Though her body of work is famous, Catherine Owens — the woman behind the visual design of U2's legendary stadium tours of the past 15 years — until now has maintained a much lower profile. Beginning with the band's revolutionary ZooTV tour in 1992, Irish artist Owens used her expertise in many media (sculpture, video art, sound design, photography, etc.) as inspiration for their subsequent PopMart, Elevation and Vertigo tours, helping the band gain a reputation as the best live act in the world. She has also recently worked on conceptual art for the Chinese musician Wu Man and the Kronos Quartet, as well as directing the award-winning video for U2's single Original of the Species in 2005.

Owens' longstanding ties with the band and intimate knowledge of their artistic sensibilities made her a natural choice to direct a 3D concert movie about the band, the first ever film in digital 3D. Though U2 3D eschews the use of backstage footage and over-elaborate camera moves for a much purer, more traditional conception of the concert movie, it uniquely succeeds in conveying the experience of seeing a band live, in most part because of the incredible, eye-popping 3D. The film, co-directed with another former U2 collaborator, Mark Pellington (also known for his fiction films, such as Arlington Road), captures the band at its very best, playing to a crowded soccer stadium in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and is a truly compelling cinematic experience.

Filmmaker spoke to Owens on the phone from Sundance about working in 3D, future possibilities for the new technology and making a romantic comedy with Emily Brontë.



Filmmaker: Are you in Sundance at the moment?

Owens: In Sundance, looking out over the snowy mountain. It's really quite beautiful because there's a lot of snow on the ground. It's my first time ever in this world, so it's very exciting. We're having a wonderful time.

Filmmaker: I'm sure you're looking forward to screening the film there. I saw it recently, and the impact it had on the audience was incredible.

Owens: It's interesting, isn't it? I think it's new and definitely breaks away from the formula, and that's something that's really exciting for us.

Filmmaker: How did you first get involved with this project?

Owens: I've worked with U2 for the best part of 15 years providing visual content for their shows. John Modell and his brother David Modell, who were starting up a company with [fellow producers] Pete Shapiro and Jon Shapiro, really are U2 fans and they were developing this technology for the sports world but they offered us the technology, [saying] “Well, we were planning to do [sports], but if you guys wanna have a go with it first...?” We were like, “OK, great. New technology, no one has a clue how it works — that'll suit us fine! We'll see if we can make something out of it.” In true U2 fashion, anything that nobody's done before is a good road to go down.

Filmmaker: And did you have a chance to get comfortable with the 3D technology in the build-up to shooting this film?

Owens: [It was] on-the-job training! [laughs] We did one small test on one camera a couple of months before we signed off on doing it, but it didn't give us any indication of what we were really in for. That only started once we were working in post-production with the 3D special effects department. It's been a very interesting conversation between the band and the special effects world, because the aim is to keep all the emotion of the performance intact, but then you also have to keep your eye on how 3D behaves with the mind and the eye. We developed new software to make it easier to view a lot of the changes we were making. It was very interesting.

Filmmaker: How much concert footage had you shot prior to this film?

Owens: Nothing... [laughs] I did make a video with U2 in 2005 that was nominated for two video awards. We had worked together on motion capture [for that], so we had already done an interesting venture into technology and music and emotion. A lot of my personal drive is to give technology emotion, because I think there are a lot of technical people who build this technology and then feel that they are the only people who know who to use it. Very often, they're not really artists or they don't necessarily have great ideas or aren't inspired, so it's trying to crossover those two worlds.

Filmmaker: Did you go out and rent concert movies like Don't Look Back or The Last Waltz as preparation for making this film?

Owens: No, I don't really do my research in that way. [laughs] But I can still remember the first time I saw Stop Making Sense, which I thought was very beautiful. I'm very much an in-the-moment type of person and I'm an artist, so my inspiration lies in the art world, and performance art and the theater and the exhibition space. I'm very well-versed in performance art and video, so that's my world of inspiration. I've always been a big fan of Bill Viola and Laurie Anderson and people who use space in an interesting way.

Filmmaker: Did you ever consider having backstage footage in the film?

Owens: I made a decision that that really wasn't the kind of film we were going to make. I wanted to document the pure performance. It's tempting to do a lot of B-roll, because a lot of people do, but I think there's too many films about how many trucks it takes to load in the gear. And even though I know the fans really want to know that, I just wanted to give the band what it is that they had invested in. The band were very happy just to focus on that.

Filmmaker: I think concert films that are purely performance generally fail to put across the feeling of watching a band play live, but this film succeeds in conveying the live experience.

Owens: A lot of that has to do with the 3D. In one shot, we have Larry in the background and the Edge layered over Larry, and Adam's to the right and Bono's in front. Two of those layers can come from a completely different image, and the image behind and in front can stay in the same space. And then you can move the front image out and bring a new image in. And then keep the two images in the middle space the same. And that's made up from two or three different shows, just that one little moment, and that's what people see when they're there.

Filmmaker: The moments where band members lean towards the camera bring out the 3D aspects a lot more for the audience, so did you encourage them to do things like that?

Owens: We started off [having] a conversation of “Let's not do all those tricks that everybody does in 3D, let's not go there. Let's really try and capture the performance as we know it and then if there are moments when you feel you want to contribute, fire away and contribute.” That worked out well because I think it took everybody away from feeling like they had to perform, so in those one or two moments where the band break through, it's enough. We built an arc from the beginning of the show to the end and within there we were able to give each song it's own look for 3D, so I felt we were able to keep reintroducing 3D without using those tricks.

Filmmaker: How different was the shooting experience given that you were shooting 3D rather than 2D?

Owens: It wasn't that different for us because we had these technical people operating the cameras and a 3D team who make 3D films, so from our point of view all we were looking at was cameras with two heads instead of one. Two cameras are recording, but you're still back calling your shots for one camera, one view. As long as your technical people are very good, there's no difference.

Filmmaker: So were you and Mark Pellington just sitting in front of banks of monitors, telling the camera operators what to do?

Owens: Yes. Myself and Mark and Tom Krueger, our DP, divided the cameras into three on the shoots that Mark co-directed, and then when we went back into the 3D world, my team in New York and the team in L.A. built the 3D and I worked with the editors. For rather a long time. But, you know, it takes that amount of time.

Filmmaker: So how long were you in post-production?

Owens: We shot in February '06, so literally two years. We started editing in May, and we finished a couple of weeks ago. [laughs] But, you know, part of that is that in my particular way of working I'm very dedicated to what I want. There are probably many directors who would have stopped short a couple of months ago, but I really needed to go to a certain place — the place it is at right now — and that took an awful lot of time revising the 3D edit. There was a lot of [time spent] making every single shot work in 3D.

Filmmaker: Did you edit in 3D?

Owens: Well, we edited first in 2D and did a rough cut per song, because I had to get a sign-off from the band (in all sorts of places, like kitchens, cars and bus stops). [laughs] We would sign off in 2D and then once we'd got a basic look for the film then we started editing that in 3D, where we learnt a lot of tricks.

Filmmaker: You said before that in the editing you took shots from different shows and layered those shots together.

Owens: Yes, comped them into the same moment. You film what you film and then you take it into the post-production world and then you take out the shots that you want and let them speak to you as to how they want to be made. That's certainly how we worked. There's a point where you let the film tell you what it wants to be, especially in the 3D space, because 3D is a bit funny. You can't just plug a script into 3D, it's very malleable and it has its own way of moving, so you just have to go with it.

Filmmaker: How keen are you to work in 3D again?

Owens: I'm very keen, very keen. I think it's an incredible, incredible medium and I'm just dying to see what other directors are going to do with it. I'm keen, but only if it's continually challenging the space and the experience of the film. I wouldn't be running off to do a whole load of films in 3D just because you could. I'm interested in the crossover between theater, performance, art and music, so I'd like to see how you could craft a narrative into that space, but keep it very conceptual.

Filmmaker: What potential do you see for 3D in the future, particularly in fiction films?

Owens: Any director with a vision is going to be able to make 3D do something really interesting. If you take somebody like Paul Thomas Anderson, Peter Greenaway or Julie Taymor, or anyone with an understanding of the sculptural aspects of space, I think 3D is going to delight them.

Filmmaker: How much of a new dawn do you think this is in terms of the impact this new technology will have on cinema?

Owens: We're just a bunch of Irish people, but I do think that we've created an avenue for people to pick up and go on down. I'd be really disappointed if people didn't think, “Oh God, let's do it!” because even though 3D is difficult, I am not a traditional film director so I'm pretty good proof that it can be done based on a vision. I'm hoping that's going to encourage a whole load of up-and-coming NYU film students. You know, 3D is a lot of fun, a lot of fun!

Filmmaker: Is Hollywood going in the right direction?

Owens: If you're a guy, yah! [laughs] If you're a man, it certainly is; if you're a woman, hmm, I'm not so sure...

Filmmaker: So what would you change?

Owens: I'd make it less of an old boys' network. I would just put more women in powerful positions.

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

Owens: In Victorian England, and I'd probably make a romantic comedy. Maybe I would work with Emily Brontë or something, or work with some female writer and make their stories into some fantastic thing.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 1/23/2008 11:34:00 PM Comments (0)

It is common for directors to have a background in theater, documentary filmmaking or editing, but Bryan Gunnar Cole is almost unique for having made a mark in all three fields. Cole was one of the founders of the Annex Theatre, a fringe company based in his native Seattle which memorably put on shows like Wonka, a colorful musical version of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He gained a BA in Film at Yale and then an MFA at NYU, where he won a raft of student accolades including the Wasserman Award, the film school's highest award, for his thesis film, Trim (1998). Since graduation, Cole has established himself as a respected editor, working in feature films (Arctic Son, Rock the Paint) as well as television (The First 48, Texas Ranch House). At the same time, he has also directed a number of documentaries such as Boomtown (2002), about Independence Day on a native American reservation, which aired on PBS as part of the channel's “P.O.V.” series after playing on the film festival circuit.

Cole made a documentary short, Unfurled, in response to 9/11, and his feature debut as director sees him enter similarly delicate political territory. Day Zero is set in America in the near future at a time when the draft has been reintroduced because of the U.S. Army's continuing problems in Iraq, and focuses on three old high school friends (Elijah Wood, Chris Klein and Jon Bernthal) who are all drafted. Cole's film is an exploration of the response, intellectual and emotional, moral and personal, to the trio's call to arms, and is intended as a starting point for discussion of the broader issues about the direction Bush's America is going. The directness of Rob Malkani's overtly political script harks back to the New Hollywood movies of the 1970s, while D.P. Matthew Clark's envisioning of New York also pays a homage to this era. Indeed Day Zero specifically recalls the work of New Hollywood's wild child, Hal Ashby (who Cole cites as a big influence), in the way that it tackles prescient political issues by introducing them to audiences through its characters' personal dramas.

Filmmaker spoke to Cole about real politics, imaginary wars and his disinclination to see the film he calls The Bucket Line.



Filmmaker: You have your roots in theater, I believe, and started the Annex Theatre company.

Cole: I started in theater in college, I had always enjoyed theater. We were just a bunch of folk that wanted to do some shows, so we started a fringe theater instead of diving into the Equity world. We were just like, “Let’s just get a space for ourselves and do our own stuff.” That was twenty-odd year ago, and our company is still thriving in Seattle and is the oldest fringe theater in the Northwest and [has] produced [plays] all over the world. We really modeled ourselves after the Steppenwolf idea.

Filmmaker: So in a way you’ve always had that independent spirit in your work.

Cole: Yeah, I like to say I haven’t had a real job since I was 12 — I’ve been freelance since then!

Filmmaker: What was your job when you were 12?

Cole: [laughs] I had a truck and a pitchfork — you can get a lot done cleaning yards and all that. I was a country boy and cleaned my fair share of horse stalls too. Part of what I think allows me to have good communication with crew and cast and even producers is that I was exposed to that entrepreneurial, independent spirit from a very early age, so it’s easy to communicate with lots of different types of people.

Filmmaker: Were your artistic inclinations supported by your parents while you were growing up?

Cole: They were always pretty supportive. Neither of them is particularly artistic, although my father enjoyed writing. As I kept my grades up and stayed out of trouble, I pretty much had free reign for whatever I wanted to do. [laughs] I did try and cause trouble, but I didn’t get into trouble, if you know what I mean...

Filmmaker: Do you mean cause trouble through your creative pursuits?

Cole: I think part of the fun of doing a film like Day Zero is that you get to stir the pot a bit. I don’t think it’s a film that has a big red bow on it and comes neatly packaged and is digestible as the feel-good war movie of the year. I think that it’s got some heart, it takes you on an emotional journey, and I just tried to stir the pot and get people talking. We wanted to have a film that when you walked out of the theater, some people are going to love it, some people are going to hate it, but I don’t think anybody’s going to [shrug and] be like, “Uhhhh…” I think that it’s going to spark some dialogue.

Filmmaker: It seems like quite an edgy and challenging film to choose for your first film as director.

Cole: I guess so. I’ve cut a lot of political documentary and directed Boomtown, which had a political [angle] to it. I feel very comfortable with that material because all politics are local, so when you really focus in on how a character is feeling about something, you get to an emotional truth which underscores a belief system which then can be challenged or supported throughout the course of the narrative. I think that’s what happens with each of the characters in Day Zero: they may be friends, but they differ in some very significant ways, [like] how they deal with the idea of their friendship when it comes in conflict with how they feel about the choices they’re about to make.

Filmmaker: What initially attracted you to Day Zero?

Cole: I read it and really loved the concept of it, and it reminded me of a Vietnam-era film like Coming Home or The Last Detail or Five Easy Pieces. So we [writer-producer Rob Malkani, producer Anthony Moody and Cole] met and had an immediate discourse because we were all very different politically and yet we all wanted to get this idea out there. Rob and Tony are extremely talented producers and it was wonderful to work with them and to have that kind of support to get this done. My nicknames for them were Time and Money: when one of them showed up [on set] it was like, “Here comes Time!” or “Here comes Money!”

Filmmaker: You’d previously done a short film, Unfurled, which dealt with 9/11, and has similar political themes to this film.

Cole: I was in very close proximity to Ground Zero, and my wife was down there, and so [Unfurled] was [a film] that she and I just needed to do together as kind of experimental, folk-art piece to exorcise this experience that we had. At the same time, I think not bringing too much politics into anything — especially in political subject matter — is good. I think the artist’s job is to provoke and ask questions and to learn throughout that process and present your findings, rather than to say, “Hey, I know everything.” I think being a know-it-all and being an artist are kind of counterintuitive to each other. [Making Day Zero] was a really exciting process of discovery about what I would do, what I felt and how to express that in a way that would be entertaining and provocative for the audience.

Filmmaker: You said in a blog post on The Huffington Post that artists have a duty to provoke political discussion.

Cole: I think that part of the reason that the film is striking a chord with audiences is just because of that. There’s a certain tabloid element to it. One reviewer described it as a “ripped-from-the-headlines” type of idea, and there is an element of that — except that that headline’s been going on for a couple of years now. Our president said that we will be in Iraq for at least another 10 years — those are the kinds of things that [make] you start to do the math on our foreign policy and the repercussions that it has socially. I really wanted it to have a timeless feel so that it could be 20 years ago or it could be now, so that there was a sense that history does repeat itself.

Filmmaker: Another recent movie, Southland Tales, also uses a near-future America to comment on the contemporary political climate. In your case, what edge did that give you?

Cole: It’s a narrative and it’s fiction, so the edge it gives you is that it’s an imaginary circumstance and you get to explore truthful emotions within that imaginary circumstance. At the same time, we didn’t have the kind of resources that bigger films have so we had to really concentrate on what our characters were going through rather than the context that they found themselves in. Some films get to explore these kinds of issues in greater imaginary detail; I keep on thinking about Blade Runner — I mean, there’s an imaginary future! [laughs] So I really enjoyed the opportunity to do a gritty, street-y film — it really played to my training and my strengths.

Filmmaker: How much did your documentary background inform the way you approached the film?

Cole: A lot, I would have to say. I’m very comfortable moving quickly, and my editorial expertise also played a big role in the filmmaking process. My coverage was pretty spare, but I think it was effective. We knew what we needed, we knew we didn’t have a lot of time to get it. My director of photography, Matthew Clark (who’s just remarkable), and I have done a number of films together and we have a very easy working relationship, so with that kind of connection you can move very quickly and know what you need to get and when you need to get it. It doesn’t mean we weren’t pressured, because we were. It was an extremely grueling schedule: we had upwards of 170 scenes and 52 distinct locations, and 24 days. But I think the film looks beautiful, so I’m really proud of our crew.

Filmmaker: How much did your own political feelings permeate the film?

Cole: I think that it’s much more in an emotional territory than political territory that I feel connected. I didn’t have a lot of time to worry about what my politics were within the shot, but politics as a discourse on the set was always very dynamic. We had conservatives who would come up to me and say, “I’m so glad you’re making a pro-war movie,” and I would have the progressives on the set come and say, “I’m so glad you’re making an anti-war movie.” [The film] is what you bring to it, and I think that carries over into the audience as well.

Filmmaker: How do you personally view the film?

Cole: It’s funny, I think of it as a film about the personal decision to go to war, not the political one. I look at it as a personal journey in a political landscape. I think it’s pretty obvious I’m a progressive, but I wanted to leave that agenda out of the filmmaking process because I wanted to discover these personal stories. For me, you have to ask yourself those questions, like “What would I do?” My dad is a World War II veteran, and he enlisted. I have other family members that were drafted or enlisted in the military, but I never had to face that so for me it’s fun as an emotional and intellectual exercise to [ask those questions]. It also depends on when the question is asked. After September 11, I would [have said], “I wanna go get revenge,” but in the run-up to the Iraq war I was an active anti-war advocate.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you burst into tears on set?

Cole: Oh my gosh, I burst into tears on set once towards the end of week three. I was running out of time, Time and Money showed up and said we had to move on and I couldn’t get part of the scene that I thought would be very important to the movie. [laughs] I think at that point I was like “Noooooooooo!” At the end of the day, it was better that we moved on than stick around and compromise our day, but at the time it was life and death! [laughs] When someone says you can’t do it, you feel like you’re five years old and at the playground and you don’t wanna go, you wanna play Monster.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Cole: The first film I ever saw was Bambi at the Lynnwood Theater on Bainbridge Island, which was my hometown.

Filmmaker: And finally, which actor would you pay to see in anything?

Cole: I love so many actors, but I am a huge Jack Nicholson fan. His career is so remarkable and I think I have probably paid to see every Jack Nicholson movie. It goes all the way back to The King of Marvin Gardens, a great film. The only one I might not see is the new Bucket movie, [laughs] The Bucket Line or whatever. But I might. It’s one of those ones where you go, “Ooh, Jack Nicholson’s in it, but nah…”

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 1/18/2008 01:16:00 PM Comments (0)

After years as a theater director, Abby Epstein has transitioned into being one of the most important new female voices in documentary film. Epstein began directing plays in the 1980s in Chicago where she started her own theater company, Roadworks Productions. In the late 1990s, she relocated to New York to helm the highly successful Broadway musical RENT. Notable amongst numerous other credits is her involvement with Eve Ensler's seminal The Vagina Monologues, which she directed during its New York run as well as its North American tour. Until the Violence Stops, her documentary about the global impact of Ensler's play, marked Epstein's move into filmmaking. It premiered at Sundance in 2004 and won an Emmy after screening on Lifetime.

Epstein's second documentary, The Business of Being Born, also grew out of her connection to The Vagina Monologues, as it was instigated by former Monolgues actress Ricki Lake. Shocked at the results of her own research into the birth industry, Lake asked Epstein to make a film about childbirth. The resulting movie, The Business of Being Born, is a damning indictment of the American medical profession which reveals how it excessively and detrimentally intervenes in women's pregnancy and labor. Characterizing hospital births as motivated more by the hospitals' financial and legal considerations than patients' wishes, or even best interests, Epstein's film makes a compelling case for a return to traditional (and often safer) midwife-assisted births.

Filmmaker spoke to Epstein about the need to change the perception of birth practices, how her own pregnancy affected the film, and her childhood obsession with The Wizard of Oz.



Filmmaker: You spent a long time working as a theater director, so how did you get into documentary filmmaking?

Epstein: This was a really weird journey, because I did theater for a long time. I really loved it, but at a point it became doing all these Broadway shows 500 times in 20 different languages. I was doing that on the Vagina Monologues in New York, where I met Ricki.

Filmmaker: Was she acting in the show?

Epstein: Yeah, we were doing this thing where we had different celebrities come in and do the show for a few weeks at a time. She was one of hundreds of actresses I directed in the show, but we really hit it off and stayed in touch. I had proposed the idea of doing this documentary about how The Vagina Monologues really became a social movement and how the play had taken off and was getting performed in these strange corners of the world. I was going to be just the producer on the project, but then the filmmaker we had selected had a conflict and couldn't do it and the playwright [Eve Ensler] said to me, “This is your baby, you should direct the film.” When I did the first film, it was a nice organic transition because I knew the material really well, and I knew what I wanted to say. I didn't have great filmmaking tools, but I knew what I was doing in terms of covering and angles from a narrative perspective and it translated pretty well to documentary. It was a bit of a trial by fire.

Filmmaker: That film, Until the Violence Stops, was a real success.

Epstein: Yeah, it was premiered at Sundance and went on to have a really nice life. It was such a difficult process and so long and tedious that I didn't want to do another documentary after that. I thought, “This was a great experience, but you can't really feed yourself doing this.” I went back to theater and was also looking for more narrative [film] projects because I was missing working with writers and actors. Then this thing with Ricki came along and I [thought], “OK, I have to do another documentary because they're so difficult and I sort of just started to figure out what I was doing on the first one, so I just need to do one more.” [laughs]

Filmmaker: These two movies have made you a prominent voice in feminist documentaries.

Epstein: It's funny, because my world before this was directing really heavy testosterone shows like Rent, Hedwig and the Angry Inch and a lot of tough, British dramas. There wasn't anything too feminist about it. The reason that I wanted to do this film was that I'm really moved by stories of empowerment, people who are suppressed and marginalized and how they find their voice. As women, I think we're still on a journey in this culture to undo a lot of negative work and empower ourselves and find our voices. I'm not a women's studies person, but with the birth film, once I got into this topic and realized something was being taken away from women, that really stirred me up.

Filmmaker: In terms of the people who are repressed and marginalized, in The Business of Being Born that group is essentially all American women, and it seems an incredible challenge to affect significant change.

Epstein: Especially with this particular topic, [because] I think people who consider themselves feminists (as I certainly did) are completely ignorant on this. I mean, I worked on The Vagina Monologues for three years and was traipsing all over the world and going to Africa to fight female genital mutilation, but I didn't know what a midwife was. I had no idea. I didn't know there was real gender politics involved in childbirth at all. I didn't know the history of it. The problem of this topic is that a lot of women who need to go out and advocate for change and more education are just not even aware that this is an issue. People know about rape and sexual abuse, but don't really know about what happens in childbirth.

Filmmaker: When you coincidentally became pregnant, was it easy for you to put into practice what the movie was proposing, namely that midwifery and homebirths were the way to go?

Epstein: [laughs] It was terrible, it was my worst nightmare. My editor [Madeline Gavin] kept saying, “I really think you should shoot your story,” and I was really fighting her, saying, “No, this isn't that kind of movie. Who cares about the filmmaker?” I had a difficult time making up my mind [about whether to have a homebirth] because I was interviewing from so many different perspectives every day, but ultimately I knew what I wanted. It wasn't necessarily studies that I'd read or experts that I'd interviewed [that affected me], it was going to someone's house and watching them giving birth in their living room and filming it and sitting around with them afterwards and ordering breakfast. It was this amazing energy, and for a woman it really helps to witness someone else doing that to believe that your body can do that. One of the reasons that I wanted to make the film was seeing the footage of Ricki's birth. I was so blown away — I'd never seen anyone give birth like that.

Filmmaker: It's so rare that someone as well-known as her would allow such a personal experience to be seen in a movie.

Epstein: I know. When I first saw the footage, I was just so moved by it, and thought it was so gorgeous and powerful and evocative. But there was a point in the editing process where I had to tell Ricki, “We're not sure where to put your birth...” She was kind of relieved, and at one point it was really not going to be in there but then we found a place for it.

Filmmaker: The footage of all the women's homebirths is very powerful, partly just because it is so totally unlike how we usually see birth on screen, with women flat on their back with their legs in the air.

Epstein: That was the intention, because that was what was most moving and surprising to me. We filmed a lot more births than are in the film, but the ones that we put in I felt we were the ones that showed [a different perspective], like that it could be a very sexy experience too. When we were at one of the homebirths, I remember thinking, “Oh my God, the neighbors are going to think we're watching a porno in here!” because there was this moaning all day and she and her husband were in the tub. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I think you don't you see [natural births] because there is a strategic effort to keep this information somewhat suppressed.

Filmmaker: Certainly a huge amount of money is made by the medical propagating the image of women incapable of giving birth simply.

Epstein: In every field, it's very easy in this society to convince women that they're not fit enough, not young enough, not pretty enough. Their bodies are never up to the task, their bodies are not fit for what they're really made to do. It's a psychological headtrip that women have bought into hook, line and sinker. There's already so much fear around this issue anyway that if anybody feeds you any more fear, it's impossible to find your footing and your confidence.

Filmmaker: You were planning to have a homebirth, but ended up having complications and having a very early Caesarian section birth, all of which we see in the film. How easy was the decision to include that footage?

Epstein: I honestly felt that this wasn't a film like Super Size Me, a filmmaker going out there like “I'm now pregnant, so I'm going to explore my maternity options,” or “I'm going to do this homebirth live on camera.” Because I started the movie as a sceptic on the outside of all of these issues, it was hard it figure out how to use my story. Ultimately my editor and I decided that we should shoot my birth just to see if there was any value in it. At the end of the day, there was an honesty, reality and balance to it, and I felt we had to include it. Ultimately, this is the nature of birth: it's this wild process, and sometimes it benefits from medical intervention and most of the time it doesn't. I think it would be deceptive to create a movie that led everybody to believe that everybody could go home and plan their perfect birth in their bathtub and it would all work out like that, because it just doesn't.

Filmmaker: This is a very important film in terms of changing women's perception of childbirth, so what do you hope this movie can achieve?

Epstein: I would really hope that we are exposing a lot of misinformation. At most of the screenings I have attended, I think it has really inspired people to look at birth in a completely different way: not as a scary medical event where you just try to cope the best you can and survive it with as little pain as possible, but as a potentially incredibly transformative and sacred rite of passage. This is not a medical experience, it's a spiritual experience, it's an emotional experience and something that people throw away too easily. I think the film reminds you of something that you sort of knew somewhere deep inside but has been covered up by layers of fear, layers of politics and legal issues. People are fed up of seeing the more sacred experiences in our lives by constantly corrupted by these bottom line policies. I think when you see that in relation to babies, it's horrifying.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Epstein: The Wizard of Oz. I got sort of obsessed with it: I started to write spin-off series and I created these whole sequels about where the wizard would take off in his hot air balloon and where the wizard would land. I think it was a huge source of imagination for me. I ended up directing musical theater and going into all that, so that film had a huge influence.

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

Epstein: It's not on a plane, but sometimes I like to watch The Devil Wears Prada. [laughs] It's the kind of film that's totally for teenagers and you're watching it and you're like, “Oh my God, this is so formulaic and silly,” but you have to watch it to the end.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was your cinematic epiphany?

Epstein: I think it was sex, lies, and videotape. When I saw it, it was a revelation to me. I had been working in theater at that point and directing a lot of plays that felt exactly like that movie, so for me it was like, “Oh, this is what I'm interested in.” I'm interested in small, intimate human stories that take place in a few locations and are dialogue-driven and character-driven, and at the time that movie was really such a departure. It was not all these fancy filmmaking tricks and all of this technical wizardry, it was something so simple and small about it. It made the whole film world suddenly feel within my reach.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 1/09/2008 08:32:00 PM Comments (4)

After spending the majority of his career working in television, 54-year-old Brit Andrew Piddington has committed the rest of his career to being an independent film director. He began his career working with poetic filmmaker Brian Lewis in 1980, and directed his first solo project as a writer-director, D.H. Lawrence as Son and Lover, that same year. Over the course of the 80s, he distinguished himself with his television work, most notably more biographical dramas about significant cultural figures, such as Under the Volcano, the 1984 profile of Malcolm Lowry and John Huston's adaptation of his greatest work; Enemy of the State (1987), a film about German artist Georg Grosz; and his television biopic of “fifth Beatle” Stuart Suttcliffe, Midnight Angel (1990), which inspired Iain Softley's later movie Backbeat. In 1991, Piddington directed his first feature, Shuttlecock, an adaptation of Graham Swift's novel which starred Alan Bates. He followed it up seven years later with The Fall, a Budapest-set thriller with Craig Sheffer and Jürgen Prochnow. At the same time, he worked prolifically on both prestige dramas like Poirot (1991) and Frontiers (1996), and real-life crime dramas such as Murder Trail (2000) and Supersleuth (2001).

Piddington's preoccupation with the psychology of killers, his aptitude for biographical portraits, and his poetic and inventive approach to real-life storytelling all collide in The Killing of John Lennon a labor of love which he spent four years of his life (and the majority of his savings) making. It is the first film to tackle the story of Mark Chapman (here played by impressive newcomer Jonas Ball), the Catcher in the Rye-fixated loner who killed John Lennon because he was a “phoney.” Rather than showing just Chapman's few days in New York before Lennon's slaying, Piddington shows us the year leading up to the event from his perspective as he stagnates in his Hawaii home, his mental health ever deteriorating. The reasons for Lennon's death will probably never be known, but Piddington's claustrophobic and often unsettling film uses Chapman's words from interviews and court transcripts to narrate the film, bringing us as close to understanding his motivations as we will get.

Filmmaker spoke to Piddington about his struggle to make the film, parallels with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and the impact of seeing Ingmar Bergman's Hour of the Wolf.



Filmmaker: Do you remember where you were when you heard John Lennon had been shot?

Piddington: I was working in television in London, making an archival programme about post-war England. One of the things I had to do was cover the late 60s. I was in the cutting room, and at the very moment somebody came through the door and told me that Lennon had been shot, I was looking at him as a moptop Beatle on a Steenbeck. That was the only synchronicity I ever had, because I grew up with and liked the Beatles but I was never a huge, obsessed fan of John Lennon or the Beatles.

Filmmaker: When did you first become interested in Mark Chapman's perspective on the events of Lennon's death?

Piddington: I came across a book by Fenton Bresler called Who Killed John Lennon? It was a Manchurian Candidate[-style] conspiracy theory book saying that [Chapman] was a Code Orange candidate and that he wasn't responsible, and that the CIA killed Lennon, which is a theory that is propounded greatly on the internet. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence but absolutely no proof that I could find, but this book contained a lot of documentary evidence — [court] transcripts, psychologists reports, interviews with people on the spot — and I became very interested in that documentation of Chapman and his mind and what he was feeling and why he would want to do it. Everybody wanted to know why, and he still hasn't given a reason why. That set me off on a journey, and I then started to research on the internet (but couldn't trust anything...), I got all the books I could. I decided that I wanted to tell the story of the film firmly rooted in the period, so I went onto eBay and bought up all the newspapers from 8 December 1980 right through to August of 1981 and got all this first-hand information. I collected all that I could that would give me a perspective of what people felt and what the story was at that time, and then that material formed the basis of the screenplay.

Filmmaker: It says at the start of the film that a lot of the narration is made up of Chapman's words. Where did those quotes come from exactly?

Piddington: It comes from depositions and court transcripts and interviews with court psychiatrists and on-the-spot reporting, so it's all very much of the time. Between 1980 and now, he's told the story many times and he's only got one story to tell, but it's very interesting how it moves and changes slightly depending on who he talks with. He loves to talk about himself, so there's a wealth of material out there once you start to sift through it.

Filmmaker: What was the process of writing the screenplay? In a way, you must have approached it in a similar manner to a documentary.

Piddington: Basically, I got the narrative skeleton together, and plotted what that dynamic was, and then had to decide where to enter the story. I could have entered it straight as he arrives in New York, but I wanted to give a visual background of paradise, of Hawaii, which for most people is a way of retreating from the world. He went there and just fermented with anger and rage. At that point, in Hawaii, it still wasn't formed in his head that he wanted to kill John Lennon — choosing John Lennon was a very random act, as it shows in the film. He just chanced across a book, and then everything just coalesced in his mind and this was the mission he was looking for.

Filmmaker: You struggled to get the film funded, and had to shoot it over a long period. This was presumably because this was such an edgy subject that people were very wary of the film.

Piddington: It's a very edgy subject because this film has never been made before. You have to ask yourself, “Why?” The reason that this film has never been made is that John Lennon is a sacred name and it touches people's nerve endings. If you're a John Lennon fan, the last thing you want to see is a film about his killing. And yet, at the same time, he was a public figure and in the same way that Gandhi and Martin Luther King and [John F.] Kennedy [were public figures], his life was in a glaring spotlight and so was his death. So it's perfectly valid to look at those events and try and understand why, because the issues it raises about celebrity stalking and private security are far more pertinent now than they were in 1980. In 1980, you could get right up close to anybody and pull the trigger. As Al Pacino says in The Godfather (Coppola is one of my favorite directors), “If history teaches us anything, it's that you can kill anyone.” And it's true. You can get close enough, and you can pull the trigger. John Lennon was the first rock 'n' roll assassination and he was the first one to suffer that tragedy. Consequently now we've had a whole raft of people who've been killed and a whole slew of people who have injunctions out on personal stalkers. Everybody wants to be famous for nothing these days. You have all these reality shows on TV and it teaches people that you don't have to have talent to be famous and make a lot of money. These issues are worth exploring.

Filmmaker: There are strong parallels between your film and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, both of which deal with obsession with celebrity and the killing of an icon.

Piddington: I really find that quite interesting, because people have mentioned this to me before. I haven't actually seen the film but I've read various things about it, which I find absolutely fascinating, and some of the things have said that Casey Affleck based his character on Mark Chapman. That's pretty interesting if that's the case.

Filmmaker: Unlike a lot of movies, both your film and Andrew Dominik's deal with the repercussions of the assassination, rather than stopping at the moment of the death, and tackle the aftermath in a really revealing way.

Piddington: I'm really pleased to hear you say that, because there was a lot of pressure on me to stop the film at the killing. If you do that, all you're doing is retelling the events that everybody knows up to the point where it became public. For me, the validation of making the film is in exploring the aftermath, because the aftermath is so revealing, psychologically and pathologically, about the character. Those are the areas that I really worked on and wanted to have a meaning and a point.

Filmmaker: A fascinating aspect was that you used all the real locations for the film.

Piddington: I can't claim credit for that. It was first done in In Cold Blood, the Truman Capote movie that was made in the 60s. Because I had to do research in these places just to make sure I knew what I was going to be recreating or just to get a feel for the place, it struck me that because we were so small [a crew], we were a core of five people, moving around wasn't a prohibitive thing. Once this became effective and I knew that I could shoot in the difficult areas, then that became a principle. In the film it doesn't really matter, but as a subtext on the set it's wonderful for the actors to know that they're walking into the office where [Chapman] actually worked, and the cubicle that he keeps his stuff in is the actual cubicle, and the flat that we shot in was the actual apartment that he lived in in Hawaii. It's quite extraordinary how we managed to secure all these locations.

Filmmaker: We have to also talk about Jonas Ball, because the success of the film hinged so heavily on you finding the right person to play Chapman, who's not only very demanding to play but appears in almost every shot of the movie.

Piddington: If he wasn't any good, the film wouldn't have worked. Jonas Ball is a magnificent young actor who's fresh out the traps and he's got a fabulous career ahead of him because he's got what every director wants: he can hold the camera in close-up. On a big screen, his face is just full of tiny nuances of emotion, ripples of reality go across his face and he has that quality of stillness. Because this film was shot over four years, it required an enormous amount of focus for me, as a director, and Jonas, as the actor, because he had to maintain a performance and I had to maintain the vision of the film. It was extremely difficult, because the longest downtime we had was a year between shooting and we had to go back and shoot stuff that was going to be cut right next to [footage] I'd shot a year ago. So the continuity problems were absolutely enormous. Every time we met, we either had to cut Jonas' hair or put hair extensions on him, and we had to go very carefully into the material to make sure it would match.

Filmmaker: Those gaps were because you ran out of money, and then had to go find more in order to finish the film. How stressful was that for you?

Piddington: It was extremely stressful, particularly in the year when we had nothing. I've had a very high profile career in television making a lot of interesting dramas, but my first love has always been cinema and I decided I was going to do this or bust. It was very stressful because I'd basically spent all my savings maintaining the film. I couldn't take any other work because I [might] be needed to go off and shoot again. Then it was just a question of getting through it, and it took longer than it should. It's not the way to make a movie, but it's an interesting process to do one, that's for sure.

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

Piddington: As a filmmaker, one of the common maxims in making films when you're under pressure is to survive it. If you survive making a film — because everybody wants to pull you down, everybody wants your job, everybody wants it to fail — then you can walk proud. The smartest decision I ever made was to just believe I had the talent and just struggle through until I had enough stuff under my belt to prove to people that I had it.

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

Piddington: I was weeping when the money ran out, that was more the case! [laughs] I suppose you've got to laugh at that.

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

Piddington: I don't know, but the first one that made an impact on me without a doubt was Hour of the Wolf by Ingmar Bergman. I found that so disturbing, I couldn't look at the screen. I was in my teens when I saw it, and I had no experience of films of that kind before. Because I'd grown up on American movies, I hadn't seen many interesting movies. I never saw a film as powerful as Hour of the Wolf because it emotionally disturbed me so much. I've never seen it since because I think the impact of seeing it that once was enough to stay with me, to show me in my own head just how powerful film can be.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 1/02/2008 11:19:00 AM Comments (0)