Asger Leth grew up with film as a way of life. His father, Danish film giant Jørgen Leth, featured him in Life in Denmark (1971) before young Asger could even walk or talk, and he also appeared in two more of his father's documentaries, Good and Evil (1975) and Moments of Play (1986). Keen to escape his father's shadow, Leth initially considered a career as a lawyer but ultimately could not resist the lure of filmmaking. He started directing short films in the mid-1990s, while simultaneously working on his father's projects, most notably the celebrated The Five Obstructions (2003), in which Lars von Trier forced Leth Sr. to remake one of his films five times.

Leth's experiences as writer and assistant director on The Five Obstructions gave him the confidence to go out and make his feature debut, and he found an ideal subject in Haiti, where Jørgen Leth has lived since the late 1980s. The resulting film is Ghosts of Cité Soleil, an immediate and compelling documentary about the Chimères, the gangs who run Cité Soleil, the dangerous and impoverished slum section of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. It focuses on two of the gang leaders, chalk-and cheese brothers Bily and 2pac: Bily is politically-minded, while all 2pac really wants to do is be a rapper and escape Cité Soleil to make his music. Stylishly shot and edited with all the pace and verve of a thriller, Ghosts of Cité Soleil arguably has just as much genuine drama as the majority of Hollywood movies, and considerably more emotional impact simply because what's happening on screen is not fiction, but real life.

Filmmaker spoke to Leth about shooting in one of the most dangerous places in the world, the current state of documentaries, and being attacked by Werner Herzog.



Filmmaker: You've spent a lot of time in Haiti because of your father. How old were you when he first moved there?

Leth: He moved there already in 1989, so I've been going to Haiti every year since then. Actually a few years before that, he did a feature film there in 1982 and a documentary in 1986 where I was also out there. I've been going there for a month or two every year for many years, so I know Haiti very well.

Filmmaker: And where on the island does your father live?

Leth: On the south coast. It's about three hours away from Port-au-Prince, and it's across a mountain range, so it feels like it's a different country. It's very beautiful and very quiet, and the political mayhem of Port-au-Prince is nowhere near. It's very, very nice.

Filmmaker: How much time did you spend in Port-au-Prince?

Leth: My father used to live in Port-au-Prince for the first 10 years, so I know Port-au-Prince very well. I used to go to Cité Soleil quite often – actually, on every trip I would go there, and it used to be a place you could actually go. It was poor and miserable and horrible, but peaceful. But then things started changing and the gang phenomenon started. It became worse and worse, and Cité Soleil became a no-go zone, totally dangerous. I saw that whole development and heard all the rumors about the Chimères, and it was just fascinating.

Filmmaker: When you first went to Cité Soleil, it was presumably a place that was safe for a young white man to go. In the film, we see that what it's becomes is radically different to that.

Leth: You used to be able to go there. It was not the place that young white men would go, even back then, but it was a place that you could go. When people visited, from time to time they would ask us to take them there. So we would, because there were very important stories to tell. There have always been important stories to tell in Cité Soleil. In a sense, you could say that Cité Soleil has always been the thermometer for Haiti: you could feel and see and report exactly what the situation was in the country. You should always go to the worst places to check out the temperature.

Filmmaker: How did you gain the trust of the Chimères, particularly 2pac and Bily?

Leth: Well, Milos Loncarevic, a Serbian guy, and Lele, the French girl you see in the film, were in there for months. She was doing work for aid organizations and he was taking still photos. So they knew these guys intimately, also because they were the only foreigners going in there. They went in there fearless, and that in itself gave them a lot of respect. Especially Lele, who actually wanted to do something. A lot of aid organizations go to a place like that and do a lot of stuff in the country but they are not necessarily keen on going into the worst place. So nobody would go into Cité Soleil, but she was like, “Well, I'm gonna do something. I wanna go there.” I heard about those two people and contacted them, and they introduced me to 2pac and Bily who wanted to tell their story. Even if there hadn't have been a rebellion, they probably knew that they were not going to live that long. They had a feeling that the president - who they worked for - was going to leave, and they were going to be stuck with the bill. The bill being [that] the rebels were going come in and kill them. So they wanted someone to tell their story, they wanted to leave their mark, and not just disappear like a blip.

Filmmaker: How did Wyclef Jean get involved with the project?

Leth: Well, Wyclef was born right next to Cité Soleil and he is the one symbol of the guy who made it out. He's not a celebrity, he's like a beacon of hope; he's the only example of somebody who made it out and made it big that they have in this area. So 2pac wanted to get in contact with him, [because he thought that] then his life would change. He tried desperately to find him, or some way to get to him, and then he met a Haitian-American who came down to record some stuff at a studio in Haiti, and he knew somebody who knew somebody who had a number for him. Then they hooked up on the phone, but the first time 2pac called him, Wyclef still didn't know this guy was for real. Then I went to New York and said, “Yeah he's for real,” and then immediately he was like, “Oh, man, I better get back on the phone with him!”

Filmmaker: The film plays like non-fiction, particularly in the way it's shot and edited.

Leth: Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted. But it's difficult, it's extremely difficult, because sometimes you get get stuck and you need some fresh eyes, and it's good to have people around you who are not close to the project who will come in and talk to you about it. I had way too little time editing this film, and I think we did a fantastic job, comparatively speaking. I financed the shooting of the film myself, had very little money to finish it with, and had technical difficulties with editing the 500 hours of material. My editor doesn't speak any Creole and didn't know the story nearly as well as me, so the process would be that he would come in at 9 o'clock in the morning, we would edit till 6, 7 at night, he would go home to his family, I would stay, look through the footage, find scenes I wanted to cut, subtitle all of it for him all night until 5 or 6 in the morning, then sleep two hours, and then he would come in again. So the process was hard, but we edited the film in record time. We probably did it in half the time we should have, but we did a fantastic job.

Filmmaker: Your father's films have typically blurred the lines between fiction and documentary, so was his style of filmmaking an influence on you?

Leth: Absolutely, absolutely, in the sense that he taught me from when I was a child that documentaries can be so many things, that it's almost an unexplored territory. I share his interest in more talking heads-style documentaries, and these university-educated, socio-anthropological pieces where people are talking, talking, talking and studying subjects from the outside and being clever about issues. You could be clever about these gangs and say, “They're gangs because of the hip-hop music,” but it's bullshit. So I wanted to do a documentary that felt like a feature film in the structure of it. I think you could push it even further. It's a totally true story, there's nothing written, but the way I tell the story with cinema verité, it's a different kind of grammatic storytelling. I think that you can tell stories like that – I wanted to prove that you can. For arrogant, filmmaking-loving reasons, I have to tell you that I specifically looked for this, so if I hadn't found that in Haiti, I wouldn't have done the film.

Filmmaker: The timing of the film was certainly excellent.

Leth: But that was easy. I know Haiti so well, I knew it was happening, and all of a sudden things were clicking into place. The thing in Haiti is that when the rebellion starts in the specific city of Gonaives it always ends up with the president or the dictator leaving the country. And it's always at the end of February! It's crazy as a documentary filmmaker that you can already [know that]. So I knew I had these two brothers, gang leaders in the world's most dangerous slum, totally different, one a Ché Guevara-type and one who wants to get out of the violence and be a rap musician. So there's personal drama going on, the rebels are coming in, the guy that these two gang leaders are working for is gonna leave them, they're going to be stuck with the bill and they're all going to know it. So that's a fantastic drama – you couldn't write it! But it was there, and I knew it was there from the beginning. I mean, I wrote two pages of the story on the first day, and it all panned out. It all happened.

Filmmaker: What was it like premiering the film?

Leth: The first screening of the film was at Telluride, and I was very, very nervous. It was way up in the mountains, it was late at night and I was scared shitless. I was hiding out in the theater and after the screening I didn't really want to hear what people had to say about the film, but then everybody left and 15 minutes later I went out, and outside were two of my big heroes, Werner Herzog and [Alejandro González] Iñárritu, both of them totally fucking crazy about the film, attacking me and saying it was “Amazing!” After that I was like, “I don't care what reviews I get, that's all I need.” It's the biggest honor, and I'm very proud of that.

Filmmaker: Do you think the current interest in documentaries will last?

Leth: It will definitely last, and it will get stronger, I think. The box has opened, and it opened a few times before with different kinds of directions in documentary filmmaking that were waves, but this wave that is coming, and that I want to be a proponent for, can also be dramatic, and even more dramatic than a [fiction] feature. That's the important last step, because you need to convince people of that. If you go see my film, it will touch you, and you will sit on the edge of your seat — and I cannot say that for 95% of the feature films you go and watch in the cinemas. When people start realizing, slowly, that you can get this kind of experience and that documentaries are not PBS and that stuff, then I think you will get an everlasting audience.

Filmmaker: Has this film prompted offers for you to direct Hollywood fiction films?

Leth: I got a lot of offers, actually, which was very interesting, and I'm developing a film with Imagine and Universal, and looking at other stuff also.

Filmmaker: What's the strangest thing you've experienced during your time in the film industry?

Leth: The strangest thing was doing The Five Obstructions, because I wrote part of it and shot most of it, and [it was] doing a film where you really didn't have any clue where the fuck the film was going, and the only one who knew was Lars von Trier. That was kind of weird, because it was three years where we had no idea where this thing was going. That was three strange years.

Filmmaker: If you could do it all over again, what would you change?

Leth: I wouldn't have gone to law school. I was there three years, and it kind of threw me off track for altogether probably seven or eight years. I feel that I'm altogether trying to catch up with maybe nine or 10 years of missed opportunities in filmmaking. My father's fame in the [Danish] film industry is like Scorsese over here, and it's very difficult to follow in your father's footsteps. So you're hiding and working for other people and learning and making sure that when you actually do it you're not going to fuck up. If you come from the outside, you can fuck up, you've got a few more shots. Because it's so fucking great to make films, I would have done it earlier.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/27/2007 09:37:00 PM Comments (4)

John Dahl has unquestionable cinematic flair and a genuine talent for telling unconventional stories, yet he never set out to be a film director. Growing up in Montana in the 60s and 70s, his great passions were art and music: he studied fine art in college, then dropped out to become a commercial artist and play in rock 'n' roll bands. Still uncertain of his place in the world, he ended up at film school where he focused on directing. After graduation, he worked as an assistant director and storyboard artist in Hollywood, then began directing music promos and wrote his first film, P.I. Private Investigations (1987). He co-wrote the first two features he directed, Kill Me Again (1989) and Red Rock West (1992), both stylish neo-noirs, and gained even greater acclaim for his next film, The Last Seduction (1994). His form dipped with Unforgettable (1996), but he bounced back with two very entertaining studio pictures, Rounders (1998) and Joy Ride (2001). Both Joy Ride and his most recent film, World War II epic The Great Raid (2005), were difficult, drawn-out productions which made him decide to return to the indie fold.

In the resulting film, You Kill Me, Dahl continues his love affair with the modern noir. Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley, playing delightfully against type) is an alcoholic hitman working for the Polish mafia in Buffalo; his drinking gets in the way of his work so much that his boss, mob don Roman (Philip Baker Hall), banishes him to San Francisco to dry out. Frank starts going to AA, and is given a job in a funeral home where he meets Laurel (Téa Leoni), a ballsy woman who seems to accept him despite his flaws. You Kill Me has great performances from its leads and boasts a fine supporting cast (which includes Luke Wilson, Bill Pullman and Denis Farina), but is most enjoyable because of its deliciously dark, dry sense of humor and the vigor with which Dahl brings to life Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely's rich screenplay.

Filmmaker spoke to Dahl about making films when you can't afford the lenses, why he won't be making The Punisher 2, and his rock musical, Here Come the Pugs.



Filmmaker: You Kill Me seems to me an unlikely project for Ben Kingsley, but he's superb in the film. It must have been a leap of faith to cast him in that role.

Dahl: I was sent the project by Carol Baum, one of the producers, after they had the script with Ben Kingsley attached, also as producer. A lot of times when an actor's attached, it's a great part but not necessarily a good movie. With this one, I really like the script, but I also thought it was a really interesting part for Ben Kingsley.

Filmmaker: It's an incredibly enjoyable film to watch. Was that a translation of the fun you were having on set?

Dahl: Well, it was not an easy movie to make because there was really very little money. As a matter of fact, at one point I remember having a conversation with one of the producers, and I wanted to get a wide angle lens for a certain shot. That was an extra $150, and they were saying, “We just don't have that.” I think Téa overheard the conversation, and said, “They're not even going to give you a lens?!” “Well,” I said, “it's a super-wide lens we need for just one shot.” She said, “You know what, I'll get the lens, dammit!” So that part of it wasn't fun, and I think we all knew going into it how brutally tight the money would be, but on the other hand, what that affords you is a lot more creative control. I don't think I've had a film where I saw eye to eye with [the leads] so instantly. We all loved the script and just wanted to get the script onto film.

Filmmaker: Was this a conscious return to noir cinema for you?

Dahl: I'd like to think that you can make those big choices in life, but ultimately I'm sitting in my office one day and I get a script. I read it and I think, “I could make this. I know how to make this movie.” I think I knew that I wanted to do a smaller, independent film, so I was more inclined to roll up my sleeves. I'd just done two large studio films back-to-back, I'd had a lot of notes from people, so the idea of doing something independent and low-budget seemed very appealing.

Filmmaker: Was your decision to make an independent movie as a result of your experiences on The Great Raid?

Dahl: The Great Raid and Joy Ride were two big studio films: on Joy Ride we did reshoots, and on The Great Raid it just took us forever to get it edited, and between Miramax and Harvey and Bob [Weinstein] leaving them, and Disney, it just took a tremendous amount of time. I look at my career and I think, “Wow, I've only made eight movies – I'd like to make a lot more films.”

Filmmaker: Was the film originally called You Kill Me, because it sounds like a prequel to your first film, Kill Me Again?

Dahl: I know, it's a little weird, isn't it? In fact, Téa was saying to somebody today, “Yeah, I love this movie and I'd like to do another one. Maybe we could call it You Kill Me Again.” But Chris [Markus] and Steve [McFeely] wrote this script 10 years ago, and that was the original title.

Filmmaker: I was surprised to see that Markus and McFeely, who are best known for writing the Narnia films, had written a black comedy.

Dahl: Chris Markus is from Buffalo, and he's Polish, and he had a family member who went to AA. To support that family member, he went to one of those meetings, and he came back and said to his writing partner, Steve, who's from San Francisco, “I just went to this AA meeting, and you can say whatever you want at those meetings!” So, they basically came up with a scenario that would totally test that theory. People in Hollywood read the script and liked it and thought it was funny, but nobody was going to make it.

Filmmaker: So it was like their calling card.

Dahl: Yeah, it was their calling card. After my first meeting that I had with them, I remember they said, “Are you guys really gonna make this movie? Is this really going to happen?” I've had the good fortune of making three movies that were writers' first-time scripts. The Last Seduction was Steve Barancik's first script, Brian [Koppelman] and David [Levien] wrote Rounders as their first script, and these guys. There's something fun about somebody's first script, if it's good, because they're not so jaded. There's that feeling of limitless possibilities, so they're much more willing to try things, and there's something fresh and exciting, because they haven't learned all the tricks yet.

Filmmaker: You wrote as well as directed earlier in your career. Have you got any scripts of your own that you're still hoping to get made?

Dahl: Yeah, I've done a fair amount of writing. I've probably got three scripts under the bed: one's a black comedy about the entertainment business, which is very hard to get made; and another one is a crime drama which we had set up at Miramax for a while, and we were actually in the process of trying to cast that. It was about a guy who robbed a bank, and had amnesia and couldn't remember where he left the money. We just could not convince anybody to act in it, so ultimately they offered me Rounders. I'm always writing something, and I used to turn down work because I was writing. But now I'm just wanting to focus on directing, I'd like to make a lot more movies.

Filmmaker: At this stage in your career, is it financial considerations that necessitate that focus on directing?

Dahl: For me, I feel like I've learned a lot about directing, so it's not as mysterious as it used to be to me. I actually feel like I'm a better director, so I want to take all the things that I've learned and apply them more. Doing Joy Ride and doing Great Raid, I felt like I really got bogged down in studio politics – together, those two movies were like five years! The thing that I enjoy the most is hanging around with film people - its like the smell of the greasepaint! I love doing location scouts and talking to cameramen, and I've even directed a few episodes of television because it's all the fun of directing but without all the bullshit, without all the studio politics.

Filmmaker: I read that you co-wrote a rock musical called Here Come the Pugs. Is that true?

Dahl: Yes, I did. That was our junior year film. It was a very ambitious musical where we had this punk rock band and there was a disco maniac who was trying to take over in this small town. The conflict was live music versus records. It was fun. Our senior film was an 87-minute black-and-white horror film spoof called The Death Mutants, where a college professor accidentally radiated himself and turned three students into the death mutants, who were helping him build “the laser.” It was totally silly.

Filmmaker: You've recently been linked to The Punisher 2.

Dahl: I was talking to New Line about that, but ultimately it just had too much baggage, too many things connected to it, and I didn't think the script was quite right. The idea of doing a really nasty vigilante movie that had a sense of humor was appealing, but I guess I wasn't convinced I could get it to that point. No matter what I would have done, it would have been Punisher 2. I would have loved to have had the opportunity to do [the original] Punisher, because politically incorrect as the idea is of a guy in a leather trench coat just wasting dozens of drug-dealing scum in an instant, like stamping out rats, I just think it could have been pretty funny. Funny and grim at the same time. You know, like you're laughing because somebody just got shot in the face? That kind of funny.

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

Dahl: Huh, that's a hard one. I'm always working on being a better father. Here's the thing: I enjoy making films, they're great, they're the best, but I guess I don't take it that seriously anymore.

Filmmaker: Finally, what's your best piece of advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Dahl: “Make a movie and get a paycheck,” I guess. In other words, recognize that this is a business, and there will always be a financial element. Yeah, it's art, but it's art business. Or maybe a better one is “Don't take yourself too seriously.” That would be my best advice.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/22/2007 11:23:00 PM Comments (2)

To describe Taika Waititi as simply a filmmaker would be to do him a disservice. Just watching him as he talks - fiddling with anything and everything within reach, getting up and walking around the room, constantly active - it's apparent that his inherent energy and enthusiasm make it impossible for him to focus on just one thing. He first rose to prominence in his native New Zealand as part of the comedy duo Humourbeast (along with Eagle vs Shark's leading man, Jemaine Clement), and was later named New Zealand's best stand-up comic; at the same time, he was pursuing careers as an actor, painter and photographer. The first short film he made, Two Cars, One Night (2004), was nominated for an Academy Award, which helped him get funding for his first feature, Eagle vs Shark.

Premiering at Sundance this year, Eagle vs Shark won the hearts of festival audiences, as well as numerous comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite, which has a similar ramshackle charm. Waititi's movie is the most unlikely of love stories: awkward fast food joint employee Lily (Loren Horsley) falls for arrogant, bespectacled nerd Jarrod (Clement), who then takes her back to his hometown and troubled family in order to face the demons of the past. The film relies on the comedy of unease, yet manages to make his bumbling characters inexplicably lovable. Though comic and romantic elements are at the fore in Eagle vs Shark, the darker moments are genuinely challenging and hint at a bravery and rare sensibility in Waititi's vision of the world that we will hopefully see more of in future films.

Filmmaker spoke to Waititi about being nominated for an Oscar, a possible career as a fashion designer, and why a time machine would be useless to him.



Filmmaker: Tell me about the initial stages of the film.

Waititi: The project originated with Loren and I just wanting to tell a story with a female protagonist who wasn't your normal bubbly, confident woman who had a lot of stuff going for her. She's the friend of the main character in a lot of films, who you never really get to know. We were just wanting to do something different, and not setting out to make a romantic comedy. We just wanted to start out with an interesting character and see where the story came from then. It was really a character piece.

Filmmaker: How involved were Loren and Jemaine in the creative process?

Waititi: Loren and I worked out this character, then started building the world around her and then eventually started asking the question, what kind of guy would she be interested in? For someone like her, I thought it would be really great if it was someone really intense, who provides a sense of danger and brings some adventure into Lily's world. I went away and wrote a screenplay based on a lot of the discussions that we'd had, and came up with a lot of the other eccentric parts of the story.

Filmmaker: You've gone through quite a transition from stand-up comedian to acclaimed filmmaker.

Waititi: Well, I didn't do stand-up as my main thing, and I've always been involved in lots of different creative outlets. I spent years doing visual arts, doing painting and photography, and throughout that whole time I was acting quite a lot in theater and New Zealand film and television. But for that whole time I wasn't really sure which one of those artforms I wanted to concentrate on, and eventually just started tinkering around with writing little short films. I made one short film which ended up doing really well, and then suddenly I was propelled into this job as a filmmaker. But actually I didn't want to be a filmmaker, I just wanted to make short film to try it out! I still don't really think I'm a filmmaker.

Filmmaker: Your short, Two Cars, One Night, was nominated for an Academy Award. How did that impact on your life?

Waititi: It didn't really impact that much, it just made it easier to get my feature made – the rest of my life didn't change at all. It was really good for getting my feature made, because I kinda got fast-tracked in the funding process. In New Zealand, the only way of getting a movie done is through the Film Commission, the government agency that funds everything. So I got nominated for the Oscar in March 2005, I wrote the screenplay for Eagle vs Shark in May, then we went to the Sundance Lab in June, got funding from the Film Commission in August, and we were shooting in October. So it was a really quick process, but if it hadn't got funding after a year I probably would have moved on. I wasn't saying, I'm going to push for this for the next 10 years and toil away on the script and work and work and work. It wasn't that kind of film, just a small, intimate, strange little character study which had room to experiment and make mistakes. It had to be a low budget film for that to work, to have that freedom.

Filmmaker: What were you experiences like of the Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Labs?

Waititi: It was just totally amazing, totally amazing! I think the biggest thing I took away from the lab was finding the tone for the film. In the marketing, it's going to be presented as a comedy, and I think that's where a lot of the problems will lie. Even in the criticism of the film, people don't get that it's not pure comedy. They're confronted with real, tragic elements in the film, actual human emotions, and moments where you might have to feel something like empathy or sympathy, and they freak out and go, “Huh? This isn't funny...” When your treading that line between comedy and tragedy, there's a danger that you slip into broad comedy and make this a wacky film with oddball characters, and it's easy to make that film. On the other hand, you could also slip into a darker, more depressing film. What was really hard was finding that balance where there's so many hilarious moments but also some heartfelt moments of truth.

Filmmaker: The way the film is composed, with its animated segments, the music, the comic and tragic elements, seems to reflect your multi-faceted creative personality.

Waititi: I didn't want it to look like a filmmaker being smart and showing off, it's just that I am interested in all those things. I love animation, and I think it's really cool to incorporate those aspects into film because it adds a fantasy element that helps an audience tap into their inner child, and these characters are children trapped in adult bodies. That style of animation, stop-motion, is very organic, clumsy, hand-made, and you really feel the human element, that someone's come and touched everything. I think you feel that with the film itself, that in a lot of ways it's just stuck together with Scotch tape – it's almost like the characters themselves made the film.

Filmmaker: How do you feel about the constant comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite?

Waititi: When I first heard about Napoleon Dynamite, I didn't want to see it because I thought it was one of those films where you laugh at the weird, quirky guy. But after I wrote the script, someone read it and said it reminded them of Napoleon Dynamite, so Loren and I went and saw it. I really loved it, thought it was really funny. It was never part of my thinking that we had to watch out not to be compared to Napoleon Dynamite, because we were making a small New Zealand film which I thought was only going to play in festivals. But it's not a bad thing, there are worse things to be compared to. I mean, imagine if it were being compared to Big Momma's House 2?!

Filmmaker: The film has done really well with American audiences.

Waititi: You always hope that the story is universal enough that everyone gets it. American audiences totally get it. One of the things I was worried about was that they wouldn't get the subtle humor, or they would only laugh at the slapstick, broad comedy. I'm not sure if they find some of the dysfunctional family stuff so funny because it's quite sad over here – but in New Zealand, all we can do is laugh at that stuff because it's so comic. A lot of people freak out and say, “Who looks after Jarrod's daughter?” Over here, it's the kind of thing where they need to call Social Welfare, but in New Zealand if you're in a small town or from a poor background it's so common that you grow up in households where there are kids and you don't even know who their parents are. You always have people coming in and out of the house - it's like staying in a train station sometimes.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Waititi: It might have been The Wiz or Clash of the Titans, or the animated Lord of the Rings. Those are some of my earliest cinemagoing memories. I know I must have been pretty young when I saw Lord of the Rings, because my dad drew the animated Gollum character on my wall. Clash of the Titans scared the shit out of me, but I actually remember seeing Harold and Maude when I was pretty young as well, but not knowing what it was. Those images of him killing himself stayed with me. It freaked me out because he was hanging in the bathroom and talking to someone, and it stayed with me until I re-watched it only about four or five years ago. It was like, “Holy shit – this is that film!” The images in that film stayed with me my entire life, so it was really amazing. Hal Ashby's my favorite director – I'm in love with all his films.

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

Waititi: When I began this press junket! [laughs] I can't say I've ever had a job – even directing isn't a job. I don't think any of this stuff is a job if I'm doing what I love, it's just creating. I've never stuck with one thing long enough for it to feel like a job, I've always mixed it up. I still even think that my days as a filmmaker are numbered because I cannot concentrate on anything for very long. My attention drifts and I get interested in something else. I always say I'm going to do something really different, like fashion. It would be fun to do something like that. [laughs] I'd make really ill-fitting clothes, that would be my point of difference.

Filmmaker: What is your dream project?

Waititi: Anything where I get to collaborate with talented people who are free of ego and attitude, where you get to be true and creative, and it's not for the money. I've never done something for the money. Yet. But the idea of that petrifies me. In this business, where you give up a year or two of your life to a project, I think it can really destroy your soul. Anything where I don't go to bed at night feeling depressed that I'm selling out, I'm happy.

Filmmaker: Finally, if you could do it all again, what would you change?

Waititi: I often think after I've done something really stupid, “Shit, this is the one time I need a time machine.” But that's happened so many times in my life, I think there's no point in having a time machine and changing anything because I'm obviously the kind of person who's going to do stupid shit again and again, so what's the point in going back. I'm just going to go on doing stupid things.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/15/2007 01:54:00 PM Comments (0)

Todd Rohal is possibly the Mumblecore director you've heard least about, maybe because his films don't fit with the movement's improvisational, talky style or focus on twentysomething relationships. A native of Columbus, Ohio, he studied film at Ohio University, where his first short film, Single Spaced (1997), was nominated for a Student Academy Award. He made two subsequent shorts in college, Slug 660 (1998) and Knuckleface Jones (1999), and resisted the lure of Hollywood after graduating, instead choosing to take a more unconventional road. He made his fourth short, Hillbilly Robot in 2001, and has since worked in DVD design, as a cinematographer and editor for TV and independent films, and also as an actor, most recently in fellow Mumblecore director Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007).

In 2006, Rohal was named one of Filmmaker's 25 New Faces of Independent Film on the strength of his debut feature, The Guatemalan Handshake, which had won Best Film at Slamdance earlier that year. The film is surreal and individualistic, one of the most original, uncategorizable visions in recent American cinema: a power outage leads to a string of strange events in a small Pennsylvania town involving characters called Turkeylegs, Mr Turnupseed and Ethel Firecracker, boy scouts stealing cars, exploding dogs and a demolition derby. Ebullient yet poignant, The Guatemalan Handshake is beautifully shot and has echoes of the work of David Gordon Green and David Lynch – though Rohal describes it as an attempt to “place Kentucky Fried Movie in the middle of Days of Heaven.” The movie has an exclusive run at Chicago's Gene Siskel Film Center from June 8-14.

Filmmaker spoke to Rohal about having the legendary Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) as his leading man, being part of the Mumblecore movement and his unique relationship with William “The Refrigerator” Perry.



Filmmaker: The film has incredible visuals, and looks like it cost quite a bit to make. How did you manage to achieve that on a small budget?

Rohal: The whole budget was probably $160,000, that's for everything up to the print, so we really didn't have much of anything. That's a lot [of money] to ask for when the people you're asking are your family and friends. Basically from the writing stage, we decided we were going to shoot 35mm anamorphic and I wanted to focus a lot of time on the sound, and make it full and big. We also had big set pieces, and we didn't necessarily have connections to all those things yet, to the demolition derby and all that, but it seemed like it wouldn't be hard. It was going into things being really naive and hoping people would be kind enough to do it for us for free. If I would have worked on a bunch of other sets, I would have thought there's no way I could do this, but we didn't have any trouble. There was no trouble getting the crew together to work for free either. It just took a little explaining as to why, where the intentions were coming from, and why we wanted the money to go to the camera, the film processing and that stuff.

Filmmaker: Did the cast work for free as well?

Rohal: Yeah. We cast locally, around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Part of it was we couldn't fly a lot of people in to work on it, and we couldn't pay for housing for them, so we cast people locally. Also it was to have these discoveries of brand new people; if we had names, it would cheapen it, it would take away the strangeness of the film. It would take away that kind of confusion where you're just really thrown into a whole new place, and that's what I wanted to do. It felt like the right thing to do that way.

Filmmaker: Tell me about your relationship with Will Oldham. Though he did Old Joy recently, he hardly ever acts. It was quite a coup for you to get him.

Rohal: It was, yeah, though no one on our crew knew who he was! The lighting guys knew who he was, but none of the producers had ever heard of him. I remember when he wrote and said he'd do it, everyone was like, "Who?" I wrote a lot of the script while listening to his stuff. I worked on a DVD for a short film he did the soundtrack for, so I had a little bit of contact with him through that. Basically, I just wrote to him and said, "Would you be willing to be in a background role in this film?" I thought it would be kinda funny, but he read the script and asked to do something a little more substantial. I didn't write the role for him. I had no idea who was going to play the role, or what he was going to look like, but he fit right into it.

Filmmaker: In interviews, he's infamous for being very evasive in his answers. Was he easy to work with, or did that side of his personality come out?

Rohal: He showed up literally like an hour before his first scene, but he was certainly 100% into what was going on. I had full confidence in him that he wasn't going to try anything strange or be evasive, it was certainly like he was taking it very seriously and he wanted to do the best job he could. He fit right in with everyone else, he linked up with the other actors. I remember a lot of the other actors didn't know who he was, so I'd come round the corner and see one guy giving him tips on how to get his music out: "You're a musician too? Well, there's this guy I know who runs a music store in town..." I don't think that hurts his feelings, I think that's nice.

Filmmaker: Music is very much an omnipresent feature in the film.

Rohal: I was listening to music constantly when I was writing. With Will's music, I would listen to every single album in a row. I was always trying to find good stuff on LimeWire, so I was constantly looking up weird things and thinking, "How can I involve this?" It was good to have music that I knew I could have access to to attach to the script, and write for that, and know when I was shooting what the music would be like. So I kept an iPod list of tracks for the film, or burned CDs to give to people to be like, "This is what I'm thinking musically." Then once the film was done, I found this Tuvan throat singing music, and that was all found through LimeWire late at night. And then David Wingo came on and did the score for the film.

Filmmaker: David's been doing live shows for you, hasn't he?

Rohal: He's playing at Schuba's [on June 13], he played in Seattle and Birmingham, Alabama, and we had a show here in Brooklyn last summer. Kimya Dawson [of the Moldy Peaches] also played with the film. They're two great musicians to have with the tour.

Filmmaker: How has being part of the so-called Mumblecore movement affected you?

Rohal: It's a strange group to be a part in, because Andrew Bujalski's films are vastly different. There's not a lot of dialogue in my films. I mean there is, but not like these guys are doing, where it's all improvised. All my stuff is definitely thought out. We knew what shots there were going to be and there was an ability to keep things loose, but not in the sense where we roll the camera and let things happen. It's not about relationships, and one of the things I wanted to do in the film was avoid making a movie about my generation and making a statement about anyone my age. I think [I'm part of this group] because I acted in Joe [Swanberg]'s film, and they hadn't seen my film, they'd heard of it. Somebody in L.A. came to see The Guatemalan Handshake, and they were like, "I thought this was going to be like Andrew Bujalski's film, and then it opens up and it's widescreen anamorphic film." Right in the first two minutes, they said, "There's no logic to whatever that Mumblecore thing is."

Filmmaker: The film won Slamdance last year, but it didn't seem to be the catalyst you might have hoped for.

Rohal: I knew that the film would be a tough sell for anyone to see. There was never a thought that it would be distributed and put out in a million theaters, but it needed that legitimacy of Sundance taking it, saying, "This is a different kind of movie, and we're going to show it." I felt it fit all the categories they always talk about, what Sundance is about, and it had been recommended by Cory McAbee, who did The American Astronaut, and David Gordon Green. I'd heard that it was going through the route, that people had seen it, but we just never got a call. We played Slamdance that year, and two programmers from Sundance came up and said, "We really love your film. It was up on the board until the last day." After the Sundance thing didn't come through, I said, "This is going to be a long journey..." It's definitely been a struggle.

Filmmaker: You've taken the film on the road to a number of different cities, and this week there's an exclusive run in Chicago. On the press release I was sent, John Hughes and William "The Refrigerator" Perry "personally invite" invite audiences to the screenings.

Rohal: William "The Refrigerator" Perry played for the Chicago Bears, and I want him to moderate the Q&A. But I think he lives in Florida now. I just completely make up stuff. We're in Chicago, so it's like, "Who are the two most famous people in Chicago filmwise? John Hughes and...?" I couldn't think of anybody. Macaulay Culkin is repetitive with John Hughes, so... William "The Refrigerator" Perry. I should definitely get in touch with him, because I'm sure he would do it. It would be amazing.

Filmmaker: It's great that you make an event out of screenings, like having David Wingo plays shows at the same time.

Rohal: The original idea that I wanted to do was go to lots of cities in a row and just travel with it, and then have the band go with us, and find different people in town and bring them in and have this whole vaudeville kind of thing. But it was just really hard to deal with theaters without a distributor, so we couldn't plan that tour. But I like that idea of doing that, and it would be awesome.

Filmmaker: What phrase best describes your philosophy on life?

Rohal: Is it multiple choice? No? OK, "Do it to it." That's what we always said on set. One of the actors kept on saying that, he was kinda nuts. He was this guy from Queens that we cast, the really loud, obnoxious guy. I guess it's like "Get 'er done," but in Queens.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you burst out laughing on set?

Rohal: There's a scene where one of the characters, Stool, is in the car with a milkshake, and there's a take that we couldn't use because I burst out laughing. He had half the milkshake, and put it between his legs to take his shirt off. I was listening on headphones, and just heard this cracking of Styrofoam and then basically I just knew the milkshake had been released into his crotch. That's when the actor blamed me for making movies just for those moments, because I guess that was the happiest he'd seen me in a long time! I couldn't stop laughing. I was accused of not even having film in the camera and just doing this to humiliate people.

Filmmaker: Finally, what's your biggest extravagance?

Rohal: Calamari. If it's on the menu, I prefer it to a regular meal. I feel rich when I'm eating it.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/08/2007 12:39:00 PM Comments (0)

After 15 years rising up through the Hollywood ranks, comedy's underdog is on top of the world. At the moment, studios are scrambling to work with Judd Apatow (there are no less than seven films he's currently involved with which he has written and/or produced), but this is a stark contrast to the rejection he became used to. It is ironic that the projects now being snapped up are the same ones that were repeatedly passed on previously. Apatow began as a writer on The Ben Stiller Show and The Larry Sanders Show, and then wrote the screenplays for Heavy Weights (1995) and Celtic Pride (1996), neither of which managed to jumpstart his film career. He returned to TV, and created two much-loved series, Freaks and Geeks (1999) and Undeclared (2001), both of which were cancelled in their first seasons, despite receiving critical raves. Since then, Apatow has been on a hot run, having produced Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), Kicking and Screaming (2005), Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006) and The TV Set (2007) as well as penning the remake of Fun with Dick and Jane (2005). However his true breakthrough came with The 40-Year-Old Virgin starring Steve Carrell, which was the sleeper hit of summer 2005.

Knocked Up is Apatow's much-anticipated follow-up to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and has had incredible word-of-mouth since its triumphant premiere at SXSW earlier this year. The film was written for actor-writer Seth Rogen, an Apatow acolyte since Freaks and Geeks, and casts the 25-year-old as Ben, a schlubby slacker who gets rising TV star Alison (Katherine Heigl) pregnant after a drunken one night stand. When Alison and Ben decide to try and become a couple for the baby's sake, Ben has to face up to his responsibilities as a father and finally grow up. It's difficult to imagine a more enjoyable film this summer than Knocked Up. The movie is a delight, and showcases Apatow's rare ability to create films that are both uproariously funny and also deeply touching, to have moments that are sweet and tender nestle alongside coarse, hilarious ones without either seeming out of place.

Filmmaker spoke to Apatow about the comedy of the underdog, being the core of a moviemaking community, and lying to his daughters for their own good.



Filmmaker: Things seem to be going very well with Knocked Up, particularly with the reaction it got at SXSW.

Apatow: It's been playing very well. It's shocking... We were all very surprised at how good the reaction to the movie has been. It has always screened very well, but I think when we put the final finishing touches on the music and the sound mix, and the credit sequences, it jumped up another notch. So it's taken us a little bit by surprise.

Filmmaker: The film was written as a vehicle for Seth Rogen, I believe.

Apatow: It was. Seth pitched me some ideas after The 40-Year-Old Virgin which were big science fiction movies. I was trying to convince him to do a small movie as his lead acting debut, and so I said, “You don't need wizards and fairies to be funny, you're funny in The 40-Year-Old Virgin just sittin' there. You barely move and you're funny. You could just be in a normal circumstance. You could get a woman pregnant and that would be enough for a movie.” And then I realised, Wait a second, maybe that's a good idea, maybe I need to write that myself.

Filmmaker: Did Seth input ideas as well?

Apatow: How this one worked was I went off and wrote a draft of it while we were shooting Talladega Nights, and then as soon as I was done I gave it to Leslie Mann – my wife – Paul Rudd and Seth, and got input from them and we started doing table reads and rehearsals. About seven months before we started shooting we did our first rehearsals. I knew it would take a while to find our female lead, but I always call everybody during the process and tell them things that are making me laugh and ask them questions about their lives and try and put it into the movie.

Filmmaker: There seems to be a lot of crossover between real life and the world of the film. For example, a lot of the actors play characters with the same name as them, and your wife and two daughters act in the film.

Apatow: A lot of the details of the movie are based on things that have happened or based on things that you think about. Or things that have happened to Paul or other actors. You know, when I'm writing I'll call Paul and ask him questions about his marriage [laughs], and a lot of the marital problems are a combination of things that Paul's wife and my wife find irritating about us. [laughs] There's a lot to find irritating about us, believe me!

Filmmaker: So there's a documentary angle to this.

Apatow: Yeah, that's one aspect to this. I have never lied to my wife and said I was at work while sneaking out to see Spiderman with my friends [as Rudd's character does], but I have dreamed about it. I do consider it all the time, I just don't have the courage to do it.

Filmmaker: So it's wish fulfillment played out on the big screen.

Apatow: It's nightmare fulfillment! [laughs]

Filmmaker: I read a quote from your wife in which she said that you were still awkward with her sometimes, although you've been together for a long time.

Apatow: It's true, I'm a very awkward person. It's hard to shake. Some people are wired for drug abuse or alcoholism or smoking; on some level, I'm wired to always feel like a goofball. No matter how well things go, I feel like I'm 15 years old. So when I'm out at a restaurant with my wife, I always feel like I'm on a first date and she might run at any moment. And it's very strange, especially as I head into my 40th year, that I can't shake that, even after about 17 years of therapy. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Until a few years ago, you were pitching ideas that mostly weren't catching the studios' imagination, but now you've got so many projects on the go that you're presumably extremely overworked.

Apatow: Well, there's a whole crew of people that are really funny and talented that I've been working with since my TV days, and because we have a shorthand in the development process and the shooting process, it's much easier than when you're working with strangers. So much of what goes wrong with movies is people put together who don't know each other well who develop a power struggle. See, if I make a movie and the star slowly realizes that he doesn't like the script or the director, and then he's trying to fix it and then the studio's trying to fix it in a different way, things tend to get difficult. Sometimes it works out, often it doesn't. I have found that it works much better when I really know the people I'm working with, I understand their strengths and weaknesses, and they respect the process. Right now, my friend Nick Stoller, who I wrote Fun with Dick and Jane with, is directing a movie called Forgetting Sarah Marshall which [Apatow regular] Jason Segel wrote and is starring in. I know Nick so well that it's very easy for me to communicate with him about what I think the movie needs, and what I think could be the obstacles in making it work. And then you have a good time!

Filmmaker: It seems like a utopian set-up, as you're basically making movies with your friends.

Apatow: When I was young I would watch Harold Ramis and Bill Murray act together, I always thought it was the greatest thing. You could tell that they were friends, and had their own specific chemistry, so whether it was Stripes or Ghostbusters, it was exciting. And then there were other movies that Ramis wrote, like Caddyshack or Animal House, that you felt like this was a group of people that had been working together for a long time, and it made the work much stronger. I didn't consciously set out to make that how we work; it happened organically. I just realized slowly that the people that do a good job once will tend to do a good job the second time, and why not stick with the people that are adding so much to the process. The guy that plays Doctor Kuni, the nasty gynaecologist at the end of the movie, he was so funny that we put him in the movie we just finished shooting, called Pineapple Express. He plays the head of an Asian drug cartel. [laughs] He was so hilarious that we said, “Let's use Ken Jeong again.” And then the group just gets bigger and bigger.

Filmmaker: I believe Pineapple Express was co-written by Seth, and directed by David Gordon Green. That sounds like a great combination.

Apatow: It's a very strange, demented Abbott and Costello movie, with a lot of action and comedy and violence. [laughs] Something I always dreamt of doing, an action movie where leads are high the entire movie. It always struck me as funny since I saw Brad Pitt in True Romance, when I thought, I wish this movie was about his character! I want to follow him around for a while.

Filmmaker: So there's a Cheech and Chong element to things.

Apatow: It definitely has a Cheech and Chong element. It's Cheech and Chong combined with Bad Boys, in a way. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Your daughters are fantastic in Knocked Up, so are they going to be a part of that ever-growing group of regular collaborators?

Apatow: They're so funny and cute and unfortunately talented. My wife and I are doing everything to discourage them from wanting to do it again, because we would like them to be normal kids, and not realize they are freakishly talented. At last night's dinner, my wife was saying, “We have to not talk about the movie much at the house, or show them all of the reviews which say they are great.” [laughs] So that's our approach: to convince them that they did a bad job!

Filmmaker: You've always written about underdog characters, but is your success going to make it increasingly difficult to get into the mindset of the underdog?

Apatow: I don't know. It's weird that everybody's talking about it so much, because I feel that every comedy is about an underdog. I don't think that there's an exception to the rule – comedy doesn't really work if you have a confident, handsome, muscular person who doesn't have a lot of problems. Comedy is all about overcoming obstacles and the worse the guy, woman and situation the better. So Buster Keaton is an underdog, and the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields and Jerry Lewis and Steve Martin – there's no way around it. I definitely appreciate a certain kind of nerd. I think I tend to have a theme in some of the movies, which is that people should take the time to get to know people better because there's more there than you think. That may be my psyche revealed, and I'll have to think of something else. But that is always an idea that is present, because that is how I feel.

Filmmaker: You wrote a couple of movies in the mid-90s, Heavy Weights and Celtic Pride, which weren't as successful as I guess you would have hoped. How did you respond to that?

Apatow: Heavy Weights was the first movie I wrote. It was a lot of fun to make, and I learned a lot, and there's some great comedy in there and it actually is a little bit of a cult movie with younger people. It's definitely a little bit of a schizophrenic movie because part of it feels like a classic Disney kids movie, and then there's a [laughs] really dark side to it which is driven by Ben Stiller as the evil head of the camp, who is videotaping the kids the whole summer and hoping to sell it as an infomercial, and almost hurting the children! [laughed] Celtic Pride was a different situation: I didn't really have any say in any of the major decisions of the movie, so it was a lesson in finding ways to be in control of these projects. I tried not to put myself in that situation again. I think it's a pleasant movie to watch; if you're home sick, and you have to kill two hours, then I think it's awesome.

Filmmaker: You seem to have a great ability to bounce back. Both Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared were wonderful, but the network still canceled both in their first season. Since then, though, you've gone from strength to strength.

Apatow: I've always tried to learn something. I look at the work as a learning experience, so I never see anything as a waste of time. I can get very emotional about the work, because I really try hard to defend it and get whatever vision everyone has through, but I really enjoy it. Whether things come out well or badly, almost all of it has been a blast to make, and a lot of the things that didn't do well are my favorite projects. So it wasn't hard to bounce back, because I couldn't believe it came out so well! Then I'd think, It's a drag that no one can see it or watch it on TV, but I'm glad it's out there. And I've always known that anything you do is on DVD and television forever, so it's more important to focus on making it great than to worry about it's immediate success.

Filmmaker: What's the smartest decision you ever made?

Apatow: To marry my wife, I think. All good things have resulted from that decision.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Apatow: The first film I remember seeing was called The Phantom Tollbooth, which was half real and half animated. I think it was about a kid in a car who goes through a tollbooth which takes him to a magical world. I recently saw a piece of it, and didn't have the stamina to watch it again. But it had a big impact on me at the time. It was just the first incredibly imaginative thing I had ever witnessed as a little, tiny kid, and I knew there was something amazing about it, the idea of another world being created. I always remember it.

Filmmaker: What's your best piece of advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Apatow: I always tell writers that the most important thing they can do is write. I knew a lot of writers who would write a script and then spend a year trying to make something happen with it – but in that year they wouldn't write something else. I remember years ago when I first met Mike Binder, he was this guy who had six scripts layin' around, and he was writing the seventh one! He would tell me how much he would learn whenever he would write a script, and never stopped writing. I think that's the best thing someone can do, to not get all obsessed about whether people liked your scripts or are willing to make it, but to start the next one and continue to learn about your craft. Good things always happen to the hardest workers.

Filmmaker: Finally, if you could do it all over again, what would you change?

Apatow: It's hard to say, because all those painful lessons led to other good things, so I probably wouldn't change anything. I definitely had some bad moments when I made people feel bad [laughs] because they didn't like some aspect of the work, and I probably could have been more political about how I interacted with people, but I just didn't know any better. I apologise to all of them: anyone I made cry, I'm sorry.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/01/2007 07:39:00 AM Comments (0)