Lars von Trier, the enfant terrible of world cinema, is always looking for the next thing to surprise or wrongfoot audiences. He made only three features in the first decade of his career, and though The Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987), and Zentropa (1991) were all critical successes that ably demonstrated von Trier's cinematic gifts, it is since then that he has truly excelled. In this period, not only has he founded the revolutionary Dogme 95 movement, but completed the Gold Hearted trilogy – made up of Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dancer (2000) – and made the first two parts of his American trilogy, Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005). All of these have been provocative, emotionally intense and technically innovative movies, cinema which has challenged the norm and polarized opinion. Though hailed as one of the saviors of modern cinema, von Trier often seems more comfortable in his self-assigned role as villain, and reports of brutal, bullying treatment of his leading ladies (Björk and Nicole Kidman, in particular) have only compounded this image.

All of this makes The Boss of It All, his latest film, all the more surprising. Though flashes were visible in The Idiots, this is the first time we see von Trier's subversive, almost zany, sense of humor really come to the fore. Ravn (Peter Ganzler), the head of an IT firm, has always told his staff that there was a mysterious, absent boss so that when difficult decisions needed to be made, he could put the blame on someone else. However when he wants to sell the company, he is required to get this shadowy CEO to appear and sign away the firm, and must get an unemployed actor, Stoffer (Jens Albinus), to play what becomes the role of a lifetime. The film deals with sex, power, and manipulation – all trademark von Trier themes – and is shot with Automavision, an innovation in which the camera angles, movements, etc. are selected by a computer, yet The Boss of It All is first and foremost a playful, affectionate and riotously funny film about office politics.

Filmmaker spoke to von Trier about the recent reports of depression crippling his creativity, classic Hollywood comedies, and killing film critics with a hammer.



Filmmaker: A story broke about 10 days ago that you were suffering from depression.

von Trier: I have had a depression for the first time in my life, which was kind of strange, but I'm coming out now. I'm on my way, but it seems it takes some time before you're really back into [it]. I've always done 10 things at the same time, but now it takes some time to get the fascination back for a project. It will come, and it is coming, but slowly.

Filmmaker: So is your next project, Antichrist, still going to happen?

von Trier: Oh, yes, Antichrist, I'm working on it. It just takes, instead of one day, two days to get a good idea. But I think I have to accept that as part of life.

Filmmaker: It's like working at a normal pace, rather than your usual pace.

von Trier: I'm trying to be a normal person. I'm working on it. I feel good, but I just need more time to write a script. I think I wrote the script for The Idiots in four days, so now it will be four months.

Filmmaker: How did you react to this story about your depression blowing up into something so big?

von Trier: I think that my problem is that whenever I talk to a journalist it's difficult for me to have an agenda, and also if he asks me, “How are you?”, then I have to tell him, “Well, I had this depression...” This is what I'd tell any person. I've done that with my anxieties too, I've talked about them, which of course must be tiresome for a reader or a journalist, but that's the way I deal with things. I tell people how things really are. I think maybe the fact that I allow myself to tell anybody that I had a depression is maybe what causes the mistake that the story will always be blown up. I'm not especially interested that anybody should write about how I am, but doing an interview is like talking to a person, and then I tell [them] how things are. It's difficult for me not to do that, but maybe stupid. I don't know.

Filmmaker: It seems ironic that your depression came just after you'd finished The Boss of It All, which is probably the happiest and most upbeat film you've ever made.

von Trier: Yeah, you don't know why these things happen. I have a theory that at a certain point, when you're fainting, that is when the body has enough. You faint, and then you kind of have a time out for the body to readjust. I think that it's maybe a little bit the same with the anxiety, when it comes to a point where it's too much. I think the depression comes in and kind of claims a couple of months. You know, what I found out is that you can't be depressed and have anxiety at the same time, it's either or. I talked to a lot of people after this who have had depression, and they all agreed that it takes some time, even if you're out of it and you're much happier – and I'm happy for many things – for the focus to come back. They actually say it takes about double the time of the depression. I had three months of depression, so it will take six months. Well, I can enjoy my freedom for another month!

Filmmaker: I think people are surprised by The Boss of It All, because it's not what they expect from a Lars von Trier film. But do you feel like it's radically different from your previous films?

von Trier: I think it's quite close to some of the stuff we worked with in The Kingdom [von Trier's surreal 90s hospital TV show], but my aim for this film was to do The Shop Around the Corner. Or something like that, a light thing that should be very simple in the structure but hopefully should still have some of the qualities that The Shop Around the Corner has. I'm not talking about sentimentality so much, I'm talking about a certain kind of comedy mood that you will find also in The Philadelphia Story, or films like that.

Filmmaker: It's the most traditional film you've ever made.

von Trier: Yeah, yeah, but that's because it is some kind of a homage to these films. Especially the ones that are not sort of corny, so you say “Ha, ha, ha!” all the time, but just is carried by a story and a mood, which I like very much. Also Bringing Up Baby I remember, and The Odd Couple was also fantastic - but that was maybe more ha-ha. There are actually some of these films that are kind of moody, but still funny so you laugh all the time.

Filmmaker: I don't think those would be films that people would expect you to like.

von Trier: But it is films like that that I will see again and again. It's like hearing pop music. We were taught in film school that The Shop Around the Corner was the best film in the world. So, I listened a little!

Filmmaker: You have Jean-Marc Barr and Fridrik Thor Fridriksson, both of whom are directors, acting in this film, and you gave Jørgen Leth filmmaking tasks for The Five Obstructions. Do you particularly like directing directors?

von Trier: [laughs] Jean-Marc was there because he's always there, only to come up and say hello. He's the godfather of my two boys. Fridrik is just a crazy guy that everybody when they read the script said he [the grim Icelandic businessman] should look like him. I don't think he really has acted before, not very much. I think he's very Icelandic, very authentic. It's actually very far from his own personality to shout, because he's always very funny and most of the time very drunk at festivals. But he actually had to work a lot to find out how to yell. I don't think he'd ever tried it.

Filmmaker: You've said before that “A film should be like a rock in the shoe", but this doesn't really feel like that.

von Trier: No. So maybe it's not a film. It's a tiny rock, if it is. But I still tried with the images to destroy somehow for everybody.

Filmmaker: Where did the idea for Automavision come from, and how easy was it to implement?

von Trier: Earlier in my career, I worked with a lot of very complicated tracking and craning, and at a certain point I had enough of that. If you are a perfectionist, which we all are at some point, then you have go on and do this better and better and better, but you can never control it. You can get 70% of your idea, you can get 80, you can get close to 100, but you can't really say “This is it.” So I was so happy when the trend said it should be handheld camera, because that suited me very well. Here the only principle I use, especially when I film myself, is that I just point the camera in the direction of where something interesting is happening. After doing all this framing, I was very anti-framing for a long time. And then I found out that this computer system could help me not to frame, even though I had a fixed camera.

Filmmaker: I think you stop noticing the odd framing very early on, and it just becomes part of the film.

von Trier: I think what surprises me in a positive way is that you actually see the film differently because you have to look for the [characters]. In a normal film, you will know exactly where the next person would be in the frame because you know all these framing rules. Here you actually have to look around; it might take a split second, but you still have to work a little harder.

Filmmaker: It's a little like your set in Dogville, where the viewer has to imagine the town. You seem to like pushing the viewer that bit further.

von Trier: Yeah, but not just to push somebody. I think that there's potential in the viewer that we very often do not challenge or do not use at all. I think that there could be people that see wonderful mountains in Dogville, much more wonderful than I could ever produce. I'm not saying that's something that happened in Dogville, but the technique of using the spectator's mind much, much more is something in films that we are doing very, very little of today.

Filmmaker: What do you think of the state of America at the moment? You say you're 60% American, so does this mean you might finally go there?

von Trier: [laughs] I can't do that because I don't fly, or sail, but I would love to go to America. There are a lot of places that I'd love to visit. Isn't there somewhere where you can go over the ice, from Asia or something like that?

Filmmaker: Maybe you could make a Werner Herzog-style documentary about taking that journey!

von Trier: Oh, yes, Werner Herzog. But he's not afraid of flying. I talked to him a couple of times, and he wants to be in [one of my films]. So maybe I can have another director to direct. I was a big fan of his, especially his earlier films that he made in Germany. They were really very inspiring to me.

Filmmaker: Can you tell me about your contribution to the film Chacun Son Cinéma, which is commemorating the 60 years of the Cannes film festival?

von Trier: It's just a little joke. It's the opening of Manderlay in Cannes, and I'm sitting next to this guy who's writing for a tiny fictitious French paper called 'On the Sunny Side,' and he's writing a review on the film, and he's obviously bored. Then he tells me about all the cars he owns, and how rich he is, and all these things. It's called Occupations, the film. So, at a certain point, he says, “So what do you do?” Then I take out this very strange hammer we have in the Danish building business, and I say, “I kill.” And then I kill him. It is as stupid as it sounds.

Filmmaker: If you could travel back in time and be able to make movies in a time and place of your choice, where and when would it be?

von Trier: It would probably be in the Soviet Union, back in the time when Tarkovsky made films. That is for me a very romantic period, even though I know it was painful for the people there. Somehow when I see The Mirror by Tarkovsky, I dream of the studios and the colors and the depression.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you burst into tears on set?

von Trier: Bryce Dallas Howard [in Manderlay] was incredible at crying, she had a fantastic technique to cry. You could start her crying and stop her crying. That was not me crying, but it was incredible. I've never seen anything like it. I've actually worked with a lot of actresses who are good at crying, but this was so fantastic. She was really a cryer. But I probably cried from anger with Björk, I'm sure. Yeah, I remember that I cried one time – I just gave up completely. I said to her, “You win.” I don't know what that meant, but probably that the film would be off.

Filmmaker: Finally, who's the most famous person in your cell phone?

von Trier: I believe it's Nicole [Kidman], actually.

Filmmaker: Do you speak a lot?

von Trier: No, but I write her some emails sometimes. It's probably not her phone number anymore, and she doesn't appear as "Nicole Kidman."

Filmmaker: So if it's stolen, it'd still be OK.

von Trier: Yeah, I think so. Or else I think I would get a hell of time explaining to her!

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 5/23/2007 07:18:00 AM Comments (2)

For a period in the 1990s, Hal Hartley was one of a group of directors, along with Jim Jarmusch and John Sayles, who really defined what American indie filmmaking was all about. Hartley's Trust (1990), Simple Men (1992) and Amateur (1994), set in the suburbs of Long Island but seen from Hartley's unique perspective, were idiosyncratic, literate films which set the bar high for other writer-directors aiming to portray contemporary American life. Since the mid-90s, though, Hartley has broadened his focus, both thematically and geographically: Flirt (1995) told love stories on three continents; The Book of Life (1998) imagined a meeting between Jesus and the Devil at the end of the millennium; No Such Thing (2001) was a modern take on Beauty and the Beast set in Iceland; and Hartley's first foray into science fiction, The Girl From Monday (2005) was set in a futuristic world where humans were traded like property.

Hartley's new film, Fay Grim, mixes old with new: familiar characters return in increasingly unfamiliar situations, and it is written with Hartley's trademark dry, quirky humor but feels and looks different to anything he's done before. It is a sequel to Hartley's 1997 Henry Fool, and requisitions the genre tropes of the espionage thriller to frame Hartley's take on the state of the post-9/11 world. Parker Posey's eponymous character, a peripheral player in the first film, becomes the unlikely heroine of the piece as she attempts to get to the bottom of a mystery involving her missing husband Henry (Thomas Jay Ryan), her imprisoned Nobel prize-winning brother Simon (James Urbaniak), and notebooks containing Henry's memoirs which government spies and international terrorists are desperate to get their hands on.

Filmmaker spoke to Hartley, who now lives in Berlin, about his reasons for leaving the U.S., shooting on DV for the first time, and his unlikely Henry Fool franchise.



Filmmaker: I'd like to start off by asking how long you've been living in Berlin, and what the reasons were for you moving there?

Hartley: I've been here pretty much for the past year full-time, but I came here in the fall of 2004. I was invited to be a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, which I guess is like the MacDowell Colony. They give you a stipend for three months to live here and do some work which should have something to do with Berlin, and hopefully American-Berlin relations. Mine was very tenuous; I was working on a script about a French philosopher who stayed in Berlin at a crucial point in her life, and they said that was enough.

Filmmaker: From watching Fay Grim, it seems that you feel very distanced from the way America is now, as opposed to how it was before. It seems almost as if you were looking for an excuse to leave.

Hartley: Um, not really. I really felt myself more of a New Yorker than a citizen of the country. I felt much more at home in New York than I did anywhere else in the States, and it's true that when I was in California I felt that I was really in a foreign land. When I was in London or Paris or Germany, I didn't. I felt like New York had much more in common with those European places. But around 2004 or 2005, everybody my wife and I knew had left - we didn't realize we had so many friends who were foreign. It just got incredibly expensive and something about the character of the city seemed to be changing. I felt like a change would be cool anyway, so when this fellowship came up I just went with it.

Filmmaker: You made comments in 2005 that it was impossible to make movies in New York anymore because it's so expensive.

Hartley: That was totally part of it. Ted Hope and I had been trying to put Fay Grim together, and since I had been living here we looked at what the situation was in New York. Even though we didn't think of this as a terribly small budget film, we were just shocked at what things would cost. It was really impossible for me to make the film there. So since we were here in Berlin, and I had contacts here, I also just realized that the whole film is indoors, so we could shoot it on sets here.

Filmmaker: What were your aims for Fay Grim? It comes across as a very political, but also personal, film.

Hartley: I guess it is. It's personal and public. When we were making Henry Fool, we thought that there was room here for sequels. Henry Fool was really written that way. I didn't commit myself to anything, but I really did feel that it was, to use a literary thing, the big, fat novel that I wanted to write. It would focus in particular on this family in Queens but, in another light, it would reflect the whole world. I wasn't quite certain how it would continue from that, but one thing that I did use a strategy in Henry Fool was that I really wanted to make the story out of the fabric of what was going on at the time. So I paid attention to newspapers and magazines, and clipped out stories, and said, 'What's the most common thing here?' At that time in 1995 or 1996, it had to do with a swing to the right in Congress and internet censorship and stuff like that. So in 2002, when I started this project, I started the same way. I said, “Whatever happens to Fay here, I want to show something about what the world feels like to us right now.” And by “us,” I certainly meant an American.

Filmmaker: This film seems like your response to the post-9/11 world.

Hartley: I'm one of those people who doesn't think the world has changed any at all since 9/11. It just seemed to be almost inevitable, something like that. That's one of the reasons why the backstory of Fay Grim goes all the way back into the '80s. I was trying to sketch out the continuity of all this hanky-panky between the security agencies of the world. I think you're right in another sense, I was writing this as the invasion of Afghanistan was going on at the time. I simply tried to focus on making Fay a representative American, in the sense that she's a type that a lot of us might associate with: she's not terribly educated, but she's not stupid; she's got a big heart, but she's uninformed; she doesn't know how tough she can be.

Filmmaker: Everybody's got a story about where they were on 9/11. What's yours?

Hartley: 9/11 was my first day teaching at Harvard University. My classes were all canceled and I got back to town two days later. I sort of want to underline the thing that I don't think the world has really changed much. I see Fay Grim in a continuity with No Such Thing and The Girl From Monday, which were both written prior to 9/11, in its concerns with media culpability, politics and the market all being jumbled up together. I think this is still part of that.

Filmmaker: This is the first film you've shot on digital HD. Was that a stylistic choice, or one dictated by financial considerations? Would you have shot this on film given the choice?

Hartley: Probably, because I didn't know any better. But when Ted introduced me to HDNet, he said, “Well, here's financing, but we have to shoot it in High Definition.” And then my gang and I got hold of some High Definition equipment and started shooting and I liked it a lot, and didn't think of it as very different from 35mm. There is a quality difference when you see HD projected, there's a lack of grain evident on the projection which is startling at first if you're somebody like me who's a professional filmmaker and you're used to looking at it, but most people don't notice. In fact, I don't find it an ugly kind of quality, it's quite beautiful.

Filmmaker: I read that you wrote in one of your notebooks a long time ago that Henry Fool was to be the “first in an indefinite series.” It seems that there's a great malleability about the characters, as Fay Grim is very different to Henry Fool.

Hartley: Yeah, it was really useful. The first movie was definitely written with this feel that it was part of a great big story, but I wasn't committing myself to what that story would be. But I do think probably in working that way I made the characters in a certain sense universal: Simon, for all his particularities, he's the thoughtful, creative person; Henry is some version of the devil, from The Devil and Daniel Webster type stories, or Faust - he's Mephistopheles; Fay is a smarter Gretchen. So they're types, they're writ large, and I'm actually finding a lot of encouragement in that now, thinking how I might move forward, in how they all do have this largeness that they can move into lots of different situations. I'm interested in the son now.

Filmmaker: It seems that, from Flirt onwards, there's been a move outward from the self-contained world of your first films. Has this been a conscious decision, or a natural progression?

Hartley: It's always been part of my way of working to talk about my time and place. Whatever I'm telling the story about, I want it to give evidence of the time and the place in which I live. Of course, in the early years that was the suburbs of Long Island and, to a certain extent, around New York City, and I knew only a certain number of things. I think those earlier films center on people who know a lot more than they've got experience of. That was conscious back then to say, “That's the only honest way where I can write things about the wider world, I have to admit my inexperience if I'm going to talk about these things.” I think I do the same thing, except I don't live in the suburbs anymore, I do travel around the world a lot, I live in a different part of the world, and certainly as I get older I've been able to grasp politics and history better so that I don't really feel overwhelmed a lot. I feel more involved in it, more engaged.

Filmmaker: The acting style in your films seems very distinctive. Do you give specific instructions to your cast to achieve that?

Hartley: Not really. The actors pointed out to me very early on in my career that the dialogue sort of indicates how it should be delivered. By the time an actor's working on the set with me they understand that the thing I do with actors is the combination of the dialogue I've written, and the rhythm and the melody of that, and the way I want them to move. This wasn't entirely clear to me either until a few years ago. Enough actors with enough experience, like Helen Mirren, pointed it out to me. They said, “The way you want me to move has everything to do with the rhythm that's already built into the language.” That was really helpful to learn. I know that it does something to an actor's attention, they start to use their face less, to express complex emotional kind of things, and they let other parts of their body do that.

Filmmaker: Is filmmaking going in the right direction?

Hartley: I think filmmaking really follows the market, and it's almost never going in the right direction. If I could answer that perfectly easily by going, “Oh yes, all films are going in the right direction,” I'd be really worried. Films that appeal to me consistently since I was 18 till now seem to be the movies that are going against the grain, that are swimming upstream. Or across the stream. I've always been at home with the knowledge that the majority of the films, and of the thinking about films and what people want from films, is all not what I intend to do.

Filmmaker: Which actor would you pay to see in anything?

Hartley: Um, wow. I should preface this by saying I'm really easy on actors. My actor friends give me a hard time about this, because whenever they're bad, I lay it at the feet of the director, or the writer. I like watching Jeremy Irons in anything. [Also] Nicole Kidman.

Filmmaker: Finally, what matters more to you, that a film is successful, or that you're happy with the finished product?

Hartley: That I'm happy with the finished product. The disappointment of having a film that's not done better, that passes.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 5/18/2007 05:33:00 PM Comments (2)

Christoffer Boe likes Cannes. After graduating from the Danish Film School in 2001, his student film Anxiety played at the 2002 festival, where it won a prize from French critics, and then Boe returned to the Croisette the following year with his debut feature, Reconstruction. A dazzlingly inventive and playful film, Reconstruction's tale of love and parallel universes in Copenhagen beguiled critics and was awarded both the Camera D'Or and the Prix Regards Jeune. Boe was celebrated as international cinema's most precocious wunderkind, and his film played all around the world, plundering prizes – including the prestigious FIPRESCI Director of the Year award at San Sebastian Film Festival – wherever it went.

Though Boe has already made his third feature, Offscreen, it has taken until now for his sophomore effort, Allegro to make it onto screens Stateside. A companion piece to Reconstruction, and similar in its visual style and unconventional narrative approach, Allegro is, however, very much the flipside to Boe's acclaimed debut. While Reconstruction was exhilarating and joyful in its depiction of love, Allegro is slow, pensive and melancholy: withdrawn concert pianist Zetterstrøm (Ulrich Thomsen) falls for the beautiful Andrea (Helena Christensen), but banishes all memories of his past when she leaves him suddenly. His abandoned memories are absorbed by the city of Copenhagen and preserved in The Zone, a mysterious place that seemingly none can enter. Boe's movie uses charmingly simple animation and a playful, omniscient narrator, Tom (Henning Moritzen), to take us to another of his very original cinematic headspaces. While Allegro is arguably not as complete or satisfying a film as Boe's first, it is a sign of the director's talents that it is nevertheless one of the most accomplished, original and thought-provoking films of the year.

Filmmaker talked to Boe about the perils of success, his addiction to cinema, and falling asleep during D.W. Griffith movies.



Filmmaker: I'm interested in the progression of the films that you've made. Reconstruction was such a romantic film, but Allegro is a lot more melancholy. Were those films a reflection on what was going on in your life at the time?

Boe: My movies have gone in the exact opposite direction of my own life. I've become more and more happy, and my movies have become more and more depressive. Offscreen is off the charts in depression and hatred. I don't know how the relationship works between that, but it seems like there is an outlet in my cinema for some feelings that I don't have in my personal life.

Filmmaker: So is one always going to be the mirror image of the other?

Boe: I don't know, it's a tough one. These movies are now at the end of a trilogy with Offscreen: they all deal with young men and their obsession with a young woman, and this obsession in many ways being a self-created image that they become obsessed with. Which is also, of course, a reflection of my own obsession with cinema which I constantly try to detox from - though I never really seem to succeed with that. Now I'm going to go in a very different direction with the movies I'm going to make. Actually right now I'm trying to figure out how I could make movies that I think are interesting but that would be completely different from what I've been doing before.

Filmmaker: You just mentioned your need to detox from movies, so is watching films still an addiction for you?

Boe: I do now have a personal life, which I've been lacking, so in that sense I do other things than watch movies, but a lot of my thinking still revolves around cinema and how it reflects human life, how these two strange mechanisms seem to interact. In many ways, I seem to wonder if we can reach some kind of new destination with cinema, or touch upon human existence in a different way to what cinema usually does in its very schematic and sometimes very controlled, plot-oriented ways of thinking. Sometimes I feel like I've found the holy grail, and next week I think it's a complete mistake and I need to try something completely different. It's an ongoing process.

Filmmaker: I'm interested by the way you talk about taking cinema in new directions. You named your production company Alphaville, after the Jean-Luc Godard film, so presumably you feel some kinship with the French New Wave.

Boe: They are the masters of modern cinema. This is not anything about quality of the works that they did and I did, it's just that the spirit in which they made movies is a spirit that I feel very connected with. It's a spirit of great love of cinema, but also of responsibility. And it's a connection with the great traditions of cinema, but also a desire and a need to reevaluate and reinvent some of those conventions.

Filmmaker: Your films are also very literary. Were you a great reader when you were younger?

Boe: When I was younger, I read a lot. I wouldn't say I do that more now, I'm usually reading non-fiction books. But still my interest in novels has been in actuality the New French Literature of the '60s, Georges Perec and the style movement of those people. But I would say that one of the reasons that my first two movies have been literary is the fact that they're playing with the nature of the game of control and destiny, and that's very much about the role of the author. In my worldview, there is no God – but there are directors.

Filmmaker: Reconstruction was such a huge success. Was that something that surprised you, and were you prepared for the consequences of that success?

Boe: Whenever you're making movies, you are an egomaniac and think you're the world, so it felt very natural to me [laughs] that people should enjoy it. Afterwards, making now two more movies, I found that it's not the nature of the game always to be appreciated. But the good thing I did after Reconstruction, which I learned by watching my fellow Danish directors, was instead of taking the world tour of the movie and being hailed at different festivals, I just started working. And I've been working ever since. So I make a movie, it comes out, and when it comes out I'm basically working on the next one – which I think is the way to do it. Otherwise you really do get wrapped up in whether it's a big success or not a big success and it becomes very strenuous to begin the next one with all the expectations and all the getting yourself into a daily work routine.

Filmmaker: What are the aims for each film that you make?

Boe: First of all, of making the greatest movie ever made – but that's a failure from the get-go. But it's also very much to capture a specific kind of mood which I have enjoyed in different kinds of movies. It's very much about defining one kind of emotional thing which I may have found in a picture, or a piece of music, or in different movies, that's an inspirational thing for the movie that I'm making, and then it's trying to make an entire movie about that one thing. Some would say it's a very stupid idea, but I like movies that in themselves are obsessive. I think my movies are about people who are somehow obsessed, but they are themselves obsessed about themselves as movies, but also about trying to work with this one thing that they are concerned with.

Filmmaker: Tell me about The Zone in Allegro. To what extent is that a homage to Tarkovsky's Stalker?

Boe: The movie began out of a very different place. I wrote it with one of my old friends, and he's a stand-up comedian, so it started out as a very cheerful kind of comedy. But then I worked with it and it was obvious it was going to get a bit bigger and it was going to take more time. I couldn't see myself doing something very slight, so the whole Zone idea came in. It seemed to me so obvious that I wouldn't want to do this without making a reference to the greatest science fiction director of all time, because I think he essentially worked with the key elements of science fiction, the key elements of human existence and portraying them in a science fiction sphere. For me, science fiction is not about gadgets, it's the big “what if?” question. And the “what if?” is if human existence was somehow be composed in a different way, how would we look then and how can that make a perspective on us now? So that's why The Zone was named The Zone. Had it not been named The Zone, I don't think the reference to Tarkovsky would have been that obvious. It's a very different kind of strange movie.

Filmmaker: Are you ever totally satisfied with your films? Reconstruction was such a huge success and seemed to be universally loved, but how did you feel about it?

Boe: I really don't look back. When I make a movie, it's a closure on something I want to deal with, but I don't look back on when I was very successful. Obviously I tend to look at what people don't like. There was a lot of stuff that people said about Reconstruction and even more so about Allegro. Obviously I try to listen to that because there might be something wrong with the way that I work with some of the ideas, but I don't look back in the sense that it's never Le Mépris. It's never Godard.

Filmmaker: How is it being a Danish director at the moment? There are a lot of prominent Danish directors now and there seems to be a sense of community because of things like Dogme '95 and Advance Party, and also Mogens Rukov, who has worked with you and Lars von Trier and many others.

Boe: I wouldn't say there is this great feeling of community. I guess that people who work with Zentropa [Lars von Trier's production company] have a much more filmic communal thing, but I always insisted on working in Copenhagen, because I can't leave. The inner city of Copenhagen to me is all foreign land, and it doesn't make sense to me to work there or live there, so actually if there is a community I'm not really a part of it.

Filmmaker: If you could travel back in time and be able to make movies in a time and place of your choice, where and when would it be?

Boe: Off the top of my head, I would go back to Copenhagen in the 1750s and film Nikolai Eigtved, who built the Copenhagen that I love.

Filmmaker: If the world ended tomorrow, what (if anything) would you be sad about that you hadn't achieved?

Boe: Ummmm... I'm speechless, I don't know what to say. I don't actually think I have many regrets, but I don't have much work which I'm very fond of yet. So it's not a question of work; I've only just begun. That whole thing to me is still in its beginning phase. So any regrets would be in my private life. I have many regrets, but also many wonderful things to say.

Filmmaker: Which classic film are you most ashamed to admit you've never seen?

Boe: That would be Birth of a Nation - I've slept through it every time I've put it on. I've slept through it not once but several times, which is something that I will have to work with.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 5/09/2007 03:53:00 PM Comments (0)

After studying at Oberlin College and NYU Film School, director and cinematographer Oren Rudavsky carved out a niche for himself in filmmaking: if you have seen a documentary about Judaism made in the last 20 years, most likely Rudavsky was involved in it. He has made numerous documentaries for television, many of them Jewish-themed, and has recently graduated to making documentary features, with notable success. The highly-praised A Life Apart (1997), an examination of the Hasidic lifestyle in America co-directed by Rudavsky with Menachem Daum (and narrated by Leonard Nimoy and Sarah Jessica Parker) was followed two years later by And Baby Makes Two, a heartwarming film Rudavsky made with his wife, Judy Katz, about women who choose to have children on their own. Rudavsky's most recent documentary, Hiding and Seeking (2004), was another collaboration with Daum and told the compelling story of a New York Orthodox Jewish family's journey to their ancestral home in Poland. It was released by First Run Features, and was nominated for Best Documentary at the Independent Spirit Awards.

Rudavsky, who had long been looking for a fiction feature project to direct, finally found the right one when he was given a copy of Daniel Menaker's novel, The Treatment. The film centers on impassioned, idealistic New York English teacher Jake Singer (Chris Eigeman), his troubled relationship with sadistic Freudian analyst, Dr. Morales (Ian Holm), and an unexpected romance with pretty widow Allegra Marshall (Famke Janssen). The performances from Whit Stillman regular Eigeman and Janssen are very pleasing, Holm has great fun in the plum role of the domineering shrink, and the whole film has an intelligence and lightness to it that is redolent of Woody Allen in playful mood. The script (by Rudavsky and Daniel Housman) is fresh and funny, and Rudavsky demonstrates how a romantic comedy can be light and sweet, and still be profound and affecting. His skill in directing fiction is immediately apparent, and it's difficult to imagine how an afternoon could be more charmingly spent than in the company of The Treatment.

Filmmaker spoke to Rudavsky about his transition from fact to fiction, his cinematic influences, and why he always hears his sisters' voices in his head when he's directing.



Filmmaker: When did you start making documentaries?

Rudavsky: I started making documentaries in my early twenties, and it was really because an opportunity came up to do something really interesting, which was make a film at a facility for mental outpatients. I made a film about these mental patients who made these animated films about their experience. It's sort of accidental that I got into making documentaries, but one of the things that attracted me to documentaries was that they're about the real world, they're about other people's experience, and at the age of 22, when I started making documentaries, I had very little life experience. I didn't think I had stories, or knew how to tell fiction film stories. I think there are 22-year-olds who know exactly how to do that, but I wasn't one of them.

Filmmaker: The Treatment doesn't seem like an obvious choice of film for you.

Rudavsky: People in the modern world, there are many different parts of their lives that don't necessarily intersect. So even though I consider myself a modern New Yorker living in the 2007 world, I grew up in [another world]. My father's a rabbi, my mother came to America from Poland in 1939, right before the war, many of my relatives are survivors – or didn't survive. And I didn't start out making documentaries, and I didn't start out making Jewish documentaries, I started out in high school making fiction films and watching Fellini, Bergman, Godard, and Truffaut, and not American films. I wanted to do fiction films. That was what I was drawn to, because those were the films that I was watching.

Filmmaker: Based on the subjects of your documentary films, though, it seems like a real departure.

Rudavsky: Yes, this film is completely a departure, but when you've been doing one thing for a long time, what you yearn for is a departure. Some people leave their wives! So I was was looking for a departure, and I was looking to do something about psychoanalysis, which I had been in, so it was very close to my own experience. I was fascinated by the whole psychoanalytic process, so originally I was working on a project called Shrink Stories, which was going to be my own thing. It was going to be a mix of documentary interviewing about going into that world of psychoanalysis, and then dramatizing pieces of that experience. That was the original idea, and then a friend of mine introduced me to the book, The Treatment. When I read The Treatment, I adored the character of Dr. Morales, and there's a lot more of him in the book. The question then was how to translate these very lengthy, talky scenes and these imagined scenes with Dr. Morales, and take it out of the office, and make a movie out of it.

Filmmaker: What was most surprising for me was how fresh and light it was, and profound rather than earnest.

Rudavsky: I like that combination - I'll take it! Somebody I gave a very early first draft to said, “Oren, this is a very difficult film for a first-time director to take on because it's got a slightly wild sensibility but you're trying to be serious at the same time. And that's a very difficult combination.” And I, naively, was like, “Well, that's what I want to do, to find that.” I'm glad it feels like there's a serious side to it, because I am both light-hearted and not always, and as I get older I'd like to live there more.

Filmmaker: Are you now a fiction feature director, or will you go back to documentaries?

Rudavsky: In the best of all possible worlds, I would feel like I could make documentaries and that I would like my main vocation to be in the fiction world. But, you know, the fiction world and the documentary world are both very fickle, and you either have luck or make luck, or you don't. And so I don't want to jinx anything, but I would like to be in the fiction world but be able to find documentaries to work on because documentaries are extraordinary and they're about the world outside your experience. You get surprised in the documentary world by characters and people who are extraordinary, who nobody knows live in some tiny little village somewhere. That's what's special for me.

Filmmaker: What skills did you gain from documentary filmmaking that you managed to use in making The Treatment?

Rudavsky: The documentaries I like to make are mostly cinema verite documentaries, and I shoot them. I've shot all my films [before The Treatment]. So I think best on my feet, and in low-budget fiction filmmaking you have very little time and you have to think on your feet and you have to come up with solutions to problems and not panic when that happens. And so I don't mind being thrown a left curve – most of them anyway. One of things is just being on your feet and thinking and trying to relate to what's going on and adjust things accordingly. When you're used to shooting yourself, it's hard to translate and articulate that and I don't think documentary films taught me that much in articulating how you want an actor to express something or do something, or in terms of where to put the camera. When you're making a documentary – especially if you're shooting it – it's purely intuitive.

Filmmaker: How did you prepare for working with actors? It was presumably a big step.

Rudavsky: As Miloŝ Forman said, “Directing is 99% casting.” So the way I prepared best was by getting fantastic actors. I don't care how great of a director you are – maybe Jean Renoir could get something from a stone – but I think having really well-trained actors who really get what you're going for (most of the time) is 90% of the battle. My preparation was in knowing the script and feeling my way through it, but the actors also bring what they want to do to the table. Beyond that, it's just listening. One of the actors, Harris Yulin - who plays the father, and is a terrific actor and a really smart man who also directs theater – when we first met he said to me, “It's all about listening. And if you're really listening, you're getting it right.”

Filmmaker: Was the pre-prepared nature of fiction filmmaking a refreshing change to you?

Rudavsky: Well, my sisters have been telling me since the age of 15, 16, when I first started films, “You have to plan this more before you go into it.” The films have gotten better, but they'd be like, “Well, that was good, but think how much better it would have been if you had planned in advance.” So I hear that voice always, 'Listen to your sisters,' but I also rebel against that voice.

Filmmaker: What were your touchstones for this film?

Rudavsky: I'm afraid to mention them because they're all great films, and I don't really want people saying, “God, he's comparing himself to that.” Nevertheless, one film that came to mind was Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, which has all these intimate close-ups and this almost whispered quality to it. And he's a talky filmmaker, there's a lot of talk. That's one, and another is Hannah and Her Sisters. I like several Woody Allen films of that era, you know, Manhattan and Annie Hall, but when I saw that film, I was really blown away, and I saw it twice in a row. After the first screening, I remember sitting in the theater crying, just because I was so happy. I just thought, 'This is wonderful, this is wonderful. Woody Allen has really got it, and he should be proud of himself,' and I hope he is for that film. You look at that film, and everything's a single take, there's no cuts. Most scenes, there's maybe one cut into it but it's all single takes and it's brilliantly choreographed. There's that fabulous scene in the bookstore, and there's many scenes like that in the movie.

Filmmaker: What's the first film you ever saw?

Rudavsky: The first film I ever saw or the first film I'm ever conscious of seeing? I was one of those kids who all my friends watched a lot of TV or Million Dollar Movie or whatever was on when we were growing up, and I have no consciousness of seeing any movie. The first film I really remember seeing was the Apu trilogy by Satyajit Ray. And I loved those films because they are kind of shot like documentaries but they are exquisitely beautiful and moving stories.

Filmmaker: What's the most embarrassing film you ever watched the whole of on an airplane?

Rudavsky: Oh, God. It wasn't on a plane, but it's called The Other Side of the Mountain. Now, I'm going to offend some group here, I think... It's the story of Jill Kinmont, this skier who some terrible tragedy happens to, and it's truly terrible, she's paralyzed. And in the course of the film she's able to learn to walk again, but it's supposed to be sad – and it's tragic, of course – but the way it's made, it was hard not to laugh. It was strikingly funny – when it was supposed to be tragic. But it was so funny, it was worth watching to the end.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you wished you had a different job?

Rudavsky: Always. I love being a filmmaker, but it is hard work. There's moments of glamor and glory, but it's basically tedious: I'm working in my office alone trying to write things, or sending out postcards to people. I mean, I do everything. Or whining to my wife – she wishes I had another job. And the other job would be either owning a little bistro, being some sort of farmer growing tomatoes or something, or being a psychoanalyst. When I was growing up I wanted to be either a garbageman or a fireman. I'm sure I've gone wrong.

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Rudavsky: Somebody should take risks on a set, but it doesn't necessarily have to be the director. If it's not the director, it should be somebody else. I love when Werner Herzog jumped in the water supposedly during the making of Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre or something. I hope to be in that situation, but I wasn't on The Treatment. I wish I took more risks. Absolutely.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you burst into tears on set?

Rudavsky: Well, I did burst into tears on the set [of The Treatment]. The last day of shooting, there was a sound blanket over the door in the classroom scene in the school, and I walked through the door and turned very sharply right into the edge of the door. That didn't make me cry, but it split open a cut on my forehead, and shook me up. A lot. I hit my head really hard and I sort of sank to the floor. It was the beginning of the day, so I had the rest of the day to go through it. Five minutes later, I went into a back room, and I just started crying. It's never happened to me like that in my life. I don't know what it was about. It was about hitting my head, but it really jogged something. It was the 25th day of shooting, and it was an extremely intense shoot. I've been involved in documentaries that I thought were extremely intense, but for me this was on a level of many times over. I think it was just like the exhaustion and 'I've made it to the end of this thing. And I can't screw it up now.'

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 5/04/2007 05:57:00 PM Comments (0)