William M. Haney III — or Bill Haney to you and me — is one of those people who one suspects would be successful at almost anything he chose to turn his hand to. He started his first business while still an undergrad at Harvard, and made $15m when he sold his stock in the company, aged just 26. He then moved on to invest in two environmental companies and then a software company, continuing his success with all three. He first became interested in film when in the mid-1990s he met Errol Morris during the making of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, an encounter which planted the idea in his head that he become a documentarian. His first movie, Gift of the Game was about baseball and U.S-Cuban relations, and subsequent films have focused on political, social and environmental issues which Haney is passionate about. In addition to his documentaries, Haney also writes and produces fiction features through his production company, Uncommon Productions, and is currently shooting a biopic of Janis Joplin, The Gospel According to Janis, starring Zooey Deschanel.

Haney excels at letting the story take center stage in his documentaries, rather than complicating issues with a showy cinematic style, and The Price of Sugar is no exception. The tale here surrounds the efforts of Father Christopher Hartley, a priest in the Dominican Republic on a crusade to improve the conditions of illegal Haitian workers bussed in by the major sugar companies and who work in virtual slavery, while living in fear and extreme poverty. Hartley is a fascinating figure, a man who grew up rich but shunned money to work for Mother Teresa and has a clear desire to be a martyr, and yet the cause he is fighting for, revealed in all its dreadful detail by Haney, is the most compelling aspect of the film. True to Haney's philanthropic instincts, he is not only active in the campaign to help the sugar cutters' cause but is also the director of Infante Sano, an organization which helps young mothers and the babies in the Dominican Republic.

Filmmaker spoke to Haney about his segue from business to the movies, how documentarians stay subjective, and the overlap of filmmaking and philanthropy.



Filmmaker: How did you first become interested in documentary filmmaking?

Haney: I was thirty five years old, running a high tech company and harboring not the slightest inkling of ever working in film. My mom called and said she needed a favor. As it turned out, a childhood neighbor had become a subject in an uncompleted Errol Morris film. At twelve years old, George Mendonca dropped out of school to work as a gardener near the school where my dad taught, and I lived. After fifty years of work, he had become the world’s foremost topiary gardener. Errol chose him as one of the subjects in his film Fast, Cheap & Out of Control but the film ran into some snags and remained unfinished for some time. George was by now getting quite old and his wife told my mother that his greatest wish was to see Errol’s film finished before he died. I called Errol and offered to lend a hand. It was my first connection with documentary filmmaking.

Filmmaker: Do you usually discover the subjects for your documentaries, or do people more often come to you with a story they want you to tell?

Haney: My partner, Tim Disney, and I have yet to diagram a documentary in advance — plot it out with the care of intentionality. Rather, we stumble over a character, setting or story so captivating we’re willing to commit the years needed to squeeze what truth from it we can. So it was with the lead character in The Price of Sugar, a charismatic and inspiring priest, Father Christopher Hartley. Risking his life in a desperate struggle for the rights of some of the poorest people in the American Hemisphere, he led us into a world we could never have dreamed existed.

Filmmaker: How did you first hear about Father Christopher?

Haney: A partner, Dr. Kim Wilson, and I were bringing medical supplies to poor rural hospitals and clinics in the Dominican Republic. A local nun connected us to Father Christopher. He was building a hospital. When he took us to see the conditions of his parish and outlined his struggle to help, the notion of our film was born.

Filmmaker: Was this a dangerous documentary to make? Were you, like Father Christopher, subject to death threats and smear campaigns?

Haney: While it is certainly true that, like Father Christopher, both our film and I have been the subject of a vicious smear campaign, the real dangers experienced during the making of The Price of Sugar were borne by Father Christopher and his parishioners. My central concerns were for the Haitian laborers courageous enough to allow us to film them, despite their fears for the wrath of the plantation owners.

Filmmaker: How close do you allow yourself to get to your subjects? Does the necessary alliance between documentarian and their subject sometimes compromise the required objectivity?

Haney: The intense relationship between a documentary film maker and the subject of their work has to have some rules. Trust is central. So is objectivity — or the closest to it any human can really get. The Price of Sugar is my fifth documentary. I have found that one of the many wonderful advantages of having talented partners — and in Tim Disney, Peter Rhodes and Eric Grunebaum I have some of the best — is that by working collaboratively we can simultaneously remain close to our subjects and preserve the distance needed for objectivity.

Filmmaker: There are partially critical comments made about Father Christopher by an American member of the Peace Corps, accusing him of being arrogant and partly damaging to his cause. Did you feel that was a necessary perspective to have in the film in order to prevent it becoming a hagiographical portrait?

Haney: When your lead character is a long time acolyte of Mother Teresa, someone who has turned his back on great wealth to live and sacrifice for the poorest of the poor, the risks of hagiography are always present. Father Christopher, the central character in our film, is a principled and compassionate man but he and his methods of advocating for his parishioners have limitations. A number of characters in our film shared their views on those limitations – and I am glad that they were as frank as they were.

Filmmaker: How did Paul Newman get involved in the project? How early on was it, and what effect did it have on the film's momentum?

Haney: I was lucky to be introduced to Paul Newman through a mutual friend. As he has demonstrated time and again, he has an extraordinary commitment to making a generous contribution to the world around him. He asked to take a look at my previous documentary, A Life Among Whales. He liked it and graciously offered to narrate The Price of Sugar. I couldn’t say thank you fast enough.

Filmmaker: How actively have the Vicini family (who own the sugar company featured in the film) obstructed the making and, more recently, screening of the film?

Haney: The Vicini family, wealthy Dominican plantation owners and their Washington lawyers are remarkably dedicated to stopping viewers from seeing The Price of Sugar, virtually showering the landscape with threats of lawsuits.

Filmmaker: What have you organized around the film's release in order to raise the profile of this situation and create a positive change?

Haney: By working with a wide range of human rights groups, religious leaders, political leaders and unions, we hope the inspiration of Father Christopher’s example and the needs of his parishioners will draw the notice of groups in both the United States and abroad. If the desperate work conditions of the estimated 14 million people around the world compelled to ‘forced labor’ receive attention as a result of our film we will be deeply gratified.

Filmmaker: What has been your personal response to making this film?

Haney: The faith and spirit of the Haitians I met laboring on the Dominican sugar plantations inspired me. The “hidden costs” of American consumerism are no longer hidden for me. I understand viscerally now the costs of trying to make a difference, if your opponents are rich and callous.

Filmmaker: Do you think the current popularity of documentaries will last or that it is a fad?

Haney: I think the popularity of powerful documentaries will grow. I hope the number of venues for their screening, especially on television, will grow likewise.

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

Haney: Virtually every work day I have moments of sheer satisfaction and moments of frustration with the quality and effect of my work. On none of those days have I ever thought of film making as a job.

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

Haney: Keep your expenses low, your sense of humor strong and your love for your story paramount.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/28/2007 06:15:00 PM Comments (1)

Though he is now living in Los Angeles, Alfredo De Villa can't stop returning to New York City to make his movies. The 35-year-old writer-director was born and raised in Puebla, Mexico, but moved to the U.S. when he was in his teens. He began his film career with shorts, Joe's Egg (1995) and Neto's Run (1999), both of which went on to win him the DGA's Best Latino Director Award. He studied Directing at Columbia University's film program, after which he moved into advertising, and in 2002 he directed his first feature, Washington Heights, about an aspiring comicbook artist who is compelled to look after his ailing father and his bodega. The film won a special mention at the first Tribeca Film Festival, and De Villa followed it up last year with Yellow, a dance movie vehicle for actress Roselyn Sanchez.

Like Washington Heights, Adrift in Manhattan was co-scripted by De Villa, with his writing partner, Nat Moss. Another portrait of life in New York, the film presents a triptych of stories about characters isolated and unfulfilled: Simon (Victor Rasuk), a shy young photographer who has a dangerously intimate relationship with his mother; Rose (Heather Graham), an optometrist consumed by grief after the death her two-year-old son; and Tomasso (Dominic Chianese), a solitary, aging painter who is about to lose his sight. The stories interweave as the three lives bisect, sometimes surprisingly, offering the hope of salvation — or at least closure — for the protagonists. De Villa's film takes a poetic and restrained approach to the material, often using the characters' actions rather than their words to give us insight, and constructs a thoughtful, poignant and ultimately hopeful portrait of urban lives.

Filmmaker spoke to De Villa about his transition into filmmaking, his cinematic homages to William Friedkin and David O. Russell, and how Darth Vader changed his life.



Filmmaker: You left your hometown of Puebla when you were 17. Why was that?

De Villa: It was a very simple decision to leave. Puebla is the fourth or fifth largest city in Mexico, and it's very regional. At the time, it was very isolated and basically the prospects of pursuing something to do with film, or trying to do a film in Puebla, were just daunting. A lot of people were getting into the film school in Mexico, but it was difficult for somebody from Puebla because you needed recommendations — I had nobody.

Filmmaker: How important are your background and heritage to your identity as a filmmaker?

De Villa: Personally, it's very important. I think my work has always been a reaction to what I grew up with as a teenager in Puebla, which has been funky because it's a very specific world and it was a very specific time, so sometimes I ran into trouble finding dramatic equivalents by setting stories in New York, in a completely different country.

Filmmaker: What did you do once you arrived in the U.S., before you got involved in filmmaking?

De Villa: Well, I worked as a dishwasher, a delivery man, I ran a little gas station — things like that. I did some gardening, cleaned people's houses sometimes. I was in Florida when I first came to the States, so I found it was lucrative to clean people's boats; it was a bitch of a job, but it paid better. So I did a few of those, but they were harsh.

Filmmaker: How did you get to the stage of making shorts?

De Villa: Since Mexico, I always had this strong desire to do films. I had the chance to do my first short film when I was in my directing class — it was basically an end-of-semester exercise. Back then [at Columbia], you could do whatever you wanted, nobody cared, use any equipment. So a friend of mine and I wrote this little script which was pretty funny, and it was self-contained so we budgeted out and realized it was going to cost us essentially the cost of film and a couple of more bucks to get it done. $1200 or something like that. So we shot it on 16 [mm].

Filmmaker: How did things progress after your graduation from Columbia?

De Villa: I did all kinds of crazy jobs, anything that came my way and one of those things was that I became a freelance proofreader. In New York, there's a lot of advertising agencies, and they started to like me because I was quiet and I did my work. What I realized was half the time you just sat there waiting, you really didn't do much, so for me it was great because I could bring my own work. I started realizing that somebody had to produce those commercials, so I asked around and finally one agency said, “Well, we don't have an opening, but give us your C.V.,” and sure enough, two months later they called me and offered me an entrance position job. So I had a parallel career in advertising, and basically until '04 I worked in that industry — even when I was shooting and cutting Washington Heights, I had a day job producing commercials.

Filmmaker: How close is the comicbook artist in Washington Heights to you, in terms of his drive and ambition?

De Villa: I never thought about it, but I think you're right. I think your observation is very interesting. In Washington Heights, I never thought of him in terms of his ambition, I always understood him in terms of his relationship (or lack thereof) with his father and how it changes him as a person. In Puebla, when my cousins and I were asked what we were going to do and what our ambitions were, nobody ever said, “Oh, I want to run the World Bank,” or, “I want to be the next governor of Puebla,” [laughs] it was like, “Yeah, I'll go to college and study engineering,” or “Maybe I'll study political science and then eventually go to law school.” Where emphasis was placed was more on family, on the idea of you staying in the same city, raising your family in the same city, and it was a very close network.

Filmmaker: That closeness of family emerges in a very unusual sense in Adrift in Manhattan, where Simon and his mother have a relationship that borders on incestuous.

De Villa: The first thing I should say is that my mother and I never had any incestuous relationship! [laughs] Let's get rid of that evil rumor before it arises! Actually I'm not that close to my mother: my father is dead, and I essentially grew up without a father. It's a very complicated family history. It was a very conscious decision when we were thinking about that character, to make him have this really complex relationship with his mother.

Filmmaker: There's an echo of David O. Russell's Spanking the Monkey in their relationship. You have a great homage to The French Connection in one scene, so was there a conscious awareness of a reference to Russell's film?

De Villa: I was very aware of that film, and I'm a big fan of it. I love the movie, and especially the scene where the mother and son come to make love: they're kinda both drunk and they're actually playing with each other and one thing leads to the next until they kiss. It's fascinating, and incredibly real. It's a beautiful moment. I knew when we made our film we would be referencing that movie in one way or another, but it wasn't that planned per se. In terms of The French Connection, the old title of the movie was 1/9 after the subway lines, and we needed a scene where Heather [Graham]'s character makes a choice to pursue this guy who's essentially stalking her, and we finally came up with the idea to do it in the subway. Then, of course, we thought about the Fernando Rey-Gene Hackman scene in French Connection, the cat and mouse [where they repeatedly move on and off the train as it's about to leave]. We decided to do it our own way, and we hoped that contextually it was different enough. I love that scene in The French Connection.

Filmmaker: I've read that the movie was quite a bit darker in initial drafts of the script, but that it had to be toned down in order for you to get funding. What did you change?

De Villa: The script was a lot darker, to be honest, and it was a really difficult proposition for the financiers. The scenes between the mother and son were a lot more explicit, and we had to stay more at the level of hint and suggestion. What Heather and Victor [Rasuk]'s characters did was a lot darker, as well – more than just the spanking, if you will!

Filmmaker: All of your movies so far have been set in New York. Is that by chance or design?

De Villa: Well, with these two films [Washington Heights and Adrift in Manhattan] it was more by design. When I came to this country, I came to Miami first and then eventually, three of four years later, I made my way to New York. I remember when I first got there, I felt immediately right at home. Coming from a foreign country, America is a very particular place and in many ways you feel very alienated from it, but I think New York, with its cosmopolitan attitude and the attitude of the real native New Yorkers, it's so in-your-face and interesting, and so different from the rest of the country that I felt at home. I remember just walking out of the plane when I first came there and just touching the soil and feeling O.K. about it. And, mind you, when I came to New York, I had $400 in my pocket — I just did it. I was fearless.

Filmmaker: Was there a moment when you were younger when you realized you wanted to become a filmmaker?

De Villa: There were a lot of things that were wrong when I was growing up in and around my family, but the appearance was a different story altogether. Even though I was seven and wasn't very self-aware, I knew there was something very wrong. This is going to sound banal, but I remember going to see The Empire Strikes Back, the Star Wars movie which marked my generation, and being fascinated when Darth Vader says to Luke Skywalker that he's his father. That powerful revelation was so raw to me, and moved me. I came out of the cinema on this main boulevard, and I was so shaken. I could just not [get rid] of that feeling. The fact that this huge emotional connection between these two characters could happen in a movie, whereas in real life we had to hide it and couldn't express those things directly, was very moving to me.

Filmmaker: Which lost overlooked masterpiece would you like to see have a renaissance?

De Villa: The movie that I love, and I'm not sure how much it's been ignored, is a movie I go back to a lot, a lot, one of the early melodramas by Luis Buñuel from Mexico, called El. I love that film. I'm not sure how much it's considered a classic, but I know a lot of people do know it because it's one of the most Buñuelian films from his Mexico years.

Filmmaker: What's the strangest thing that's happened to you during your time as a filmmaker?

De Villa: Well, the one that I can remember most is a very weird story. We were talking to this foreign sales company based in Hollywood to get some projections to raise money, based on actors and whatnot. I had to go in and meet them and hear their notes on the script [of Adrift in Manhattan] (when the script was a lot darker). They sat me down with the president of the company and the development team and were telling me the score and what it is. It was really strange, they went in and said, “The dialogue is good, the situations are good, but there's no political intrigue. Maybe you could write it like Crash, give it a political angle.” They suggested that the young photographer could try and assassinate the mayor. What do you do with comments like that? And then they said, “The movie doesn't have enough sex.” I managed to dodge the question of politics, and when it comes to the sex, I said, “No, no, no, you're wrong. The movie is like Last Tango In Paris, sans the butter.” They actually took notes, nodded to each other, and that was satisfactory. It was just really surreal — I [suddenly] understood a lot of the David Lynch movies after that. [laughs] David Lynch is basically just making documentaries of his surroundings.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/21/2007 08:31:00 PM Comments (0)

Previously best known as David Gordon Green's right-hand man, Craig Zobel has effortlessly emerged from his friend's shadow and established himself as an important presence in American filmmaking in his own right. Though born in New York, Zobel grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, and stayed in the South for his college education, studying film at the North Carolina School of the Arts alongside Green and a number of other future collaborators. After graduation, Zobel worked on Green's first three films — George Washington (2000), All the Real Girls (2003) and Undertow (2003) — as either co-producer, production manager or second unit director, and as well as a handful of other films, such as Adam Bhala Lough's Bomb the System (2002), in a similar capacity.

Though Zobel's previous work in film was mostly conducted in the ostensibly non-creative area of production, his debut feature as writer-director shows an innate cinematic sense as well as a keen ability to engage his audience's emotions. Great World of Sound focuses on a pair of hapless salesmen, straight-laced Martin (Pat Healy) and his streetsmart partner Clarence (Kene Holliday), who unwittingly find themselves working as “talent scouts” for Great World of Sound, a company that scams wannabe musicians out of their savings. A well-written and thought-provoking film, Great World of Sound is even more impressive given the technical demands of the shoot: Zobel shot all the audition material in a hidden camera set-up with real auditioners, placing extreme demands on both his crew and two leads in order to get the realism and immediacy he wanted.

Filmmaker spoke to Zobel about working with Terrence Malick, his love of I Heart Huckabees, and his desire to make the seventh Bourne movie.



Filmmaker: What influence did your childhood in the South have on you as a filmmaker?

Zobel: It was definitely very formative in ways, like I knew I wanted my film to take place in the South. I'd always seen how the movies portrayed the South in a very singular way, and it's so not like that. That stuff just isn't in the South, it doesn't exist anymore, it's just a fabrication of the movies. As far as racism, people say the South is racist and there is definitely that there, but Atlanta's had a black mayor forever. Moving to New York, this town has a lot more weird stuff going on in it than I feel like's going on in Atlanta. Personally.

Filmmaker: Do you feel like a Southern filmmaker?

Zobel: I would be fine if somebody called me that, but I would also like to make a movie up here in New York. There's this book I'm trying to adapt right now, and none of it takes place in the South, it's much more in the suburbs of the world.

Filmmaker: You studied film at the North Carolina School of the Arts, alongside people like David Gordon Green and your co-writer, George Smith. What was that like?

Zobel: It was awesome. I went to school down there because North Carolina wanted to promote filmmaking so the school was relatively well-funded, with new equipment. They would pay for the movies. It was great because it's in Winston-Salem where there's not much going on. It's a very tiny town, and that ended up being a very good thing because it created this thing where there was nothing else to do except watch movies. It was a tiny conservatory, so you quickly got to know everybody there. It wasn't just David and George, there was David's cinematographer, Tim Orr, my cinematographer, Adam Stone, and the sound guy and production designer David and I both use, Chris Gebert and Richard Wright. There was a whole group of us, and our friends were Ben Best and Jody Hill and Dan McBride who made The Foot Fist Way. And Paul Schneider who was in All the Real Girls, and just directed his own movie. We were the second and third graduating classes so it was kind of unexplored territory, and the emphasis of the school back then was “Go out and shoot something!”, which was cool. It was an energetic time.

Filmmaker: What was it like working with Terrence Malick on Undertow?

Zobel: It's so awesome the day you get to meet Terrence Malick — you're like, “Wow! Hi!” It was amazing and it was also really cool because we quickly realized that Terry — I'm not actually comfortable calling him Terry... [laughs] — Terrence Malick is a normal dude who is a passionate, cool, excited guy and it was great to be around him for that short time.

Filmmaker: How did you come up with the idea for Great World of Sound? It seems a bit like your take on the American Idol effect.

Zobel: Well, in the 70s my dad was a radio DJ, and when he moved down to Atlanta he ended up not initially being able to get a job in radio and so got a job as a talent scout for this record company and over time slowly pieced together that it was a scam. It's funny because I had this idea before American Idol really. I think it was a fun, interesting way to talk about [the fact that] I didn't think my dad was a bad dude, but he did something that I would think a bad guy had done. I thought making a film about that and trying to get that across in a way that people could feel compassion for him, I thought it could be an amazing journey. That was the initial impetus, and it's fortunate [for the film] that American Idol has become what it's become.

Filmmaker: You ended up writing the script with George Smith.

Zobel: He went to school with us and he's one of my closest friends. He's an amazing writer and I had written an original draft of Great World of Sound that was just mine, but it was too long and I felt it had problems that I couldn't see because it was about my dad and I was trying to include all these scenes in it that I thought were really important just because they really happened. I needed perspective, so I asked for notes from George, but one of his main notes was that I should write out the song that Kyndra Kent sings, which I hadn't done and had just said, “We'll make something up on the day...” I was living in Washington Heights and he was living way down in south Brooklyn, and on the train ride to my house he wrote this song. It was like, “This is the song!” When he came and showed me that song I pretty much immediately said, “Hey, do you just want to write this with me?” He's now working on another adaptation of a play and a script that I really want to produce for him to direct. It would have to be a smaller movie, but it would be really cool.

Filmmaker: How difficult was it from a technical standpoint to shoot the hotel room scenes and not have it be obvious to the people auditioning that they were secretly being filmed?

Zobel: It was very hard. I didn't want it to look like one of those hidden cameras things where the camera's in the bush. We had a production office that was attached to a warehouse, and then we cleaned out the rooms in the front of the production and hung up gold records and stuff — it's the office that's in the movie — and then we built a fake hallway and put down a carpet and a drop ceiling and then built these sets that were off the hallway that were completely fabricated. You could walk from the office into the fake hallway and into one of these rooms and not know that you were in the middle of a big warehouse. In those [rooms], we set it up with two cameras on dollies perpendicular to each other, and one stationary camera opposite one of those, and all of them were operated. It was crazy because the two-way mirrors were too soft to shoot through, so it had to be really, really bright in the room in order to make it work. It was really hot, and all the camera crew had to wear all-black or else you would have been able to see them through the mirrors.

Filmmaker: Presumably the sound aspects were a challenge too.

Zobel: Chris Gebert had to hide the sound in unique places, and in addition to acting and selling the whole thing, Pat and Kene had to steer people to certain places in the room, make sure that they weren't blocking the people, make sure that people were in front of the mics — [laughs] there was a lot going on! That was one of things about the cellphone [the characters have], because I could call [Pat and Kene] at any time and say, “Hey, move that water bottle,” or give direction by text message, or say “Leave the room and let Kene hit on that girl.” Technically, it was like a crazy, unscripted live television show vibe, but none of us had experience of that ever. I vividly remember Richard and Adam and me sitting around the day after we finished all those scenes, drinking a beer and saying, “Wow, I can't believe we just did that!” I remember Richard saying, “At this point, I think I know how we could actually do this again and do it totally right and nail it — but I don't want to!” [laughs]

Filmmaker: You had to fool the musicians who thought they were auditioning for a record contract in a similar way to actual scam artists — except that you came clean at the end. How did you feel about that from a moral or ethical standpoint?

Zobel: One of the main points of making the movie that way was to get these performances. In any movie you see about a scam artist, there's something sexy and cool about being a scam artist and it just never fully lets you empathize with the person on the other side of it, and I wanted the movie to be about those people. They're the heart and soul of the movie.

Filmmaker: You wanted to be like the anti-David Mamet.

Zobel: [laughs] Exactly! As far as ethics, I came back last week after I showed the movie to all the people that were in it, and that was one of the best experiences of my entire life. Everybody really responded to it and everyone that I talked to really felt that what it had to say meant something to them and that they were proud to be a part of it.

Filmmaker: Were there people who auditioned who didn't sign release forms?

Zobel: Absolutely, and we didn't use those people, but we apologized profusely for wasting their time. But there weren't a whole lot.

Filmmaker: What are you working on at the moment?

Zobel: There's a project I had before Great World of Sound which is called Turkey in the Straw. It has a bigger budget, and it's a dark comedy. It seems like the right time to get behind it because people like this movie [Great World of Sound] and now it's just about whether the [WGA] strike gets in the way of people's schedules.

Filmmaker: What's the closest you've come to a religious experience while watching a film?

Zobel: I don't want to say a Terrence Malick movie, but honestly The Thin Red Line is an incredible, incredible movie.

Filmmaker: Which film do you wish you'd directed?

Zobel: There's something really, really cool about I Heart Huckabees. I know that's a funny answer, but I was just laughing all the time. It's so smart and so dumb at the same time, it's like completely the stupidest movie ever and it's really smart. And everybody has a good performance. And this is so film school to say, but Five Easy Pieces is such a good movie. Five Easy Pieces and Dog Day Afternoon are like the most immaculate movies to me as far as the construction, the acting, the direction.

Filmmaker: What's the worst film you've watched the whole of on an airplane?

Zobel: It was that new Jim Carrey movie — I can't even remember the name of it, it was so bad.

Filmmaker: The Number 23?

Zobel: Yeah, The Number 23. That movie is a very bad movie. But there's a movie I watched on an airplane and talked about for three weeks after and was obsessed with, called Shooter. I had a lot of fun. It's in the realm of The Parallax View and those movies where the government's against them, and I was like, “Wow! Shooter!” I've been at so many film festivals showing art films that I keep watching Paul Greengrass movies and I really got into Breach. It's like [Tom] Clancy-esque stuff.

Filmmaker: Maybe that's a new direction for you.

Zobel: [laughs] Maybe so. I could do that. I'd love to do The Bourne Part 7.

Filmmaker: Finally, who are your filmmaking heroes?

Zobel: Hal Ashby, Michael Ritchie, Robert Altman, maybe Arthur Penn — that's pretty good to start.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/14/2007 04:00:00 PM Comments (0)

John Turturro has the distinction of being both a director's actor and an actor's director. A favorite of both Spike Lee and the Coen brothers, over the past 20 years Turturro has marked himself out as one of the most interesting and talented actors in film, and whether it is a blocked writer (Barton Fink), a socially-awkward chess master (The Luzhin Defense) or a grief-stricken widower (Fear X), he adds a depth and humanity to the characters he inhabits. In 1992, he directed his first film, Mac, about three Italian American brothers who band together to start a construction firm, a story which was inspired by Turturro's own father's experiences as a carpenter. He followed it up with, Illuminata (1998), a tragicomic farce about a Manhattan theater troupe in the early 20th Century. A true multihyphenate, Turturro also co-wrote both films with Brandon Cole, and played the principal lead in each.

Apart from a blink-and-you-miss-it appearance as a dancer, Turturro does not appear in his latest directorial effort, Romance & Cigarettes, the first film he has written on his own. A musical of the common man, it uses songs by the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin and James Brown in the story of Nick Murder (James Gandolfini), a man torn between his earthy English mistress, Tula (Kate Winslet), and long-suffering wife, Kitty (Susan Sarandon). Alongside the leads, Turturro assembles a stellar supporting cast featuring Steve Buscemi, Christopher Walken, Bobby Cannavale, Mary-Louise Parker, Eddie Izzard and Mandy Moore, who turn up to sing and dance with gusto. Like Illuminata, Romance & Cigarettes combines moments of broad comedy and bawdy humor with ones of soulful loneliness; as a musical, it breaks the mold by both embracing the surreal nature of the genre and adding a stark realism which is alien to the form. Though it premiered in Venice exactly two years ago, the movie has had a troubled time finding a distributor because of its unique take on the musical, however audiences who give it a chance will find it a sweet, entertaining and rewarding experience.

Filmmaker spoke to Turturro about the film's difficulties, the influence of Charles Bukowski, Dennis Potter and Etta James, and working with non-driving actor Christopher Walken.



Filmmaker: You must be happy that Romance & Cigarettes is getting a U.S. release after it was in the wilderness for a few years.

Turturro: Yeah. I feel like I've been flying without an air traffic controller and I've finally been brought in. [laughs] Life is bizarre, so what else is new?

Filmmaker: I believe your problems began when Sony executives screened the film, and just didn't get it.

Turturro: They didn't see it with an audience, and for a movie like this, that's an impossibility. If it had a brand name on it, like “A Pedro Almodovar Film,” they would have said O.K. But the truth of the situation with this movie is that when you put it in a room it plays like gangbusters. The whole idea is that it's different, and that was the calling card to get people to see it. I'm not angry about [Sony's reaction], but it does make you scratch your head a bit when people who buy films don't think they need to see it with a group.

Filmmaker: Where did your inspiration came from for this film? It's not what we expect from you as a director.

Turturro: To me, the film is very much me. [laughs] It's probably more me than anything I've ever done. There's a real nakedness to it, and I promised myself I'd be uninhibited as much as I possibly could be [laughs], and try to get everyone else to do that. There are things in life that you witness that can be painful or harsh, but when you digest them you say, “Wow, there's something universal there.” My idea was to put that into a form that was entertaining. I think if you're laughing at something, you're open, and you could also be very moved.

Filmmaker: What was your musical background growing up?

Turturro: I grew up in a very small house which was bursting with music. My mother was a very good singer, and her brothers were jazz musicians and she sang with them for a while, and my older brother's a big musician. We just had tons and tons of music in our house. To people of modest means, music is a powerful form of transportation to go to the realms of fantasy.

Filmmaker: What were your influences while you were conceiving the idea for the film?

Turturro: I was told about Dennis Potter, whose work I knew about but never had seen. I saw a little bit of his stuff, and I said, “Wow, he's really onto something!” I didn't want to do it exactly that way so I didn't watch too much, but I read some interviews with him and was very touched by some of the things he said. Then someone gave me a Charles Bukowski book they wanted me to adapt called Women. I read that and I was laughing because it was the dirtiest.... It would be rated Triple X!

Filmmaker: I've read Women, and it would definitely be difficult to adapt.

Turturro: It would be problematic to do it, but it reminded me of people — like my father, who was a builder — and I liked that postman, garbageman poetry. It reminded me of popular music. So I sat on [those ideas] for about ten years, and then one day said, “There's something here.” I took a year off, I wrote it, I took it to Joel and Ethan [Coen] and they really liked it. They really like the film and are proud of it, and so am I.

Filmmaker: In the film, you really embrace the surreal aspects of musicals, even more than the classic Hollywood model, and then juxtapose that with very realistic elements.

Turturro: Musicals are surreal, and they were popular during the Depression, when people were so poor. This movie is a love story, and music is how most people get through the day, even very successful people. I think it's a great form. In early Greek plays, they used song and a chorus and dance, and they were serious plays.

Filmmaker: How did you bring together such a fantastic cast?

Turturro: I wanted people who were very grounded and not cerebral actors, and I didn't want people who were so great musically. I wanted really earthy people, and the Coens recommended that I check out James [Gandolfini]. I thought he was a little young at first, but he did a reading with us and he was brilliant. I always thought of Kate [Winslet], because Kate is from a working class family and she was so uninhibited in that strange Jane Campion movie, Holy Smoke. I needed someone who could play this girl and show you her crude side but also her tender side. I don't see how her performance could be better.

Filmmaker: How did the cast respond to the script?

Turturro: Everyone read it, and everyone liked it. We rehearsed it like a play: we did acting exercises, we did all kinds of things to make people feel foolish and relax with each other, because you can't achieve that by being professionals — you've got to get into the realm of the amateur.

Filmmaker: How easy was it to get the cast to sing?

Turturro: Well, Kate sings. I sent them all to singing lessons, and I figured that they would all sing along, like you would sing along with the radio. James was a little nervous, but James actually has a very nice voice. Everyone just embraced it. We had two choreographers and then I would come in and rechoreograph it because I wanted it to be more like regular movements and not Broadway choreography. I looked at that one big song that Ann-Margret had in Tommy, and that was an inspiration. Ann-Margret was an inspiration for Kate's whole look — and she was someone I had a thing for when I was a kid.

Filmmaker: What was it like working with Christopher Walken? He's not only a great actor, but also a very talented dancer.

Turturro: Chris is a huge talent. Now we think of him in a more eccentric way, but he's also done tremendous stage work, where he's moving and emotional in things. I told him I would love to make a movie with him about a clown, and he goes, “Oh, yeah. Clowns are scary.” He's a lovely guy and I love working with him. He would say, “I don't want the choreographer to tell me things.” I said, “OK, do you want to try stuff?” He said, “No, you do it and then I'll watch you. If I like what you do, I'll steal it from you.” He made me dance, and he'd be “Oh, I like that, I'll do that.” We get along very well, but he has the things that he needs. He doesn't like to drive and act anymore, I don't know why. “You got to be parked, that's the only thing.” He likes the old rear-projection system.

Filmmaker: The two previous films you directed you co-wrote with Brandon Cole, so what was it like writing this screenplay on your own?

Turturro: It was a daunting thing, but I had so much great material. To be honest, my mother was a real big source of stories and she can be really irreverent and really funny. I would listen to a lot of things that she said and write them down. When I was a little kid, my mother would talk to all her friends and I would always be eavesdropping, crawling up the hallway to listen to them. When I was writing, I would read Bukowski's poems to charge me up, listen to Etta James, and get in there!

Filmmaker: One of the aspects of the film that might surprise people is the dialogue, which is colorful and sexual in a wonderfully inventive way.

Turturro: I asked the Bukowski estate if I could use a few quotes. My father was a builder, and when he got angry he had a wonderfully expressive foul mouth, but he never talked that way sexually. I have an appreciation of that. Shakespeare has all these bawdy things, and there's something about it that can be really liberating.

Filmmaker: You also wrote some great roles for women in this film.

Turturro: I have to say, I like women, any age. I think women are very powerful, wonderful, complicated, and in movies you don't see almost any of that. You see young girls and it's all about falling in love. But what happens when you're in it? What happens when it goes on for a while? What happens with a guy when you're caught between? I do like putting women in situations I don't see them in and I know that they have in them. When you look at great plays and great literature and old movies, the women got to do things. And in this movie, they're pretty active.

Filmmaker: What were the films that made you love cinema when you were young?

Turturro: When I was a kid, I grew up on Warner Brothers films, but I went through all different phases. Angels With Dirty Faces, On the Waterfront, The Sweet Smell of Success, Spartacus when I was a kid, but then when I saw European cinema when I was a teenager, I was blown away. The neo-realists, Bergman, Kurosawa, Buñuel — I like different people for different things. When I was young, there were a lot of things to inspire me: the movies of the '70s, movies way before that from the '50s, American films, European films. Those are the films that made me want to do this. Today, when I watch films, I don't see that as much. You don't see people like Bergman, struggling with their problems in a movie. To me, there's nothing more exciting, because it makes me feel less lonely, and included in life. When someone does that, it can be liberating — and also civilising. I'm very appreciative of it, even when it's not perfect; other movies, I have to be in the mood for.

Filmmaker: Which director that you've worked for has influenced you most?

Turturro: Certainly the Coen brothers in terms of preparation and everything, and not being afraid of doing something that they think no one is going to get. That gave me the courage to do something that I get, and they got it, which was good for me. I've worked with so many good directors: them, Spike [Lee], Francesco Rosi, who's a great compositional guy, Peter Weir, who plays music on his sets. I played music on the set all the time, even when [the scene] wasn't musical, just to get people in the mood, as something to respond to. I do a lot of things off-camera, because I know how actors are treated. If you do a little extra for an actor, they can do amazing things, so I tried to create an atmosphere that was fun and relaxed. It was serious and prepared, but irreverent. You take from different directors, say, “I like what that guy does” — but, at the end of the day, it's you.

Filmmaker: Do you have other things in the pipeline as a director?

Turturro: I have a couple of projects that I've worked on and that are done that would be very interesting to do. One based on a book by a very good writer, Roland Merullo, who now is being published more and more. It's a beautiful story, but I'm too old to be in it so I'd have to find the right actor. There's another script that I've developed with Scorsese and Spike Lee about a corrupt athlete, called Prince Jack, by Michael Di Jiacomo, who's another wonderful screenwriter. He's only directed one movie, but he's a major talent and that's a wonderful script that I'd like to do.

Filmmaker: Do you have to take on a role in a big movie if you're going direct one of your films?

Turturro: I do it afterwards. But I've made a certain amount of money and I've put it away. If you're a little short, you put in a little extra to know [a movie] is going to happen. Whether or not you get that back, you get it back in other ways. After I made my first film, I got a lot of offers to direct, but I wasn't really interested in anything they sent my way. For me, I've really gotta be in love with something.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/07/2007 03:34:00 PM Comments (1)