question an ambiguous ending, I feel like that’s a terrible thing to do because it’s left ambiguous for a reason, but I’ll try to make this as abstract as possible… do you think that Collette is left with the potential for happiness or a way to find some sort of catharsis in the future?

How interesting. Well, I think she’s a woman who’ll be haunted by what she’s done for the rest of her life, and as an emblem for Northern Ireland itself, time does heal… superficially. It’s happened in that part of the country, and in the UK, and now there’s a generation coming of age, 18 or 19 years old, that don’t know that conflict on a daily basis. If you live through that conflict it will always mark you, somehow, if you see Martin McGuiness who is a known IRA terrorist, making jokes with Ian Paisley who is a Protesstant minister and politician, then there’s hope for all of us if those two can get along.

It does feel like a hopeful ending… 

If you know the history of what then happens, this dialogue, this political informant exploitation leads somewhere, and that’s significant. What we later found out generally is that the British secret service had put a lot of high-level informants into the IRA by this time, and they got very good at doing that. And the IRA had become a very good terrorist organization, both forces were battle-hardened. So you could say, cynically, that one of the reasons that the British government were able to make those first tentative steps towards a dialogue is that they knew that certain factions of the IRA were gong to be receptive to them. There was a very famous note that was passed to the British government from the IRA saying that the conflict was over. So this was going on behind the scenes, much of which we’ll never know about, and there was collateral damage to people, but it all lead to somewhere that was better.

You didn’t actually film in Belfast, correct? You filmed in Dublin?

Right, but that was entirely financial.

But ideally you would have filmed in Belfast?

Oh, definitely, we tried desperately to do that, but we couldn’t make the money work. Ultimately you have to go where you can make the film, and Dublin has many similarities to Belfast.

Sure, it’s not like I could tell the difference. 

It’s only an hour’s drive from Belfast, and they both have a very strong Victorian flavor to them. But you can find housing estates that are very similar in both cities, and the weather is the same. It’s not like shooting in Monte Carlo.

Would you have felt as if you were tapping into something vibrant, a living history, if you shot in Belfast? 

Definitely, that’s why we wanted to do it. We thought it would be a very good idea. Andrea Riseborough did a lot of that work herself, she spent a lot of time in Belfast during pre-production to get in touch with that history and perfect the accent. People absorb things, so she brought all of that back to Dublin which was great for the rest of us.

I hesitate to get into the subject that I imagine dominates so many of your interviews, this dichotomy between your narrative features and your documentary films, I’m of the mind that both terms are dirty words. But watching your films, I feel like you upend the obvious approach, with your documentary films being more likely to be shot on sticks with a locked-off camera, while your narrative films tend to feel a bit looser and feature a more handheld aesthetic.  

That’s true, and the first film I shot was all hand-held, just for financial reasons because we had to shoot as quickly as possible, without much finessing. But that showed me what hand-held could do. There’s actually not much hand-held in “Shadow Dancer,” though people think… well, there’s been observations made in quite a number of the reviews I’ve seen that there’s a lot of hand-held but there really isn’t much at work whatsoever. It’s much more, dare I say it, controlled, even more than “Red Riding” was. But it’s true, you’re trying to get at a level of realism in a feature film that documentary films implicitly provide you, and I tend to get away from that. In “Man on Wire” the reconstructions are very fantastical, they’re not supposed to be realistic, they’re cartoonish. They’re deliberately like a heist movie, very genre, because reality is a given.

So when you’re approaching a film, you don’t first consider the mode of filmmaking and then build your aesthetic around that, it sort of happens more organically? 

Definitely. Stylistically, you work out from material rather than impose things upon it. In “Man on Wire,” we filmed the reconstructions like a heist or a silent film because that’s the way that Philip Petit saw it, so I thought why not make that real, somehow? Whereas this film was very much about creating a level of anxiety and dread for the main character from the get-go.

To speak for the critical community, I think there’s one scene that really cements a false impression that hand-held is used much more than it is, the scene where Collette puts her hood on and her partner gets shot… it registers ecstatically in a way that might not be representative of how you filmed it. 

Well, that was steadicam! You know, whatever people make of my films is fine by me, but there is that sort of impression because it is a realistic backdrop, a Ken Loach kind of look. Our approach was very methodical in terms of our shot sequences and rhythms we worked out ahead of time with the DP.

What about cinematographer Rob Hardy’s previous work made him feel like the right choice to you for this?

We were companions on “Red Riding,” Rob shot the first “Red Riding” film. And I read that screenplay, of the first film, and I almost did that film and had ideas on how to do it, and Rob seemed to get those ideas and he put them all on screen. And I’ve worked with a DP named Igor Martinovich who’s based in New York, and I was very curious for Igor to come shoot a film in Leeds as a Croatian living in New York, but when it came to “Shadow Dancer” I felt like I got on well with Rob, we liked the same movies.

You could speak to each other in references. 

You know that you value the same things, and therefore it was a very pleasing and open collaboration. And I tend to become friends with DPs, all of my best friends are DPs, that’s one of the great things about making films because if you have those relationships they’re based on trust and loyalty.

I read that you watched Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar” when you were making “Project Nim,” which makes eminent sense, and I was wondering if there were any films you watched as touchstones for “Shadow Dancer?” 

Bresson, again! I mena it sounds awful to make Bresson your reference point when you’re not fit to clean his shoes as a filmmaker, but the opening scene of the film as written was a big long elaborate bike chase through the streets of London, and I thought there was no way we could afford to do it. And I remembered that scene in “Pickpocket” where they go to the underground in Paris and it’s just the most brilliantly tense scene done with the most simple, economic means. Bresson is a great director of thrillers, “A Man Escaped” is so tense and exciting, yet he’s known for his spiritual quests and his Catholic worldview and his work with actors and how he emptied them out. And yet he’s a great director of thrillers, so Bresson again loomed large. He’s just an amazingly good filmmaker, and he shoots things so simply. It’s so unfussy, and done very simply and it’s all very very clear what he wants you to take away from the film and the performances. So he’s a great study.

Well, I look forward to seeing your “L’Argent.” 

I look forward to making it!

One last question, a purely semantic one, but there’s an ongoing debate as to what to do when you have thickly accented English-language films playing in America, should they be subtitled?

Subtitled, for sure. Absolutely. People are struggling to understand, and there’s so much whispering in the film, I’m all in favor of making the language as available as possible, and if subtitles are possible then by all means include them. In the British isles you get in tune with the various accents, you hear people from Scotland and you hear people from Newcastle and it’s part of your linguistic repertoire, whereas Americans don’t get the same kind of exposure to the endless variety of English that are spoken in the British Isles. “Red Riding” was released with subtitles and I was very happy about that.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Andrea riseborough, Clive owen, Director's cut, Interview, James marsh, Shadow dancer

Director’s Cut: Noah Baumbach (‘Frances Ha’)

Just call him The Fantastic Mr. Baumbach.

Director and indie golden boy Noah Baumbach has another critical darling on his hands with “Frances Ha,” the black and white ode to single-girl-in-the-big-city living he co-wrote with girlfriend Greta Gerwig, who also stars in the film. Frances, who readily admits that she’s “not really a real person yet,” fumbles — and sometimes dances — through her friendships and general life in a sometimes funny-ha-ha, sometimes funny-cringing manner.

The film is one of Baumbach’s more upbeat works after fare such as “Greenberg,” “The Squid and the Whale” and “Kicking and Screaming.” The writer/director has also been known to make bold choices: He penned both “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.” Yes, that “Madagascar.” The one with the CGI penguins.

I chatted with Baumbach in New York ahead of the May 17 release of “Frances Ha,” covering everything from trash-talkers to secret scripts.

FILM.COM Congratulations on the movie, I really love it. I saw it at the New York Film Festival last October and you did a Q&A after. Do you watch your screenings at festivals, or are you dashing in while the credits roll?

NOAH BAUMBACH: I did when I watched it the first time we showed it publicly, I watched it at Telluride, and I watched it, I’m trying to remember, maybe I watched it in Toronto. I feel like New York, I was going to watch it at the New York Film Festival, I thought that would be the last one. Obviously when you make it, you watch it so many times, and so I felt like I’ll watch it with a New York audience at the New York Film Festival. it was a great audience, so it was a great one to go out on. The plan is probably to never see it again.

Never again? If you see your work on TV or something, do you immediately change the channel? What’s your reaction to that?

Yes, but I also…sometimes there’s something kind of momentarily fascinating about seeing it on TV, because it’s so, like, to see it in the context of flipping channels, it’s almost like there’s another thing. It feels a little bit like, it’s something…the context of it is strange. So I might just linger for a second to see, how does that feel to me? That cut is too fast, I should have held longer. I’ve gotta move on.

It’s an interesting thing, that sort of relationship to something that you’ve spent so much time on and watched so many times, and then sort of let go of for a while. I did just like a retrospective, where I was doing a talk recently, and there were clips, so I had to see each clip. That was interesting to sort of see, and to see them in context, all together, as like a group of movies. That’s interesting. But, yeah, I can’t linger on that long.

It’s like flipping through a yearbook and seeing a picture of yourself that you’d forgotten.

Yeah. They also kind of turn into, like particularly my first movie, “Kicking and Screaming,” when I look at it, it really does look like looking at old photos of friends. It’s like college photos or something.

A sort of mix of nostalgia and embarrassment?

Yeah, that’s about right.

“Frances Ha” is a very New York movie too. Do you have a favorite New York movie or any elements of those you were trying to mirror?

Well, I have a lot of, I can watch any movie that has New York in it. I’ve gotten to that point. Particularly in the ’80s, because that’s my childhood, kind of the meat of my childhood, my adolescence in New York, and then the ’70s because it’s a New York that I feel a connection to but also sort of a New York gone by that I find so interesting. And then going backward it’s like New York before I was born is its own thing. It almost doesn’t matter what the movie is. If it’s on location, I love looking at it. Like, Oh, that street, that’s no longer there! There’s something that’s very emotional about it.

For this movie, I was kind of looking at it both from sort of my own emotional relationship with this city. I’ve kind of, because I was shooting it in black and white, I was thinking about “Manhattan” and Woody Allen’s New York movies in black and white particularly.

Was the decision to shoot in black and white clear from the beginning?

It was something that was one of the first ideas I had, even before I kind of knew why that was a good choice. I kind of just felt like I wanted to do it and it’s not like anyone was ever going to encourage me to shoot in black and white, so.

“You know what you should do, man?”

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I was like, before you can talk me out of it, let’s do this! Before I regret this decision, let’s do it.

Do you approach a lot of things that way? You wrote “Madagascar 3? too.

Yes. Yes I did.

I like that you have range like that, and that you just seem unafraid of straying kind of off-theme, so to speak, and making unexpected choices. Did anyone talk s**t about doing” Madagascar?

Not to my knowledge. I mean, you know, I had a lot of fun doing it and it was really kind of illuminating to me too, because the whole animation, to really see how they do these things and all the kind of work and inspiration that goes into them. I love doing it. But no one talked s**t to my face, anyway.

But probably, I’m sure that if you and I took about a minute and a half right now, we could find some s**t-talking.

People were calling this a secret movie, since it came out of nowhere. Do you object to that?

Well, I guess it was a secret for a while. We didn’t set out to make it a secret, but we didn’t announce ourselves, either. The fact that we kinda gamed the internet in a way, I’m kind of proud of, but it wasn’t a goal. It kind of just happened.

I know it had a different working title, one that was purposefully…

Boring-sounding.

“Nothing to see here.” Who knew about it?

The script was never released. it was released to the crew, obviously, but like the actors only had their scenes. Nobody had a full script. it never went through like agencies. And it was a script that I didn’t, like, I made a deal to make it before I wrote it, so I never sent it out for financing. It never got into the system in any way. But, you know, those things were sort of partly by design. I wasn’t, you need so many people, and we’re shooting on location and everything anyway, so it’s not like we could hide and keep things that secret, it’s really just like nobody was looking. Nobody was asking, and we weren’t going to do their work for them.

This is like “Mad Men”! Secret scripts!

Mmmhmm. I think it creates a kind of nice focus for people, like we’re all doing this together. It’s like, you know, we can just focus on our work and not have to think about anything else.

And it doesn’t raise expectations

Right.

It’s like, hey, surprise, they made this movie and it was awesome!

It helps that it worked out. (laughing) Otherwise, who cares?

Is there something that characterizes friendships between women as opposed to between men? Do you have a different process for writing that voice? I thought this friendship in the movie was really realistic.

There definitely is, but I don’t…I think it’s like, once you’re writing women or working with actresses, I guess I don’t, there isn’t kind of like a deliberate shift I make where because I’m working with or writing about women I’ve gotta think this way. It’s like when you’re writing, you’re kind of androgynous in a way, you’re writing everybody.

It’s true of every movie I’ve done, so I don’t think, the thing about writing is that you only need to know enough to get it to the point that it needs to get to, if that makes any sense. You don’t have to know what this person’s childhood was like, you don’t have to be the person. You just have to know enough of the material, and that’s all I do know. It’s true for male or female characters. it’s true of the endings of my movies, when people ask what happens afterwards, it’s like, I only know up to here. The rest of it, you can guess as well as I can. But obviously with this one, because it was with Greta, she was kind of main point of inspiration for me, and a collaborator at the same time, so I was drawing from her, and understanding her, and in a way I felt like she could lead me and I could follow.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Frances Ha, Noah Baumbach, Noah Baumbach Frances Ha

Director’s Cut: Shane Black and Kevin Feige on Customizing ‘Iron Man 3′

Phase Two of Marvel’s movie universe kicks off on May 3 when “Iron Man 3” rockets into theaters. This time we find Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), who is still traumatized by his near-death experience in “The Avengers,” forced to face a more personal threat when his Malibu mansion is destroyed and he embarks on a quest to find those responsible. As he fights his way back after his world literally crumbles around him, Tony is forced to consider if the man makes the suit or the suit makes the man.

We sat down with Marvel president and “Iron Man 3? producer Kevin Feige and “Iron Man 3? director-writer Shane Black to discuss what sets this “Iron Man” apart from the previous films, which Marvel character Feige feels most protective of, and if moviegoers can glean any information about “The Avengers 2? from the post-credits scenes like the one in “Iron Man 3.”

Read our review of “Iron Man 3? here.

Robert DeSalvo: Kevin, for Iron Man’s third stand-alone movie, what specifically did you want to do differently from the other “Iron Man” films?

KEVIN FEIGE: Well, the most important thing was to make a good part three. The curse of the threequel is something that people write a lot about, and I didn’t want to fall prey to that. One way to try to not fall prey to that was do something different and not rely on making things bigger, bigger, bigger. Although, ironically, this has some of the biggest action set pieces in any of our movies. But, knowing that it would come a year after “The Avengers,” we wanted to focus on Tony again. What we found in “Iron Man” and less so in “Iron Man 2? was that audiences really respond to Tony—as brash and egotistical as he is. When he’s knocked down a peg and he’s backed into a corner, they like watching him get out of it. With one of our first conversations with Shane, we said we want to metaphorically put him back into that cave and convoy from the first one. People see in the trailer the house coming down, and that is the start of a journey that I hope is very unique and unexpected for a superhero.

RD: Shane, your script is the best “Iron Man” yet—there is a lot of action, but there are great comic moments. Did your work on the first two “Lethal Weapon” movies influence any of the interactions in “Iron Man 3?? There is a similar vibe at times.

SHANE BLACK: There is a similar vibe and a similar pace—the notion of checking in with people and seeing as their lives are progressing as things start circling around them and the net gets tighter and tighter until they are in over their heads. There is tossing in of different characters like the ["Lethal Weapon"] Joe Pesci character… in this case we have the little boy. There are escalating set pieces until they are in the most desperate situation and have to pull out all the stops. So, yeah, the shape of it is not that dissimilar, but having this kind of a canvas to paint on with this much spectacle was pretty neat.

RD: Kevin, was Jon Favreau at all interested in directing this installment or did he only want to reprise his role as Happy Hogan?

KF: Early on, it was clear that he was going to go do other things right after “Iron Man 2? came out. That being said, he’s an executive producer on the movie, “Avengers” and the upcoming “Avengers 2.” He wanted to stay in the family and help. It was important to all of us that Happy be the catalyst that sends Tony on this mission. It’s certainly the best Happy performance and storyline.

RD: Shane, abduction is a recurring theme in a lot of your movies. Is there something you want to tell us?

SB: [Laughs] I think I try to stay away from it as much as possible. There was a version of the script where Pepper went along knowingly or unwittingly with these guys and was sort of just traveling with the bad guys at some point. Eventually, it came down to the simplicity that she is going to become subdued, so it became this abduction plot. We saw that coming—the damsel-in-distress potential—so we had to take the curse off. She doesn’t stay captive for very long.

RD: Kevin, out of all the great Marvel characters in all the big Marvel movies that you’ve produced, do you have a character that you love most and feel most protective towards?

KF: Well, I like to think that I’m protective of all of them because the truth is that when we got the financing to become our own studio—I was excited that we had Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Hawkeye and Black Widow—I said, “I can’t believe this. This is great.” Then the “L.A. Times” said that we had the B-team and that Marvel was scraping the bottom of the barrel. I thought, these are all A-list—they just don’t know it yet. The fact that “Iron Man” is arguably bigger than them makes me pleased and even more protective of all of them, but certainly “Iron Man”  kicked it all off. “Iron Man” was the first movie we had the final say on—from the choice of Favreau to the choice of Downey and playing with real life like convoy attacks in Afghanistan—it was sort of all of our instincts wrapped into one movie. So I would say “Iron Man” is the most representative of the birth of our studio.

RD: Shane, Sir Ben Kingsley steals scenes in “Iron Man 3.” Did you have more laughs writing his dialogue or the banter between Tony Stark and the young boy?

SB: Those were all fun. Tony Stark and the boy were fun days because Robert and the kid had a chance to bond and you could really see it happen. Sir Ben was probably my favorite actor to have met and work with just because I’ve never met a more competent, effective and yet gracious and absolutely humble man. You hear stories about these actors that come in and have all these demands. From the beginning, this guy was just everything about the elegant, artful British actor.

KF: Sir Ben is an amazing human being. Often times when actors sign up for our movies they don’t read the scripts because either we’re being overly cautious and security-minded or the script hasn’t been written yet. I was in London at a press junket for “Avengers” and Sir Ben had signed up to do the movie. It occurred to me that he didn’t know what he was doing in the movie, so I went out to visit him and pitched him what the storyline was. To his credit, he got it instantly. He said, “Tell Shane that I get it completely and I’m completely on board,” including what to say and not say in interviews. He just overdelivered.

RD: Warner Bros. yanked “Gangster Squad” out of theaters and refilmed a theater scene because of the Colorado theater shootings. “Iron Man 3? involves terrorist bombings. Did you consider changing anything given recent events in Boston?

KF: I was never privy to any of those conversations if they were had. Our first thought was just Boston and is everyone OK. My wife and I were both born in Boston, I have family in Boston, so that’s all we were thinking about. The truth is that what happens in “Iron Man 3? is a very different thing.

SB: There were explosions and the word “terrorist,” but that’s about the sum of it in “Iron Man 3.” As opposed to, say, a shooting in a movie theater.

RD: Is there some connecting thread viewers should look for in the post-credits scenes that you will have with all the Marvel Phase Two films leading up to “Avengers 2??

KF: The tags certainly have less pressure as connective tissue because everyone knows the movies are connected now. We were educating the audience as much as anything else in the Phase One films, so I think we’re liberated to allow the tags to be anything if we do them at all. It all depends on when inspiration strikes. I would say that there is an overall arching theme to the movies, but it won’t become apparent until you see “Avengers 2.” I don’t think there is anything obvious in “Iron Man 3? that you can see, but it connects.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Ben kingsley, Director's cut, Interview, Iron man 2, Iron Man 3, Kevin Feige, Shane Black, The Mandarin

Director’s Cut: Seimetz on ‘Sun Don’t Shine,’ ‘Upstream Color’ and Why Murder Is Bad

Right now, as you read this, Amy Seimetz is blowing up. Just now she got a little more famous. There, it happened again. There’s a good chance that by breakfast tomorrow there will even be a bit of a backlash. But for now – right now – this is her moment.

A veteran actress on the micro-indie stage (“Alexander the Last,” “Gabi on the Roof in July,”) she can currently be seen in the much ballyhooed “Upstream Color.” In addition to that, she has three major acting gigs in the can – Lionsgate’s horror/comedy “You’re Next,” Christopher Guest’s HBO show “Family Tree” and one of the new lead roles in AMC’s third season of “The Killing.”

Seimetz’s first feature as a director, the award-winning “Sun Don’t Shine,” is about to make its theatrical and VOD debut. It stars Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley as two lovers on the run with a dead body in their trunk. It is shot on 16mm film in the blazing Flordia sun and it is lyrical and elliptical and refuses to make excuses for its characters. It’s a remarkable vehicle for Sheil, who, by all rights, ought to be blowing up right alongside Seimetz.

This past Sunday the New York Times ran a profile that, no offense to the Grey Lady, was exciting for Ms. Seimetz’s scrapbook, but didn’t do much to tell us what made her tick. We had the good fortune to catch her via telephone very late on Sunday night, tuckered out from shooting and not beholden to any normal talking points. As such, this conversation is all over the place. However, it is just that – a conversation. We invite you to read along.

Jordan Hoffman: I first saw “Sun Don’t Shine” a little over one year ago when it played the festival circuit. At the end of last year the Indiewire Critics’ Poll named it the Best Undistributed Film. I imagine that is among the most strangely gratifying awards out there – a real rebuke to the world, like, hey, what the hell, you guys all screwed up!

Amy Seimetz: Of course. It’s a strange world, where I’m working on television shows and winning the “best film not distributed.” But only because I didn’t set out to make stuff that’s mainstream. I’ve always tried to make personal and, earlier on, aggressive films. So it’s interesting for me to come into a place where you’re not sure if you’re becoming more mainstream or if you are suddenly finding your voice.

Well, I wanted to talk about this later, but you are alluding to acting in HBO show “Family Tree” and the new season of “The Killing,” neither of which have debuted yet. Is this something that keeps you up nights? Are you, to say it like we did when we were in college, worried about “losing your cred?”

How do you lose your cred working for Christopher Guest?

Fair point.

And … have you watched “The Killing?”

Um, no, but …

Well, the way that they shoot – the way both shows shoot, actually – they are really pushing boundaries of story. “The Killing” is a slow burn and you are allowed to breathe with characters, and understand a world that is uncomfortable. It’s very punchy and entertaining, don’t get me wrong, but it goes to dark places.

And when the season finale happens everyone loses their s**t on the Internet. Like I said, I haven’t gotten to this show yet, but I know people freak the hell out about it. Are you prepared for that sort of feedback?

I don’t know. Truth is, I don’t know how Season Three ends. I know the trajectory, but not the ending. I try to stay away from the response to stuff as best I can, but someone asked me “are you ready for people to really hate you?” I was … “huh? What do you mean?”

These longform stories on cable, people get really tied up in them. So, yeah, you’ll be spat upon in the streets.

I’d rather that than play some woman who is easy to deal with.

So, let’s let you shill for a minute, Amy Seimetz. For idiots like me who have their heads in the sand, I would imagine that Season Three is the perfect place for a newcomer to jump in?

Yes, absolutely true.

It’s as if it were made for guys like me who have been meaning to catch “The Killing,” but haven’t, and now I can.

This is all totally true.

Elias Koteas is in the new cast.

I know, right? Isn’t he amazing? But it’s funny, most of my scenes are outside of Elias, but we’re all really excited to be with him. But I don’t have any fun set stories, I don’t have any scenes with him. He’s around, though, and I do get a little starstruck. Same as on “Family Tree.”

What is your favorite scene from a Christopher Guest movie?

In “Waiting For Guffman,” when he’s trying to sell that the community needs to give him $100,000 for him to put on his play. When he’s telling them how dreamy and wonderful the play will be. And they all say “it’s great! It’s wonderful!” and they are so supportive, then he says he wants $100,000 and the board says they have something like $15,000 for the entire arts funding. And he gets so mad and tells them that they are all awful people. [starts laughing.] It’s the reactions, really, and that’s what’s so great about his films. They are so human – it doesn’t just go to a funny level just to be funny – it’s human and it’s painful.

Guest’s films really did anticipate the proliferation of lot of the semi-scripted stuff that’s happening on TV, as well as the “comedy of embarrassment.”

He’s the beacon of a very specific format.

You have some scenes with Fred Willard?

Oh, yeah. He just turns on. He’s a beautifully eccentric man. In real life you just think “okay, he’s just this eccentric dude” then the camera comes on and this wild world comes out of his mouth. It’s just, “wow, he is holding all these beautiful ideas inside.” Same with Bob Balaban.

Another guy who has directed some great films.

Right? Everyone on this show is, in a way, writing and directing their own material outside of it.

You should bill them triple.

Huh.

Okay, enough chit-chat. Let’s talk about “Sun Don’t Shine.” This movie begins with an outstanding opening scene, and an outstanding opening shot. Woe be to anyone who comes to the theater a minute late and misses the opening shot. Was this in draft one?

Not draft one, but as I got a firmer grasp on the immediacy, then yes. By the time we shot I knew that was going to be the opening. Initially I had a prologue.

Was the prologue about the victim? Or about the off-screen child?

It was about the child. The prologue was going to set up the Mom telling a bedtime story to the daughter, then later you realize she’s telling the story as a rationalization of the actions she did – a fairy tale in a way that explains why someone would do something like this.

That’s interesting to me, because one of the things I find when watching this movie is wondering just what kind of mother is Kate Lyn Sheil. She is, if I can speak bluntly, she’s such a mess, that you think “I want to see her with her child.” “How does she behave as a mother?” is one of the big question marks.

Yes, and that is why I excluded it. I really wanted to extract a female character from the role of being a mom. You can decide if she’s a good mom or not, but extract her from the roles of motherhood or a professional setting or whether she’s ambitious, then you just have a person in an existential crisis.

We only see her in this pressure cooker environment. We never see her at rest.

Exactly, that’s my take on it. Your role as a mother or a professional person – it’s done and gone. You are doomed by the situation.

Right. You know, as a guy who writes movie reviews, I often think about how people would write about things. If you see the character before and she works, say, selling car insurance, the graf might read “Kate Lyn Sheil, a car insurance agent, is on the run with her boyfriend …” when it isn’t relevant.

It’s funny, when Kate and I talked when this first was shown and some people got angry at the movie, we noticed that people got really angry at her. No one got mad at him [Kentucker Audley.] But she shouldn’t be doing these things! People got angry. I loved that they were freaking out.

There should be more – usually that anger is reserved for male parts, for the Ray Liotta parts, you know? [laughs.] Which is funny because I just watched “Killing Them Softly” and for the first time I was like, “wow, I feel sad for this character.”

I love that movie.

I loved it! Andrew Dominik. It’s so great. It’s shot so gorgeously. Greig Fraser is a terrific DP.

I saw that with my chum Matt Patches of Hollywood.com at a screening room in New York City and when we got in the elevator he and I were over the moon about it, and a very well-put-together older woman audibly chuffed at us. “That movie was vile and despicable,” she said, and we were like “We know!”

[laughs.] Yes, I know, I agree, it’s vile, it’s violent and brutal. What I loved about it was that I felt so bad for the criminals. I felt really sad for Ray Liotta. So, what I was thinking was, women don’t get to play these parts – roles that say “here I am, here’s where I exist in the world and you either hate me or you don’t, but I’ll give you all this baggage and this is how I’m dealing with this shit.”

Kate and I made a joke. I said “maybe when you go to the payphone” – there’s a big scene in “Sun Don’t Shine” where he sees her at a payphone – “maybe instead of it being ambiguous about whether you called your daughter or your mom or not, maybe we should have had you trading stocks. Shouting ‘buy buy buy! sell sell sell!’” Then people would say “well, at least she knows how to trade stocks.”

There’s a weird fake form of feminism that, in order to be a complete human being, you need to have a stronghold on your professional life in a cinematic sense. If I gave her some mundane knowledge, like knowing how to sell stocks, then people would think that she had some self-worth in the world, you know? People would say “this isn’t so bad, now.”

One could argue she’s been put upon her own life, and has never had an opportunity to quote unquote better herself.

That’s what I wanted to explore. What does it mean to be a victim? I didn’t want to shy away from the unhealthy aspects of victim status. Especially the participatory aspects of it. Why do women keep finding themselves in these positions? Or men, for that matter. The willingness to allow yourself in the position until it is too late. That’s a controversial stance to take – but I think it is empowering for victims to recognize that they are, in some way, allowing themselves to be victims.

Do you consider “Sun Don’t Shine” a cautionary tale?

It’s complicated. More of an exploration. There’s no message I’m trying to bring home.

Well, “crime doesn’t pay” is in there.

Well, right, but specifically, there’s no excuse for behavior. You can have all these things happen, but murder is not a good choice.

That’s the headline. Amy Seimetz: Murder is Not a Good Choice.

Yes.

This movie is set in Florida. Whenever someone sends you a tabloid story about some outlandish crime, it’s always in Florida. You’re from Florida. What the hell’s going on down there?

Always Florida, seriously. I’m born and raised, and that’s the feeling. I didn’t grow up with people who shoved bodies in trunks, but there is a feeling that this could happen to you at any moment. It’s a violent place and only when I moved away did I realize not everyone went to high schools were there were four violent fights a day. Or that violence was not the obvious way to end an argument.

Could it be the heat?

Yes, I think this is a huge aspect, seriously. Heat makes you crazy. If you are in the heat for long periods of time it changes the way you approach things. You are just “I don’t care, I just want this done” attitude, in the way you dress, the way you act. Statistically, crime increases as heat increases. It gets your atoms moving faster and more aggravated.

Also, Florida is a confused landscape. Like Australia, they sent criminals down there to dredge this inhabitable place into a vacation land. Who else would go down? They made a work program.

Ever seen John Sayles’ “Sunshine State?”

Oh, God, yes, I love that movie. And I told John Sayles that unabashedly when I was in Toronto with “A Horrible Way To Die.” I saw him and ran over and flipped out and everyone told me I was being really uncool.

It’s okay to be uncool around a guy like John Sayles, I mean, what the hell?

Right, that’s what I said. I said “you guys are being uncool!” Everyone was standing around saying that he was their hero and I’m the one who ran over!

There’s a brief moment at a low-rent Mermaid Show, with a woman breathing through a hose. . .

It’s real!

Yeah, I had a hunch.

I made a documentary about that place with James Ponsoldt. It’s a time-warp roadside attraction. It just felt right to go there, a place set for escape, right on the water. And mermaids, the transformation of women, these mythical creatures, is a theme in the whole film – I’d written them in as sirens, as a noir aspect.

Boy, I’m an idiot. That blazed right past me. Don’t tell anyone I said that, that’s embarrassing.

Eh, it’s fine.

Mermaids date back to sirens who would lure to men in the water. Now, the ones that fascinate me the most are the ones that just want to play. They lure men to come and play and they aren’t aware that men can’t breathe and they die. I like the idea of someone who is unaware of the consequences.

These are sirens who are in no way malicious, just joyous and playful and killing men unbeknownst to themselves?

Yes, this is much more interesting to me than the typical femme fatale. Someone with no control over their emotions, who aren’t self-aware about why they need someone else.

THE CONVERSATION CONTINUES ON PAGE 2.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Amy seimetz, Christopher guest, Director's cut, Interview, Sun Don't Shine, The killing, Upstream Color

Director’s Cut: Mira Nair (‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’)

Director Mira Nair has been making waves around the world since her first film, 1998's “Salaam Bombay!” debuted to critical praise. Nair has created a fascinating and juicy body of work that cuts a wide swath through global cinema, from the cross-cultural romance “Mississippi Masala” to the dazzling wedding drama “Monsoon Wedding.” Always a forward-thinker, she was way ahead of the cable TV curve when she made the HBO original film “Hysterical Blindness,” with Gena Rowlands, Uma Thurman, and Juliette Lewis; she also gave “Harold and Kumar” star Kal Penn his first real dramatic role in her adaptation of “The Namesake” by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri.

Mira Nair’s latest film is an adaptation of Mohsin Hamid’s bestselling and critically acclaimed novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” A young Pakistani professor named Changez (Riz Ahmed) is reflecting on his life in American before and after 9/11, and how his own identity and beliefs have changed over the years since he graduated from Princeton and worked on Wall Street. Nair’s adaptation also stars Liev Schreiber as a journalist interviewing Changez for a story on revolutionary educators, Kate Hudson as Changez’s American lover Erica, and Kiefer Sutherland as his former boss.

Nair was in New York City to attend the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” when we met up with her for a chat earlier this week. It opens in limited cities on April 26th.

Jenni Miller: Let’s talk about your personal connection to the book and the work, because I noticed the movie was dedicated to your father.

Mira Nair: The first bolt of inspiration to make “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” actually came not from the book but from my first trip to Pakistan in 2004. As a kid in modern India, you don’t get to go across the border into a country that was once one but now is riddled by conflict, and really a wall, so I was just dazzled… Firstly, it was just deeply familiar because the language, the poetry, the music, the realm of artistic expression is extraordinary. And it’s nothing like what you think Pakistan is from the papers, even in India or here.

Also check out: Our review of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”

Of course, it was familiar because my father had raised us somewhat Lahore in India; we spoke Urdu, we knew these poems, we knew that music. And so I wanted to immediately make a tale about contemporary Pakistan.

Indian directors have stopped with the partition. We’ve never seen beyond that, you know? And then, then I read Mohsin’s novel, about 18 months later. Like him, I’ve lived half my life here and half my life in the subcontinent, and not only did it give me the chance to make a tale about modern Pakistan, but it was a dialogue in its bones, with America. And I so much want this dialogue to happen, because I’ve lived here, I’ve felt the impact of 9/11 right in my front yard, and I’ve seen the reaction to it, and the consequences that we are paying for those reactions.

I think that the answer is not, you’re either with us or against us, or you’re black or white, or you’re good or evil. I think the answer is in opening our minds and hearts and knowing that on the other side are also human beings, as complicated and as fun and as human and as believing in all the things we believe in, as in this country. So that’s what I tried to do, because we don’t have this conversation; it’s always a monologue, it’s always one point of view. And Mohsin’s and my own sensibility wanted to create the dialogue.

One thing I really enjoy about your filmmaking is behind the scenes, which is how predominantly female your crew is. Do you think that’s the secret of women breaking through in film, is supporting other women, whether as cast, crew, producers – what do you think that brings to the game?

Well, my crew is largely female simply because they’re simply superb at what they do, and take me further in every respect. A big part of making film is the family with which you make film, and I’m so blessed to have this film family that I have, of course, nourished since 20, 25 years…

In terms of the paucity of female filmmakers, because this really is a conundrum for me — I just feel like it’s one of the saddest things because I work so differently and work with so many spirited women [laughs] — but I think that we have to plow on and we just have to keep not subscribing to being part of a cookie cut kind of world, but plow on with the courage of being distinct and having our own voices and our stories, because look at this story. It is a story of about the world and its multiplicity, and it’s because I also live in three countries… I am forced to expand my worldview.

Similarly, as a woman, one has these multi arms, you know, like the goddesses in India [laughs], and we excel in doing these different things at every moment, different roles I play and we play all. I just think to make movies you have to have a core of very strong self-belief, and you have to have something to say.

I read a really wonderful quote from Kate Hudson that she was recuperating from childbirth and not feeling great one day on set, and that you rubbed her feet?

[laughs] I used to do whatever because she is the most unpretentious person. She came with no entourage, absolutely unfettered, you know? And I loved that, I loved there was no some drama, you know, mishegoss every time to do it. She was totally open, and I’ve given birth so I know what that feels like, and it’s amazing that she managed to do all this. So I would do whatever she needed, you know? I rubbed her feet.

She would be breastfeeding, and I would just – she didn’t need anything, but I would cover her up [laughing] – anything to make her [comfortable]… I just love working with her and love how her – she just is brave, she just embraces instinct in every way. Her whole personality is like that, so I’m pretty similar in some senses.

Is it true that you turned down “Harry Potter”?

Well, it’s true in the sense that yeah, we went down the road a long way [laughs] – if I could have, I could have, you know? But I was just two months before shooting “The Namesake,” and I was deep in that. “Namesake” was really fueled by loss, and yet I felt divided because my son learned to read on “Harry Potter.” But he was the one who liberated me. He said, “Many can make ‘Harry Potter,’” but he said, “Mama, only you can make ‘The Namesake.’” It really was a beautiful lesson from a 14-year-old. He’s a great guy. He’s 21 now.

The film, in a way, is made for him and his group of people, the twenty-somethings of the world, because we’re all on this journey of finding out who we are, and it’s even more complicated when you come from many places or one other place or whatever. It’s seeking to hold a mirror to that journey, to make you question where will you be heard? What is that truth that they hand out to you? So, let’s see, I’m hoping to galvanize the young.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Director's cut, Harry potter, Interview, Kate hudson, Mira nair, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Director’s Cut: Five Questions with François Ozon (‘In the House’)

It can be hard to keep up with François Ozon, a prolific and prodigiously talented French filmmaker who’s been reliably churning out modern classics like “Swimming Pool” and “5 x 2? on a near-annual basis since the turn of the millennium. And it’s not like he’s slowing down – his latest film, “In the House,” hits theaters today, and it’s arguably the best thing he’s ever made. The story of a strange teenage boy who embeds himself in a friend’s house in order to mine material for his high school writing class, “In the House” won the San Sebastían Film Festival in 2012, and it finally arrives in American theaters today (here’s what our critic had to say about it).

Film.com had a brief opportunity to chat with Ozon at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, where he told us all about how much he wants to disturb you.

Film.com: Facts, perception, and subjectivity are integral ideas to this film. At a certain point, the reality of things starts to become unclear. Do you feel that there are certain points in the film that absolutely happened?

François Ozon: For me, everything is relative. Everything is relative because I think dreams are relative too. I think that things don’t need to happen … if they happen emotionally, they happen for me. So that’s what interests me. It’s up to the audience to feel what they want. But I tried my way of shooting the scenes to make no difference between what is relative and what is not to be relative.When you see Claude sleeping so you can think it’s a dream, it’s just a deep thought. We work on that in the editing. We try to subvert everything. But the audience has to work. You have to do your own work.

I like to work with genre, I like to disturb the audience using this kind of story and then suddenly changing … you think it will be sad and actually it’s funny. I know it’s disturbing, but that’s what I like.

Do you think that most audiences will rise to that challenge and embrace the ambiguity?

Well, this film is too ambiguous to be a blockbuster. But I know some American people have said to me this would be a very good remake…but they would change everything.

You have to decide – what [in the story] is true? What’s not true? What’s the reality of everything? I remember a film which I think was quite good but was a big flop in America. It was called … “Birth,” with Nicole Kidman. It’s quite a good film, except for the end which was totally remade. Because I think the script was very ambiguous but they decided to show everything at the end to give an explanation, which was so stupid because it kills the film at the end. I don’t need that.

Are there American directors that you’re interested in, or interested in their careers?

The movie directors I love are older European directors who came before or during the war. Especially all the Germans, the Jews …  They are really the directors I love. Yes, there are many good American directors. I like David Lynch, I like older people that have a different way. They are in the system and at the same time they have their own view, their own personality and they’re not totally used by the system. They try to keep their work and point of view.

The Hollywood machine is very restrictive and I think that’s a challenge. For you, is there a type of movie that you simply feel is not in your comfort zone?

For me I’m very open minded. I have no problem, as a spectator I can see many kinds of movies. I can see an art movie, I can see a blockbuster, I have pleasure with everything. As a director, I won’t be about to do an action movie, not in term of techniques but in terms of interest. It doesn’t interest me to shoot some cars, some explosions, those kind of things. It doesn’t interest me so I think I won’t be good to do an action movie. Maybe science fiction, I’m not sure. It would be a very twisted science fiction movie.

It would be the best kind of science fiction movie. The last thing I wanted to ask you is just about the young actor who played Claude. The role required a very nuanced performa … I couldn’t decide if he was a wounded bird or a very wicked boy. Was there something specific you were looking for in him?

Yes actually you know the boy is 16 in the film, so my first work doing the cast was to meet many boys of 16. And I realized they are babies. The girls at 16 are already very often women but the boys they are 16 and stuck to their mothers. So I was afraid, because I said this was the lead part, I have to find someone. So I decided to open the cast and to see older boys. And I saw a picture of Ernst and I thought he had a beautiful look in his eyes, a way of watching the camera. And so I met him, and actually he’s 21 but he looks even 14 or 12 sometimes.

I know the producer was not sure about him because he was not as good as some others who were technically much better but they didn’t have the ambiguity. I know it may have been more difficult with him, but he could be very good and we worked a lot and I learned to know from where he came. And actually he’s very close to the character because lives in a small country, in a small city, not in Paris, he has a difficult background with his family and it was good for the theme. So he had many links, many connections with the character of Claude and he was totally involved and I think at the end it was very good. He was the best choice.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Director's cut, Francois Ozon, In the House, Interview

Director’s Cut: Derek Cianfrance Talks ‘The Place Beyond the Pines’

Although he’s best known for directing the deeply dark and remarkably affecting “Blue Valentine,” director and screenwriter Derek Cianfrance got his start in the cinematic world through making documentaries about a variety of subjects. Whether it was catching up with degenerates or exploring the dark underbelly of society, he found plenty of stories worth telling in a more traditional form, including this month’s three-part drama, “The Place Beyond the Pines” which re-teams Cianfrance with his “Blue Valentine” star, Ryan Gosling. We recently caught up with Cianfrance to discuss filmmaking, the importance of the film “Creepshow” and the deeply rooted shame of Ryan Gosling.

Amanda Mae Meyncke: “The Place Beyond the Pines” seems at times like it’ll be heist movie, but then it’s three separate stories that get equal weight — it’s kind of an anthology. Horror movies are doing that a lot these days. Is that the future of film, all shorter stories tied together?

Derek Cianfrance: For 20 years I wanted to make a triptych, ever since I saw Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” in film school. When I saw that ending with the three screens going on at one time I wanted to make a movie that was three, and you know, “Blue Valentine” was a duet, so the next logical step was to make a triptych. The horror movie thing, the vignettes stories, you know “Creepshow?” I watched “Creepshow” more than any other movie in my life. So maybe “Creepshow” sunk itself into this movie somehow. I was interested in the one, the singularity of this movie, even though it is three different movies, I was interested in the consistency of making a single story out of those stories, how it would all unify into one. The one thing that was really crucial to me in this was the structure, and keeping it linear. There was lots of suggestions in the process of making this film, you know, putting it in a blender. And I’d seen [Alejandro González] Iñárritu do that, I’d seen [Quentin] Tarantino do that, all the way back to D.W. Griffith through “Star Wars,” has done the crosscut. I did it myself in “Blue Valentine,” but for this film, it was about lineage, it was about being haunted by your past, it was about legacy. I felt like it had to go in linear order. I don’t know what the future holds but I’m very excited that it is a fresh movie that audiences have the choice to go see something that isn’t simple a genre film or a heist film.

AMM: One of the major themes is a deep disappointment and how it can affect what happens next in a person’s life, the sins of the fathers being passed down. The fathers and sons in this movie have strange relationships, and Bradley Cooper’s character is on both sides of that.

DC: To be a parent, you can understand it more. I interviewed a number of police officers and soldiers who had taken lives in the line of duty and who had an incredible difficulty ever relating to their home life again afterwards, the divorce rate amongst cops is huge. Avery’s a guy who grows up in this hierarchy in the city, he’s kind of royalty in this city, his father’s this powerful judge and he’s expected to assume that place that his father has set aside for him, but he wants to be his own man so what does he do? he becomes a cop, he’s never supposed to be a cop, he’s not really good at it. He has this one moment where he acts too eagerly, too full of ambition to become the hero cop, what does he do? He makes this mistake. I think he regrets it, the guy has a child, and Avery has a child, and you start thinking well, it’s not fair. It’s guilt, it’s a toxic shame that takes over him and he feels corrupted inside and he can’t deal with himself anymore, so what does he do? He deals with the corruption all around him instead of the corruption inside of him. I think it’s a very human thing, it’s part of the human condition if you’ve ever killed somebody. [pause] Which I haven’t. But my research shows.

AMM: This was your second time working with Ryan Gosling, He’s obviously a huge draw, he’s very popular right now. You de-pretty-fied him in this film, with the tattoos and the bleached hair. Took him out of his element, was he involved in the creation of this character?

DC: He is the guy. He becomes the guy. He called me up one day about six months before we started shooting, and he said “Hey D, let’s do the most tattoos in movie history.” I was like, “You wanna put tattoos on in this movie, huh?” And he says, “Yeah, I want a face tattoo.” And I said, “C’mon man, a face tattoo? That’s really extreme.”

AMM: “I’m trying to sell a movie here!”

DC: No, it’s just a lot to walk around with a face tattoo, and he said “No, face tattoos are the coolest, and this one’s gonna be a dagger and it’s gonna be dripping blood.” And I said “Okay if I was your parent right now, I’d tell you don’t get a tattoo, you’re gonna regret it, but you’re a big boy, you’re the guy, if you want a tattoo, get a tattoo.” Ao he got a tattoo for it. So we’re shooting the movie, first day of production and he comes up to me during lunch and he says “Hey D, can I talk to you for a second?” And then he said, “I think I went too far with the tattoo,” and I said “Well, that’s what happens when you get a tattoo, you regret it, and now you have to live with it. You’re not taking it off, it’s on you, every time you walk into a scene, it’s gonna be the first thing people see and it’s with you, you’re marked.” He was ashamed of it, and that shame played into his character, so when he’s holding the baby for the first time, he’s a marked man, he’s tarnished, he’s tainted, he’s stained, and here’s this baby that’s clean and he doesn’t feel good enough to hold it.

You know the scene when he walks into the baptism? He was never supposed to cry in that scene, Ryan walked in and there was Eva [Mendes] and the baby, and the whole City of Schenectady dressed nicely, and here comes Ryan, walking in with ripped t-shirt, just covered in tattoos and he sits down in a corner, and we’re shooting him, I noticed he was just trembling, just absolutely ashamed, in fear, regretful, and he started crying. I wanted to stop the cameras and give the guy a hug, but you couldn’t and that’s what I’m looking for when I’m making my films, I’m looking for when the acting stops and when the behavior begins. When actors make decisions like that… I”m so thankful that Ryan went as far as he did, cause it created who that guy was.

AMM: The title is intriguing, a very mysterious “Twin Peaks”-y title, it’s the indian name for the city of Schenectady, but I didn’t know that going in. I kept looking for the literal place beyond the pines, and there’s a few pivotal moments where events happen, life altering events are begun deep in the forest.

DC: I feel very close to that feeling of dread in my life, a lot of times I’m a very big worrier, if I didn’t have filmmaking to take my imagination away, my life would be a wreak. The place beyond the pines is imaginary. Yes, it is about Schenectady, but to me, it’s the place where [certain characters] get to at the end of the movie.

AMM: Do you see writing and directing as a way of working out issues in your own life? 

DC: Yes. [Long pause, smile.]

AMM: [laughs] Good answer!

DC: [smiles] There’s no elaboration on that.

AMM: You came from a strong documentary background, did that come into play with this film? With “Blue Velvet” it’s a little easier to see…

DC: “Blue Valentine.”

AMM: “Blue Valentine!” Sorry!

DC: When an actor does the script, I’m disappointed. I wanna be surprised, I want to find life. I want to capture life in living, breathing moments, so we never go in and do the script. I never say action, I never say cut, the actors do all the research, for instance, documentary background will go into place when Ryan walks in with all these tattoos, we’ve set up this whole situation, now he walks up, everyone in the church is either looking at him or ignoring him and he’s sitting in the back corner of the church and he’s trapped and he’s on camera and all he wants to do is run away but he has to stay there and that process of filmmaking creates that. There’s another moment where there’s like a four page dialogue scene after they rob their first bank, and Ben and Ryan are counting money, and the lines were something like, Ben says, “Well it’s not a million dollars yet, but if we do it a few more times it will be.” So we’re setting up to shoot that shot, and Ryan played “Dancing in the Dark” on the radio, just to get the mood going, and we got this beautiful moment with Ben with his shirt off, and Ryan with the dog, and cigarette smoke, and Bruce Springsteen, and I never thought Bruce Springsteen would be in the movie, and then all of a sudden, we did four hours of the rest of the dialogue, but that moment was the thing that felt alive. I’m always looking for life.

AMM: Directing puts you in close contact with your own limitations as an artist, did you find that to be true in making this film?

DC: My film professors always told me that as an artist, you must risk failure. I’ve tried to do that my whole life, tried to push to the point where I will fail. In making documentaries many years ago, I interviewed Danica Patrick, and I asked her “How do you drive so fast?” and she said “Well, ever since I was a little girl, I’d always know how fast I could go, I’d always drive as fast as I could, and I’d always push it a couple notches forward. I’d get to the point where I was really in danger of crashing, and that’s how I could continue to go fast.” So, to me, as a filmmaker, “Pines” played right above the speed I could go and I pushed up to that speed, that’s how you evolve. Especially about this film that’s about Darwinism, it’s about evolution, it’s about growth, personal growth. I had to do that.

Categories: Interviews

Tags: Blue valentine, Derek Cianfrance, Director's cut, Ryan gosling, The Place Beyond The Pines