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When Life Imitates Art: Matt Johnson on ‘BlackBerry’

12 Friday May 2023

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Jay Baruchel and Matt Johnson in Blackberry

In a way, BlackBerry, SFFILM’s Sloan Science on Screen Award recipient that screened at the Festival on Monday, Apr. 17, began with DIY woodworking videos on YouTube. Producer Niv Fichman (The Saddest Music in the World, Antiviral) approached Operation Avalanche writer/director Matt Johnson and writer/producer Matthew Miller with the proposal that they adapt the book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story of the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, about the once popular precursor to modern smartphones. Finding those videos turned out to be key to cracking the story.

The story behind the making of BlackBerry

The book by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff spun the tale of Research In Motion (RIM), the Waterloo, Ontario, company that invented the BlackBerry through the eyes of its two CEOS, tech geek Mike Lazaridis and hard-charging businessman Jim Balsillie. What Toronto native Johnson wanted to find were opinions of people who had worked at RIM. His brother-in-law is an engineer and through him, he learned of the connection between that profession and DIY projects, leading Johnson to scour YouTube until he struck gold when he discovered that one of BlackBerry’s original engineers later started his own woodworking company, posting videos about his projects. Johnson reached out and managed to overcome the man’s initial reticence.

“He really opened up from his perspective as just an engineer on the ground,” Johnson said during a phone call in the days leading up to the Festival. “He told us everything that was happening in the day to day. That’s when it clicked with us that this company, yes, is an engineering firm. But to us, it’s a lot like what it’s like to start a filmmaking career. You’re working with your friends, you’re working all day, and it’s fun. You don’t go to work for the money. The camaraderie is more important than either the product or the compensation.

“That’s when it really took off. We came up with this structure, a story about a kind of exciting startup culture that gets transformed through success into a corporate culture. That is when, all of a sudden, we knew what the characters needed to be and we were able to dig into all of our research from that angle. So that was a real lightning moment for us.”

Fichman originally hired Johnson and Miller merely to write the script, but as the pair threw themselves into the work, it became apparent that they wanted to tell the story themselves. Miller became a producer. BlackBerry became Johnson’s first feature since Operation Avalanche and he took on the role of Doug, Lazaridis’ closest collaborator at the beginning and the company’s amiable and goofy conscience.

“Basically, as soon as I realized this was an opportunity to tell the story of my own life, I thought, ‘Well, it wouldn’t be right to write it and put it in somebody else’s hands,’” Johnson said. “It wasn’t that I wanted to do it so badly, but because I thought, ‘Well, what we’re writing is really not going to be manageable by somebody who hasn’t exactly lived through it in the same way. Niv agreed one to one. He was an amazing partner.”

Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie in BlackBerry

The Trotsky’s Jay Baruchel came aboard to play the silver-haired Lazaridis, a man perhaps too invested in his company’s product, while It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton is the id of the piece as the energetic, crude, take-no-prisoners Balsillie. BlackBerry represents another step in the evolution of Johnson’s career, after making his 2013 feature debut with the ultra-low-budget, Slamdance award winner The Dirties, followed by Operation Avalanche in 2016, in which film geeks working for the CIA during the Cold War get involved with shenanigans involving the space race and Stanley Kubrick–and a film in which Johnson and his crew managed to invade NASA.

What was it like to work on BlackBerry?

“By American standards, BlackBerry’s budget is quite small, 8½ million Canadian,” Johnson said. For me, it meant that all of the sudden I was working with the actors’ union, all of the sudden we were working with a crew of 40+ people and the marshaling and coaching that went on. It was so funny how life imitated art, trying to maintain the ethos of that early Research in Motion. We’re all doing this for the fun energy while knowing not only the stakes but also that there were way more people involved. I like to hope that some of that energy remains on the screen. That was, by far, the hardest part of the process.

“You may notice that we tried to shoot as much in the real world as we could,” he added. “A lot of the actors aren’t really actors. A lot of them are real people, all those engineers I’m surrounded by are all very young filmmakers from Toronto, who have no background in acting but have a certain vitality, a certain life. And we shot in all the real places Research in Motion actually was. We shot in Waterloo in a lot of the real factories. The kind of stuff was important. We didn’t necessarily break in to as many places as we did on my last film but certainly authenticity was important.”

What does Johnson make of the rise and fall of BlackBerry?

The story of BlackBerry reads like an Icarus tale, a company that flew too high and crashed and burned, as much a victim of corporate hubris as the invention of the iPhone, the product that slew BlackBerry with its more advanced features and sleek style. But Johnson sees another reason for the fall of Research In Motion and its phone.

Jay Baruchel as Michael Lazaridis in BlackBerry

“I think Michael Lazaridis really had a bit of falling love with his own product, to the point of obsession,” he said. “I think what the film highlights in its own small way is a kind of – I don’t want to say arrogance–but there is that myth of the man who makes a statue of a woman and he makes it so perfect, so beautiful, that he falls in love with it. It was like that with Mike, so that when all of a sudden there was another device that did things almost the exact opposite of what his did, his pride and love for his own creation made him completely blind to the positives of what the smartphone was going to become. He fell so in love with what he’d done that he was blinded by possible improvements, because he thought, ‘Well, this could never be better.’” —Pam Gradt

Thanks to SFFILM for allowing me to reprint this interview from https://sffilm.org/blog/

Bert Stern Recalls A SUMMER’S DAY

12 Wednesday Aug 2020

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Dinah WashingtonNote: This interview was conducted in June 2000 and originally appeared on Reel.com. Then the interview ran in conjunction with the DVD release of Jazz on a Summer’s Day. Twenty years later, it is running as the 4K restoration of the 1959 documentary opens in virtual cinemas.   

In a career that spans nearly 50 years and is still going strong, Bert Stern has racked up quite a resume as a still photographer and director of commercials. He photographed Marilyn Monroe and designed the infamous, heart-shaped sunglasses poster for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita. In 1958, Stern took a break from photography and shot his only film, Jazz on a Summer’s Day, a breathtaking, tune-filled documentary on that year’s Newport music festival. With the film recently released on an eye-popping DVD by New Yorker Films, Stern took some time from his busy schedule to chat with Reel.com about his acclaimed detour into filmmaking and why he only made the one picture.

Q: The liner notes interview from Jazz on a Summer’s Day states that the film is less of a documentary than a happening. Is that how you perceived the project going in and why?

Bert Stern: I think it is more of a music film and a happening. In fact, it was an event, which was the Newport Jazz Festival. It was just an opportunity to make a movie out of a musical event, which is what intrigued me, plus the fact that jazz took place in Newport, which seemed unusual.

Q: Why did that seem unusual to you?

Bert Stern: Because I always associated jazz with the South — [music] for poor people, you might say, and Newport with the North and rich people. And at that time, it seemed strange to me that the South and North would be together. It doesn’t seem strange anymore, but, at that time, it was strange.

 Q: Jazz on a Summer’s Day benefits not just from having the eye of a great photographer, but also that gorgeous film stock. What went into your decision to shoot color rather than the more documentary-standard black-and-white of the era?

Bert Stern: Well, it was 35mm Eastman color negative. I think basically when I had the idea, I kind of envisioned green grass and sunny days and stuff. It was an outdoor festival. I always thought Newport as being a beautiful, rich place. I didn’t think of it in black and white at all. Also, most of my photographs are in color.

Q: You’ve also said that when you think of jazz documentaries, you tend to think of them as being more downbeat than your film. Did that go into your decision to shoot in color as well? Did you want to bring jazz out into the light?

Bert Stern: Well, you might say that. I like to think that most of the movies that are made about jazz or music were black-and-white and downstairs in little rooms, and I thought that was somewhat depressing. Whereas music should be uplifting.

Q: You originally envisioned this as a short. When did you realize that you had a feature film on your hands?

Bert Stern: I think that when we started to plan it, I said maybe I could put a story to it and make a full-length feature.

Q: And then the story ended up?

Bert Stern: On the cutting-room floor.

Q: You were a photographer but you had served in the motion picture unit in the Army. When you decided to make the film, what kind of tests did you do prior to actually shooting the film to re-familiarize yourself with cinematography, or did you just go on the fly?

Bert Stern: Just went on the fly. I did news photography for the Army in Japan and I was familiar with movie cameras from that.

Q: You did adapt telephoto lenses for the cameras that you used.

Bert Stern: I adapted a long lens which I use a lot in my still work and put it on an Arriflex, which gave me a chance to shoot all the close-ups because we weren’t allowed on the stage.

Q: You had five cameras on the shoot, how did you decide who would shoot what?

Bert Stern: We didn’t have five all the time. But basically, long shot, medium shot, close-up and two medium shots, made one on each side.

Q: Did you plan in advance who was doing what?

BS: No, we just had — like I was the close-up camera looking towards the stage on the left which is most of the close-ups in the movie. So that was my camera. But we had a long one in the back and we had two other people roaming around on the right and center below.

Q: Some of the most stunning footage in the film is the aerial footage from the America’s Cup races. Did you always have it in mind to shoot those races or was that something that you came up with after you arrived in Newport?

Bert Stern: I think it came up after I arrived in Newport. When I got a feeling of what was going on in the area, it seemed to add dimension to the idea; instead of just shooting people playing musical instruments, to bring in the things that were happening around the event. The birds, the boats, children, all kinds of things. I guess that came out of shooting the music. The first thing I shot was Jimmy Giuffre, which is the opening of the movie. And first I put the camera on and just listened to him. I just pictured the seagulls flying around, which led me to shoot the next morning out at the dock. But there were no seagulls, so I shot reflections on the water and put that to his music.

 Q: I know you shot the party sequence later on Long Island. There are also cutaways to a Dixieland band driving through town and playing at what looks like an amusement park and also on the beach. Was that all staged as well and if so, why did you chose those particular images?

Bert Stern: The band in the car was a group that came to town on their own and we just asked if we could shoot them. So, we just followed them around a bit when we weren’t shooting the festival. The kids on the merry-go-round were kids on a merry-go-round but the footage of the party on the roof was done afterwards because we needed a little bit more cutaways and we set that up in Long Island in a similar-looking area.

Q: [Music supervisor] George Avakian determined who you would shoot on the basis of what music you knew you would be able to clear later on?

Bert Stern: Right.

Q: There were people you didn’t shoot at the festival, like Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and Ray Charles, I guess because you couldn’t get the permissions to use their music. Do you regret not getting some of them on film?

Newport

Bert Stern: Probably. I’ve never been a big Duke Ellington fan so I was very happy with Louis Armstrong. I think basically, I had to choose between the two of them. Didn’t have enough budget to afford both. And Coltrane I wasn’t aware of at the time.

Q: How did you finance the film?

Bert Stern: By shooting photographs during the week.

Q: So, this was totally, totally self-financed?

Bert Stern: Well, not just totally self-financed. There was a little money here and there that was raised and finally to finish the film, we met a man named Milton Gordon, who became the distributor and who put up the final amount that we needed to pay Louis Armstrong and finish the film. The budget was, I think, the total cost of the film was $215,000.

Q: I know your relationship with the Avakian brothers was somewhat contentious. What was it like editing with Aram Avakian? And prior to going into editing, did you have a game plan going in or was editing more or less improvisational?

Bert Stern: Aram is a great editor and is the brother of George, of course. I think Aram is a different kind of filmmaker and he kind of objected that I was so improvisational. He was much more structured in the way he went about making films, and many times I had to tell him I didn’t want to do the kind of cutting he was normally accustomed to and to leave it alone. So, it was my decision finally to decide what to do. But he was a wonderful editor, and it was very hard putting all that footage together. I think it took him at least six months. It was a very difficult task since it was before video tape and everything.

Q: You’ve never made another film after this film. Did you decide you couldn’t be both a still photographer and a filmmaker?

Bert Stern: Pretty much. But I did do some Twiggy specials in 1967 when she came to America. I did three specials for ABC and I did a lot of commercials, of course. But I never decided to give up still photography and just make movies, because that is what it would take.

Monk

Q: Have you ever had any regrets that you didn’t make more movies?

Bert Stern: No, I think I would have been a good filmmaker, but that would have been my career instead of still photography.

Q: You are probably most famous for your wonderful portraits of Marilyn Monroe and you’ve also had great successes as a still photographer, a commercial director, and you made the one film. What do you regard as your greatest achievement?

Bert Stern: Surviving. I guess. Photography. I think there is something very Americana about my photography that I like. I am very much an American kind of photographer.

Q: Is that what you would like to be remembered for?

Bert Stern: I don’t know. The Marilyn pictures I like. I like my pictures so I don’t know — I guess I will be remembered for them because you can look at them. There is something nice about a photograph because you can have it around all the time. A movie you have to project and sit down and watch for an hour and a half.

Q: What do you remember at this point? It has been over 40 years since that jazz festival. What do you remember most about it now?

BS: About the jazz festival?

Q: Yes, and about making the film. What stands out in your mind more than anything else?

Bert Stern: That is hard to say. I guess just the idea of being there and being able to capture that kind of material on film and a group of people that weren’t usually together. There are very few times that there were so many musical stars at a festival. That was probably the only time. I just liked the idea and I liked doing it. –Pam Grady

Jazz on a Summer’s Day opens virtually at CinemaSF and BAMPFA on Aug. 12 and the Roxie Theater on Aug. 14.

 

Q&A: AERONAUTS’ director Tom Harper on his high-flying adventure

06 Friday Dec 2019

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Aeronauts

Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon
We could float among the stars together, you and I
For we can fly, we can fly – Jimmy Webb, “Up, Up and Away”

Three years after the release of his acclaimed miniseries adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace and after pausing to make the Glasgow-Nashville-set contemporary drama Wild Rose, director Tom Harper returns to the 19th century with The Aeronauts. Combining fact and fiction, the story by Harper and screenwriter Jack Thorne, spins the tale of pioneering meteorologist James Glaisher and balloon pilot Amelia Wren as they take vertiginous flight in the name of science. Glaisher is obsessed with weather. To find the answers he needs takes death-defying feats of derring-do.

The Aeronauts reunites The Theory of Everything stars Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones as Glaisher and Wren, depositing the actors in a real-life replica of a 19th-century gas balloon as Harper filmed scenes as often as possible in the open air to an altitude of 3,000 feet.

On a visit to San Francisco recently to accept SFFILM’s Sloan Science in Cinema Prize on behalf of The Aeronauts and screen the film, Harper, 39, sat down with Cinezinekane to chat about his high-flying achievement.

Q: In this age of CGI, you insisted on building and flying a real balloon.

Tom Harper: We wanted it to feel as real as possible. So much of the jeopardy and the thrills come from experiencing or kind of feeling what it’s like for those characters. And I think that you can just tell the difference if you’ve done some of it for real. We’re now living in a day and age where you can create visuals in CGI that are almost impossible, if at all possible, to tell the difference. But there are other factors as well.

For example, you can shoot something that’s completely photorealistic and believable, but if the camera’s moving around the balloon and the crane, in your subconscious you’re going, ‘That it’s not possible.’ We went up in a balloon and we filmed for real and we saw some, you know, parachuters and, and actually, it’s all of the imperfections that make something believable. And that’s actually the thing that I’m most interested in in filmmaking, the imperfections. Humans are these wonderful, fallible imperfect beings.

Q: You’ve made an action adventure movie about weather. Saying it out loud sounds so daft.

Tom Harper: (laughs) I mean, it’s not the most glamorous of interests, admittedly. But James Glaisher talks about trying to understand the things that you can’t control. There is something so big involved about the weather and our atmosphere, that it is sort of unknowable.

And 170 years ago, it was thought that it would be impossible to predict the weather. Admittedly, we still have a way to go, but we’ve come an incredible way. And I like the idea that what we think is impossible now, in a hundred years will be considered commonplace. There’s something wonderful about that, and it sort of challenges us to think beyond the outer limits.

Q: James Glaisher was a real person, a pioneering aeronaut and meteorologist. Amelia Wren is a fictional character. In fictionalizing his story, you could have followed many different avenues, what led you and screenwriter Jack Thorne to Amelia?

Tom Harper: With Amelia, not only do you have that dynamic of male, female, but she is such a show person. Amelia is based on (19th-century aeronaut) Sophie Blanchard. She was a flamboyant firecracker, a woman who was an acrobat and who shot off fireworks from her basket.

We thought putting someone like Sophie in the basket with James, who’s a meticulous, methodical scientist would be a really interesting combination of characters. The main thing was OK, if you’re gonna spend 90 minutes in that basket, who are the most interesting characters to put there?

Also, there is a gender bias in science, and certain there is in film, where there aren’t enough strong female characters. So, that there was this historical woman to draw from was a wonderful thing and something we embraced wholeheartedly.

Q: In casting Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, they have great chemistry and that is enhanced by that sense memory of the two of them together in The Theory of Everything.

Tom Harper: They are great friends and they do have this great chemistry, but they also trust each other and they dare each other to take risks. I think the reason that they’re so good together is because they push each other and they have great working relationship.  And that’s reflected in the relationship that eventually evolves between the two of them in the balloon as they start out as these antagonists that are stuck in this basket together. Because of the things that happen, they have to learn how to rely and trust each other or they’re just not going to survive.

Q: And you and Eddie went through hypoxia training so that he would know what it was actually like to be deprived of oxygen?

Tom Harper:  We did, yes. And Eddie was very keen to (do it), so that he could draw from those experiences and deliver the best performance. We went to a Ministry of Defense base in in the UK and they put us in a decompression chamber and they took us up to the equivalent of 25,000 feet. They take you out, they break off oxygen, and you basically suffocate while you starve yourself of oxygen. That has a very interesting physiological effect on you. And, actually, everyone responds differently. It can lead actually to a sort of euphoria and sort of a fervid quality or you start losing your memory; all sorts of strange things can start happening to you. I just felt very sick and then, of course, forgot everything. Eddie, on the other hand, became fervid and passionate and started reciting lines from the film. He was generally very cool. I was less so.

Q: You spent a lot of time up in balloons preparing to make The Aeronauts. You built and filmed your own balloon and found drama in that tiny basket high up in the air. Has all that experience translated into a lasting addiction to ballooning?

Tom Harper: I hope so. I loved it. There is something majestic and wonderful about it. I would like to get my piloting license, I have to say. You need to be very flexible with ballooning. because it depends on the weather. So, I think it’s like the perfect retirement thing, because you have to drop out, you know, when the weather is right. You just have to drop everything and go.

Q: So, Around the World in 80 Days’ Phineas Fogg, he’s your spirit animal.

Tom Harper: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. –Pam Grady

Director Alma Har’el helps Shia LaBeouf find catharsis in HONEY BOY

25 Monday Nov 2019

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HONEY BOYShia LaBeouf came into the Sundance Film Festival last year a scandal-plagued actor with something to prove. The former child star and one time face of the Transformers franchise announced a career rebirth with Honey Boy, an autobiographical drama he not only stars in but wrote.

LaBeouf’s Israeli director, Alma Har’el had something to prove, as well, a documentary filmmaker making her first feature. Honey Boy premiered to glowing reviews and Har’el came away with a special jury prize for “vision and craft.” But, as she explained nearly a year later in introducing the film to a Toronto Film Festival audience, she took something else from Sundance.

“I realized how many people… have parents or childhood trauma or relationships that they have to forgive in order to move on,” Har’el said, going on to note that the film addresses the inherited, generational pain that so many people carry.

That generational pain Har’el speaks of is all on screen in Honey Boy. English actor Noah Jupe plays 12-year-old Otis Lort, a rising child actor not unlike LaBeouf 20 years ago. LaBeouf plays James, a version of his real-life father, a clown (literally, as LaBeouf’s dad was), alcoholic, and abusive ne’er-do-well living off his child and cultivating hopeless get-rich-quick schemes.

Like LaBeouf, Otis grows up to be an action star—now played by Lucas Hedges. Real life and reel life intersect when the troubled young actor is arrested and sentenced to rehab. In truth, LaBeouf’s journey to Honey Boy arose out of a 2017 incident when he was in Savannah, Georgia, making Peanut Butter Falcon. Arrested for disorderly conduct and public drunkenness in an expletive-laced incident caught on tape, LaBeouf was sentenced to rehab. His screenplay for Honey Boy began as part of his therapy as he dealt with his own alcohol issues and a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) arising from his childhood.

“It was a really big and deep long process that led to this film,” says Har’el during a visit to the Bay Area where Honey Boy screened at the Mill Valley Film Festival. “When we finished it, I feel Shia got to exorcise all of the anger he had.”

There is an odd sense of destiny that hangs over Honey Boy, a series of steps without which the film might never have been made. There is the public humiliation of LaBeouf’s arrest and court-ordered rehab, of course, but it was to Har’el that LaBeouf sent his pages, a short film set in a hotel room. It was she who suggested he expand the story and include the adult Otis. She collaborated with him through what she estimates is 80 to 90 drafts leading to the final script.

Har’el was essential to LaBeouf getting his story out there and that only happens because of the fan letter that led to their meeting. Blown away by Bombay Beach, Har’el’s award-winning 2011 documentary focused on residents of an impoverished Salton Sea community, he emailed her, leading to a dinner where they discovered they were both the children of alcoholics. A bond formed, growing tighter when he starred in her video for Sigur Rós’ “Fjögur pianó” video and then financed and executive produced her 2016 feature documentary LoveTrue. By the time, he was in rehab, LeBeouf and Har’el were close friends, so much so that she was able to convince him to overcome his qualms about playing his father.

“I think I had to just make sure that he felt safe and that he can trust me, which was something that was inherent to our relationship already,” says Har’el “The lethal combination of PTSD and alcoholism is just so real. It’s a real dive.

“So yeah, it was, it was a hard decision to make (for LaBeouf to play the role), but it was as an extremely organic continuation of the work we did. And I remember calling him and saying, ‘When you think about it, it’s exactly what we did in LoveTrue… That film was people playing with their younger selves and we had a therapist on set. It was like psychodrama… having people go into their trauma or their fears or their memories and sit next to their younger self and talk to them.”

LaBeouf’s last step before embarking on the role was to visit his father. He returned from that meeting with a sense of purpose, determined to challenge himself artistically. Meanwhile, Har’el remained mindful that the role her friend was about to embark on was a potential minefield for his mental health.

“I spoke to his therapist from the court-ordered rehab facility and she knew about everything we were doing,” Har’el says. “I tried to educate myself a lot about what is PTSD.

“She warned me about a lot of things that I should be aware of with Shia playing his father and taking on the person that has been the most abusive to him in his life. It was a learning curve for all of us.”

Perhaps, what is most surprising about Honey Boy is its lack of judgment and bitterness. LaBeouf inherited a terrible legacy from his father, but what is reflected on screen is compassion. James Lort is most certainly not a nice guy and what young Otis witnesses and experiences is disturbing. Yet, James is not portrayed simply as an abusive villain but as a troubled man beset by his own demons.

“You have to develop a sort of empathy to the person that has caused you pain,” Har’el says. “And you have to play out who he was and then you get to see what you inherited, because some of that anger and those behaviors do become yours even if they come out only when you’re triggered or they come out only when you’re put in a certain situation. That’s the tools you’ve had, that you’ve been given.

“You know, we see a lot of movies that are cathartic, but, but it’s still acting. But this was a real catharsis. Bizarrely, this was real, you know, this was a real person at a junction in his life where he thought that he’s never going to act again and was given the opportunity to act again, but only if he can connect to his father who caused him pain.”—Pam Grady

TIFF Q&A: Takashi Miike recalls FIRST LOVE

17 Thursday Oct 2019

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firstlove_0HEROThe meeting with Japan’s great auteur Takashi Miike takes place in the conference room of a Marriott Residence Inn in Toronto where Miike has come to screen his latest genre exercise, First Love, as the Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness program. The bland anonymity of the space is at odds with the man who makes a vibrant entrance in a ruched leather coat, beaded bracelets on both wrists. At 59, Miike describes himself as an “elderly” man, but the spring in his step, the fashion-forward duds, and First Love belie that assertion.

Miike’s 103rd IMDB entry, prodigious output dating back to 1991, is a mashup of sorts, blending yakuza, romance, black comedy, and even, in one arresting sequence, anime. A kind of riff on the Quentin Tarantino co-scripted True Romance, First Love spins the  action-packed tale of a drug deal and heist that comes to involve yakuza, Chinese triads, and a corrupt cop and pulls into its orbit a young woman coerced into prostitution and a boxer living under the cloud of a terminal diagnosis. For the latter, the meet is anything but cute as they are forced to flee for their lives.

For the maker of Audition, Ichi the Killer, and more recently, Blade of the Immortal, First Love was in some ways, just another day at the office. But in others, as Miike explains through an interpreter in this conversation, it was a trip back to his old neighborhood, a return to a favorite genre in the film’s yakuza elements, and a reckoning with the realities of the Japanese film industry and his own limited budgets.

Q: You have said that, “This film gives me joy like returning to my home ground.” Can you expand on that?

A: I grew up in a place that was very rough and tumble. There were a lot of rough characters. There was a lot of misery, a lot of poverty going on. There were some opposing forces of pride and love and resentment and hope. In this film, those same elements exist and a lot of people lose their lives. What I mean when I say this film is like going back to my hometown is that even in circumstances that are that dire, two humans can meet and escape together and find this love story, this profound love story. That’s something that I think unites us as humanity, that we have this strength that we can draw from, that even in those situations, we can find something good and find something positive from it.

Q: Do you see your story as a fairy tale? One of the things that struck me about the film is that there are these two innocents caught up in this world of violence and poverty, yet they are somehow able to transcend that.

A: I agree with you and I think the reason it became the movie it did become is because you have these fairytale-esque elements in there; you have these themes, also, that are almost too beautiful to express. It’s almost difficult for a shy Japanese person to express this beautiful love story and yell-at-the-top-of-the-mountains-type thing. We have to find a more subtle way to express that. As humans, we have these things we’re trying to hide. We have our own skeletons in the closet. But we have to believe there’s a reason why we’re here. There’s a reason why we were born and there’s a reason for us living. Maybe that reason does exist and maybe it doesn’t exist—it’s hard to say for sure—but we have to believe that there’s something like that that’s moving us forward. Once you start talking about those kinds of themes, you’ve already gone into the fantasy realm. You’re talking about hate and resentment versus love and hope and all these ideal values, they’re pushing up against each other. That leads you to this story, this fantastic love story. By going through this yakuza theme or motif, I felt that would give us a very interesting background that would allow me to express a very beautiful love story.

Q: Expanding on that, yakuza stories are ones you’ve returned to again and again in your work. What is their appeal to you?

A: I think what is attractive about the yakuza film genre as opposed to other film genres is that you basically have a straightforward premise. Somebody wants something and they want it fast and they want it now and the other person doesn’t want to give it them and then they fight. They have these contrived conversations, but within these contrived conversations—you don’t want to make them seem contrived, you want to make them realistic, but they are contrived because it’s fiction—you have this speed. You have this condensed version of life, right? Somebody wants something, the other person doesn’t want to give it to them and they fight. If you think about it, over 10 years, that’s probably happened to any given person, they’ve been through that situation on a micro-scale. This condenses that. With a yakuza theme, you can do all of that, all that might happen to a person in 10 years, in one night. It creates a compressed or compacted version of real life. If you extract some of the most tense and climactic moments from real life, you’re probably going to have a film that seems like a yakuza film. Any human being will have something like that, where you have betrayal; you have love; you have bickering or fighting between romantic partners. You put all that together and compact it together, and you look back at it, “Wow! My life is kind of like a yakuza film.” Yakuza movies are just a miniature version of life.

I actually feel very uncomfortable watching a normal film, a mainstream film. The reason I feel uncomfortable watching a mainstream film is because—in every film, you have bad guys, the antagonists, but the reason they exist in most mainstream films is just so they can make the good people look better. They’re there to convince everyone in this disgustingly fake way that the good guys are perfect and the bad guys are horrible. That, to me, is so absolutely fake. There’s a part of me that wants to reach out an olive branch and extend a hand to these people that are being labeled as bad guys and help them out a little bit and say, “Actually, we’re all human. The good people aren’t that great, either.” I have a kind of twisted love, in a way, for these rough-and-tumble characters.

Q: Within the film, there is a wonderful animated sequence that takes the place of a big car stunt. Most directors would have stuck with live-action throughout and accomplished what that scene does with camera tricks and green screens. Why did you opt for anime?

A: It’s very easy to create a stunt like that in Hollywood. It’s not actually technically complicated at all, but right now in Japan, we’re in a situation where the traditional car stuntmen are all getting older. Most of them are in my same age range. I love all of those actors, but there is an aversion to risk and physical danger that we have to put them through, so there’s this thinking that, “OK, you want this big fancy stunt film, well go watch a Hollywood show. We’re not going to do that here.

Part of that is also based on the fact that because most of the traditional stuntmen are getting so elderly and very little new blood is coming into the stuntman-actor category, these elderly gentlemen are kind of a national treasure. They’re an endangered species. I personally love those people and I want to protect them. We decided to do an anime scene and it worked. At the same time, there’s this burning desire within me to come up with a story idea where I can present some of those people, those aging actors, so that they can take part in that, as part of their legacy. I want to be able to pay them their guarantee fee that they really deserve and have this amazing car stunt scene or action-packed film with these elderly Japanese stunt actors and pull out all the stops, not pull any punches and really give them a film they can be proud of with the kind of structure and the kind of story arc where they would be able to say, “You know, even if I die when I’m doing this, I’ll still be glad that I did it.”

Q: Did you consider jettisoning that scene altogether before you hit on the idea of animating it?

A: When you come up to these obstacles, you really have two choices. You have budget constraints and you have other constraints but you have to find a way to work around them. You can either run away from that and say, “We’re just not going to do it. We just won’t film that scene or that movie; we’ll move on to the next thing.” Or you can say, “This is a story worth telling, so we’ll find a way to make that happen.”  If you take the first option and run away, you will end up missing the opportunity to develop your ability to find other people that are making low-budget stuff that is great and they still have to work within budget constraints and you have to find a way to work around those issues and still make a great film. If you run away, you’re not going to make those connections and finding those people you can collaborate with and still make really good films even with a limited budget.

That being said, very few people have been willing to invest enormous amounts of money in my productions so far, so I guess we’ll see what happens. –Pam Grady

Conflict as fodder for comedy: Filmmaker Sameh Zoabi on TEL AVIV ON FIRE

12 Monday Aug 2019

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Tel avivTel Aviv on Fire is the name of a film. It is also the name of a soap opera within the film that has become appointment TV in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, set in 1967 in the months before the Six Day War and revolving around the affair between an Israeli officer and the gorgeous Palestinian spy sent to seduce him. Salam (Kais Nashif), a Palestinian who is the show’s Hebrew translator, gets bumped up to writer, a position he advances with covert help from Assi (Yaniv Biton), an Israeli border guard and superfan of the show.

Director/co-writer Sameh Zoabi’s third narrative feature is the rare film to come at the situation between Israel and Palestine as a comedy. Zoabi himself was born in Iksal, Israel, a Palestinian village near Nazareth. Tel Aviv on Fire is a Palestinian film that is a co-production of France, Luxembourg, Belgium—and Israel. It has been nominated for four Ophirs—the Israeli equivalent of the Oscar—including Best Screenplay and Best Film. It is a film arising out of the perspective of a filmmaker who is simultaneously an insider and an outsider.

Zoabi screened Tel Aviv on Fire at the recent San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The following day he sat down with a cinezinekane to talk about the film, using soap opera to comment on Israeli and Palestinian societies, and his unique place within those societies.

Q: Where did this story come from of this odd partnership between a Palestinian writer and an Israeli soldier?

Sameh Zoabi:    The whole idea came to me, because of that personal dilemma that I lived as a Palestinian growing up inside Israel, making movies about Palestinians, and taking Israeli money to do it. So, you’re always in that dilemma with the Israelis, ‘OK, wait a second, is he a good Arab? Is he turning too Palestinian on us with his films?’ And the Arabs are like, ‘He’s taking Israeli money? Is he selling his soul to make his movies?’ Europeans always like, you know, they always want to be balanced, because they don’t want to offend anyone. But it feels like every film you make, you go through the same thing over and over. Nobody’s made a movie about this, about the politics and the people’s agenda or even if they don’t have any agenda, people’s perception of what should be and should not and what it means. 

Q: From the outside, people think of Palestinians as living in Gaza or the West Bank. They don’t think about the sheer number of people that actually live and were born and have grown up within the state of Israel.

Sameh Zoabi: That was my experience when I came to Columbia University on a Fulbright scholarship. And so, it says, you know, in my files it’s always says he’s from Israel, because that’s what’s on my passport… I came to the US in 2000. People would ask, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘I am from Nazareth.’ ‘Oh, you know, we have a lot of Jewish family in Israel.’ ‘But I’m not Jewish.’ And then then you go through explaining yourself and 1948 and how we were there.

I mean I always have to justify and explain that we exist and we’ve been there and we didn’t come from anywhere else, you know what I mean? And that’s why it’s very important for me as a filmmaker to separate that. I would say that’s an important part of also moving forward is acceptance. Like Israelis, sometimes are not comfortable or, or Jewish Americans are not comfortable with the Palestinian Israeli term. Like you are a Palestinian but you are Israeli at the same time. A lot of people are like, ‘You’re an Arab Israeli.’ Yeah, but I’m Palestinian. You don’t have to run away from it by accepting it. Acknowledging the other, you can move forward. But by denying all the time that we existed to start with and even calling us something else is not going to lead us to anything.

I guess my film career has been kind of dedicated to show that side of Palestinians who live in Israel, who speak Hebrew, they can manage their way. They’re trying to survive. My first film [Man Without a Cell Phone, 2010] was also about that, about a young guy growing up in an Arab village trying to go university in Tel Aviv, like the lives that we actually live in Israel. A Palestinian who grew up in the West Bank would never be able to write or make this film, because my experience is different. I grew up knowing what Israelis think of us and what I think of them as a Palestinian. And, of course, stereotypes are the best form of comedy. It’s about how everyone sees the other.

Q: What was your thinking in setting the soap opera in 1967 before the Six Day War?

Sameh Zoabi: It’s about how everyone sees the other. So, in the West Bank they’re writing the Israeli general in ’67, imagining what the Israelis were thinking at that time. And Assi wants to change the story, because he thinks they should think otherwise. And that, for me it is always fascinating how our Palestinian experience dictates also the variety of filmmaking that we do. And we should not be judging that. In essence, we should be celebrating, you know, the different points of view. We have a narrative now where in the West Bank, Palestinians don’t meet Israelis. They only see, soldiers. In Gaza, they don’t see Israelis or soldiers. They see bombs or helicopters. For me, as a Palestinian who grew up inside, I have more possibility to interact and that’s why I was able to do this. It doesn’t mean that it’s only a film that depends on a Palestinian perspective, but it’s one that plays on this knowledge of both Palestinians and Israelis.

Q: The show isn’t just a soap opera. It’s a show everyone watches on both sides of the border.

Sameh Zoabi: That is true, by the way. When I was growing up, there were only two channels, Israeli and Jordanian. And on Fridays, every Friday, Israeli TV showed Egyptian films.  And Palestinians from all over, from Gaza, the West Bank, from inside, they would all watch Egyptian films on the Israel channel and the Israelis would all watch, as well.

When I wrote the script, many people said, ‘Yeah, but that show never existed where Israelis and Palestinians both watched,’ but when I showed the film to Israelis, nobody questioned it. Because it’s not farfetched. It did happen. We had elements of it.

Q: What is this film to you?

This film captures the essence of what I’ve always believed in a sense. It’s very personal in a sense. It’s broad, it’s comedy, but it has things that Palestinians love. We just had a screening back home, in my hometown. All the Palestinian activists inside Israel wrote about how Palestinian the film is, how strong of a voice it has, how it makes fun of our reality that becomes so abnormal and tragic that we can accept the idea that someone wants to change a TV show. It’s such farfetched idea, but it’s so believable there because (of what goes on).

With Israelis, it’s the same thing. They can see through humor. I mean for me; I see Israelis and Jewish audiences responding to and following the journey of a Palestinian character and they really want him to succeed. That’s the core of it, seeing each other at this humane level. What we need is for the ground to change… We live in a reality of disconnect: Walls, checkpoints, them again us. That’s not going lead to peace, of course.

I always get a few questions about what do I think of the government? It’s like they are so busy keeping the status quo, they would do anything for people not to meet, because God forbid, if they meet they’re going to like each other. –Pam Grady

Sing a song of THE NIGHTINGALE: Q&A with Aisling Franciosi

08 Thursday Aug 2019

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The Nightingale - Still 1Over the course of the past seven years, Irish actress Aisling Franciosi has amassed quite a resume, counting among her characters Marie in Ken Loach’s 2014 drama Jimmy’s Hall, an award-winning turn as a serial killer-obsessed teenager in the British series The Fall (2013-2016), and Lyanna Stark, mother to Jon Snow, on Game of Thrones. In The Babadook filmmaker Jennifer Kent’s savage revenge thriller, The Nightingale, Franciosi steps into her first starring movie role. Delivering a resonant performance as Clare, a 19th-century convict of the penal colony on the Australian island of Tasmania, Franciosi convinces as a woman pushed over her limits. Forming a partnership with similarly vengeful aboriginal Billy (dancer Baykali Ganabarr in his screen debut), Clare goes on the hunt for Hawkins (Sam Claflin) and other Australian officers who have done her wrong.

In San Francisco in April for the SFFILM Festival, Franciosi was ebullient and expansive as she sat down for a conversation about The Nightingale.

Q: The film is very much in your face in terms of the off-chart-violence. Was that intensity apparent even when you read the script for the first time?

Aisling Franciosi:  I knew it would be a tough watch no matter how it was filmed, but what even I was surprised at when I saw it for the first time on the screen and what makes it so difficult to watch is how human all the characters are and how as you watch the violence inflicted on them, you can’t escape the fact that they’re human beings. Whereas in other films, I think frequently we’re quite distant from the people who are being killed or slaughtered or whatever. In this, it’s a very intimate form of violence. And I think that that makes it really, as you say, in your face, but you know, if we’re going to show it and we’re going to, if you want to talk about violence, if you want to talk about sexual violence, well, then here it is. You know, let’s look at it properly.

Q: It’s not just the visuals. It’s the sound design, as well, that really underlines the brutality.

Aisling Franciosi: Yeah. It’s amazing. Jennifer told me, ‘I don’t think we’re going to have music. Actually, I think we’re going to just have sounds.’ We had an incredible sound designer. And I think it really adds to it, because in some moments it just completely feels suffocating and inescapable in the ways it should. And then other times, it just allows you to breathe and you feel that there’s a moment of respite. There’s nothing taking away from that. You know, breathe for a second in the same way that the characters are, the audience has given a moment to kind of go, ‘Whew!’

Q: You’re Irish, so you were not raised with that history.

Aisling Franciosi: I knew a little bit about the convict history of Australia, but you’re right, I definitely didn’t know the extent to which I know now. And also I didn’t realize how systematic it was, you know, or how particularly, at a certain point, women and girls were sent there. Lots of convicts were sent for extremely petty crimes, like survival crimes, stealing bread, stealing food. But women and girls were sent very, very young and essentially to populate the island of Tasmania in particular where there was an extremely low ratio of men to women. So, you can imagine what happened when these women stepped off the ship. They were sometimes bartered for a bottle of whiskey. They endured terrible violence and terrible lives.

I remember reading one book that said a British officer there to do a survey noticed that if you were a convict, you were, you know, the lowest of the low. But if you were an Irish convict, you were like dirt. Like you were at the lowest rank of all the convicts just for being Irish. And so, if you can imagine, not only are you Irish, but you’re also a woman and you’re a convict. I found learning about it so interesting, but also found myself getting very angry. You would be sent to to Australia and frequently you would finish your term, not in the jail, but you know, working for a sergeant or whoever and if you were raped and became pregnant by him, you would go to prison and your baby was taken away. And nothing would happen to the rapist. It was just a constant battle for survival for these convicts. I find it so incredible how resilient they all were to then go on and essentially, you know, build a nation.

Q: Well, it’s that idea of institutionalized rape, some that goes on in places even now.

Aisling Franciosi: What I’m really proud about in this film is if you don’t want to acknowledge it for what it is, we’re going to make you acknowledge it for what it is. I think it’s often brushed aside, whether it’s because of shame or just not wanting to accept it for how brutal and violent that it is or how destructive it is. But like, even as part of my prep, I was watching a documentary called The Invisible War. It’s fascinating and it’s about sexual violence and rape in the US military. It was appalling, it was shocking to me. And one of the quotes that you see on the screen at the very end of the movie was from a very highly ranked officer, and he says, ‘Rape is a hazard of the job.’ Getting shot, maybe, getting hurt in battle, maybe, but rape should never be a hazard of the job.

Q: One of the things that struck me about Clare is how strong she is. And I don’t mean just after everything happened, but even before, she’s much stronger than her husband.

Aisling Franciosi: Yeah. It’s so interesting people say to me, ‘Oh, she goes from timid to Joan of Arc.’ But if you really think about it, she is actually enduring so much for the sake of her family. It’s not that she’s not strong enough to stand up to Hawkins. I mean, it would probably cut her life short, but I think she would do it if she was just on her own. But she’s trying to protect her dream of a future with her family, the safety of her husband and the safety of her baby. It’s all on her shoulders and all just kept safe by her enduring, enduring, enduring. Endurance might not be the most glamorous type of strength, but it’s a strength and she has it in spades. Then it becomes a different kind of strength going forward. But yeah, I don’t, I don’t see her as going through this transformation. I think it’s actually the opposite. It’s just her unleashing all the rage.

Q: She also undergoes a different kind of transformation, because at a certain point, she’s just like every other white person in Tasmania looking at the aboriginal people through racist eyes until she’s thrown in with Billy.

Aisling Franciosi: Well, I think it’s beautiful that it’s two very traumatized and hurt souls kind of metaphorically holding each other’s hands and just going through it together. Yeah, she absolutely does (change). She initially is quite awful to him, but I like that Jen has portrayed Clare as being a human being with her flaws and showing the not-so-great sides to her personality. You know, I like that she’s a fully formed person. And I love that it’s essentially Billy and the compassion she gets from him and then the friendship that they have that makes Clare choose survival. –Pam Grady

Q&A: Pawel Pawlikowski on Poland and COLD WAR

17 Thursday Jan 2019

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Pawel Pawlikowski was born in Poland, but moved to England with his mother when he was a teenager. After studying literature and philosophy at Oxford, he established his career as filmmaker, first with documentaries before turning to fiction with such films as Last Resort (2000) and My Summer of Love (2003). But then he traveled back to his native country to make his 2013 Academy Award-winning drama Ida about a 1960s era novitiate who receives life-changing news about her identity. In making the movie, Pawlikowski realized he was home. Now, he has made a new feature, Cold War, about the tumultuous relationship between a singer (Joanna Kulig) and a jazz musician (Tomasz Kot) who fall in love in Stalinist, post-World War II Poland. Pawlikowski won the directing award at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. The film is on the shortlist for the foreign-language Academy Award; won five European Film Awards, including best European film; and received four BAFTA nominations, among other honors. In October, Pawlikowski was feted with a tribute at the Mill Valley Film Festival. It was during that visit to the San Francisco Bay Area that this conversation took place.

Q: You spent most of your career in the West. What brought you back to Poland?

Pawel Pawlikowski: Many things. I reached a certain age, I suppose, where I needed to change something. My kids grew up and left home. My wife died. I didn’t originally plan to move back to Poland, but when I started preparing Ida, I just started feeling very at home there. A friend, Agnieszka Holland, lent me her flat in Warsaw, very near to where I used to live. I felt very at home. It was very peculiar. Driving around Poland looking for locations, I recognized landscapes from my childhood. I suddenly felt like this is where I feel most at home. It has something to do with age. Half of one’s life, one tries to escape from somewhere and the other half, wants to get back somewhere. Poland just feels like home. It’s like finding a pair of slippers that feel very comfy. Of course, I chose a very interesting time politically—a couple of years later after the election [of Poland’s right-wing President Andrzej Duda], it doesn’t look so cozy.

When I dreamt of something, it always tended to be some corner of Warsaw. It’s also a city I feel very sentimental and affectionate about, partly because we grew up among ruins. Not literally ruins, I’m exaggerating, but I was born 13 years after the war and there were still bullet holes in the walls of my house. With every step, you find history. Here’s where 300 people were executed during the Warsaw Uprising. Here is the entrance to the sewer, just outside my flat now, the entrance to the sewer through which the insurgents were escaping to another area and here is the Ghetto. It was flattened and it’s completely different. It’s haunted. Warsaw is a haunted city. It’s not a tourist attraction, but if you have imagination, it’s the most fascinating city in the world. I actually love it very much.

Q: Since you’ve been back, the two films you’ve made Ida and now Cold War take place during the Communist era. Does that time have a particular pull for you?

PP: There are several reasons, I suppose. It’s a world in which you can tell stories where digital technology is not important and where everything you do has huge consequences. It seems like people, whatever they do, there’s something kind of fatal about it. You can look across a table or look across a room and see somebody fall in love.  Where moral problems are focused. I think in today’s world it’s very difficult to find that. Some directors do it very well, like Ruben Östlund [Force Majeure, The Square] who makes fantastic films about today with moral issues. But that [earlier era] is where I feel more confident and more attracted to, as well. I like a world that is less cluttered with images, information, sounds, where everything becomes quite expressive and you can really look properly. I find today there’s too much stuff that washes over you. For me. It’s a midlife crisis thing.

Q: Cold War is dedicated to your parents and was inspired by your parents, but the story is not about them. Talk about that inspiration and how it led to the tale of this couple.

PP: My parents had a very tempestuous marriage. Clearly, in the back of my head, I’ve had their story hovering over me for a long time. When they were still alive, it was just a source of amusement and irritation, horror, because when I was 13, they divorced. They were fighting all the time. And then I met their partners and it wasn’t great for a teenage son. I was the only son, so it was very intense. Then it became almost comical in a way in the way they couldn’t get on when they met again in the West. Then they died in total harmony, but after 40 years of [passionate conflict]. They were too tired to fight. When they died in 1989, just before the Berlin Wall came down, just before the Cold War ended, I had this feeling that I’d been the witness to an amazing love story. It didn’t look like a love story most of the time, but it actually was.

That was somewhere in the back of my head when I was inventing other stories, but I always kind of went back to this jewel, two characters who are equally strong and who don’t give in, who spend a lot of time apart from each other and fantasize each other. They build each other up and then something happens that destroys that idea of themselves. That was always the matrix of all love stories, in a way. Ten years ago, I thought, “This would be a really good story to tell.” Not because I need to tell it, but it’s a good story. It’s a very difficult story to tell, because it’s so messy, but what’s good about is you have these strong, contradictory characters who are never quite good enough or bad enough, who live in historical times, which is always really important, the way history forces their hand. Occasionally, I tried to write it up, but I was always too close to the real thing. Dramatically, it was not that interesting.  Ida gave me the confidence to tell things synthetically, elliptically. I didn’t have to be literal and explain everything.  Around then, I also thought that music would be an important element, which would change things, take it away from my parents, who were not musicians. Music brings them together, keeps them together, and then kind of illustrates all the ups and downs and the changes in their relationship.

Q: The music from that era is so evocative, the jazz from that era, even album cover designs.

PP: Exactly, and there wasn’t such a glut of stuff. Everything was meaningful. Also, jazz was banned in Stalinist Poland, so if you played jazz, it meant something. You weren’t just playing jazz because you liked it, as one of many things you could do. Also, folk music was interesting. I started with genuine folk music. I found all these performers around Poland to perform these songs. Then you see them transformed into this folk ensemble with this orchestra. When something big like that comes about, of course, politics steps in and coopts it. That’s inspired by a real story of a folk ensemble that got coopted.  The Communist regime decided that folk music was the music of the people as opposed to bourgeois, decadent jazz. Art wasn’t something that just happened; it was all pretty state controlled. The official doctrine of the Stalinist period in art was social realism. The formula for that was that the music should be popular in form and socialist in content. So, this folk ensemble that started innocently becomes the official art of the state. Then, in the West, the same number becomes a bebop number, a melody they dance to.

Music is always not just something people do. It has meaning. It has a kind of resonance. In terms of the film, the narrative, it tells you where we are and when we are. And then “Rock Around the Clock” crops up in ’57. Also, at that point, I didn’t think about it, but when I watched the film in Cannes, yeah, it’s true, because there is a 10-year difference between Zula and Viktor, and “Rock Around the Clock” he doesn’t react to at all. He just keeps talking to that other guy, whereas for her, the devil enters her and she goes off on this drunken solo dance. So, you can see the difference between them. This is a wedge between them that is generational, too. There was a 10-year gap between my father and my mother and she was much more crazy. So, yes, music is always both historical and psychological. You can use it in so many ways. It’s great that they are both musicians, so you can play with that.

Q: Both Ida and Cold War are in black and white and eschew widescreen for the narrower Academy ratio. What was your thinking behind those choices?

PP: With Ida, it was one thing. With Cold War, it’s another. Ida, I wanted to remove it from reality slightly, which is in color. Also, it was partially inspired by my family album, my photo album, which was all in black and white. Here, in Cold War, I started out thinking I was going to make a color film and then I just couldn’t find the right colors. Colors that would feel lively enough, Poland was very gray at that time. In a way, making it in black and white was a way of making it more colorful, more punchy and constrasty. If I was actually quite truthful to the colors of the time, they would have been really murky and monotonous. To invent some new colors or some different colors would have been fake. I thought black and white was more truthful. If the film had been set in the States, I would have used color, because in the States you had saturated colors in the ‘50s. I would’ve been thinking about that world, Hopper’s paintings, photographs. –Pam Grady

Edgerton fills in the contours of a BOY ERASED

01 Thursday Nov 2018

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BOY ERASED

Flying Air Canada to the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival where Joel Edgerton’s second directorial effort Boy Erased was screening, two of the Australian actor/filmmaker’s movies were available to view on the airline’s entertainment system. If last year’s thriller Red Sparrow represents the more mainstream facet of his Hollywood career, 2005’s Kinky Boots, in which lives are changed when drag queen Lola (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and her designs come to the rescue of Charlie’s (Edgerton) failing Northampton shoe factory, reflects more the impulse that led Edgerton to Boy Erased.

“It funny, I was asked by Steve Pateman, the real Kinky Boots guy, he’s written a book and asked me to write a quote for it,” Edgerton says. “I thought about it and I ended up talking about how beautiful that film is, how it’s such a mad, extravagant collision of separate worlds, which we have in Boy Erased, too, straight and gay, Southern and New York, and just a general contradiction of ideas. Kinky Boots, really, at its core, is about people accepting other people. It’s not about the madness of drag shows. It’s not about industry. Those are all sub-themes. The big macro is, ‘You’re different from me. I’m different from you. So, what?’”

Boy Erased, which Edgerton adapted from Garrard Conley’s memoir, stars Lucas Hedges as Jared, an Arkansas college student sent to gay conversion therapy by his Baptist preacher father, Marshall (Russell Crowe), and mother, Nancy (Nicole Kidman), after he’s outed to them. It was 2016’s Loving, in which Edgerton played one half of the couple at the heart of the 1967 Supreme Court case that struck down laws banning interracial marriage, that set him on the path to Boy Erased.

“Loving is definitely why I got involved with this film,” he says. “I think it plucked the same nerves in me. It agitated the same feeling that Loving did in terms of people or a person unable to live a normal life like everybody else, because there is some quality of difference or minority difference that means they get treated differently.

“Garrard’s memoir is not just about the madness of an institution,” he adds. “The book is about the chaos and madness of a family dealing with something that shouldn’t necessarily need to create any drama and yet all this stuff happened, all this energy was output and all of this pain was created.”

Edgerton, 44, grew up in Dural, a small suburb of Sydney, and doesn’t remember any of the kids his age coming out as gay while they lived under their parents’ roofs. The kind of attitudes that lead people to seek gay conversion therapy is strong, he feels, all over the planet. But to get to the heart of Jared’s story, he relied on Conley to act as his guide into an unfamiliar world.

“Garrard was my porthole to everything that he experienced,” Edgerton says. “He was my access to other survivors of conversion therapy. He was my access to his mother and father, Herschel and Martha, who were gracious to invite me to dine at their house, to attend church. He was my porthole to John Schmidt [the head of the therapy center], who I play in the movie, on whom I based my character. I felt more a passenger of Garrard’s story as I was making the movie. He was my navigator. It was really about that. And getting access to that Baptist world was about literally going to Herschel’s church and doing a lot of research. I did a lot of research about ideas – I think during the production I had six different Bibles dotted throughout my apartment.”

BOY ERASED

Edgerton wanted to paint as detailed a picture of the world he was depicted as possible without judgment. He didn’t want a movie with obvious heroes and villains. Jared’s parents, the church elders his father goes to for advice, the people at the center, they mean well—and that’s what’s so chilling.

“I think there’s something more insidious and terrifying about being in a situation where everybody is, ‘We’re just here to help,’” Edgerton says. “That’s hard to sidestep and also because you don’t have all the information and you’re naïve going in, like Garrard was. If somebody told you there was a 84% success rate and that your sexuality, which was plaguing you during your waking hours and threatening your freedom within your community, if somebody told you that could all just be turned around, wouldn’t you sign on the dotted line, too? Who would want that if living in your community could become terrifying, and hell, you could be beaten and ostracized?

“And you’d have to go somewhere else,” he adds. “There are a lot of young people in the world who find the agency to say, ‘I do not accept that you will not accept me, and therefore, I will go and do something else, even if that means cutting family away.’ But Garrard represents, to me, the majority, because I’m like him, as in I didn’t have an agency that would have powered this rebellious, renegade, forge-my-own-path mentality. I was very much under the spell of my parents. I think most of us are rule keepers.”

On the surface, Boy Erased is a different kind of project for Edgerton. A prolific screenwriter, most of his work, including the script for his brother Nash’s 2008 thriller, The Square, and his own directing debut, 2015’s psychological thriller, The Gift, has been genre-based. For this, Edgerton had to step outside that comfort zone, but as he worked on his screenplay, he discovered that even in adapting a memoir, certain genre rules still applied.

“It was sort of just about applying it to a more dramatic scenario without the hand holds of genre,” says Edgerton. “Yet, I wanted it to have a pinch of genre feeling of suspense and the potential for danger and the tension that comes out of real life. You don’t know what’s around the corner for Jared when the men gather in the kitchen to decide his fate. What’s going to happen to him? The sense of suspense in moments like that.

“On this film, when I wrote it, I became a little possessed. I just felt, once I started writing, it came pouring out of me. Thankfully, Garrard had laid the foundation, because he lived the life and he was brave enough to talk about it. Then I felt the privilege of just being able to really just take his clay and reshape it into something else, turn it from words on page onto other worlds on a page that would allow it to become a visual thing. It felt like it wrote itself pretty easily.” –Pam Grady

To read more about Boy Erased, check out my interview with Lucas Hedges in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Joel Edgerton will be at San Francisco Embarcadero Center Cinema on Sunday, Nov. 4, to take part in Q&As after the 2 and 2:30pm screenings of Boy Erased.

Q&A: Writer/Director Antonio Méndez Esparza on LIFE AND NOTHING MORE

26 Friday Oct 2018

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Life

Antonio Méndez Esparza never thought he would make a film in the United States. But after making his first feature, 2012’s Aquí y allá: Here and There, winner of the Critics Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, the Spanish director found himself living in the US. Taking a job teaching at Florida State University’s film school and settling in Tallahassee changed his perspective. He decided Florida was the right location for his next work, one employing a documentary style and using a non-professional cast as he’d done in his debut. The result is Life and Nothing More, a drama in which single mother Regina (Regina Williams) struggles to raise two children on her minimum-wage waitressing job and keep her eldest, 14-year-old Andrew (Andrew Bleechington)—whose father is incarcerated—on the straight and narrow. Here, Esparza talks about his latest feature, the winner of the John Cassavetes Award at the 2018 Film Independent Spirit Awards.

Q: Why a single mom?

A: We sometimes have these instincts that are hard to explain. You write a poem or you paint a picture. Sometimes it’s just something that you feel. The first reaction is unexplainable to a certain degree. Even to myself. Is because of my relationship with my mom?  My wife was a single mom when I met her, so that gave me a little insight to what her daily life was. But all of these explanations come as an afterthought in a way. There is a seed lurking, moving inside you that pushes you to that. Then you try to explain why, but it’s never a straight line for me. Also, in the context of this film, it’s me trying to understand the US. The US is maybe too big. It’s me trying to understand the place where I live, Tallahassee.

Q: Your story is clearly drawn from life. Who did you talk to? Where did your characters come from?

A: From the many interviews I did over the year and a half when I was casting. The whole process was very slow. Now when I look at the film and it’s finished and perhaps one may think, ‘That’s what he intended.’ But in a way, the movie was supposed to be about a single mom, and then over the course of it, it became about much more.  It was really all based on encounters I had with many different people. In a way, every scene has a little story—like some of the men they weren’t offended by the story of a single mom, but they told me, ‘We’re fathers. We’re not bad. We’re trying to do good.’ Many of them had been raised by single moms, and they were trying to do better with their kids.

Q: The most solidarity you see in the film is between all the women that work with Regina, all the waitresses. They’re clearly all in the same situation.

A: Those are scenes that I love very much. They are very unassuming scenes, but you see that they care for each other. They’re there to help.

Q: You are known for working with non-professional casts and this film is no different. That has to add a degree of difficulty to what you’re doing.

A: It is a challenge, but I don’t see any other way to make a film, or at least a film like this where you know little about the world and the cast really has to guide you through the process. Casting becomes a process of illumination. You meet people and even if they end up not being in the film, they still provide some jewels, some gold. Or maybe they don’t add to the story, but they end up in the film. Casting becomes everything, in a way.

Casting sometimes is as simple as an interview. With the main actors, there is more of a process. There is an improvisational exercise, and then another one, and then another one. Then we decide to shoot. The actors don’t know the script. They are unaware of what the story is about. They discover it little by little. They know a little bit, like Regina’s going to be the mom. I try to build a world, but not what’s happening. So, we build a house together. They go to the house. They like the house where they’re going to live. Are they OK with it? The school the kids go to is the one they really go to. She has to work in a place where we’ve gone a few times before, so she’s accustomed to it. I try to make it as close to reality as I can, and then we just go. –Pam Grady