The North Carolina School of the Arts film program has, during its relatively short existence, produced a wealth of cinematic talent. Prominent alums includes writer-directors David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Michael Tully, Aaron Katz, Jody Hill and Nate Meyer, actors Danny McBride and Paul Schneider (who is also a writer-director), D.P.s Tim Orr and Adam Stone — and to that list one must now add another notable talent, Jeff Nichols. A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Nichols graduated from the school in 2001 and has to date written and directed six short films in addition to working on Gary Hawkins' The Rough South of Larry Brown (2002) and Margaret Brown's Be Here To Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt (2004). He currently lives in Austin.

Shotgun Stories, Nichols' first feature, is a film with a classical feel that is nevertheless uniquely the vision of its writer-director. Set in Southeast Arkansas, where Nichols spent much of his adolescence, it is a small town tale of three brothers, Son (Michael Shannon), Kid (Barlow Jacobs) and Boy (Douglas Ligon), who are thrust into a feud when the father who abandoned them as children dies suddenly, and Son's actions at his funeral incur the wrath of their four half brothers. Fusing together elements of classic tragedy, traditional American storytelling and epic cinema, Shotgun Stories is a poetic and powerful film which displays Nichol's flair for creating vivid, original characters and intense and thoughtful narratives. Shot in 35mm anamorphic, it is a beautiful, expansive vision of America with a grandeur and grace that belies its limited budget.

Filmmaker spoke to Nichols about modern day revenge movies, the influence of Lawrence of Arabia, and his dad taking him to see Pale Rider in the second grade.



Filmmaker: What was the genesis of Shotgun Stories?

Nichols: I come from a family of three brothers and that relationship was something that I understood really well. I thought about if something tragic or violent were to happen to one of my brothers, just whatever the feeling is in your gut. At the emotional heart of the film was that feeling, and I held onto that through everything else. Combined with that was the fact that I grew up in this region and always knew that my first film would take place in this kind of setting. I was thinking about the idea of post-9/11 revenge in America and what it would be like to reexamine the structure of a revenge film. I was going along that path and I heard this song by the Drive By Truckers called “Decoration Day.” It was about a more typical feud, kind of Hatfields-McCoys, and I was wondering how a present-day version of that might play out in Southeast Arkansas. There was an image [in my head] of a guy spitting on a casket, and from there the story started to piece together.

Filmmaker: Shotgun Stories is a revenge movie but is very different from the usual genre take.

Nichols: [In a typical revenge movie], the guy that gets killed and [whose death] the hero spends the rest of the movie trying to avenge, we only get to spend five minutes with him and there's never really any emotional connection or sense of loss. If Shotgun Stories to a degree is a meditation on conflict and conflict resolution, it didn't make sense to make a film that relished violence or the act of revenge. [I thought], “I wonder if we can push the inciting thing, the death of someone, really far back into the film...” On top of that, when things really start to gear up in a revenge film, the good guy's going to kick ass and find the bad guy and do him in. Violence really gets into that and there's a definite sense of narrative drive, and I was debunking that at every step of the way.

Filmmaker: You call it a post-9/11 revenge story, but there's also strong echoes of classical tragedy here.

Nichols: It's a pretty universal theme we're working with here: these brothers are fated to have to resolve their father's past without him. It's funny, in telling the story I didn't sit down and plan out for Shampoo to be a Greek chorus necessarily. His character was developed very practically because I needed to transfer information between these two sides that wouldn't speak, but at the end of the day that's the exact purpose of a Greek chorus. I think it feels like a classic story and is aided by the environment. It's not in a bustling city, it's detached from the regular hustle and bustle of things. I guess there are very few trappings of contemporary cinema: it's not handheld video with unscripted dialogue, it's heavily scripted, the narrative structure is extremely thought out and plotted, and it's shot, blocked off, widescreen. The camera only moves when it absolutely has to, which pushes a slower pace, and so the whole film is being presented to the audience in a classical way.

Filmmaker: You wrote in your Director's Statement about the impact Lawrence of Arabia had on you.

Nichols: David Gordon Green said when George Washington was coming out that he wanted to make something beautiful that reminded him of the films that he had seen in a theater growing up that you were struck by because of their size and their scope. That was very much what happened with Lawrence of Arabia for me. I was in sixth grade and they had a re-release print of Lawrence of Arabia in my hometown. It was enormous. We had a dome theater so it was a beautiful screen to see it on. I remember being struck by its scope and also by the fact that a landscape could dictate structure, that things that happened in the movie couldn't have happened without that landscape, and that landscape couldn't have been shown any other way than to be that big. [laughs] I just remember being shook by it, saying, “Wow, that's a powerful film,” and when I sat down to make Shotgun Stories, I wanted it to be a powerful experience. I know we didn't have any money and were working with some non-actors and that this wasn't a big budgeted 1960s studio films, but those were the films that I liked and I wanted to get as close to that as possible with what we had.

Filmmaker: How did you manage to shoot on 35mm widescreen anamorphic on such a small budget?

Nichols: I have to give a lot of credit to watching David Green go through this process
on George Washington, and having him as a friend. We went through the same film school, I was two years behind him, and I got to see the important places to put your cash and the kind of people you need to have around to make the equipment that you have work as well as possible. I knew I wanted to shoot on film, I knew we wouldn't have a lot of crew or equipment or a lot of time to light. You just start off by using available light as best you can and if you're shooting on 35 and you get a proper exposure, it's gonna look good. On top of that, not everybody has a good friend like Adam Stone, the cinematographer, who'll come down and work for peanuts and who is truly a talented cinematographer. I called my friends, cashed in as many favors as I could, cobbled together whatever crew that I could. I had a handful of really talented people that came out of college with me, I knew their abilities, I knew where to put 'em, and it was about knowing where to put things. [laughs] Although we gambled on everything, nothing was too unknown. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Did you shoot close to where you grew up in Arkansas?

Nichols: I grew up in Little Rock, which is the biggest city in Arkansas, which isn't saying a lot, but my grandparents lived in a town called Altheimer, which is about an hour southeast of Little Rock. I would spend summers and holidays just basically driving through every location you see in Shotgun Stories. It was a valuable place to be because I was just removed enough from the locations for them to still seem special: we would drive out into the country and it would feel like a trip, so I had a romantic relationship with these landscapes. If I'd grown up in a small town like England, which is where we did a lot of the shooting, I may have perceived it a little differently. [laughs] This landscape produces these kind of men, this kind of stoic Southern man. These were guys I'd run into growing up. The fish farm that Son works at is owned by my dad's cousin and I worked on that summers in high school, so there were people that I just felt close to.

Filmmaker: The first time I saw this film was on a DVD screener, and it's nowhere near the same experience it is on the big screen. Is it very frustrating to you that a lot of journalists, film festival programmers and distributors are essentially watching it in an inferior format?

Nichols: It's reality so I can't buck it too hard, but the [Independent] Spirit Awards actually streamed our film online in a box considerably smaller than your computer screen. It's tough. It's not the way your film is meant to be seen. I was watching this thing on YouTube of David Lynch talking about watching movies on your iPhone. That's pretty much the essence of it. There's nothing I can do about it, but the flipside is this was a film that started from nowhere, below zero in terms of its aspirations for getting out in the world. Anyone that watches it, that's one more person than I expected to. If someone can hear the title Shotgun Stories and be able to look it up and get it on DVD, that's a pretty huge success for the film. But if people get the chance to see it in the theater, it's definitely worth it.

Filmmaker: I know Terrence Malick was a big influence on David Gordon Green, but you also seem to share some of that epic scale and a poetic perspective on rural America.

Nichols: Badlands was the one film that struck me. I saw it for the first time in college. But I have a lot less to do with Malick than David does, I have a lot more to do with Tender Mercies, a lot more to do with Hud and Cool Hand Luke. A poetic realistic look of America was definitely something that I was going after, but the films I was studying were less Malick.

Filmmaker: The film also seems to come out of a tradition of American literature also. What authors were an influence on you?

Nichols: I was introduced to some of my favorite literature in high school, but it was in college that I started to read somewhat voraciously. At that time I was introduced to a lot of contemporary Southern writers: Larry Brown, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy. It was Larry Brown's short stories that kinda floored me. Harry Crews wrote a biography called A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, a collection of essays, and that combined with Larry Brown's short fiction and Big Bad Love and Facing the Music really kinda [made me think], especially given where I was from, “OK, this feels like an appropriate description of these places.” I definitely hadn't seen it in movies and the fact that I found it in books was pretty overwhelming. So then you get back into Flannery O'Connor and, for me, a lot of Mark Twain and then, of course, Raymond Carver. I stumbled across Raymond Carver in my junior year, which is late. I'm kind of a late bloomer. [laughs]

Filmmaker: 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?

Nichols: It would be the mid-60s and I'd be making movies in the South, American black-and-white films in Scope like The Hustler.

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

Nichols: When I worked at Blockbuster — that was terrible! That was my senior year in college, so that was seven years ago. As long as I'm writing and making movies, I'm happy.

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a kid?

Nichols: Hmmm, I think in third grade I wanted to be a marine biologist. I don't know why though. I think just because I had never been to the beach — Arkansas's a landlocked state — and I just liked the idea of working on the beach all day. I don't think that's even what they do.

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

Nichols: I don't know about the first film I ever saw, but the first film I remember seeing in the theater (mainly because it was R-rated film) was Pale Rider, Clint Eastwood. My dad took me when I was in second grade. It had a huge impact on me. It's the movie where he shoots everyone in the forehead and that didn't bother me at all, but there's a scene where a girl's dog gets killed and it was rainworks, just tears. I feel oddly connected to Clint Eastwood. A Perfect World is actually one of my favorite movies. People don't talk about it very much, but I really like it. Out of all the studio directors working today, I think Clint Eastwood seems to have the working style I'd like to work towards more than anyone.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 3/26/2008 11:25:00 PM Comments (1)

Occasionally a filmmaker comes along who truly remind us why we love cinema. Christophe Honoré is not only one of those people, but also finds multiple other ways of expressing his seemingly endless creativity. He was born in Finistere (literally “The end of the world”), a small town in Brittany, France, and attended the University of Rennes, where he studied literature and film. In 1995, he moved to Paris where he began reviewing for the legendary Cahiers du Cinéma while writing both plays and children's books. His first book of young fiction, Tout contre Léo (1995), tackled the tough subject of children born with HIV, and Honoré has shown a similarly unflinching approach in his adult novels which deal with incest, suicide and AIDS. Since 1995, he has written 12 children's books, four novels, four plays and four screenplays for other directors. He made his debut as a writer-director in 2002 with 17 Times Cécile Cassard but it was his audacious adaptation of Georges Bataille's Ma Mère (2004), featuring Isabelle Huppert as Louis Garrel's hedonistic mother, that first attracted international attention. Honoré's follow-up, the unconventional family drama Dans Paris (2006), was redolent of the French New Wave in its bold, loose approach and demonstrated the extent of the auteur's potential.

Honoré's latest film, Love Songs, is a companion piece to Dans Paris in which he returns to the themes of love and grief as seen through the eyes of young Parisian men, and once again stylistically references the Nouvelle Vague--and it's a musical. Based around the songs of Honoré's regular composer Alex Beaupain, Love Songs begins by introducing three carefree lovers, Ismaël (Louis Garrel, in his third consecutive movie for Honoré), his girlfriend Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Alice (Clotilde Hesme), who has recently become their bedfellow. From this light, bawdy start the film takes an unexpected turn as Honoré pushes the musical genre to an unusually dark and somber place, combining poppy ballads with realism and a deeply serious and emotionally intense plot. A musical fused to the ideas and audacities of the French New Wave, teh resulting film utterly revitalizes the genre and gives one hope that cinema as a fluid, malleable and evolving art form is far from dead.

Filmmaker spoke to Honoré about reinvigorating the musical, his thoughts on Sarko L'Americain, and how he and Wes Anderson are both still really nine-and-a-half year olds.



Filmmaker: What were your reasons for interpreting the musical genre in this way?

Honoré: There are two reasons for the film, really. One is my friendship with the composer Alex Beaupain, which I've had for many, many years. He did the music for all my movies and also has a parallel career as a singer-songwriter in France. Since we're very, very good friends, we've lived through a lot of things together in the 20 years that we've known each other. One thing that happened that was extremely unpleasant was the disappearance of a female friend of ours who we were very close with. So we really wanted to turn that event into a sort of a happy grief, and that propelled us towards wanting to make this movie. So that's the personal reason for the film, and the second is that as an adolescent and a cinephile, probably the first filmmaker that I focused on was Jacques Demy. I am from Brittany and he was from Nantes, and my grandmother lived in Nantes. So when I would go and stay with her during the summer, I would make a pilgrimage to all the locations where he had shot his films. He was always like an imaginary godfather for me. After that, I started to work at Cahiers du Cinema and I took as a pseudonym the name of one of Jacques Demy's characters, Roland Cassard. And then I did my first film, which is called 17 Times Cécile Cassard, and [in it] I asked Romain Duris to sing a song that Anouk Aimée sang in Lola. So I was trying to find a way to not do a film in the style of Jacques Demy, but do a musical comedy in France in my own style.

Filmmaker: The roots of the movie seem to be in the scene in Dans Paris where Romain Duris sings to his ex-lover on the phone. Was that consciously a preparation for this movie?

Honoré: It was like a preparation. Alex and I talked a long time ago about Love Songs, and in Dans Paris I wanted to try a sequence with a song so I asked Romain to sing. Romain is a very, very bad singer [laughs] and it was very difficult for him, but at the end I thought the sequence was a good one, one of the best in the film. Dans Paris had a lot of success in France so it gave me the courage to compose Love Songs.

Filmmaker: How was it fashioning a narrative around existing songs?

Honoré: Since it was a very personal story, I didn't have to invent a plot. The story is what happened and Alex had already written songs about the event that he sang solo in concert. So first I did an adaptive process to turn the songs into duets or three-part songs, then I wrote the screenplay and after that I worked with Alex and changed certain dialogue sequences into song.

Filmmaker: How different was the process of directing a musical from your previous experiences?

Honoré: It's true that the musical comedy genre has very rigid technical demands, the main one being that we had to record the songs in a studio prior to the shoot. In the studio, I had to direct the actors, who didn't know at all what was going to be happening on set. So it forced me to look ahead and make sure that the song sequences were much more rigorously prepared than the other scenes in the film. Then all the work during the shoot when we were doing playbacks was to bring life back into something that was already too set.

Filmmaker: How important was it for you to make this a realistic film?

Honoré: It was one of the biggest differences between this movie and the movies of Jacques Demy. All of Jacques Demy's movies are some kind of tribute to Broadway musicals and his way of directing is very theatrical: he's always in front of his actors and he wants to metamorphose reality into something else. So even if he is one of the members of the New Wave, when he shot outside in the street he painted all the walls pink. For me, it's very, very different because I want to place the film in a real reality. I was very, very cautious about the film being kitsch, because it's a thin line between tragedy and kitsch. One of the things that I thought was important today was to get rid of that sort of Broadway theatricality — because it's not normal behavior when people are singing — but to place them in a setting where everything else is going on normally, even if they're singing. The way this was conceived was that the characters start to sing when they really can't express their emotions, so in Love Songs you can think of it almost as if it's an offstage voice that comes in to to help the characters.

Filmmaker: You've described this movie as a romantic comedy, but there are darker and more tragic aspects.

Honoré: There was a real drive to have something about the pop spirit in there, where you talk about serious things with lightness. The grave, heavy side of the film really ties into some very personal issues for me, so I know that I'm not creating something that's cotton candy. When the film came out in France, people really appropriated it and I realized that the film had something that was sentimentally extremely generous. That's always something of a misunderstanding, but on the other hand I really don't look down on it at all and really don't have an opinion on it.

Filmmaker: There seems to be a desire in your recent films to break or rewrite the rules of cinema, which again leads us back to the Nouvelle Vague.

Honoré: I'm not sure if people see it so much from the outside, but in France I think there is such a strong return to academia and what is considered classic cinematic structures. It's true that with my last two films I've really tried to put that pleasure at the core of my directing, to try things that are not necessarily forbidden but to try and deconstruct a little bit. I think that deconstructivism is one of the principles of modern cinema, art and literature. I know that post-modern perspective on the arts is frowned upon, but one of the things I like about it is the idea that cinema, paintings and literature contain the memory of other art that has preceded it. What really weighs on me is the amnesia of contemporary cinema.

Filmmaker: How conscious are you of building up an interconnected body of work? I ask because there's almost a dialogue between Dans Paris and Love Songs: there are visual aspects and plotpoints that appear in both, as well as shared cast members.

Honoré: Already I'm aware that Ma Mère and 17 Times Cécile Cassard are two parts of one ensemble and there's a real break between them and Dans Paris and Love Songs. It's true that Dans Paris and Love Songs are variations on a common theme and I see them together and would say that they're part of a trilogy because I just finished shooting another film this winter with Louis Garrel. In these three films there's the wish to tackle three themes: a look at Paris, a look at French cinema, and a look at the sentimental portrait of youth. I have already the screenplay for my next film and so I know that I've now moved onto something else, and have left Paris to move back to Brittany.

Filmmaker: How does your other work — your novels, children's books and plays — fit into your film career? Your writing career came first, but do you still want to keep that going in tandem with making movies?

Honoré: I don't really know how it's going to work out because it's true that for the last three years I've done one film after another. It's true that I've written children's book but I haven't had time for a new novel. I think filmmaking is such a physical activity and so I have to take advantage of it in the next ten years while I still have the chance. When I'm old and tired, I can become an old French writer in his bathrobe.

Filmmaker: When someone asks you at a party what your job is, what do you tell them?

Honoré: It's funny that you ask me that questions because I've often been very embarrassed and confused with that. I used to not be able to say I was a writer because I thought it was pretentious, but now I don't like to say I'm a filmmaker because the person asking me is probably a young actor and then it's going to be difficult. The business card I take out most readily is the one that says “Writer of Children's Books,” because it reassures everybody but doesn't interest anyone. People then don't bother me and, as I don't like to be bothered, that works.

Filmmaker: What are your thoughts on contemporary American cinema?

Honoré: I have a lot of admiration for certain American directors, but I'm particularly influenced by American literature in my films. Bret Easton Ellis was a big influence on my adaptation of Bataille's Ma Mère, and Dans Paris was a clandestine adaptation of Franny and Zooey by Salinger. But the American directors I like today are people like Tim Burton, and Wes Anderson is someone I admire a lot. We have something very important in common: Wes Anderson and I remember really well what it's like to be nine and a half, and it's through that perspective that everything is viewed. I admit that my nine-and-a-half year marking point has more of an influence on my children's books but I sense that it will also be seen in my filmmaking.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Honoré: I think the first film I saw was one that my parents took me to called The War of the Buttons. It's about a war between groups of children in a little village, and there's a scene where all the children are naked in the woods and I remember it as being a very erotic sequence. And I was much younger than nine and a half!

Filmmaker: Which film do you wish you had directed?

Honoré: The Godfather, parts one, two and three. I really like Part III. It's not my favorite, but for me Coppola is one of the biggest. When I walk around and look at my camera angles, to look at a Coppola sequence is always a lesson.

Filmmaker: Should actors sing and singers act?

Honoré: In France there are a lots of actors, and particularly actresses, who sing and make albums that are pretty unbearable to listen to. It's pretty embarrassing. And singers who act is not really a French tradition. I wouldn't mind putting Justin Timberlake in one of my movies. I didn't think he was too bad in Alpha Dog.

Filmmaker: And what do you think about supermodels who make records, one in particular...

Honoré: It's a little hard for us because in the heart of Paris we're so ashamed of this president who weighs upon me with his crudeness and stupidity. After a Rolex watch, he gets a model wife. The only reason I know about [Sarkozy's new wife, Carla Bruni, making albums] is because Louis [Garrel] is dating her sister, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi. It could be a joke and we could make fun of it but actually I think it's very serious for France, like it is with Bush in America.

Filmmaker: Finally, what's the biggest compliment you ever received?

Honoré: It was a Sunday night in Cannes at 11 o'clock at night. I got a call on my cell phone from a number I didn't recognize, so I didn't answer. When I listened to the message I found out it was Catherine Deneuve, who had just seen Love Songs. She said very, very nice things about the film.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 3/21/2008 11:22:00 PM Comments (0)

Michael Haneke is a director who makes films strictly on his terms, and — as his new movie demonstrates — writes his own rules if he doesn’t like the existing ones. The son of an actor-director father and an actress mother, Haneke was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up just outside the Austrian capital, Vienna. He attended the University of Vienna, where he studied philosophy, psychology and theater. Over the course of the 70s and 80s, Haneke plied his trade as a writer-director on television and stage productions before making his feature debut in 1989 with The Seventh Continent. He made waves internationally with Benny’s Video (1992), in which his preoccupations with the dynamics of screen violence and the horrors of everyday life were very much at the fore. Haneke attracted further attention with Funny Games (1997), again focusing on the theme of movie violence, and has since held an elevated position in the ranks of the European auteurs. In his subsequent works - Code Unknown (2000), The Piano Teacher (2001), The Time of the Wolf (2003) and Caché (2005) – he has shown a willingness to utilize big name European actors like Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert and Daniel Auteuil to attract audiences to his challenging and uncompromising visions of the darker aspects of human experience.

Haneke claims he had always wanted Funny Games to be seen widely by a U.S. audience as the film was commenting predominantly on violence in American cinema. So when he was offered the chance to direct an English language remake, he gladly accepted — on the condition that Naomi Watts played the lead. The resulting film, Funny Games U.S,, is a shot-for-shot remake of his 1997 success, and replicates the Austrian original's close scrutiny of viewers' complicity in the film’s brutality. The plot concerns a (now American) family – a yuppie couple (Watts and Tim Roth) and their young son (Devon Gearhart) – whose vacation at their country house is interrupted by two white-clad young men (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett), who are supposedly friends of their neighbors. As the two men psychically and psychologically torture the family, Funny Games U.S. (like all smart “horror” movies) harnesses its considerable power by not showing the most violent or shocking moments and allowing the dreadful acts to exist within the minds of its audience.

Filmmaker spoke to Haneke about resurrecting his prescient 1997 movie, cinema as truth or lies, and bawling in terror at Olivier's Hamlet.



Filmmaker: I suppose the logical first question is...

Haneke: Why? [laughs] Why a remake?

Filmmaker: Yes.

Haneke: Because when I did the first Funny Games it was intended to be for a public of violence consumers in the English-speaking world, [but] because [it was in] the German language the film stayed always in the arthouses and so didn't reach the public that it would need to have. I had this proposition from Chris Coen to [remake] it with an English-speaking cast, and for this reason I said “O.K.” Maybe now the film will come to the right public.

Filmmaker: And how daunting was it for you to work in English?

Haneke: Difficult, of course. [laughs] My English is terrible so it's less the problem to explain what I mean (because I can explain in a not very elegant way), but to understand other people. And especially [during] shooting when there's a lot of conversation around you. If I shoot in German, I understand all things around[me], but this was very difficult because I understood nothing. [laughs] Also here because of the unions it's always very heavy. For example, when I shot the first film in Austria, our shoot was six weeks and it was easy in six weeks; here, I had eight and a half weeks and it was very difficult to finish. So it was not too funny Funny Games! [laughs]

Filmmaker: Did you work with a translator when you were shooting?

Haneke: Yes, but it's another thing to have a translator in a conversation like now — you speak, I speak, so it's easy — but shooting you have ten people, [and] everybody needs something. We had another translator but they were all a little overwhelmed by the situation, so this was a difficult part. But I am a little used to working in a language that is not mine because the last ten years I've always been shooting in French. My French is better than my English but I'm not bilingual. The most difficult thing was that there were, in my opinion, too many people. The first time I came into the canteen, there were 200 people [and I thought] “Who are all these people?”

Filmmaker: When you work in France, do you always write your scripts in German and then have them translated?

Haneke: I write all my scripts in German and then I give it to a translator and then I work with the translator on the translation and finally I am satisfied. Here also in this case, there was a translation and then another translator was editing it and then I was [working] together with a writer-director (what is his name...?) and together we changed some things from the European way of life to here. For example, a little detail we had in the original: when the phone is working again, he says, “Call somebody!” “Who?” “The police.” “I don't know the number...” This is possible in Austria because I don't know the number for the police in Austria either, but in America everybody knows 911. So we changed things like this.

Filmmaker: How many details were there like that which changed?

Haneke: Not so many. There was a play on words, the prayer, things like this. But, in general, it's the same.

Filmmaker: How important was it for you to keep the remake very close to the original?

Haneke: It was a decision because I had the impression that the film is today more up-to-date than 10 years ago so I had no need to change something. If I do a remake with the same script, why do it in a different way? It was also a little bit of a gamble with myself [to see] if I was able to do the same film under different circumstances. It was pretty difficult. [laughs]

Filmmaker: The film looks incredibly similar, and I heard that you exactly recreated the house from the first film.

Haneke: The house was rebuilt but the first house was in the studio so this was easy. But to find exteriors that allowed [me] to have the same framing, this was really difficult. [laughs]

Filmmaker: In the period between the first and second films, the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres took place, in addition to many similar tragedies. Did they change your perception of the ideas in the 1997 version at all?

Haneke: These developments seem to have confirmed what the film is attacking. This is why I said the film is more up-to-date today than it was 10 years ago.

Filmmaker: What initial signs of these kinds of incidents did you identify back when you were writing the first film? What do you see as the source of the problem?

Haneke: That's a difficult question because it's a very complex thing. There is not one source but the whole of society is at the [core of the problem]. For me, the most irritating point today in comparison with 10 years ago [is that], even for the intellectual people, in this kind of post-modern view of life it became chic to make violence as an entertainment, even for the filmmakers and the critics, and this I find is a little bit disgusting. [laughs]

Filmmaker: So do you watch Tarantino movies and the like?

Haneke: Of course. If you are in the business you need to see at least the most exposed examples. [laughs] But I don't go very often to the cinema. I prefer to see the films I like [laughs] when I have time, so I'm not somebody who's going to see the newest films.

Filmmaker: You were talking before about how this film is about violence in American cinema and how you wanted it to reach an English-speaking audience. So what do you hope the impact will be? And what change do you hope might come about?

Haneke: A film can do nothing, but in the best case it can provoke so that some viewer makes his own thoughts about his own part in this international game of consuming violence, because it's a big business. [laughs] So maybe one or other [person will ask], “What am I doing when I'm working for this? Why am I working for this?” That's the top from the possibilities. [laughs] And I'm not a social worker. [laughs]

Filmmaker: So in an ideal world...

Haneke: I don't believe in an ideal world. [laughs]

Filmmaker: I'll rephrase that then. Would it be preferable for you to see a Hollywood cinema that is much more responsible in regards to violence?

Haneke: Of course. Cinema could be an artform, can be an artform... it's very rare. If it is art, it is automatically responsible. A film has to be a dialogue, not a monologue — a dialogue to provoke in the viewer his own thoughts, his own feelings. And if a film is a dialogue then it's a good film; if it's not a dialogue, it's a bad film. It's very easy.

Filmmaker: This film is very much a dialogue, and it's involvement of the viewer is at its most intense with the final shot, where Michael Pitt stares straight into the camera. How would you characterize that final image?

Haneke: I don't like to interpret myself. [laughs]

Filmmaker: I think you said, in reference to Caché, that every viewer sees a different film. How concerned are you that someone will see a very different meaning in your film to the one you intended?

Haneke: You can do your best to avoid misunderstanding but there is no guarantee to not have a misunderstanding. If somebody is a complete lunatic, they will find this a good example to go and kill other people. What shall I do? The question is, in this case, what is the alternative? To not speak about this thing, or to try to speak in a responsible way? I try to do [that], but there is no security that somebody can't misunderstand you, of course.

Filmmaker: You were famously quoted as saying that cinema was “twenty-four lies per second.”

Haneke: This was a joke because it's famous phrase from Godard [“Cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second”], and I said it's a lie 24 times a second to serve the truth. What I will say is that film is always a manipulation.

Filmmaker: I mentioned that quote because there's a line in the film which says that an act of violence is real if we see it, whether it is fake or real.

Haneke: This is a very ironic dialogue, [laughs] but in a certain way it's true. Because the violence is in you, in your mind, so it is real.

Filmmaker: You picked your top 10 movies for Sight and Sound magazine in 2002.

Haneke: I forgot which ones they are. I know three or four, but I forgot the rest. It's a very stupid idea to have 10. Why not 20?

Filmmaker: One of the things I noticed about the films you chose was that none of them were made beyond the 1970s. So what is your opinion of contemporary cinema?

Haneke: There are filmmakers that I like a lot. For me, Abbas Kiarostami is my favorite —
he is the best. Also Bruno Dumont. That's two persons that I like a lot but... It's difficult to say, there are a lot of good filmmakers that I like. David Lynch. But they are all in opposition to the mainstream, of course. That's the difference: at the time, in the 60s, film artists had a public, Godard or Antonioni, all these people had big successes in their time, but since then the coming up of television, it's changed. Now cinema is always in comparison with the television, so it devolves, it goes down.

Filmmaker: You talk about working against the mainstream, but it seems like this film is an intermediate between an independent film and a studio picture.

Haneke: Yeah, it's a Trojan horse. [laughs]

Filmmaker: So if this is a Trojan horse, what happens when the soldiers come out?

Haneke: I don't know, maybe the people that come out of the horse, they are the viewer and they have understood something. [laughs] Maybe, maybe, because I have not to give a lesson. I try to provoke a little bit, to reflect where I am looking at cinema. That's all. I have no lesson to give, because I wouldn't know what the lesson is. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Your next movie, The White Band, is an Austrian film, but do you plan to return to work in America again?

Haneke: It depends. If I can do what I want to do, why not? I have nothing against America. I have a lot against a certain kind of cinema, but if I can have my way... On this film, of course, people tried to convince me to change things and I said, “No, no, it's clear: I have my contract, I have final cut and all artistic decisions are mine so you can stop continuing to ask me if I will do it like this.” If I can do it like I like to work, then I can work in Austria, in France, in America, in India...

Filmmaker: So maybe a Bollywood musical next?

Haneke: [laughs loudly]

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

Haneke: I think it was my first experience with cinema when I was a little child. My grandmother went to the cinema with me and it was Hamlet with Laurence Olivier. The film starts with the big castle and the waves and it's very dark. I was so scared, I started to cry and my grandmother had to go out [of the theater] with me. This is my first impression of cinema, so it was strange. [laughs] The second moment that I remember of cinema, I was six years old. I was in Denmark, because after the war in Austria it was difficult so there was a program to bring little children to the Scandinavian countries to give them milk. I was very unhappy there because I was not at home, and the people there also brought me into the cinema. We saw a film [set] in Africa with animals and it was fantastic. At the end, the curtain closed and the doors opened to the rainy city of Copenhagen and I couldn't understand why I was so quickly back in Copenhagen, because I was in Africa. It was important for me because today for children who have grown up with television, there was never this knowledge of how strong the impression is for children's brains. I think it was a good experience, a very strong experience.

Filmmaker: What matters more to you, that a film is successful, or that you're happy with the finished product?

Haneke: Of course, the second.

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

Haneke: The Oscar? Is the Oscar the most desirable prize in the world? I know a lot of great filmmakers that never got an Oscar. The greatest filmmakers, for me, are Bresson and Tarkovsky, but it would be very strange if Bresson got an Oscar. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 3/14/2008 11:20:00 PM Comments (0)

The projects Lucy Walker has chosen to take on in her career demonstrate an admirable desire to tell difficult and important stories. The British documentarian was born and raised in London, and during her childhood lost the sight in one of her eyes. However, if anything this only further fueled her fascination with film and other visual media. She was a literature major at Oxford University before winning a Fulbright Scholarship which took her to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied film. During this time, she made a handful of student films and a video for the Cowboy Junkies. (Walker is also a music fanatic who used to DJ as part of the Byzar ensemble, and produced IFC's 2001 series on rock stars who act, Crossover.) After winning Daytime Emmy nominations in 2001 and 2002 for her directorial work on the children's animated show Blue's Clues, Walker had a breakthrough success with her first documentary feature, The Devil's Playground, a highly acclaimed and revelatory film about Amish teenagers. After a successful film festival run, it played on TV and garnered Walker three further Emmy nods; it is now a hit DVD.

At the center of Walker's new documentary, Blindsight, are two compelling characters: Connecticut native Erik Weihenmayer, the first blind man to ever reach the summit of Mount Everest, and Sabriye Tenberken, an intrepid blind German woman who founded the first blind school in Tibet — where the blind are treated as outcasts who people believe are being punished for sins of a past life. The film is the tale of Weihenmayer's attempt to take Tenberken and six of her blind Tibetan students to the top of Lhakpa Ri, a peak next to Everest. Blindsight is not only a touching and beautifully shot movie about the exceptional courage and determination of its principal subjects, but also gives a fascinating insight into the contrasting ways in which different cultures deal with the perceived impediments of blindness.

Filmmaker spoke to Walker about her own partial blindness, shooting in the death zone, and being distraught when she couldn't watch The Aristocats for a fifth day in a row.



Filmmaker: How did you first come across this story?

Walker: It came across me — I’m a lucky girl! Erik, who’s quite media savvy, decided this was maybe a movie. I was very lucky because they were asking around and they got a recommendation from Vanessa Arteaga, who I had worked with on The Devil’s Playground. In fact, a lot of people recommended me because after The Devil’s Playground I was the go-to person for getting young people who are generally inaccessible to open up. I also like these “crackpots only need apply” documentaries, these goose chases.

Filmmaker: You were also an apt choice because of your personal experiences with blindness.

Walker: I am blind in one eye, and had the sight in the other eye saved by doctors at Moorfield Eye Hospital in London. I’m sure this is partly why I’m such a cinephile, visual artist fanatic, photographer and painter, because when I was growing up I had these eye problems and everything visual became so precious and intriguing to me that I saw things with different eyes. I became fascinated with that whole world of optics. If I’d been born in Tibet, I would have been in a back room, like the kids were before [Sabriye] got there. So it was very close to home. It was very obvious to me immediately that we should start and end on darkness, a black screen. It was very intuitive for me. I felt like I’d done this sort of character-driven verité before, following people that I loved in these tender and very precious moments in their lives. I felt very privileged to do it and it was all a very good fit. I was lucky because it all happened really, really quickly: we were off to Tibet a month later.

Filmmaker: How did you prep for the movie?

Walker: I did everything – I didn’t do much sleeping. [laughs] That’s one way to put it. I learned Tibetan, as much as I could cram because I realized these kids’ English was not very good and you’ve got to try everything to connect with people. My Tibetan turned out to be ropey, obviously, [laughs] but it did turn out to be a wonderful way of proving to the kids that they would be better off speaking English. They were laughing at my Tibetan and then felt very comfortable trying out their English. We had these shoots in incredibly far-flung villages — sometimes we were driving for a week — and they’d certainly never seen Europeans or Westerners before, let alone a film crew, and I had enough Tibetan that in an emergency, with our limited time and limited resources, to run up to a nomad who was staring at us and said, “Hello, thank you. Could you please look over here not over here just for one minute, thank you very much” in my best Tibetan. He actually understood and we got the shot. I thought, “Crikey, that’s what I learned that Tibetan for!”

Filmmaker: Were you an experienced climber then, or was that something you had to pick up as you went along?

Walker: I’ve never climbed mountains before. I was very fit — I used to race in triathlons and marathons — but mountaineering was a whole new challenge. It was probably a good thing I didn’t know what I was in for. I had a funny time when I was buying equipment. This guy [in the store] was helping me and being a little dismissive, and then I got all this stuff and felt a bit bothered because the sleeping bag wasn’t all that warm and I kept thinking, “Why didn’t he give me a warmer sleeping bag? Crikey, I’m going up Everest!” So I went back to the shop and said, “I’m sorry but I really don’t have the right equipment.” They said, “But you’re going to 7,000 feet, right?” I said, “No, I’m going to 7,000 metres!” Then they looked at me and said “Oh God” and ran around the store throwing equipment and ropes and crampons at me. It was moments like that that it dawned on me the curiousness of what we were doing in mountaineering terms. The other thing was what cameras worked, what crew did we need; that was a gigantic set of decisions. Altitude does a lot: iPods, for example, stop working about 12,000 feet, so with electronic things you’re always in the land of guesswork. There was absolutely no margin for error because there were certainly no camera repair stores or places we could buy extra film or crew centers up Everest. You had to anticipate everything, and everything had to be “yak portable.”

Filmmaker: I think it’s an interesting choice that you made to completely absent yourself from the film.

Walker: I felt honestly that the story going on was absolutely fascinating and told itself. I also felt like eight main characters — plus the doctors and various other characters that come in and out — was such a challenge already to squash into a feature movie and were more interesting than me. There was interesting stuff that happened behind the scenes and actually our film crew doctor almost died. At moments like that, as a documentarian you feel torn because part of you feels a responsibility to the truth, and the truth of the expedition was that something happened that really haunts me and affected the way that I think of the trip when I think how close he was to being dead and how he was the healthiest of the lot. When something like that happens, you think “That's not part of the official story and yet it happened,” and the line you're always negotiating in a documentary is where does the observer become subject, and feeling out those ideas we all shook up in the 60s about truth and objectivity. But when you're on a mountain and you're all on the same rope team, there's no such thing as objectivity.

Filmmaker: It must have been extremely challenging to be directing while on a perilous mountaineering trek.

Walker: It was like everyone had dropped acid, because you'd look around and think, “Who's functioning normally?” and nobody is. Nobody is. For every 10 people who try to climb Mount Everest, one dies, and we were way up into the death zone. There's a quote about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that whatever Fred was doing Ginger was doing backwards in high heels. I always felt like that: whatever was happening on the screen, it was happening to us too when we were having to make the film. My head was pounding, I honestly didn't know if I was going to make it and I was expected to be doing all the verité filmmaker does, which is constantly evaluating what's going on. You've got a big old group of rough and tumble activities going on strung out across a mountain when you can't even take a step because you're so oxygen-deprived, and you're looking at your crew, because their lips are blue and the technical challenge of the cameramen was immense. It was just incredibly challenging stuff, but utterly exhilarating because as a filmmaker you know exactly when the moment is rich and fascinating and cinematic enough to really make this movie phenomenal.

Filmmaker: I read that you suffered a litany of injuries while making the film, including a broken leg, amoebic dysentery, giardiasis, headlice and altitude sickness.

Walker: Fortunately my leg was broken between the two trips [to Tibet] and I had taken my plaster off so it was simply painful. It took a while to heal after I got back because I probably shouldn't have climbed Everest on a broken leg. That was painful. The thing that got me in the end was the amoebic dysentery. I became quite sick, but not until we were back in Lhasa and had everything in the can. One night when everyone was out at a party, the onscreen doctor Jeff left me alone with a drip and I had to, in my extremely delirious state, remove the [bag]. I was a complete mess and everyone was partying and it did cross my mind, for at least 30 seconds, to absolutely stitch him up in the movie!

Filmmaker: What matters more to you, that a film is successful, or that you're happy with the finished product?

Walker: Success for me means the film being successful on its own terms, and Blindsight teaches us to question the definitions of success. [laughs] I feel like some films that neither succeed aesthetically or financially can be successes in people's lives in other ways. If you had to put a gun to my head and ask would I make a film that I loved or a film that broke box office records and that I hated, I'd always say love over money every single time. But I also still have this naïve idea that wonderful work will find an audience eventually, somehow. With The Devil's Playground, nobody expected anyone to see or like the film. We didn't have a publicist, we didn't have that “machine.” It was made without that hope that anybody in this town would see it, but I've gone to dinner parties in L.A. where every single person there had seen the movie.

Filmmaker: 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?

Walker: I think right here, right now. I genuinely think that there's an explosion of filmmaking energy right now, particularly in the nonfiction world, and I think this will be considered a golden era. There's some phenomenal [documentary] work being done, and in fiction as well, and also in this whole beautiful space in between the two that people are playing with. I sometimes feel like it's a little harder as a woman, that there are fewer opportunities and that it's easier to overlook talented women. Sometimes I wonder if there's going to be a gap in between me paying my dues — working my ass off in compromised situations for no cash and suffering lots of frustrations and disappointments and challenges — and, you know death? [laughs] I hope so. I feel like I'm still learning lots.

Filmmaker: What's your favorite Bob Dylan album?

Walker: I'm thinking Blood on the Tracks, but I could change my mind in an instant. I guess it came to me at the right time and the right place. I have incredible memories of being a teenager with that album. I have always been a huge music nut, I've always been obsessed with records and cassettes. As a teenager before I had access to filmmaking equipment or could imagine that I could be a filmmaker I wanted to be a DJ. Most of my teenage memories have soundtracks firmly attached. [laughs]

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

Walker: The Jungle Book. I had a broken leg when I saw it. I was in love with the movie as a kid, absolutely obsessed. I recall my dad carrying me into the movie theater and having to sit in the front row because I had a full-leg plaster. I didn't even know where I was or what I was doing there, and then suddenly the lights went down and I had this experience. That was it. I grew up just before [my family got] VHS, so we had to go to the movie theater and I remember I would just nag everybody constantly to take me to the movies. There was one half-term holiday where The Aristocats, which I was obsessed with, was playing. I managed to persuade people to take me to see it four days in a row — my mum, my dad, my friend, my other friend — and after that I'd run out of people to take me to the movies and I was inconsolable. For the rest of my childhood, it was all about trying to persuade adults to take me to the cinema.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 3/05/2008 05:04:00 PM Comments (0)