Ramin Bahrani's films are what one could term “outsider cinema,” and yet they are made with the quiet confidence of someone who knows he belongs. Iranian-American Bahrani was born and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and moved to New York to study film at Columbia University. After making the short films Backgammon (1998) and Strangers (2000), he spent three years living in Iran, his parents' former home country. Once back in the U.S., his awareness of immigrant life and the psychology of the outsider found a voice in his debut feature, Man Push Cart (2005). The story of Ahmed, a former Pakistani rock star who works as an anonymous push cart vendor in New York, the film revealed Bahrani's talents for capturing small moments and telling ostensibly low-key stories in a compelling manner. After premiering at Venice and then also playing Sundance, Man Push Cart was released theatrically to glowing reviews.

Bahrani's sophomore feature, Chop Shop, another tale of minority struggles in New York, is very much a companion piece to Man Push Cart. It centers on precocious teenager Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco), who works doggedly at a garage in Willets Point, Queens, as he tries to save enough money to buy a food van that he hopes to run with his older sister, Isamar (Isamar Gonzales). Chop Shop is more minimal and pared down in style than Bahrani's debut as he focuses more intently on resonant human stories told in simple, understated ways. Once again, Bahrani gets fine naturalistic performances from a cast of non-actors, principally youngsters Polanco, Gonzales and Carlos Zapata. Bahrani's movies are unashamedly “small” in their scope, yet the emotional purity and power he manages to convey in his films eclipses that of bigger, grander productions.

Filmmaker spoke to Bahrani about his distinctive creative process, making the camera invisible, and Queen Latifah movies.



Filmmaker: When did you first discover Willets Point in Queens, the film's setting?

Bahrani: I was editing Man Push Cart in the winter of 2004 and my cameraman [Michael Simmonds] called me and said, “I'm going to get my car fixed in a place you're going to love. You should come with me.” And so I went, and immediately was struck by it. I turned to him and said, “We're going to make the next film here. I don't know what it's about, but we're going to make it here.” I started going there a lot . Visually it's incredible, but initially I was struck by the people who were really struggling on the most fundamental level for survival. They were very fierce and in competition to get cars to their garage – sometimes leading to physical violence – yet later in the afternoon they would have a barbecue together, play music and have beers, or suddenly in the middle of all this a soccer game would erupt. I found this combination of competition and joy, life and death all at one time, to be great. How could I not make the film there?

Filmmaker: Did you go back there regularly? How did you find your story?

Bahrani: While I was finishing Push Cart, I would go there once every week or two weeks, and once that film finished I started going there three, four times a week. The last six, seven months before the film was made, I was going there almost every day. The more I went there, the more I became interested in the young kids that lived and worked there because it seems natural that you would be most interested in a kid in this adult world. As you see in the film, Shea Stadium is across the street and has this big billboard, “Make Dreams Happen,” and there's something connected [there]. I really started to wonder what dreams these kids would have and what are they going to do in this situation? So we started to focus the story on a young boy.

Filmmaker: When you were going to Willets Point, were you interacting or just observing?

Bahrani: Initially you just come and go a little bit until you get comfortable, and then you start talking to people. And then after you're there for months, they start to know you and they want to know what you're doing. I usually tell people initially that I'm a student writing a short story, because it sounds really boring. Then they don't really pay much attention to you and they'll talk to you about just about anything. If you tell people you're making a film, the first thing that comes into their mind is Hollywood and big money and big stars, and suddenly everything changes. So I really tried to avoid that kind of conversation for a long time. In fact the first person I talked to about it was Rob [Sowulski, the garage owner in real life and the movie]: after six, seven months, he called me over one time and said [puts on a gruff voice], “Come over here! What are you doing?” I said, “Well, I'm just lookin' around...” He said, “Don't bullshit me. You've been here six months. What the fuck's going on?” I said, “Well, I'm just making a little short story.” He said, “That's a bunch of bullshit. What are you doing?” I said, “OK, well I want to make a small film.” He said, “You're going to make your film right here.” And that's it, that's how you start becoming friends with people. I was there for so long that they trusted me. They told me many times the only reason they let me make the film was because I was there for so long.

Filmmaker: One of the incredible qualities of the film is that the camera feels invisible.

Bahrani: I consider it a compliment that you would say that. The cameraman, Michael Simmonds, and I wanted to be less visible than we were in Push Cart. Most of the scenes are just one shot, it's usually take 30, and that you tell me you think it just happened is a testament to Michael and the kids. The kids were relentless performers, doing it until we got it just right. Of course there are scenes in the film that are just documentary – when Alejandro's calling these cars in, he's really calling these cars in to make money – but the bigger scenes that are involving him and his sister, him and other characters, they were all scripted, incredibly blocked out, with the goal that it would feel like an accident, that you would never feel the mise en scene.

Filmmaker: The film feels so loose and spontaneous, despite your tight scripting and blocking.

Bahrani: There was a very detailed script which was never shown to the actors. We would rehearse with them for months in advance, so I would tell Ale and Izzy, “Alright, in this scene this happens. This scene is about this” and I would tell each of them separately what I thought the scene would be about for them, not in intellectual terms but in the most fundamental terms. They remember enough of it to get the point and then they say it the way they want to say it. I'd record all the rehearsals and I'd transcribe the best of what they'd changed. If they forgot things that were important, I'd remind them, because they don't read the words, they say it in their own language. “Those shoes are fake.” “No, they're real.” That's what it says in the script, but Izzy says, “No, they official.” That's fuckin' great, man. I don't talk like that and I don't know about it, but whenever she didn't say “No, they official,” I'd say “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you said 'No, they official.' I like that. You have to say that from now on.”

Filmmaker: What was the process of casting like? It seems that who was playing the roles was integral to the movie's success.

Bahrani: I learned on Push Cart that the biggest job in learning to work with the actors is casting. We were relentless on the casting: we looked for months for the kids, we saw probably 2-3,000 kids, I put 625 interviews on tape. Usually the first step is Q&A: “Who are you? Where are you from?” After you get them comfortable and you get them talking, you start asking things like, “So, have you ever stolen anything?” “No.” “Really?! You haven't stolen anything?! Why not?” Then sometimes you'll get, “Well, one time...” “Oh, cool. Tell me more about that.” Then you start getting into things that match the character: “Would you kill someone if they were hurting your sister?” “You wouldn't?! You wouldn't think about it?” Alejandro was close to that, and he and Isamar were from the same school so they already had a rapport of some sort. She had stood up for his real sister and so he already loved her and looked up to her. After that, it was just constant rehearsing.

Filmmaker: How quickly did people at Willets Point get used to you filming there and ignore the camera?

Bahrani: Thank God, they ignored us early! I'd been there for a long time, Alejandro had worked in the garage for six months so people knew him already. By the time we made the film, he knew more people in the direct vicinity of Rob's garage than me, especially the ones that only spoke Spanish. People thought we were making a documentary about him, so five, six weeks before we shot the film, me, Michael, the kids and one or two assistants or interns shot the whole movie on handycam. I brought people, even if they had nothing to do, so it looked like a little crew almost and so that they would get bored with us. The first thing we did was film the kids with the camera right in their face, moving it around in front of their eyes, because after five or six days of doing this they don't care anymore. And we would film the people around Rob's garage that we knew we were focusing on and we would film them a bunch until they were bored with that too.

Filmmaker: Man Push Cart really felt like a New York movie, but the New York location you used here really feels like a different country.

Bahrani: It's certainly not the New York that we know about in cinema but most of Queens and Brooklyn don't look like the New York we see in most movies. And, of course, this is amplified. In fact, it reminded me of a place north of Tehran that has that same place where cars are fixed and torn up. This is part of New York, part of America. I was born and raised in North Carolina and there are places there that I would challenge someone to tell me that this was the richest country in the world. I bring you to these places that no one wants to accept that they exist. These movies aren't about marginal characters, despite what people say. These movies are about how most people in the world live: check to check, month to month, day to day.

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

Bahrani: I guess Daniel Day-Lewis. He's pretty amazing in There Will Be Blood.

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

Bahrani: I saw this movie with Queen Latifah, she thought she had cancer and she went to be a chef in Karlovy Vary. She fell in love with someone there and then she learned that she didn't have cancer or something like that. It was really cheesy. No, she went to a spa in Karlovy Vary and fell in love with the chef, Gerard Depardieu, maybe. Something like that. I also saw Wedding Crashers — that was really dumb.

Filmmaker: What's the biggest compliment you've ever received?

Bahrani: You just told me that it felt like there was no camera in Chop Shop. That's a nice compliment.

Filmmaker: Finally, what are you working on at the moment?

Bahrani: I'm wrapping up post on my new film, Goodbye Solo. I shot it in my hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and it's about a thirties Senegalese taxi driver who's a very humble, friendly compassionate kind of guy. The movie begins abruptly in the middle of a scene: he's driving the night shift, there's a 70-year-old Caucasian man in the back named William who offers Solo $1000 to take him to a mountain two hours away called Blowing Rock. He wants to go there in about two weeks, exactly on October 20th, and he doesn't want to come back. Solo understands why he wants to go there, so he decides to be his friend so maybe he won't want to go there.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 2/27/2008 02:12:00 PM Comments (0)

It is the natural desire of critics to put films and their directors into neat categorizations, and yet there are some directors, such as Stefan Ruzowitzky, whose work simply cannot be summed up in a simple all-encompassing description. Born in Vienna, Austria, on Christmas Day 1961, Ruzowitzky stayed in his home city to study film, theater and history before pursuing a career in directing television shows, commercials, and pop promos for bands such as The Scorpions and Nsync. In 1996 he began an amazingly diverse career in features with the hip urban slice of life Tempo. He followed up with The Inheritors (1997), an acclaimed family drama about Austrian farmers in the 1930s, which was Austria's selection for the Academy Awards. From restrained pastoral he segued into populist horror, helming two highly successful German medical gorefests Anatomie (2000) and Anatomie 2 (2003). In between, he directed All the Queen's Men (2001), a WW2 dramedy about crossdressing spies starring Matt LeBlanc and Eddie Izzard.

Ruzowitzky returns to the subject of World War II with The Counterfeiters, though this time there are few laughs to be had. The movie, based on a remarkable true story, revolves around master counterfeiter Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics) whose decadent, immoral life in Berlin is shattered when the Nazis begin rounding up Jews and sending them off to concentration camps. In order to survive, he paints the wardens' portraits, and then agrees to lead “Operation Bernhardt,” the Nazi's plot to flood the market with fake American dollars. The Counterfeiters is not a Holocaust movie, but rather an immensely compelling real-life adventure set against the backdrop of WW2 and concentration camps. It does not, however, sidestep the inherent issues of the Holocaust, as the film's central problem — personal survival vs collective survival — is inextricably linked to the horror of what happened in the camps. Grippingly written and directed by Ruzowitsky and featuring a standout performance by Markovics, The Counterfeiters is one of the five films nominated for the Best Foreign Language Feature at the Academy Awards this Sunday.

Filmmaker spoke to Ruzowitzky about the movie's moral complexities, his Nazi grandparents and rescuing his school play aged 10.



Filmmaker: How did you first find out about this story?

Ruzowitzky: It's not well known in Austria or Germany, one must say. It was quite a coincidence because there were two producers who were approaching me with that same story more or less at the same time, so I knew this was destiny. What intrigued me right away was actually the central character of Sally. To have a counterfeiter in the concentration camp was the pitch that was striking me. With this counterfeiting, would he be able to manipulate reality also in the camps? Would he be able to betray people there? Betray himself? In such a situation, not knowing anything about the details, but this I knew right away that's interesting.

Filmmaker: How much research did you do into the story?

Ruzowitzky: A lot. There is the book by Adolf Burger, and he is still alive so I talked with him. There were also other inmates of these special units who had written memoirs, and I also read a lot of other autobiographies of former inmates. I also did additional research, knowing that this is such a sensitive issue and that there are so many possibilities to come across with a wrong message, even if you have the best of intentions. The last line, when Sorowitsch is saying, “We're going to make some new money again,” was very important for me because at a certain point I found out that it would be an awful message to bring across saying those Jews who survived the gas chambers became better people at least. This would be a completely wrong thing, so you have to take care and do a lot of research and think about it properly and talk with a lot of people.

Filmmaker: Did you have to change aspects of the story in order to turn it into a movie?

Ruzowitzky: I did to a certain extent. But all these details — like the pingpong table and the operatta music played to them all day long and these musical dance evenings that they had organised — are too good to be invented. What I did was straighten the chain of events, and make one character out of three or four real life characters.

Filmmaker: And is the character of Sally Sorowitsch a real life person?

Ruzowitzky: Yes. Sally is, and he's also very close to the role model. His name was Sally Smolianoff, and all this is true with him surviving Mauthausen, the first concentration camp, because he was painting portraits of the wardens. Burger had told me that Sally got arrested because, as we show in the picture, he was about to leave the country and then he met a beautiful woman and stayed for one night too long. So I used all that. He was quite an interesting character so there was a lot of material to work with. It was all rumors, which was perfect for a filmmaker, because you can play around with it. There was the rumor that he showed up in Monte Carlo sometime after the war and lost a lot of money there — that's just great material to work with and interpret it.

Filmmaker: He's a morally complicated character, which I presume was ideal in telling such a morally complex story.

Ruzowitzky: Yes, and the interesting thing is this is something new in many respects: this perspective, such a character. He's an anti-hero, because usually Jewish victims have to be good people and likeable from the start, and here you have a crook who is not really likeable in the beginning, but therefore people get to like him even more because they're taking the journey with him. Also, it's a different perspective and this is something I really found out doing research: all these autobiographies from concentration camp inmates were all written by people like us, people with an intellectual, academic background and bourgeois, but Sally is a jailbird. He knows how to get along in a prison, which is a completely different perspective. For people like Bruno Bettelheim, who was a student of philosophy, coming to such a situation you don't get along with it at all. I'm not saying that a concentration camp is just another prison — that would be a misunderstanding — but in many ways it works like one, and I think he got the system and knew how to deal with it much more than a philosophy student.

Filmmaker: He's almost like a film noir character in a Holocaust movie. Except that you that you seem to be completely rewriting the rules of what a Holocaust movie is supposed to be.

Ruzowitzky: In a way, I feel it's not a Holocaust movie, it's a movie that's set in a concentration camp but the situation is so special, you know? That's also a problem of the movie, because people think, “Oh, it's a Holocaust movie. Not again...”, because that means you have everybody dying because that was the essence of concentration camps. My movie is, of course, not light-hearted and entertaining but it's not what you would expect from a Holocaust movie.

Filmmaker: Were there any films that influenced you in regard to the tone or perspective of this movie?

Ruzowitzky: I definitely wanted to have this documentary approach and felt it would be completely wrong to have it too slick and beautiful and clean and nicely lit and [with] dolly movements and that kind of stuff. I felt if I had a chance to make the audience come close to what my protagonists went through you have to force them always to be with my hero, always look over his shoulder, always be there, never know what's going to happen next, never have an objective view.

Filmmaker: Your career has gone through interesting progressions. Based on your first film, The Inheritors, one would not expect that you would make Anatomie or Anatomie 2.

Ruzowitzky: This is one of the greatest things about my job, that I can do so many different things. Last summer I made a children's movie [Hexe Lilli] and one of the reasons for doing that was that I've got two [young] children so I felt my children are an important part of my life. But so are my Nazi grandparents, and so both [films] make sense. I always see myself mainly as a storyteller, somebody who tries to communicate with an audience and deciding to have a certain visual aesthetics and dramatic concept to me is part of storytelling: Who is my audience going to be? How am I going to reach them? What are the best strategies to bring my story across?

Filmmaker: How much did having Nazi grandparents motivate your perspective on this story and your desire to tell it?

Ruzowitzky: Living in Austria, if you're not completely blocked [off], you are aware that this is part of your history — your family history, your country's history — because the remains are everywhere. My grandparents weren't some huge war criminals, they were just average people fascinated by the Nazi's ideas. I can remember my grandparents saying things whereas nowadays it would be incredible what they were saying, so this is just dealing with your common past, in a way.

Filmmaker: The Counterfeiters was Austria's official selection for the Academy Awards and is now one of the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. How has life been for you as a result?

Ruzowitzky: It's great and I really would not have expected that the reaction in Austria would be that enthusiastic, because the Austrians do not really love their own movies. Like when the film was in competition at Berlin, which is an 'A' festival (something very important for a filmmaker), that didn't mean anything, but if it would win the Academy Awards you would be the king of the world. I'm a national hero, I've got my 15 minutes right now in Austria with stewards on the plane asking me for autographs and recognizing me and things like that.

Filmmaker: Now that you are an Oscar-nominated director and will have more creative license, what kind of projects would you like to be doing?

Ruzowitzky: It can only be about the next interesting project, and not making an American movie at all costs. If you do a bad American movie, it's going to hurt your career here and back home. For me the ideal thing would be to have the possibility to make projects here that are bigger budgeted and where you have the possibility to work with all these great American actors and other artists, and then again do something smaller back home, which is a privilege for us Europeans. It's like what Stephen Frears or Neil Jordan are doing; that would be perfect for me. It's not about “Hollywood here I come!” and looking for a villa in Beverly Hills. I have two children who are going to school and you can't do adventures like that [where you] just go to Hollywood and see what's going to happen. This you can do when you're 25 and have nobody you're responsible for.

Filmmaker: Which film do you wish you had directed?

Ruzowitzky: Once Upon A Time in the West. That's one of my favorite movies because I always see myself as craftsman and this is a movie that breaks so many rules of the craft but still works. The beginning of Once Upon A Time in the West, for 10 minutes nothing happens and its suspenseful. It's really cool.

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

Ruzowitzky: Hitchcock, I don't think he ever won. The book of Francois Truffaut interviewing Hitchcock was probably the most important for me concerning learning how to make films. It still influences me a lot, especially this thing of having themes, where he says, “If I'm shooting in Switzerland, then it's about mountains and chocolate and somebody's drowned in hot chocolate and somebody's fallen off the mountain,” and things like that which I'm trying to do as well.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was the first film that made you want to be a director?

Ruzowitzky: The story about me wanting to become a filmmaker is that when I was in primary school there was always a stage play performed by the fourth grade, the kids who were about to leave the school. I saw it when my brother did it: the mothers were doing the costumes and it was all wonderful. So for the whole of primary school I was waiting to be in the fourth grade and be part of such a performance, and when I finally got there our teacher came and said, “Kids, this year there's no performance.” [laughs] I said, “This can't be,” and so I organized the whole thing by myself. I was casting my friends, and doing just everything. Obviously it was pretty good because we did a lot of performances for the whole school and the parents, so this is when I decided, “This is what I want to do as a profession.”

Filmmaker: So you directed the play as well as organizing it?

Ruzowitzky: Yes, and I was male lead! [laughs] It was good fun.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 2/22/2008 02:07:00 PM Comments (0)

No matter how you look at it, George A. Romero will always be remembered as the godfather of the zombie movie. Born in 1940 in New York City, Romero graduated from Carnegie Mellon in the early 60s and stayed in Pittsburgh to set up a commercial production company. In 1968, he segued into features with his seminal debut, Night of the Living Dead, a low budget zombie movie which, in what would become Romero's trademark style, combined horror elements with dark and incisive sociopolitical satire. Romero continued to establish himself with unconventional horror films like Season of the Witch (1972), The Crazies (1973), and Martin (1977), before returning to zombies with Dawn of the Dead (1978). Since then he has collaborated with other horror luminaries such as Stephen King and Dario Argento, and made two further movies in his Dead series, Day of the Dead (1985) and Land of the Dead (2005).

While some Romero fanatics criticized Land of the Dead for being too much of a Hollywood film, Diary of the Dead is very much a return to the director's roots. The majority of the movie is made up of The Death of Death, a documentary movie shot by film student Jason Creed (Josh Close) and edited and introduced by his girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan). The documentary captures the experiences of Creed and his friends as they attempt to escape Pittsburgh when the dead refuse to stay dead. The familiar premise of the zombie apocalypse is here examined from the perspective of an American youth hooked on new technology and desensitized by the media. Diary of the Dead is quintessential Romero: the film's moments of humor and thrills cannot conceal its serious underlying message, that zombies or no zombies our society is very much heading in the wrong direction.

Filmmaker spoke to Romero about his going back to low budget filmmaking, the problem with Hollywood, and Meryl Streep being called yesterday's pizza.



Filmmaker: Is Diary of the Dead a response to fans' criticisms that Land of the Dead was too much of a Hollywood movie?

Romero: To some extent, yeah. It actually surprised me that so many fans felt that way. There's really a mixture of people who thought it was too big [and people who didn't]. I thought it was too big. I thought that it had lost touch with its roots completely, and gotten too “Thunderdome,” and I didn't know where to go next with it. But it wasn't so much that, man. I had this idea I wanted to do something about this emerging media and the dangers. To me, it seems that it's fraught with dangers. Anybody can throw up a blog, anybody with radical ideas, and if they can make it sound half-way reasonable all of a sudden you've got a million followers. [laughs] I can see tribes being formed, and the last thing we need is more tribes.

Filmmaker: How familiar are you with that emerging technology?

Romero: Familiar enough. I don't sit there, I don't surf around, I don't really use it, I've just looked at it for research purposes. I had a website of my own for a while, but I just got really sick and tired of it. I tried to be diligent, I tried to show up at least two nights a week and actually answer questions and have conversations, but pretty soon people were just sniping at each other and it was sort of a party that had nothing to do with me anymore. Sort of coming over to my house, eating stuff out of my fridge, [laughs] and just calling each other names. So I just wrote a letter saying, “Guys, gotta go. Help yourself to what's in the fridge...” The stuff that really worries me is that [the] tube has always had a kind of power, like Walter Kronkite was “the most trusted man in America.” I think a lot of the blame falls on the people out there. Nobody bothers to do their homework, they'd rather just look up from their beer and say, “Ah, you hear that?” and buy it without looking into anything that might go behind it. That's really the danger. It's very easy to suck people in. You could be a TV evangelist, you could be a Nazi, you could be a neo-Nazi, a white supremacist, whatever, and there's going to be millions of people out there that are willing to say “Yeah, man, I'll join your team!” So I wanted to do something about that, plus the way people are being invited to become reporters. Like CNN with the tornadoes: “Be careful, folks, but if you can get a good shot, please send it in and we'll put it on the air and send you a CNN coffee mug.”

Filmmaker: So how do you get around the problem of biased news media? How do you find sources you can trust?

Romero: I don't think that you can trust any of them necessarily. All of them are going to spin it to some extent. There don't seem to be any [Ed] Murrows around these days. Maybe there are, I don't know. Michael Moore is certainly not a terrific spokesman, I mean he seems to exaggerate and lie. It's very hard to trust anybody. I think you just have to do your own homework. You have to do a lot of reading and digging and it's pretty hard to get to the truth. Normally you don't have time, so you just try and intuit as best you can. But a lot of people don't, a lot of people just buy what they hear. I wanted to do something about people who get obsessed with being part of this, and believing they can help and losing sight of their own survival behind this, looking through that lens, and coming to the point where you just become blind and completely insensitive and you're not doing anything to help anyone, you're just shooting. Which is ironic, because that's theoretically the journalist's mandate, right? Don't get involved, just report.

Filmmaker: There's a line in the film where someone says “If it didn't happen on screen, it's like it didn't happen.”

Romero: That's at the center of [what I'm trying to say], yeah. I was trying to throw in stuff from all over the map, I was trying to make this patchwork quilt of media over past the 10 years. The radio reports that they're listening to when they go into the hospital are real 9/11 police radios, and there's footage from Katrina. I just wanted to lay this patchwork on top of it, and to just give you a gut impression so it's almost like Rorschach, a barrage.

Filmmaker: The conceit of this being a documentary meant that you had to have a very basic approach to how you made the film. What was that experience like?

Romero: I couldn't have done it if I hadn't had the control of this film. Normally you'd have to sign each page and you'd have to shoot that page, and if you see a sunset and want to shoot it, you've got to write a memo to get permission — and then the sunset's gone. So it was great having the complete control.

Filmmaker: You started making 8mm movies when you were 14, so this pared down style almost seems to hark back to that.

Romero: [laughs] It does to some extent, but it really goes back to The Night of the Living Dead and the days when we were just a bunch of buddies in Pittsburgh desperate to try to [make a movie]. We started a commercial production company doing beer commercials and industrial films and all that, and we said, “Well, we have the lights, we have the cameras — let's try and make a movie.” It was just real guerilla stuff, audacious, you know? In my mind, there's a throwback to that. But I've always tried to do that from my childhood, when I had an uncle with an 8mm camera. I would just mess around with it and learn how to use it: what an F-stop was, running film in reverse, double exposing accidentally, and never thinking that I could have a career out of it. I thought you had to be born royalty, I didn't think you could just work your way up. There was no such thing as film school in those days.

Filmmaker: Do you still feel like an outsider?

Romero: An outsider? No. I can get into all the offices, I can get any meeting I want, but I certainly prefer to be. I wouldn't like living in Los Angeles — I never have. I've probably lived there on the aggregate for three or four years doing post [production], but I prefer to stay out of that influence. There are so many bad influences when you live out there. Suddenly everyone's using the same new film stock, this new technique. When the Steadicam first came out, it was “Oh man!” There are so many influences that make everything look the same, as far as I'm concerned.

Filmmaker: Talking of influences, your films have been a big influence on this current generation of horror filmmakers. What are your feelings on movies like 28 Days Later or Resident Evil?

Romero: Well, I have a sore spot about Resident Evil because I worked on that script for about a year and half, and I thought it was great. I resisted it at first, and then said, “Oh, maybe I can have some fun with this” and did a script that I thought was pretty good. Capcom liked it, the L.A. branch really liked it, and I thought, “O.K., we're going to make this movie.” But it's a German company and it's basically one guy [who] runs it. And it just wasn't the way he wanted to go. But, again, it's the typical thing: he doesn't look at it until it's all over. My partner, Peter, and I were at New Line for two years. They would buy a novel for us, they'd hire a writer and have it adapted and Bob Shaye wouldn't look at it until it was all finished. He never read the book. So we would bust ass doing this screenplay, and he'd come in and say, “That's what this is about?! We'd never make a movie about this!” Basically, something that could have been stopped on Day 1, so it's just a lot of wasted time and money, and that's the stuff that used to drive me crazy. For about seven years I never made a film; I made more money than I've ever made before or since [from] development deals: The Mummy, Goosebumps, this thing Before I Wake, all of these projects that either got too expensive and became cast-dependent, or for one reason or another didn't get made. You know, [like] Scholastic suddenly has a battle royale with Fox, and they don't make Goosebumps, stuff that's unavoidable.

Filmmaker: In 2002, you told Sight and Sound your top 10 movies, and they were all great movies, but there was not a single horror movie in there. You've said in the past that people see you purely as a genre director, so do you still have aspirations to make other kinds of films?

Romero: You know, “aspirations” may be too strong a word. I just grew up lovin' movies, man. I find that there's this prejudice against anything that might smack of romance or schmaltz or whatever, so so many films seem to be so vacant or seem to have lost their soul. They ran Brief Encounter on Turner [recently], and I watched. You look at it and it's corny and you sort of laugh at the old fashioned techniques and you laugh at the style and everything else, but at the end there's a tear in your eye. And that's missing today. Nobody wants to step over that line, everybody's afraid.

Filmmaker: I believe you're a big Powell and Pressburger fan.

Romero: Oh yeah. Powell is the man. Experimenting with that little 8mm camera when I first saw Tales of Hoffman and I saw some of those techniques, it made it accessible. It actually made me be able to say to myself, “I know how he did that,” and it made the process more accessible and it gave me a little spark and think,”Maybe I could do this some day,” because the tricks he was using were so obvious. It's a beautiful, beautiful film, and I'm a big Michael Powell fan. What an amazing body of work. In the old days, before video, if you wanted to watch a movie at home you had to go rent a 16mm print and a projector. So I always used to go down to Janus and get The Tales of Hoffman, [laughs] and no one ever took that movie out until some other kid started to take it out. There was this kid in Brooklyn and he felt the same way. I think we were the only two guys. It was Scorsese. We've since both done commentary tracks on the laser [disc] and the DVD of that film. I think we were both really influenced by that movie pretty substantially.

Filmmaker: Is Hollywood going in the right direction?

Romero: [laughs loud and long] I don't know if it ever has gone in the right direction, it hasn't gone far enough west. You know, it's supposed to have snapped off by now and drifted into the sea. [laughs] But that hasn't happened yet. You know, Hollywood is just so predictable and unfortunately I find it this genocidal business of release patterns and “Let's beat this guy up,” and “Let's beat the other guy up,” and so much good stuff gets lost or not made because it just gets too expensive in development. It reminds me of the way they run the Homeland Security Department. They're killing themselves, frankly, with release patterns, with spending too much money on the wrong things, and very few of the executives having any affection — forget the genre — just for the medium itself. So that's too bad.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Romero: The first movie I ever saw was The Thief of Bagdad. My dad rented a television: no cabinet, all the guts hanging out, tubes, and a circular picture tube. We would sit and wait until something was on. It was not picking from what was on, it was “When is something going to be on?” Every once in a while something would come on, and one of the first things that came on was The Thief of Bagdad. The first movie I ever watched, I watched on that tiny circular screen, and that was it. I said, “Wow, this is great!” I was eight or nine, something like that.

Filmmaker: What phrase best describes your philosophy on life?

Romero: That's a tough one, I've got to think about that. I don't really have a philosophy on life, I just... I don't know. I guess I've always done what I do and figured out some way to do it. I think a lot of people don't do that and that a lot of people settle for vanilla. [laughs]

Filmmaker: What's the biggest compliment you've ever received?

Romero: They all came from my mother — I could do no wrong in her eyes. I could fart and she would say, “That was great!” [laughs] As a filmmaker, there have been a couple of people who have written about my stuff that I think give it too much credit. [Vincent] Canby's review of The Dark Half was probably the review I appreciated most because no one liked that movie and Canby was the only guy who saw what I was trying to do with it, and was able to get past Steve King. I mean, I got blamed by all these reviewers, and I got blamed because of Steve! [laughs] It was like, “Steve, what are you doing to me here?!”

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

Romero: Strangest? I don't know. It's not strange, it's just sort of sad how people drop in and out of favor. I was trying to get a film financed and it was one of those projects that had become star-dependent, and Meryl Streep had semi-agreed to do the role in it. This executive said, “Meryl Streep? Yesterday's pizza.” So I used that line in Bruiser, because that was the worst line I'd ever heard. That was the pits.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 2/15/2008 11:45:00 PM Comments (0)

A rare handful of people are born to make movies, and new British writer-director Paul Andrew Williams is undoubtedly one of those few. Born in 1973 in the Southern coastal town of Portsmouth, Williams initially studied as an actor at LAMDA and spent the latter part of the 1990s playing smaller roles in UK TV shows like Casualty, Eastenders and Soldier, Soldier. In 2000, however, he set up So Loose Films and began making a string of short films. The second of these, Sugar (2000), was picked up by Atom Films, and his next few got him into Fox Searchlight's Director's Lab, during which he made the Sundance-premiering It's Okay to Drink Whiskey (2003). Subsequently, he spent two years fruitlessly trying to set up the comedy horror The Cottage as his first film, before giving up and making London to Brighton, which was inspired by an earlier short, Royalty (2001).

Williams made London to Brighton on a shoestring (£60,000), yet the film's low-budget restraints only help highlight his distinctive cinematic voice. Told partly through flashback, it follows prostitute Kelly (Lorraine Stanley) and 11-year-old runaway Joanne (Georgia Groome) as they go on the run after the pair accidentally kill the pedophile father of London crime boss Stuart Allen (Sam Spruell). With Allen and Kelly's pimp Derek (Johnny Harris) wanting answers and retribution, the two flee to the relative safety of the nearby seaside town of Brighton. Though on paper it sounds like a harsh gangster movie, London to Brighton is in fact a naturalistic, deeply human drama in which criminal events are the movie's backdrop rather than its narrative core. Williams' characters are beautifully written — as well as brilliantly portrayed by leads Stanley and Groome — and he captures their downs (and occasional ups) with documentary-like care and intensity. Highly praised in its native UK, London to Brighton is arguably the best British debut film since Pawel Pawlikowski's The Last Resort, another great humanist drama about people at the fringes of society. Williams' The Cottage, now finally made, opens in the UK next month.

Filmmaker spoke to Williams about his instinctive approach to directing, British gangster films, and his decision to quit as director of Wild Things 3.



Filmmaker: I believe this movie was inspired by a short film you made called Royalty.

Williams: Basically I made Royalty — a long time ago... — because I'd just had an idea that I wanted to do this short film. I thought about it walking home, and when I got home I just typed it up in 15 minutes. I didn't really think much of it, to be honest, but it was my idea to work on just characters and not concentrate on the story. It was five years ago, but it was only when I was struggling to get [The Cottage] made that I thought, “God, I've got to do something...” A week before, I'd pictured one of the scenes from [London to Brighton], and I thought, “Actually, you could just put Kelly there and you could base it in and around her world,” and that's how it came about.

Filmmaker: And before that you had been acting mainly?

Williams: I'd been an actor and had no formal training in film [directing]. I just had this idea for a short film in my head, and told my mate and he said, “Let's do it.” Six months later, we'd raised a bit of money and did that short film. And then did another one, and just carried on doing that, not really having any money but continuing to film stuff. Eventually I got a deal in America with Fox Searchlight (which, like anybody else who got a deal with Fox Searchlight, was absolutely worthless), and met some people in L.A. but then came back [to the U.K.] and had some people interested scripts. But I was so broke, I lived with my parents. I was absolutely penniless for six, seven years. Until midway through last year. That's what you have to sacrifice.

Filmmaker: Did you have an ultimate goal that you were making these sacrifices for?

Williams: To be honest, my goal was always just to make stuff. At the time, it was really like I wanted a crack at making short films, music videos, and being proactive and creating stuff and being constantly busy doing things. It was only the fact that one of my films [The Cottage] was getting close to being made — I was going, “Oh my God, it's going to happen,” and it just kept getting pushed back and back — that was what made me go, “Right, I've got to make this feature film.”

Filmmaker: Did you teach yourself the basic points of directing?

Williams: I've never had any formal training. I would say it started off being an instinctive thing and still is that, although I have learnt a lot of lessons. It was an instinctive thing of wanting to create and collaborate with actors and come up with these characters and these crazy situations, and then to explain to the D.P., “This is the shot I imagine” and then show him my storyboards. As you do more stuff, you start to think about how you can do more things and all the other aspects of music and sound, as well as the characters, which for me are the most important thing.

Filmmaker: The logline of London to Brighton would probably lead someone to expect a very different film from the one you made.

Williams: I completely agree.

Filmmaker: So how did you overcome that problem when you were pitching the film and trying to get funding?

Williams: Well, the people who backed it never read it. Because it was only £60,000, it was totally through private funding and they just believed the talk I gave them, which is why they put money into it. But for me, I was never making a gangster film. I tend not to think about a film in a genre because that's really putting something in a certain bracket when realistically, for me, a film is a story. The story is what's most important and I wouldn't want to place that somewhere, because I think you alienate people. The only reason there are loglines and genres, I think, are for people who are selling movies. They need a label — it needs to be that easy-to-swallow, instant idea of what this film might be.

Filmmaker: I've seen a lot of really dreadful British gangster films over the past decade, but this was an incredibly different experience.

Williams: If you've got someone carrying a gun in a film and someone doing shady deals or breaking the law — especially if they've got a London accent — then it's automatically classed as gangster film, whereas I never looked at it as a gangster film at all. Unfortunately with most films there are certain plot devices that you do need, but I hopefully made it as natural as possible. But for me it's not a gangster movie. People are like, “It's a gangster, so it's a cockney gangster who's going to speak like this, “Fuckin' 'ere, cor blimey!” and who's gonna be this Jack the lad.” I'm like, “Bollocks, man, these guys are pimps, they're looking after whores who wear fuckin' tracksuit bottoms and trainers. These pimps eat fucking cereal and live in shitty flats.” Basically, the gangster films you might have seen which have been very poor are all [based on] what an audience thinks a gangster is, “So let's give them that, because an audience wants to see these gangsters all fuckin' happy.” Whereas the real people who commit crimes aren't like that.

Filmmaker: It must have been very difficult to make London to Brighton for just £60,000.

Williams: To be honest, it was less problematic than making [The Cottage] for £2.5m. When you're making something for very little money, you can change plans and it doesn't make any difference to the budget. If I wanted a different car on London to Brighton, we'd just get it; they'd both cost no money, so it would be fine. Whereas on The Cottage, everyone's getting paid and everyone wants this and if you go over then everyone wants their money, and if you want to change that camera shot then you can't get [something else]. There are people who go, “This is costing money, and you are answerable.”

Filmmaker: There are plot elements that are very sensitive, such as the film's pedophilic encounter, so how challenging was that given that you were working with such a young actress?

Williams: What was good was that she was very mature. The script was sent to her mom before and we talked about it well before she did it, and [her mother] was on set every day and if there was any problem at all we would discuss it. It was harder for the people watching it because they were completely aware of the underlying theme of how bad that situation is, whereas Georgia — although she understood it wasn't right — didn't understand just how awful the reality of this would be to somebody else. But you get around that by saying, “This is when she would be incredibly ready to cry, and if you can imagine something else [really bad] then this is akin to this moment.” But she was really fucking clever, man, she was really good.

Filmmaker: Your next two projects, the road movie Wisdom's Last Legs and a coming-of-age drama S.H.S. (Self Harm Society), seem completely different from both The Cottage and London to Brighton in tone and genre. How keen are you to establish yourself as someone who can make all styles of movie and won't be pigeonholed?

Williams: Very keen, I guess, but because I want to do that and not as a statement. I'm not doing it to say, “You'll never guess what I'm doing, so I'll fucking keep you on your toes,” it's purely because I like to do different stories, and it's the story that makes me interested. It's all about characters and story and I think that that's what's important, and where that story's set is secondary. I've just made The Cottage, which is a comedy horror, and you can tell people are already going, “He made London to Brighton — what's he doing?! Why's he doing this?” Once you've made a film that's so well-received you're in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation. I could just make a film similar to that, or I could do something I want to do that's different and I'm sure I would have got doubters either way. People unfortunately always go into a cinema with some preconception of what they're going to see and the idea is hopefully to break that within a few minutes.

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

Williams: I have to say it's not very often. However much I may moan, I'm extremely lucky to be in this position and very fortunate that I get to do what I do, because I find it extremely hard. I'm one of those people's who very rarely satisfied with what I do, so I'm basically living in a permanent state of trying to achieve the unachievable. If I could do a job in a fuckin' supermarket and be happy and satisfied with that, then maybe I'd do that. But luckily, right at this present moment I'm not as broke as I've ever been and also people seem to be interested in what I'm doing (some for the right reasons, some for the wrong...), so that's pretty lucky, man. I've worked my arse off to get here, though.

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

Williams: It was to quit a film I was doing in America. I was hired by Columbia to do Wild Things 3. At this point, I'd never done a film and I was like, “Yeah, cool. I've got a film, I've got some money, it'll be great,” but after a week I was like, “These guys are total fucking wankers! And they don't give a shit about the film or me or anything, so what am I doing...?” The people who were making it were awful. This was a line from one of the guys at the studio: “It's only Wild Things 3, it doesn't have to be perfect.”

Filmmaker: Did you see the movie?

Williams: Yes. It's absolutely dreadful. It was awful and it was always going to be awful, but when I first read the script it was like, “If I can do this my way then [it could be good].” If I would have done that, I would never have worked again, because either the film would have been so bad that everyone would have hated me, or I would not have wanted to be part of that industry anymore. But it totally changed my life: it really made me realize what I wanted to do and make decisions based on that rather than anything else.

Filmmaker: Is Hollywood going in the right direction?

Williams: Fuck no! Before films are made, the emphasis is very rarely on the creative worth of a project. It is all about the things that aren't necessarily related to the project itself or the initial script: who's doing it, who's in it, how can we sell it, how can we market it, what's the title. “That title? We can market that title regardless of what the film is.” Releasing The Omen on the 6th of the 6th '06, and making that film purely because that was the date – that's fuckin' terrible! They should be ashamed of themselves wasting money on things like that when people are dying. It's all about money, man. The studios are being run by people who don't have an interest in movies. I'm not saying I wouldn't come to Hollywood, but I would certainly be very careful of what I would do. I'm the kind of person who'd say, “I'll do this project if it's done in this way but if it deviates, I'll just walk off it.”

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

Williams: Never stop. Never, ever give in. The only filmmakers who won't make a film are those who give up.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 2/08/2008 02:08:00 PM Comments (0)

As role models, few filmmakers are more inspirational than Nadine Labaki. On top of the inherent difficulty of succeeding as a writer-director, Labaki grew up in Lebanon's war-ravaged capital, Beirut, in a Middle Eastern culture where women are essentially second-class citizens. However, Labaki's passion for film drove her to overcome her obstacles, and in 1998 her short film 11 Rue Pasteur (her graduating project at Beirut's Saint-Joseph University) won the top prize at an Arabian film festival in Paris. Back in Lebanon, Labaki honed her craft as a director by helming numerous pop promos and commercials, winning more prizes and accolades in the process.

A meeting with French producer Anne-Marie Toussaint in 2003 led to Labaki being sponsored by the Cannes Film Festival the following year to write her first feature script. Three years later, she returned to Cannes as the writer, director and star of Caramel, a vibrant depiction of a group of female friends in modern-day Beirut. The action is centered around Si Belle, a ramshackle beauty salon, where owner Layale (Labaki) and her employees and friends discuss and attempt to solve their problematic love lives. As well as being an effervescent celebration of sisterhood, Caramel explodes pre-existing ideas of Beirut, which here has the bustle and color of a European city, and is shot in a glossy, almost Hollywood style.

Filmmaker spoke to Labaki about watching Dallas and Dynasty while the bombs fell, using an entire cast of non-actors, and believing she was Disney's Snow White.



Filmmaker: Where did the idea for this project come from?

Labaki: It was something very personal. It started with something I used to feel and am feeling sometimes, this contradiction between [the fact that] I live in a country that is very modern and exposed to Western culture, and at the same time I'm confused between this culture and the weight of tradition, religion, education and there's always a lot of self-censorship, self-control. I'm a little bit lost between these two things, and I don't know who I am exactly. I looked around me and felt that all women around me were feeling the same thing, and that's why I decided to write this film, to talk about women now in Lebanon and what they are facing, and this contradiction between East and West and how we are trying to find our own identity.

Filmmaker: Was the film helpful in you finding your own identity?

Labaki: For me, it was something that I needed to talk about to understand more about myself. So I decided to talk about problems that I saw around me, or stories that I'd heard, or be inspired by people I see around me. It's not like anybody is based on one person but they're based on different people that you see, and then you summarize everything in one person. You cannot talk about all women in one film with five women, but you can give a big picture of what's happening.

Filmmaker: Do you feel the film is representative of how Lebanon, and specifically Beirut, is today?

Labaki: Absolutely, yeah, because it seems to be like a very modern country. It could be anywhere else in the world, but at the same time it's not — we still have a lot of issues to deal with. And it's true to the fact that in Lebanon we live in a community: you don't live on your own, you stay with your parents until you are married and you live in a family, a society. Lebanon is like a huge village where everybody knows everybody, so this creates a lot of pressure. We are also very much attached to our religion (whether we're Christians or Muslims), attached to education, tradition. I think we are a mixture of both [Western and Eastern cultures] and trying to find our own identity between both. Until we have found this right balance, I think we're going to make a lot of mistakes.

Filmmaker: It seems like you set out to change Western viewers' perceptions of Lebanon.

Labaki: First, I wanted to change that cliché of a country that is at war. That's it, that's all you know about Lebanon or Beirut, it's the only thing that you understand about this country. “Oh, it's a place where there's war.” It's important that people know what kind of people we are and how we deal with everyday problems, and the nature of these people who are very warm-hearted, who have a good sense of humor, who have this strong will to live and who are very colorful, very warm. This is something that people need to know also. It's not only a country where there's a war, there's so many things that people need to discover about this country.

Filmmaker: The film makes Beirut seem like a very happy, colorful, vibrant place.

Labaki: Because it is. It is a vibrant, happy, colorful place, in spite of everything. Lebanese people have developed this very strong way of adapting. It's surprising and at the same time touching to see how Lebanese people have survived until now and how they keep surviving, and keep living. It's this will that I wanted also to show in the film. This warmth that exists over there is something that is amazing, and people should know about it.

Filmmaker: How much of an impact did Lebanon being at war have on your childhood and the way that you view the world?

Labaki: I've lived [with] the war all my childhood: most of my childhood was spent at home because we couldn't go out, there was no school for a long time, so I saw and understood the world through TV. That's how I learned English, that's how I decided to become a filmmaker. I learned that through films I could be able to create realities that are different from my reality, and worlds that are different from my world. That was my childhood, just me in front of the TV watching films.

Filmmaker: So TV acted as your education.

Labaki: Yes, my education about the world. Of course, we went to school but we spent a lot of time at home, when there was no school, when everything was closed. The only escape was watching TV. I used to watch everything: Egyptian movies, American movies, European movies, French movies, everything. These stupid talk shows, stupid TV series. I know everything about Dallas and Dynasty! [laughs] It was the 80s and TV was my real education.

Filmmaker: One of the characters, Jamale, is almost like a comic character from a soap opera.

Labaki: [laughs] Yes. But it's also reality, this woman is real. In the film I didn't use actors, I used ordinary people and I asked them to be themselves, to exist the way they are. I didn't ask them to become someone for the film, like go through the process of some actor and become someone else. I just chose people from life — and it took a long time, a year of work [to find] people that look exactly like the way I imagined them in the script.

Filmmaker: Did you rewrite the script at all to tailor roles to the people you'd cast?

Labaki: I didn't rewrite it, but when we were shooting I just adapted it to the people, and the fact that I was acting with them really helped me because I was inside, and I could react really quickly to what was happening. Many times, we went in directions that were not even written because I was using non-actors. They couldn't memorize the text — they don't have the discipline, don't have the rhythm — so it was a huge work of editing afterwards, because every shot was a different shot.

Filmmaker: How much of a challenge was it to not only write and direct your first feature, but to act in it also?

Labaki: For me, it was easier. It might be surprising to people, but it was easier because it created a very strong bonding between me and my actors. I was not anymore the director who is giving them instructions, I was their friend and we were just having fun, we were just being ourselves in a certain situation. [For] some scenes where I was not acting and only directing, it was much harder, it was much more tiring for me to get there.

Filmmaker: How much rehearsal time did you have?

Labaki: Not a lot. I didn't want to lose the spontaneity and the freshness, so I didn't do a lot of rehearsal because I saw them a lot before starting to shoot. We just hung out together and we became friends, and this real friendship shows on the screen.

Filmmaker: What are your influences for this film? There's almost a Hollywood aspect to it, in its tone and visuals.

Labaki: I don't know, because when I was writing the film, I didn't have the thought of one film. I am inspired by everything I see. I saw so many different things, like I told you, so there are many influences but not one thing in particular inspired me. There's no plot in this film, it's just describing slices of life. With no plot. That's why it's different from an American movie where there's a plot, a beginning and an ending. I don't really know what my influences are, I just try to be as close to reality as possible. I am giving people the impression that they are observing other people's lives that look like them, act like them, are like them. I am really inspired by ordinary people. I think there's a lot of beauty in ordinary people. I don't like heroes, so that's maybe why I chose people who aren't actors, and chose them from real life.

Filmmaker: As soon as the movie wrapped, Beirut once again became a war zone and was being bombed. How difficult was that for you?

Labaki: Very hard to deal with [laughs] because I've made a film that has nothing to do with war — it talks about life, love, friendship — and then my country was at war again. It was something unimaginable to me, I couldn't believe it was happening again. You have a very big sense of guilt because you're a filmmaker and you don't know how you can help and how your art can do something for your country. So it was very hard — but then I understood that maybe it was my mission to make this film that shows something else of my country, a new image.

Filmmaker: How difficult has it been working as a woman in the film industry in Lebanon?

Labaki: I've never felt the difficulty because I'm a woman, it's a hard job anyway. It's difficult for a man also, so I've never felt that because I'm a woman it's much more difficult. That's the contradiction: this country [Lebanon] allows you to do things, but at the same time you have this self-control, you're scared of hurting people's feelings. You have all these issues that are not solved and at the same time you're working in a field that's not easy for women. You travel a lot and you do what you want, but still you don't leave your house unless you're married. I'm in that situation. That's the contradiction of this country.

Filmmaker: Do you see yourself making films similar to this in the future?

Labaki: I think I want to do something different. I'm going to start writing again in April but it's still not very clear yet. I have a theme, but it's too early to talk about it. I still need some time to become obsessed with it.

Filmmaker: If Caramel is very successful in the U.S., would you consider working in Hollywood?

Labaki: Because the film was in Cannes, there's a lot of people who came knocking at my door. [laughs] I still don't know. I have to think about it, I have to think about it. I just feel like I want to keep making Lebanese films in Lebanon with Lebanese people. You never know. It's really tempting, I must say.

Filmmaker: There's certainly a universality about Caramel that has given it mass appeal.

Labaki: Of course. I hope that I would keep making Lebanese films that would go and travel and become universal.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Labaki: Maybe Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I used to identify with that woman that had, you know, black hair and white skin. I used to think I was her and dream of her life and dream of the day a Prince Charming was going to come and kiss me. [laughs] Yeah, it made me dream and it's one of my favorite films.

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

Labaki: I love Meryl Streep. I love also Robert De Niro.

Filmmaker: So are you a fan of Falling in Love?

Labaki: I love that film, I love it! You just hit it spot on! One of my favorite films, really sensitive.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 2/01/2008 01:37:00 PM Comments (0)