Though he looks and dresses like he's still a teenager, behind Juan Antonio Bayona's youthful appearance hides a mature and sophisticated cinematic sensibility. The 32-year-old Barcelona native has a passion for movies that first led him to become a precocious journalist, and then to study directing at film school. Since graduating, he has built a formidable reputation making a series of acclaimed commercials, pop promos for Spanish artists such as Hevia, Ella Baila Sola, Camela and OBK, and two short films, Mis Vacaciones (My Holidays) (1999) and El Hombre Esponja (The Sponge Man) (2002). Throughout this period, Bayona's progress was being tracked by his friend and mentor, Guillermo Del Toro, who he had interviewed at the Sitges International Film Festival when Del Toro's first film, Cronos, played there in 1993.

Del Toro was an integral player in the production of Bayona's feature debut, The Orphanage, which is written by Bayona's friend and fellow short film director, Sergio G. Sánchez. Recalling both Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone and Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, The Orphanage is a classic, Gothic-style ghost story about Laura (Belén Rueda), a woman who returns with her husband and young son to the orphanage where she grew up in order to open a haven for stricken children. However it appears that (possibly literal) ghosts of the past have reared their heads when her son disappears suddenly in mysterious and eerie circumstances. Well-paced and told with admirable restraint, The Orphanage is not only a cracking ghost story but also an emotionally resonant psychological examination of the difficulties of childhood and parental responsibility.

Filmmaker spoke to Bayona about ghost stories, growing up on a diet of great movies, and the inherent appeal of Stephen King's Sugar in the Raw.



Filmmaker: How did you get involved with this project?

Bayona: I was at a film festival when I discovered 7337, a short film Sergio [G. Sánchez, the screenwriter] directed. I loved it so I asked him for material [he'd written] and he told me about The Orphanage. He had been trying to get financing for two or three years but no production company wanted to pick it up. They used to say that the movie was an impossible mixture of horror and drama, and the things for us that make the movie different from the rest of the formulaic movies were the things that they were trying to criticize in the script. Because I knew some production companies in Barcelona and I was a friend of Guillermo Del Toro, I was able to get the financing and Sergio generously gave me the script and I could finally do it.

Filmmaker: What kind of a director-writer partnership do you have with Sergio?

Bayona: I read the script and was very impressed that the scary sequences were very well-written but there was a perfect balance between horror and emotion. I thought that made the story so different from the usual horror movie that I decided to go in. We talked a lot about [Henry James' ghost story] Turn of the Screw, and I remember that [Sergio] told me something very useful: the first time he read Turn of the Screw, he was an 8th grader and he didn't understand anything. But he kept reading it every year (he was kind of obsessed with that), and then he discovered that there was nothing to understand, that it's the reader who puts their interpretation on the story. I thought that was very interesting. What we did was create that same kind of story that could be read like a horror story or at the same time like a real drama, and let the audience interpret the story at the end.

Filmmaker: How did you get to know Guillermo Del Toro, and at what stage did he get involved on this project?

Bayona: I met Guillermo 15 years ago (and I am 32 now), so I was a young man. I was working as a journalist and I met him in a very similar situation to [the two of us talking] right now. The first time he saw me, he thought I was a 10-year-old boy and he was very impressed by my questions. After that, we kept in touch. I went to film school and did all kinds of different things like short films and music videos, and he loved all of them. So when he knew I was going to do The Orphanage, he wanted to be part of that.

Filmmaker: Had you been trying to make your first feature for quite a while? Were you waiting for the right project?

Bayona: Yeah, I rejected a lot of projects before I did The Orphanage. I didn't find the right material until I found The Orphanage. To do a movie takes so much time and is so painful that you have to find something that is worth doing.

Filmmaker: How much of am influence was Del Toro on this project?

Bayona: What I really admire in Guillermo — apart from, of course, his movies — is the way he works. He's a stylist, and he's very into the melodrama thing. Probably melodrama and horror movies are the two genres that are most effective at visualizing the inner conflicts of the characters. That is what movies are about, what the mise en scène is all about, so it's great as a director to be able to put the story and the conflicts of the characters to a very extreme situation in the most expressive way.

Filmmaker: Del Toro's The Devil's Backbone and The Orphanager have plot parallels, and also share an attention to detail and a richness, in both the narrative and the visual aspects.

Bayona: Guillermo Del Toro is always very obsessed with very small details, and The Orphanage is a story with different levels of reading, so that makes the story and the elements very rich, very layered and dense. We found some people saw the movie for the second time and they thought that they had seen a completely different movie. It's because there are several levels of reading in the story.

Filmmaker: It's classical and revisionist at the same time.

Bayona: We got all these classical elements, all these clichés, and there is a moment where Laura is using them to create the story in her mind, so I thought it was justified that we had all these elements in the beginning of the movie, and as the movie progresses forward it becomes something else. For example, there is the evil character of Benigna, and I remember when we were talking to some studios, they tried to keep the character alive until the end, so we decided to kill the character in the middle of the movie in a very extreme situation to prepare the audience for the unexpected. I strip the movie of all the classic Gothic elements until finally the movie is bare: there's just one character in the house, there's no dialogue. The audience doesn't know where to go, because after the mystery is solved they think the movie is ending, but the whole point of the movie comes after that.

Filmmaker: How confident were you with this being your debut feature?

Bayona: I was able to work with my usual crew, and we've been shooting for 10 years. I remember the first day of shooting, I went to my cinematographer and I told him, “It's funny how calm we are on our first day.” It was like a usual day in our lives. You never think about what's next in a movie, you never think about what's going to happen when the film opens as you're shooting. You are so focused on the camera, the actors, your work, that you never think about all this.

Filmmaker: What were the challenges of the filming process?

Bayona: The more difficult part was the script. It was crazy to try to set a perfect puzzle with pieces that fit perfectly with two different readings at the same time. For example, in the séance sequence we couldn't use cheap tricks or digital effects, because at the end you couldn't have justified one of the readings. What we had to do was work with the sound design and the idea of point of view so that it makes the results more interesting.

Filmmaker: What ghost movies were touchstones for you?

Bayona: We talked a lot about Jack Clayton's version of The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents, and there is another Jack Clayton [movie] I love, which is Our Mother's House. It's a very small movie from the 60s about these children who live with their mother, and when the mother dies they decide not to tell anybody. They bury the body in the cellar, and every night they do a séance to talk to their mother in order to find out what to do with adults, with real life. I thought that was an amazing movie.

Filmmaker: Talking with such authority about obscure Jack Clayton movies from the 60s suggests you have a real depth of knowledge about movies.

Bayona: One of the great things at the moment in Spain is that we were the first generation with democracy. After what happened in the Franco regime, the government paid a lot of care to our education and culture. We only had one station on Spanish TV, so we just had to see the movies that were on TV. When I was a child we used to watch movies from Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut, Federico Fellini, [Pier Paolo] Pasolini. Right now it's impossible for a little child to discover movies from Roman Polanski or Francois Truffaut on prime time TV, but my love of movies grew watching these movies. The storytelling in my movies is as a result of watching all these movies. I saw Jack Clayton movies, Jack Arnold movies, Jacques Tourneur [movies], I saw Steven Spielberg and I saw Francis Ford Coppola [movies]. I think my generation was lucky to have that sort of education.

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

Bayona: Christopher Reeve. I discovered movies watching Superman. I have a Superman obsession.

Filmmaker: So are you jealous of Bryan Singer? Would you like to be making Superman movies?

Bayona: I would love to do that, but it would be a very different Superman movie than what Bryan Singer did.

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

Bayona: When we were working on the script with Guillermo Del Toro, I wanted to change the title. I thought The Orphanage sounded a little cheesy, so I got the idea of the title being Within The Walls. It tells a lot about Laura's situation and a lot about the end of the movie. Guillermo had written a ghost story years ago and that script was never done, so he was taking some ideas from that movie and giving them to us. Then there was this moment when I asked him, “So, what was the title of that movie?” and he told me, “Within The Walls.” I thought, “What the fuck?! It's impossible!”

Filmmaker: It's a great title.

Bayona: Don't tell me that! I remember, I went to see Sergio during the process of writing, and I told him, “There is this movie which is a big flop all over the world, and then this movie is number one in Spain.” That movie was called Cold Creek Manor, and the Spanish title was The House. I thought, “Oh, my God, we're going to call our movie The Orphanage!” He said, “No way!” But we did $35m in Spain with that title, so we were probably not that wrong.

Filmmaker: All of John Grisham's book titles start with A or The, and they all sell in huge quantities.

Bayona: I've got a friend who always used to tell me that whatever the title, if there is Stephen King's before it, [it would sell]. [He picks up a sugar packet] You could say, Stephen King's Sugar in the Raw, and that would be a big hit.

Filmmaker: Moving forward, what plans do you have for your next project?

Bayona: Sergio and I are working together on an English movie. It's going to be a European production, so half a step between a Spanish movie and an American one. And I have another project in Spanish, but I need time to figure out what it's going to be.

Filmmaker: Finally, do you see yourself making movies in America five years from now?

Bayona: This is one of the greatest things that a Spanish or Mexican director could do: you can make movies with Americans, and when you get tired of them you could go back to your country and be treated as a king and do whatever you want. Yesterday, Guillermo Del Toro showed me the preview for Hellboy 2, and the first line was “From The Visionary Director of Pan's Labyrinth.” I thought, “Oh, my God, Guillermo, you're selling Hellboy 2 using Pan's Labyrinth!” Isn't it great?!

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 12/28/2007 11:13:00 AM Comments (0)

Our perception of a director hinges heavily on the most recent film they've made. Jake Kasdan's last movie, The TV Set, was a smart, sardonic satire of the process of creating a hit series that drew on Kasdan's own bitter experiences in network television. Though Kasdan had enjoyed working for Judd Apatow on Freaks and Geeks (1999) and Undeclared (2001) — directing episodes for these in between making his first and second features, Zero Effect (1997) and Orange County (2002) — the less positive times he had spent on other shows had given him ample fodder for his film. Kasdan's razor-sharp analysis of the brutal entertainment business could also be traced to the many years he had spent watching the intricacies of Hollywood life growing up on the sets of the films of his father, director Lawrence Kasdan. However, the dry, observational humorist that emerges as the writer-director of The TV Set is only one side of Jake Kasdan, as his new film seems to come from an entirely different place, an entirely different person, almost.

Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is the tale of fictional rock 'n' roll icon Dewey Cox, whose need to make music stems from a deep-seated childhood guilt — he cut his brother in half with a machete. Co-written by Kasdan and Apatow, the film relentlessly pokes fun at clichéd music biopics and their shortcomings, and features John C. Reilly playing the eponymous lead from the age of, yes, 14 years old onwards. Where The TV Set was sly and subtle, Walk Hard is shamelessly broad and often laugh-out-loud funny. Highlights include a meeting in India between Cox and the Beatles (Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Justin Long and Jason Schwartzman as John, Paul, George and Ringo respectively), and an "anatomical" gag which has no right to be funny, but is in fact hilarious.

Filmmaker spoke to Kasdan about his wide-ranging work, the comic potential of the name "Cox," and the current WGA strike.



Filmmaker: Coming one after the other, Walk Hard and The TV Set are radically different films.

Kasdan: They’re so different that it’s almost hard to even think of them as being the same job. The TV Set is more personal, it’s more singularly my voice, and this is a lot harder. [laughs] It’s a lot more demanding and also more gratifying in certain ways. I love both of ‘em, but they couldn’t be more different processes.

Filmmaker: This movie seems more like you and Judd Apatow just having fun.

Kasdan: Right. That’s a good way of putting it. [laughs] This movie was partly a reaction to The TV Set. I wanted to do a comedy that was more fun, [laughs] as opposed to The TV Set. There was a moment late in it when I realized that it was basically a comedy that is designed to make people laugh and then ultimately sort of feel bad. It’s kind of depressing, and I wanted to make a comedy [next] that wasn’t depressing. I remember sitting in those screenings of The TV Set and thinking how much I was enjoying making a funny movie, but then there was the thing that the people who loved it would say, “I love it, it’s so depressing!” “I love it, it was so painful I could barely sit there!” [laughs] So I was attracted to making something that was a less complicated experience of laughter. I had the idea, and Judd sparked to it and the decision to do it was kind of, “This seems like it would be a fun thing to do…”

Filmmaker: What was the process of writing with Judd like?

Kasdan: I had never written a screenplay with anyone before, but it was great. This [movie] never would have happened but for that. I never could have sat there by myself and generated 120 pages without him. It’s hard too with a movie like this that’s meant to be funny constantly. It lives joke to joke and you can’t have a scene that’s not funny. There’s a problem if there isn’t a joke at the center of the scene. It requires a lot of joke-writing, a lot of ideas, and you need that energy of just exchanging material — making yourself laugh, making someone else laugh, and someone making you laugh — in order to just get through it.

Filmmaker: It seems like you and Judd were trying to make the dialogue in the movie as clunky as possible….

Kasdan: Right, no subtext. [laughs]

Filmmaker: …And also trying to throw in contextual information as awkwardly as possible.

Kasdan: What year it is, how old people are, all those sorts of things. It was one of the go-to jokes. There was even more of it, and in every scene we would make sure there was some line where someone was saying exactly who they are and what they’re thinking and what the context is. It was one of the original inspirations for the movie, that style where people constantly walk in and announce themselves, the clumsy exposition: “It’s the Sixties, man, things are changing!” “As your manager, I’d like to tell you…” [laughs]

Filmmaker: Over the course of making this film, did you come closer to finding the answer for how to make a good, serious music biopic?

Kasdan: I think this might be the answer. [laughs] Finally, a biopic about somebody who doesn’t exist.

Filmmaker: Then there’s the unavoidable subject of “Cox” gags…

Kasdan: The gift that keeps on givin’! [laughs] It turns out there are an endless number of them and we haven’t gotten sick of them, if that’s your question. It’s a very understandable question. I don’t know how it happened, it’s the constantly regenerating fuel source. [laughs] They just keep on coming, so to speak. It’s funny, when I came up with the name I wasn’t even really thinking about it, believe it or not, as insane as that sounds. And then John [C. Reilly] and I embraced it pretty wholly while we were recording [the music], and by the time we were shooting we were both in a rhythm where the Cox jokes would just appear wherever you wanted them to. It was like a magic trick: you could pull one out of thin air in pretty much any context [laughs], sometimes amusing ourselves more than anyone else.

Filmmaker: You and Judd didn’t write any of the songs, but was there a stage early on when you were trying to write them yourselves?

Kasdan: Yes, it was not pretty. [laughs] You would not want to have had anything to do with that, believe me! There was never a stage where we believed that we were going to do it, but there were definitely moments when you would believe that you would have something to contribute, and it was always a horrible realization that we had nothing to contribute musically.

Filmmaker: You’ve worked with Judd for close to 10 years, so what do you think the reason is for his recent success? Has he changed what he’s doing, or is it that Hollywood is finally listening?

Kasdan: I don’t think that he’s changed what he’s doing, I think that he’s got better and better at what he does, and he’s found a place to write from and make work from that people are really responding to. It started with the TV shows [Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared], and for some reason it works better for a broad audience in movies. Part of it is just he gets better and better (as we all hope to), and part of it is that right at the moment there seems to be a real desire for a certain kind of comedy.

Filmmaker: He also seems to be very smart about marketing his movies. A month or two ago I received a pair of Dewey Cox underpants in the mail, and before we started the interview, we were talking about the Cox Across America tour that John C. Reilly and the band are doing. It all seems to go beyond the movie.

Kasdan: [Judd]’s really good at that. It comes from a place of really trying to come up with fun stuff to do. The sense right now is that Judd’s presence makes this a very commercial movie, but that’s a brand new concept. I mean, Knocked Up is a Seth Rogen vehicle, and Superbad is a Jonah Hill-Michael Cera vehicle — he’s doing all these movies without comedy stars, which is very unusual. We are doing [Walk Hard] with [John C. Reilly], a guy that is a super-established, brilliant guy but who hasn’t carried a movie like this before. There are huge advantages to doing that and it’s part of what excites Judd and excites me, but it does require getting people to understand what it is a little bit more than if it’s somebody whose movies they have a long relationship with. [It’s] trying to figure out various fun ways to explain to people what we’re servin’ up, and Judd’s very good at that, very imaginative.

Filmmaker: This film seems to be in the grand tradition of spoofs like Airplane and Hot Shots. How steeped are you in those movies?

Kasdan: I think Airplane is one of the funniest movies of all time, I loved Top Secret. When I was a little younger I never missed one of those movies, so we knew that we were moving into territory that’s been done quite well many times and that you gotta bring your A-game and figure out some new way to do stuff without it feeling like you’re ripping off other movies. We also knew that the ultimate dream would be eventually [the movie] takes on enough of its own unique characteristic that it has a story you can follow to its conclusion, and by the end of the movie you’re invested enough.

Filmmaker: The movie is being called a spoof of Walk The Line.

Kasdan: You know, there were several of them [that we were spoofing]. There were a whole bunch of them in a short time, music ones and biopics in general. I actually loved Walk the Line: I thought [Reese Witherspoon and Joaquin Phoenix] were both so great in that movie, and I’m a huge Johnny Cash fan. It was more the recurrence of these types of movies that are about someone’s extraordinary life and the series of “important American life” movies that we were playing at, the conventions of those things.

Filmmaker: Have you seen I’m Not There? It’s strangely similar in some ways to your movie.

Kasdan: I haven’t yet. They are [both] deconstructionist biopics. [laughs] It’s the year of the deconstructionist biopic, it turns out.

Filmmaker: What would you like to do ideally after this film?

Kasdan: I really don’t know. I always kind of think it’s a mistake to [look too far ahead]. I discovered early on these things just never work out how you planned. Usually the main thing a movie does is make people think that you could make a very similar movie, and usually what I want to do is not that. I don’t want to do the same thing two times in a row and this [movie] is so unusual for me that I have no idea [what’s next]. I think what you’re really hoping is that the movie allows you to make another movie.

Filmmaker: So have you got a project that you’ve written that you’re hoping to do?

Kasdan: I don’t, no.

Filmmaker: Is that a daunting prospect?

Kasdan: I feel like this was the more unusual thing, that I had [The TV Set and Walk Hard] lined up [one after the other] like this. I could use a break. It’s important for a director to keep working, but it’s also important to have moments when you’re not.

Filmmaker: Do you sit down with a blank page, or does it take you getting an idea for you to sit down to write?

Kasdan: I sit down with a blank page. At the moment, no one’s sitting down with a blank page…because we’re in this horrible thing. But hopefully it will be over soon.

Filmmaker: How do you see the strike panning out?

Kasdan: No one knows how it’s going to pan out right at the moment, but I think it’s critically important. There’s a reason it’s happening, and it’s a reason that’s really unpleasant. This is a set of issues that needs to be resolved, and this is the moment. If it weren’t for this strike, these issues would not be forced because, as we’re seeing, there’s tremendous momentum not to do anything about it. But for people who make things, for the primary creative forces behind movies and television, this is incredibly important. The issues at stake affect every writer and every actor and every director, and they affect you slightly less when things are going well, but when things are not going well, it’s like life or death. It’s your mortgage payment, it’s really critical. The frustrating thing has been to watch it, to feel so powerless in it, but we’ve got to trust our guild to work out this problem. Everybody knows it’s a real problem, and it’s only going to get more painful as it continues because people are really going to [suffer]. The studios have decided to shut down Hollywood over this, and it could be resolved. It’s not like this is some uncrossable divide, these are finite economic issues that can be resolved. It’s not going to put anyone out of business, it’s just a very basic kind of negotiation that’s at a horrible impasse. There’s a number of ways it could proceed from here, but you just hope that it wraps up quickly and fairly.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 12/21/2007 07:09:00 PM Comments (0)

Esther Robinson has an effusive passion for cinema that is infectious, and has led her to dedicate her career to helping artists and filmmakers. She studied film and television at NYU's Tisch School for the Arts, and at the age of only 24 produced Alive TV, a television show for PBS about alternative and experimental film. In 1998, she started Wavelength Releasing, a company established to explore new ways to make, distribute and show movies, which was responsible for the first fully digital film release as well as the groundbreaking, multi-platform release of The Last Broadcast (1999). In 1999, Robinson became the Director of Film/Video and Performing Arts at the Creative Capital Foundation (the grant-giving body housed in the same offices as the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts), a post she held until 2006.

One day at work, a chance mention of her uncle, Danny Williams, lead Robinson to discover that the Warhol Foundation held a number of shorts films he had made in the 1960s while he was Warhol's lover — and just before he disappeared, believed drowned. After seeing Williams' films, Robinson was compelled to make A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory, a personal documentary that examines Williams' life and dealings with the members of Warhol's Factory clique. Robinson's film sheds new light on the familiar subject of Warholiana with her affectionate and revealing portrait of Williams, a gifted filmmaker and troubled soul who Warhol used and then got bored of. Robinson, an experienced producer, claims she will not direct again in the near future, which is sad given the obvious talent for documentary filmmaking that she shows in this, her debut feature.

Filmmaker spoke to Robinson about Warhol's continuing influence, spending high school dressed as Edie Sedgwick, and how Stranger Than Paradise changed her life.



Filmmaker: How much was Danny Williams talked about in your family?

Robinson: I think every family has this thing that no one talks about. I literally never heard my grandmother talk about him, but in my her house there was a bookshelf that was filled with books like The Velvet Underground [laughs], these crazy punk books that at 13 you think, “This is a badass book!” Inside the books, there'd be things she'd underlined, like “No!” or “Wrong!” I knew that my grandmother basically thought that Andy Warhol killed my uncle (in that elusive “What does kill mean?” way). I knew that there was question around his disappearance: “Was it suicide? Was he gone? Was he alive?” I knew it was elicit [to talk about him]. I was a punk kid in Minneapolis, and when my friends were dressing up like punks in the '80s, it was far more horrifying to my parents to dress like Edie Sedgwick than to have a mohawk. [laughs] So I dressed like Edie Sedgwick for all of high school.

Filmmaker: And you were fully aware of the resonance?

Robinson: Oh yeah, but I didn't explore the resonance. You take for granted that you don't ask, but it doesn't mean that you don't read every book scouring for information, scour every photo album trying to understand. That's what I wanted my movie to do, to replicate that feeling of searching and constant re-evaluation that we all do in life. Documentaries have a tendency to have this fixed perspective to prove a point, and to me the point is that it's very fluid, that memory is very fluid.

Filmmaker: The starting point for the documentary was a visit your grandmother made to the offices you were working in, which you shared with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Robinson: While I was showing her around, she started talking about Danny. That was the first time I had ever heard her even mention his name. She started saying, “My son lived with Andy Warhol and his mother. He was his boyfriend,” stuff that was shocking in any context, especially because my grandmother's feelings about him being gay were quite conflicted and here she was bragging about it. This staff member was walking by and heard the name, it triggered something in her memory about the archives, and she put me in touch with the archivist for the Warhol films. I called her — no, actually I waited.

Filmmaker: Why did you wait?

Robinson: When you start the journey of asking the questions no one's ever asked, it's the hardest thing. It's impossible to even recreate or describe, it's just inertia. When Danny disappeared, my family tried to contact Warhol and No one answered. In fact, people were mean. I probably internalized that fear of rejection, and I didn't want to bump up against that. But I called Callie [Angel, the archivist], and she just said, “I've been trying to find your family for seven years. I have all your uncle's films.”

Filmmaker: How soon after that did you decide that you wanted to make a film about Danny? Had you been considering directing anyway?

Robinson: Here's the thing: I'm a producer, and I'm a savvy producer. If you find 20 films that your uncle made in the Warhol Factory in 1965, who's supposed to direct that movie? You have to direct it. The story only makes sense with you at the center, or you in the search role. We interviewed my grandmother for a year, but it wasn't until I saw Danny's films that I had to make the movie. When I saw Danny films, it's impossible to describe... I love them, I love them like a person. They're so singular, they really have this very specific cinema vision. His directorial sensibility is really idiosyncratic, and I was elated by it, and that immediate connection to the work meant that I needed to know what happened. I had to know what happened, and that became the fuel for making it. Movies are like that — they get you deep.

Filmmaker: I like that you adopted a style of filmmaking that allowed us to see your progression towards greater understanding of what happened.

Robinson: To me, part of the act of loving Danny was allowing him to own whatever ending he had made for himself, and I was as interested in what had happened to him as I was interested in the idea of how complexity gets reduced to fact. When you read most of the Warhol books, they're pretty catty and always trying to prove [one of] two things: Warhol was the greatest artist genius that America has ever produced, or he was the man responsible for killing Edie and all these kids, and both of those things aren't the truth to me. They're about myth.

Filmmaker: Of the Factory interviewees, Paul Morrissey comes across very badly and is dismissive of Danny Williams, whereas John Cale was not only a kind but surprisingly insightful. What was the emotional impact of interviewing these people, both as a director and Danny's relative?

Robinson: It was hard, painful. I think your first instincts when someone [like Paul Morrissey] is really denying someone's existence is to feel like they're doing that to hurt that person or you, but the truth is that all those people are good people and all they're trying to do is maintain their equilibrium in a pretty big sea of egos. [laughs] I came to understand that [people's] greatest protection to that larger force of Andy was a really strong artistic practice. So for people like John, who went in as a known artist and left as a known artist, they actually loved their time and can remember a really wide range of feelings, but for people for whose work became highly identified with Andy Warhol, it was much more difficult. A lot of these people's work is really extraordinary and it's unknown and it will take a long for history to parse out.

Filmmaker: How many of the people you interviewed from the Factory crowd did you show Danny's movies to? Were you able to let them see the films before speaking to them?

Robinson: I showed them to them while I was talking to them. I brought a little [DVD] player and would screen them to them, and I would do it halfway or three quarters of the way through the interview because I wanted to know what they remembered before I showed them. I wanted [the interviewees] to give me a sense of them, but also everyone was so accustomed to talking about Andy that you had to let them talk about Andy for a while, to let it out. Shannon [Kennedy, the editor] was incredibly good at finding those stories that made it feel like verité, that had an urgency to it. We'd also said as a rule that anything we'd heard before, we didn't want in the movie. I wanted to feel like not only were we discovering what happened to Danny, but we were discovering new things and new sides about what happened [in the Factory], and to those people.

Filmmaker: By the end of the film, how strongly did you relate to Danny?

Robinson: I love this kid... I'm tearing up. I count going to the Berlin Film Festival to screen his films as one of the greatest moments of my life. This is somebody that didn't exist, a 26-year-old kid that made movies for six months. These are crazy sketches full of promise and I'm just so proud of that promise, but there's a tender sadness when the promise isn't realized. I think it's heartbreaking. I never found anyone from that last year and a half [of his life] that loved him, that knew him like a best friend or a lover. It's shocking to me. My husband at one point said, “You're going to spend your whole lifetime learning about Danny Williams, but the movie has to end!” It's true, a lot of the things that are hard when you make a movie become part of your life. Danny is a part of my life.

Filmmaker: What's your favorite Bob Dylan album?

Robinson: I like the really early electrified one, that's the only one I really like. Yeah, Blonde on Blonde. My husband will laugh and laugh — he loves Bob Dylan. I love that Todd Haynes movie [I'm Not There] so much. It makes me so happy. It's so fucked up and wrong in some ways, but I loved every second. I was like, “Yay for the failure! Yay!”

Filmmaker: What's the most embarrassing movie you've watched the whole of on a plane?

Robinson: I've watched so many bad movies on planes I can't even distinguish them, and the worst part is that I cry at all of them, even if I hate them. So I try to watch the movie without headphones and guess everything that's going to happen next. It's really annoying to my seatmate, but it's the way I survive it. There was this terrible one in which the girl who played Lolita [Leelee Sobieski] dies. It's clear within the first 10 minutes: there's the rich guy and [she's] a poor kid, and you just look at her and go, “She's gonna die.” I watched that movie. [laughs]

Filmmaker: There's a rule in movies where if anybody coughs, they're a goner.

Robinson: She does cough, she does cough!

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

Robinson: Be true to a vision that you cultivate yourself. I think right now there's this cult of product and people are very drawn to the idea of having made a movie. But the truth is that for most of your life you're just making movies, so you have to love the process or you're doomed. And I feel like there's not enough bravery anymore. I think people should ask more of themselves when they make movies.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was the first film you ever saw?

Robinson: Probably The Red Balloon. My parents relentlessly pulled it out on 16mm and showed it at every one of my birthday parties from four on. But the first movie that changed my life was a double feature of Blood Simple and Stranger Than Paradise when I was 15 years old. There's this moment in Stranger Than Paradise where it goes to black in between scenes, and I remember sitting in this black theater thinking, “Holy fuck! You can do that?! You can just go to black?!” It literally changed my life. I went to NYU because of sitting in the black in Stranger Than Paradise. Cinema talks to me like a person and it's as seductive and joy-inducing and as angry. There's movies that I dislike that I can get apoplectic about, but I love this thing, this endeavor, this crazy madness.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 12/14/2007 09:31:00 PM Comments (0)

You might say that Jennifer Venditti is a people person. After starting out as a fashion stylist, she moved on to casting where she distinguished herself as someone with an eye for the unconventional as well as the beautiful. In 1998, she started JV8inc, a New York-based casting company working in fashion, commercials and film, which has become known for its use of street scouting, finding “real” people for campaigns or movies by going out and pounding the pavements. Since starting JV8, Venditti has worked for photographic luminaries such as Terry Richardson and the late Richard Avedon, as well as people like Bruce Weber and Spike Jonze, both of whom work across a variety of media.

It was while casting her friend Carter Smith's short film, Bugcrush, that Venditti first met Billy Price, a teenager with behavioral problems, and realized that she wanted to make a film about him. Venditti's resulting documentary is a remarkable portrait of a unique human being, a true original who isn't understood by many of the people around him in his small town in rural Maine, but whose unmannered wisdom and innocence has totally won over audiences since the film's debut at SXSW earlier this year. As well giving insight into how its protagonist ticks, Billy the Kid also has a compelling narrative, as the few days Venditti spent filming Billy coincided with his first, awkward brush with romance. Charming, moving and utterly involving, Venditti's film showcases her singular talent for not only finding exceptional people but allowing them to reveal themselves completely on screen.

Filmmaker spoke to Venditti about her progression to documentary directing, working with Spike Jonze, and the problems of turning up late to see Margot at the Wedding.



Filmmaker: Your background is as a casting director. How long have you being doing that?

Venditti: I've been doing it about 10 years. I started in the fashion industry doing styling, and I was really interested in how clothes make a character and how people express themselves that way. I got really frustrated by that, but then my friend Carter Smith (who directed Bugcrush) started taking pictures and he wanted me to find people for him to photograph and brought me into that world. Then through that, people started calling me for commercials and advertisements and films.

Filmmaker: I believe you were casting Bugcrush for Carter when you first met Billy at a high school in Maine.

Venditti: I sat in the lunchroom everyday and started noticing how all these kids always sat at the same tables with the same people, so I started asking kids why they sat where they sat ,and whether they ever let anyone new sit there. These bullies said, “Yeah, we had this kid come sit here, but he freaked out.” I said, “Who is the kid?” They said, “He's over there. His name's Billy,” and Billy was sitting at a table all by himself. I walked over there, he opened his mouth and I was like, “My God, this kid is amazing! Why is the whole school not sitting at his table?” We just kept talking, and the first thing in my mind was, “How is this kid at this school? What's wrong with him? What does he have?” I started talking to teachers and asking people things, and no one would really give me a [satisfactory] answer. All the kids were like, “Oh, he's so weird. He's dangerous, he freaks out,” because they torture him and he doesn't just take it. He gets mad, he gets angry. And then the teachers would all say things like, “Oh, he's really complicated, he has emotional disabilities.” I started to think, "No one's going to tell me about what he has or what he is," and I didn't care anymore: I wanted to understand the world through his experience.

Filmmaker: You cast Billy in Bugcrush, but at what stage did you think about making a film about him?

Venditti: The whole time during Bugcrush I was in charge of taking care of him and I would take him to the set and home everyday, and we would listen to music on the radio and we would sing. I was filming and interviewing him because I did this all the time with all my castings. I had no idea that I was ever going to be a filmmaker, I was just obsessed with filming people. When I came home from [making Bugcrush], I was talking with a friend, saying “God, one day I really do need to make a film,” but not even thinking about Billy.

Filmmaker: Wasn't the initial plan was to make a film about Billy and some other people, though?

Venditti: We discussed going on a road trip and doing this short about some people that I'd cast. We'd start with Billy in Maine, and then go to West Virginia to this interesting woman that I'd found there, and then come back and do a couple of people in New York City. I wasn't even excited about Billy, I was excited about the woman in West Virginia. I had made a list of all this stuff I wanted to shoot with Billy, [saying] “OK, I'm going to be a director...” I threw that away after an hour of being there! I realized it was about creating a really safe environment and trust with [Billy and his family]. Billy has been the director of his own movie his whole life, and he sees his life through a cinematic lens, and I just wanted to create this space for him to be him and for us to just go on his journey with him. Then the whole Heather thing happened.

Filmmaker: It must have been amazing to watch that teenage love story between Billy and Heather unfolding in front of you.

Venditti: Every night we would go back to our place and watch the footage, and I remember going to bed that night and Donald [Cumming, the DP] saying, “You have something really special here.” I said, “I know! I've never seen first time love like that on film.” I remember the day we left, we were driving to West Virginia and I remember being really sad. I left that place crying, and it was this really bittersweet moment of thinking, “What is going to happen to him?” As we drove to West Virginia, I couldn't stop thinking about everything he'd said. But when we got there, all these hillbillies came after us and wouldn't let us film and we realized that the last videotape that Billy had said all his amazing things about love on, that tape was gone. The whole night we couldn't sleep, and Donald was like, “Oh my God, I lost it!” We couldn't call [Billy's mother] Penny and see if we left it there because it was the middle of the night. Then that morning, we finally got a hold of her, and [she told us] it had fallen onto the driveway. We had not slept that night, and at that point I knew I had to make a film about this kid.

Filmmaker: Billy ended up going to a couple of festivals with the film. What was that like for him?

Venditti: Oh my God! Number one, he'd never been on a plane, and number two, he just hasn't been around a lot of people, only people in his community. But he came to New York, because he had to film parts of Bugcrush [there]. On Myspace or Youtube, there's footage of him in New York at a block party, and he's on top of this banister. He started dancing and he took his shirt and and took his glasses off. He was with all the hipster kids dancing and you could see he was totally in his element. If Billy lived in New York, he would have a whole crew of people and be accepted, but he loves nature and it's a little too overstimulating for him [in New York]. His senses are very acute and he loves animals and trees, and he loves that peaceful quality of life and fresh air. He kept saying when he was in New York, “God, the air is so bad!” But he loves the people and the spirit and the diversity and the acceptance of all the people in New York.

Filmmaker: There was quite a bit of buzz around the film after SXSW, but you ended up opting for a smaller distributor, Elephant Eye.

Venditti: We were approached by so many big distributors, people that don't usually do documentaries. It was crazy, studios and distributors that I would have thought never would have been interested in a project like this. We got so hyped up in the beginning, it was like, “Wow!” In the end, nothing ever panned out with anyone, because everyone was so scared to touch it. It was that stock answer of, “We're not sure how to market it,” and in the end I'm so happy. This film needs the kind of treatment where we're handling the distribution: we're so involved from the artwork to the trailer (A.J. [Schnack] from About A Son ended up cutting it). I've been doing events and speaking with people and connecting. I'm really glad that I've not only gotten to learn all aspects of getting a film out there, but be really involved.

Filmmaker: So often it seems like the people marketing a film and trying to find an audience have significantly less understanding of it than the filmmakers themselves.

Venditti: I know, and I've seen time after time these films that are coming out and they flop, and I'm just determined to show that you do not have to spend that amount of money and you can still get success. If not more, because who knows the film more than the people that made it and the people that run those companies usually don't want to listen to them.

Filmmaker: This was such a special, serendipitous film, so are you daunted by the prospect of making a follow-up?

Venditti: I have to tell you, at many different festivals, people have come up to me and said, “God, how are you going to top that! I feel sorry for you.” [laughs] I don't see it that way. This was one film and I definitely consider myself a filmmaker now and am so thankful for this experience because it really was the thing that tapped into everything I wanted to do. I'm starting to work on another film and I'm not looking for it to be another Billy the Kid. What I do next will be unique unto itself, probably not a documentary but a hybrid of non-fiction and fiction. I don't see myself as a documentarian, I see myself as a storyteller, and I tell the story the way I think it should be told.

Filmmaker: Recently you've also been working with Spike Jonze on the casting of Where the Wild Things Are.

Venditti: Yeah, I like him a lot. He's a huge fan of Billy the Kid too. I love how he sees the world in this magical way and is able to utilize that in storytelling. Whether it's music, sets, casting, he's just really inventive and isn't held to a certain way of how things are [supposed to be done]. I think Karen O is doing the soundtrack for Where the Wild Things Are. When he saw the main character, [Max], from Where the Wild Things Are, he really wanted him to have an accent, because he didn't want him to be just this angelic character, he wanted him to be more real and flawed in a way. So we were looking for kids in Jersey, Brooklyn and Philly, and we went all over because he wanted the kid to have that edge to him. I like that he sees things in that way. I like flaws, I feel like that's part of what makes each of us interesting.

Filmmaker: What were you at school: the smart kid, the class clown or the dunce?

Venditti: I am going to say the dunce, because I wasn't the smart kid and I wasn't the class clown. I was totally hated school and my only way of rebelling way to say, “Fuck you, people, I'm not doing it!” So I didn't do well in school. It was my way showing that I would not conform to the way they wanted me to learn and the things they wanted me to do. I was a rebel!

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

Venditti: I'm either there just in time at the beginning, or I get there late and get pissed. I got to Margot at the Wedding right when Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kidman were just seeing each other at the house. I was pissed by the end because I didn't see the very beginning so I had to wait until the beginning [of the next show to see it]. I had to fucking see the beginning at the end! I would hate someone if that did that to my movie! [laughs]

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

Venditti: There's a few. Do not look to outside sources to validate your film. Be very, very clear on what your idea is, but be open to hearing other things. And don't give up. Ever.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 12/07/2007 11:14:00 AM Comments (1)