Whether he's writing, directing, creating special effects, playing music, or simply recounting anecdotes, Frank Cappello seems to have a compulsive need to entertain. He honed his storytelling skills as a kid reading out his imagined motocross adventures to classmates, and then spent years writing spec scripts while working in special effects. Though the first script he sold, Suburban Commando (1991), became a derided Hulk Hogan vehicle, it was a launchpad for Cappello to direct two genre pictures. American Yakuza (1993) and No Way Back (1995) both ended up above-average thrillers as a result of Cappello's contribution as writer-director-for-hire, as well as the presence of future stars Viggo Mortensen and Russell Crowe, respectively. Cappello, however, chose to move away from B-movie direction instead doing SFX work on Flubber (1997), Deep Blue Sea (1999) and Red Planet (2000), and writing the screenplays for the studio movies Timeline (2003) and Constantine (2005).

Cappello's desire to return to directing with a “small” film prompted him to write He Was A Quiet Man, the tale of troubled Bob Maconel (the excellent Christian Slater), a reclusive office nobody trying to work up the courage to murder his callous colleagues with the gun stashed in his desk drawer. But fate conspires to make him a hero when he kills a workmate who has gone postal — just seconds before Bob himself was planning to do the same. Capello's handling of the material, and particularly Bob's relationship with the woman he saves, Venessa (Elisha Cuthbert), is smart and thoughtful, and he consistently confounds our expectations and forces us to think closely about the complexities of the characters and their situations. Playing out like the bastard son of Office Space and Fight Club, He Was A Quiet Man distinguishes itself with its originality and dark humor, and suggests that there is much more to come from Cappello — as long as he can again get funding for edgy fare like this.

Filmmaker spoke to Cappello about making Christian Slater bald, ugly and awkward, the best way to handle Russell Crowe, and how Dirt Bike magazine taught him how to write.



Filmmaker: I presume a film with this subject matter was tough to get funded.

Cappello: A lot of people say how it was hell to make a movie — I have the opposite story. Two years ago in November I was engaged to get married and I was having [an engagement] party. I had talked about doing the film and some big stars were coming to the table, $12m stars that would do it for free. Christian Slater was someone I had always thought about, and then who comes barging into the party but Christian Slater. I hadn't even asked him [to be in the film], but he had heard through the grapevine I was doing it. He came and really campaigned for it, and it was kinda refreshing to see somebody shake everybody's hand and say “I'm the guy.” That night I had an argument: there were problems [with my fiancée], and we broke up! So the next week, I said “I don't want to think about this relationship, so I need to work now. Christian's available now, so I want to go.” Everybody was like, “He's on his way down, he's over.” I said, “I don't care. Slater's at rock bottom. He's raw, he's ready to do it. He'll do anything I ask. He'll shave his head, he'll do all this stuff. Christian's the guy.” I got a lot of people arguing with me, but I [was] paying half the bills.

Filmmaker: So you just embraced the spontaneity of the situation.

Cappello: I shot in L.A. with no unions. I just risked it. I just said, “To hell with it. I'm gonna go and if we get shut down, we get shut down.” But from the moment I said, “I'm making this movie,” everything fell into place. I always used the example of the sheepherder from the book The Alchemist, that when you're on the right path it seems like everything opens up. And it all happened because I didn't marry this girl, and decided to go right then. And because I went right then, everything fell into place, [and] all these people started walking in and saying, “I'd love to be a part of this.”

Filmmaker: Christian Slater really seemed to relish taking on a role this challenging and substantial.

Cappello: I think he's always been a great actor. He's really an intuitive actor, and he's always in his scene — he's there. He's not just saying lines, he will look around to see what other actors in the scene are thinking while he says something embarrassing, and that to me is somebody who really is an actor. He didn't need any direction, other than I'd whisper in his ear and say, “You've got too much [Jack] Nicholson. Get rid of the Nicholson.” I told him at the very start, “You've got to get rid of the cool factor.” How he found this role was we were sitting around [at his place], and it's cold. He starts rocking, because he's cold, and he's really stiff and tensing his whole body up, and I go, “That's Bob!” All he had to do was think about being cold. Then we went in and he allowed me to do anything. “You wanna shave back my hair? Give me crooked teeth? Give me rotten teeth? Give me rosacea?” And that's what we did. As he hadn't met Elisha Cuthbert until the third day of shooting, he was already Bob and when she walked in, he kept saying, “This is not how I look. I am not bald like this!”

Filmmaker: So that was about two years ago?

Cappello: We had a year and a half of post, which is why we're finally coming out [only now]. We had a lot of test screenings and I had an ending that was kind of confusing that I premiered in Austin, Texas, at the South by Southwest [Film Festival]. After I saw the crowd's reaction to the end, I went back to an ending that I [had] wanted to do. It's a darker ending, but it's not confusing. On paper, [the first ending] sounds good, but the audience was scratching its head so much at the end that it took away from [them] getting any feeling from the movie — all they did was guess what I was trying to say, and they finally gave up.

Filmmaker: Christian Slater didn't watch his dailies, so what was his reaction to the film when he saw it?

Cappello: Talk about a nervous guy. He came up to my apartment on the 12th floor, and he goes, “Are you sure you're having this screening on the right floor?” Because he might jump. So he sat down and watched, and at first he was going, “God, I look so geeky!” At the end, he buried his head in the pillows of my couch and he started kicking, and he's going, “We're in trouble, we're in trouble, we're in trouble...” We're going, “Christian, what's wrong?” He said, “There's nothing wrong. I've never felt this after a film I've done, this is the most pure feeling I've ever felt after doing a film.” He was just really excited.

Filmmaker: I think one of the film's great strengths is that it never descends into cliché, and you are always caught off guard by the directions that it takes.

Cappello: When I sat down to write it, reality TV was really coming on strong, and everybody was saying that within five years scripted work would be gone. I said, “Why?” “Because everybody knows what's gonna happen.” With reality TV and sports, we don't know the outcome, and so we watch. When I sat down to write this, I wrote it in two weeks, and I honestly just allowed myself to go in directions [that were more interesting]. When you're writing fast, you're almost watching it as a movie, and you're excited about where [the story is going].

Filmmaker: The film played at the GenArt Film Festival just after the Virginia Tech massacre – what was that like?

Cappello: The day before Virginia Tech we screened at a small theater, and it was a completely different feeling: at the end, people were really talking about it, but they were still laughing. The day after Virginia Tech, which was the closing night of GenArt, I had to get up and say, “This is a darkly humorous film, but in light of certain events we want you to know that we take it very seriously and you'll know by the end how seriously we do take it.” At the party afterwards, I just got flooded: the movie took on a whole new feeling. People really wanted to talk about it, about why these [killers] do it.

Filmmaker: How did you start writing?

Cappello: I was always a writer, even in junior high school. I'm not very good at English grammar, I hated all the rules, so in order for me to get passing grades I had to do extra credit work, which was a weekly story. It was about motocross riding, because I used to ride motocross, and each week I'd have to stand up and read my extra credit [writing]. I learned how to write from Dirt Bike Magazine. [laughs] Dirt Bike Magazine talked to the reader in a very irreverent way, so I learned to write in a very smart-ass way. My first script that sold out here was called Urban Commando, which they turned into Suburban Commando, with Hulk Hogan and Christopher Lloyd. It was really bad and it ended up being a really crappy movie.

Filmmaker: You worked with Russell Crowe on No Way Back.

Cappello: No one wanted him on the production because they didn't know who he was. He was from New Zealand. He wasn't your traditional handsome leading man, in fact, he was a little pudgy. He came over in a beard and he said, “I think I should have a beard because I have been hiding out for seven years since my wife died...” The producers were all saying, “You've got to make him shave his beard, because no actor has a beard — that's the worst thing in the world.” I said, “You make him shave the beard!” He and I had it out only one night: it was pouring down rain and I was shooting two scenes and he was yelling at me because I wasn't getting a long enough close-up on the other guy, not on him! I said, “Don't you ever yell at me in front of the crew again.” We went off, we drank a bunch of beer and we were best buddies after that. That's what you have to do with Russell, you just have to stand up to him.

Filmmaker: How did you get involved with Constantine?

Cappello: I was a getting a lot of comic book offers at the time. Warner Brothers handed me [the script for] Constantine, and I threw it away. I said, “This is a terrible script, this is Indiana Jones in Hong Kong.” It was really bad. Then they gave me the graphic novels and I went, “Oh my God, this is really great!” They let me go and write and I threw everything out and started over. When I turned it in, everyone was mad at me because I threw out a million dollars worth of script and I started over. I went through three directors, two actors and I was on that project on-and-off for five years. It got together because we just kept working at it.

Filmmaker: What's the worst, or weirdest, job you've ever had?

Cappello: Dishwasher, but I was really young at the time. Anytime you have the murky water when you're washing dishes at a restaurant, they do funny things to the new guy like put a rat trap inside, under the soap. Yeah, I got that.

Filmmaker: Is Hollywood going in the right direction?

Cappello: There's one direction for Hollywood to go, and that's the direction it's going. There's nothing else you can do. Honestly. You know what the coolest thing about special effects [being so good] that anything you can imagine can be done now? The only way to stand out is to have a better story. So now we're back to telling stories — you can't just throw a bunch of special effects in a movie.

Filmmaker: What was the first movie you ever saw?

Cappello: It could have been The Ten Commandments. I think it was at a drive-in theater. I don't think it had any impact at that age. I think I was four years old. The parting of the Red Sea — I do remember that. I was like, “Wow! How did they open up the water?” And then I ran up to the swing set upfront and played. [laughs]

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

Cappello: That I'm happy. No doubt. I haven't had one that has been completely over-the-top successful, so maybe I don't know yet. Maybe if I had a film that made $400m and made everybody go “Wow!”, but it sucked, I'd feel different.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 11/30/2007 12:55:00 PM Comments (1)

Put simply, Crispin Glover is not from here: there is an otherworldly quality to the actor-turned-director's appearance, manner and aesthetics that make even his friend and mentor David Lynch seem pretty normal. The son of actors Bruce and Marie Glover, he came to prominence in the mid-1980s with performances in Back to the Future (1985) and River's Edge (1986). Very much treading his own path, he combined a career playing eccentrics on screen with painting, writing books, like Oak Mot (1991) and Rat Catching (1992), and also releasing an album, The Big Problem Does Not Equal the Solution, The Solution Equals Let It Be (1989), which he released, like his books, under the name Crispin Hellion Glover. Having worked with Lynch, Oliver Stone, Milos Forman, Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Neil LaBute (not to mention McG on both Charlie's Angels movies!), Glover made his directorial debut in 2005 with What Is It? A wildly bizarre experimental film that he also wrote and starred in, it tackles numerous taboo subjects, features a cast predominantly made up of young people with Down Syndrome, and is described by Glover as “the adventures of a young man whose principle interests are snails, salt, a pipe, and how to get home.”

Glover's follow-up, and the second part of his It trilogy, is It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE, which was written by the late Steven C. Stewart, an actor with cerebral palsy who appeared in What Is It? Co-directed by David Brothers, the film stars Stewart as his alter-ego Paul, a man who also is confined to a wheelchair and whose speech is almost indecipherable, but who is perfectly understood by women, most of whom want to sleep with him. The film indulges Stewart's sexual fantasies and fetishes, but more importantly underlines the fact that Paul, despite his disability, is capable of good and bad just like anybody else — a point made all too clear when he strangles every single woman he beds. Shot and acted in an eerie Lynchian style, and boasting a carnivalesque cast — everybody from a Rainer Werner Fassbinder regular, Margit Carstensen, and a Playmate of the Month to a dwarf, an amputee and both Glover's parents — It is Fine! is a grand cinematic statement. A meeting of Stewart's ideas and Glover's stylistics, the film is audacious and shocking not only because of its graphic sex and violence but because of the directness with which it attacks seemingly unbroachable subjects.

Filmmaker spoke with Glover about his unique writer-star Stewart, fearlessly tackling taboo subjects, and how he reacted when Robert Zemeckis stole his face.



Filmmaker: What was the genesis of this project?

Glover: Steven C. Stewart had been locked in a nursing home from when he was in his early twenties for about 10 years — and, coincidentally, the nursing home that we shot in, we found out when we got there that was the nursing home Steve had been locked in. And you can see that was not a fun place to be living all of your twenties. Once Steve got out of the nursing home he lived in an assisted living place so he was able to get out, and he started writing this screenplay. He showed it to [director] Larry Roberts, and there was a younger filmmaker that he thought might be interested in it, named David Brothers. David was pretty amazed by the screenplay. He started telling me about this project and I read the screenplay, and as soon as I read it I knew it was something I had to produce. It was particularly the scene where he proposes marriage to [Margit Carstensen's character] Linda; you could tell that there was a reality within this fantastical structure that he had that was extremely revealing and had a lot of pathos and a cathartic element.

Filmmaker: What was it like working with him, as both an actor and a screenwriter?

Glover: You can see it in the film, Steve had a kind of a graceful, charming quality about him. For David and I, it was imperative that we kept the integrity of the naïveté of Steve’s screenplay: we didn’t want to mess with that because that was what was really beautiful about it. Steve really would have let us do anything we wanted to do. He wasn’t a prima donna worried about if something was puce or not. His [script] was 120-some pages and I cut it down to 50 just so I could shoot it. He had written it in a genre style like a television murder mystery from the ‘70s wherein he was the bad guy. That was what was important to him. He felt that as a handicapped person he should be able to play the bad guy instead of the nice guy. That’s part of what I think again helps: because he’s being truthful on some level about what his real experience is. There’s these genre structuralisms, but yet he’s a man in a wheelchair, a man with a hair fetish, which is at least as important as the wheelchair element. [laughs] But it’s his reality, so he’s not straying too far from that, yet it’s a fantasy, so there’s fantasies within his reality. It’s not like he gets up out of his chair, but there are certain elements: women understand him quite readily (though he’s obviously difficult to understand), and they fall in love with him and want to have sex with him very readily. It’s very interesting stuff.

Filmmaker: What sense did you get from him of what it was like to play out his long-held fantasy?

Glover: Well, another thing is that Steve was a real ham. He really loved being in front of the camera, acting, he loved to sing show tunes. In 2000, one of his lungs collapsed and it became apparent that if we didn’t shoot anything soon we may never get to shoot anything at all. I met with Steve, we started building the sets, I went back to L.A., acted in an independent film for about six weeks and then went back to Salt Lake and we shot over a six-month time period. Within a month after we finished shooting, Steve died. When he was on his deathbed, I got a call one morning and I was told that Steve was basically asking us for permission to take himself off of life-support, because his lung had collapsed again. Cerebral palsy is not degenerative, but he was choking on his own saliva and had pneumatic problems. So that was, of course, a very sad day and a heavy responsibility to let him know that yes, we did have enough film and that was that. But I know that if I had said, “No, Steve, we don’t have enough film, we need more stuff,” he would have got the operation and stayed alive to make the movie. He needed to get something across and this was what his life was about, in a way.

Filmmaker: Did he ever make it clear just how significant it was to him?

Glover: There was a day when we were shooting, and David had to bring [Steven] back [home]. As they were driving home, it was in a rush and the toupee had to come off and there was glue on his head and he was all messed up, and they were driving home and Steve apparently said, “This is the best time of my life.” David said, “No, come on, you’re a mess. What are you talking about? This is all rushed…” and then Steve made some kind of [forceful] motion and said, “No, no. This is the best day of my life.” He made it very apparent and serious that this was really what it was about for him. I knew it was important, but in retrospect now I really know how important it was. If I hadn’t got this movie done, I would have felt that I had actually done something wrong, like I had done a bad thing. I would have never felt right about it if I hadn’t gotten this movie made. When he died, I realized how much this person had influenced my life, in a big way and in a positive way. He was a powerful communicator.

Filmmaker: People who see this film will think that you have a desire to shock.

Glover: I didn’t write this movie. I really have zero interest in shock and in a certain way part of the reason I put this as a second film to What Is It? is because it’s more what I like to call “exploration of taboo subject area.” I think right now in corporately funded and distributed film, anything that can possibly make an audience uncomfortable in any way is necessarily excised, or the film is not funded or distributed, and I think that’s a very bad thing for the culture. It’s the moment when an audience sits back in its chairs and looks up at the screen and says, “Is this right, what I’m watching? Is this wrong, what I’m watching? Is the filmmaker right or wrong? Should I be here or not?” It’s at the moment that these genuine questions are being asked that true education can happen. And true education isn’t happening in the cinema right now in this culture.

Filmmaker: The film seems to be the meeting of Steven C. Stewart’s thematic concerns and your stylistic concerns.

Glover: Yeah. And in What Is It? there are thematic elements that are related to the thematic elements [in this film], and part of it is because I put him in the film, and there’s graphic sexuality to do with his character in What Is It? also. I’m really not that interested in making films with graphic sexuality, but for this movie it was extremely important. When [Steven] wrote the screenplay, the graphicness of the sexuality was very detailed. The hair [fetish] was in extreme detail. No detail about where they were, what it looked like, or how the people were, so this is where David and I brought in our [expertise], trying to make it look as opulent and as beautifully fantastical of a world that would look like a corporate funded and distributed film as much as we could.

Filmmaker: You have an incredibly diverse cast: a man with cerebral palsy, one of Fassbinder’s muses, a former Playboy Playmate of the Month, and both your parents.

Glover: That’s right. I wanted, in casting the women particularly, to have a certain kind of fantastical perfection of women, because it was written like that. Most of the women in it I knew one way or another. I went out with Jami [Farrell] and she was always a nice person. My father is an actor and acting teacher, and my mother is a former dancer and actress. I needed people that were willing to do it, and also that I didn’t have to pay. Margit Carstensen is a different story: I did pay Margit Carstensen something, but not very much compared with what she makes [usually]. I originally had a different conception for her character; it was more similar to the actresses who embodied the other roles, [but then] I started thinking, “Who are great actresses?” I’d been watching a lot of Fassbinder and as soon as I thought of her I thought, “I’ll bet she’ll be attracted to this,” because she worked with a great filmmaker that was interested in interesting things.

Filmmaker: What’s your biggest extravagance?

Glover: Sometimes I like to eat at nice restaurants and I have some cars that are a hobby, but I’ve got them inexpensively. And I’ll go to classical concerts, museums and parks and castles, historical things. But everything else has to do with my filmmaking. I own property in the Czech Republic, it’s an old chateau that was built in the 1600s and next to it are horse stables that I’m turning into a soundstage to make movies. It’s a nice place, but I wanted to buy a place where I wanted to be.

Filmmaker: When can we expect It Is Mine, the final part of the It trilogy?

Glover: The screenplay is written, and probably will be cut down. I’ll be funding this myself and shooting it in the Czech Republic. But it’s going to be a long time before I shoot that film. I need to make at least a couple of films in the Czech Republic: it’s a new culture, a new language and there will be certain difficulties that I haven’t encountered. I need to make simpler films at first and then build up to It Is Mine.

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

Glover: Probably the least pleasant thing I’ve experienced was the situation that happened with the sequels to Back to the Future and the fact that the producers hired another actor and put them into a false nose, chin and cheekbones and interspliced it with a little bit of footage of me from the original film in order to fool audiences into thinking that it was me. There was a lawsuit about it and because of my lawsuit there’s laws in the Screen Actors Guild to make it so that producers and actors could never do that again. Strangely, I just finished [playing] Grendel in Beowulf, and it was directed by [Back to the Future’s] Robert Zemeckis. We never talked about it, we just talked about the work at hand.

Filmmaker: Finally, is Crispin Glover the actor and Crispin Hellion Glover the artist?

Glover: It’s not quite that, but it has something to do with that. I started acting professionally when I was 13 but previous to that when I would draw things or write, I would sign it “Crispin Hellion Glover.” That’s my birth-given whole name, and when I started acting I thought it was a bit long so I just used Crispin Glover, and that’s my name in the Screen Actor’s Guild. Publicly it seems like I’ve chosen this name late, but that isn’t what it is. I know sometimes people go, “Oh, what is this pretentious thing?” but it’s my real whole name and it makes sense to use for those things.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 11/21/2007 05:43:00 PM Comments (0)

If you believe what you read, Noah Baumbach's films — sharp, witty, poignant and sometimes devastating — are drawn directly from his life. The son of Village Voice film critic Georgia Brown and novelist and film critic Jonathan Baumbach, Baumbach debuted as a writer-director in 1995 with his acclaimed Kicking and Screaming, the first of a number of films made during his twenties about New Yorkers in their twenties. After his second film, Mr Jealousy (1997), Baumbach admits that he got "derailed" and ended up making Highball (1997) pseudonymously then scripted a TV movie, Thirty (2000), neither of which he considers to be his best work. However, his career was re-energized by his association with Wes Anderson: he brought Baumbach on board to co-write The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), and then produced Baumbach's triumphant The Squid and the Whale (2005), a semi-autobiographical film about the disintegration of a bohemian Brooklyn family which left the world in no doubt about Baumbach's skills as both writer and director. (In addition, Anderson and Baumbach recently adapted Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr. Fox, which will be released in 2009.)

Margot at the Wedding is the perfect companion piece to The Squid and the Whale: like its predecessor it shows us a world of callous but creative individuals from the perspective of teenagers who probably have more insight into human behavior than their parents. Set over the course of a few days, it chronicles the return of novelist Margot (Nicole Kidman), with her son Claude (Zane Pais) in tow, to her old childhood home for the wedding of her formerly estranged sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who is Baumbach's wife). That Margot disapproves of the groom, Malcolm (Jack Black), that she is having an affair and is planning to leave her husband, Jim (John Turturro), that Pauline is secretly pregnant and Margot can't keep her mouth shut about that (or anything else for that matter), all adds to an already complicated situation. Channeling the 70s in its look and soundtrack, Margot at the Wedding is a beautifully written and deeply human drama. Very funny despite, and sometimes because of, its neuroses and emotional upheavals, Baumbach's film is a smart, classy and highly satisfying piece of cinema.

Filmmaker spoke to Baumbach about the autobiographical aspects of his work, his love of Yellow Submarine, and the legendary director he and Wes Anderson call "Pop."



Filmmaker: Margot at the Wedding really looks a ‘70s film, despite the fact that it is set in the present day. What was the reason behind you having that anachronistic quality?

Baumbach: We thought about this a lot with the design of the house: those homes that still have all the things from over the years, the old records and books, and things only get replaced when they break. In those kind of houses, somebody always comes and stays and leaves the book they were reading, so it becomes part of the shelf. I think of the movie as very contemporary, but when you’re returning to your family home there can be a feeling of stopped time.

Filmmaker: The way characters are dressed is also very redolent of the ‘70s.

Baumbach: I guess so. I hadn’t thought so specifically the ‘70s, but [they were] styles that felt right for the people and they happened not to be the most contemporary. It wasn’t as deliberate as thinking about linking things to the ’70s as it was about being true to the anthropology of these people.

Filmmaker: Did you have trips to secluded New England summer houses, like the one in the movie, in your own childhood?

Baumbach: I didn’t have anything like this specific situation, but I spent a couple of summers on islands: Shelter Island, an island in Maine, and also an island near Seattle. From a kid’s perspective, it always felt like an adventure if you were going to an island, and there was a great feeling of seclusion and remove and coziness, but also it’s kind of scary. There’s that feeling of isolation, and “What if something happens? Can we get back to civilization?” And then learning that Manhattan was an island threw me off further! It seemed like such a strange thing to be true. So there were those feelings from my childhood. I grew up in Brooklyn in an urban environment and when we would go to the country there was always something intriguing, exciting and scary to me because it felt so different from my life.

Filmmaker: With The Squid and the Whale, there was a lot of speculation about just how autobiographical the film was. In Margot, there is a scene where you seem to address that issue, when Margot is asked about how real life is echoed in her work.

Baumbach: I did write that scene after one too many Squid and the Whale interviews and I was having some fun with it. I also meant for that scene to show the pointlessness of [autobiographical aspects] in terms of the work. I mean, I understand people’s interest in it but I think it is a reductive way to talk about any kind of art.

Filmmaker: You’ve said previously that you viewed all of your life as potential material for a movie. In retrospect, do you regret saying that?

Baumbach: The thing is that it’s a like a recipe: you take all these things and you invent off of them and you change them. The way I write, I write as openly as I can in the early stages, and then I construct and change and cut and move things around and combine characters, and when it’s all over it’s this complete mishmash of things. What gets me in trouble is that I tend to use elements from my life or friends of mine’s names or things that I have a personal connection to. It makes me feel comfortable when I’m working, but it’s not as easy as saying, “Oh, [he] used that name, that’s that person.” Or, “[He] used that chair so the person that sits in that chair is [him].” But I do write very personally, and so if someone wants to go through it and find things and link them, they’re probably going to be able to do that in some kind of superficial way, but it has nothing to do with the substance of what the work is.

Filmmaker: Some of the characters in your films are monsters, or at least do and say monstrous things. What is the process of the writing like for you, when you channel and live with these people?

Baumbach: When I’m writing about people, I don’t think of what they’re doing as monstrous. I don’t think the characters in the movies are monstrous or even do monstrous things, I think this is how people are. [laughs] It doesn’t mean that’s how everyone is, it doesn’t mean they’re like this the whole time. This is reflective of how I see the world, so I’m not going into some horribly dark place to do it, I’m just connecting to what’s out there.

Filmmaker: The casting of Jack Black seems very out of keeping with the kind of people you’ve had in your films. Was this an intentional ploy to show how much of an outsider his character was?

Baumbach: Jack was my first idea and I always wanted whoever played Malcolm to be funny. I’d met Jack and I knew Jack could act, and I think Jack’s really good even in School of Rock and movies he’s done where it’s a comic performance. It always felt very grounded to me. I talked to Jack about doing the part, and he was joking, “I’ll have to bring my A-game to work with Nicole and Jennifer.” I said, “Well, think of yourself as the outsider in that group, so use that feeling.” I was saying it just to convince him to do it, but maybe it was helpful.

Filmmaker: And what was it like working with your wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, on this film?

Baumbach: I understand the potential pitfalls to working with your wife, but it was only easy. It felt just like an extension of our relationship. It was great to be able to go to work together and have the same project to talk about, and our intimacy only helped our ability to work together. I wanted her to play something that felt closer to her. Not that the character is literally like her in any way, but that the performance would come from a place that was closer to her and [it would] be less of a character that she took on. Because I know her so well, I was able to work with her that way.

Filmmaker: Did you write the part for her?

Baumbach: I don’t really think of actors when I’m writing, but certainly at a fairly early point I thought she should play it. I don’t remember when I told her that.

Filmmaker: How quickly did you call her agent?

Baumbach: [laughs] Right, right! I figured I’d bypass the agent in this case. [laughs]

Filmmaker: The resurgence of your career seems to have stemmed from your association with Wes Anderson. How much of an impact did he have on what you’re doing at the moment?

Baumbach: In a very specific way, he brought me on to write The Life Aquatic when I was struggling to get The Squid and the Whale made and basically a year that I would have spent waiting for the phone to ring I instead spent working on that script with him, which was a real pleasure. And he also produced The Squid and the Whale, which gave the movie a bit of a boost. It took five years to make; maybe it would have taken eight without Wes. [laughs] He’s a great friend, and it’s always a funny question: how do you talk about your friends as public figures? [laughs] In a way, Wes was an inspiration too because he just continues to do his thing and do it exactly his way and on his terms. I think I got derailed in my career after my second movie, and being around him and seeing how he was doing things and how he took control of his career was great. I learned a lot, thinking “If I get back in…”, how I was going to do things, and do things on my terms.

Filmmaker: In the first part of your career you seemed to be making films from a twentysomething perspective, whereas with your latter two films it’s very much from an adolescent point of view.

Baumbach: In my twenties, I was making films almost chronicling what was actually happening at the time and probably as I got older and became an adult and my scope broadened artistically, I looked more inward and I became more open to my life as a whole. And so, of course, that involves thinking about childhood and adolescence, and also thinking forward and to my parents’ generation and people older than me. For whatever reason, these are more the stories that were interesting to me.

Filmmaker: At the core of these two recent films there has been a mother-son relationship. Is that dynamic particularly interesting to you?

Baumbach: I’m very close with my parents and I’m very interested in adults and kids and how they occupy the same space and how the space between them blurs and how kids pick up on things and how adults see kids as allies. If you approach a character as I do from the psychological standpoint and really think about the real psychology of their behavior, it’s always going to connect to childhood, whether you actually see their childhood or not in the movie.

Filmmaker: You cast Peter Bogdanovich in a number of your early movies. How did your friendship with him affect you as a filmmaker?

Baumbach: It had a real impact on me. I cast him in Mr Jealousy — incidentally before The Sopranos — as a therapist [laughs], and we became friends during that. I was a huge fan of his. When Wes and I became friends, soon after that he met Peter separately so the three of us often get together. I call him “Pop” and he calls us his sons and it’s a sort of a cinema family. [laughs] Peter‘s a great resource: I show him scripts and early cuts of things, he had some really good things to say about Margot and Squid. He’s lived through so much of it, he’s a great, wise voice about the movie business and about movies, and I love so many of the movies that he [made] and the filmmakers that he spoke to and hung out with. It’s really great to have a friend like that who has done it all.

Filmmaker: Your movies seem very novelistic. Have you ever considered actually writing a novel?

Baumbach: I think of things in terms of movies, so my feeling is why can’t movies have the subject matter and the quality of novels or short stories? So many of the movies I love — the Truffaut movies, Rohmer movies and Bergman movies and Renoir movies — you could say the same thing about them, but they’re so cinematic. The simple way to say it is I want to make cinematic versions of human stories.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Baumbach: Yellow Submarine. It was a great first movie to have because it’s sophisticated but it’s also colorful and a cartoon, so it prepares you for the future but it’s good for you right then and there.

Filmmaker: Do you always try and get into the theater early enough to watch the previews?

Baumbach: I used to, yes, but now with all the commercials, and some theaters have this thing called The Ten, where it’s like 10 minutes of garbage they throw at you and video game commercials… It’s awful. So now it’s less important to me, [but] I used to love that.

Filmmaker: Finally, should a director always take risks?

Baumbach: I don’t think any director can not take a risk. There’s too many things that are uncontrollable on a movie set, so I think even if you’re trying to control everything, even if you’re Stanley Kubrick and trying to micromanage the whole situation, there’s just risk in making a film, period.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 11/16/2007 05:38:00 PM Comments (0)

Considering Steve Barron's career, you can't help wondering why he isn't better known. Having grown up around films (because his mother, Zelda Barron, was a script supervisor, producer and director), Dublin-born Barron progressed from a clapper loader on movies like A Bridge Too Far and Ridley Scott’s debut The Duellists (both 1977) to one of the most influential pop promo directors of the 1980s. He was responsible for the videos for Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing and a-ha’s Take On Me. After making the cult classic Electric Dreams (1984), he worked with Jim Henson's Creature Shop, a gig that lead to him helming the hugely successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). He followed it up with Saturday Night Live spin-off The Coneheads, then worked as a producer on a handful of Hollywood movies before making three memorable, big-budget mini series, Merlin (1998), Arabian Nights (2000) and DreamKeeper (2003). Between the latter two, he returned to his native U.K. to make a brace of distinctly British comedies, Rat (2000) and Mike Bassett: England Manager (2001).

Despite the variety of his work, nothing in his past indicated that Barron would make a film like Choking Man. An inventive, understated New York indie, it tells the tale of Jorge (Octavio Gómez), an Ecuadorian dishwasher working in a diner in Jamaica, Queens, said to be the most cosmopolitan place in the world. Crippled by shyness, Jorge is almost incapable of communication and spends most of his time staring at the poster of the Heimlich maneuver that hangs above his work station, but sees hope of redemption in cheery Chinese waitress Amy (Eugenia Yuan) who owner Rick (Mandy Patinkin) has recently hired. Choking Man is Barron’s first time as writer as well as director and sees him reinvent himself with a pared down, quietly evocative film marked by its smart use of animation, which acts as a window into Jorge’s inner life. Choking Man debuted at the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival, and won Best Film Not Playing At A Theater Near You at the Gotham Awards later that same year.

Filmmaker spoke to Barron about his surprising move into indie filmmaking, spending his childhood on movie sets, and how Anthony Minghella got him the job directing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.



Filmmaker: What was your inspiration for Choking Man?

Barron: I’d spent a couple of years in New York before deciding to do this particular film. I was looking for a story. I was inspired by independent films coming out of New York in the last six, seven years, [like] The Station Agent and Raising Victor Vargas. I thought, those scripts, if there were any flying around, they wouldn’t be coming to me in a million years because I’m so far from that kind of material in what I’ve done so far. I’d always wanted to write, so I decided to find the story in New York.

Filmmaker: And where did the main concept come from?

Barron: I’d originally been sitting with my son in a diner and we’d been looking at that poster of the Heimlich maneuver and thinking how unappetizing it is, but looking around I could see that it really was invisible to the locals. That related to another conversation with my son about how the people who work in the kitchens, a lot of whom are illegal immigrants, fade into a sort of anonymity. I felt that one character could find some solace in that poster, and a window into his life through the non-descript character in the graphic. Those two things felt quite exciting, so I spent a few months getting on the train to Jamaica and just wandering around: I’d go from one diner to the next and I’d listen to dialogue and watch what was going on through the kitchen doors, how the relationships between the waitresses and the kitchen staff are, and slowly the pieces came together and it seemed like they were all right for each other.

Filmmaker: How easy was it for you to write once you’d done that research?

Barron: Very easy, actually, I loved it. It’s my first script, so I didn’t know what it was going to be. I was really nervous because I’d never written dialogue, but that was what I concentrated on, what I was hearing, and I’d often be scribbling down [lines] in a notebook. I got some funny looks. I had to move diners every two hours, so I drank so many cups of tea and so many bowls of gravy mash, but I really got fascinated by the culture, and the story grew up [out of that].

Filmmaker: Was it is easier for you to write the dialogue when your central character is essentially mute?

Barron: Yeah, it was easier. Having him mute was a definite decision also because when I was in those diners I thought, I want to do it about a character you don’t normally make a film about. In fact, somebody asked me after one of the screenings at Tribeca, “Why on earth did you do it about this character when there’s five other characters in the film that it should have been about?” I said, “That’s precisely why I did it, because I’ve seen films about those other characters, but I hadn’t seen this film.”

Filmmaker: It seems like with this film you overhauled your whole filmmaking process and redefined the way in which you work.

Barron: Yeah, totally. I feel like I’ve more than overhauled it, I’ve started a new track of authoring a film, literally. What I felt I could get out of this was more depth in the film and the characters if I wrote it as well, because I’d have a bigger understanding of what was going on beyond it and I wouldn’t have to paste those layers on, they would exist [anyway]. These are much stronger performances than I’ve ever been at the helm of, and I don’t think that’s any coincidence: it’s because I’m able to imbue a lot of that in the writing, and really understand it and go there in a way that I haven’t before. Also, my tastes have changed: I used to be first in line at the theater when Ghostbusters opened, and I’m not anymore, I’m first in line at Lust, Caution.

Filmmaker: Ghostbusters takes us in the direction of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. How did you end up directing that film?

Barron: It happened through the Henson Creature Shop primarily. [In the late 80s] Jim Henson approached me about doing a TV series, a very interesting, dark early folk tales [series] called Storyteller. I found that really fun because it was a blank page again, and Anthony Minghella was the writer, so we did what I felt was good stuff together. Because I’d worked with creatures, Ninja Turtles came along and it was actually Anthony Minghella’s suggestion to the film’s producers that I do it. I still feel I’m in that pigeonhole: I still get sent the 6-10-year-olds scripts, even though I’ve not done any for some time.

Filmmaker: Looking at your résumé, you’ve had discrete periods when you focused on one type of work (like music videos, children’s films, mini-series, etc.). Is this the start of a new period in your career in independent film?

Barron: I think so. There have been chapters and I do sort of stick on a chapter, but once I’ve done it, I feel like I’ve done it. I’ve just written another screenplay which I’m hoping to shoot in India next year. I’ve started casting and that feels like part of the Choking Man thing, as it’s an independent film that I’ve written that is as uncompromised as I want to make it. It’s definitely not in the commercial bracket on paper, but it could become [something like] Monsoon Wedding. I would be very happy with that.

Filmmaker: What have you taken from those different chapters of your career that you put into Choking Man?

Barron: In a lot of ways, I took more from what I did in my first chapter, the music videos, which is how to stand up there and drive it with adrenaline. You had to make 23 set-ups a day and you were on a pulse that was very different. The thing I didn’t take from any of those [other chapters] was that comfort zone that you would get into on most of the films. I went back to that adrenaline that came out of being very light-footed and not stuck in a groove and that was a massive difference.

Filmmaker: The animation in Choking Man seems to hark back somewhat to the video you directed for A-Ha’s Take On Me.

Barron: When I was putting it together afterwards it reminded me of Take On Me, but I hadn’t thought of it while we were making it. I’ve always had that rule about animation that it’s got to be motivated. When we made Take On Me, we had this animation style we wanted to use with the guys, but I wasn’t comfortable with using it until I thought of the idea, which was motivated by a comic book. Once it had that motivation, it really grew in stature and [it was] the same with Choking Man: the concept came before the animation, and it’s the idea of his window.

Filmmaker: Because of your mother, who worked in film in a variety of roles, you were on sets quite a bit as a kid. What effect did that have on you?

Barron: It had a big impact, massive. I hated school, my mom was quite liberal and my dad was always not around so she would go onto a film and we’d either look after ourselves at home or I’d convince her to take us to wherever she was filming and we’d be around the set. But just because it was a laugh, not because I was interested in film. It was a way of avoiding school. I had good “set smarts,” but I was more interested in playing football with the technicians than finding out what a director did. I had no idea what a director did even though I was around sets for years as a kid. I just thought they turned up and were treated very well!

Filmmaker: So when did your interest in film really begin?

Barron: It actually changed at school, when I was 15. I was getting nowhere on any of the exams and I was crap at art as well, mainly because I didn’t show up a lot and I couldn’t draw. But this art teacher said, “This year you’ve got a CSE [course] and instead of doing a drawing you can make a little film and they give you a 3-minute roll of film.” The government giving you a 3-minute roll of film was so abstract and so unlike anything that was going on, but I’d seen cameras on the set so I said yes to the roll of film and camera and then made a film about the colors and magic of glass, and got my only pass in an exam. That was the main reason I got inspired, but it was more about the cameras. I was fascinated with the cameras, left school and just rang up all the camera hire firms and said, “Have you got any jobs?” I got a job as a teaboy at that biggest camera hire firm in London, and for a couple of years all I was interested in was the cameras, not the filmmaking process.

Filmmaker: Presumably your mother becoming a director herself was an inspiration to you too.

Barron: Totally. Actually, what happened was I got pulled onto Superman and A Bridge Too Far as a clapper loader. On days off, I’d be in town getting interested in New Wave bands and started meeting people in music whilst I was working at Pinewood [Studios] on these massive films. I put the two together and [one] guy gave me a bit of cash and said, ”Will you make a film on our group?” It was pre-MTV and we were making these promo films, and the first few we turned up for, no one was the director and I was the producer. We did The Jam, their first [video], Strange Town. We all just turned up and there was an idea, but [the lead singer] Paul Weller didn’t want to go out in the rain, so we changed the idea. After doing about 20 of them, I realized that I was just starting to be a director.

Filmmaker: If you had an unlimited budget and could cast whoever you wanted (alive or dead), what film would you make?

Barron: Right now, the film I would make is the film I’ve written about a kid and a rickshaw driver in Bangalore in India. It’s got Irfan Khan in it, the guy from A Mighty Heart, and that’s who I’d have, even with an unlimited budget.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Barron: I think the first film I was saw was called Sammy Going South, which no one’s ever heard of and I’ve never found since. It’s probably the reason I want to do this film in India. It’s the story of a little kid who gets kidnapped by a sheikh and taken across the Sahara, chained from his finger to the [sheik’s] little finger. I was transported into another world for the first time I can remember. The first [movie] memory I’ve got is that film. I can still see some scenes in it today, and I think it’s influenced some of the things I’ve done. I think you re-dream these films and reinvent and restage them. There’s one particular night scene where he throws a little stone into the fire and it jumps out and blinds the Arab. I’ve not seen it since I was [a kid] — I bet it’s not got the same angles that I have in my head.

Filmmaker: Finally, should a director always take risks?

Barron: There’s a quote by [Ralph Waldo] Emerson, the famous philosopher, and he said, “Always do what you’re afraid to do.” I only found that out later, but that’s what I was doing. Unless I was afraid it, it wasn’t going to be any good, and I found the biggest risks I took — when I was really out there and on a limb with the things I did — those were the ones that were easily the best at the end of it.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 11/09/2007 12:46:00 PM Comments (0)

For 30 years, Brit Julien Temple has combined his dual passions of film and music, and worked with greats in both fields along the way. He first came to prominence with The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1979), the Sex Pistols' madcap cinematic offering, and from there went on to become an important figure in the fledgling pop video medium as well as pioneering the feature-length promo with the Human League's spy-themed Mantrap (1983) and Mick Jagger's Running Out of Luck (1987). Though Absolute Beginners (1986), the lavish 50s-set musical starring David Bowie and the Kinks' Ray Davies, famously flopped, he immediately bounced back by contributing a segment to the opera portmanteau movie Aria (1987) and followed that with Earth Girls are Easy (1988), an aliens-on-earth Hollywood comedy with a strong musical aspect. In the decade that followed, Temple made an IMAX movie for the Rolling Stones, At the Max (1991), a gritty New York crime pic co-written by and starring Mickey Rourke, Bullet (1996), and biopics of French auteur Jean Vigo and the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vigo (1998) and Pandaemonium (2000).

Having recently made two definitive music documentaries, The Filth and the Fury (2000) and Glastonbury (2006), Temple now continues the trend with Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, his film about the iconic Clash frontman. Blending archive footage with campfire remembrances from myriad figures in Strummer's life, it constructs a portrait of a complex, evolving artist. Initially defined by his politicized rebelliousness and ruthless ambition, Strummer found greater peace after the demise of the Clash. He died tragically of a congenital heart defect in 2002, aged just 50. As with The Filth and the Fury, Temple's superlative documentary about the Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer is brought to life by the director's dynamic cinematic style and passion for the subject, and serves as a fitting memorial to one of the great figures in late 20th century music.

Filmmaker spoke to Temple about his unusual first meeting with Strummer, keeping his punk sensibility and why he wishes he'd made Méliès' A Trip to the Moon.



Filmmaker: When did you first meet Joe?

Temple: I first met him in Chalk Farm [in London] in the rehearsal space that the Clash had. I’d got permission to go there from Bernie [Rhodes, their manager]; he said, “Go there, you can film and they’ll be rehearsing.” So we turned up — it was very cold, I remember, it was winter [1976]. There was no one there in this big, open warehouse space, except there was this really weird smell and there was this table with a plastic tablecloth over it, and the smell seemed to be coming from there. When I lifted up the tablecloth, there was Joe asleep. He still had his boots on, and was not very happy to have been woken.

Filmmaker: And how quickly did you become friends with him?

Temple: Well, I was filming them quite intensely for three or four months, and then it was all over because they said, “You’ve either got to be with us or The [Sex] Pistols.” So I wasn’t friends with him properly until much later, in the mid-‘90s when he actually moved down to where I live [in Somerset] in England. I met him again by accident: he turned up at my house with my wife’s oldest school friend, as her new boyfriend. It was a quite bizarre moment. Partly because we were spending time down there in the middle of nowhere, we became quite close friends.

Filmmaker: What are your strongest memories of Joe?

Temple: My main memory is his knock on my door: it was always very clear that it was Joe knocking on my door and there was a kind of excitement about hearing the knock because you knew you were in for a really good time. It was great spending time with him, he really challenged you and there was always a provoking dimension to what he would talk about. He made you feel that he would listen to what you would say and it’s a stupid cliché but I think people really felt he made their lives better in some weird way. Partly because he was a great listener, which a lot of people aren’t. But the campfires [that Strummer organized] were great in those years, in the sense of seeing him find another direction, or begin to find a direction, after clearly having gone through a disorienting, dark period [after the Clash split up].

Filmmaker: And did the idea for the film only come to you after his death?

Temple: Yeah, I wouldn’t have made it if he was still around. I think a lot of people who knew him were very affected by his death and were a little disoriented themselves by it, [so] I had to wait [anyway]. We didn’t have a memorial or a concert, so I felt that it might help people to get back around the fire and talk about him

Filmmaker: You brought together all these interesting, diverse people — from Jim Jarmusch, John Cusack and Matt Dillon to Joe’s schoolmates, band members and contemporaries — to talk about him around campfires in London, New York, Los Angeles, etc. That must have been a great experience.

Temple: It was. The key was they were all very keen to do it for Joe. They all knew Joe in different ways but it wasn’t as if you had to hunt them down or pressurize them. Some of them said, “I hear you’re doing this, can I come to the fire?” A lot of other people would have been in it if they’d been around in those cities at the time we were doing the fire, but it was a pretty good cross-section. You’re always slightly conflicted about the idea of celebrity endorsements and one thing that helped me with that is that the fire is a great equalizer: around a fire, no knows who you are. You don’t wear a nametag like at a convention.

Filmmaker: It almost seems as if Joe was maybe the only person who could have been the link between that disparate group of people.

Temple: Yeah, I think so...that hippie-punk thing that he seemed to own up to at the end. I think he was unique in being able to cross cultural barriers. He was more a beat than a hippie; there was a real beat poet aspect to Joe, a punk aspect and a rasta aspect almost. There was something almost shamanic about the guy but also something rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly. That’s quite a strange confluence of things.

Filmmaker: What was it like finding archive footage of Joe from his childhood and late teens?

Temple: I was amazed how much stuff had been shot of him, in photographs and stills as well as bits of moving films. One of the fun things about a project like this is the archaeological dig aspect, finding a horde of treasure on 8mm. We had one bit of film that hadn’t been developed, and they said maybe it was something to do with The 101ers [Strummer’s band before the Clash]. It was great, those images of Joe loading up the van, on the steps of the squat and so on. When we developed it, it looked like it was shot yesterday. It was so strange — no scratches, really good color.

Filmmaker: You also found quite a lot of Joe’s art, some of which you animated in the film. How straightforward was that to do?

Temple: It’s a lot easier than it used to be. A guy who worked in my garden did that on his laptop. We had all these old carrier bags of Joe’s doodles, and people told me that at one time he did think he’d become an animated cartoonist, so it was like, “Well, Joe, here you are, you are a cartoonist, you drawings now are animated,” which was a nice thing to do.

Filmmaker: How easy was it to make this film as Joe’s friend, and to keep a perceived objectivity?

Temple: Well, it was helped by the fact that you felt he’d get out of his grave and strangle you if you showed him in too perfect a light. I had a very strong sense that he would not want to be shown as some kind of saint, partly because I had watched how he worked and the contradictions and the flaws were part of his creativity: he went to those areas to find a creative energy. He liked different opinions and he liked being honest about your faults. I certainly didn’t want to put him down, I wanted to celebrate him but I did want to celebrate a version of him that I felt was truthful and rounded.

Filmmaker: Your film career has mostly stuck very closely to music, so how do feel about the tag of “music filmmaker”?

Temple: I don’t like it because I don’t think this really is a film about music. It’s [about] a man who made music, but it’s still not his life. The culture he came from, the time he lived— those things, to me, are more what it’s about than music. I think every film is given another dimension by the use of music, or the absence of music. How you play with music and images in a movie is a very powerful part of making movies, whatever the movie is. But I don’t like [the word] “rockumentary” — I hate that; the name gives me nightmares.

Filmmaker: It seems as if in Vigo and Pandaemonium you were investing yourself in subjects you were passionate about and people you were interested in just as much as you would have with a music-themed film.

Temple: Yeah, definitely. I think Pandaemonium was something I put a lot into, but you have more “cooks” telling you what to do in those situations, which I’m not so good at. [On documentaries], you’re left alone, partly because you don’t have a script where people can say, “Tear that page out.” There’s nothing physical to control because you‘re making it up as you go along and [have] that freedom to do it very minimally, budget-wise, do it with a small crew and be light on your feet, spontaneous, improvising — if you want to do it, you can do it. But the juggernaut of a big film crew is scary. Your creative function is challenged by this administrative keep-everyone-happy [role]. So you spend a lot of energy doing that and not wrestling with the actual [questions], “Is this a better way of doing it than what we thought of?” or “What’s happening in this moment? Can we use it?” which is really to me what the cinema should be about, chance, and what’s happening as you make the film as well as the planning of it. I think the planning of it is overestimated.

Filmmaker: Looking at your career, you’ve worked with Jim Carrey before he was famous (on Earth Girls Are Easy), Tupac Shakur just before he died (on Bullet) and with Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Altman (on the portmanteau film Aria). There seems to be a wild diversity there.

Temple: It’s important to me to try and do things you haven’t done before, or at least treat each film as if I don’t know anything about filmmaking. I like the crew to think I don’t know anything, so they’re telling me, “If you put this lens on…” and so you get ideas from them that way, rather than you saying, “I want this lens.” If you treat each film as a new start then that’s the best way, and often a new subject gives you that as well.

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

Temple: I think it has every chance of lasting because it is exploring other ways of telling stories. Mainstream cinema that most people have access to has a very limited way of telling a story, but [in documentaries there is] the idea that I was talking about before, that the filmmaker isn’t quite so controlled by the forces that finance films and develop films. This committee idea that a film has to get through all these hurdles to be ready to shoot kills the cinema in a lot of films. Documentary is inherently free of that, and there is real chance in the telling of it because you’re not about to say, “I didn’t like the way you did that, do it again,” it’s just what you get, which is quite interesting.

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

Temple: I don’t think that you should wish you’d directed anybody else’s film really, but the [Georges] Méliès one, A Trip to the Moon, would be quite good. [laughs] It wouldn’t have taken that long to do as it’s only about five minutes long, but it kicked off a whole lot of stuff, didn’t it? I like that idea of something that opens up other things.

Filmmaker: Is that something you’ve tried to do in your own career, to make groundbreaking work?

Temple: Partly because of the punk connection I’ve had. Yeah, I like the idea of trying to break down conventional rules, and it’s nice if you can show [something] from a different point of view than you’d expect. I think [a film] should provoke thought.

Filmmaker: Do you still try and instill that punk ethos into your work, even the narrative stuff that you do?

Temple: I do, but I want to do more of it than I have done. They like to take it out — that’s part of the committee thing. It’s quite hard to demonstrate it until it’s there as an edit and a moment in the film, as that aspect can be hard to put on a piece of paper but you find it in the making of it. That’s the kind of unplanned nature of punk events as well.

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

Temple: Never give up. If you want to do something, there are ways of doing it if you don’t give up. Also believe in what you’re doing. Don’t take yourself too seriously. These are all mistakes I’ve made. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 11/02/2007 10:09:00 AM Comments (1)