In most people's eyes, David Stenn's first film as a director marks the start of his third career, but to him it's a continuation of what he's been doing all along: storytelling. Chicago native Stenn started writing for Hill Street Blues after graduating from Harvard, then moved on to more TV writing, most notably on teen guilty pleasures 21 Jump Street and Beverly Hills 90210. In 1988, he published an acclaimed biography of 1920s film icon Clara Bow, and followed it in 1993 with an exhaustive tome on the tragically short life of another Hollywood legend, Jean Harlow.

In the process of researching the Harlow book, Stenn came across the story of 17-year-old Patricia Douglas, who in 1937 claimed to have been raped at a stag party held by MGM for its salesmen. Her story was briefly a tabloid sensation, but Douglas was then subjected to a character assassination by MGM, which protected David Ross, the MGM salesman she had accused, by buying off all Douglas' witnesses – even her own mother. Douglas' tale was then buried until Stenn rediscovered it and began tireless research to find out what went on, and ultimately discovered that Douglas was actually still alive. Girl 27 has compelling footage of Douglas recalling her traumatic attack, but the film is also about Stenn's odyssey and the surprising and touching relationship that developed between the Hollywood historian and his subject.

Filmmaker spoke to Stenn about the uncovering of one of Hollywood's greatest scandals, the part Jackie O played in his story, and why he hates it when people discuss 2001.



Filmmaker: How did you first find out about the story of Patricia Douglas?

Stenn: I was on deadline for my Jean Harlow biography, and I was just following the Harlow headlines, when all of a sudden [I came across] another story about this person I've never heard of who's claiming that she was tricked into attending a stag party hosted by MGM, and that she was raped. I was so immersed in MGM at the time because of the machinations of how they handled Jean Harlow's death, so I felt like, “How could I not have come across this anywhere?” So I started researching, looking at all the books again, and her name wasn't mentioned anywhere, even in the books where you thought it would be, like Hollywood Babylon. I didn't understand that, and that intrigued me. I was skeptical because I thought if the story had merit and validity, it would have appeared somewhere, because it was on the record, it was a legal case. What got me interested was that I thought I had heard of every Hollywood scandal, and here's the biggest one of the 30s and I hadn't heard of it, and nobody I talked to had ever heard of it, no research resource I consulted mentioned it.

Filmmaker: You were on deadline for your Jean Harlow book at the time you first came across the Patricia Douglas case, so how quickly were you able to progress with researching the story?

Stenn: That was 1993. These things take a long time, and there are always stories that I'm researching that take years because I'm not a big one for printing anything that says “purportedly” or “allegedly” — I like to have proof. So it takes a long time, and I didn't immerse myself in it right away because I had the deadline. I started looking at the MGM convention, and it just seemed very straightforward to me: the coverage in the trades about it has no mention about Patricia Douglas, even after she went public – not a single mention of the case! It was about five or six years later when I actually found out she was still alive that it became a number one priority.

Filmmaker: You must have assumed that she was dead.

Stenn: Well, making presumptions in this line of work is always bad business but you're right, I kind of just presumed it. If she were alive, you would have heard from her, because someone who was so vocal at the time wouldn't have not been vocal again, or someone else would have found her way before me, or printed the story and said she'd disappeared.

Filmmaker: Tell me about the part that Jackie Onassis played in this.

Stenn: She was the editor of both my books, and after the Jean Harlow book came out we had lunch and she asked me what I wanted to do next. I really didn't know, but I did mention this story. It was more a tentative mention, and having already done two books with her she knew me and my ferocious tenacity about research, so she said, “If anyone can find this story, it's you. Because you won't give up.” Then she passed away shortly afterwards, so it was the greatest vote of confidence you could possibly get, for someone like her to say, “You're the guy to do it.”

Filmmaker: How did you go about finding Patricia? How did you first discover she was still alive?

Stenn: I only found out she was alive when I found out her mother was dead, because she was listed as the survivor on her mother's death record. I was just astounded that she was alive, but then she was listed in the phonebook! I found her and was amazed and astounded and galvanized, because it was like, “My God, this woman is alive and no one has ever talked to her!” And then [when I called her], she hung up on me! I was so close, and yet so far. It got really emotionally difficult because I had this person I thought was a really important figure, and yet she wouldn't tell her story. It's a very strange and complicated dynamic when you call a stranger up and say to them, “I know your deepest, darkest secret, the thing you thought nobody else alive knew.” There's an instant intimacy there, but it's also very threatening to them. The thing about Patricia was that she could relate to me different than anybody else because I knew what happened to her, and yet I cared about her. She had spent almost 70 years thinking that if anyone found out, they wouldn't respect or love her.

Filmmaker: One of the great things about the movie is that it turns into this wonderfully unexpected, unconventional love story between you and Patricia.

Stenn: And it is, to me. It was so unexpected because I never thought Patricia would be alive, and then I met her, and what were the odds that at her age, and after what she'd been through, she would be so lucid and intelligent and funny and dramatic and commanding, and all of those qualities that she has on screen? She's a real personality, like one of the larger-than-life personalities in Grey Gardens. To me, Patricia had a quality to her that was very compelling, and I found myself at a certain point, after many phone calls, becoming so emotionally involved in a way I never had before with a subject, because my subjects prior to this had been deceased. Not only did I become close to her, but I also became zealously committed to finding vindication for her because I felt she deserved it so much, and it broke my heart on a regular basis to hear her talk about herself, and hear that she couldn't understand why she should be proud.

Filmmaker: You said before that you were not certain the story was true when you started researching it?

Stenn: At the beginning you have to remain a healthy skeptic, because you don't necessarily know that it's true. There was a moment I remember vividly where, on my second trip out to see her, I brought about two dozen photographs, all black-and-white headshots, of Eddie Mannix, Louis B. Mayer, some other MGM executives and producers, and David Ross was in there with them. She sat on the couch and had the photographs on her lap and she looked at them and they didn't mean anything to her. Then she got to [the photo of] David Ross and she had a physical reaction. Her whole body started to vibrate, and it was like I didn't exist anymore: she looked down at that face and just cried, “Bastard!” Then I knew, because she hadn't seen that face since 1937, and 63 years later at the second she saw that face, she knew that face. I thought to myself, “This woman is not lying, she is telling the truth. This really happened.”

Filmmaker: At what point did you make the decision to turn this into a film?

Stenn: I don't know. I know when I shot her all I wanted to do was to get her on camera to testify. I thought of Steven Spielberg's Shoah project and the witnesses in Reds, the way Warren Beatty used some of the people who knew John Reed and Louise Bryant, and I thought, “She is the central figure in this story, she is its protagonist. She has never done an interview, and I just need to get her recorded for history's sake.” And then finding the convention footage, those two elements made me think it should be a film. I believe this story happened in other industry locations — I think company towns have these scandals — but in the case of Hollywood, it is so photogenic. I felt that visual aspect lent itself more to a movie than [a book]. I would never have done it when she was alive, but when she passed away I felt like this could be her vindication.

Filmmaker: How much confidence did you have making this as your first film?

Stenn: I did everything wrong! You name it, I did it wrong. I used my own money, which is the first no-no of all time, I did everything myself, like legal clearances, our crew was tiny, and I just didn't really know what I was doing. It was based on complete inexperience. I broke a cardinal rule by using my own money, but that turned out to be very liberating because I had complete control. But also I was blowing my savings and thinking, “Is anyone ever going to see this?” There was all that stuff, waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, sitting in the car, crying, thinking, “There's just too much here, I don't know if we’re going to get it done.” But we did.

Filmmaker: You don't actually have a director's credit on the film, do you?

Stenn: I feel like it's authored rather than directed. It's a storytelling movie and I hope what it accomplishes is to tell a lot of story in a lucid way. There's a lot going on there between the studio politics and the personal issues and then the [story of Patricia's] family.

Filmmaker: What was your Sundance experience like? And what was it like when you were accepted?

Stenn: Overwhelming. It was the first festival I ever attended, and to have a film in competition...I'd say "dream come true" but I never dared to even dream it.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Stenn: The Wizard of Oz. It's still my favorite film of all time. It's consummate perfection on every level: direction, script, cinematography, performance, art direction, special effects...everyone a master at their craft.

Filmmaker: If you could hand out an Oscar to anyone who has never won, who would you give it to?

Stenn: Doris Day. I kind of think the name says it all.

Filmmaker: Which classic film are you ashamed to admit you haven't seen?

Stenn: 2001: A Space Odyssey. It gets referenced constantly, and I'm always clueless.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 7/27/2007 05:20:00 PM Comments (2)

It is something of a tragic irony that after escaping the restrictions of Communist Czechoslovakia in 1968 — where he had made five films in five years — in the subsequent 40 years Milos Forman has worked in America, he has only made a further nine features. Taking Off (1971) was a transition between the looseness of his Czech films, such as the classic Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen's Ball (1967), and the more conventional Hollywood style he would later adopt, and was the first of many films in which he captured the essence of America by taking an outsider's perspective. Forman's greatest successes, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984), both won him Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture, but even the supposedly less successful films he made around the same time — Hair (1979), Ragtime (1981) and Valmont (1989) — are rich, wonderful and often extremely underrated films. In the 1990s, Forman turned his attention to American counterculture figures, producing acclaimed biopics of porn baron Larry Flynt (The People vs. Larry Flynt) and alternative comedian Andy Kaufman (Man on the Moon).

Though since 1971 Forman's films have either been based on previously existing material (novels, a musical, or real-life stories), his new film Goya's Ghosts came from an original idea he had over 50 years ago while at film school: to tell the story of the Spanish Inquisition and the Napoleonic Wars. Forman solidified his ideas for the project while in Madrid for Amadeus, and then developed the script with long-time friend Jean-Claude Carrière, who previously wrote Taking Off and Valmont with him. A compelling historical tale, Goya's Ghosts presents personal drama in the form of the political, religious and romantic dealings between iconic painter Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgård), pretty young merchant's daughter Inés (Natalie Portman) and religious zealot Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem). It also has deep political resonances with the state of the world — and particularly America — today.

Filmmaker spoke to Forman about Goya's Ghosts' epic journey to the screen, history repeating itself, and the time one of his actors nearly burned down one of Europe's most historic buildings.



Filmmaker: From what I've read, you had the idea for this film over 50 years ago.

Forman: Well, not exactly entirely. I got intrigued by these stories in a book which I read as a student in the early 50s in Czechoslovakia, a book about the European Inquisition. There was a chapter on the Spanish Inquisition about these horrors that happened in these dark ages 200 years ago, and suddenly the same things are happening in Czechoslovakia right around me. People are being arrested and nobody knew why, people got accused of crimes they never committed, people were confessing to these crimes which they never committed after being tortured, people were executed. So for a young idealistic guy still at school, it was like, "What's going on in the world? We are learning how history is teaching us lessons after every war but we never learn the lesson, and then it's happening right here, again!"

Filmmaker: How much did the film develop and change in your head over the years?

Forman: Over the years, you don't work on it really. This was something from the back of my head, a subject that I wanted to deal with one day, and it was revived in the 80s. For the first time I went to the Prado Museum in Madrid and saw Goya's paintings. I saw the memories of that book I had read 30 years before being illustrated by this Goya. You see everything there, you see the Inquisition tribunals, the torture chambers, the mental institutions, the dungeons. You see it all depicted by Goya. And so I was suddenly trying to put these two elements together, it seemed to me like an exciting thing to try.

Filmmaker: I believe you always meant for there to be present day political parallels in the film. Originally it was with Communist Eastern Europe, but there seem to be equally pertinent parallels to the US involvement in Iraq today.

Forman: That's the thing which is totally incomprehensible to me is that history repeats itself. But I must tell you one thing: the screenplay of the film was finished months before the events in Iraq. Even the line "You will be welcomed with flowers as liberators" was already in the script because this line was said by Napoleon to his generals before raiding and liberating Spain. I'm not being facetious, he really liberated Spain: he deposed royals, he banished immediately the Inquisition, he freed all the prisoners. He really tried to plant the seeds of democracy in Spanish soil! But he didn't realize one important thing, that if you plant the right seed in the wrong soil, nothing comes of it. So it was not me doing the parallels, it was history.

Filmmaker: All your films since Hair have been period pieces. Why are you so attracted to making them?

Forman: Well, I'll tell you. [There are] several reasons, probably the main is that when I was in Czechoslovakia, all my films were contemporary, because I speak Czech, I read Czech, nobody can fool me, I understand every word in the pub. For me to speak English, it's still work. I don't feel at home, I don't speak with the same ease I breathe. And in that moment, I am sort of feeling shy to tackle very contemporary subjects and for me it's more comfortable to do the subjects which are a little distant in time so that my English can be adequate to what I'm doing.

Filmmaker: You've spent over half your life in America, so do you still see things as an outsider? It's a perspective all your films seem to take to a certain degree.

Forman: I'm not only an outsider here, I'm an outsider everywhere. Even when I was living in Czechoslovakia, I wouldn't be a member of any political party because I want to be as objective as I can. The moment you attach yourself in a political or nationalistic way, you subconsciously are losing objectivity. You are asked for loyalty, and I don't want that. I didn't want that there, and I don't want it here. I want to stay outside and watch what's happening around me, and then get involved in what I do.

Filmmaker: Tell me about your feelings on the importance of location shooting?

Forman: That's very important, because authenticity of everything — of the people, of the architecture, of the nature — it's very important for the credibility of the whole film. It's like if somebody lies to you once, he's always a suspected liar. If you do something fake, then people suspect that everything you do is fake.

Filmmaker: How do you feel about the films you have made? Are the ones that win Oscars your favorites? Do you see them as “better” as a result?

Forman: Well, you know, it's like with children: a child that is injured or hurt somehow, you give him a little more affection.

Filmmaker: Which films do you feel like that about?

Forman: Two films, The Firemen's Ball and The People vs. Larry Flynt. The Firemen's Ball was banned officially forever [in Czechoslovakia], and The People vs. Larry Flynt was ridiculously attacked for glorifying pornography, which is as ridiculous as condemning Romeo and Juliet for glorifying teenage suicide.

Filmmaker: You have only made 9 films in your 40 years in Hollywood. Were there many projects that fell through, or has each one just been a slow process?

Forman: When I was in Czechoslovakia, in one year I made two films! [laughs] But everybody works in a different way, at a different pace. I envy people who while finishing one film can prepare another one. I can't do that. I'm not saying it's better or worse, it's just like that. This last gap, [which is] like seven years between Man on the Moon and Goya's Ghosts, I had three projects which I spent at least a year or a year and a half developing the script, preparing the film — and they collapsed. One collapsed seven days before the shooting was supposed to start, one collapsed four, five weeks before the shooting was supposed to start, and the other collapsed after I started casting.

Filmmaker: How do you feel when films collapse like that?

Forman: On one hand, you are very frustrated; on the other hand, suddenly you are relieved of all these anxieties and tensions which I feel before starting any movie. You start to doubt: is the screenplay really right, is the cast right, did I choose the right locations? That gives you a great anxiety, so at the same time as you are frustrated that the film collapsed, you are relieved of all this tension.

Filmmaker: Do you remember the moment you realized you wanted to make films?

Forman: I developed my passion for film at university, at film school. I wanted originally to enter the drama school and be a stage director. I was not accepted, but thank God I applied for the screenwriting department at film school, and I was accepted. And I tell you, spending four years seeing tons of movies, and having chats every night till five in the morning talking to my fellow students in the pubs, you just develop a passion for movies.

Filmmaker: What's the dream project you've been wanting to make for years, but think is probably impossible?

Forman: I don't have this kind of a dream project — if I had it, I would go like a greyhound after it and make it. No, no, I'm just waiting for the next subject that I will fall in love with.

Filmmaker: What's more important to you: that a film is successful, or that you are happy with the finished product?

Forman: I'll tell you: both. It's more important for me that I know that I did my best and that I didn't compromise anything and the film is the way I want it. But also very important is the success, because that will give you more clout, and more clout will give you more freedom in choosing subjects and dealing with all the bureaucracy of filmmaking.

Filmmaker: Finally, what's the strangest experience you've had as a filmmaker?

Forman: We were shooting Amadeus in one of a couple of the remaining 18th Century theaters in Europe. We had chandeliers and thousands and thousands of candles burning, so we had 30 or 40 firemen all over the stage and in the theater. When you rehearse, you don't light the candles, you don't want to waste them. So we rehearsed everything carefully: we had 600 hundred extras in the audience in period costume, and dancers and singers and an orchestra. Everything was fine, so we light the candles and start the camera, and have the camera rolling. It was a playback on a piece of Don Giovanni from the end of the opera, and the music started and the singer was in the ecstasy of performing – and nobody noticed that he had made a wrong step. He had a hat with huge feathers, and they caught fire. Now everybody — hundreds of people — sees, but he didn't know it because he was in the ecstasy, and it was behind his back. Nobody moves — everybody is watching it! It took a long time — five, six seconds and lasted an eternity — until finally one young fireman stuck his head out of the wings and said, “Mr. Forman, could you please stop the camera? Your actor is on fire.” And that shows you the magic of filmmaking: the camera is rolling, so nobody must disturb that — even if the whole theater burns down! That was really strange, but beautiful in a way.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 7/20/2007 04:34:00 PM Comments (0)

Not many people can genuinely claim that cinema is their savior, but Gerardo Naranjo is probably one of the few. Growing up in the small Mexican town of Salamanca, he frequently got into trouble and was forced to move from school to school as a result of his problems with authority, but managed to escape his difficulties while watching movies. He ended up studying at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, where he founded a cinema club called Zero for Conduct, — named after the Jean Vigo movie, a favorite which appealed to his sense of rebellion — in order to screen classic films he loved. While in Mexico City, he wrote film criticism and directed his first short, Perro Negro (1997), which ultimately led to him taking a Masters in Directing at American Film Institute in L.A. There he became best friends with fellow students Goran Dukic (whose Wristcutters: A Love Story is released next month) and Azazel Jacobs, the son of Ken Jacobs, who shared his anarchic spirit. After another acclaimed short, The Last Attack of the Beast (2002), Naranjo made his feature debut with the Scorsese-esque Malachance (2004) before co-writing and co-starring in Azazel Jacobs' The GoodTimesKid (2005).

Naranjo’s sophomore effort, Drama/Mex, is a triptych following three interweaving stories set in Acapulco: Fernanda (Diana Garcia) discovers that her ex-lover Chano (Emilio Valdés) is back in town, putting her relationship with new boyfriend Gonzalo (Juan Pablo Castañeda) in doubt; aging office clerk Jaime (Fernando Becerril) decides to steal from his boss, quit his job and then kill himself; and teen runaway Tigrillo (Miriana Moro) joins a gang of delinquent girls who prey on tourists. Drama/Mex is stylishly shot, insightfully written and sensitively directed, and Naranjo’s emotionally resonant depiction of characters on the edge is never less than compelling. In the hands of a lesser director, the material would have become bleak and overblown yet Naranjo instils a sense of unshakeable optimism, simultaneously creating one of the most accomplished films of the year.

Filmmaker spoke to Naranjo — in preproduction on his next film, Voy a Explotar (I Am Going to Explode) — about his passion for film, the renaissance in Mexican cinema and why La Jetée makes Werner Herzog miserable.



Filmmaker: Where are you at the moment? What are you doing?

Naranjo: I'm in Mexico and I start shooting the new movie in 15 days. So it's pretty crazy to have those things overlapped.

Filmmaker: What's the new movie about?

Naranjo: The movie is about two kids that fall in love and escape and make a rebellion against the adult world. It's inspired by the movies that show me the dark age of being a teenage guy, like Zero for Conduct, If..., 400 Blows. Movies about kids that don't fit into society.

Filmmaker: You've just mentioned some really wonderful classic movies. You seem to have a very good grasp of cinema history, which is apparent in Drama/Mex.

Naranjo: I hope so. It was an interesting dilemma when we were doing the movie because I knew that in order to pay homage to these guys I admire I have to be modern. For me it was a challenge to free the form.

Filmmaker: At the start of Drama/Mex, there seems to be a sly reference to Jean-Paul Belmondo in Godard's Breathless. I presume this was intentional.

Naranjo: Yeah, it was definitely a reference to it. I didn't want it to be too obvious. We thought about a direct homage to Breathless, but we thought we couldn't put medals on ourselves that weren't ours, you know? I decided to channel the spirit of Belmondo. Breathless is the movie that taught me about freedom and the spirit of anarchy — it means so much to me. The characters I like to portray are a little bit on the outside of society. I like to see them when they choose to get out of their normal surroundings. Like Jaime, the bureaucrat: I am not really interested in him as a mechanism of the system, [but] I am interested when he decides to break out of that relationship.

Filmmaker: Tell me about your inspiration for the film.

Naranjo: I made one previous movie, Malachance, that tried to be an homage to cinema. It was very respectful, it was all static shots — it was Bressonian for me, or pre-Kaurismäki, who I also admire. In Drama/Mex, I felt that I had to free the form and stop making homages and just tell the story more from the core: what it is to break out, what it is to know that you've been wasting your life and wanting to kill yourself, what it is to find out that your girl cheated on you. So I chose to throw [away memories of] every movie I had seen before,I tried to take [them] out of my mind and say, “I'm just going to do justice to the story.” Obviously, I was conscious that Dogma existed before, that cinéma vérité existed before, that there were so many currents that were documentary-like, but even so I really tried to push everybody not to think that we were doing a certain style of visual language, just serve the story. There was a controversy when we were editing that many people were asking to take the out-of-focus shots out of the movie. I really fought for them, because every time I see a Cassavetes movie, or any other movie that keeps out-of-focus shots running, I think it has magic. I feel it's one of my victories, one of the things that I really like from the movie [is] that imperfection, the feeling that there were humans behind this, not a machine.

Filmmaker: I believe you're a Jim Jarmusch fan, so how influenced were you by Mystery Train? Your film has a similar approach of blending and overlapping three narrative strands.

Naranjo: I love that you tell me that because it is precisely what I was [going for]. I love Jarmusch because I feel he is the American representation of Kaurismäki, who I think is one of the best directors around. In Mexico, everybody relates the movie to Babel or to Amores Perros, which I always disagree [with]. Even if I think they are great movies and are incredible, it wasn't my reference to break the time in the structure. I think there are movies that have done it in a much more respectful way. Babel is an incredible movie, but I feel it really moves you in the direction the director wants, not in the direction of the story.

Filmmaker: How much do you feel part of the current renaissance in Mexican cinema, as led by the so-called Three Amigos, Iñárritu, Del Toro and Cuarón?

Naranjo: I think the best thing about this phenomenon is that young people are feeling they are capable of doing movies. When I was starting in Mexico before going to the USA, the general feeling was that it was [run by] the old people, it was such a mafia-controlled system that you couldn't make a movie. We had the concept that young, irresponsible movies wouldn't be classified as movies. The best thing today is that there is this feeling that we can do something. On the other hand, the Three Amigos have been struggling personally and individually for a long time. It's their fight, and I don't think the Mexican industry has anything to do with that. I think it's very talented people who have been pushing and struggling so much for such a long time, and the phenomenon is in [people's] head. I don't think any of the directors that I admire here from Mexico — the Three Amigos, [Carlos] Reygadas, [Amat] Escalante, and [Fernando] Eimbcke, who did Duck Season — share a common aesthetic. I think it's such a diverse style that I don't think we have much in common.

Filmmaker: How important was your move to the U.S. in your progression as a filmmaker?

Naranjo: It was incredible - it was like the sun coming up! When I was in Mexico, I was young and I was very frustrated because I couldn't do movies. And then I got to the US, and I found out that all the lies and all the “theories” they'd been teaching me that movies are done with a lot of drugs and millions of dollars — that wasn't true. I started seeing independent films on the streets of L.A. and I began to see young kids defying the status quo. It gave me so much confidence in trying myself. I saw so many people having the dream and going for it, and that wasn't happening in Mexico at the time. So it changed me radically, and also I got a chance to study film more deeply. I felt the most important times were in the AFI library, in looking at films, in going to the New Beverly and watching movies and seeing that the movies that stand out are personal expressions. If you're gonna do a low-budget movie, the only one that is gonna transcend is one that's personal and you discover a new world. So it also gave me a lot of confidence to say, “OK, I'm not going to do genre films — if I don't do genre, I might have a chance. If I tell my personal story, I may have a chance.” Also being in the shadow of the industry and seeing people who are waiting for their big break, that also changed me a lot, to see how the industry at times can be so dumb and lose so many opportunities.

Filmmaker: Were there any films that you saw early on in L.A. that changed your perception of cinema and the way that one can approach filmmaking?

Naranjo: At the Egyptian [Theater], there was a Scorsese retrospective where I saw all the movies of him, and at the New Beverly I saw Badlands for the first time, and that also changed my life. I'd seen it many times on video, but when I saw it on film it was like a completely new experience. Once, I saw Chinatown, and next to me was Faye Dunaway and she was crying. It was one of the most beautiful things. There are crazy things that you get to see in L.A.: one time at the Egyptian, we were seeing La Jetée, and when we went out there was [Werner] Herzog and he was a miserable person because he would never make a beautiful movie like La Jetée. Just seeing that, this master, this guy who had done beautiful movies paying homage to another great guy — it was so beautiful. I really got inspired by seeing the possibilities of film from breakfast to lunch to dinner, seeing films and talking about movies. It was the best time of my life because everything was possible at that moment and I had my friends [Azazel Jacobs and Goran Dukic] with me and we were dreaming. It's so crazy, because now my friends from that time, the three of us from our [AFI class], are making movies — [but] nobody else has done one. We were the misfits, or the outcasts, so it's very paradoxical. We weren't following the rules of the school that much, and were getting into trouble a lot. The AFI is very industry-oriented, but for us the only way to do it was to make our movies our way.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Naranjo: I saw a lot of movies, but the first movie that I really remember is The Thief of Bagdad. It's the one that I remember seeing as a kid and thinking it was real, that it existed. I remember thinking, “Oh my god, there are monsters!” The real first film that I saw when I was growing up, when I was 13 or 14, was La Dolce Vita. It blew me away — I never thought film could be like that. I was overwhelmed, and from then on I dedicated myself to seeing movies. I wasn't much of a filmmaker, but I joined a cineclub, and they were showing movies and I really tried to know as much as I could. One day, I dropped the cineclub and decided to start making movies.

Filmmaker: Which film do you wish you had directed?

Naranjo: Oh my God, that's crazy... I don't know, it's an interesting question. I would like to have been on the set of any Jean Vigo movie. I had a very problematic childhood, and had a lot of trouble with authority, and the first time I saw Zero for Conduct I thought, “Cinema is a spiritual thing.” I felt that movie was done for me. It spoke to me and said, “You belong to this world. It doesn't matter if you don't get along with anybody or anything, you have the right to be an individual.”

Filmmaker: What advice would you give to young filmmakers?

Naranjo: Oh my God, such hard questions! I guess I'd say that films are not about production or connections or about money, they're more about looking inside. I feel like the only advice that I would give any filmmaker is just to look inside and see what it is that is special about them. If they are going to make a movie, they better choose a subject that they are willing to give five years of their life for. We should stop for a second and reflect on what kind of movies we need. That's the biggest problem: we are worried about making hits or great ideas, but I don't think great movies are made out of great ideas, I think they are the reflection of who we are.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 7/11/2007 10:51:00 PM Comments (0)

Australian director Cherie Nowlan grew up in the small town of Singleton, New South Wales, and segued from a brief career as a journalist to working her way up the ladder in television and film. Her first film, God’s Girls (1991), about the nuns who taught her in high school, won the Best Documentary prize at the Australian Film Institute Awards, and prompted her to go to film school to study screenwriting. After making the short Lucinda 31 (1995), Nowlan directed her first feature, romantic comedy Thank God He Met Lizzie (1997), a film which helped launch the careers of two unknowns, Cate Blanchett and Frances O’Connor. Since then, Nowlan has found considerable success as a director for Australian television, most notably on the cult series, The Secret Life of Us, in addition to award-winning work in commercials.

Nowlan’s second feature, Introducing the Dwights, was written by Keith Thompson as a vehicle for Brenda Blethyn over a decade ago. It stars Blethyn as single mom Jeanie, a wannabe stand-up comedienne on the Australian working men’s club circuit who is trying to keep her two sons - Tim (Khan Chittenden) and Mark (Richard Wilson), who has special needs - well and truly under her thumb. Tim, however, falls for pretty girl-next-door Jill (Emma Booth), and their romance not only undermines Jeanie’s much-needed control, but threatens to create a serious rift in their tight family unit. A bittersweet comedy drama, Introducing the Dwights is an acutely observed portrait of familial tension and features a typically impressive virtuoso performance from Blethyn, as well as very promising turns from its young stars, Chittenden, Booth and the excellent Wilson. It was an audience favorite at Sundance this year, where it was acquired by Warner Independent Pictures.

Filmmaker talked to Nowlan about why Brenda Blethyn is "a freak," not knowing Frances O'Connor from a bar of soap, and filming herself asleep in bed at night.



Filmmaker: Before we started the interview, you were telling me that Brenda Blethyn is “a freak.”

Nowlan: Brenda Blethyn is a freak. Of nature. I just don't think there's anyone quite like her. Quite apart from the fact that this role was written with her in mind, I could not picture anyone else in it. She's so happy to explore the unpalatable truths about life. She's happy to play flaws, and she's not concerned with not being liked - and as a result I think she's enormously likeable on screen. I always say characters don't have to be likeable, actors do. When you look at her body of work on film, there's such a variety of characters and a huge scale, from passive and vulnerable to quite indomitable, and every kind of variation on that theme. When you watch her, you think you're watching Brenda – she's nothing like any of those characters, but she somehow manages to be all these people completely believably. There aren't many actresses who can do that: Meryl Streep can do it, Brenda can do it; of the younger actresses, Cate Blanchett can do it, Kate Winslet.

Filmmaker: What special qualities did Brenda bring to the role?

Nowlan: When you get to work with Brenda, you're working with a woman who's also a fantastic writer. And then you consider Mike Leigh's method, and you think about Secrets and Lies and then Grown-Ups, that every word she uttered she wrote. When she comes to a role, she brings with it that incredible method that she has. On Clubland, she contributed to the script, she wrote most of the stand-up. So with her, you get all these other amazing skills, and for me and particularly the younger cast, to be able to sit back and watch and learn from her was a privilege. I just adore her.

Filmmaker: You just referred to the film as Clubland, although it's getting released over here as Introducing the Dwights. How do you feel about the title change?

Nowlan: Um, I can understand it because they don't have working men's clubs like they do in Australia and England, so I can appreciate they don't want to confuse the audience and have them thinking it's a film about rap music or nightclubs. The film is actually about performing, but it's also about family so... It's a little inconvenient, because sometimes I say Clubland and no one knows what I'm talking about! But it's pretty common, to be honest, to have a name change in different territories.

Filmmaker: For the role of Mark, Tim's brother who was brain damaged at birth, did you ever consider casting an actor with the same condition as the character?

Nowlan: I did, but as it happens with films, I took forever to get it funded, but then when I did get it funded I had very little time to do it. I had to cast and shoot it before Easter, which is a major holiday in Australia, because we couldn't pay them [for that period]. I didn't find [someone to play] Tim until the second last day of casting, and I knew how long I had to shoot the film. In a way, it was a practical decision that I made, and in an ideal world I would have scoured Australia and found the person. But I knew how good Richard Wilson was. You might know him from The Proposition, but most people think he has special needs.

Filmmaker: He is fantastic in the film.

Nowlan: He's just a brilliant, brilliant young actor, and very nearly steals the film, I think. When we went to Sundance, he wasn't with us, and everyone assumed that it was because it was too difficult for him to travel because he had special needs! He was a great playmate for Brenda – they got on like a house in fire. He's very clever, which she appreciates. He spent a week in Disability Services, where we filmed, in character, [because] he didn't want anyone to know that he was pretending to have a disability. He worked on it with therapists to get it all right. We were forever massaging his hands, because it was quite painful to be in that kind of spasm all the time.

Filmmaker: I read that you didn't expect to be accepted at Sundance.

Nowlan: No, I didn't, but I thought that it was the one festival that we were ideally suited to. Geoff Gilmore, the director of the festival, saw the film and he didn't know what country it was from, so that was a good sign. I said, “OK, maybe it does have a universality.” The fact that it happened so quickly - we were literally trying to finish the film to make [the festival] - was a good thing [because] I didn't have any time to think about it. When we turned up for that first screening, there were 1200 people there – I honestly thought they were at the wrong movie! There's nothing better than a surprise; if you kinda don't expect anything, sometimes you're rewarded. It's been wonderful.

Filmmaker: This is only your second feature, but on your first film, Thank God He Met Lizzie, you also worked with some wonderful actresses, Cate Blanchett and Frances O'Connor, both just as they were about to become famous.

Nowlan: Yeah, yeah. How lucky was that? What a gift! Frances I didn't know from a bar of soap, so that was really a discovery, and Emma Booth is my Frances in Clubland. It was the same thing - walked in, knocked me out. I was like, “Holy mackerel, this girl's going to be a rocket!” I was convinced somebody in Hollywood was going to discover her before I would get to make this film, and indeed she hasn't stopped since Clubland. Fran was a wonderful actress, and I had the benefit of knowing all of Cate's theater work, but she had never made a film. She'd made one 50-minute short when she auditioned for me, and she'd just been cast in Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road. Two days after she saw me, and she was coming back to audition for Frances' role, she got Oscar and Lucinda. And then we went on a bit of a holiday, and then Shekhar Kapur chased Cate around the world to get her to audition for Elizabeth. It was a great privilege to see the beginning of her international career, but I knew how good she was. When she walked in to audition for that role, I just said, “Jesus, this girl's amazing!” She didn't need to read the scene. It's a cliché, but with casting you know instantly if the actor is going to work. It's just chemistry.

Filmmaker: In between doing Thank God He Met Lizzie and this film, you did a lot of TV. Does the success so far of this film mean that you'll now remain a feature director?

Nowlan: I love television, and I'm up for all of it, to be honest. They all have very different challenges and different effects. I like the quick turnaround in television; film's a very long process. I love directing commercials. It's all directing, it's all time on your feet as a director, so it all contributes. I'd love to direct theater – I dunno if anyone would ever let me! That's the only unknown terrain for me. I'd love the opportunity to refine a performance over the period of four weeks. It would just be really exciting, the fact that it's a living performance every day. Brenda has said to me you can do a play, say it's a comedy, and do one performance where you don't get a single laugh and you can hear a pin drop, and then at the end you get a standing ovation. At other times, they'll laugh like drains the whole way through. You never know what's going on in an audience's mind.

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

Nowlan: Oh my God, that would be any time with Brenda Blethyn. All the time. Whenever we were doing improv with her, for example all the video stuff, that was riotously funny, and I ruined several takes because I could be heard laughing. And in fact, the cinematographer could also be heard laughing. Any given day with Blethyn, you'll corpse. I'm a terrible giggler. I have to be out of eyeshot too – I sit at the monitor because I do laugh too much. The further I am away from the actors, the better it is for them.

Filmmaker: What's the biggest compliment you've ever received?

Nowlan: I don't hear them, I really don't. I've been told so many wonderful things, and I block them out because I think, “If I believe that, I'll have to hear all the stuff I'm not so pleased to hear.” I've talked to Brenda about it, and I said, “I really squirm when people praise me, it's kind of irritating to me. Do you feel the same?” She said, “Yes, but I don't mind overhearing it!” [laughs]

Filmmaker: Finally, what keeps you awake at night?

Nowlan: Everything! [laughs] God, what an appropriate question! When I'm making a film, I direct myself in my sleep – it's infuriating. I think, “You don't have to direct this scene, you're just sleeping,” and there's literally a camera at the end of my bed. It is really annoying when I film myself in my sleep – it's like, “Get the crew out of my bedroom!” They're really long days, and it's very difficult to switch off. As I get older, it actually gets worse, so I'm going to have to go back to meditation, I think, just to snap out of it and leave the work at work.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 7/04/2007 11:24:00 PM Comments (0)