Interview: Brian De Palma Goes To War With Redacted

Brian De Palma fans beware: his most recent film will make you think that the veteran director has -- to borrow a line from Full Metal Jacket -- been "born again hard." Redacted is a war drama centered on the rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old Iraqi girl at the hands of American soldiers. Based on true events and told in documentary fashion, the movie uses a collage of digital media to portray the heinous crime up-close and personal, giving audience members every reason to look away but also, by doing so, asking us why it's taken so long to cringe.

De Palma's film presents the conflict through every facet available to us, the civilian viewers. His patchwork story expertly addresses the Iraq conflict on its own terms, using the war's own visual language: a soldier's video diary is interwoven with a French documentary about military check points, which gets mixed in with Arab TV broadcasts, security camera footage from the army base, internet blogs by wives of the enlisted, webcam chats, recordings of judicial inquisitions, clips posted online by terrorists, YouTube rants, and a slew of still images (which ultimately give real-life footnotes to the fictionalized events). The complex style of Redacted feels like a Google search for "Iraq, war crimes." This hyper-abundance of accessible media shows that the horrifying war is not just taking place on the ground in Iraq, but also, literally, in the terrain of cyberspace; a place where everyone with a homepage is a resident, and where the rules of engagement are still being written.

Yet despite this daring strategy, the response to Redacted has been ambivalent. Critics, who currently give the film a 57 percent Tomatometer rating, point to flaws in the dramatic logic and a few misjudged performances. But similar problems plague most movies, and these mistakes do not detract from the emotional impact of Redacted or tarnish the film's craftsmanship in any way. When was the last time you saw a movie with a fifteen-minute shot, handheld, at night, that exposes the true nature of every main character? To disparage Redacted for technical reasons is to miss -- or, perhaps, to willfully avoid -- its rich, textured, and honest depiction of how the Iraq war is being waged for an audience.

Checkpoint tedium in Redacted

In short, De Palma has made a movie that could only exist in the 21st century, about a war that could only be waged in the 21st century. Whatever missteps in direction he has taken do not indicate a flagging talent but instead reveal that, in this warp speed wireless world, the direction has yet to be defined. If we don't fully understand Redacted -- in other words, if it's a difficult film for us to read -- then that's because the narrative language remains incomplete. But by risking a new filmmaking vocabulary, De Palma has begun to create the cinetax.

Rotten Tomatoes recently spoke with Brian De Palma about modern warfare, surfing the web, and how video games might just be the vanguard of storytelling.

People who attend Redacted expecting to see a "Brian De Palma film" are going to be surprised by how different it is from your previous work -- I certainly was. What about this subject matter made you alter your style so significantly?

Brian De Palma: I discovered the form while I was researching the material. I was approached by HDNet to make one of their 5 million dollar movies, on anything I wanted. The only requirement was that it be shot in high definition, and I thought that was great, if I could figure out something that would work best in that medium. When I read about this incident that was so similar to the events in Casualties of War (1989) I did some research on the internet and I came up with all these unique forms where people were expressing themselves in relationship to this incident, and the war in general. That became the shape of the movie. It was a unique way of presenting the material in a format that was interesting to me because it's a whole new way of creating a storyline in this kind of fragmented mock-documentary. My initial idea was to use as much real material as possible, but of course the lawyers told me I couldn't use it because it was too close to the real case, so I was forced to fictionalize everything. I relied very much on the characters in Casualties of War, not knowing much about the actual soldiers except for the prime instigator. There wasn't much information about them. They were all being prosecuted while I was making this movie.

Redacted

Redacted rings very strongly of truth, so even if you had to change the facts, it's one of those stories that's very familiar to people who get up every morning and read the headlines. But it goes much further than that, with all the different points of view that you include, each with its own voice. How did you develop this tapestry?

De Palma: It all emerged from my research. My first task was to get the news stories about the actual case, but since I couldn't use the real news stories I had to fabricate ones using international correspondents who were in Amman, where we shot. So I basically duplicated the original news stories. That was the beginning. Then I read somewhere about this Los Angeles-based Spanish-American filmmaker making a movie from his war diaries to get into NYU Film School -- that was based on something I stumbled upon on the web. I realized that this could provide my principle narrative. And, of course, that idea also comes out of the documentaries I looked at where there were soldiers with cameras recording what's going on, because everyone has a camera over there. I saw all that in the documentaries. Then the attitudes, and the feelings, and frustrations, and the passion about the war, all those were expressed in the soldiers' blogs, and in many independent documentaries that I looked at. So the principal narrative form came from Salazar's personal diary.

Then I had all this information I had to convey about what happens at check points, because this particular unit was on a checkpoint and that's where they saw the girl going in and out every day. There were many, many news stories about accidents at check points and how many people were killed all the time. So I had to present all that information, and I also wanted to slow the movie down. Being deployed in Iraq is incredibly boring most of the time, but then it's punctuated by incredible, crazy violence from out of nowhere. I had to slow the movie down. That's why I created the mock French documentary -- very elegant, Handel music playing from Barry Lyndon -- it slows everything down, and it gets all the statistics across about what happens when people go in and out of check points.

The pacing of the movie was extremely effective, with how you gradually build tension for the frantic violence that happens later on. It sounds like your research process was a micro version of what historians will have to do when they look back on this conflict years from now, in terms of synthesizing a gigantic amount of very specific information.

De Palma: That's what surprises me about the people who are shocked by Redacted, or the portrayal of the soldiers, or the pictures at the end of the film -- all this material is out there! It's like they assume I dreamt this up. It's all there. The problem is, it's not in your mainstream media, so nobody knows about it. But if you get on your Google search engine and put any of these things in, you'll come up with all the same devices that I used, including something like the rant of the protestor. That's one of the few things we were able to buy, actually. That was somebody's rant. We actually bought the rights to that, and I just rewrote it to be played, and the best person to do it was Abigail Savage. But that's an actual rant.

Redacted

It's shocking because it's so familiar, but it's the stuff that you subconsciously try to forget about, you don't want to pay attention to it.

De Palma: I think not many people are doing the kind of research that I was doing. They're watching, you know, what happens to Britney when she takes her daughter to some play group. Those are the kind of things that dominate the web, and YouTube, and whatever. You have to dig a little deeper. But all of this stuff is out there.

There have been other films recently about the Iraq conflict, such as Jarhead and The Kingdom, but you've very intentionally and very effectively adopted a completely different perspective from those: the documentary perspective. Do you feel like a documentary style, for the nature of this war, is the best method for examining it?

De Palma: That's something that I discovered. It's not like I had a plan. In the process of researching I came up with all these unique ways of expression that are completely indigenous to the web. Nobody's ever seen this onscreen before. I have another idea to put in this form, but things have changed in the last six months since I wrote it! There are even newer forms that people have not seen yet. There's all of this new media going on. It's very interesting to tell these types of contemporary stories in this form.

Straight-forward narrative filmmaking essentially would have been Casualties of War, but there's no point in doing that again. I was quite happy with the different forms that I came up with when I researched the material. And who knows; this may be one experimental film that comes and goes, and we move on to whatever. But I feel that there's something here, in Redacted, and I want to experiment with it more, because it's the way that I've noticed my daughters take in information. They're sixteen and eleven, and they sit on their beds with their computers on their stomachs and they browse from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing. They don't go to the theatre and sit down and watch O'Neil for five hours. That's not how they're getting their stories told to them. So, I don't know where it's going, but it's certainly changing.

The uncomfortable reactions to the movie must be coming from not only the disturbing subject matter, but also from the fact that it's a new language. A normal theatergoing audience can't quite comprehend it yet.

De Palma: Exactly correct. To me it's almost atonal. Suddenly you're playing atonal music and people don't know what to make of it. That's what I noticed when I screened it at the beginning, is people had nothing to say afterwards. Basically they were struck dumb. They couldn't process the material. Then the first thing, of course, when you don't understand something, you attack it. "It's not this, it's not this, it's not this." I'll never forget the first time I saw Barry Lyndon, I just wasn't ready to process the way Stanley Kubrick did the movie, and I reacted very strongly against it. The way he told this particular story, with this particular technique. But over the years it's become one of my favorite movies of Kubrick's. Once it gets you into the temporal sense, and the pictorial sense, of the period, of the piece, it all makes perfect sense to you. But when you first see it, you go, "Why all these endless shots, why these zoom-ins -- what's going on here?"

Like Redacted, Barry Lyndon is also a movie where the filmmaker imposed very stringent technical limitations on himself.

De Palma: Exactly correct.

Is there any other reason besides your admiration for Barry Lyndon for why you wanted to use the same music in your movie?

De Palma: I think what was so instructive about Barry Lyndon was how Kubrick slowed down time; using very classical, measured music, he used very elaborate pull-backs. Of course I didn't have the beautiful pictorials that he did. You make the audience study the frame; something that I think people have completely forgotten about.

Redacted

I'd like to dig a little bit deeper, if we can, into what you discovered about the language of digital storytelling. It's such a new phenomenon, and I think Redacted is one of the few films that really prods at the edges of what's possible -- ultra long takes, handheld consumer cameras, relationships developed over the internet, everyone allowed a voice -- it's fascinating. And the other thing about digital media, which is why this war is a perfect topic for it, is the immediacy and the responsiveness of it. You can produce images like a reflex. That's the raw nerve that this film strikes.

De Palma: It's a great new way to deal with narrative forms. It's like things you discover in video games; the way they tell their stories. And of course video games emulate films a lot, and television shows, with their little story sequences within the games. But there was a really big breakthrough when they started to have games where you could approach the world from any place. It didn't go linearly. It was more like a mosaic. You could discover the story from the north, the south, the east, the west, and I said, "Wow."

I remember when I saw my first video game where it was played from a point-of-view shot. It was Colony and this must have been twenty years ago. I was knocked out by it. I said, "Oh my God." The players were perceiving all of this space through a point-of-view shot. And of course that's one of the main building blocks of moviemaking; it's totally cinematic, it doesn't exist in any other art form. I'm always fascinated by what the video games are doing. I truly believe that the creative forces in my generation, instead of being filmmakers, they wanted to be game programmers. They're literally creating spaces and stories. They're constantly discovering new forms. Every six months there's a new game where they push the envelope into something else. And this is also very true of the internet. The other day I discovered BloggerTV, where you have two guys talking about a subject, like an iChat, and it's any topic they want to talk about, like talking heads on television, except it's a discussion about a specific subject instead of people screaming at each. In any event, all this stuff is changing every day. And as I think about doing another film in this form, I'm constantly amazed at the new things that crop up.

Is it a coincidence that you've been influenced by video games, and quite often the "video game mentality" of modern warfare is cited? Is that something you brought into the film, this idea of soldiers being trained by virtual simulation and how that might affect their actions on the battlefield?

De Palma: Yeah, people say that, but the reality of on-the-ground has nothing to do with a videogame. As soon as soldiers get over to Iraq, they get it real fast. You can play every one of the most violent videogames in the world, and it doesn't give you a clue about what it's like to really be deployed in Iraq. A comparison is ridiculous.

Redacted

As far as the actors whom you chose to portray the soldiers, none of them will be recognizable faces to an audience, but I thought all of their performances were convincing. Private Flake was an incredibly frightening character.

De Palma: It's interesting that you say that, because that's one of the main criticisms I get all the time, "Oh, these actors are overacting; they're a bunch of amateurs." Ridiculous! I mean, they're acting in relationship to what situation they're in. When they're in barrage, they behave like warriors at the post, because that's what they're supposed to look like; that's how the director wanted them to look, and the actors take on a personae and an acting style appropriate for that form. When they're being filmed by Salazar, they're mugging and confused and spontaneous, which is exactly what it's like if you're taking a home video. When people react against Redacted so strongly, they don't understand the context of what the actors are doing. People are used to movies where the actors are always the same because the point of view never shifts. But when you change the form, the acting has to adjust.

So instead of a classical "character arc" you were going for a more prismatic study of people.

De Palma: Yes, but there's still very much a sense of character progression. Flake is a little tweaked when he gets over to Iraq, but you can see him sort of changing as the movie goes forth. People just don't understand how the form affects character presentation.

My immediate reaction after seeing the film, and what I did, was to view it a second time. In thinking about why that was, I got the notion that it was almost too much to absorb in one sitting -- to learn how to view the film, and then to appreciate it at the same time -- and so it resists a sense a resolution.

De Palma: The resolution is very much how I feel. I very much identify with McCoy; I feel frustration at not being able to stop the war, of being a participant in it, but being unable to do anything about it, just like McCoy can't do anything about the girl being raped. He carries that guilt with him. The other thing we'll be living with for decades is all of these soldiers coming back from Iraq harboring what they've been through. It's going to be like Vietnam but ten times worse. And it's going to go on for decades. I live near a V.A. hospital in California and I see these guys all the time, wandering around with that aimless stare on their faces, and of course everyone forgets about them. This is going to be going on for decades.

Redacted is in limited release this Friday.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Interview: Richard Kelly Tells Southland Tales of Love and Devotion

The fan base that rallied around Donnie Darko has for years been anxiously awaiting the release of Richard Kelly's second film, Southland Tales, scouring the film's abstract website and three prequel graphic novels in anticipation of its release. And then came the infamous 2006 Cannes screening, where the film premiered to a near-historic critical harpooning. Since then Kelly has spent a considerable amount of money to augment the special effects and now, more than a year later, he's revealed a shorter, more distributor-friendly picture. Although cameo sequences with Janeane Garofalo are now on the cutting room floor, the film boasts abundant acting talent and a cache of cultural references that rivals Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema in sheer volume. Kelly calls it "apocalyptic science fiction film noir," but as he explains, the film reaches ever further than that.

Southland Tales opens in the fascist, media-debased near future. Our navigators through this profligate America are an amnesiac named Boxer Santos (Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson), and Ronald Taverner (Seann William Scott), a cop who has unwittingly been embroiled in a secret agenda by neo-Marxist rebels. Private Abilene (Justin Timberlake) is the narrator and askew conscience of the film, whose off-kilter prophecies describe a distorted America that bears a pointed resemblance to our own. Kelly's film is a pastiche of references from many facets of media and culture funneled as if through a funhouse mirror. CNN screens display images of technology that look like Metropolis by way of Mel Brooks. The futurist nightmares of William Gibson and Thomas Pynchon are explored with the snark of Mike Judge (Idiocracy). Philip K. Dick shares the stage with noir classic Kiss Me Deadly, as well as Repo Man, Mad Max, Satyricon, and Brazil. This wouldn't seem so odd if it didn't also recall so much of The Gospel According to John.

Literary and pop references aside, what Kelly has built is as much a mythology as it is a fever dream about today's America. And though it may divide critics and take time to attract new audiences, Kelly is putting forward a work that few would attempt and none could imitate.

Richard Kelly on the set of Southland Tales

Tell me about the flag on the cover of Book 1: Two Roads Diverge. It's also behind Mandy Moore in one of her last scenes with Dwayne Johnson. It looks like a Jasper Johns cut in half. Is that original art?

Richard Kelly: That is original art by my friend J. Kelly. He did that art as a collage right after 9-11. I was over at his house and he did it over a couple nights. It thought it was pretty powerful. I said, "That's the movie I'm getting ready to make! That's Southland Tales! That's what it's about. That painting." So it became an icon to the film.

One of your prequel graphic novels is called The Mechanicals. This is named for the improv group? Tell me a bit about them.

RK: They're an eight-person comedy troupe that I stumbled upon a few years ago. They used to hang out at Barney's Beanery and we used to go drinking together. Abby McBride who plays one of the porn star girls -- two of the girls are mechanicals, Starla, the girl who stalks Dwayne on the beach with the gun is a Mechanical, the Asian kid who gets shot on the toilet is a Mechanical. They're spread all throughout the movie. I just thought their comedy was brilliant. I used to run around with video cameras and do little sketch comedy stuff with them over the years and they became good friends of mine and they were all struggling so I thought, I'd give them all parts in the movie and name the third chapter after them.

Seann William Scott in Southland Tales

The toy soldier crawling on the LA street, was that a reference to the toy monkey in Rebel Without A Cause?

RK: No, that's funny you would mention that. I stumbled upon that toy soldier when I was doing research in Venice and it was raining the morning we shot that and we stuck the soldier on the pavement and we got this great shot and it was absurd, it was trippy, disturbing funny and brought up all these emotions looking at this toy soldier on the pavement. I thought it was emblematic of the futility of conflict or war. It may be Justin's character a little bit: A mechanical pawn the government is using.

Johnson's character as well.

RK: Yeah, alone on the wet pavement in Venice. It's one of my favorite shots in the movie and it's something we did as a whim that became something significant.

This film is so packed with references. Why did you feel a need to construct your film with such thick references? Do you think that's become a tool for critical division?

RK: Well, you talked about that painting: Resolved, the American flag divided in two. That's a piece of collage art. He [J. Kelly] has taken newspaper headlines and images from American history and he's embedded them into a collage and I wanted this film to be like a big piece of pop art and if you think about the way we use product placement in the movie, the way we use pop culture and music, we sort of put them into this kaleidoscope blender. I think at its base level I see it more as influenced by Philip K. Dick or Thomas Pynchon or Raymond Chandler -- apocalyptic, science fiction, film noir. That's where it's rooted stylistically. If you go to LA, you're surrounded by pop culture faces and products and billboards. LA is a collage. It's like a gigantic messy collage with everything flowing together. And I wanted it to feel like LA. Not only that, the fragmentation you see on CNN and the news screens and quad screens, that's the way life feels and I thought the movie should be reflection of Los Angeles life and it all came together that way.

When you construct a collage you ultimately affect the modern values of the pieces you cut up to build it. I wanted to ask a question about rewriting the last line of T.S. Elliott's The Hollow Men. Initially I thought this was about spin but now I'm seeing it differently.

RK: Flip flopping T.S. Eliot's last line in The Hollow Men was an absurd statement. [The original goes] "Not with a bang but a whimper." Me, [I think] that's T.S. Eliot having a premonition about global warming. The whimper is us slowly drowning ourselves over many hundreds of years. This is the flip-flop of that [notion] where it all ends on the fun party weekend before the election in 2008. It all happens just the day after tomorrow -- just right around the corner. The idea that "with a bang" is Hollywood blockbuster hero Dwayne Johnson is your guide through that final three days. It felt comedic and it felt like an inversion of the poem was the right way to go.

It also seems to be a good tennis fellow for your Road Not Taken reference. It seemed to me as if you were saying "we took the road more commonly taken, and here we are."

RK: The Road Not Taken really is the one where we all vote, take a stand, make a difference and try to solve the energy crisis together. That's the 'road not taken', unfortunately.

The aspect of the film I found most challenging was the acting. You've wrangled some adept talent here but their performances sometimes broach the realm of camp, which I should qualify can be ambiguous if not easy to confuse for poor performance. As deliberate as I understand the performances were, could you explain Timberlake's histrionics and Johnson's Monty Burns impersonations?

RK: (Laughs) It's funny you say "Monty Burns." Dwayne was playing Boxer Santeros but he's also switching into Jericho Kane, renegade cop: The Ralph Meeker character in Kiss Me Deadly. And he studied Ralph Meeker's lowering voice. That became Jericho Kane and he's a schizophrenic [living] between those two identities. It was a deliberate discussion had with each actor to understand the role he was playing and the whole greater mystery was a lack in my mind. With Justin it was all about - he's this doomsday prophet who's a famous guy who's been drafted and disfigured by his best friend in Iraq and now he's been put on this perch in front of this big alternative fuel center to guard it. [He's] a terrorist in the Santa Monica Bay. And he's dealing this underground drug. The elaborate mythology the audience has understood, Justin was able to latch onto that, in a way. Like you said, it was all very deliberate. I was just trying to capture the humanity beneath any of these eccentricities they developed.

Do you feel that could be a future vehicle for camp?

RK: Yeah, but the characters are all sincere, even when they're acting eccentric. What the actors were trying to do was remain sincere in their moments of eccentricity. Dwayne is really terrified when the woman pulls the gun on him at the beach. He had an absurd facial expression but he was terrified and really is schizophrenic and thinks he's the cop trying to talk her down with the gun. I think one of the more important things to understand about Dwayne's character is he is schizophrenic and he is playing this ridiculous cop character. He's researching the role to get into character.

JT bringing apocalypse back.

The film involves a lot of parallel texts: TV, news, the plot of the underground, the plot of the right wing, Boxer's story, the script he's carrying around. And all these texts blur into each other and share details. Tell me why you felt this blurring was important to involve in your apocalypse satire?

RK: I think that there's a metaphysical quality to the way in which the news media is scripted and our lives feel scripted. In a way [when] you think about the way the war in Iraq was sold to us, almost as a screenplay. And I feel like there's "what could have been" and "what we're living with now." It's a very metaphysical thing. It's hard to wrap it all into one easy explanation but sometimes I wonder if there's someone out there who's written a screenplay for our lives. And living in Hollywood, are we all living in a movie? Sometimes I feel like my life is a movie.

Are you talking about destiny?

RK: Yeah. It is about predestination. What is the destiny of our country? Are we going to be able to pull ourselves out of this or are we going to continue [like this]. Are we going to self-destruct?

The critics are really wrestling with this one but I for one hope it's seen by a lot of people.

RK: I'm proud of it. I can finally sleep at night.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Interview: Talking In The Shadow of the Moon With Director David Sington

David Sington's Certified Fresh film In the Shadow of the Moon puts us on the Apollo missions, learning first-hand from its crew and through astonishing photography captured onboard the full scale and experience of their missions to the moon. Featuring footage never before seen and all-new interviews with astronauts Buzz Aldrin, Alan Bean, Mike Collins and more, it's a stirring portrait of brave men's missions to teach us more about the world beyond our own.
Everyone has a fascination with space and the Apollo missions, but what was fascinating about the film was how much footage I don't think many people have seen.

David Sington: The people who found it really are the producer Duncan Copp and his colleague Chris Reilly who was the archive producer. My company did a film which Duncan directed for us a few years ago. It was a television documentary for National Geographic about a shuttle mission so Duncan spent a lot of time at Johnson filming the training. The public affairs people at Johnson are also the people who look after the archive, so Duncan basically saw this large room full of racks of film cans and asked what it was. They said it was the Apollo film archive, and Duncan realised that basically no-one had actually explored this archive.

At the time of the missions Nasa made thirty-minute film documentaries, from this material, which it put out to the media. If you ring up Nasa and say, "I'd like Apollo footage please," you get a box of these tapes. And it's a lot of material; it was a lot of missions. I think for the vast majority of people making a Nasa documentary, that footage is enough. But obviously behind those little films there are 10,000 rolls of original film material, from the early days of the programme right through to the end. I think a lot of people just didn't really realise it was there.

Nasa themselves had never sought to exploit this material and because we knew about it I think that was a big incentive for us to do the film. It would give us an opportunity, with a decent budget, to spend time in the archive and see what was there, but we were confident there must be hours of interesting material and that it wouldn't have been seen before.

How does it work in terms of clearing this footage for the film?

DS: The brilliant thing about Nasa is that as a publically-funded organisation this material is public domain. In theory anybody can use it and it's license-free. However, you also have to get hold of it. That, I think, requires that you can show the archivist that you know what you're doing and that you have a serious purpose. They're not going to let any old Tom, Dick or Harry go rifling through these film cans because it's historically important material. It's a little bit like going and looking at manuscripts at the British Museum. In theory it's open to all, but in practice you have to be a reputable scholar and show that you know what you're doing and that you have a serious purpose for looking at this stuff. Fortunately we had a pre-existing relationship with the people at Nasa because of the previous film we'd made.

Remastering from the film stock to High Definition video is an expensive business and that's really where the expense lies. We spent a huge deal of money on the archive doing that, so again, in theory it's free, in practise it's really, really expensive!

It's certainly well worth the effort; seeing that footage as sharp and clear as it is in the film is a sight to behold. You realise that you're not seeing computer graphics, you're seeing what these astronauts saw.

DS: To me it's obviously a fantastic technical achievement, Apollo, but it's also a human experience. A great adventure. It's also, I think, a really profound moment in human history; because what makes us human is that we're self-aware. We know our situation while other animals don't. That self-awareness was certainly not complete, or lacked a crucial element, until human beings were able to leave the Earth; to go into space, and look back at the Earth and then return to it. It's like leaving your home as a child, or leaving your home city; when you come back you see it differently. I think these people, and there were only twenty-four of them in the whole of human history, have seen what that is, what our human situation is. And that understanding was communicated to us through the pictures but I think you also want to hear it from them, to listen to them talk.

It's also an important threshold or step in the evolution of human consciousness if one wants to put it in rather grandiose terms. It's nonetheless true. So I think understanding the human level, the human experience, is very important and that's the importance of the Apollo missions. It's not that we returned rock samples from the moon, though that was scientifically enormously important, but that human beings went. It wouldn't have been the same if it were just a robot, as the Russians sent to the moon.

The astronauts are also given the freedom to tell that story in their own words, and very often that story is so human and so unscientific.

DS: They're smart regular guys. I was quite surprised, actually, at how diverse they were as people. Alan Bean's a very different character to Buzz Aldrin, who's different again from Mike Collins, who's different from Charlie Duke. They're actually as diverse as you can possibly expect ten men of the same nation and generation to be. And also, I think, they're very funny, and that was another thing that took me by surprise. That allowed the film to have a bit of humour which I think is important for any film, it helps the audience engage with it.

I think we were getting them at a good time as men in their seventies. They were able to look back, I think, once all the hoopla had fallen away. It got them back to the real essence of the experience. And I think that that experience of leaving the Earth and returning has marked them all. It's a good thing; it gives them a perspective on life. They've literally seen the world from a different perspective and a perspective we've not seen in film except through photographs, which is not really the same thing. I think that perspective just gives them a rather wonderful sense of what's important and what's not important. I think people who know what's what in some way are calmer and easier to deal with and they don't get fussed about trivial things. It's a very attractive personality trait.

In a strange sort of way, they've probably got a clearer idea than any of us of our own insignificance too. There's a line where one of them can't believe just how fragile the Earth looks from that far out.

DS: I think that the great power of film is that it can take the audience somewhere new, somewhere they haven't been, and allow them to experience things vicariously through the characters in the film. That's really the essence of drama, and it has been since the ancient Greeks. As Aristotle explained, it's all to do with empathising with the characters and feeling, through them, the pity and fear of dramatic events. So I think that one can do that equally powerfully in a non-fiction film. That's really what we were trying to do, to allow the viewers to share the experience that the astronauts had. What did it feel like to do these things? Obviously, nothing can match the experience itself but I hope that with the footage and the experience of the astronauts themselves one does get some sense of what it was like.

At least I think one certainly gets a sense of what it was like to witness the events through television at the time. And I think that's also partly what the film's about; what it was like to be back on Earth in those heady days sharing that experience. I think that certainly the film does achieve that.

I walked away feeling that nothing has really been that absorbing since. No event, to my mind, had captured the imaginations of so many, so powerfully and so positively. It made me wonder why that fascination dwindled and why the space missions aren't as powerful for people anymore.

DS: I think that's because, in a sense, the element of human exploration is not present at the moment. The space shuttle, and the Russian space craft, can't venture beyond Earth orbit. They don't go fast enough, fundamentally. That means that we're just going somewhere we've been before and we're seeing things we've seen before, so it's unsurprising that people aren't as wrapped up in the 105th shuttle mission as they are in the first landing on the moon. That's just human nature and it's entirely right and proper.

But I think it's interesting that now the shuttle is really reaching the end of its life, I think that's the reason we'll go back to the Moon because there's really no point in building another spacecraft to take people into orbit. We're not really going to learn anything more from going up into orbit and really there aren't very many things that people can do in orbit that can't be done by machines. So unless we're going to give up completely on human space flight, which I just don't think we will, I think we will go back to the Moon and we will go to Mars. Or at least we'll try. Going to Mars will be a really big challenge.

And presumably we've still got quite a lot to learn from the Moon.

DS: Oh, absolutely. The Apollo missions took men to another world and brought them back again but I think that eventually human beings will leave the Earth and never come back. We've got amazing technology, now, for creating images and I think if we can send men to the Moon and Mars the experiences they share with us will be even more vivid than they were during Apollo. One of the things that I think the film hopefully brings out is the political effect of going to the Moon. The way it allows people to see themselves, simply, as human beings first and foremost. And I think that's a very valuable thing politically.

If we go back again in twenty years that sense of global solidarity will be enormously important. Issues like climate change are global issues. All our problems now, the serious ones, are really global ones; political, environmental and economic problems. What happens to mortgage lending in America effects the production of factories in China and vice-versa. We need to develop a sense of ourselves in one place rather than many, many different places. That's not to say we need a World Government, I think that would be too far for people, but we need a gut feeling of ourselves as human beings first and I think that's the value of going to the Moon. It's not primarily, actually, to do with the scientific knowledge that we gain, though that's obviously very interesting.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Interview: Josh Hartnett talks 30 Days of Night

Josh Hartnett has had a busy career since his big-screen debut in Halloween H20 in 1998. With 30 Days of Night, out now in cinemas, he marks horror book-ends to his career, nine years of experience transforming him from a vulnerable son in Halloween to a bona-fide protector in 30 Days.

Along the way he's played a variety of roles in films as diverse as Black Hawk Down, Sin City and The Black Dahlia. He'd prefer if you didn't mention Pearl Harbor.

Rotten Tomatoes caught up with Hartnett to find out more about his career, and his time on the vampire flick.

It seems that you have a passion for horror movies; this is not your first one. The Faculty, Halloween...

Josh Hartnett: I's say The Faculty is kind of a spoof. Out of the 23 films that I have done, only two of them are really horror movies. I wouldn't say that it's my genre but I would say that this film was something that I thought would be an interesting project. I'm not limited by genre and it doesn't really matter what the genre is as long as the film is going to be new and have some real artistic integrity. This was a good group of people to work with.

We haven't seen vampires like this on screen for a long time.

JH: Yeah, it kind of harkens back to the original concept of vampires, maybe more the silent area, the Nosferatu types, but more the Nosferatu that can actually move. It's more about it's more about these creatures being creatures and less about them being humanised.

I think vampires have gotten maybe a little bit silly in the last few years where they're all wearing crushed velvet and reading poetry and making sweet love to their victims, you know, it's not really all that scary.

First of all I liked the way that Ben Templesmith drew the vampires and I liked the way that David Slade kind of brought that to the screen. I think Danny Huston really flushes it out and makes it a fully-fledged character and half the reason that this film works because Danny plays Marlow.

Eben's kind of an unlikely hero as well in the sense that he's a good deal more reluctant than your usual vampire movie heroes.

JH: We made him more like that than he was in the comic book. We spent a little bit of time before we started filming, rewriting and trying to figure out how to adapt this. The type of film that this was for me was a Western with supernatural overtones. The character is, I think, more interesting when he is isolated so I wanted him emotionally isolated. We took the relationship he has in the comic book with his wife, where they're kind of this dynamic duo and we separated them and then had that have a major effect on how he related to his younger brother.

So basically he is someone who is not letting a lot of people in when the movie starts and nor is he capable of relating to a lot of people. And, obviously, the physical isolation of being in the middle of nowhere in the Great North adds to that.

So how method was it, the shoot? How many night shoots did you do and was it actually cold?

JH: There were 20 days of cold shooting and 33 days of night shoots. We shot the first bit of the film in a snow farm in Wanaka which is on the South Island of New Zealand. We were on top of a mountain a couple of hundred metres away from where the US snowboard team was practising

It was horribly cold and I actually had Mono at the time - I was sick as a dog - so that made it even more chilling. And then when we finished that we went up to Auckland where it was pretty warm and shot the rest of it on these sets that were built by an amazing set designer with fake snow and all that. But we shot a lot of nights up there; a lot of it was outdoors.

The night thing, we had about a month and a half where we never slept during the night and were never awake during the day which was a little unnerving after a while.

What was Danny Huston like to work with?

JH: Danny was a friend of mine before we even started so it was just fun to work with him. He's a professional but he's also a real gentlemen so there's not a lot of method bullshit; just a lot of trying to figure out how to create the best image, how to create the best character, and I loved talking to him about that. There was a lot of communication, especially between him and David Slade, because really Danny and I are only in one scene together and it's almost purely physical. That sounds weird! We just beat the crap out of each other!

Watching this you get the sense that your roles have matured. Back in the day you'd have been cast as your younger brother.

JH: Yeah! [laughs] I don't know, I never really think of it that way, I just think of interesting roles to play. I guess that I have matured, I guess growing up and becoming a man, your taste in characters changes and I think I have become more interested in active characters as I have become less contemplative in my personal life. Things have become a little bit more interesting in the doing these days and less interesting in the thinking about the doing.

So you're a lot more comfortable on a film set? That it's not something you have to think a lot about anymore?

JH: No, not at all. I was talking about my personal life being less absorbed in the concepts of life and more interested in actually getting out and feeling it and being a part of it. I was a kind-of contemplative kid and I think the characters reflected that, a lot of them were ponderous and I think it's been more fun now to find characters that are a little bit more outgoing. The character that I play next, in this film August that I produced as well - David Bowie was in it with me and Naomi Harris who is an excellent British actress - the character is just a real jerk, he's starting to keep this company afloat just through sheer force of personality and he will sell anything to anybody if it will help save this precious golden egg that he thought he had created in this company. But I think that just your tastes change as you get older and I think they'll continue to change.

As that happens, do you see yourself becoming more interested in the behind-the-camera roles?

JH: Control is always good, you know. Having a little bit more say and having a little bit more I guess depth of understanding in the process. Yeah I guess I will probably produce a little bit more. I've got a couple of scripts that I am producing right now that are still in the works and I have written a few things. I don't know, we'll see where it all ends up going. But for me it's a career, you create as you go along and you can't worry about always being on top.

Talking of challenges, is the Chet Baker thing still on?

JH: Yeah the Chet Baker thing is still on but it's set back right now because some people just don't believe that we need any more work on the script but I think that the script needs quite a bit more work before it can be the great film that it could be. I dropped out, knowing full well that it's probably one of the greatest characters that I will ever actually get to play. But if it's not done right I don't want to do it, just to do it, you know...

 

This is probably the first film you've done where there's been an enormous fan interest in it from conception - did you get a sense of that during the production?

JH: I don't spend a lot of time on the internet in general so I don't really get much of a sense of that. It's like reading reviews; you don't want to get too caught up in what too many people are saying about what you are doing as long as you feel like you're growing and the people that you trust will tell you the truth. I have been lucky enough to meet a lot of my idols in this industry and there are some great actors who don't bullshit me and tell me when I am doing good work and when I am not. These are people I really have to listen to. And so I guess going online and listening to the opinions of everybody would be maddening.

But you did go to Comic-Con?

JH: I did do that and I actually really enjoyed it. There was a really funny comment at Comic-Con where a guy came up and he said "you know Ben I like everything you do," to Ben Foster, and then he said, "And Mr Raimi you really are a genius. But Josh some of the stuff you do is really like..." [Laughs] Stop right there! I'm all over the place, I do a lot of weird movies that maybe you don't like and I experiment a lot but maybe I do appreciate the process and I think my greatest joy in this business is that I have had the ability to screw up in a lot of really interesting films!

You learn so much from making mistakes, not even necessarily mistakes that I've made, a lot of the time the films just don't work out because it's a really difficult process. And sometimes there's a certain person underlining process. But I've had an opportunity to work on all different types of films and I have had a lot of opportunities to stretch myself in different ways and now is the time where I get to try and figure out out the roles that I can really play well and play them well. But I wanted to experiment; I wanted to keep growing. I didn't want to just sit back and rest on my haunches and do the things I knew I could do for a while.

I would rather gamble it all away than play it safe you know? And now it's time to sink into some really interesting work. And this movie August and this other one I Come With the Rain are two of them and I am just hopefully going to keep on growing.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Interview: Julien Temple on Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten

In Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, director Julien Temple presents a fascinating portrait of the Clash frontman, whose life was filled with contradictions. He was embarrassed by his boarding school education. He was a hippie who became a punk. He was politically liberal and open-minded but occasionally staunchly ideological. And he was fascinated by American culture, even though he wrote a song called "I'm So Bored with the U.S.A."

Temple is uniquely positioned to tell this story. Not only was he was a friend of Strummer's, but he's made a number of excellent music films, from a well constructed history of the Sex Pistols, The Filth and the Fury, to Glastonbury, a portrait of Britain's venerable rock fest. To tell Strummer's story, Temple utilizes a mix of images, from concert footage to scratches of Strummer's writings. Before his death from a heart attack in 2002, Strummer became obsessed with the idea of the community of campfires, and Temple uses the concept as a framing device, interviewing Strummer's friends and famous fans (including Bono, Johnny Depp, and Melle Mel) next to a campfire.

Temple spoke with Rotten Tomatoes at the Mill Valley Film Festival, where The Future is Unwritten screened before its limited release this week. The director discussed a number of subjects, including the legacy of the Clash, the challenge of making original musical documentaries, and why Tupac Shakur was one of the few musical artists who could actually act.

Rotten Tomatoes: Someone like Joe Strummer is indicative of punk becoming a cultural phenomenon. He went from an underground situation to selling out stadiums and becoming this beloved figure. What's the story you wanted to tell in making this film about him?

Julian Temple: I wanted to tell the story of his life beyond the Clash, what led up to that and what he had to deal with breaking it up. I was interested in it on a number of levels. I was born in the same year [he was] so I wanted to make a history of our culture through [that] kind of framing device: how Joe was educated, how he was shaped by our culture and then went on to have some quite profound impacts on English and global culture. On one level it was a social history, on another level it was a film about a friend. It wasn't really a film about music. You can call it a music film if you want but it's about celebrity [and] its effect [on] not just the fans but on somebody famous. Those were various elements that seem intimate to me but his life throws up so many ideas. I like him as a philosopher more than as a rock star.

Joe Strummer sort of embodies a contradictory spirit. He began as a hippie and then he jettisoned that and then the Clash became something else. Your film is a celebratory film but not altogether.

JT: It's not a fan film. That was Joe's strength. He was very, very human and that's what he fought to retain: his connection with his own humanity. Obviously that means flaws and faults. A lot of rock stars I think believe they're perfect. A lot of a--holes thinking they're above criticism and confliction and contradiction. In contrast with that, I think Joe used the flaws and contradictions as the motive for his work.

Was it tough making a "warts and all" film about a person you knew?

JT: It is. I knew I had to do that because Joe would have risen from the grave and strangled me. He may yet do that, I don't know. He would have wanted "warts and all" but what was quite hard was getting the balance in your own head and getting over this thing of trying to second guess what he would have thought. In the end he's not going to give you an answer but obviously I didn't want to assassinate the guy because I loved him. But on the other hand I wanted to show what was special about him. He was deeply flawed as well as deeply generous and inspirational like most people.

You seem to have a pretty interesting way of making these biopics in the sense that you're not doing the "talking heads" thing. Are you trying to break out of the model?

JT: I'm just trying to find another way of doing it. Treat each time as though you know nothing about the form. Certainly, I do hate, more than anything, the curse of the talking head. Going on about how he made an album, that's as bad as it gets. It's so far away from the cinema but you do have to include talking and you have to find ways of doing that that doesn't kill everything else stone dead.

Were you at all concerned the narrative might get lost if people didn't know who was whom?

JT: Not really. In a film with that many people you'd be having a title every two seconds. So you wouldn't be watching the film, you'd be reading names. You have to do it for everybody or else you shouldn't do it. What I'd hoped to do is treat [the story] like cinema and fly [viewers] into the screen, into this life that Joe lived. And if you've got captions, you can't fly. It's like barbed wire. You get caught.
Your fiction films include musicians of some stripe. At Cannes, Wong Kar-Wai said singers have a sort of built-in actor-ly rhythm. Does that appeal to you?

JT: I disagree with that. Some singers are the worst actors you can dream of. Mick Jagger, for example. Singers have a rhythm they have to lose, unless you want them to play themselves. Performance, Mick Jagger isn't bad in that. But if you want him to play Ned Kelly, he's got a big handicap. He has to get rid of his Mick Jaggerisms.

How was it working with Tupac Shakur on Bullet?

JT: It was cool. I think rap stars are a bit different than pop stars. I had a great time with Tupac. We got along really well; I think he's a very intelligent guy and a real rebel so I liked him a lot. I was lucky actually, because I have Mickey Rourke in the same film and Mickey can play up the bad guy and because, I think, he realized Tupac was badder than anything he could come up with so he behaved a bit more. Tupac had quite an aura about him; like if you want to do something, take it seriously and do it. In a context like we were in, that was really helpful.

Do you think on some level the Clash, who had something to say and sold out arenas, do you think they're the last group who could have that? Is that something your film is saying?

JT: The film is about the process because it does show a no-win situation. You believe things you're doing and saying in your music and reaching an audience with that music. And when you do, you have to sign up with some machine that allows you to play places that'll reach big audiences and sell records but in doing that you're doing a deal with the devil and you have to live with that and you don't like it. That's part of why Joe is really interesting. On a bigger level, he wrestled with that. And that's the drama of the film: that struggle with what you want and what you get.

What do you think about the state of music today?

JT: I think there's great music out but not any great commercial music. That's a kind of contradiction. It's certainly much harder for really good music to be seen as commercial or meeting a mass audience than it was in the past. I think that's partly the problem. There is great music out there but people don't get to hear it. Same with movies. You're fighting a machine that only wants you to hear shit. I saw a punk band in London -- which normally would scare me, but now how pathetic that idea is. The band was really [good] but they'll never get an album. A lot of people don't think [so], but there are still people who do [good music] and what they do is as good as it ever was.

Was Joe Strummer unhappy after the Clash broke up?

JT: I didn't really know him at the time. I was working with the Pistols already. I was given the ultimatum by the Clash: "Us or them." So I didn't really see The Clash very much for like 20 years. I did bump into them, funny enough, [when] Joe came down to where I lived, by chance, to Somerset. He was on his way out of that [dark] period. I got the feeling he was very lost and haunted by a lot of things and unable to find a direction that made sense to him. A lot of people I got to know [who were] close to him didn't [recognize] that thinking. Sometimes you'd get the sense that was a really dark place he was in.

It seemed so long between the Clash and [Strummer's last band] the Mescaleros. I wondered where he'd been.

JT: He was always capable. That was exciting to me because I was part of seeing that process. He did really do it around campfires. He would find musicians and talk to them in-depth around the fire and he'd play incredibly diverse music around the campfire -- music from different cultures. You could see him piecing a way to the Mescaleros between different fires. He had different attempts at it with characters that weren't in the final lineup of the Mescaleros. That was really interesting, it wasn't overnight.

Was he really haunted by his brother's suicide?

JT: I think he was. He never really talked to me about it. He spoke with my wife when we were living with Joe in Somerset, because she lost her brother to suicide. Joe was very responsive to her and what she was feeling but he wouldn't talk to most people about it. He did say that he made a point of thinking about it once a day.

Is that similar to a political or world view of --

JT: Yeah, I think Joe saw him as a real victim of that school system. And I think Joe saw himself as a survivor who had to move as far away from what he expected to become as a product of that system. So it did have a sort of springboard effect on what Joe would become. I don't think it was a kind of a 'rosebud' thing to what Joe Strummer is.

Joe Strummer wrote a lot of notes to himself. Was he always writing randomly or did he have a diary?

JT: He was constantly doing that. I think it came from writing lyrics. By the end it became a thing in itself, it didn't have to be part of a lyric, if he thought something he'd write it down. He had plastic carrier bags of these doodles in his bath. It's funny, he could slam the door on different parts of his life and still get away with these carrier bags full of doodles and ideas. He was funny. He did have a sense of some kind of destiny about him. Some sense he'd do something important. Maybe everyone does but he certainly delivered on that.

What else are you working on?

JT: I've just done an opera film, actually. It's called The Eternity Man, it's an Australian Opera. I had Guy Pearce wanting to do it for a while and it's a difficult decision but in the end he couldn't do the arias. Opera is quite an art. We tried out musical theatre people and they couldn't do it. It's not like you can master the technique in two weeks. It's probably harder to get actors to sing but it's hard all around. These opera singers are used to having to hit the back rows. It's never going to be the same as in a regular close up, they're singing, but we did need to find a way to get them to feel 'in the moment.' I also didn't realize how important counting and conducting is. We actually had a conductor off-screen conducting and keeping time, white gloves and all. They [the singers] are actually looking at this conductor and then trying to deal with entering and how to act in each scene.
Are you working on any other music biopics?

JT: I don't want to do another one like this immediately. You know, you get pigeonholed. And they're hard to do, energy-wise. It's quite nice to have a script when you edit. You know: This shot goes next to this one and that one before this, whereas [in a documentary] you've got all this footage for this film and there's a million ways to put it together. So I'd like to work on some narrative films, but I'd like to be free with them the way I have been with these [documentaries]; where I've not been told so much what to do. I have a project called Wise Children by novelist Angela Carter, who died in the early 1990s. I have a thriller about Christopher Marlowe, the playwright from the time of Shakespeare. I do want to do a film on The Kinks at some point. I'm sort of searching and not quite ready. Though I think that would have to have a layer of fiction involved in it.

What do you hope a young person who doesn't know anything about the Clash might take away from this film?

JT: That you can create a whole code of liberties when you're young that you don't have to give up on when you're older. I think a lot of people grow out of who they were and that paradigm of having joy making whatever it is they make. They don't have to take on that paradigm of thought that once they grow up they have to let go of their right to think. I love that about Joe: he had a code he created when he was young -- though you don't have to come up with it when you're young -- and he held by it. He knew you don't have to abandon those ways of thinking when you get older. You're forced to do it on many levels but in the core part of you, you don't have to do that. And Joe was a philosopher. He really enjoyed thinking things through and trying to find a new way of looking at whatever it was. I think that's very good for everyone.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Interview: Jerry Seinfeld on Bee Movie

Nine years after ending his ratings-dominating TV show and walking away from the public limelight, Jerry Seinfeld is everywhere again. You probably saw the comedian on primetime with his absurdist teasers (called "TV Juniors") or in a guest role on 30 Rock, all to increase visibility for his new film, Bee Movie, opening this Friday. For Dreamworks' second animated film of 2007 (after Shrek the Third), Seinfeld voices Barry B. Benson, an idealistic bee who takes humanity to court for withholding profits from our wanton honey consumption.

So why animation over live-action?

Because I had done so much of that on the TV series. I had made 90 hours of programming. You cut that up, that's like 45 movies. So there was no movie that seemed exciting to me. "Yeah, I know, they give you the script, you stand over here..." I don't know...it just wasn't exciting.

But [then] I saw this whole technology, and the look of it is so different. I thought, "Gee, what if we took that look but [made them] talk like I want them to talk, maybe that would be something interesting." I just got excited about it.

Did becoming a father have something to do with it?

No. [Laughs] I just wanted to do something different.

[But] it is funny how it worked out. I have three kids -- six, four, and two. Of course, I know all their friends so now I know millions of kids. And I realized these kids are going to go nuts [over Bee Movie]. Sometimes when their friends are over I show them little clips on the computer that I'm working on for whatever reason. And they'll come in and they'll watch it. They go nuts. It's so fun. There's nothing more fun than entertaining kids.

Do you find there's a big difference in the kind of comedy you have to invent between mediums?

There's a big difference. Sometimes you can do certain things on stage, or even in a TV series, and people see the look on your face and they know what you mean, so you can get away with certain things. But if you can't create that look on an animated character, which is essentially a puppet, the line will hit the audience in a very bad way.

[It's] like a petting zoo and you're blindfolded. They want you to take care of this animal, which is your show. But you're blindfolded. We're going to put you in a room with the animal, and the food that it needs. And everything it needs is in the room, and you're in the room with the animal. But you're blindfolded. So you go into this room and start feeling around for this stuff. Feel a little fur, and you feel a little claw. And you go, "Oh, my God, what is this thing?"

This is the great advantage that you have doing a TV series. Say, for example, my series -- which is the only one I know anything about -- by year four, we knew exactly what this thing ate, when it wanted to go out, how it liked to be petted. What it liked and what it didn't like. And what makes a movie so challenging -- so much more challenging than a TV series, frankly -- is that you never get that opportunity. Because you make a TV show and you put it out there and you get a reaction. You go, "Okay, this work. This doesn't work." You put out another one. "They like this. They don't like this." But with a movie, you get one shot at it. Even though you have test screenings, pretty much, we're going to put this lemur in people's living rooms. And, just, bang, they're going to react to it. I hope I didn't over-answer your question. [Laughs]

This is one of my big things of creative pursuits. You have your idea you want to do, but then you got to figure out what does this thing want to be? You got to let it lead you a little.

And how were the test screenings?

Well, you know, I like to try anything. So we would have some horrible ones. We'd try crazy things just to see how they reacted. Some of the work, some of them don't. Comedy is a very scientific exploration. You have to do the experiments to find out what the formulas are.

How much did you put yourself into the character of Barry?

How much? As much as I have. I don't really know how to do it any other way. I think in a TV series I could be a little more obnoxious. This character in this movie is never obnoxious. He's a little nicer than I am. So I actually took a little of myself out.

 

How much of Bee Movie is yours? Is it a collaborative effort between you and Dreamworks or do you feel that this is entirely your vision?

There's nothing "entirely." You have 350 people working on this thing. [But] I would say the tone, the comedy of it is mine. Even though I work with writers, I'm in charge of what goes in the script and what doesn't. Win or lose, [that] is my thing.

How involved were you with the casting of the other voices?

I was involved in every single aspect of everything. [Laughs] From the cars they drove, to the ties they wore, to the desks they sat at. Not to say that I came up with it all, but it was brought to me. "Do you like it like this? Do you like it like that?" All day, every day. It was ridiculous. [Laughs.]

Was there a lot of ad-libbing in Bee Movie?

Some of it we'd use, some of it we didn't. We had a scene about [Renee Zellweger's character] trying to have coffee with [Barry]. We read the scenes a few times and we got all the lines. So I said, "Okay, just try to get me to have coffee. Just keep pushing me to have coffee and I'm going to say, 'Nah, I don't want any.'" And a lot of that made it into the movie. It gives it some life if you do it that way.

Were the TV and movie teasers your idea?

Yeah. I wanted to do something that signaled to the public that this is not going to be the same flavor that you're used to getting from animated movies. I [know] that a certain type of moviegoing audience [will say], "Here comes the next Dreamworks movie. Here comes the next Pixar movie." You don't know what this is going to be.

What did you do different from other animated movies?

Some of the way we recorded dialogue was different. The jokes that we make are different. It's got its own personality. It definitely does not feel like a slice off of the same loaf. Certainly, [not like] all these animal movies, which, believe me, I'm as sick of as you are.

During the Cannes Film Festival, I heard you jumped off a hotel, and dived eight stories into a pool.

You just heard about it? You should check on that. [Laughs] It was a little nutty. But I was told that during the Cannes Film Festival, people do crazy things. You know, Sacha Cohen did that crazy thing on the beach. Did you hear about that? You have a computer, don't you? [Laughs]

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Interview: David Cronenberg on Eastern Promises - UK Spin!

Canadian-born David Cronenberg made his name with a series of brilliant 'body horror' movies including Rabid, Shivers and The Fly. His last film was the violently brilliant A History of Violence for which he, and his star Viggo Mortensen, received rave reviews. The pair re-teams this week for Eastern Promises, an equally violent but no less brilliant tale of Russian mobsters in contemporary London.

How did you end up making a film about Russian gangsters in London?

David Cronenberg: Well it all has to do with the script. Wonderful characters, wonderful dialogue, an intriguing narrative, so that's what really was what brought me to into it. I mean I never wanted to do a movie about the Russian mob in London but once I read his script then I did want to. It's obvious.

So where did you go from there? Did you work on the script?

DC: Oh yes. It was a first draft and it had kind of languished at BBC Films for some time. I think [Stephen Knight] actually wrote it before Dirty Pretty Things that he did for Stephen Frears, but that got made first. And as it is with a first draft, it can often go off in five different directions, but I think he was really eager to get back to it and have a chance to have a go at it again with someone who had an objective opinion. We made quite a few changes.

Was it easy to research the material or is that world kind of a closed shop?

DC: No not at all, I mean, people are eager to talk about their lives, you know? In this case it didn't seem to be enclosed at all. Not just in terms of the books that we read and the documentaries we looked at and so on, but we also had a crew of one hundred and fifty people who were all doing research on their own levels. The costume designer will be trying to find out what kind of shoes these people would wear and whoever is designing the restaurant will want to know what's on the walls and what coffee tables cost so there's a lot of details and for that they would go into the Russian community here and would go to the Russian churches, go to the community centres, wherever they could find people to talk to about those things. There was no resistance to it, I think people were pretty fascinated that we were doing a movie about Russians in London and were pretty eager to see that we got it right, in fact.

It was kind of nice to see different London locations onscreen. Was that simply because the script demanded it or did you want to shoot in those areas?

DC: Yeah I think it was because of Steve Knight's own sensibility and it came naturally with the script. If he had been a more conventional writer and the script had taken place in more conventional places then it might not have been as interesting a script for me but it all sort of went together. But he was interested in delving into these relatively unknown aspects of London.

I'd like ask you a little bit about the cast as well. Were you initially hesitant about casting Viggo Mortensen having just made a film with him as it would make comparisons between A History of Violence and Eastern Promises inevitable?

DC: No, I completely forget about that. I mean, I just don't worry about that at all. In many ways you can paralyse yourself as a filmmaker worrying about what people's expectations are and what they expect from you. I loved working with Viggo so I was very eager to work with him again, that was a positive. And the fact that it was another mobster movie was totally by circumstance. There were quite a few other possible film projects that kept floating by and I might well have done one of them if they had come together for various reasons and then we would be talking about that instead. So I wasn't really worried about A History of Violence.

If I felt that I was doing the same thing over again then yes that would be boring but creatively this was so different when you think of it. History is all about America, all the characters are American, its small town and rural America. A lot of it takes place in the sunshine. This is a big city; it's all Eastern Europeans, no Americans in the whole movie, more like a film noir because it's night in the city, so creatively completely different. And for Viggo too, I mean imagine the character, it's completely different.

So do you think it's just because it's you directing and him starring that people are talking about them as companion pieces?

DC: I can see analytically that there are comparisons to be made and quite nice ones. They would probably make a really interesting double bill. But creatively thinking about History of Violence wouldn't have helped, it's just so different visually and in every other way - even the soundtrack and the accents are completely different. It's quite legitimate to compare them but not part of the creative process for us when making the movie.

Another way that the films seem similar is in terms of the reality of the fight scenes.

DC: Well that's interesting. I was going to ask you a question about that but I won't.

You can if you want!

DC: Well no I was just thinking, because if it's something like the Bourne movies, they take a different approach to violence. It's far more impressionistic, the cutting is very quick, you don't really see what's going on and the body count is much higher in those movies but the emotional impact is much less because you don't have any investment in those characters usually. So it's not really a question.

That's fine! So what are you up to next?

DC: I'm doing an opera of the Fly.

Where is that going to be?

DC: It's going to premiere in Paris in July '08 and then it will go to LA for the LA Company as it's a co-production.

And how is that going?

DC: It's going well, I mean I spent five days in Paris just a couple of weeks ago, for the first time directing singers and that was very interesting - asking them sort of naive questions like can you sing while you are hanging upside down? Because I don't know! But it's been interesting.

And film-wise, do you think you'll ever return to the horror genre?

DC: It's quite possible I've never ruled that out. ExistenZ was only three movies ago. It's just a question of something that is really striking and unique and challenging. I wouldn't rule it out at all.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Interview: An Interview with Saw IV's Marcus Dunstan

Two years ago I was fortunate enough to meet Marcus Dunstan at the world premiere of his screenwriting debut, Feast (co-written with writing partner Patrick Melton). Since I don't have cable (swear to god), I had never seen the Project Greenlight that led up to this wonderfully post-modern cult masterpiece: this was my first exposure to both the guys and to the film.I've since run into Marcus at a couple of conventions and festivals and we've become friends. And since he and Patrick took on the duties of writing for the Saw series, I felt I should probably shoot him an email and ask him a few questions in honor of the release of Saw IV. He was kind enough to oblige.

Cargill: What was it that attracted you to the Saw material? What about it excited you? What couldn't you wait to play around with?

Marcus: The Saw films are like the Dr. Phibesfilms with Vincent Price re-imagined for the modern age. There is no safety. Good guys can lose; bad guys lose more; and the villain is several steps ahead of all of us. The whole series reminded me of a line Gene Hackman said in Heist. His character was asked roughly how he outsmarted people and his response is "I imagine someone smarter than me and then I ask him what he would do." That was pretty much the thought we pressed into our heads every step of the way on this one. It just had to push. It had to be rough and vital. Otherwise, we would be the kids that pissed in the pool. Nobody needs that. What couldn't we wait to play with? The dark side of poetic justice. The recklessness of anger. And, what would Jigsaw do to someone that hurt him deeply? That excited the hell out of us.

Cargill: Was it intimidating to pick up a series that was so far along and had already developed its mythology?

Marcus: YES! Friggin' scary as acne. However, that intimidation led to more focus and effort than we could ever imagine. We just didn't want to screw this up. This is a terrific series, one that has to earn its viewers time and time again with evolving dynamics and grounded storytelling. It is a machine set to "pain" and it just keeps chugging along.

Cargill: What is your favorite moment out of the series?

Marcus: I have one "fan" answer and one conceited answer. The fan answer is actually the moment in Saw III where Detective Mathews outsmarts the leg shackle by breaking his foot, jerking open the door and screaming for murder. I jerked back in my seat and nailed my head on the wall when it happened. I thought that concoction of horror, intelligence and thrill were all turned up to ten in that moment. Stellar.

The conceited answer is a moment in SAW IV. Darren took a really difficult scene involving a red tinted room and made it into a recruitment film for the dark side. It was the make it or break it moment for me as a viewer and when the audience started clapping last night after that scene went down...oh man...that felt GREAT!

Cargill: What was it that you didn't like or felt lacked in the previous three films that you wanted to improve upon here?

Marcus: I was thrilled we had a chance to bring a grisly "who dunnit" vibe back to the series. This is Agatha Christie on meth.

Cargill: What angle did you decide to take with this new film? Was there anything you took in a new direction (without spoiling anything of course)?

Marcus: We wanted to adrenalize the proceedings. By the fourth entry, in order to demand attention, the film must be as tough and strong as the first. A part II or a part III is no stranger to multiplexes, but a part IV? A good part IV? There just aren't that many I can name. With that in mind, Patrick and I went at this film like it was alone. It had to earn back every single person out there. It had to be as good on the second viewing as it was the first. It had to be made of steel. If last night's premiere was any indication...I can't wait for FRIDAY NIGHT!!

Cargill: What's the toughest part of writing a horror sequel?

Marcus: Honoring the opportunity with quality. No matter the budget. No matter the time crunch. I think if I am going to be associated with anything my parents or friends are going to be forced to sit through, it better be damn good. The one thing we don't get back is time. I don't dare want to waste anyone's time.

Cargill: Speaking of sequels, you're presently putting together Feast 2 and Feast 3. Anything you can tell us about that?

Marcus: I can tell you that Feast II: Sloppy Seconds begins shooting on Halloween day! It will be a blast! These suckers are going to be a frenzy of unrated mayhem. This is unfiltered Gulager-vision unleashed to terrorize the world! We were laughing so hard the other day at one of the painful moments that we had a lovely assortment of tears and fluids shooting from our noses. The Feast [films] will be 100% unredeemable shock-o-rama!

Cargill: I was fortunate enough to see the test footage for your upcoming directorial debut Midnight Man. What can you tell us about that?

Marcus: Thank you! I hope to be shooting The Midnight Man for Dimension this February but... I will believe it when I am whispering "action."

Saw IV opens this Friday. Like I had to tell you that.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Interview: BradBird Takes RT Through Ratatouille

Ratatouille is one of the freshest wide releases of the year. Critics love it, audiences love it, everyone in the RT office loves it too. This is a familiar feeling for Brad Bird, whose previous success, The Incredibles wowed audiences worldwide, and for Pixar who've been Certified Fresh on every film since their feature film debut with Toy Story in 1995. With the recent UK cinema release and the upcoming US DVD release of Ratatouille, we caught up with Bird to find out where the story began for him.

Take us back to the beginning, how did you come on board Ratatouille? It wasn't your project initially, was it?

Brad Bird: No it was an idea that was conceived by Jan Pinkava and he was working on it when I first came up to Pixar in 2000 to do The Incredibles. So I was aware of the film and always loved the idea but it was a very difficult story to kind-of describe in a sentence or two. It's not like "Pixar Goes Underwater" or "Pixar Does Superheroes," it's a much weirder idea.

So it was challenging to pull it together and a little over a year and a half ago the founders of Pixar, John Lasseter, Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull, asked me to come onboard and help solidify the story because the story was elusive. I wrote a new script and took it through production. So my time on the film was relatively short and, in animation terms, quick.

What was there initially that you wanted to keep and what did you feel needed to change?

BB: I thought the initial concept of a rat who wants to cook was always an idea that was full of possibilities. I think the Cyrano de Bergerac relationship between Remy and Linguini was always appealing to me; it was funny and the possibility for physical comedy was great. I think that the challenge was to get all the storylines supporting the key relationship in the film which was between the rat and the garbage boy. So I had to lose some of the other characters - I killed Gusteau off and made him part of Remy's imagination. Colette was a minor character; I made her a major character. I made the rats rattier, I minimised the family storyline, separated Remy from the family for a chunk of the film which made the relationship with Linguini able to grow. I had Remy actually join Linguini and have him share the apartment with him, almost like The Odd Couple. The legal relationship between Linguini and Gusteau wasn't in there.

So it was a lot of things and I just had to find the right mix.

 

If you're going to come onboard a project late, is Pixar the place to do it?

BB: It's a great team and if you're clear about what you want they can get it for you just like that. But you have to be very clear, and very specific. I had to make a lot of decisions very quickly and then stick with them because the time for going "maybe this, maybe that" had all been used up by the time I got involved.

It's known as being a very high-tech company but I think that in many respects it's Pixar's embrace of old-fashioned notions of not focus-grouping ideas but just going with your gut, people following their instincts, simply saying, What kind of movie would we like to see, and making that, which make it such a great place to work. Also their message that it's not about the technology, those kinds of ideas and the focus on characters, is what makes the place so special. And the fact that filmmakers are in charge of the projects.

What's next for you?

BB: I was starting to work on a live action film a couple of years before I came on board Ratatouille so I'm going to return to that and I'm quite excited by that idea. I don't want to tell you too much about just yet, I'm not really ready for that, but it's a historical-based thing and I think it's going to be pretty wild.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Interview: Thomas Sangster chats The Last Legion

Despite his tender age, 17-year old Thomas Sangster has already appeared along side some of the biggest names in the business. He's worked with Liam Neeson in Love, Actually, Emma Thompson in Nanny McPhee, David Tennant in critically acclaimed episodes of Doctor Who, and now he's set to star opposite Sir Ben Kingsley and Colin Firth in The Last Legion. He plays Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of Rome, who must go in hiding when barbarians invade the empire.

What was interested you in The Last Legion in the first place?

Thomas Sangster: I think the fact I hadn't done anything like that before, it was an epic, there were Romans involved! I did the Romans at school and I think they're considered quite cool! And because of the action as well, that was really fun.

It was also really good to do because it was filmed in Tunisia and Slovakia, and it was amazing there. It was quite a culture shock actually because it went from 50 Celsius in Tunisia and we literally got in a plane and got of in Slovakia and it was freezing cold, it was very odd.

You did Tristan and Isolde as well; do you enjoy doing these big historical epic films?

TS: They are good fun, just because I haven't done much of them before, it's something different for me, and if any more come up I'll definitely do them... I got to do a little bit of sword fighting as well which was good but I wanted to do more!

This was your third film with Colin Firth, do you like working with him?

TS: He's a great guy actually... We've actually got a really good relationship, it's a bit strange, and after each film we're like "see you in the next one!"

You also share a lot of screen time with Sir Ben Kinsley -- what's he like, and does he make you call him sir?

TS: It was great to work with Sir Ben Kingsley, I mean, he is who he is, a great actor. He didn't make me call him Sir Ben but I did anyway!

So what's it like being at school and having to act as well?

TS: It can be a bit difficult just because even when you do school work on a film set you can't give it your full attention because you're in a completely different place, you know you're off playing Caesar and then you need to come in and do maths work -- its a bit crazy.

What have you got coming up in the future?

TS: At the end of the month I'm going to Italy to do a film version of Pinocchio which is great and it sounds quite fun although I haven't read the script yet! And I've got a few other things on the horizon and some possibilities next year as well...

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Interview: Michael Clayton Director Tony Gilroy

After beginning with The Cutting Edge in 1992, Tony Gilroy has built a career on writing dramas (Extreme Measures), thrillers (Dolores Claiborne), blockbusters (Armageddon), and some films that combine all of the above into one (the Bourne trilogy). Gilroy makes his directorial debut with Michael Clayton, starring Sydney Pollack, Tom Wilkinson, and George Clooney as the titular character, a washed-up legal consultant embroiled in murder, cover-ups, and deadly intrigue. Michael Clayton had its North American debut to a receptive audience during the Toronto Film Fest, and has since attained Certified Fresh status in limited release. It expands to theaters everywhere today. Rotten Tomatoes caught up with Gilroy in San Francisco at the tail end of his promotional tour to discuss final cut, film criticism, and his role on a certain Michael Bay production.

Rotten Tomatoes: George Clooney's clout got you final cut on Michael Clayton. How often does that happen?

Tony Gilroy: Very difficult, almost impossible. For me to get final cut on the first picture is unheard of. I doubt I'll get it again for the next picture.

RT: Who came aboard first during Michael Clayton's casting process?

TG: George. I needed to have that piece first. Once I had George though, I could cast whoever I want. I didn't have to cast for part sales; I didn't have to cast for studio. I always knew that I needed a movie star to work for free. That was the only way this movie was going to get made. Once I had George, I was totally protected.

RT: Sydney Pollack had expressed interest in directing Michael Clayton. Did it take convincing that this was going to be your project?

TG: It wasn't like Rocky where someone's floating four million dollars in the back of your house going, "Take the money!" I had to go to my wife, saying, "Oh, my God, what should I do?" Everyone pretty much understood. Sydney and [his production company] Mirage has such a great track record of working with first-time directors with the movies that they produce. He got it right away.

RT: Was your plan always to write screenplays and then get into directing?

TG: No. I prided myself [on screenwriting] sort of foolishly for a while. Like, "I'm going to be a writer, I'm going to be an A-list screenwriter, I'm going to be pure and that's going to be my gig."

RT: When did the shift in attitude happen?

TG: About 10 years ago, the frustration really started to kick in. No one should feel sorry for a successful screenwriter. [But] I don't know any screenwriter -- anywhere, at any level -- who hasn't been frustrated.

RT: Was there a particular movie where, at that moment, you felt you had observed enough and were ready to direct?

TG: God, if I were smart, I probably would've done it a long time ago. What you can know, what you need to know to direct a movie is [of] such great variety. I've worked with people who were maestros, who know everything. I've worked with people who were empty and lost, who had no clue what they were doing. You wouldn't hire them to paint your apartment. And then there's everything in-between. There's no list of skills you have to have to sit in that chair.

RT: Your father was also a screenwriter and director. Was there encouragement from him to get into movies?

TG: He moved us away from Hollywood when I was in kindergarten. So when I was five we moved out of California to upstate New York. One of his primary reasons was that he was coming back to work on the theater, but, really, he didn't want us to grow up out there. It wasn't like he put up a barb wire, but he really didn't want us to be involved in that. So we were not encouraged. We weren't discouraged. It was like living over the factory: it was around us all the time, but it wasn't something we were ever encouraged to do.

RT: Was he helpful when you did express interest in becoming a screenwriter?

TG: Yeah. I mean, I've been listening to him talk about stories my whole life. [But] no one can help you write. No one can teach you how to write. We talk about all this stuff as if it's a mechanical thing. Really, what this is all about is making s--- up. It's all about imagination. You can't teach someone to be imaginative. That's one of the things that bothers me the most if you're talking about screenwriting: the "craft" of screening and the "mechanics" of screenwriting. In the end, it's about making things up. You cannot invest [for someone else to have] imagination.

The big advantage of having a father who's a writer is [that] you learn what a writer's life looks like. You learn what a director's life looks like. How the days run. The trials, the disappointments. How you get paid. How you don't get paid. How people screw you, how you get over it. That's the really valuable part you have a leg up on. When you start to live the life, you go, "This feels familiar."

RT: Your brothers have also gone into film in various capacities. How did that come about?

TG: I don't know. Is there a genetic component? Is it being around [my father]? I'm raising two children now [and] you sort of watch them. [So] I don't have an answer to that. But it is. That's what it is.

RT: This being your first directed film, are you following criticism of Michael Clayton more closely than you normally would? Do you usually read reviews?

TG: Yeah. Hell, yeah. I remember getting reviews for The Cutting Edge. First time I ever got them they sent me several clips...they sent me a box of stuff. You know, every paper [out there]. There were a lot more reviewers than there are now. Every local paper had their own [reviewer], there was much less wire. Everyone still had their jobs. I remember going though and it was one terrible review after another. And I'm like, "Oh, my God." This huge stack of bad, bad, bad. A fifth of the way through the stack and they were all bad and I was like, "I can't go on." So I flipped to the end and it was a great one. I realized they had put the bad ones on top. [laughs]

RT: The Cutting Edge is one of those movies that keeps on attracting a strong cult audience.

TG: You know, I keep getting checks. They keep re-issuing it.

RT: Do you plan on directing exclusively from now on?

TG: I wouldn't say that. I'm trying to direct again. It would be from a script of mime. I've written for other people since we finished the film. We finished the film a while ago, waiting for a release. We had to wait after The Good German, and we had to wait after Ocean's [Thirteen]. I've done a studio rewrite, I've written for a director, and I've written for myself since then. I can't imagine directing from someone else's script. That's the only sort of equation that's the hardest for me to imagine.

RT: Why's that?

TG: I don't know if I want to live in someone else's head for two years. If I was going to go through the trouble of [directing a script], I'd want to do my own. I think. I reserve the right to change my mind.

RT: What studio rewrites have you done since Michael Clayton?

TG: You know, they're production work, so I don't really want to talk about it. I finally got IMDb to pull down [some of] that stuff. That kind of work shouldn't be public. You're coming in to fix some stuff. I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting. [The credits that appear in the movie] are the credits and you live by them. That's fair play.

RT: Armageddon is an odd credit to have on your resume.

TG: [laughs] Yeah. There were so many people working on that. I don't know what number writer I was. I worked on it for a couple months. I did exactly what I wanted to do. I got in, I did what I had to do, made some people happy, I got out. Let's just leave it at that.

Michael Clayton expands into theaters everywhere today.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com