Forty-plus years into a still-vital, ever-proliferating filmmaking career, Werner Herzog has aged gracefully into the role of the sage adventurer, still fearlessly exploring the terrain between documentary and fiction as well as the vanishing point between charismatic eccentricity and full-blown psychosis. Born in Munich, raised in the Bavarian Alps, and lumped early on with other avatars of the New German Cinema, Herzog has ceaselessly chronicled the obsessions of dreamers and renegades both real (God’s Angry Man) and imagined (Stroszek, The Wild Blue Yonder), as well as social outcasts whose quest for ecstatic truth leads to madness, self-destruction, or sometimes, in the case of Grizzly Man’s Timothy Treadwell, both. There are those who find Herzog’s documentaries to be the apotheosis of that singular vision, and those who are partial to the fevered collaborations with Klaus Kinski, when Herzog seemed to be placing his own life at risk in order to realize impossible ambitions, just like the protagonists of his twin monuments to crazed hubris, Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, The Wrath of God. In recent years, he has journeyed to a science colony in Antarctica (Encounters at the End of the World), ringed the jungle canopy with a high-flying inventor (The White Diamond), and revisited the story of downed airman Dieter Dengler (Little Dieter Needs to Fly), this time in fiction (Rescue Dawn). Regardless of whether it makes sense to divide such effulgently individualistic output into separate genres (in this director’s cinema of extremes, we are forever on the brink of both catastrophe and revelation), one thing is certain: only Herzog is ever Herzogian.

His latest film is Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a rogue-cop drama loosely based on Abel Ferrara’s 1992 crime thriller about a drug-deranged, out-of-control New York detective investigating the murder of a nun. (Herzog claims never to have seen Ferrara’s film.) In the new reimagining, Nicholas Cage plays Lieutenant Terence McDonagh, a decorated Crescent City officer who injures his back rescuing an inmate from a flooded cell in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and then spirals downward into pill-popping addiction, boisterous self-abuse, and all manner of depravity (extortion, bad gambling debts, forced fellatio). Under Herzog’s resolutely go-for-broke direction, Cage’s wild-card badge careens between feats of grotesque gutsiness and coarse-tongued slapstick. When his inner demons finally materialize as a pair of iguanas, all he can do is snicker, knowing how screwed he is. It’s a full-bodied, often hoot-worthy performance by the actor, enacted with all the ardently strange facial tics and bizarre vocal mannerisms Cage can muster, as he riffs off Val Kilmer’s blithely amoral cop and Eva Mendes’s easygoing, coke-snorting hooker. Part garish psychodrama, part cable-TV-grade policier gone horribly foul, Bad Lieutenant is one of Herzog’s cheekiest, most offbeat features in years.

Filmmaker spoke to Herzog about the appeal of shooting a modern noir in New Orleans, the viciousness of certain desert lizards, and why aspiring filmmakers should consider working in a sex club.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans opens in New York and Los Angeles on Friday.

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Filmmaker: What was the challenge for you in taking on the renegade-cop genre?

Herzog: It wasn’t a big deal to take on this story, and of course there’s a sense of being in times of crisis where film noir always has fertile ground to sprout. But it’s so simple: just imagine you were a director and an opportunity arises to work with Nic Cage and to do a film in New Orleans and have Eva Mendes on board, would you say no? [Laughs] You just can’t. It’s a no-brainer.

Filmmaker: Was the idea also to be playful with this as well?

Herzog: It was inherent in the screenplay, in a way. But we emphasized it. Immediately I said to Nicholas, there has to be such a thing as “the bliss of evil.” Enjoy yourself, as vile and as debased as you get. And of course, he’s getting hilarious, but it was not as strongly there. It was some sort of color that the film gained during shooting, and many things were invented en route, like the iguanas and the dancing soul. Hilarious moments.

Filmmaker: Cage’s Terence McDonagh has the manic ferocity of some of the charismatics we’ve seen in your other films. He’s even got some of Kinski’s wild intensity, except Cage is pushing his performance into broad humor at times. What was the guiding principle for his character, or was it sui generis?

Herzog: I would say sui generis. But we should let Kinski rest in peace [laughs] and not burden him with Nic Cage or vice versa. It wouldn’t do justice to either one. They’re both phenomenal actors. You wouldn’t compare Marlon Brando with Humphrey Bogart. It doesn’t get us anywhere. What they have in common is that kind of presence and intensity on the screen. That’s about it.

Filmmaker: I was thinking about something you said to the BFI Southbank audience not long ago when you presented Encounters at the End of the World. You had just finished filming Bad Lieutenant and you said you’d taken Nicholas Cage to places he’d not been before. What did you mean by that?

Herzog: Well, I think he has a platform from where he can depart into the unknown. Nicholas has a very nice phrase for it: he says it was a “designed” role and you cannot [measure] it with a ruler, so you have to give him the liberty and the security to just go for it. I gave him the security for doing that.

Filmmaker: Your touch is definitely in evidence here, and you mentioned the iguanas, so let me ask you about those sequences. Were they a holdover from your South American adventures?

Herzog: Not at all. I saw an iguana in a tree, next to where our camera truck was parked, and it was just sitting there. I thought, man, I need an iguana for one of the next day’s scenes. Actually, [in the film] it wasn’t two iguanas—one was one of these vicious desert lizards that bite like hell! [Laughs] It jumped forward and got my thumb and gripped it like a vise of steel, and I couldn’t shake it off. But these are the pleasures of making a movie.

Filmmaker: You seem to magnetize those experiences in a way.

Herzog: No, that’s just a little arabesque in making a film. I was filming it myself. I was shooting only millimeters away from the skin of the lizard, and getting very close to the eyes only, an inch away or less, and of course, one of them didn’t feel very happy about it. It just bit like hell.

Filmmaker: I understand they have a third eye, a parietal eye.

Herzog: I don’t know, it just went after me! It was a funny moment and everybody in the crew enjoyed it.

Filmmaker: Bad Lieutenant is a little unusual in that you didn’t write the entire screenplay yourself.

Herzog: It was Billy Finkelstein’s screenplay and it still is. However, we had to modify certain elements. The film was originally written for New York City, and it starts in a subway station. New Orleans doesn’t have a subway, so I said let’s start it in a flooded prison cell right after Katrina. And things like that I invented, but I would do that with my own screenplay as well.

Filmmaker: Why was it important for you to contextualize the film in the aftermath of Katrina?

Herzog: I think that’s why it really fits extremely well: it’s a city that was destroyed by a natural disaster which was neglected by the government and where civility had collapsed. That’s the right place for doing something like the Bad Lieutenant.

Filmmaker: You’ve said many times that you’re not a big filmgoer.

Herzog: No, it’s true.

Filmmaker: Do you have any particular fascination with film noir apart from this story?

Herzog: I haven’t seen too many, maybe two or three. I remember there was one with Edward G. Robinson, but I forgot the story and the title. I’m not, for example, like Marty Scorsese, who loves to watch movies, day in and day out. It’s joyous, this kind of life. But I’ve been different in that respect.

Filmmaker: At this point in your working career, having done so many different films, all of which really bear your personal stamp, do you find yourself drawn more toward documentary or drama?

Herzog: It comes as it comes, you see. It’s like burglars in the night. I have to get them out of my home or off my shoulders. No, the next four or five projects that are pushing me already are features, however there’s one or two docs as well. I don’t worry about which form it takes. And many of my docs are feature films in disguise anyway.

Filmmaker: There’s one wacky scene in Bad Lieutenant that I really loved, which is when you cut to the assisted living facility where the nursing assistant is tending to the elderly lady. The door closes, and Cage pops out from behind it, grooming his face with an electric razor.

Herzog: Yes, that was his idea. It’s just wonderful to work with an actor like that. And the scene was scripted only halfway through it. He intimidates them until he has the information about where this young kid is, the 15-year-old boy who was a witness to the crime. But then I said to him, “I think there’s more to it. You should turn the hawk loose.” [Laughs] And man does he do it! And it’s all his own design. Today, for the first time, I heard Nic talking in a roundtable interview about designing [his role], and this is a very well-coined word to describe what he’s doing. It’s not just acting, he’s designing.

Filmmaker: And you respond to that as well.

Herzog: Yes, and I know how to embed him in a texture of supporting cast. Without Eva Mendes or the other very strong members in the cast, it would be a no man’s land.

Filmmaker: There’s certainly plenty of acting talent in this film, like Brad Dourif, who was in the The Wild Blue Yonder, and Michael Shannon, who I really admired in Shotgun Stories, and who also stars in your other new film, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done.

Herzog: You see with Mikey Shannon, before I started this film, I told him I would love to put the leading character of my new film on his shoulders. And in order to warm up with each other, I said “I have a small role and I’m sorry I can’t offer you anything bigger. But would you like to come for two or three days, to see how I’m working?” And he accepted the invitation. It was healthy and good to learn about each other a little bit, and then more than half a year later, we filmed My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done. At that time, when we did Bad Lieutenant, he hadn’t gotten an Academy Award nomination [for Revolutionary Road]. And I was so proud when he did. A phenomenal talent.

Filmmaker: When you make a film like Rescue Dawn or Bad Lieutenant, do you ever feel like you’re beating Hollywood at its own game?

Herzog: No. I don’t have to beat anyone. I make the films that I love to do. I have nothing against Hollywood. For example, The Dark Knight, which I saw because I wanted to see how Christian Bale was doing. How dark and how intense this film was—a total, wonderful surprise, and it can’t be more mainstream. Yet it’s the film with the most substance, probably, of last year.

Filmmaker: Would you ever consider making a film specifically for an online platform, like David Lynch has decided to do recently?

Herzog: No, I think the mother of all battles will be decided in theaters, with a large audience seeing a film and giving you a ripple of laughter coming from the front row and passing through the whole house. My goal is the movie theaters. Everything beyond that is secondary.

Filmmaker: Science seems to be a prevalent theme in many of your films, like Lessons of Darkness and The White Diamond, and your expedition to Antarctica for Encounters yielded what for me is one of your most amazing legacies. Is there any technology that you fear? Is it a source of anxiety at times?

Herzog: It doesn’t really frighten me, but when you look at the explosive evolution of means of communication — cell phones and television and radio and talk shows and blogs and virtual reality and the Internet — I think it does not isolate people, but it does creates a deep existential solitude. It’s very strange because it seems like a contradiction, a paradox. I’m one who, for example, does not have a cell phone. And people find me anyway. I like real conversation among grown-up men, face to face. And I think there’s a value to it, which we cannot ever underestimate.

Filmmaker: And here we are on a phone, talking.

Herzog: Yes, but you see sometimes these instruments and tools are a technical necessity, fine. But I don’t spend my life on the Internet.

Filmmaker: I understand you’re starting a film school. Can you tell me about it?

Herzog: Oh, you have to look at it on the Internet! It’s kind of provocative and it gives everyone who actually will be admitted courage to realize their own dreams — beating bureaucracy, for example. It’s more about a very basic attitude than technical things you can learn. For that, you’d better sign up at your local film school. And of course, I give a reading list, starting with a poet of Roman antiquity, Virgil. We take it seriously. Read read read read, or travel on foot or work as a bouncer in a sex club. [Laughs] I’m doing the first weekend seminar early in January, but applications are coming in great numbers, so I have to reduce those. I study them very carefully. I have to reduce the number to a very small group.

Filmmaker: What’s your greatest unrealized dream, Werner?

Herzog: Well, the funny thing is that in a way I have realized my dreams. I wouldn’t know. Of course, there’s quite a few projects that are pushing me, but it’s not that I have somehow bypassed a great dream and then am longing to fulfill it. I’m not into this kind of life. I’ve been blessed in a way.

Filmmaker: And in terms of cinema?

Herzog: Well, I’m still plowing on, let’s face it. And I’ve done every film I’ve really wanted to do. There’s one or two exceptions, but I’ve always had a nonchalant attitude. There was one project so huge that I knew I could do it eventually if my last film made $300 million domestic box office. Then I would have enough money. But it doesn’t really matter whether out of fifty or sixty films I’ve done, one somehow is still dormant, so what.

Filmmaker: Do you see the direction cinema is headed in, at least in the U.S., as productive for the kind of communal theater experience you were talking about before?

Herzog: Well, it’s a huge question. Let’s make it very short. I’m not worried about cinema. It’s so robust and so vibrant in our culture worldwide that we shouldn’t be worried. And cinema always finds its outlets, its paths. But the theaters, as I said before, are the mother of all battles.

# posted by Damon Smith @ 11/18/2009 09:52:00 AM Comments (0)

If one had only a single adjective with which to describe the body of work that directing team David Siegel and Scott McGehee have crafted over the past decade and a half, cerebral immediately jumps to mind. Since their debut film Suture (1993), an austere, black and white thriller starring Dennis Haysbert that took Toronto and Sundance by storm, they have often found it difficult to get their peculiar brand of thoughtful, idea driven filmmaking off the ground. Even if it was far from experimental hijinks of a Hollis Frampton or Kenneth Anger, the fact that the original Suture VHS and DVD boxes from MGM were packaged as "Avant-Garde Cinema" surely didn't help the film find the audience it should have.

After The Deep End (2001), a startlingly effective update of Max Ophuls' The Reckless Moment (1949) with Tilda Swinton and Bee Season (2005), a star studded adaptation of Myla Goldberg's celebrated novel, they embarked upon a series of projects that proved difficult to make a reality. In the interim they conceived and quickly made Uncertainty (2008), a film that conjoins the formalistic and genre elements of Suture and The Deep End with the familial drama of Bee Season.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lynn Collins play a young New York couple who are at a loss as to how to spend their Fourth of July; should they go to her families' Brooklyn enclave, where during the course of a long holiday dinner party various secrets and disappointments may unavoidably be revealed, or should they go to Manhattan to celebrate at a friends apartment? The film allows the couple to indulge in both choices with the help of some metaphysical chicanery; They dash to opposite ends of the bridge separately, only to inexplicably meet the other upon arriving in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The film tracks both pairs of lovers as the Manhattan bound couple find themselves pulled into an elaborate thriller upon finding a phone in the back of a Manhattan cab, while a visit to Kate's family in Brooklyn slowly enmeshes us and our protagonists in the rhythms of domestic drama.

Filmmaker caught up with the directing duo, out for breakfast at a Flat Iron district bakery, to discuss the unorthodox process through which they made the film, the various pros and cons of shooting on HD and how the desire to work with (and against) genres impacts their choices.

Uncertainty opens in Manhattan and on VOD this Friday.

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Filmmaker: What informed the conceptual quality and look of the film? It has both a formal and a loose quality. You often use composition and color very deliberately, yet you relied on hand held shots more so than your previous films.

McGehee: I think this film more than any we’ve done since Suture started out with a broad concept. We were frustrated with the process of trying to make another film, a bigger film that had reached a dead end. We were really frustrated with the process of making films that were traditionally financed, the cast contingent, foreign money model. We were looking for something to do that we could do quickly and immediately. The whole idea of how things happen or don’t happen and why was really on our minds. We set a task for ourselves to sort of make a film about chance. We came upon the title of Uncertainty very early on and that was the mantra of the entire process of the film, how do we keep an element of Uncertainty and chance in the filmmaking itself? The dialogue was improvised through a long process of rehearsal with them. We’d written a whole script of story beats where the plot of the film was laid out, but we shaped the voices of the characters through a process with the actors.

With the camera style, it was partly a necessity driven by the style in which we were working with the actors. We knew that each take would be a little different and we needed to develop a style that would be loose enough to cut between takes that didn’t match. We also thought it would be interesting to have a different relationship with the camera and the DP.

Filmmaker: When did you settle upon the idea of having a two pronged story involving the same pair of lovers, a thriller set in Chinatown and a familial drama set in Brooklyn? What specifically about those boroughs made them the desired setting for each half of film?

Siegel: Well, the Brooklyn Bridge connections them. [Laughs]

McGehee: The Queensboro Bridge doesn’t seem quite as romantic. [Laughs]

Siegel: It’s a lot longer for Joe and Lynn to run.

McGehee: It's not as photogenic either.

Siegel: The story got built from little nuggets of ideas. Tossing a coin and running in opposite directions on the bridge was an early idea. Part of the idea of chance as Scott was saying. So the Brooklyn Bridge seemed like the obvious bridge for us because it connects what are perhaps the two most iconic boroughs of New York. So the idea of a genre story and a more neo-realist, quotidian story and how those two things might relate to each other, we didn’t go into the process of writing thinking we would know how those two stories relate to each other before making the movie. I’m not even sure after making the movie precisely how those stories relate to each other. We like that they create something else, a third thing resonate in people’s minds about the process of living.

Filmmaker: Throughout your career, the pair of you have been very attracted to the notion of genre. You’ve not so much worked within genres as on top of them. I don’t think either of the strands here function in the typical way we come to expect from the genres you’re indulging in, but the cool formalistic quality of the movie seems to tie them together. Was this a conscious attempt to get back to some of the formal rigor of Suture?

Siegel: That’s very perceptive of you. No one else has quite formulated it like that and I think it’s really true. We thought a lot about Suture when we were thinking about this. We liked the building blocks of Suture a lot when we were making it and writing it. As you were saying, we are very attracted to genre and we consider ourselves American filmmakers who appreciate the old Hollywood methods of storytelling very much. That idea of doing something that was both rigorous and free was something we were thinking about very much when we were writing it.

McGehee: I was saying how we started with the idea of chance and Uncertainty. With Suture we started out with a big, broad concept as well, the idea of identity. The story was generated from conceptual level down, in a way. That’s not a typical way to generate entertainment.

Siegel: You could just write an essay instead. [Laughs]

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McGehee: Its been a rewarding process for us, to take a big idea like that, a fairly robust idea that can reach into a lot of places and just start thinking about genre, plot, ways to get at that idea from a storytelling place. In both of these films, the process of writing them was similar in that way. It’s the only two times we’ve made films that we’ve written from scratch.

Filmmaker: What is it like directing as a pair? How has it informed your films in a way that would be different if the division of labor was more distinct?

Siegel: We didn’t go to film school. I was a painter. Scott was going to be an academic. We were finishing graduate school when we started working together. It was quite a long time ago. There was no institution to say, maybe one of you should do this and one of you should do that. We were so ignorant and naïve about what filmmaking was, what the process of making movies was.

McGehee: We’re also fans of Powell and Pressberger, so we had one model to think about. [Laughs]

Siegel: So we just did everything together. Things worked out in the way that they did or things remained together in the way they are together simply because that was the process that got worked out. It’s a little bit of a miracle that its lasted this long in that we’re still best friends and yet we’re not a couple and we’re not brothers. I know it’s the luckiest thing for me because I think neither one of us would have probably chosen film. I would have become a painter, Scott would have become an academic. We were both having success at those things. Something clicked between us and that’s continued to work for us.

In terms of what might have been different had we been working individually in film, we both level of ideas with each other, which at times might be a negative thing, but we inspire each other, which is the positive side of it. We made a pact early on that we wouldn’t compromise in terms of ideas. So if one of us did not like something, we wouldn’t say, well you take this one and I’ll take that one. We’d just find another way. That’s served us very well over the years.

McGehee: I agree.

Filmmaker: What was the extensive improvisatory process like? Did it change how you went about directing the film in unforeseen ways?

McGehee: It was interesting. It was a process that really started with auditions. From the first audition on, David and I were learning about the script we wrote, learning how actors would react in certainly situations. We had never directed this way either. It was a very open thing. Actors would come into auditions and we didn’t really know how to help them get to what we needed. Some of them were really good at it and some of them weren’t. Some very good actors aren’t very good at improv, it’s a very different skill. It was kind of self selecting; some people wouldn’t show up to auditions because they got scared. The ones who did, and who were enthusiastic were the ones who were better at it generally. We didn’t end up with anybody on set who was afraid of the process or who wasn’t into it.

Filmmaker: Was it ever unnerving, working without the safety net of a text. With your previous two films, The Deep End and Bee Season, you had a pair of texts, seeing how both films are drawn from other source material…

Siegel: For us at least, filmmaker has to remain a little bit loose. Even with scripts in which we want the actors to say a very specific thing, it’s more about the emotional beat of the scene, than it is about sticking to the book, so to speak. We’ve always allowed a certain amount of freedom with the words. There were times, both of The Deep End and Bee Season, where we’d be like, “no, I want you to say this. Stop saying that.” [Laughs]

We were really lucky with Joe and Lynn, to have actors who are both as talented as they are and committed to the process through which we wanted to make the movie. They didn’t fight us in that regard. That opened up so much trust amongst the four of us. That month rehearsal period we had with Joe and Lynn was mostly spent rehearsing scenes that would never be in the movie. They were scenes from their history, to create a history for them to lean on. That was such a rewarding process for us in a way we had never experienced with actors before. It was so intimate. We would be rehearsing here, right? We’d say, lets do a scene that’s the second time you’d had coffee, after you’d had sex, right? So we’d do it a City Bakery or some other place. We got to be in their private little world in such an intimate way that over the course of a month of that, we really became our own therapy group. [Laughs]

Filmmaker: You shot much of the film on long lenses in very populated, uncontrollable New York City locations. It really comes off quite beautifully.

McGehee: It was really thrilling. We weren’t sure how it would go. Normally you lock off a street and fill it with extras that you can control. When we were shooting, we knew Joe had a bit of notoriety, we weren’t sure if he would attract attention, I think it might be different for him now after 500 Days of Summer, we may not have been so lucky…

Siegel: He’s a regular enough looking guy…

McGehee: He fits into the city, he looks like the other people in Union Square enough except for wearing a yellow T-shirt that made him stand out. New York being New York, people kind of avoided the film shoot, even when we were right there with a camera close by and it was clear what we were doing, people don’t look at the lens, people don’t gather around, it was very comfortable shooting a film right in the middle of New York.

Siegel: It was eye opening in terms of what you could pull off. That rooftop chase, had it been done by a studio, would have cost, all by itself, more than the budget of this entire movie. It was like, we can do this in this way and do something interesting for peanuts compared to what a studio would spend and it has more authenticity. So it was pretty exciting.

Filmmaker: You worked with Rain Li for the first time, Christopher Doyle’s longtime protégé. How did she add to the process of shooting the film in this fashion?

Siegel: She’s a tremendously gifted hand held operator, I’d say that’s Rain’s great skill, as it is with Chris Doyle. Her ability to work in natural light and available light, her ability to operate a camera on sticks in a fluid and open way, she’s a very good operator.

McGehee: She’s the same generation as Joe and Lynn. The camaraderie they had was nice to watch. I think that’s a really important thing. The person behind the camera is someone that the actors can relate to and trust and connect with. They had a nice relationship that way.

Filmmaker: How much of the inter cutting between the stories was in the original writing and how much did you find in the editing room? Was it difficult to find a balance between the two story threads?

Siegel: That was the real challenge in the editing. The way we wrote the script, the blocks of moments in each story were much bigger than they were going to be in the cutting. We couldn’t write a script so cutty or it wouldn’t read. So we had imagined in advance moments that we thought would be very cutty and some moments that we felt would be much longer. Finding balance was the real trick. We thought for a long time in the cutting that it was the Brooklyn story that was giving us more trouble. We had to find a kind of life in it, because the Manhattan story had so much more plot in a way. In the end it was the Manhattan story that was more trying in terms of finding emotionality. To talk about things we find successful and not so successful in the movie, we always wanted more conflict on the Manhattan side between Joe and Lynn in terms of the issue of pregnancy. There are things that we shot that are intended to do that. Yet, they didn’t work in relation to the cutting back and forth. So eventually, we found ourselves pushing to have the cutting replace some of that conflict, or stand in for some of that conflict. We thought it was relatively successful at the end, but that’s an example of the struggle we found ourselves facing as we cut the movie.

Filmmaker: This is the first time you’ve worked in HD. Did you like working in the format? Were the differences concerning the quickness with which you were able to shoot, color saturation, ability to handle darkness, difficult to adjust to?

McGehee: Pluses and minuses.

Siegel: Arriflex makes a camera called the D-20. It’s enormous. We chose it eventually. When we started this process, we thought we were going to make this with a camera that’s the size of my first. There are many of those. We tested them and immediate we were like, that’s not really the look that we want. So as we moved up the HD food chain, we looked at the Viper, the Genesis, and then at the Arri D-20. It’s a big camera, its quite heavy, and it looks like a machine.

McGehee: It looks like the bastard child of a cinder block and a machine. It weighs that much.

Siegel: It’s an easier camera to use in terms of being able to see directly on the monitor what you’re getting. We think we got a great look out of it, but it was big camera, it wasn’t faster to shoot that 35mm camera, we were tethered to a deck, it was quite cumbersome. We were able to run though. It allowed us to shoot many, many more hours of footage than we were accustomed to however. It was much less expensive than film.

McGehee: We abandoned that camera when we went into the subway. We shot Super 16mm on the subway. We shot in the subway on the DL. The first time we went down into the subway with that D-20 camera, we were building the camera, and we’re just watching our AC put the camera together, he’s got a battery belt on his waist, he’s attaching a red cable and then a blue cable to this box, then connecting this other box…

Siegel: You’re a suicide bomber. [Laughs]

McGehee: This is clearly not a stealthy way to get a shot in a subway. [Laughs]

Siegel: Who are all these guys standing around? [Laughs] Why are they whispering? [Laughs] Film shoot? Yeah, sure.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 11/11/2009 12:01:00 PM Comments (0)

Ex-LAPD Detective, investigative journalist, 9/11 truther, foreteller of the coming apocalypse --- these are just some of the roles Michael C. Ruppert has inhabited in his fascinating life, one that versatile filmmaker Chris Smith (American Movie, The Yes Men) has chosen to examine in his newest film Collapse. It is a return to documentary films for Smith, who has oscillated between disparate narrative and documentary work with a rare deftness. His most recent film The Pool (2007), a naturalistic narrative which Smith photographed himself, tracks a rural teenager working in a Panjim hotel to support his family who becomes obsessed with a swimming pool in the opulent Goan hills and the mysterious family who owns it. His newest picture couldn’t have less in common with that film. Reminiscent if Errol Morris’ work, Collapse is a chilling look at the mind and opinions of a man often labeled a conspiracy theorist and nut job who first came to notice as a whistle blower on the CIA's alleged involvement with drug traffiking in the 1970s and 80s. In Smith's film heoffers lucid and persuasive analysis of the ways in which the realization of time worn concepts like peak oil and climate change and the unquestioned acceptance of fractional reserve banking and fiat currency are pushing our overpopulated world toward unimaginable catastrophes of famine and deindustrialization.

Smith, a native Midwesterner who now lives in London, entered the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Graduate Film Program in 1995 after shooting his feature debut American Job (1996). Chris met Mark Borchardt while editing that film and quickly began filming a documentary about the making of Mark's psychological thriller Coven (2000). Both American Job and American Movie (2000), his sublime chronicle of Borchardt's quixotic filmmaking ambitions, played at the Sundance Film Festival, and American Movie won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary, after which Sony Pictures Classics acquired the film and Borchardt became a minor celebrity, with segments of The David Letterman Show and bit parts in myriad B films.

Collapse opens on Friday in Manhattan, November 13th in Los Angeles and on Video on Demand via Cinetic FilmBuff.

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Filmmaker: When did Michael Ruppert first come to your attention? When in the process of making the documentary you set out to make about the CIA’s involvement in drug smuggling did you decide to focus on Ruppert’s opinions and ideas instead?

Smith: We’d heard about him four or five years ago. He was doing some lectures and I had seen the videos of them on YouTube. I knew about him for a long time. I had heard the story about his alleged recruitment by the CIA to get involved in drug trafficking in the 70s. We were finishing our last film The Pool and researching different projects. We had contacted him to talk about that and possibly working on something. We set up a meeting at his house. When we got there he had literally just finished his newest book. Or at least, he was very close to finishing it. This was in February of 2009. He was consumed with this idea of collapse which he saw happening all around him. It was something he had talked about for many years. All the things he thought were going to happen in the near future were starting happen. He was just obsessed with where we were at this point in history. We went over there intending to talk about his personal history and the experiences he had had. He said that he was just focusing on what was happening now. He talked for two or three hours. He hadn’t done any press or interviews for a couple years. He just had so much energy. He was bursting at the seams. We left there scratching our heads. He had so many other things on his mind then going back and delving into what had happened to him in the 1970s.

We went away and two or three weeks later wrote him and email with a proposal for an idea, which was to just do an interview based on this book and what he sees happening around us. It was such a fascinating monologue. That’s really where it started. We were planning on it being a very short, interim project, where we would film for a couple days and cut something together quick, then maybe throw up what we’d done on YouTube or just give it to him. We didn’t really plan to make it the next film we were working on. It’s just one of those things were once we started filming, it just sort of evolved into what it is now. We filmed the bulk of the movie over two days and then we did three additional days of shooting over the few weeks that followed to clarify a few things, but for the most part the movie was shot in March over the course of the first two days.

Filmmaker: Although he’s incredibly persuasive, was there any point in which you thought about expanding the scope of the film outside of Michael’s point of view?

Smith: Ultimately I was interested in making a character study about a guy who’s dedicated his life to these issues. He’s spent thirty years coming up with this theory. To me, the film was about who he is and how he ended up here and the effect that this process has had on his life. I personally wasn’t interested in making a movie about energy or sustainability or food or overpopulation or economics. There are so many of those films that have come out over the last couple of years. I find that they can feel somewhat educational. I find Michael to be an incredibly entertaining person. His philosophy, the way he looks at the world, is more unique than anyone I’ve ever met. That was what we wanted to focus on, on him. We wanted to make a character study as opposed to an issue driven movie. The issues are there and for you to understand him I think you have to understand why he thinks these things are going to happen and what his theory is.

The thing that is fascinating about Michael is that he sort of takes a step back from all these various issues and ties everything together. I think to do a fair and fully informed movie that analyzes every one of those issues from every angle would be impossible. The amount of material necessary could never fit into a feature film. At least how I would want to do it. So what was most intriguing was Michael; he’s whom we wanted to make a movie about.

Filmmaker: How challenging was it to edit Michael’s expansive analysis and find supplemental footage to illustrate his points?

Smith: The amount of information that’s swimming in Michael’s head is incomprehensible. He came into this basement with no notes. He didn’t know any of the questions we were going to ask him. We basically just started talking. For us the challenge became to cull that down. We’d jump from topic to topic and then come back to things. Making something that seemed cohesive was challenging, more so because the way the film was shot than Michael himself. We followed the energy in the conversation to wherever it would lead us as opposed to saying, “let’s talk about each one of these things in a compartmentalized way”. Ultimately, that’s how we had to structure the film, but we let it be a much more loose, organic process while we where shooting. That’s what allowed Michael to be himself, to allow his train of thought to flow and work tangentially through these various topics. I think that’s where he’s the strongest.

Filmmaker: For being such a self-contained film, you worked with two cinematographers, including the great Ed Lachman (Far From Heaven, Lightning Over Water). For a film about one man and his opinions, it had a very dynamic style. How did you come up with the visual design?

Smith: The first three days we shot with a cinematographer named Max Malkin. He’s incredibly talented. I talked to him before we started filming. We talked about a few ideas, weather we should shoot on a stage or somewhere else. Max was talking about some apocalyptic café, playing off the idea of the collapse, but we ultimately decided to go with the basement of an abandoned meat packing plant in downtown Los Angeles. It gave the feeling of an interrogation, the sense of being let in on some secret information about how things really work. It ties into Mike’s history and mystique, the dealings with the CIA and that world. We wanted a look that complemented that feel. It should look and feel like its taking place at four in the morning while everyone else is sleeping. So we set it up with Max and then the last two days of shooting, Ed came in and did those. So it looks very similar. Ed is an incredible cinematographer and he loved the way the first three days were shot, so he basically went in and matched that.

What was nice about both of those DPs is that when you are working with people that are so talented, they’re not just running a camera they’re also thinking about the film’s subject matter and what you’re trying to achieve thematically. They both contributed greatly not just in capturing a look, but in effecting the content of the piece as well.

Filmmaker: You move between the worlds of narrative and documentary, tackling vastly dissimilar topics, with what seems like relative ease.

Smith: When looking at new projects I always work intuitively. I always assume whatever interests me might be interesting to someone else. When this came about, I thought it was interesting because it was so different from anything I had ever done before and I thought it was challenging from a formalistic point of view to see if you could make something interesting from just this guy talking. To be honest, after we did The Yes Men film, I had personally told myself I was going to quit doing documentaries. I had started in narrative filmmaking back in 1996 when my first film American Job went to Sundance. I had never actually planned to make documentary films. I always liked them but it wasn’t something I wanted to do. At the time that I was planning to work of new projects however, the documentary subjects I had at my disposal just seemed more interesting. So that’s how I ended up making American Movie, Home Movie and The Yes Men. After The Yes Men, we went to India and made The Pool. From there I was writing and researching narrative projects when we met with Michael and it was one of those things that, it was too good to pass up. It was right there. You have to follow your instinct at that point, weather you want to do another documentary or narrative or what have you. At a certain point you just look at what’s been presented to you in terms of opportunities and kind of go with it. I’m hoping this is the last one, but you don’t know.

Filmmaker: How have audience responded to the film so far? Has its near apocalyptic message been the catalyst for naysayers?

Smith: I find that the people that stick around and ask you questions are generally the people that like the film. I think the people that don’t like the film you generally don’t hear from. They’re critics and they write about it. Toronto for us was incredibly positive. We expected the film to be more controversial than it was just because of Michael’s nature and his extreme view on certain things. He really has conviction and isn’t afraid to say what he thinks. There was some thought that his opinions would cause more controversy. What surprised us the most was that people who agreed with him wholeheartedly, as well as people who agreed with some of the things he said and people who didn’t agree with him, all really liked the film. I think that made us really happy, that people were able to enjoy the film regardless of how much they align themselves with his views.

Filmmaker: Has Michael seen the film?

Smith: He saw it right before we went to Toronto.

Filmmaker: What did he think of it?

Smith: We didn’t get into many specifics, but he told me he liked it. There are some things he takes issue with. Ultimately we were trying to make a film that was entertaining, that moved, that wasn’t just and educational exercise. So there’s little things, like in the clean coal section, where he wishes we had put in how clean coal doesn’t deal with the sludge or the toxic waste that’s produced, there’s technical things that he wishes could have been included, but ultimately he understood that it’s a movie and if people want to learn more about it they can read his book or they can go to any number of people who have written and talked about these subjects. So I think ultimately he loved the film, that it really captured him and that it was fair. I think he’s smart enough to realize that the stuff that’s critical of him is important to have in there so that people can make up there own mind about him and what they choose to believe about his message and what he’s trying to do. If it was a one sided portrayal of him I think he knows that would be something that wouldn’t be able to reach a wide audience, but beyond that, I think he understands that he’s a complicated person. I think that comes across in the film and he appreciates the work that was put in to make that come across. Its difficult when a film is about you. I’ve dealt with this one American Movie and on The Yes Men where, you become close with the people while making the film so you can see how it weighs on them because they’re so under a microscope. I think if you put any of us in front of a camera for twelve, fourteen hours, there’s going to be things in there you may or may not wish you had said, but they’re all part of what makes that person who they are and I think that’s what comes across.

Filmmaker: Have you noticed any difference in how people of various political persuasions have viewed the film? Has there been any split across ideological lines?

Smith: It wasn’t appealing to people on a partisan level. There have been a lot of Republicans and Democrats we’ve heard from, a lot of financial people who’ve responded to it. I think it appeals to everyone on a certain level who’s interested in any of these issues. Michael comes from a Republican family. His just the facts, straight-forward way of talking appeals to certain people. Yet, I think everyone takes what he says with a grain of salt. I think what we hope people will do is use the film as a catalyst to do some research and come up with there own well-informed opinions. There are many varied opinions on these subject matters. History teaches us that no one knows anything really, no one knows for sure what’s going to happen. I think to have least thought about some of these issues is not harmful. If anything, I think it could be positive. Regardless of your take on the material, I think the film is entertaining and you get to peer into someone’s life. I’ve always thought that’s what the best documentaries do; transport you into someone else’s world and you get to understand and live with them for a period. That’s all you can hope for.

Filmmaker: Are you planning on buying a farm?

Smith: No [Laughs]. I’m fairly optimistic. I don’t know why [Laughs]. Maybe I’ve hit the level of acceptance as a result of working on this project. I feel fairly at ease with everything. I know when we first starting working on this, there were a few nights where we were just staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours thinking about everything, but when you come to the other side you realize that regardless of weather these things will or will not happen, opening up your mind to think about these ideas to this degree and to the degree Michael thinks about them is really fascinating. The amount of time we spent on this film led us to really have to go through the mental process of taking in all this information. It’s been really interesting. The discussions we were having while making the film and the discussions we’ve had with people who’ve seen the film have all been really interesting and useful. I feel so well informed now that I feel like I can at least try to voice my opinion and vote appropriately when and if these issues become something we can have a say in. There are many well-informed, smart, educated people who fall on both sides of several of the issues Michael talks about. There are people that agree with him 100% and people who disagree with him 100%. So I hope we can open up a lot of debate.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 11/04/2009 12:14:00 PM Comments (1)

As a genre that's all about keeping the audience on its toes, the horror movie naturally needs a regular injection of fresh talent, and writer-director Ti West is the latest to give it a shot in the arm. Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1980, West spent his adolescence watching as many movies as he could catch on TV or rent from his local video store. Though he made stop motion movies with his G.I. Joe action figures, he didn't give much serious thought to filmmaking until he decided to make a short film to indicate to colleges that he had more to offer than his grades suggested. He ended up at New York's School of the Visual Arts studying film production and was introduced by one of his professors, director Kelly Reichardt, to low budget horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden, who became a champion of West's short films, such as The Wicked (2001). In 2005, Fessenden acted as producer on West's first feature, The Roost, a 1970s throwback horror about a group of friends on their way to a wedding who get stuck on a creepy farm. West also continued his working relationship with Fessenden and his Glass Eye Pix production company on his sophomore feature, Trigger Man, a low-key, pared down thriller about a hunting trip gone wrong. West's next directorial effort, Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever, is awaiting release, and he has also just completed the web series Dead and Lonely for IFC.

West's latest movie, The House of the Devil, is a lovingly made, 80s-set horror movie that further underlines the writer-director's considerable talent. The plot is simple: impoverished student Sam (Jocelin Donahue), desperately trying to scrape together money to pay the deposit on her new apartment, accepts a babysitting job advertised by the unsettling Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan). It later transpires that it's not a child that Sam will be keeping company in the big, old house, and – as ever – things are much more sinister than they initially seem. As in Trigger Man, West's strategy here is to fashion a film that is normal and even a little mundane in the first half, and then changes gears to become a horror movie for the second half. West's conceit could easily have come across as gimmicky, however it works extremely effectively because all the time the film's overtly horrific events are kept at bay, a tension and sense of dread builds organically. The House of the Devil is a fine horror movie but also transcends its genre limitations thanks to the precision and care of West's less-is-more approach to filmmaking.

Filmmaker spoke to West about rooting his movies in reality, his precise recreation of the 1980s, and why he wishes he'd directed Citizen Kane.



Filmmaker: At the start of the movie, there's a caption saying that the film is based on true, unexplained events. I'm presuming that's a little tongue-in-cheek.

West: Preceding that is a statistic that [during the 1980s] 70% of Americans believed in abusive Satantic cults, which is actually an accurate statistic. The “true events” thing has an element of bullshit to it, sure, but the reason it's there is during this time period there was this cultural phenomenon dubbed “Satanic Panic.” From 1979 to 1983-ish, there was this nationwide obsession with Satanic cults and cultural ritual abuse, perpetuated by a lot of daytime TV like “Geraldo,” which put the fear out there that this really bizarre thing would happen: you'd be kidnapped and sacrificed to the devil. It wasn't true, but everyone really believed in it, and I always thought that was kind of amazing. Also, a huge tonal part of the film is realism, and almost a real-time element. So when it says “based on true events,” the cultural event was happening in this time period, and a lot of the film is portrayed in a very realistic, mundane way, so it helped accent that. It really worked like a primer for the film: it put you in a different state of mind. It set the tone of “This is serious,” and I wanted to make a serious horror movie. It helps you not to be there to cheer for people being killed and be there to sit down and say, “I'm going to watch something now.”

Filmmaker: Is it a major aspect of your approach to filmmaking that you want people to believe what they're watching is rooted in reality?

West: It depends, it's a case by case thing. With The Roost, not at all – that's a goofy movie – and not Cabin Fever 2 either. So it depends on the movie, but Trigger Man is steeped in realism and House of the Devil has elements of that as well. The contrast in horror movies is what's most important, the contrast between the really horrific elements and the really mundane other stuff. I think there has to be a strong contrast to make that accessible and make it effective.

Filmmaker: As well as being steeped in realism, this movie is also steeped in the 1980s. Is it more about the films of that period, or your memories of growing up then?

West: I'm an only child and obsessive compulsive. My formative years with pop culture in my youth and when I was most like a sponge was when I was very young, like seven or eight years old. I became very obsessed with pop culture and what was going on around me in television and movies. Being an only child, you tend to obsess over it more because you entertain yourself by it. I had this stuff seeping into my subconscious.

Filmmaker: What kind of stuff got into your subconscious?

West: I have a photographic memory and I kind of take in everything. I can't remember names for shit, but I can remember all kinds of weird little details. I've always been able to perfectly remember what seems to be meaningless stuff to most people, so when it came to this movie I had lists of all the stuff I wanted to be in the movie. Everything from wallpaper to popcorn makers to the Walkman to the kind of TVs. It was important to me that it wasn't an “homage”; I wanted to make a very accurate period piece. I was like, “If we're going to do this, let's do it right.”

Filmmaker: It's very popular to be ironic about the 80s, but you seem very be affectionate instead.

West: I have very find memories of that time and I have a very old-fashioned sensibility. This story is ultimately a very old-fashioned horror movie story with all the classic tropes, but there's something about them that's presented a little bit differently, and that's what I was interested in. I wanted to take the classic horror movie structure and work within that and just put spins on things and do my own thing stuff in that framework. That's what was interesting to me.

Filmmaker: House of the Devil is not quite a movie about movies, but it's clearly the work of a cinephile. For instance, there's the Frightmare late night horror movie that she watches on TV.

West: Movies are a huge part of my life. And the Frightmare thing was a nod to my first film, The Roost, because that's the name of the TV station in that. I'm comfortable with ironies in movies, so I like that she's so scared and she has to listen to her friend's voicemail that's stupid and insulting at this point. I like that she's so scared that she tries to chill out and watch TV and she sees a girl being attacked. All that stuff is funny to me.

Filmmaker: In this and Trigger Man, you really subvert the horror genre by making a normal movie for the first half and a horror movie for the second half.

West: I think it's a horror movie the whole time, but there's that's the moment when we know that all bets are off. I think the whole time it's spooky and weird and we're setting up a horror movie, but that's the moment of no return. Contrast to me is really important, and is what makes art accessible. As far as horror movies, what's interesting to me are the awkward details. If you see real footage of someone getting killed, it's not the blood that you remember, it's the weird way that their face went or how they dropped and something fell out of their hand. It's that stuff that weeks later you're still traumatized by. There's something bizarre and fascinating about that to me. If you had a home invasion and we're murdered, you were probably just watching YouTube before it. I was on a plane here that was really bumpy and I was watching a movie on my laptop; I was totally entertained, and the next minute it was like, “Oh, my God, I could be dead right now.” What a weird contrast that I wasn't doing anything grand, I was just sitting and watching. The focus on the reality stuff in contrast to the horrific stuff interests me.

Filmmaker: House of the Devil is much more subtle and understated than most films in its genre, and I found that waiting for so long for the heroine to be in genuine peril actually ramped up the tension in a really effective way.

West: I think it's subjective because some people might agree with you and some people might say, “This is the most boring movie ever!” But it's my personal taste. I'm the kind of person who goes to see a movie and doesn't have some place to be five minutes after it's over. I'm going to the movie to experience the movie. I like to take my time with things, but I also like movies that are mystery films. This is a horror movie but there's an element to this that's about solving a mystery, and I wanted to let that play out. I also wanted to take everyone who's very familiar with horror movies out of their comfort zone. You go in a room where you think, “Oh, my God, something's going to happen,” and then she just talks to a fish and leaves. And then she goes into another room – and it's just a bathroom. You get to the point where you go, “Yeah, I actually don't know what's going to happen, and I'm just at the mercy of this person.” I think that that's effective and I think that's the way that it should be. I don't think you should have someone open a mirror and you know when they close it there's going to be something behind her, and if it's not there it's going to be there when she turns around. I don't want to be smarter than the movie – that sucks! Then it's not effective anymore.

Filmmaker: You've talked about the more mundane aspects of the movie and the challenge of attracting and keeping an audience given that, so how do you feel about the trailer, which sells the movie as a much more conventional horror?

West: I think there's always a bait-and-switch element to trailers, I think that's what they are. I cut this trailer with Graham Reznick, the sound designer, and I'm very happy with the trailer for this movie. Usually it's some company that cuts it and you're like, “Ugh, this is way off!” I think the bait-and-switch thing is important. I think when you test screen movies, why don't you just test screen the trailers? Why don't you find the trailer the majority of people like and use that trailer, as opposed to fucking with the movie? Maybe I do trick you to get you in there, but maybe you end up liking it. Or maybe you knew better and the trailer didn't fool you, but you wanted to see it anyway.

Filmmaker: Do you feel like if this movie is successful, your next film could be sold more on what it truly is?

West: I hope so. I have this weird renaissance mentality that a few people have. Last year, there's Let the Right One In which everybody likes but there's not a lot of crossover potential to that. It's not like people say, “Yeah, let's make movies like that!” – the first thing they want to do is remake it. I think that the horror genre has so much potential, yet everyone does the same thing over and over because that seems to be successful. As long as we as a paying public continue to go see shitty movies, the same shitty movies will get made. And that's just the way it goes.

Filmmaker: Do you have aspirations to work more in the mainstream?Cabin Fever 2 was obviously an attempt at that...

West: And you're aware of the situation on that. Yeah, that was an attempt that didn't really pan out. I'd like to be able to work with bigger actors and have the money to be able to pay them. If I go make some mainstream movie, it won't be like House of the Devil and there won't be scenes of people walking in and out of shot, because it's a mainstream audience and I'm not trying to make things difficult. It doesn't necessarily have to be as challenging as Trigger Man. I'm not so naive as to go say, “There's going to be an hour of no talking while they're hunting...” – I understand that that's for art house crowds. But films are personal for me and I have very clear ideas of how I want those films to be, so if I go make some big Hollywood movie, as it seems likely may happen, I want to try and maintain that credibility of making it challenging and have that auteur vibe where it better and a little more interesting than most fare.

Filmmaker: What's the worst (or weirdest) job you've ever had?

West: A dishwasher, that was the worst. I was in a restaurant washing dishes – it sucked. I did it for like six months, longer than I wanted to, but then I got upgraded to cook for a while. That was OK, but it was still also kind of a bummer. And any job working in an office. I can't work at a desk, I'm not cut out for it.

Filmmaker: What was your cinematic epiphany?

West: The movies that made me love cinema were The Karate Kid and Back to the Future, and as far as making me want to be a filmmaker it would be maybe The Evil Dead or Bad Taste, one of these movies where I said, “This seems possible.” The time that I really warmed up to movies was when I had more of an interest in potentially making movies. Then I saw these people making movies that I really liked and I'd say, “Oh, I could see how this was done.”

Filmmaker: If you could hand out an Oscar to someone who's never won, who would you give it to?

West: Did Kubrick ever win one? I'd give one to him. And what about Peter Medak? I think The Changeling is really pretty great.

Filmmaker: Finally, which film do you wish you had directed?

West: The movie that I've seen in the last year that I would say is really great was Two Lovers. I really liked that movie a lot and was like, “James Gray, good job on that!” I think Let the Right One In is pretty great also. ...I should have said Citizen Kane. If I'd directed that movie, I'd be like, “Hey now!”

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/30/2009 12:16:00 PM Comments (0)

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)