interviews – Page 16

Nice, Short Fresh Air Interview with Richard Kelly

Richard Kelly was on Fresh Air last week to discuss the director’s cut of Donnie Darko, which is platforming out into theaters now.
Who noted that theatrical re-release is fast becoming a standard marketing element for a remastered or new-version DVD?
Listen to Richard Kelly’s interview [9/7/04, 12 min., NPR]
Buy the old DVD version on Amazon, while supplies last [“Customers also bought Requiem for a Dream, Lost in Translation, Kill Bill and Pi“? Yeah, no kidding.]

Hey, So Did I

I first came across Jay Rosenblatt‘s short film in March, as I was surfing across the Silverdocs site, getting ready to submit my own tape.
It wasn’t just the title, but the combination of title and picture. Rosenblatt was holding his daughter up in the air. The one sentence-synopsis read, “Video cameras come with an owner’s manual and babies don’t, so documentary filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt uses the first to understand the second.” The title: I Used to Be A Filmmaker.
In the first few weeks after our own kid was born, when even dubbing a couple of screeners felt like a major accomplishment, I saw my entire life in Rosenblatt’s title alone. I read some reviews (all very good) and thought, the guy spent two years on one short? I am cooked.
Actually, what Rosenblatt did was construct an interface between two worlds: his own as a documentarian and film instructor, and his new daughter’s. Or more precisely, he bridged his own two worlds, his passion/profession and his family. All in about 10 minutes. 10 minutes over the course of two years.
In I Used to be a Filmmaker, Rosenblatt uses scenes from the first 18 months of his daughter’s life to illustrate various film production terms. The still above was from “pickup shot,” for example. A scene where he gets her to stop crying is called MOS. It’s sometimes corny, but usually very funny, and it works. Rosenblatt takes some of the most unrepentantly self-indulgent imagery known to mankind–a smitten new dad’s home movies–and by giving it structure and context, makes it not just watchable by others, but actually entertaining. No small feat.
Unlike most shorts, which directors use as calling cards for the coming feature, I Used to be a Filmmaker is what it is, complete. Which made it stand out on the festival circuit enough for Shiela Nevins to buy it for Cinemax, the Sabrina to HBO’s Samantha. It premiered on Father’s Day, and will have its last scheduled broadcast is tonight, Thurs. 7/29, at 6:35PM east coast, 9:35PM west coast.

Spike Jonze, scion of my BUTT

Oy. If I see one more mention of Spike Jonze being the “heir” to “the Spiegel catalogue fortune…” This title is nothing but an artifact of lazy-ass entertainment journalism.[not you, Gawker. I know you’re not journalism.]
1. Spike’s, aka Adam Spiegel’s father is Arthur Spiegel III, a healthcare consultant in New York. [So he’s an heir to the APM/CSC fortune?] Trip, we can assume, is descended from Arthur Spiegel, one of the sons of one of the founders of the Spiegel mail order furniture business.
Trouble is, that Arthur way back then left the mailorder business for Hollywood. David Selznick convinced him to invest in World Picture Company, a pre-Gone With The Wind flop. Arthur died early and rather unattractively in a New York hotel room. Drugs? Suicide? Something. But was he an heir to anything? And did he have any descendants to be heirs to anything?
And heir to what? The Spiegel fortune itself, such as it is/was, had more than its share of ups and downs. The company nearly went bust more than once because it had overextended credit to indigent rural shoppers to finance their purchases. It’s certainly no Marshall Fields fortune, which actually exists and continues to underpin socialite lifestyles and hippy chic communes to this day.
And anyway, the Spiegel that almost anyone alive now knows was the work of the German conglomerate which bought the catalogue in the mid-70’s, and which has been bleeding red ink for years, both on Spiegel and on the “only the Ford Explorer’s worth a damn” brand, Eddie Bauer.
The only family member to have been involved with the company in ages is Ted Spiegel–a fourth cousin?? I don’t know–who was also a marketing professor at Northwestern.
How the Spiegel cousins four generations ago divvied up their stock is a mystery to me, and frankly I don’t care. And why should I? By Spike-profile standards, I’d be scion to the Ethan Allen furniture fortune.
If you’re an “All the research I need comes from Entertainment Weekly” journalist looking for a meaningless tidbit for yet another piece on Spike, why not try something more interesting than “heir to the Spiegel catalog fortune”? How about “abandoned by parents and raised in a skateboard shop,”? Or, if you are some genetic determinist, how about “Spike Jonze, son of the guy who replaced rent control with rent stabilization” or “Spike Jonze, whose great grandfather didn’t invest in Gone With The Wind?” At least that one’s got something to do with films.
As for Sofia Coppola, in addition to being the heir to a Central American shack-n-hammock resort fortune, she IS the scion of a middlebrow wine fortune. But now that it comes in cans, it’s not just for tables anymore.

Spike Jonze, scion of my BUTT

Talk About Lost in Translation…

J. Hoberman interviewed Ghost in the Shell anime director Oshii Mamoru at Cannes, where he screened his latest work, Innocence. As Hoberman reports it, the interview was straight out of the Keanu junket in Lost in Translation, with the director himself barely speaking and the Japanese translator answering for him on auto-pilot.
Totemo mendokusai.

“What does he whisper to her at the end?”

It’s the most annoying question I kept getting from Lost in Translation fans. Well, now’s your chance to find out.
Over at Greencine, David’s collecting captions for this pic.
My choices:
“Why’d I write 115 pages if you can win one with a 12-page outline?”
“Let’s get your mother to film us later.”
“I didn’t wash my hands.”
“I’m gunning for that MoMA award next year.”
But I finally went with, “I’ve got a can of wine with your name on it back in my suite.”

Souvenir Series, Sofia, and me

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve decided to shoot a fourth short film, which may be part of the Souvenir Series, or may not. We’ll see. It was not in the original outline of the series, and it’s out of the order I’d planned to shoot them, but the opportunity and idea presented themselves so clearly, I’ve decided to at least get it shot, then see where to take it.
Long story short, it’s a reconceiving of the baptism/massacre sequence from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. The scene is a classic, not only of storytelling and dramatic contrast, but of editing as well.
While it has the immediate feel of intercutting–jumping back and forth between simultaneous events–as this Yale film analysis site where you can watch (most of) the sequence points out, it’s unlikely that all the other mafia dons in NYC were actually assassinated at the same instant. They call it montage.
Frankly, I always thought they were concurrent events. The baptism scene provides a sense of linear time that is utterly absent from, say, Jennifer Beals’ rehearsal/welding scenes in Flashdance. (Gimme a break, she was on The Daily Show last night.)
Anyway, Seeing as how the baby in that scene was a weeks-old Sofia Coppola, and seeing as how I have a weeks-old baby myself now, and seeing as how I’m gonna be hanging out with the Coppolas tonight at a MoMA Film Department benefit, I thought I’d better start shooting.

ND/NF: Captive by Gaston Biraben

I saw Captive, the debut feature from Gaston Biraben, at New Directors/New Films last night; it’s a subtly powerful movie that gripped the sellout audience at MoMA Gramercy.
Captive is a fictionalized telling of real events, a surreal, politically charged story of, “You’re adopted…And then some.” A 15-year old Buenos Aires girl’s life is turned upsidedown when she learns her real parents were among The Disappeared, the tens of thousands of Argentines kidnapped, tortured and killed by the country’s military dictatorship in the 70’s. On top of dealing with a new family of strangers, the girl has to confront the chilling circumstances of her birth and her adoptive parents’ possible complicity in the systematic crimes of the junta.
By keeping a restrained, naturalistic focus on a the experience of one girl, the film tackles the third rail of the Argentine psyche–accountability for The Disappeared–with tremendous skill, and without devolving into political agitprop. Biraben coaxed a highly effective, intuitive performance from his star, Barbara Lombardo, which holds the film together.
Almost the entire audience stayed for the Q&A. Sensing, perhaps, Captive‘s potential for making great political waves, many questions were about where the film has shown and what was the reaction. It turns out ND/NF is one of the first screenings for Captive, so the impact is still to come. [The film was also at Palm Springs and San Sebastian, where it won the Horizontes award for Latin American films.]
This all serves as setup for the improbably story of Biraben’s getting the film made in the first place, and how he scored a cameo that elicited surprised howls of recognition from the New York audience. I spoke with Gaston and his co-producer/editor Tammis Chandler after the Q&A.

Continue reading “ND/NF: Captive by Gaston Biraben”

Three for Three

If you want to win, just impart your filmmaking wisdom on greg.org
Congratulations to Oscar winners, Independent Spirit Award winners– and greg.org interviewees–Sofia Coppola and Errol Morris.
And don’t forget Dany Wolf and Gus Van Sant with their Palme d’Or from a little ‘burg called Cannes.

The Shoes of Errol Morris

Errol Morris, you just won an Oscar and an Indpendent Spirit Award. Where are you going next?
“I’m going to Nordstrom! Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.”

Errol Morris's shoe, in a corner office of Sony Classics, February 2004, image: greg.org

Buy Sperry Top-Sider ‘Stripers’ like the ones Morris wore to both award ceremonies– and our interview— at Nordstrom.

Learning at Errol Morris’s Knee

Last week, in the Sony Classics offices on Madison Avenue, I sat down to talk with Errol Morris, whose current documentary, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, was nominated for an Academy Award.
Morris’s films are best known for the intensity of the interviews he conducts. He invented the Interrotron, a teleprompter setup that gets the interviewee to look and speak straight into the camera. I, in the mean time, didn’t have a digital recorder, so I decided to use a DV camera, the Sony VX-1000, to record our discussion. (Plus, that’d give me a chance to drop it off at the Sony Service Center downstairs to get the viewfinder fixed when I was done.)
I set the camera on the coffee table. Not only did I not get Morris looking directly into the camera, I ended up with an entire tapeful of Morris’s bouncing sneaker. Just as he did in The Fog of War, I structured our discussion around eleven lessons. [OK, fine. I went through the transcript and stuck eleven smartass lessons in as an editorial conceit. Close enough.]
Lesson One: Start an interview with an Academy Award-nominated director you’ve admired for fifteen years by sucking up. Big time.
Greg Allen: First congratulations on the film and the nomination. I should tell you, seeing Thin Blue Line in college was one of the reasons I wanted to become a filmmaker. It was so powerful and so not what you’d expect a documentary to be, especially at that time. So, thank you.
Errol Morris:
Thank you.
GA: With The Fog of War, a great deal of attention has been focused on the interview footage itself and what McNamara did or didn’t say, and was he going to take responsibility for the war or were you going to grill him about this or that. But your films have such a strong aesthetic and dramatic sense, which you achieve with other elements. I’d really like to hear more about how you go about making a film and what your process is for the putting those other elements together.
Lesson Two: I am a babbling sycophant.

Continue reading “Learning at Errol Morris’s Knee”

The Fog of War Re-enactors

Robert McNamara, Prof. Mark Danner, and Errol Morris at Berkeley, image: berkeley.edu

[via NYT] They’re putting the band back together, Elroy.
For the first time since The Fog of War was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award, Robert McNamara and Errol Morris took their show on the road. They spoke at Berkeley Wednesday, the first time McNamara appeared at the school that led the anti-war movement in the Sixties. It’s also his and Morris’s alma mater.
The webcast is available on Berkeley’s site. [The discussion starts about 11 minutes into the stream.] Whatever else he does, McNamara demonstrates a frustrating but entertaining mastery of the art of answering the question he wants to, not the one he was asked.
Of course, it’s more frustrating when reports of the event miss the big story, perhaps because it involves another paper. The Times claimed that McNamara strenuously refused to comment on the current administration and its policies. That’s not news; he has refused 172 (by his count) journalists’ requests to comment on Bush and Iraq. But the climax of the evening’s discussion was about #173, an interview McNamara gave the Toronto Globe and Mail in Jan. where he revealed his mind in unambiguous terms.
McNamara told a Canadian audience that the lessons he learned in Vietnam (and wrote about in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect) being ignored and directly contradicted in the present situation. But he told the Berkeley crowd, “What you want me to do is apply them to Bush. I’m not going to do it. You apply them to Bush” [much applause ensues]. Somewhere there’s a headline, “Architect of Vietnam War Condemns Bush’s War in Iraq” searching for a story.
Anyhoo, Errol Morris does very little talking, true to form. What would you ask him? Thta’s not a rhetorical question; I

gregFebruary 6, 2004interviews

Phrancis Phord Coppola’s Ophspring

Sofia Coppola being praised for her wok by people who can't bother to spell her name correctly, image: yahoo.com

From Yahoo News coverage of the Golden Globes[note: annoyingly slippery link]:

Director Sophia Coppola holds her award after winning Best Screenplay for a motion picture for her wok on the film ‘Lost In Translation’ during the 61st annual Golden Globe Awards (news – web sites) in Beverly Hills January 25, 2004. (Chris Haston/NBC via Reuters)

Dude, she spells it “Sofia.” This is the Baysinger/Bassinger of her generation.
[And while she’s usually very quiet, the one thing Sofia won’t shut up about is her wok.]
Drew Nieporent’s SF Rubicon is just down the street from The Wok Shop. Sofia’s father is an investor. Coincidence?

FLASH: Pretend-journalists love Sofia Coppola

As you can see by my interview with her last year.
On the subject of pretend-journalists, Lost in Translation beat out indie underdog Finding Nemo for best comedy/musical at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Golden Globes last night. The 80-page or so outline/story/is it really a script? that funders initially thought was too slight to make a whole film from won best screenplay, and Bill Murray won best actor (for finishing it, I guess).
Gothamist has minute-by-minute coverage of the boozefest which is more entertaining than the show itself. Sort of a Joan Rivers-meets-Andrew Sarris kind of thing.
Scarlett Johanssen goes 1 for 3 on getting thanked. Hmm. On the subject of misbehaving ingenues, it sounds like Britney Murphy didn’t have a presenting meltdown like she did last year at the IFP Awards. Whew.

My Yogurt with Gus

On the occasion of Elephant‘s release in the UK, Simon Hattenstone goes on a publicity pilgrimage to Oregon to interview Gus Van Sant for the Guardian. Gus sends him for coffee before buzzing him up, and later serves him blueberry yogurt [which Simon apparently doesn’t understand is the archetypal food of the Guy Living Alone.] It’s a long account with some nice backstory and several references to Van Sant’s art background (he went to RISD with David Byrne).
Related: My interview last month with Dany Wolf, Van Sant’s producer