John August holds a unique position as not only one of Hollywood's most sought-after screenwriters, but also one of the filmmaking community's most active and helpful members. August's first produced script was Go (1999), directed by Doug Liman, a triptych of interweaving stories which played out like a junior version of Pulp Fiction. He has since written the animated Titan A.E. (2000) and both Charlie's Angels movies, and collaborated with Tim Burton on Big Fish (2003), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Corpse Bride (both 2005). All the while, he has also been passing on his professional expertise to others by answering online readers' questions, maintaining a blog (at www.johnaugust.com) and participating in Sundance labs.

It is a sign of August's ambition that the script he chose as his first directorial project, The Nines, is his most complex and challenging by far. The film is a psychoreligious existential conundrum told across three consecutive stories, in which leads Ryan Reynolds, Hope Davis and Melissa McCarthy all play multiple roles: Gary, Margaret and Sarah in the first, Gavin, Melissa and Susan in the second, and Gabriel, Mary and Sierra in the final part. The segments are all shot in differing styles and begin to overlap somewhat in their stories of an out-of-control actor, a TV writer, and a computer game inventor (all played by Reynolds). However August's film refuses to make things too neat or give easy answers to the questions he poses about creative responsibility, the nature of existence and, yes, storytelling itself. The Nines may not please audiences seeking superficial pleasures, but it delivers a cinematic experience which is smart, thought-provoking and deeply memorable.

Filmmaker spoke to August about the world of The Nines, drawing on his own experiences for inspiration, and his continuing love of The Muppet Movie.



Filmmaker: I believe the inspiration for the film stemmed from an incident in your own life when you were working on the TV show D.C.

August: I created a show called D.C. for the WB Network, which was my first time running a show. It's an overwhelming job. The minute you finish writing a script, you're already behind on the next one, and keeping all the plates spinning takes 47 hours a day. The way people have "walking pneumonia," I sort of had a walking nervous breakdown, and started to have a very hard time distinguishing what was happening inside the show from what was happening outside the show. I felt a tremendous responsibility to the characters I'd created, and to the actors playing those roles, but I couldn't keep the show -- or myself -- afloat. As I recovered from the experience, I started thinking about what it meant to be a creator in general, and the inherent problems and paradoxes.

Filmmaker: How integral was your friend Melissa McCarthy to the conception of the film?

August: I sat down with her before I ever put pen to paper. I knew that if she didn’t want to do it, I didn’t want to do it. Not only does she play herself in the movie, which is always a bit uncomfortable, but she revisits a character we’d created when we were both starting out. I knew we’d have to shoot during her summer hiatus from Gilmore Girls, so that was a driving force behind the schedule.

Filmmaker: When did you make the decision to direct the film?

August: I wrote it knowing I was going to direct it. Part Two is both highly autobiographical and largely unscripted, so it relied on my being both writer and director.

Filmmaker: This seems a lot more arty and abstract than your previous studio work. Is this your preferred style or true authorial voice?

August: I don’t know that a writer has to have a single style or voice, but it’s certainly the most “me” I’ve ever had in a movie. For Big Fish, there was a lot of autobiographical material, but I could hide behind the fact it was an adaptation.

Filmmaker: Was this a hard movie to finance?

August: Not really. We knew how much money we could pull in from various sources, and constructed the movie based on those numbers. We didn’t cheap out on anything for budget, but we were smart and frugal about our choices.

Filmmaker: Was Ryan Reynolds your first choice for the G’s? It seems an unusual but inspired career choice for him.

August: We discussed other actors, but I knew Ryan was the guy from the moment I met him. Everyone who’s worked with him raves about him, and with good reason. He’s a great guy in addition to being a great actor. On the 13th hour of shooting, he’s still giving you his best.

Filmmaker: How did the actors, and particularly Ryan, handle three such differing roles? Did he base his performance as the writer, Gavin, heavily on you?

August: When Ryan and I were discussing the roles, we were careful not to focus on the differences between the three characters, but rather on who each guy is individually. I think that helped keep it from feeling like an Acting Showcase. Part Two’s Gavin is based on me, and I gave Ryan permission to use anything he wanted of mine, good or bad. It’s not an impersonation by any stretch, but he did capture a fair amount of my personality.

Filmmaker: What was it like shooting in three different sections in three different styles? Was this problematic for the actors’ schedules? Did you shoot each sequence separately?

August: Each section was shot separately -- it was like shooting three short films, back to back. That was a big help for the actors, because they never had to switch gears in the middle of a day’s shooting. It made it harder to handle some scheduling issues, though. Hope Davis lives in New York, and it wasn’t possible to keep all of her scenes together in one block, as you’d normally do.

Filmmaker: Has your experience of directing, and seeing scripts from a different perspective, changed the way you will write now?

August: No. I’ve always written scripts that are meant to be read and filmed, and The Nines is no different. For a writer, I’ve been unusually involved in the editing of a lot of my movies, so the changes that come in that phase were no surprise.

Filmmaker: There seems to be a lot of yourself in the film’s characters and incidents. Was it easy putting your own life on film?

August: I’m a fairly private person by nature, but I’m happy to exploit dramatic incidents from my life if they help tell a story. Most fiction is truth with the names changed, anyways.

Filmmaker: Can you explain exactly what a Nine is?

August: A Nine is almost a Ten. Working backwards, let’s say a Ten is a theoretical ultimate. In terms of beings, a monotheistic God would be a Ten. He can do anything, and there’s no one else as powerful, or more powerful, than he is. If you were a character in a book, or a movie, the writer would at first glance seem like a Ten. After all, he could kill you at any moment, or change any part of your world at a whim. But of course, something could have created the writer. He’s not a theoretical ultimate. So it would be safer to label him a Nine. For a character in a work of fiction, the writer is a Nine. Same holds true for a character in a videogame. The creator is a Nine. The world of the movie was created by a Nine, who stuck around entirely too long fiddling and tweaking. Eventually, his peers (other Nines) came to convince him to come back home.

Filmmaker: The film is very dense and complex, and you’ve described it as a question rather than an answer. What exactly do you mean by that?

August: To the degree there’s a secret in the movie, it’s answered. And as the author, I can answer any question about “what this meant” or “why she said that.” But the movie ultimately posits pretty big questions about the nature of reality, which no movie could ever answer. It sort of bleeds past the edges of the story.

Filmmaker: How much has your screenwriting blog altered the way you think about your work? Did your thoughts about the process of writing inform the ideas in The Nines?

August: More than the blog, the desire to tackle some of these ideas came up after working for years as an advisor to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. The movies that go through that process are invariably and unapologetically challenging. They don’t put on false grins, hoping that you’ll like them.

Filmmaker: Are there more of your characters, like the ones in D.C., that are still stranded in limbo that you need to revisit?

August: Unfortunately, a lot of them are stuck in legal purgatory. My Tarzan screenplay is probably the best writing I’ve ever done, and it’s apparently never getting made. I have a huge fondness for the Barbarella I wrote for Drew Barrymore, which has likewise been shelved. That’s part of the reason I’m gunshy about committing to movies that I’m not certain will get made.

Filmmaker: Which film do you wish you had directed?

August: Of any film, ever? Aliens. But then I’d probably change careers, because I would never top it. Of the movies I’ve written, I’m closest to Go, but I wasn’t ready to direct it myself at the time. Same for Big Fish, which was simply too big for me to handle logistically. But I could have done Barbarella. I still would, if it ever came back around.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

August: The Muppet Movie. Still in my Top 10.

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

August: Seek challenge, not validation.

Filmmaker: What's the strangest thing you've seen, or had to do yourself, during your time in the film industry?

August: A certain film executive once wiped her glasses on my shirt, without acknowledging that I was wearing it. Or existed.

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

August: Not mentioning her name.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 8/31/2007 03:48:00 PM Comments (0)

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the "mumblecore" tag, one positive thing it has certainly done is help bring deserved attention to filmmakers like Joe Swanberg. The precocious 25-year-old was born in Detroit, but moved around as a kid before attending Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he studied film. After graduation, he used money he had made from web design work to fund his first feature, Kissing on the Mouth (2005), which played at the SXSW Film Festival at the time the concept of "mumblecore" was born. His sophomore effort, LOL — which features "noisehead" contributions from many fellow mumblecorers — followed the year after, and premieres on DVD August 28 through Benten Films.

Swanberg's third feature, Hannah Takes the Stairs, is arguably the director's breakthrough film. Hannah (Greta Gerwig) is a recent college grad working at a production company with two writers, Matt (Kent Osborne) and Paul (Andrew Bujalski), who both take an interest in her, despite the fact that she already has a boyfriend, Mike (Mark Duplass). A fascinating portrait of Gerwig's chronically unhappy romantic, Hannah Takes the Stairs is a lot more linear and conventional than Swanberg's previous work, despite the fact that it was almost entirely improvised. Gerwig gives a phenomenal, career-launching performance as Hannah, while the film itself reveals a new focus and maturity in Swanberg that promises much for the future.

Filmmaker spoke to Swanberg about directing directors, his continuing quest to make "the one," and his desire to make a PG-13 romantic comedy.



Filmmaker: You were only 22 when you made Kissing on the Mouth. How did you go about making your first feature at such a young age?

Swanberg: I'd gotten out of film school and made some shorts, and I was like, “God, I'm 22 and I haven't made a feature!” I graduated in March, and by December I was really adamant that I was going to start shooting something. I was talking with Kris [Williams], who's my wife now but was my girlfriend at the time, about all these crazy, experimental ideas: I wanted to make a movie with no characters that were there the whole time, and I didn't want to give anybody names. I wanted to try a million different things. It got more and more conventional as we went, and what started as these really weird notions got honed down into a pretty recognizable feature. But I didn't set out knowing it was going to be a feature, or knowing what length it would be, or what it would be like — we just kind of started shooting.

Filmmaker: LOL is also very unconventional, so did you use the same process on that film?

Swanberg: Since Kissing on the Mouth had already played some festivals, I was more aware that it would be a good idea to make LOL feature length. But the shooting process was definitely really similar, where I was just shooting scenes, not really knowing where they would go. At the time, we were even kicking around the idea that we wouldn't ever have a definitive cut of the movie, and it would something we would put out on DVD where you could choose to randomise the chapters and just watch it in shuffle mode. We thought there would never be an actual narrative to the movie, or that the audience would have to piece it together after the fact.

Filmmaker: The people in your films are slackers, and yet you are 25 and have already made three features. There's a great moment in LOL where your character is caught working on his laptop late at night, but do you have a similarly compulsive approach to work?

Swanberg: That moment is totally, sadly accurate! I keep really unhealthy hours. There have been times in my life when I don't want to go to sleep because there's so much to be done, and it's just easier to stay up and try and work through it. In general, I have this weird relationship with sleep because I always feel like I'm missing something, like “If I go to sleep, something great's going to happen, and I won't be there to witness it.” I think that's true of a lot of the people I work with. It's this weird thing of workaholic overachievers depicting slacker underachievers, [laughs] but I think it's something about exposing your worst tendencies. I always get a kick out of taking the things in my own personality that I think are really annoying and then making those be the focal point.

Filmmaker: Hannah Takes the Stairs is the first of your films that you haven't also acted in, so did you feel as emotionally involved in it?

Swanberg: It's funny, because I asked myself that same question somewhere in the middle of making it: “Is this still personal? Am I here in the making of this, or am I just outside of it observing people?” I realized that I'm Hannah, and I'm feeling that constant disappointment and perpetual dissatisfaction [she feels], only it's in my film work, not with boys or relationships. It really became clear to me that the relationships she's going through are very similar to the way that I'm making these films. I got really excited about them, and get way, heavily into them for a while, and then my attention shifts to the next project, and I move around looking for satisfaction, but ultimately not finding it.

Filmmaker: So does this mean you look upon your previous films as failures?

Swanberg: I'm really proud of those movies, but they're not “the one.” None of them are ever going to be “the one,” but each time around somewhere midway through, I'm always like, “OK, this is the one. It feels really good, and I'm going to get it right this time.” Then I finish it, and it feels OK, but it's ultimately not “the one” — and that's what makes me go searching for the next one. But it's exciting for me, not depressing. The thing that makes me sad is knowing how much each of these projects meant to me at one point, and looking back on them as just films that I made. You know, they obsess your life and take up all your time for eight months, they're all you think about and you invest everything in them — and then two years later, it's just a DVD package that's sitting on your shelf that you occasionally show to friends. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Was it daunting on Hannah when so many of your actors were also directors? Were they constantly offering advice?

Swanberg: No, they were really good, but I think it was because they were hyper-conscious about not being like that! [laughs] None of them wanted to be the one that accidentally started directing. I wouldn't have felt weird about it at all, and they're input was definitely welcome, but I know there were multiple moments through the shoot when they would have to check themselves and keep from their first instinct, which would have been to take over a little bit and start directing the scene.

Filmmaker: Greta Gerwig is integral to this film, and somebody even described her to me as your muse.

Swanberg: I think she's incredible, and the process of making this movie was just sort of falling in love with her, and realizing all the things that she could do. She'd gotten out of school, and her first job out of college was coming and being in this movie. I think she gives a really amazing performance — it feels committed to what's going on. We had a lot of long talks, and she really legitimately cared for this character, wanted to make sure that the movie accurately represented her, and had a lot of great ideas. There were a lot of times where she would come up and tell me what she was going to do, when she wouldn't tell the actors in the scene, so I would know what to look out for. Midway through the shoot, she and I looked at the scenes that we had shot so far and sort of pieced together the rest of the movie, and what was going to happen. She really deserves a lot of credit for this film.

Filmmaker: The role demands more of her than most actresses are willing to give, both physically and emotionally.

Swanberg: I felt like I had her trust, which is a really great way to work. It never felt like a process where I was trying to talk her into things. She's really comfortable with herself, which is so important for a role like this. Greta is self-confident and smart and has a really good sense of what works,. Her sensibilities were on target, so she would know if something was going to work or if it was a good idea. There were no discussions about whether things were outside of her comfort zone or not, it was more like, “We're making a film and it's going to work, so I'm going to do it.” Everybody was like that. Mark Duplass showed up, and within a few hours he was [being filmed] naked in the shower with her!

Filmmaker: I believe the film was basically improvised.

Swanberg: It was a movie that was put together by the people in it. I didn't tell a single one of them to say anything. Everything that came out of their mouth was stuff that they were creating, and the shape that the movie took was because of that. If there weren't the need to have traditional credits like “writer” and “director,” I would really just leave it as a film by all of us, and have that be the final word on it.

Filmmaker: So how did the script evolve over the course of shooting?

Swanberg: We had the concept of the three guys [Hannah has relationships with] from the very beginning, and the general flow of the movie, so that structure helped. One of the other things that helped us was we started thinking of the movie in a kind of palindrome structure: the beginning and the end would mirror each other, and we'd work inward from that. Those were formal devices that we used, but then all the dialogue was improvised so things that came up naturally just had to be worked in.

Filmmaker: As this is a more conventional movie, do you think it will take you down a more mainstream path?

Swanberg: I'm really naive about all that stuff and I don't have any expectations about what'll happen. I'm not really interested in a lot of the conventional next steps, like getting an agent or writing a script or trying to do a bigger movie. I already made a really small movie since Hannah Takes the Stairs that I did with Greta that we shot last December, and the ideas I have now for future projects are all still pretty small. So it's not a calling card or an attempt to get attention from the mainstream. But hopefully it will be successful and allow me to make small movies that will be seen by bigger audiences.

Filmmaker: Which movies are your guilty pleasures?

Swanberg: I really do have a pretty mainstream sensibility. I really love the movie That Thing You Do! that Tom Hanks made, and there's a lot of stuff like that that's really pretty conventional and cutesy. My guilty pleasure is probably a really good PG-13 romantic comedy – I love them! You know, a movie like Fever Pitch with Jimmy Fallon, those kind of Drew Barrymore, Adam Sandler cutesy movies. I really like those.

Filmmaker: Is this a potential new direction for you then?

Swanberg: Totally, I would do it in a second! I'd love to make a movie with Adam Sandler and Samantha Morton that's a PG-13 romantic comedy. That would be great. I love her, I love her — I'm obsessed with Samantha Morton!

Filmmaker: In a way that your wife understands?

Swanberg: Yeah, totally. I think Kris would freely let me off the hook to go and explore my Samantha Morton love! [laughs]

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

Swanberg: Danny Huston is so fucking awesome in Ivansxtc. It blew my mind [so much] I actually went back and saw it the next day. I went home and said, “Did I really just see that? There's no way somebody's that good!” Then I watched it again, just because I couldn't believe it. When I was in film school, I worked at this small film festival at school and showed it there, but it just didn't get a response. I was like, “Are you people watching the same thing I'm watching? This is amazing stuff!” So I would give Danny Huston an Oscar — and also everybody involved with Jackass: The Movie!

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

Swanberg: Is it really obnoxious to say that I feel content right now? I feel great — what on earth would I have to complain about?! Moviewise things are really good, I've been very fortunate, Hannah's about to come out, I'm working on another cool project, I'm married and I had a great honeymoon... I dunno, I'm feeling pretty content right now! [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 8/22/2007 05:21:00 PM Comments (0)

It's a sign of Hollywood's wrongheadedness that it's been a decade since Greg Mottola last made a movie. In 1996, Mottola arrived on the scene with his debut, The Daytrippers, a funny and poignant indie that recalled the classy Hollywood comedies of the '60s and '70s. Though the film led to Mottola becoming friends with Woody Allen — unquestionably an influence on Daytrippers — his next two projects failed to come to fruition, so he turned his focus to television. Mottola's work in TV has been exemplary: he has directed Arrested Development, The Comeback, Mike White's Cracking Up, and no less than six episodes of Judd Apatow's criminally underrated follow-up to Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared. And it was Mottola's connection with Apatow and his protégé Seth Rogen that lead to the director's return to moviemaking.

For years, Apatow had been trying to get funding to make Superbad, a script Rogen had written with writing partner Evan Goldberg while both were still in their teens, but it only got greenlit after the success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Though Mottola is a surprising choice to direct a high school comedy, he does a brilliant job with the material. Not only is the film hilariously and unrelentingly funny, but the central relationships — between Seth (Jonah Hill) and his best friend Evan (Michael Cera), and geeky tagalong Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) and the cops (Seth Rogen and Bill Hader) who take him under their wing — are sensitively and realistically drawn, something totally alien to the genre. Indeed the film is such a crowd-pleaser that it not only consolidates Rogen and Apatow's places at the top of Hollywood's hot list, but makes a strong case for Mottola joining them there.

Filmmaker spoke to Mottola about his sabbatical from film, why he's the natural replacement for Sidney Lumet, and making zombie vomit for George A. Romero.



Filmmaker: You've basically been away from films for 10 years.

Mottola: Yep. There's been a couple of near-films in between. The most heartbreaking one was a movie I wrote right after Daytrippers that was ironically set up at Columbia Pictures, the same place Superbad was made. We actually got as far as casting and preproduction on it, but then there was a similar-themed movie that they were also developing simultaneously that they decided was a better commercial bet, and they killed mine. It kept almost coming back to life and may yet still be made. It was a dark comedy about an intervention.

Filmmaker: Which film did it get shelved because of?

Mottola: 28 Days was the movie that got made in lieu of it. It was about rehab and mine was about an intervention, so they're both alcoholic movies. I think we were just trumped because she [Sandra Bullock] was an especially big star at that moment.

Filmmaker: During the period your film projects were faltering, you worked as a TV director on some really great shows.

Mottola: I probably spent too much time trying to revive that project, and then when I realized I just needed to be working it was hard to feel like I hadn't blown my little window after Daytrippers. I had talked to Judd Apatow about doing Freaks and Geeks at the time that I thought my movie was happening, and then [later] I heard Judd was doing another show. Right around that time, he contacted me and before he could finish asking me if I would do it, I was on an airplane. I was lucky in that I got to work on shows that don't suck.

Filmmaker: Undeclared, Arrested Development and Mike White's Cracking Up, three great shows you worked on, all got canceled frustratingly early by their networks.

Mottola: Yeah, it was kind of heartbreaking. It's just really hard to keep shows going, and once the ratings start to slip people lose their fight anyway, because it's just so hard. I distinctly remember Mike White being in a completely schizophrenic place of fighting for his life to keep the show alive, and praying for it to end. It's tough, and it did suck because those were really fun jobs. I would almost start to feel guilty that I was not challenging myself enough because it was so enjoyable to do.

Filmmaker: You worked closely with Judd on Undeclared, but at what stage did he first talk to you about Superbad?

Mottola: We did a table read of a version of the script in 2001 or 2002 with all the people from Undeclared. Seth Rogen was reading the lead, and Jason Segel the other lead. I've always had a hard time wanting to direct other people's writing, but this was one of the scripts that I immediately heard and said, “If you guys get this going, think of me as the director.” So I stayed in touch with Judd and we talked about the project over the years. Then one day last spring, Judd called me here in New York and said, “Do you remember Superbad? I think Sony is interested in making it. Would you still want to do it?” I started to launch into a kind of pretentious explanation as to why I thought I was the perfect director for it, and why it really suited me, and Judd was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, OK, we're going to fly you to L.A. next week.” We went through some rewriting hoops to make the studio happy, and then we were going, and by and large left alone by them. Well, supported but not really hassled.

Filmmaker: Was it your decision to bring Michael Cera from Arrested Development on board as one of the leads?

Mottola: Yeah, he was the first person I thought of. I worked on Arrested Development at the very beginning, so I met Michael when he was 15. I was already a huge fan of Jeffrey Tambor, David Cross, Jason Bateman, and I was like, “Who's this kid who's not only keeping up with them but sometimes is the funniest person in the room, and has the best improvs here?” I was just really amazed by his strange Bob-Newhart-trapped-in-a-15-year-old's-body vibe, which was so incredibly dry. He just had his own thing.

Filmmaker: Was the chemistry in the Michael Cera-Jonah Hill double act instantly there, or did you have to work to create it?

Mottola: I wouldn't read Jonah right away because I was being a real stickler about casting actors who were under 21 — and Jonah was all of 22. I resisted him only because of that reason. He did one of our early readings doing a number of other parts and was just amazing, and I knew I wanted him in the movie somewhere. So we cast Michael and had him read with a lot of people, and there was the unfortunate effect that the supposed straight man in the scene was much funnier than the supposed funny guy. So we were getting depressed, we couldn't find anyone who could match him or keep up with him. Judd was shooting Knocked Up, and one day we asked Jonah to read for us, and it was clear that he was incredible. We basically cast him without ever reading the two of them together, we just felt, “They're both so good, it's got to work.” Then we immediately had them read together with potential other guys for the third friend, the McLuvin character, and luckily the chemistry was immediately there. We made them hang out a lot so there would be a shorthand with each other, and that clicked really quickly.

Filmmaker: Presumably when you did the table read in 2001, Seth Rogen was going to play the Seth character rather.

Mottola: Yeah, when I was desperate I was even thinking, “Is there any way we can make Seth look young enough?” — but Seth already looks like a 40-year-old man at the age of 24, so it's hard.

Filmmaker: I think it's really heartening that Seth Rogen has become a huge star.

Mottola: When I first talked to Judd about doing Freaks and Geeks, the person I most liked on that show was Seth. There's something going on with him as an actor, this combination of sweetness and gruffness, anger and vulnerability, and he's a person I really enjoy watching. His humor comes from behavior, and he has a really uncanny sense [of people] and is very observant. Even if he's just acting in something, he's always writing and rewriting his lines. He crafts lines in his scripts very intuitively, and he notices specifically how people reveal themselves by the way they talk. So he's insanely smart.

Filmmaker: I believe he and Evan Goldberg were incredibly young when they wrote the first draft of Superbad.

Mottola: The two of them are disgusting because the writing comes easy to them and they started really young. They were literally 13 or 14 when they did the first draft. I think very little survived that first version, but I do know one of the first things they wrote was the name McLuvin. It's perfect that that joke was written by a 13- or 14-year-old. People are already probably sick of McLuvin references; it's already become like “Vote for Pedro” [from Napoleon Dynamite].

Filmmaker: I recently saw a “Fuck Pedro” t-shirt.

Mottola: I'm gonna go make some “Fuck McLuvin” shirts!

Filmmaker: Did you ever consider changing the title from Superbad, as it makes it an easy target for reviewers?

Mottola: Definitely a few times we looked at each other and said, “Do we really think this is a good idea?” There was one day I was driving with the crew going to the location and the teamster driver who was taking us was on the phone with a friend, and I overheard him saying, “I'm working on this movie. It's called Superbad, and it is.” I thought, “This could have been a big mistake...”

Filmmaker: Are you a fan of high school and college movies, like Animal House or Porky's?

Mottola: Well, certainly things like Animal House and Meatballs or any kind of Harold Ramis or even John Hughes movies. They all hold a special place in my youth. I don't think I loved Porky's that much, even though I probably saw it a couple of times. Even as a kid, I think I thought it was cheap. But I certainly had a lot of affection for the ones which had really funny comics in them, and the ones that have great acting in them, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It's a more serious movie than Superbad, but we aspired to some of its sense of authenticity. I can't really remember what happens in Porky's, but I assume that there were scenes of topless girls in the shower, and I think quite frankly the studio would have been happy if we had more of that, instead of endless representations of human male sex organs. But that was intentional, we didn't want to do the suddenly-her-top-flies-off stuff. We'd seen a lot of that over the years, and somehow it seemed funnier to just show a lot of dicks. Some kids will be like, “Why is there no female nudity in this?!”

Filmmaker: I believe you're friends with Woody Allen. You've also had the honor of playing a director for him in Celebrity, and then an assistant director in Hollywood Ending.

Mottola: If he ever casts me again, I'll be a P.A. — I'm slowly being demoted. Woody has been very kind to me and it came about because a mutual friend of ours — Doug McGrath, who co-wrote Bullets Over Broadway — showed Woody Daytrippers, and he really liked it. He was looking to cast a director in Celebrity, and originally it was going to be Sidney Lumet, but he had to leave to do a movie. So the natural next choice if you can't get Sidney Lumet is to get me, because I also directed 12 classics during the '70s... I came in and read for Woody, and since then have had the great pleasure of socializing with him on occasion. We've had dinner a few times, and he's been very kind to me. In fact, I met my wife on the set of Hollywood Ending, because she was Woody's assistant. To me, it's amazing to hang out with Woody because he's very open about answering any question about his movies, or any movie he's ever loved or, apropos of this week, meeting Ingmar Bergman and Antonioni.

Filmmaker: Has he seen Superbad yet?

Mottola: He hasn't. I'm not sure if it's going to be his cup of tea, but I'll try and describe it to him and give him the option whether he wants to watch it.

Filmmaker: And what about the future for you?

Mottola: I've been quietly writing scripts and have a few lined up that I want to make. Now that I have a kid, I hope to continue to make studio films but to checkerboard them with my stuff. I've written a film that Ted Hope is producing, and we hope to be shooting at the end of September. It's a smaller, personal comedy drama, more like Daytrippers.

Filmmaker: What was the first film that made you interested in cinema?

Mottola: My parents took me to see 2001 when I was only seven years old, and I became obsessed with movies from there on in. I think my parents became bored silly, but I couldn't stop talking about it, thinking about it. I'm going to try and arrange a screening for my son when he's seven. We'll see if he falls asleep.

Filmmaker: What's the worst film you've seen the whole of on a plane?

Mottola: Let me think of one that made me cry that I didn't want anyone to even know I saw... Probably that cheerleader one, Bring It On. That is pretty pitiful. It's actually a very well-made film, but I'm still not supposed to cry at a cheerleader movie.

Filmmaker: Finally, what's the strangest thing you've seen, or had to do yourself, during your time in the film industry?

Mottola: I'd say it was my first job. I was in college at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and my first ever gig was spending an entire day making zombie vomit for George Romero on Day of the Dead. It was an awesome intro to the film industry.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 8/17/2007 01:32:00 PM Comments (0)

It is difficult to write about Julie Delpy's career without rhapsodizing about the multi-talented Frenchwoman. At just 14, she got her breakthrough in Jean-Luc Godard's Detective, and while still in her teens she worked with such celebrated European auteurs as Leos Carax, Bertrand Tavernier, Carlos Saura, Agnieszka Holland and Volker Schlöndorff. In the early 1990s, Delpy established herself as one of the most promising actresses around with her work in both arthouse successes (Krysztof Kieślowski's White and Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise) and more commercial fare like Killing Zoe and The Three Musketeers. But rather than trying to establish herself as a Hollywood A-lister, Delpy went to film school at NYU and studied directing. Since graduating, Delpy has written and directed three short films, earned an Academy Award nomination for her contribution to the Before Sunset screenplay and released an album of her own songs, all the while acting in at least one or two films per year.

People who just identify Delpy as a strikingly beautiful actress will be surprised by 2 Days in Paris, her debut feature as writer-director. (Delpy also edited, produced and wrote the music for the film.) Though on the surface it would appear to bear a significant resemblance to Before Sunset— it is about a French woman (Delpy) and an American man (Adam Goldberg) in Paris — 2 Days in Paris is a very different film. Showcasing Delpy’s assured direction and charmingly earthy sense of humor, it is a smart relationship comedy which recalls Woody Allen at his playful, beguiling best. By turns bawdy, thoughtful, farcical, political and romantic, 2 Days in Paris is a completely winning comic treat which suggests Delpy can excel at anything she is passionate enough to pursue.

Filmmaker spoke to Delpy about her transition to low-budget filmmaking, working with Kieślowski, and her father's tendency to stare at firemen's butts.



Filmmaker: What were the origins of the film?

Delpy: I thought about it for the first time in 2001, and I thought it would be funny to have a movie about a relationship over 48 hours in Paris that falls apart. An American guy with a lot of neuroses, and a fearless French woman who doesn't have any neuroses. I actually originally started writing a short story or a novel, but I can't write novels, I'm not capable of doing it. It always ends up that I start doing the dialogue, and as it goes along I transfer it from Word to Final Draft and it turns into a screenplay. Then Richard Linklater called me for writing Before Sunset, so I was like, “OK, forget that one! Why don't we set Before Sunset in Paris?” They were like, “OK, let's do that.” It was because I wanted to do a movie in Paris, but then [the idea for 2 Days in Paris] stayed in my head because it was still a very different subject matter — you know, about a couple breaking up, and not a couple meeting again — so I was like, “Why don't I try and do it?” Then I called Adam Goldberg. I had already called him in 2001 and said, “Would you do this film?”, because I wanted to do it totally guerilla, shoot it in a few days, over New Year. But then I met this producer who said, “Why don't you raise money?” I didn't want to write a full screenplay until I had money, because I've written many screenplays that never happened, and I'm tired of it. So I met some financiers and had some initial money which made me finish the screenplay. It was kind of a slow process, but quick because as soon as I had the money I wrote the screenplay, and then we shot it, and then I edited it, I did the music and then, boom, we released it.

Filmmaker: How long was there between getting the money and it being finished?

Delpy: We got the money in February [2006], and finished the film in February [2007] for Berlin.

Filmmaker: So did you feel a lot of pressure doing it all so quickly?

Delpy: Yeah, it was a lot of pressure, a lot of stress. The biggest stress was not getting the money we thought we were going to get. The producer thought we were going to get money from the French government; and then he thought we were going to get money from Paris, because Paris gives people money when they shoot in the city; then we thought we were going to get money from a French-German fund, but we didn't get it because some director didn't like the screenplay and fought against it, like, violently — and gave the money to his best friend! [laughs] So we got no help whatsoever, and we made the film with very little money. That was very stressful, because as I was preparing the film every day we were finding out we were getting no money, and Adam was stuck on a movie.

Filmmaker: Was that on Zodiac?

Delpy: No, it was Deja Vu. We didn't know if he was going to show up or not, which was very stressful. We thought about recasting and I called other people, but then I'd written it for him so it was tough for me to change my mind in the last minute. Finally, 12 hours before the shoot, he turned up. It's very hard when you have no power, when you're a little fish, because you can't tell actors, “Listen, you're under contract,” so you have to wait for them. We pushed the movie [back] for one week, so we lost the money for post-production because of that. It's always the same story on little movies. You suffer so much to do such a little film, but the shoot itself, and directing, and doing the work, and working with the actors was great.

Filmmaker: How fluid was the writing process? The Before Sunset script you co-wrote is incredibly different in tone from this film.

Delpy: Well, I can write very different things. It's funny, when I wrote Before Sunset, when I sent Richard the first draft that I had written, he said, “There's too much of a comedic tone.” Sometimes I go towards drama, and I've done it, but when I write about a couple talking, it goes into comedy. I always think it's funny when people are mean to one another, it just makes me laugh, so the tone was very crude and kind of harsh. It's my natural tendency to go that way. Also, I had meetings with [many of the actors] and so I was fed by a lot of [ideas] — I even had meetings with my parents about their characters! I just had a great time writing these horrible things that people are saying to each other.

Filmmaker: Adam Goldberg's performance is different from how I've seen him before, as his neurotic schtick is almost completely absent. Is that because of how you directed him?

Delpy: At the beginning he's like that a little bit, but I didn't want him to be the caricature of the neurotic Jewish New York guy. What I like about Adam, and what you don't see very much in movies, is that the guy is really good-looking, covered in tattoos — it's like he's this antithesis of what his face could be like. He's kind of macho, he likes to hang out in bars and drink with his friends, so I wanted to use that in the film because it's kind of interesting. He's so good at playing the neurotic guy, but I've known him well for many years and know he has that other side to him. I like that he's taking off his shirt [in this film] — well, I asked him to! [laughs] It was no problem to him, though. It was like, “Adam, maybe you need your shirt on in this shot...” [laughs]

Filmmaker: You're also showing a much geekier side to yourself in this film.

Delpy: I'm very geeky, and so much more than what I seem to be right now — I'm wearing a dress, heels and stuff but I'm not really that, you know? It was nice: I wore glasses, I gained 20 pounds for the film. We tried dark hair, but it just didn't work for me; suddenly, I looked like I was in a drama and that people were dying! It was fun to play this character who's not only geeky, she's a little crazy: she attacks people, she lunges at people when she's angry.

Filmmaker: The character feels like it's quite close to your real personality.

Delpy: She is, in a way. I'm not a flirtatious person, and I don't take love lightly at all, actually. In the film, she's [flirting] with the firemen [laughs], but I don't know any woman in France who doesn't talk to firemen and smile at them, because they're always so sweet, and they're wearing those tight pants. Even my dad looks at their ass when they walk down the street!

Filmmaker: Both your parents are wonderful in the film, but was it easy working with them?

Delpy: Well, they're both wonderful actors, theater actors and, in fact, it was hard to get them because they were both doing a play at the same time. But it was wonderful to direct them actually because they played the game and they were very funny and really easy to direct. They were actually very cute, because they were impressed I was doing my film, they were very sweet. The only worries I had were about them being taken care of, because it was a tough shoot, we were working long hours, and they're older people.

Filmmaker: You'd directed some shorts before this, but how much confidence did you have going into production on a low-budget film with a tight schedule?

Delpy: I was stressed out but, like everything else, you take it day by day. If I think about it now, it's like a mountain: it was a lot of really hard work. I was stressed, and the two days before shooting I couldn't sleep really. But after the first day started and I did the first day, every day it was like, “Gotta get the whole thing shot.” I had my shot list, and it was like, “OK, we don't have time for 20 shots – I'll do it in 15. What do we do? What do we cut? What do we really need?” Every day was like this intense, crazy madness, and [sometimes] you have to beg the technician for an extra half hour, so I begged on my knees. I don't care – you do what you have to do to make your film, that's how it is. It's like being in a blender, but that's the way it goes for every person who makes a film. I think the urgency and the stress were not bad, in the end. I would just throw myself on the set, boom, and just do it.

Filmmaker: You've worked with a huge number of fantastic directors – Jean-Luc Godard, Krysztof Kieślowski, Jim Jarmusch, Carlos Saura, Alan Rudolph, to name just a few – but who was the biggest influence on your directorial approach?

Delpy: The person that talked to me the most about directing was Kieślowski, because he knew I wanted to go to film school. I did his film right before I went to NYU, and he was also friends with Agnieszka Holland, so he loved women directors. At the school he went to, Łódź in Poland, everyone was very supportive of each other so he had a sense of helping and tutoring others, and he gave me a lot of advice on writing and stuff. What he told me was just to do my own stuff. I would always be such a film person and watch every movie [out there], and so I asked him what films he liked, “Do you like Douglas Sirk? Billy Wilder?“ And he'd be like, “No, I just like watching things around me, and I write from that.” That was interesting for me. When I write, I like to take from personal experience. Even if I write a period piece, it has to come from something that I've observed or felt, and then it comes naturally.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you remember seeing?

Delpy: I think it was probably The Birds, Hitchcock. I love cinema because of it.

Filmmaker: What's the strangest experience you've had during your time in filmmaking?

Delpy: I've never had really strange experiences, but I've worked with a few bad directors, and I knew they were bad. You just have to stand still and wait until it's over! [laughs] You have to stay and keep it going, and you know [the film] is not going to be great.

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

Delpy: To never give up. [laughs] If you want to become one, you have to be really, really strong, never give up, because you're going to have so many “no”s. When I wrote my first screenplay I was 17, but when I directed my first film I was 36. It gives you an idea how long it takes.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 8/10/2007 05:40:00 PM Comments (0)

Anyone wanting to prove that a there is a “cinematic gene” need look no further than Julie Gavras. The daughter of legendary director Costa-Gavras, most famous for films like Z (1968) and Missing (1982), and movie producer Michèle Ray-Gavras, Gavras initially resisted working in film and enrolled in law school. However, her desire to tell stories on film proved irrepressible. After a stint as an assistant director in France and Italy, Gavras started making documentaries, most notably The Pirate, the Wizard, the Thief and the Children (2002).

When Gavras read the book, Tutta Colpa di Fidel, by her Italian writer friend Domitilla Calamai, she associated so strongly with the story that she knew she had to turn it into a film. Set in the early '70s, it is the story of a precocious young French girl, Anna (Nina Kervel-Bey), who is forced to bid farewell to her comfortable bourgeois life, large country house and beloved catechism classes when her parents (Stefano Accorsi and Julie Depardieu) become politically enlightened and turn into Communist activists. Gavras makes us see the film's events from Anna's perspective, and as she begins to understand and warm to the complex ideas her parents have embraced, viewers cannot help but be won over by the charm of the film and the fantastic performance from Kervel-Bey, its young lead.

Filmmaker spoke to Gavras about being part of a filmic dynasty, the frustration of working with child actors, and an unfortunate teenage experience involving Bo Derek.




Filmmaker: You studied law before you decided to become a filmmaker.

Gavras: I’m from a movie family — my father’s a director, my mother’s a producer and I have brothers who work in the business — so at some time I decided that I was not going to do it, so I went to law school. I didn’t decide to become a film director, but I met people who had a story that interested me so I did a documentary. I started directing documentaries, which was fine with my first decision not to be like my family, because nobody [in my family] makes documentaries. I finally found this Italian book, Blame It On Fidel, and decided that I was going to do a movie.

Filmmaker: So you didn’t want to feel in the shadow of your parents.

Gavras: It’s not the shadow thing, it’s just that it’s so difficult to know if you decide to go into the business just because you’re so used to it, or because you really want [to do] it and you really love it. It’s really difficult which one it is, or both, and I still don’t know but since I’ve done the movie and really enjoyed doing it, I don’t care anymore what the real reason is. But I wondered for a long time, so knowing I couldn’t answer that question I decided to do something else.

Filmmaker: What prompted your decision to leave law behind and start working in film?

Gavras: I guess I realized that law didn’t interest me so much. My mother was producing a movie about gypsies around the world, and they had to send some film and some [equipment] for the movie camera, so they sent me [to take them] because I was on vacation. They were shooting in Egypt, so I thought I was going to have a week vacation, but the day I arrived the 1st A.D. got sick, so I took his job for a week. When I got home, I said, “OK, I’m finishing law and then I’m going to try something else.”

Filmmaker: When did you first discover the book of Blame It On Fidel?

Gavras: Actually I knew the author because I lived in Rome for a year and when I asked about what she was doing, people told me she had written a book. I read it and I loved it. What’s in the movie is not my life, but it’s so close to what I could say I felt as a child, so I decided try and make something out of it.

Filmmaker: How much of the book did you change to make the film closer to your own life? I know that the part about President Allende and Chile was something you added.

Gavras: I think I kept a third of the book, which is the events of the beginning and the main idea: a little girl from a very bourgeois family who sees her life completely transformed because of her parents’ political activities. I added the Chilean parts because when I was 12, my father did a movie called Missing, and Missing was like my political awakening. I was 12, and for the first time I understood one of my father’s movies. Before, they were not movies for children but I understood what a putsch was. Also, the story was simple for a child to understand: it was a father looking for his son.

Filmmaker: In the film Anna feels very neglected by her parents. Is this something you felt too when both your parents were off making films?

Gavras: In the movie, it’s not that she’s neglected, it’s just that her parents are living something very strong and it’s very hard for them to understand exactly what’s happening themselves, so it’s even harder to try and explain it to children. I always wanted to have the parents sympathetic, I didn’t want people to think they were horrible parents who didn’t take care of their children, although they do make mistakes. But I guess everybody does when you’re parents.

Filmmaker: You were only a few years old at the time the movie takes place, so how much research did you have to do to recreate that period detail?

Gavras: I don’t know how it is in the States, but in France when there’s a movie about the 70s, it always shows people living in orange houses with plastic furniture and only wearing brown pants. I don’t believe it was like that, and my set designer and director of photography agreed that it couldn’t be that way because people don’t live like stereotypes, so we decided to go for something a bit different. Of course we were cautious to make sure that everything was from the 70s, but we also tried to give it a different vision.

Filmmaker: How closely do you associate with the character of Anna?

Gavras: I used things from my childhood when I was writing the script, but I stopped relating to her when I was directing Nina; that was mainly during the writing of the script. When Nina started embodying the character, I related more to her than to myself. Nina has the kind of personality that’s very strong and very close to the character of Anna.

Filmmaker: Anna is very wise and precocious, though she still has a lot to learn. Is Nina similar to that?

Gavras: Exactly. We tried to explain a lot of the background to her, but a few months after the shooting [finished], when [former Chilean dictator Augusto] Pinochet died, I realized we still had many things to explain to her because she was still a bit confused.

Filmmaker: What was it like working with child actors?

Gavras: I really knew them very well when we arrived on the set because I had spent six months doing the casting to find the children and I had seen Nina and Benjamin [Feuillet] at least 10 times before. Three weeks before shooting, we spent three days together at the country house near Paris so the kids could have a brother-and-sister life: have dinner together, sleep in the same room together, things like that. When I was directing them on set, I never gave them the big picture, I just told them what to do precisely for that moment. It’s not like for an adult actor who wants to know at what stage in the character’s [arc] he is at that moment.

Filmmaker: Were there any moments where you became frustrated by either of the children?

Gavras: [I did] with the little boy, Benjamin, but I can’t recall the precise moment. It was just so difficult with him, because he was five and a half. At some points, we would laugh because we just couldn’t get [the take]. You know, it’s the twentieth take, he’s five years old and he’s tired and he forgets what to do.

Filmmaker: What is your favorite book?

Gavras: I’m very bad at favorite directors and favorite movies because I don’t have a favorite anything, but I can tell you the last book I loved. There’s a book I read while writing the script for Blame It On Fidel called What Maisie Knew by Henry James, and it’s exactly the same thing, a story told from the unique point of view of a little girl. Though it doesn’t tell the same story at all [as my film], it was very interesting.

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

Gavras: I think it would be Meryl Streep, just because I think she is amazing because she can do so many different things. In France, we like actors that are more characters than actors, actors who have a big personality instead of actors that have their own personality disappear and become another character. But Meryl Streep has that amazing ability to become someone else.

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

Gavras: Even before the movie camera was invented? I guess I like the romantic aspect of the 19th Century, but the good thing about making movies is that you can go back in time without a time machine.

Filmmaker: Finally, what’s the film you are most embarrassed to have seen?

Gavras: It’s a movie called Bolero by Bo Derek. It’s wonderful, you should rent it. I don’t know why [I saw it]. It came out in France when I was 14 or 15, and maybe it was a thing like, “Let’s go and see a grown-up movie.”

Filmmaker: And you loved it?!

Gavras: No, no, I didn’t love it, I felt very embarrassed. That was one of the very rare times that I walked out of a movie, which I never do. Even if I hate the movie, I stay until the end because I hate to not know the end of the story.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 8/03/2007 12:51:00 PM Comments (0)