It is not uncommon to describe filmmakers as “true artists,” however in the case of Peter Greenaway it is literally the case that he brings an artist's sensibility to work on the big screen. Born in Newport, Wales, in 1942, Greenaway grew up in London and studied to be a painter at the city's Walthamstow College of Art. In the late 60s, Greenaway began to explore his fascination with cinema, embarking on a series of documentary short films which he continued throughout the 1970s that set out to capture the peculiarities of the world (or the world from a peculiar standpoint). He made his feature debut in 1980 with the faux-documentary The Falls, about the victims of an unspecified disaster, but first made an impact with The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), a 17th Century drama about art, sexuality and class, and how they intersect. Greenaway solidified his reputation as a visually and thematically sophisticated filmmaker with his next two films, A Zed and Two Noughts (1985) and The Belly of an Architect (1987), while two contemporary, more accessible films, Drowning by Numbers (1988) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), established him as a household name. He began the 1990s with the lavish period pieces Prospero's Books – his 1991 riff on Shakespeare's The Tempest – and The Baby of Macon (1993), before making two sexually provocative modern day dramas The Pillow Book (1995) and 8½ Women (1999). Beyond filmmaking, Greenaway has written opera libretti, recently explored multimedia projects, such as The Tulse Luper Suitcases (which includes in it a trilogy of films), has begun VJing, and is currently working on an ongoing installation project called Nine Classical Paintings Revisited.

The first painting Greenaway chose for his Nine Classical Paintings Revisited installation was Rembrandt's iconic 1642 portrait of a group of militia soldiers, The Night Watch. His fixation on the picture, in turn, lead him to make the 2007 feature Nightwatching, about Rembrandt's creation of the masterpiece, and subsequently the documentary Rembrandt's J'Accuse, which goes on release this week. The latter movie is the outlet for his exhaustive research into and close examination of Rembrandt's painting, information which Greenaway weaves together into a vigorous and playful cinematic essay. The central thrust of Rembrandt's J'Accuse is that the visual deconstruction of The Night Watch can unlock a murder mystery, with Greenaway contending that Rembrandt employed iconographic elements of the picture to incriminate two of the soldiers in the portrait in the death of one of their own. Segmenting the film into 30 questions, Greenaway's lively documentary literally puts the picture together piece by piece, allowing even today's “visually illiterate” audiences (as he provocatively calls them) to ultimately see what he sees.

Filmmaker spoke to Greenaway about finding a murder mystery in Rembrandt's picture, why cinema is a “finished” medium, and a life-changing childhood moment at the movies.



Filmmaker: Tell me about how Rembrandt's J'Accuse came about.

Greenaway: Well, there's a huge amount of information. Rembrandt is an extraordinarily well-documented painter, and I have lived in his city, Amsterdam, for 20 years. We virtually know which streets he walked along and which brothels he went to and where all his children are buried and where his wives died of the plague, so just as Paris is Godard's city and Manhattan is Woody Allen's city, Amsterdam belongs to Rembrandt. Unlike his almost-contemporary Vermeer, who we know almost nothing about, there's an overload of information [on Rembrandt]. When we made Nightwatching, I was very keen to posit this; not only to talk about a painting or a painter, but to talk about the milieu and the emotional and political ripples. [I was] making a very thorough investigation of a singular image, which primarily is of enormous importance to the Dutch but I think is set very squarely in the end period of the 17th Century Baroque and has all sorts of connections to – at least in my subjective understanding – artificial light. (And what is cinema but the manipulation of artificial light?) And the suggestion indeed that cinema did not begin in 1895 with the Lumière brothers but was a manifestation already anticipated by those extraordinary painters who were the first to paint artificial light, those four giants of Caravaggio, Velasquez, Rubens and Rembrandt. These sorts of notions of sharing the ground of 8,000 years of our painting tradition, which belongs to us all and brought us to the pitch where we are now, and the concepts of a remarkably new and, I now think, finished medium called cinema.

Filmmaker: I definitely want to return to the idea of cinema being finished later on, but I'd like to ask first about why you chose Rembrandt and this picture in particular?

Greenaway: Fashions in art change very quickly and very rapidly, and each generation has its take on all these things. We might not have thought about Rembrandt in this light maybe two generations back and we might not think him significant two generations hence, but for the moment he ticks all the right boxes. He comes out of a democratic republic, and we all pretend to be ideal democrat republicans nowadays. I think that he's very anti-misogynist: he never ever paints a degrading image of a female. (He might paint ugly women, but he never paints ugly portraits of women.) To use fashionable contemporary terms, he's definitely post-Freudian and he's certainly post-Modernist. People have painted emotion on people's faces for years and years, but for the first time with Rembrandt, there seems to be a correspondence between the inner and the outer man. And I think he's non-judgmental and he obviously has a non-recidivist attitude towards history which is wry and personal. For those democratic, cultural reasons, I find the man very, very interesting. I don't particularly like Rembrandt very much – I think he's too repetitive, often goes for the cheap effect, often a bit too Hollywood for me – but I don't think you can ignore him. He's a colossus who stands astride a whole series of post-Renaissance, post-Baroque paintings. He can be noted as deeply influential to all the Impressionists and the Post-Impressionists, and they are the entry into huge experiments in the 20th Century, so there's a continuity there. If you're really serious about painting, you ignore Rembrandt at your peril.

Filmmaker: How unique and groundbreaking is your interpretation of The Night Watch as such a specific and damning message?

Greenaway: A whole series of extraordinary people, often very articulate, have looked at [the painting], so there's a huge body of information and opinion about it. A lot of the particular characteristics that I examine one by one are part of the Rembrandt art history phenomenon. But I think I have discovered a number of new ones which offer new interpretations, and I have brought forward some of this critique phenomenon with a lot that art history either wishes not to talk about or maybe regards as irrelevant to the actual investigation of the painting itself. All this concern for the homosexual relationship between the two major figures, which seems to be part of the satirical intent to either laugh at these characters or degrade them in the public eye, gives me credence to believe there's much antagonism here between Rembrandt and his subject matter, which ultimately leads for me to make this design and create this scenario where there's both a murder and a conspiracy in the painting. But I think along the way there's sufficient sense of black humor and deliberate exploitation of the critical method within this film to allow for the truth, the half truths, the apocryphal truths and the downright lie. It's really about as much as the critique and the individual examination of the image here as it is to end up with a set of theories of ideas that are provable or unprovable.

Filmmaker: How would you describe the complementary relationship between Rembrandt's J'Accuse and Nightwatching?

Greenaway: I think, initially, I have to come clean: there was so much information and so much that was fascinating, in a sense I couldn't fit it in into the Nightwatching scenario as a drama, where I had to rely on the suspension of disbelief. I began my career as a documentary filmmaker and I'm still fascinated by the metier, especially by the recent in which documentary has made a big comeback all over the place. I think it's very interesting as a form of delivering information.

Filmmaker: The is extremely dynamic and active, both visually and intellectually, and you really invigorate the documentary medium.

Greenaway: I have a great interest in contemporary editing language and I enjoy the quick nature of a visual medium, playing with visual tricks. Some of them are straight tricks, but I hope they are taken sensibly and seriously in order to elucidate a point, to draw your attention. There's something self-reflexive about that: if we're going to talk about images, let's really talk about them in terms of how we understand images can be manipulated post-television in the 21st Century, so that would be part of the game. I think I am also treating my audiences very intelligently as people who can think as quickly as the film surface can think. That should be part and parcel of communication in the information age.

Filmmaker: In the film, you talk about the “visual illiteracy” of the world and “an impoverished cinema.” And at the start of the interview, you called cinema “finished.” Can you explain more fully your thoughts on this?

Greenaway: Well, we have a text-based cinema and I don't think we've seen any “cinema cinema,” or if we have it's very rare. The very best painting is non-narrative and it communicates its meaning by its ability to organize the sense of representation and the image. The big things that happened at the start of the 20th Century (that seem extraordinary in retrospect and that people like Rembrandt would have been astonished by) were things like where harmony could legitimately be seen to disappear from music and figuration could be seen to disappear from painting. In a sense, painting and music were never impoverished by either of these apparently essential revolutionary disturbances. I think cinema is a very poor medium. I think cinema knows this, which is why it always goes back to the bookshop, and this is why we have a text-based cinema. I could not possibly – nor could any other filmmaker – go to a producer or a film studio with four paintings, three lithographs and a book of drawings and say, “Give me the money.” We don't have cultural confidence in the image, strangely enough, and often I think this is as much true in the cinema as it is outside the cinema.

Filmmaker: How do you see cinema moving forward then?

Greenaway: I think the text is, in a sense, at the center of how we all communicate. Umberto Eco has said that we've had 8,000 years of the text masters who've given us our holy books and jurisprudence and told us our moral agenda, and it's all been based on text. But Eco would argue that the digital revolution, which in some senses is incredibly visual in its formatting, is going to suggest that all the text masters have to move aside so all the image masters can come forward. But if people are visually illiterate, if they feel uncomfortable the manufacture and reception of the image, then we're in for a poor time. If civilization is going to be rewrit, reconsidered, refabulated with the primacy of the image when most people are visually illiterate, how are we going to cope with new sophistications? One would have thought that cinema would be the ideal educator to move us into this position, so maybe we should thank the Lumière brothers for laying the ground. Maybe the 114 years we've seen is indeed the prologue, and now we can get in with the real business of making sensible, coherent, sophisticated communication via the image.

Filmmaker: How do you see yourself as functioning as an artist within this “finished” medium?

Greenaway: Well, the two buzzwords are “interactivity” and “multimedia.” Rather facetiously, I give a date for the death of cinema and its the 31st of September, 1983, when the remote control was introduced into the living rooms of the world. Previously, the passive medium of cinema demanded that you sit back in the dark, looking in one direction. The introduction of the remote control, however primitive it might have been in 1983, was the beginning of a cultural democracy. In Athens in about 300 B.C., there was one artist for a million people. By the time you get to the Second World War, there's probably 250,000 artists for a million people and surely the way things are going, soon there will be no difference whatsoever between the notion of the maker and the recipient. I don't think we need to be anxious about notions of quality, but I'm talking about the apparatus of cultural receptivity and creation. I think the greatest thing that's happened in the last 10 years was the invention of YouTube: finally we've got rid of all those middlemen, the elitism whereby someone else has told us what we can show and what we can't show. That means that, I'm sure we all agree, YouTube is 97% crap, but that's always been the case. Whatever period is high cultural activity – Versailles, the Weimar Republic, etc. - it's always been the same: 97% crap and 3% shining, valuable, desperately important substance.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Greenaway: My grandmother was an old age pensioner and she could go to the cinema free on a Thursday afternoon, and she used to take me along with her. We used to watch westerns, and I was always not fully engaged and not prepared to involve myself in the suspension of disbelief, but I remember there were all these characters wandering around with raspberry juice on their heads. It never occurred to me that it was anything other than raspberry juice, and then suddenly one afternoon I realized I was supposed to believe that raspberry juice was blood, and I ran screaming out of the cinema. That was a pretty mind-shocking experience.

Filmmaker: When did you last do it for the money not the love?

Greenaway: Oh, my God, how honest can I get? I've got to put food on the table, I've got children. There's always a financial angle somewhere, but it's certainly never been my major priority, which also means I've never been a very rich man. I live a satisfactory, English-language-spoken, bourgeois life with all the amenities and all the lifestyle that most people in the Western world enjoy, so love of the project, love of the idea, love of the continuity has certainly been the prime effort and it's been the thing that keeps me going.

Filmmaker: If someone gave you $1m dollars that you had to spend it within a week, what would you do?

Greenaway: One of my dreams, a very bourgeois dream, is to build a bedroom with an enormous, beautiful bed inside a library inside a garden, and there are no roofs anywhere so it's open to the sky. I don't know if I could spend the money that quickly to get that, but I'd do my damndest to find one somewhere.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was your dream job as a kid?

Greenaway: I'm going to be very boring, because the dream job turned into a real job. Ever since I was six or seven, I wanted to be a painter. I have no evidence of anything like this in my family, so it really came out of the blue. To be a painter was what I always wanted to do, and I sort of kept that up until I was 28 and then, maybe unfortunately, I discovered cinema.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/21/2009 12:12:00 PM Comments (1)

Friday, October 16, 2009

SEBASTIAN SILVA, THE MAID 

CATALINA SAAVEDRA IN DIRECTOR SEBASTIAN SILVA'S THE MAID. COURTESY ELEPHANT EYE FILMS.

Sebastián Silva could seemingly make a career out of a variety of creative pursuits, however at the moment it is on filmmaking that he is focusing all his attention. Silva was born in Santiago, the capital of Chile, in 1979, and grew up attending a Catholic school in the city. Though from a young age it was clear that he had a talent for art, after finishing high school he went to study film at the Escuela de Cine in Santiago. After a year, however, he quit to move to Montreal to learn animation. Since then, Silva has been constantly busy with a range of projects. He had a gallery show of his drawings while working as a shoe salesman, and later another show in New York City. He started the faux rap group CHC with Gabriel Diaz (also a cinematographer) and musician Pedro Subercaseaux, and the band has now released three albums. He was behind the groups Yaia and Los Mono, and has recorded a solo album. And he spent a period of time in Hollywood working as a gardener and obsessively seeking out Steven Spielberg to pitch him a movie idea. In 2007, Silva made his directorial debut with La Vida Me Mata, a black-and-white comedy with absurdist overtones which won the Best Film award from the Chilean Critics Circle.

While his first film was a success in his home country, the New York-based Silva has made his breakthrough movie with his sophomore effort, The Maid. Set in present day Santiago, the film is centered on the eponymous Raquel (Catalina Saavedra), an abrasive, overworked housekeeper who has been with the same family for over 20 years. When she collapses one day, the family decides to hire another live-in maid to help lighten her excessive workload, however Raquel responds negatively to the idea, seeing it as the first step to her becoming obsolete. One of the great strengths of Silva's film is that is takes a different direction from what we initially suspect, as the potentially predictable set-up involving an increasingly unhinged domestic servant is given an intelligent and humanistic spin. Dark, funny and ultimately touching, The Maid shows Silva's increasing assurance as both writer and director while Saavedra – who is in almost every scene – delivers a complex, nuanced performance that is easily one of the best of 2009.

Filmmaker spoke to Silva about his personal experience with live-in maids, shooting the film in his childhood home, and ending up at a self-help meeting in a Santa hat.

DIRECTOR SEBASTIAN SILVA ON THE SET OF THE MAID. COURTESY ELEPHANT EYE FILMS.

Filmmaker: When did you first think about making this film?

Silva: The film was shot in February in 2008, and about nine months before that I started thinking about the idea. In the beginning, we wanted to make a really cheap film. It's already really cheap – it cost us between $250,000 and $300,000 – but I was thinking more of making a film for $20,000. (You always have those idealistic production scenarios, but they never come true.) The idea was to make a really tiny film at my parents' house, which is where we finally shot it, but it just got bigger. It was 2007 that I started thinking about the film, and that year I released my first film. My sister's boyfriend mentioned something about the maids that worked at my parents' house and this Lucy-Raquel kind of story that took place between two of them. He said, “What do you think about that?” I said, “That sounds like a good film. I could totally write about live-in maids.” That's something that I really knew about, and it's a really striking phenomenon for everybody. I felt like, “I have so much to tell about this!” So I started writing the screenplay, aiming to end up with this story between Lucy and Raquel. Everything that happens before that is a mix of memories and experiences that I went through, together with some fiction that I added to the story with my co-writer, Pedro [Peirano] (who I also co-wrote my first film with).

Filmmaker: What were your own experiences of having a live-in maid?

Silva: The first memory I have of maids that worked in my house has a rebellious feeling to it. It was because they were a third authority – I already had a father and a mother, and they were another authority figure at home that you didn't want to be bossed around by. It was like, “Who are you, lady? Whoa, whoa, whoa! Nobody tells me when to eat!” I started feeling awkward having someone at home 24/7 and feeling that her authority was less than my parents'. Also, they were more illiterate than everybody else in the house, and we were much younger than them and already knew stuff that they didn't know, so you would feel a little superior, in a way. All those factors together either makes you act like a fucking asshole towards them, feel superior, ignore them, or feel a little sympathy. But it wasn't just sympathy, it was guilt, and I didn't like that, because I wasn't responsible: “Man, she's hired here, I didn't do anything.” We didn't really get along, so my experience wasn't exactly negative, but it was confusing and the emotional relationship I had with her was unsolved until now. I think the film has helped me a lot to overcome this, and it's been very therapeutic for myself and my family and also the maids that work st my house.

Filmmaker: Is the Raquel character directly based on the maid you grew up with?

Silva: Yes. She was working with my family until I made the film, then I showed her the film, and she quit after two weeks. Since then, she's been away living with someone that she loves and she has a car and she has her own life. I do see her sometimes on Skype, and say “Hey, how are you?” She liked the film a lot and I think it was great for her too to see herself portrayed in such a fair way. Even though it's sad in a sense, I think the story is of someone who redeems herself so it has a positive attitude and it's based on, it's not her. The character of Raquel is much stronger than the real maid is – it's a cinematic character.

Filmmaker: Is she as an extreme a character as Raquel?

Silva: There are some things that I used that I don't really regret but were a little extreme, like the hairdo. She had the same hairdo when I was growing up. I used a lot of personal things of hers, like I shot the movie at my parents' house and Raquel's room is her real room. I didn't change the bed covers, I used the same TV set and the same picture frames, the same photo album. Everything is the same, I even took some photos that she had in her photo album and retouched the actress' face in on top of her face. I went really deep, and she knew that and agreed with that. I showed that I wasn't exploiting that, just trying to be as real as possible. At some points, I was like, “I don't need to go that far into reality, I could fake that,” and then I would make something up and say, “Why would I make it up?! The real shit is so much better.” It just made sense, it was perfect. I took the risk of creating such an accurate portrait of my family intimacy, but I walked out victoriously.

Filmmaker: What was it like for you to make a film in your childhood home?

Silva: Technically, it was really comfortable because we had the chance with the DP to do some storyboarding beforehand, I had the keys to the location, and 85% of the film takes place in that house. I'd lived there for 10 years, so I knew every single corner, I knew all the dynamics of each room, so that made the writing and the shooting pretty organic.

Filmmaker: What about your emotional response to shooting there?

Silva: It just felt so like home that I don't remember any weird feeling. At the beginning, I guess, having 40 strangers walking around with tripods and lights all over my parents' house and actors sitting on my parents' bed and an actress dressing up as my mother and wearing the same pajamas as my mother was weird, but I got used to it. Then, all of a sudden, on the third day, it was like, “Whoa, I'm at home. And I'm filming my family!” It was stressful, and there were points with the stress that I would go to a bathroom, lock myself in and pant in front of the mirror, like, “Fuck, what's going on, what's going on?” But I think that was because were shooting 12 scenes a day.

Filmmaker: How much were you influenced by things like Jean Genet's The Maids?

Silva: Or Buñuel films. Well, I haven't seen those films and I was told to watch them before I made this film, but I didn't. It's something that I would never do. Every time you make a film about something, people are like “Oh, you have to read The Odyssey, you have to watch this Buñuel film, you have to read this book about a maid written in Slovenia...” That's exactly what I don't want to do; I want to go to my writing desk and write without any influence from things. So what I did was I got more influenced by talking to the maids at my house and doing emotional research about them, how they feel at my parents', how was the first week that they were working at a stranger's house and serving then, how was it to wear a new uniform for the first time. I was more intrigued by that stuff rather than art pieces about maids. And clearly I'm not intrigued now, as I haven't seen them. But at some point I will.

Filmmaker: The film is centered around the performance of Catalina Saavedra, who you wrote the role of Raquel for, but I believe she initially said she didn't want to be in the movie.

Silva: She wasn't really excited. She has played several roles as maids in Chile before this one, but I don't watch any TV and I'm not in Chile that often so I was unaware of that when I offered it to her. But I found out later that she had done, like, seven different maids before this one. When I worked with her on my first film, she had a secondary, comedic role and I was totally in love with her performance and her exceptional talent, so I told her that together with my co-writer I was going to write specially something for her. Then I called her and said, "I have the perfect project for you," and she said, "What is it called?" When I said, "It's called La Nana," she was like, "Fuck you, man, you can do better than that, Sebastian, please! I've done fucking eight maids – what are you talking about?" I said, "No, I promise this will be better. It's a humane character, it has two sides..." And then she read the screenplay and she liked it, because it's nothing like she's played before. Every other maid she's played was a caricature, either really spicy or bitchy, or a thief, or a fat maid who ate all day. She was a human being. She did a great, great job. She's 80% of the film and I seriously wouldn't allow her to refuse my invitation. I don't think I would have done the film without her.

Filmmaker: You're not just a filmmaker, you're an artist and a musician as well, so how do all your creative pursuits fit together? Do the other activities also inform your filmmaking?

Silva: Filmmaking is the main thing, I guess, but I do keep my drawing and painting and illustrating pretty much alive. I have made several music albums and I sing on all of them and I do write lyrics and I'm good at coming up with poppy melodies. But I'm not a musician. You give me a guitar, and I'll give you a sad spectacle. Music is a hobby and I'm planning on keeping it as a hobby, because it's really relieving to create songs. Painting is the thing that I've done the most in my life, so I take that very seriously. I haven't shown my work in many places and I'm not rushing to do it. I'm keeping it for myself until I can show it somewhere nice. I started making films five years ago, and it seems like I've got talent for it. I definitely feel very comfortable directing, and I think drawing and illustrating have given me a sense of composition and picturing scenes beforehand very accurately. I can really close my eyes and see the movie, and that's thanks to my drawing abilities and my abilities to put ideas on paper.

Filmmaker: In your bio, it says that you tried to go down a more mainstream route in Hollywood before you decided to make indie movies.

Silva: [laughs] My experience in Hollywood really has nothing to do with the film industry. It was actually a crazy, schizophrenic quest that I had when I was 21 years old and I went there in search of Steven Spielberg with a crazy project to save humanity. It's another film, and there's actually a screenplay for that story. It's called May I Talk to Steven Spielberg?. I was not trying to make a living as a filmmaker, I was working as a gardener and smoking marijuana every day. I working for this eccentric family in Bel Air and looking for Spielberg. That was my life in Hollywood, and I ended up in a self-help meeting wearing a Santa Claus hat, wearing a name tag and sharing my misery with fat people.

Filmmaker: When you were a teenager, whose pin-up poster did you have on your wall?

Silva: When I was a teenager, I had a poster of Goofy and Bambi. Seriously. And maybe Ren and Stimpy, and probably the Beatles. And then my drawings and stuffed animals. I was never a fan of any filmmaker. Ever. Now that I've been making films, I've been watching more films and there are definitely a lot of filmmakers that I really admire, but I never had a poster of theirs on my wall. If there's a filmmaker I worship in my life, it's Walt Disney. Seriously. He has contributed to my imagination the most, I think.

Filmmaker: What's the most embarrassing film you watched the whole of on a plane?

Silva: Robin Williams is in it. Of course. It's called Death to Smoochy, or something. I think Danny DeVito is in it too. That film is quite embarrassing. And I didn't see it on a plane, but the film where Robin Williams plays a robot [Bicentennial Man] is the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was your cinematic epiphany?

Silva: There are three films: Harold and Maude, Stand by Me, Scenes from a Marriage. Those are the three films that made me go, "Oh, my God, I want to do something like this."

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/16/2009 12:37:00 PM Comments (1)

Friday, October 9, 2009

NICOLAS WINDING REFN, BRONSON 

TOM HARDY AS THE EPONYMOUS LEAD IN WRITER_DIRECTOR NICOLAS WINDING REFN'S BRONSON. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.

At a time when Danish cinema boasts a large number of first rate directors, Nicolas Winding Refn stands out among his peers for his raw talent and ambition. The son of filmmaker Anders Refn, Refn was born in Copenhagen in 1970 but spent much of his teenage years living in New York, which had a great impact on his cinematic sensibility. He started film school at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, but was expelled for throwing a desk at a wall, one of a number of incidents that got him the nickname “Enfant Sauvage,” or “wild child.” He was accepted by the Danish Film School but dropped out before his studies had even begun. However, when a producer saw one of his short films and asked him to turn it into a feature, he was able to bypass a conventional cinematic education entirely. That film was Pusher (1996), a violent drug movie set on the streets of Copenhagen which drew rave reviews as well as comparisons with Refn's idol, Martin Scorsese. He followed up the huge success of that film with Bleeder (1999), another unvarnished portrayal of urban Copenhagen that showed a greater depth to his work. In 2003, Refn released Fear X, an unconventional take on the revenge movie, starring John Turturro and written by Hubert Selby Jr., however the financial failure of the film bankrupted him. To pay off his debts, he agreed to complete the Pusher trilogy, making Pusher II (2004) and Pusher III (2005) back-to-back.

According to Refn, making the second and third Pusher movies purely for money transformed his attitude to filmmaking, and we see a reborn director at work in his latest movie, Bronson. The film is based on the story of Michael Peterson (Tom Hardy), a petty criminal infamous for being the most violent prisoner in Britain and who reinvented himself as tough guy “Charles Bronson.” Refn's Bronson, however, is not a biopic but rather a riff on some of the events of Peterson's life and his transformation from an unexceptional nobody to a prison “celebrity” to, ultimately, a much celebrated artist and writer. Bronson is a thrilling, dynamic cinematic experience as a result of Refn's inventive, quasi-operatic way of telling Peterson's tale (which includes a theatrical one-man show by Bronson) and Hardy's powerhouse performance in the lead role make. In their hands, Bronson becomes a classic screen character as his vulnerabilities and tragic qualities – along with his sense of humor – are drawn out to great, and sometimes moving, effect.

Filmmaker spoke to Refn about overcoming his initial resistance to making Bronson, his personal parallels with Michael Peterson, and making movies with James Stewart.

NICOLAS WINDING REFN ON THE SET OF BRONSON. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES.

Filmmaker: When did you first hear about Charles Bronson?

Refn: The producer Rupert Preston had acquired the rights to make a movie about his life. Rupert is a good friend of mine and also the distributor of all my films in the U.K. He basically asked if I was interested in making a movie about him, and my first reaction was no. But then when I began to think about it, I said yes, because I saw some potential. I didn't know what the potential was yet, but I needed to find out what it was.

Filmmaker: Was there a script at the time?

Refn: For many years, people had been trying to make a biopic of Michael Peterson so there were some very, very bad scripts written. But one of the conditions was that they were all eliminated and we had to start from scratch, because I didn't have an interest in making a biopic of Michael Peterson, but a movie about the transformation from Michael Peterson into Charlie Bronson.

Filmmaker: So you went and did your own research?

Refn: I didn't do research, I basically just thought, “How would I like to make this movie?” And that's how it began.

Filmmaker: What were your materials for writing the script?

Refn: Well, first I had to come up with the stage performance – that would be kind of how Charlie sees his own life. The second act is when he's released in Luton, when we get to see that Charlie has difficulties living in reality, because he has his own alternative reality. And act three is the audience perceiving as they wish to interpret him: is he crazy or is he not?

Filmmaker: How important was it for you to root this in historical fact?

Refn: Because I was making a movie about a person who does exist, I needed to stay close to a certain degree to what happened to him, but at the same time take artistic license. But I had a gray area because I wasn't making a biopic of Michael Peterson, I was making a movie about my own interpretation of the transformation.

Filmmaker: How did the performance aspects become part of the film?

Refn: Because I wanted to make the film very operatic and very feminine, because it's also very much about the concept of art and art is a feminine medium. So it was having all those elements thrown into it. The painting of the face is more like he's a circus entertainer, like an old-fashioned personality that doesn't exist anymore. And yet there is no face – he's an invisible person, because Charlie Bronson is a made up person, he doesn't exist.

Filmmaker: Did you try to make contact with Charles Bronson at all?

Refn: No, I didn't have an interest in contacting him because I didn't want to make a movie about him. But at one point I needed to speak to him about two things. I wanted him to come up with some ideas for the monologue about what it's like being in prison, and I wanted a little on how he got back into prison, just some factual things that I needed to clarify.

Filmmaker:What was it like speaking to him?

Refn: Interesting to speak to a guy who was in solitary confinement for his whole life, probably. You can't say a lot of things, because you don't know what you'd say. What do you say? "How's life? What are you doing? What are you up to?" That conversation is not there. So I was very specific about what I needed to know, and I passed him back to Tom [Hardy] who was more friendly.

Filmmaker: Did you ask him any questions that probed at the core of personality?

Refn: No, because there was no way I could get to the bottom of it – it was too complex. Plus, I wasn't interested in him. There is no "Rosebud" in Bronson. On the contrary, that's why there are reasons to make a film, because there is no "Rosebud." It's all about interpretation. Great art has to leave a bit of a question mark and a lot of interpretation so people still feel they're getting what they're paying for.

Filmmaker: Has Charles Bronson seen Bronson?

Refn: No, he's not allowed. But he's heard the movie, I'm told, and he thought it's the greatest movie ever made. Obviously.

Filmmaker: Can you tell me about how you worked with Tom Hardy to build the character? Was it a very collaborative process?

Refn: It was a very close partnership. I'm very collaborative in that way because I shoot in chronological order so I leave great responsibility on the cast. So it's always a very collaborative form when I work with anybody, in that it's seeking out all possibilities and finding out which ones work and which ones don't.

Filmmaker: Did you allow him to improvise at all, like for the monologue?

Refn: No, that was very clearly written, but I definitely utilized Tom a lot in terms of phrasing and so forth. He had a friend called Kelly Marshall, a very nice woman, who helped me write some of the wording because, not being English, it was sometimes difficult for me to find the right phrasing.

Filmmaker: You seemed to capture the Britishness very well. How difficult was that coming in as an outsider?

Refn:Well, I didn't have an ambition so I didn't know what to achieve with it, because I'm not British. I can't really identify with that specific thing.

Filmmaker:Was it important to you that you got that aspect right?

Refn: Whatever you do, you have to get it right no matter what, so it's part of the game.

Filmmaker: Tom Hardy went through a miraculous physical transformation to become the character. Given what he previously looked like, what prompted you to cast him?

Refn: I'd never seen him before. He worked out, he did all the things that needed to be done. He got all muscular. Those were the things that I found least interesting, but he was very obsessed with it. I said, "You go do your thing and I'll do mine." [laughs]

Filmmaker: And were there things that you became obsessed about?

Refn: Yeah, that more about how the movie became more and more about my own life, in a way. It's probably the closest I'll get to an autobiography. That was very creepy, in a way, but I didn't know that until after I was editing.

Filmmaker: In what sense did you feel it was about your own life?

Refn: When I was very young, I was very nihilistic and destructive like Charlie was. I wanted to be very famous like he did. I was searching for a stage like he was. I didn't many skills, which he says he didn't either. My second phase started when I completed the Pusher trilogy, seeing that art can be a way to express and not a preconceived notion. Charlie realizes that art is an act of violence and that if he can just let it go, it will just be a natural evolution for him and he can become a complete person. There are many things like that that are very similar in our lives.

Filmmaker: Do you always need to find parallels like that in your work?

Refn: Anything I do is part of me, part of my DNA.

Filmmaker: I was struck by how sympathetic you make Bronson, despite his violent nature.

Refn: You always have to love your character. When you do that, you find vulnerability. Charlie's a very vulnerable man and that's why he reacts the way he does. So is Tom Hardy, so it was very good casting.

Filmmaker: In the second act, when he's a free man, he reminded me of King Kong or Quasimodo, freaks of nature who are out of place in normal existence.

Refn: People that don't belong in the real world. There's an awkwardness to them, almost a childishness, like a fairy tale character. Me and Tom used to refer to Charles Bronson as "The Little Toy Soldier" who marches into the real world, realizes he can't function, so he has to march right back.

Filmmaker: Do you think about your place among your filmmaking peers?

Refn: I don't think like that, and you shouldn't because then you go crazy.

Filmmaker: Did you used to think like that?

Refn: When I was younger, because it was all preconceived. You wanted your art before you made it, you wanted to create your own myth before it was there. Like Charlie Bronson. I was impatient, I wanted to go somewhere. I always wanted to work with James Stewart, but he's no longer around. The filmmakers I would have loved to meet are more obscure, like Andy Milligan. He's a very obscure filmmaker who made films for Times Square in the 60s and 70s.

Filmmaker: Are you ever afraid you'll be disappointed when you meet your idols?

Refn: No, I never think of it like that. When I meet other filmmakers, I try not to talk about film. I talk about things like children and politics, which are much more important.

Filmmaker: Since you became a father, have your priorities as a person changed how you see things as a filmmaker?

Refn: Look, when you die you may be the greatest artist in the world but the only thing that they're going to ask you about when you want to enter heaven is, "Were you good with your children?" I think I make better films than I did before because I know what's more important and I have that easy relationship with my work. I'm more occupied with when I'm going to go to Asia and buy toys, because I collect toys. It's not that I don't love what I do, it's healthier to have more than that.

Filmmaker: Does filmmaking feel like work?

Refn: No, it feels like all fun and games. That's why it's so difficult to prioritize your time. You're forever in a struggle between good and evil because you want to make sure that St Peter lets you into heaven.

Filmmaker: You've shot all your movies in chronological order. Is this a strict principle of yours?

Refn: Yeah, it helps me discover the movie. Why make something if you know what it's going to be like? Now, of course, when you make a movie you make two movies. You make a physical movie, which is a physical journey, and you make the physical movie with the script. Stick to the script and write a very good one, or find a very good one. But shooting it in chronological order, you add a metaphysical part, where the movie takes on a life of its own, and that is what I enjoy more than anything else. I love to travel into the unknown and see what I come up with in the end.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you cried in a film, and which film was it?

Refn: I don't watch that many films anymore. My wife cried in Gran Torino when Clint Eastwood died. I thought that was pretty cool. I was very affected, very affected. I can't remember if I cried; she did, at least. I was very moved by it. I loved the movie, but then I love Clint Eastwood.

Filmmaker: If you had an unlimited budget and could cast whoever you wanted (alive or dead), what film would you make?

Refn: I would love to work with James Stewart, and it would take place in a room in total darkness. It would be about a guy who's trying to find a light switch. There wouldn't be a lot of dialogue.

Filmmaker: It sounds a little like Container, the Lukas Moodysson movie.

Refn: Okay, then I'm not going to make it. That's terrible. Then I would probably make a horror movie with James Stewart.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was the smartest decision you ever made?

Refn: Going bankrupt. Because I needed to crash in order to rebuild my own life and career and I was heading on the wrong course. It was in 2003, because of Fear X. I basically crashed, and then I made Pusher 2 and 3 to pay off my debt.

Filmmaker: So you did them purely to make money?

Refn: And it turned out to restart my career, because I was able to make two films much better than I did the first one. It was like back to basics, but I felt God had given me an opportunity to say, “Look, you're not doing this the right way.” I approached them purely as a commodity, but I was completely at ease doing them, because I didn't care. And that helped me see a way in. I thought, “My God, if I just didn't really care so much about the result and just did what I felt would be fun, I'd make better movies.”

Filmmaker: So you make movies much more instinctively now?

Refn: Sure. Now, it's anything that feels right, that's what you do and that's where the satisfaction comes in. It's not the result – it's over in 20 minutes, who cares? It's about getting there.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/09/2009 06:32:00 PM Comments (0)

Friday, October 2, 2009

ANTONIO CAMPOS, AFTERSCHOOL 

EZRA MILLER IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ANTONIO CAMPOS' AFTERSCHOOL. COURTESY IFC FILMS.

To call Antonio Campos a precocious talent would be to understate his abilities. Amazingly, the 26-year-old writer director, a native of New York City, has already spent half of his young life making films. Campos directed his debut short, Puberty (1997), at the age of 13 as part of a New York Film Academy program, and over the course of his teens made numerous shorts – both fiction and documentary – including First Kiss (2001), Pandora (2002) and Who's Your Daddy? (2004). At 21, he had his short film Buy It Now (2005) play at the Cannes Film Festival Cinefondation (where it won the top prize), and in the process established a longstanding relationship with the festival. He returned to the Croisette two years later with another short, The Last 15, and also in 2007 was selected to take part in the festival's Residence Program. Along with Josh Mond and Sean Durkin, two former classmates from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Campos set up the production company Borderline Films, for whom he has done such work as the pop promo for the Shins' song "Sleeping Lessons."

Afterschool, which premiered at Cannes in 2008, is Antonio Campos' first feature. It tells the story of Rob (Ezra Miller), an introverted teenager at a prep school in upstate New York who witnesses the tragic death of two female classmates one day in a hallway at school. A frequent watcher of internet videos, Rob is a member of the school's A.V. club and is asked to create a video tribute to the deceased girls, however his unconventional approach to the project causes problems. Afterschool is a dark and damning examination of the YouTube generation, with Campos presenting a socially withdrawn protagonist who is more emotionally engaged by the funny, violent or sexual videos he watches online than by real life. The film has a cold, stark quality reminiscent of Michael Haneke's work and is remarkably assured, both stylistically and in its tackling of the themes of voyeurism and violence in a post-Columbine world. Indeed Afterschool is so accomplished and powerful a piece of filmmaking that it stands out not only among recent debut features, but also among all American films of the past few years.

Filmmaker spoke to Campos about the personal experiences that fueled the making of Afterschool, secretly recording people's conversations to plunder for material, and his childhood wish to be a ghostbuster.

ANTONIO CAMPOS, DIRECTOR OF AFTERSCHOOL. COURTESY IFC FILMS.

Filmmaker: When did you first get the idea for Afterschool?

Campos: About eight years ago when I started high school. The first week of high school, 9/11 happened and that day my best friend's father died in the towers. It was just a surreal time in general for anybody who lived in New York, but being connected to it in that way had an effect on me. Then at the end of that year an ex-girlfriend and a good friend of mine died in a freak accident traveling in Europe. In both of those cases, there were no bodies; I was very distant from it, but at the same time it had a very profound effect on me. That summer of 2002, the idea came that there was this boy who witnesses two girls die of a drug overdose. Originally, he happened to be in the bathroom with these two girls who'd never really spoken to, who he'd just seen in the hallways, but now he was witnessing them dying. Then over the years, I did a lot of other things, and my perspective changed on it. When I was 23, I got into the Residence, and that's when it all kind of came together. I had applied once before and got rejected. Bruno Dumont was on the jury, and that was horrible. I didn't even know who he was at the time, I just knew he was the scariest French person I'd seen in my life. And then I came home and saw his films, and now he's one of my favorite filmmakers. I went after that and rewrote the treatment, resubmitted the treatment and got in.

Filmmaker: After 9/11, was filmmaking the way that you were consciously trying to process these events?

Campos: I always wanted to be a filmmaker, I always loved movies. Early on, around the age of 10 or 11, I knew I wanted to make movies. I didn't really know what that entailed, but I just wanted to make them. Then at 13, I saw A Clockwork Orange, and that really made me realize what a director did. I don't know why, but it. That year, I went to the New York Film Academy and I made my first short film at the Cinema Village. At that time, I'd just started at a prep school, Dwight. It was smaller [than my old school], I didn't have a set of friends and I was ostracized because I was the new kid, so all these things were happening and I really didn't have anything else. I became really obsessive about school work, but then I was always writing down ideas of things that I wanted to make. Essentially, I was just writing down the things that were happening to me, but writing them as though they were happening to a character in a film. In that way, it helped me deal with it, and everything that I was dealing with became fodder for film. That was the way that I was processing things.

Filmmaker: Is that now an instinctive process?

Campos: It's become like everything is preproduction for something. I also got in the habit of recording a lot of conversations. From an early age, I was recording lots of family fights and discussions, and whenever my friends came over I recorded hanging out with them. I was always trying to document as much as possible without anybody knowing that I was documenting. I would record a lot in school. I had a tape recorder in my bag and a microphone stuffed in the edge of the bag so no one would notice it. I tried to record as much as possible, then I would listen to it. There's still a bunch of tapes that are sitting around that I haven't listened to in a long time. When I went to France, I brought them all with me in case I needed to listen to them.

Filmmaker: Hearing that stuff about your prep school, it's tempting to conclude that there's a lot of you in the character of Rob in Afterschool.

Campos: The first year at my new school was miserable. I was made fun of, I didn't have any real friends and the friends I did have were the ones that had made fun of me before – it was a strange relationship. But eventually I adapted to the school and I made friends, and by the time high school came around I had been there for a while, so it was slightly different. For me, the character of Rob is a concentration of a lot of my insecurities and my confusion, and in terms of experience there are definitely pieces from my own teenage years. There's also things from other people's experiences that I've taken, but he's essentially a very focused, concentrated amount of a certain aspect of me.

Filmmaker: Were those insecurities and confusions ones you had during your teenage years, or more recent?

Campos: Those things always stay with you. I'm always dealing with that transition I made when I was 11, going to this new school. Somehow I've always been upset about it, but at the same time it's the thing that drove me to make movies, so I can't be too angry about it. Those insecurities are always with you in a way, I think, and they just get processed differently or you're able to be more objective about them. High school is a very strange time because it seems like the end of the world, but when you get to the real world you can deal with these things and move on. I think those things are always with me, it's just that I've grown up and I can deal with them differently. Or if I'm not exactly feeling those things, I can intellectually look at them and understand them and go back to them when I need to.

Filmmaker: Do you still have an outsider's perspective?

Campos: I guess I've always felt more comfortable outside than I did inside. I always felt comfortable being the one just observing. I guess that's why I make movies, because I can be behind the camera. When I'm making a movie about something, I can completely disconnect from it. And, for me, confronting things in films has always been the most therapeutic thing to do, because it forces you not to be emotionally involved necessarily. I guess from my first film, Puberty, which I made when I was 13 and going through puberty, everything has been dealing with something that I'm experiencing or have experienced, or feelings that I've had. It's finally getting them out. It's also the best way for me to have dialogue with people. There are some things that I couldn't say to my family or friends, but in movies I can say it all, and don't have to say anything.

Filmmaker: You mentioned getting emotionally detached in order to make films, and this film itself is about emotionally detached viewers.

Campos: For me, Robert wasn't a character who didn't feel emotion, it was that he was filled with so many emotions he didn't know how to deal with them. Somehow watching these clips fulfilled that experience, but was from a safe distance. I think that this generation more than any other has been overexposed to images, and to get a rise out of them you need to get more disgusting, funnier – you're always waiting, and there's this momentary excitement about it. Robert's an extreme case of someone who I think most teenagers can find some sort of connection to.

Filmmaker: Afterschool seems to also be about both the voyeurism of cinema and the voyeurism of modern life.

Campos: I think so. One of the things that fascinated me about everything on YouTube was that it was just a lot of videos of people filming themselves or filming their friends. There was this obsession with just watching ourselves and then watching it back. How many times do we take a picture and then right there look at the picture as though it's happened a week ago or a year ago: “Whoa, that was amazing!” There's this constant desire to capture and to own, to distribute and to share. The film for me is about this obsession with watching, and it was just as much about the obsession of watching at my end as it was about watching at the boys' end.

Filmmaker: When people talk about the film, they mention Gus Van Sant and Michael Haneke a lot as comparisons. Were those two filmmakers a major influence on Afterschool?

Campos: Gus Van Sant was someone I knew the film would be compared to. He made a high school film, but my goal wasn't to make a Gus Van Sant high school film. I think a lot of the things that Gus Van Sant took from radical European cinema are the things that influenced and inspired me. We both watched Jeanne Dielman a couple of times. Michael Haneke has had a much more profound effect on me as a filmmaker. When I saw Code Unknown, it was like watching A Clockwork Orange: it was something that I'd never seen before, but a language that I could understand somehow and that I wanted to learn. Haneke was using video way before other people started looking at video and media that. I always think that Sex, Lies and Videotape is provocative, but Benny's Video is profound. The restraint and the amount of tension he's able to raise with nothing. And also the performances: Haneke is an actor's director. Before that, Bergman and Fassbinder and Kubrick were the others. Kubrick before anybody else.

Filmmaker: Where do you feel you are right now as a filmmaker?

Campos: The only way you can figure yourself out as filmmaker is to keep making films. At this moment, I've been making films for 13 years. I've been actively making films throughout my teenage years; not all of them were good, probably most of them sucked. I constantly consume as many movies as I can, constantly try to do as many things as I can to try and figure out who I am and what I do like and don't like. And the only way to do that when you're not making movies is by watching movies. There's so many things that you can learn as a filmmaker from watching films, and also watching a filmmaker's back catalogue. Watch everything by Fassbinder: see where he started, see where he went, and then try and work out why all of sudden he went from making Love is Colder Than Death to Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. And then go back and watch Douglas Sirk movies. You watch Haneke and you've never seen anything like that before, but then you watch L'Argent by Bresson, and you go “Oh, fuck!” You watch something by Dumont, and then you watch Mouchette. And The White Ribbon seems like Haneke's tribute to Bergman, in a way. It's all connected.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Campos: The most vivid early movie memories were in my room with VHS literally watching Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II three times in a row back-to-back. My mom would be like, “What the hell are you doing? Get out of your room!” “No, it's amazing – I want to be a Ghostbuster!” The next big memory was going to see The Crying Game when I was 10 years old. My father had taken my to see Johnny Stecchino the week before, and I'd loved it, thought it was hilarious. So he said, “So this is it, enough of this Hollywood crap, we're only going to see foreign and independent movies now.” And when [the twist was revealed], I got really excited because I had figured it. I'd said, “There's something wrong with this woman – she is not a woman.”

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Campos: Yeah, I think so. Seriously, what's the point of making a movie if you don't take risks? There are those calculated risks where you think, “This could blow up in my face, but this could also be brilliant.”

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a kid?

Campos: A ghostbuster. Or an archaeologist, because of Indiana Jones. But then someone said, “Archaeology isn't that fun, it's not really like that.” So then I wanted to be a ghostbuster, but that didn't really exist. And then I wanted to be a filmmaker.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/02/2009 10:16:00 PM Comments (0)