At a time when the popularity of documentaries is at an all-time high, Canadian director Yung Chang is not only telling stories as compelling as his peers', but doing so with a truly cinematic sensibility that is often lacking in his field. Born in Whitby, Ontario, to first generation Chinese immigrant parents, Chang studied film production at Concordia University, graduating in 1999. He was also a student at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he learned the Meisner Technique. He directed the short film The Fish Market in 2002 and the following year made his documentary debut with Earth to Mouth, a National Film Board of Canada commission that chronicled the existence of a Chinese immigrant farmer in Canada. The film won prizes at a number of film festivals including Rencontres Internationales du documentaire in Montreal, the city where Chang is currently based.

Like Earth to Mouth, Chang's latest film, Up the Yangtze, sees the director drawing on his cultural heritage as a source of inspiration. The documentary takes as its subject the Yangzter river's Three Gorges Dam Project, a symbol of Chinese progress – and the flooding and eradication of whole towns that is a result of this "step forward." The film focuses on the lives of two young employees working on a Yangtze “farewell cruise” (to see towns before they are submerged), shy Yu Shui (“Cindy”), a studious but impoverished girl whose family home will soon be lost to the rising waters, and Chen Bo Yo ("Jerry"), an arrogant middle class teen intent on making his fortune. Chang ably balances the different elements in the film, making it both epic in its depiction of the changing countryside and intimate in the tender way it depicts its inhabitants. He offsets the tragic story of the Yu family with Jerry's almost comic subplot and never takes us too far beyond these personal perspectives, resisting the temptation to make some forced grand argument out of their lives.

Filmmaker spoke to Chang about his experiences filming in China, the future of documentaries and the meaning of “Chinese time.”



Filmmaker: I believe you got the idea for the film on one of the “farewell cruises” on the Yangtze in 2002.

Chang: That was the first time I went to the Yangtze River, and that particular trip was with my parents and my grandfather. It was a very different context to be traveling with your family but also to be slightly aware of what you're about to embark on. I had a video camera with me and I filmed a little bit of that trip. That initial process of taking that boat was, for me, sort of cautious and what I was really inspired by at that moment was to tell a story much more about the culture of tourism and the tourism of culture, but it became much more over the many years that I was developing it.

Filmmaker: How did you first make contact with your subjects in the documentary, because at the start of the film they have not yet started working on the cruise boat?

Chang: The timeline worked very well. I found them in March 2006 through the recruitment process, when the ships go to look for new employees they go to all the local rover towns. They canvas at the high schools and kids will sign up for interviews. So Yu Shui signed up, Jerry signed up. I was with the managers during the signing up, so it was sort of a natural casting process where I could filter through who I wanted to have as my main subjects. Through that process I found Yu Shui, and then went back and found the family. The kids weren't scheduled to go onto the ship until summer, and I followed that natural timeline so I had the timespan between the winter and the summer to work with the family at their home base.

Filmmaker: How much time did you spend building trust and getting to know the family?

Chang: A long time, I would say a few months. Right from the get-go in March I went to the family home, spent time there and didn't bring a camera. I explained what I was trying to do and I think the family looked at me as a mentor for Yu Shui, because she would be leaving home for the first time. They looked at me as someone that would be there with her during that process, so that was a special relationship. Something that I learned along the way was that in order to not exploit your subjects you have to make them aware that you're in it for the long term. In order to make that relationship work intimately, and for the camera to have that emotional intimacy, you have to maintain that connection. Even to this day I'm still in touch with the family, and Yu Shui calls me her big brother, so that was important.

Filmmaker: It seems like you had a planned narrative arc for the film going into production.

Chang: Right. I'm pretty consciously driven by telling a narrative story and I think that the timeline for the film had this built-in structure where I knew that at some point the home was going to be flooded by the river, so everything seemed to reach to that moment. Then I had that special arc of seeing the transformation of Yu Shui on the boat and the sudden, unexpected things that happened along the way. And then what happened with Jerry, and how that complemented within the general story structure. Having lived in Chongqing and shot the film for a year in that location, I think you really get a sense of the rhythms and patterns of how things develop.

Filmmaker: How much did people try and affect you in the way you portrayed the impact of the dam?

Chang: It happened a lot, even within my Chinese documentary film crew. I'm considered an “overseas Chinese,” but I'm an outsider. That position is unique: being Chinese, being Western-raised but having that sensibility of speaking Mandarin. It put me in a weird position to be able to have this debate with my crew, and it even filtered through to the very frontline level where my crew were wondering why I wanted to show negative aspects of China, which I firmly disagreed that I was doing. I think by the end of the filming, my crew were on my side, they could really see that the story of a peasant family spoke volumes to the kind of social conditions of this new progress in China. If you just peel back that first layer, there are many people that are discontent and it was not uncommon for me to be driving from location A to location B and run into a protest on the highway, protests against corruption or land development, so that was eye-opening. We would arrive in towns and villages and pull out our camera and people would think we were from the local TV station, so they would come up and tell us about some kind of local corrupt official or some restaurant selling bad food. It was interesting to be in that position.

Filmmaker: In regard to the Chinese authorities, how careful did you feel you had to be in terms of what you said and filmed?

Chang: The greatest irony of how it works with the Chinese is that even though there are plenty of documentaries made by Chinese filmmakers that criticize their own social issues – I'm thinking of To Live Is Better Than To Die or some movie by Wang Bing – these films are loaded with commentary, but the minute that an outsider steps in to make that same sort of point of view, they're going to be lambasted for that. But I think I was careful and I definitely tried to play up the fact that I'm Chinese, I'm an overseas Chinese, that I do have that connection to seeing both perspectives, the Western and the Chinese.

Filmmaker: Has the film played in China?

Chang: We've shown the film to a salon environment of filmmakers and producers and it went very positively. We're even looking at the potential of having the film slightly recut for a broader audience in China, perhaps broadcast it. We're working with a Chinese producer to do this.

Filmmaker: What kind of cuts would you have to make?

Chang: I think any sort of comment about the central government would have to be taken out. I think I may have to lose the antique dealer [scene]. I think that's the most politically charged sequence in the movie and unfortunately that would have to go. I think what's awkward is that it's so emotional.

Filmmaker: So many documentaries prioritize capturing certain footage and proving certain points ahead of being cinematic in their presentation, but this is not the case with your film. Was having that cinematic quality important to you?

Chang: That was really, really important. I had created a banner in our production office that said “Cinema Not Documentary.” It was really important that we maintained this idea of capturing something that was emotional on a human level, that was not going to be didactic and try to explain something or give some sort of background information. The dam structure for me only exists as a sort of abstract monument in the film and I didn't want to fill it with statistics. That just wasn't the point of the film so I made sure that we focused on the human aspect.

Filmmaker: How did Jerry and Yu Shui and her family respond to seeing the film?

Chang: When I finished the film, the first thing I did was go back to China and show the movie to all the participants. Yu Shui was very emotional when she saw herself depicted in this documentary. You can imagine. She said that through her film she was able to see her fate and her destiny, which is quite a heavy thing to say. As a result, she decided to leave the cruise boat and go back to high school, so our production company stepped in to pay for three years of her high school tuition and now we've started a fund for her family. We've raised quite a bit of money now and we're continuing this fund and branching the fund out to help other migrant families of the Three Gorges project. Hopefully we're going to lift the family out of their poverty, buy a plot of land, start a business.

Filmmaker: What about Jerry?

Chang: I'm not worrying about Jerry. Jerry saw the film and in very typical Jerry fashion he wished that the story could have been more focused on him. [laughs] He said that he wanted a greater storyline. All the tragedy that occurred and his arrogance in the film went completely over his head. [laughs] He subsequently asked us about applying to the Dramatic Arts Institute in Beijing and perhaps pursuing a career in acting, which would be very interesting. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Will the current interest in documentaries last, or is it just a fad?

Chang: Well, I think what's interesting is that it'll last and I think it's because the definition itself is being explored right now. You've got films all over the place like Behave, a Brazilian film. It's about the judicial system in Brazil and [the director] wasn't allowed to film the prisoners or the children that were under trial, so she filmed the judge and the conversations between the court and then she reversed the camera and filmed kids portraying being on trial. There's a very natural feeling in the documentary. In fact, it questions documentary, and I like that. I like films that are pushing those boundaries. Even Jia Zhang-Ke’s Useless is very good, one of these narrative or non-linear documentaries that border between fiction and documentary. I think that's where things are going. And Herzog does it too, so I like that.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you cried in a film, and which film was it?

Chang: Last night I saw a movie by a Malaysian director called Flower in the Pocket. It won the top film at Pusan. I just met the filmmaker, he's a little elfin guy, 27 years of age and he made this movie with a mini DV camera. It's completely raw, the sound is horrible but the story of these two kids (it's about young brothers) is absolutely heart-wrenching. There was a moment that reminded me of my relationship with my brother and that brought tears. I cry a lot in movies. [laughs] In fact, I feel like if you don't then something's not right.

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

Chang: Well, I'm a bit of a stick, if I miss five minutes of a film I'm very upset so I try to get there early. But because I'm from Montreal and work on Chinese time as well, I'm always a little bit late. [laughs] I always arrive somewhere between the previews and the beginning of the opening credits but I missed the first 10 minutes of There Will Be Blood. I heard I missed the film, basically, so I need to get back into the theater to see it again.

Filmmaker: Can you explain what being on Chinese time means?

Chang: It's kind of arbitrary. Living in the South of China, you don't pre-arrange things: when you call somebody on the phone there are no answering machines or voicemails, you have to talk directly to the person. I think Chinese time is something that is very... inexact.

Filmmaker: In The Visitor, one of the characters talks about being on Arab time, which I believe involves being about an hour late for everything.

Chang: Well, Chinese time is not late time, it's just “you don't know if it's going to happen” time. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/25/2008 01:35:00 PM Comments (0)

Best known for his fiction films, Scott Hicks has returned to another form in which he has also distinguished himself: documentary. Usually identified as an Australian, Hicks was in fact born in Uganda and lived in Kenya until the age of 10, before his family moved to England and then Australia. He studied English, Drama and Cinema at Flinders University of South Australia, and made his directorial debut the year of graduation with the ultra-low-budget drama Down the Wind (1975). After working as an assistant director for the remainder of the 70s, Hicks returned to directing with the road movie Freedom (1982), the kids' film Sebastian and the Sparrow (1988) and the true-life heist thriller Call Me Mr. Brown (1990). He had notable success with his documentary series The Great Wall of Iron (1989) and Submarines: Sharks of Steel (1993), both of which gained record-breaking ratings on U.S. television. In 1996, Hicks had his breakthrough success with Shine, a biopic of pianist David Helfgott which won an Oscar for its lead, Geoffrey Rush. Since then, Hicks has written and directed two literary adaptations, David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) and Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis (2001), and last year he remade the German hit Mostly Martha as No Reservations.

Like Shine, Hick's latest film Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts is a compelling portrait of an enigmatic musical genius. Commissioned to mark iconic composer Philip Glass's 70th birthday, it captures 18 months in his life as he puts his seemingly boundless energy into a symphony, an opera, several film scores, and performances both as a solo pianist and with his ensemble. In addition, Hicks is there to document Glass' family vacations, visits to eminent friends (such as artist Chuck Close) and his multi-faceted exploration of his spirituality. Hicks’ film is respectful and never invasive, yet Glass is sufficiently open and uninhibited that we get a genuine insight into his life, and come away feeling that we know the artist, though the man remains somewhat obscure, perhaps even to Glass himself.

Filmmaker spoke to Hicks about returning to his filmmaking roots, editing over the internet, and watching The Red Balloon at a drive-in in Kenya.



Filmmaker: What was the first contact that you had with Philip Glass?

Hicks: It was actually when I was editing Snow Falling on Cedars back in 1997 or '98, and I was using (as so many filmmakers do) some tracks of Philip's music as temp score to edit to. I made contact with his management just in case we wanted to actually license the music and Jim Keller, his manager, actually realized that I was a Glass fanatic and so he arranged for Philip and I to meet when we were in Los Angeles at the same time. We kind of hit it off together. Philip is a very easy person to get on with and I just found him wonderful, charming, delightful company, basically. Over the ensuing years we would get together from time to time when we were in the same city, be it in Sydney, L.A. or New York, and a friendship grew out of it.

Filmmaker: What was your initial conception of the documentary?

Hicks: I bought an HDV camera and I flew to Nova Scotia to where Philip was on vacation with his family. I just took a sound recordist and an assistant to help, and I thought I'd just film a lot of background material to put in the bank for when I had a proper crew and a budget and could do it the way I imagined. But something remarkable happened, which was that my presence in the room with this little camera was somehow so non-threatening and unintimidating that everybody responded as if it was just me being there. Even on the very first night, Philip started making pizza for his family and was talking about the eighth symphony he was working on. I realized that something special was happening, because how often do you get into that sort of intimacy with a major artist who's executing an enormous piece of work? And here he is talking about it when he's chopping onions! It's like a dream. At that point I thought,“Maybe this is more than just background material I'm getting.”

Filmmaker: The intimacy of the documentary is what makes it special, so how much of that came from the existing closeness of your relationship with Glass?

Hicks: I'm sure that had a lot to do with, but I think a lot of it is just Philip's nature. When I was filming him for the first time, he started chatting to me and I was thinking, “Wait a minute, I'm supposed to be a fly on the wall, and you're talking to me! What's going on?” [laughs] What he was doing was acting as if the camera was not there, because that's exactly what he's like. He's very easy to get on with, he's sociable, he's funny and I felt that this was a side of Philip that the world at large had not really had much exposure to. That's really what the mission of the film became, to capture the human elements of Philip's life.

Filmmaker: How much of a technical challenge was it? I'm imagining it must be a long time since you were your own camera operator?

Hicks: It's the first time I've ever done it and so it was enormously challenging, but oddly liberating as well. Although I've done a lot of documentary work in the past and I've worked very closely with cameramen in documentaries and in features, now it was down to me to find the moment, find the framings. I take a lot of stills so I'm used to looking through the lens, but to my delight I discovered I could find the shots you could never describe to someone unless you were looking through the lens. So it was a very exciting process for me. At times I would go, “Am I missing something?” When you're directing, you scan the horizon and you can nudge the cameraman over to something that's out of their vision, so I began to wonder if I was missing everything that was really going on. [laughs] It was like going back to my roots as a filmmaker, thinking back to early days when you really wanted to make a film, you got a group of people together and you went out and did it, regardless of how it was going to be financed or what it was going to entail.

Filmmaker: Glass comes across as very unguarded, but there are a few moments where his family say things like “Hopefully you'll edit this out” and “Don't quote me on that.” Did you feel awkward leaving moments like that in the film?

Hicks: I think when a sophisticated and intelligent human being is talking to a camera and they say “Don't quote me” and they're laughing, I don't feel there's any betrayal there. It's disingenuous to think that that's seriously going to end up on the cutting room floor. I think if you steal those moments or try to catch somebody off guard without them knowing that you're recording them – because there were instances where people asked us to turn the camera off.

Filmmaker: What was the film like to edit?

Hicks: Steven Jeffs, who edited the film, was an incredible collaborator and he stepped forward at a time when I really didn't know where I was going to start. He had edited commercials for me and this is his first long-form work. He lives in New York and I live in Adelaide, and we cut this first film together over the internet for a six-month period. He would cut and post his cuts at four or five o'clock in the morning my time, I would get up, I would download his cuts, we would link ourselves together with a piece of software which locked our two computers into perfect sync, and we would view the cuts and talk about them across the internet. And that's how we worked. Without the technology, and without his energy, none of this could have happened. It was something that just could not have been achievable a few years ago.

Filmmaker: I believe Philip Glass did the music for your movie No Reservations, which you were shooting at the same time as this.

Hicks: It was a bit like being woven into a double helix because I would be with Philip looking at cues and how they worked with the movie and I'd have my camera there on remote in the corner, thinking we might have an interesting conversation that might end up in the film and then I'd go to adjust the camera, and Philip would say, “Now look, Scott, what film are you making at the moment? Are you making No Reservations or are you making the documentary?” [laughs] In the end, I had to turn the camera off because I had to focus on the film, but it was an interesting point at which it would have been better to have someone else shooting.

Filmmaker: What has Philip's reaction been to the film?

Hicks: Naturally, it was complicated. My heart was in my mouth when I showed the film to him. I said after showing the film to Philip that the closest experience I've had of that was the time I showed Shine to David Helfgott — the main difference being that Philip wasn't clinging to my leg at the time. When you're showing someone a film that is about their life, it's a very exposing thing. We never see ourselves the way the world sees us, but he's a man lacking in vanity to a high degree so I don't think it weighs too heavily on his mind.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Hicks: The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse. I was born in East Africa, I grew up in Nairobi [in Kenya] and my parents took me to the drive-in one night. I was probably five years old. I didn't see much cinema because there wasn't a lot in Nairobi and there was no TV, but that film (and subsequently the book) made a huge impact on me as a kid. Years later, I went to stay with Max von Sydow in Provence after Snow Falling on Cedars and we were wandering around his property. At one point he said “Oh, that's my neighbor, Pierre Lamorisse,” and it turns out it was the little boy [from The Red Balloon] who was Max's next door neighbor. I thought that was an interesting journey for me, 50 years later.

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

Hicks: When I was a restaurant photographer in 1976. [laughs] I had that job where you go around and photograph people in restaurants: you'd disrupt their dinner, make them sit in arrangements they don't want to, flash a thing in their face, rush away to develop the film, dry it with a hairdryer, spit out prints of it and then slap them back on the table to hit them with a huge bill before they left the restaurant. [laughs] I didn't enjoy that. That was my last attempt at having anything approaching a real job – since then I've only worked as a filmmaker.

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Hicks: I think it's always good trying to explore. Rather than falling back on how you've done something before, thinking “How can I do this different to the way I've done or seen this before?” Whether that's a risk or not, I don't know, but it's about trying to keep some level of challenge in what you're doing.

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

Hicks: I worked on a number of film crews for terrific directors in the 70s in Australia, as a production assistant, a 3rd A.D., a 2nd A.D. Very early on in that experience, before I really knew my way around a film set properly, the 1st assistant director took me aside one day and said, “Your job is to watch me and anticipate what I'm going to ask you to do. You have to know better than me what has to happen next.” I thought “Crikey!” The next morning we're out at dawn, we're shooting in this forest and I'm poised at the edge of the set, my eyes are riveted on him and I'm trying to read his mind. [laughs] He turns to me and he makes a gesture, and I'm completely startled, I've no idea what he's talking about but he makes it again and so I wave back. I turn and blunder away into the shrubbery in the dark, thinking “Oh God, what does he want? I've no idea! This is catastrophic, I'm going to be fired...” I'm blundering away from the set, completely lost, when I hear music and I think “Oh, they shouldn't be playing music, we're recording dialogue – that's what it is!” So then I started to work my way to the source of the music and I found somebody with a radio on back in the basecamp and said, “Turn that off, turn that off!” Then I rushed back to the set and got to the edge of the magic circle around the camera and [the 1st A.D.] just turned around and he nodded. [laughs] He was like some kind of sensei, and I'd learned something.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/18/2008 02:18:00 PM Comments (0)

Television directors often go through their careers dreaming of striking cinematic gold like Stephen Walker has. The 46-year-old Brit is a veteran of the small screen who plied his trade at the BBC before setting up his own production company, Walker George Films, with his producer and life partner, Sally George. Walker has directed narrative material, including Prisoners in Time (1995) starring John Hurt, but is best known for his TV documentary work. He won acclaim for Hiroshima – A Day That Shook The World (2005), a drama-documentary that was nominated for three Emmys, including Best Director. Other highly regarded documentaries he has directed and produced include Hardcore (2001), an unflinching portrait of the pornography industry, and Waiting for Harvey (1999), a light-hearted look at the Cannes Film Festival. He has also written two books, Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima (2005) and King of Cannes (1999).

Walker's latest project, Young@Heart, is a documentary about the Young@Heart Chorus, a choir of septuagenarians and octogenarians from Northampton, Massachusetts who sing rock 'n' roll songs. It began life as a documentary commissioned by the UK television station Channel 4. After a highly successful showing in November 2006, Walker submitted the film to the Los Angeles Film Festival, where it took the Audience Award and was snapped up by Fox Searchlight. While Young@Heart still has the look and feel of a low-budget TV documentary, the inherent strengths of the material and the unexpected emotional power and intensity of the story allow it to rise above these limitations. Beyond the inherent appeal of seeing a group of eightysomethings singing The Ramones and Sonic Youth, it's Young@Heart's motley cast of characters that makes it such an engrossing, heartwarming and ultimately very moving film.

Filmmaker spoke to Walker about the conception of the film as a rock opera, the transition from small to big screen, and choosing Halloween 4 as an antidote to plane turbulence.



Filmmaker: What was your initial contact with the Young@Heart Chorus?

Walker: One night I was coming back from a shopping trip and Sally [George] was sitting in the kitchen brandishing a couple of tickets for this performance of a show called Road to Nowhere, named after the Talking Heads song, with a bunch of old people from America who sing rock 'n' roll music. I remember thinking it could be a good idea, but I was definitely skeptical. I went along to see the performance and I was completely blown away by it, partly because the audience were so blown away by it. I also just thought the music was great, and what they were singing about was great because all that rock 'n' roll stuff suddenly became different when it's sung by people in their nineties. 'Should I Stay or Should I Go?' becomes a song about death, 'Road to Nowhere' becomes a song about the celebration of life on the road to death, and 'I Wanna Be Sedated' becomes a song about what it's like to be in an old people's home. There's still a punk edge to it – you don't have to be 18 to be a punk rocker, you can be 80. I just thought “Wow!” and them I walked away from that and Sally and I were very revved up afterwards and we were saying “There could be an amazing rock opera about old age here.”

Filmmaker: So the rock opera was conceived in a similar vein as the choir's music videos in the film?

Walker: Yeah, the music videos were very much part of what we wanted to do. We knew we were going to make them, and we knew we were going to make them part of the film. I was always excited by the whole Dennis Potter, Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven territory, and I thought that would be a fun way to go when you break out of time and play around a bit. Because you get bored. You have to keep making documentaries fresh and I didn't want to make just a classic observational narrative feature, I wanted to do different things. I wanted the film to be very personalized, I wanted to travel that journey with them. I'm shooting a lot of it myself and they're looking straight at me, which means they're talking straight at the audience. There's intimacy there, which I like.

Filmmaker: So when did it go from rock opera to documentary?

Walker: In a sense, that's a very good question. The operatic qualities of the film were always going to be contained within some sort of documentary narrative. The story was constructed, and in some ways it was an artificial story that we constructed – but not entirely, because the chorus do do this. The tension was to construct a show, for the chorus to spend a couple of months working towards that show with new songs, and the show would have a climax, a big pay-off at the end. And along the way there would be other shows, like the jail show. We had to select the songs they were going to be working on. [Choir master] Bob Cillman came up with the idea of bringing back these two [former choir members] that had been sick into the chorus because he felt they had recovered sufficiently to be able to perform a song. The song he thought would work very well was 'Fix You,' the Coldplay song, and we thought that was a really good idea. As we started to meet people and cast it, the elements of narrative structure began to form themselves. The key element of the narrative structure that we could never anticipate was that two of the characters that we concentrated on would actually die. That did change the narrative, obviously, quite remarkably.

Filmmaker: It must be very conflicting for you as a documentary filmmaker to have those sorts of things happen because on one hand it's obviously very sad, but it also adds great power...

Walker: Of course, and I'm not unaware of that. It would be a complete lie to sit here and say that I'm not aware of that. I've considered the point that you're making before and I've had to really try and put myself back into that time. I think my initial reaction was certainly not “Gosh, this is going to add hugely to the power of the film,” it was utter shock. I actually remember the shock most of all in both cases, but really with Joe, in the second case. It was real shock and you're dealing with that first of all. I remember the initial dilemma that I was dealing with to begin with was actually not between “Wow, this could be really amazing and a great bonus to the film!” and “Oh, but I'm emotionally engaged...”, but actually “I'm so shocked, how do I go on and make the film?” It was very intimate: you're talking to somebody, and the next time you see them – in both cases – is in the coffins, with the lids open. It's never happened to me before, and you cannot overestimate what that feels like. I thought that was it, that the whole film should just stop at that point, the concert would be canceled, there was no way it was going to go on, and I would just put a caption [on the screen] and the film would end right there. Obviously later, when I was in the cutting room particularly, I began to realize the power of the material I had as I started to put all those elements together. Not cynically, but professionally. Although the film is rightly being marketed by Fox Searchlight as a crowdpleaser, to get people through the doors, I'd like to think that it's a hell of a lot more than that. It is actually quite uncompromising in certain places when we approach the subject of actual death, virtually in front of your eyes.

Filmmaker: How do you feel about that marketing tactic of playing up certain aspects of the film just to get audiences through the door, rather than giving a totally accurate impression of the movie as a whole?

Walker: We chose Searchlight, and we had a lot of offers – some very good offers – from Hollywood studios when we took the film to the Los Angeles Film Festival. We won the audience award and everybody was all over us and it was great, but we chose Searchlight. We had a very extensive series of meetings with them about what they were going to do with this film, and I was really tough about that and felt really strongly that you've got to have the right people behind you. What often happens with all this stuff – and it has happened to me before, and I can see now I'm growing up – is that you're just the next piece of meat, and they just want to bit of that meat. They don't know if you're going to be big, hot, useless – but you could be money. I'm a grownup, I'm not a kid – I'm in my forties – and I knew that I had to be really careful of all of this and be very grounded, not like some 20-year-old kid, and look at this and say “What is best for the film? Who is best for the film? Leave the money aside.” So we're sitting there thinking “Who's right for this film?” and we liked them. They were very passionate, they are also brilliant marketeers – they do know what they're doing.

Filmmaker: When was the decision made to send this made-for-TV documentary to the Los Angeles Film Festival and to try and get it distributed as a theatrical film?

Walker: What actually happened was that we made the film, it went out on Channel 4, it had this fantastic reaction. We started having private screenings in London, just for fun, and we had these amazing communal reactions and people were really enjoying watching it together with other people. I was thinking, “God, maybe there is a theatrical life here somewhere. Maybe, maybe, maybe.” Everyone knows it's fucking difficult to get from television to the movies, it hardly ever happens but we all dream. So what we did was we decided to submit to the L.A. Film Festival because there's a lot of distributors in L.A. and they might actually come and see it if we can drum up a bit of interest. We got accepted by L.A. and went out there with the film. I didn't have any money, and I spent all the money I didn't have on getting a marketeer to do some stuff. We had tons of leaflets made up at the local copy shop, Kinko's, and I was out there walking the streets handing out flyers. We got a guerrilla publicist on board who did it for virtually nothing, Mickey Cottrell, who was great. Suddenly we started getting distributors in there, and then suddenly it went wild. For the second screening, I remember there was a queue about 150 yards long. It was really starting to fill, and it became huge very, very quickly.

Filmmaker: So what changes were made to the film to adapt it from a TV documentary to a theatrical film?

Walker: When Fox got it, I insisted on going back to the cutting room, because there were things I wanted to change. So I made the film much more cinematic: I changed the opening to make it much more theatrical; I made it about four minutes shorter; I had to kill the commercial breaks, and that's very complicated because it's not just about closing gaps, it's about a different structure and it's quite complicated. New graphics went in and much more importantly than all of that, we also put totally new sound in there. We just had a stereo mix of compressed sound, and what we did was we decompressed everything right back to the bare recording and reconstructed everything. It took weeks and weeks at Pinewood and also the studio at Technicolor – we reconstructed it all for the cinema and turned it into this huge sound.

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

Walker: I've seen some terrible movies on planes but I can't remember the names of half of them. I'm now trying to think of the worst movie I've seen in my life, but I don't know. I hate horror films, and I think I remember seeing something like Halloween 4 – one of the really late, downstream ones – and I remember thinking it was [dreadful]. I can't remember why I watched it. I was trying to scare myself on a plane, I think. Maybe we were bouncing around in turbulence and I wanted something else to take my mind off it that was scarier.

Filmmaker: What was your cinematic epiphany?

Walker: I grew up in that whole era of Scorsese and Coppola in the 1970s – I'm 46 now – so [I was] growing up and watching movies like Taxi Driver, The Godfather and even Apocalypse Now, which is brilliant but flawed. I just thought they were extraordinary. I thought, “God, what an amazing experience to do something like that.” I'm not a Star Wars person – I was too old for Star Wars, it's not my kind of movie – but those movies I thought were great.

Filmmaker: What's the best piece of advice you have for aspiring filmmakers?

Walker: Don't do it. [laughs] No, “Perseverance” I suppose is the right thing to say, isn't it? Genuinely, it's not perseverance, as that's a kind of obvious thing to say, but keep a really open mind. I wasn't at all convinced about Young@Heart when I first heard about it and look what's happened to it. Whether you're going to be a documentary or narrative filmmaker, the world of stories is all around you, all the time. Every day you read the paper, go down the street, sit on the subway, wherever you are, keep an open mind. Keep it open, because openness brings fertility and fertility can bring amazing results.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/09/2008 02:18:00 PM Comments (1)

After proving their mastery of the written word, Israel's first couple of literature, Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen, have now turned their attention to film. Keret was born in 1967 in Tel Aviv, Israel, and started writing in 1992. He has since written graphic novels, plays and children's books, but he is best known for his short stories, which have been collected in The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God & Other Stories (2004) and The Nimrod Flipout (2006). He has also written a number of short films and TV shows, directed the short Skin Deep (1996), and had his story “Kneller's Happy Campers” turned into the feature Wristcutters: A Love Story (2007). Thirty-six-year-old Geffen, Keret's wife of three years, comes from a musical family (her brother Aviv is a rock singer and her father Yehonathan a songwriter and writer) but chose to express her lyricism through words. Like Keret, Geffen's career is diverse: she is primarily known as a poet and playwright, but also directs plays, acts in theater, film and TV, and writes for both the big and small screens. Keret and Geffen recently co-wrote a children's book and first worked together co-writing the short film The Three Towers (2006).

After a prolonged and fruitless search for a director to bring her script Jellyfish to the screen, Geffen ultimately opted to co-direct it with Keret on what would be the feature directing debut for both of them. It was a smart decision as Geffen's nuanced script comes fully to life with their sensitive handling. The film features three parallel plots that play out in the seaside resort of Tel Aviv: an independent-minded waitress finds a lost mute girl on the beach, two newlyweds spend their honeymoon in a local hotel after the bride breaks her leg, and a Filipino nurse struggles to cope with her elderly patient because she cannot speak Hebrew. The trio of stories all feature pairs of characters failing to connect with each other, with a poignant poeticism linking the three rather than any contrived plot intersections. Jellyfish, with its gentle but sure-handed touch, feels short at less than 80 minutes, but we can only hope that there will be more soon from Keret and Geffen.

Filmmaker spoke to the couple about Keret's engagement with movies (regardless of their quality), Geffen being pregnant during production, and the ideal literary adaptation.



Filmmaker: You are both known for your writing much more than your involvement in film, so how far back does your interest in cinema stretch?

Keret: With me, when I started writing my influence was just as much from films as it was from writing. I would see Terry Gilliam, Coen brothers or Kaurismäki films, and that's what started me writing fiction. My writing always began from visual images so it's not such a big difference for me to write a story or to work on a film. It all blends together. I remember that I once had to make a list of the 10 books that had influenced me the most, and half my list was films. They sent it back to me and said, “You can't have films, you have to have books.” I feel like my connection to films is really, really strong.

Geffen: My connection to film is less powerful because I began writing and directing in the theater. From there, I discovered film from that point of view. Etgar and I have been married for four years but we've been together 10 years and I think he dragged me into the film world. I'm doing stuff that's more surrealist, like poems.

Keret: We flew together and she saw me crying while seeing Wimbledon... [laughs] I have this thing that even if I see the crappiest movie, I can't stop watching it in the middle. Usually I completely identify with these films. After watching the American remake of The Vanishing, I refused to drink the coffee that she made me. My connection with films is regardless of whether they're good films or bad films, there is something about this experience that I completely go with it. We were flying to Australia and I was watching The Last Samurai - it's not like I'm talking about masterpieces here - and there was a bit there when the flight attendant was trying to speak to me and Shira burst out laughing because I [put my hand up to send her away] and was like, “Shhh, they're going to kill him!” So I have this great passion for film. There's just something about this medium that it just sucks me in immediately.

Filmmaker: Shira, you wrote the script for Jellyfish, whereas on Etgar's previous film projects he has been the writer. So did Etgar rewrite with you also?

Geffen: After I wrote the script, we started working because we're good at working together and we were directing together, so a lot of the ideas were directing ideas. But the script came from a short story that I wrote long ago about Batya and the little girl in the sea. This is the main feeling of the movie.

Filmmaker: How different is the process of constructing a narrative for a screenplay as opposed to a short story? How do you create the story?

Geffen: I think it's a long process and it's layers; it's not one thing where you sit and write it down. It's step by step. Because I come from the poetry and theater world, I see it like scenes and not really like one strong plot. The plot isn't the main thing, it's like a very slim straw that holds everything together.

Keret: Shira has written a few short stories, but basically the thing she does most of the time is writing plays and writing poetry. I find that there is a strong connection between fiction and screenplays, and between poetry and plays. Both poetry and plays take place in the present: they're not about plot, they're more about mise en scene, about being in the moment. Fiction and screenplay writing is all about what happened before and what will happen next. The thing that made us such good collaborators is that we see a story in different ways. When I think about a scene, the first thing I think about is what the character has been through and where they're heading. When Shira sees a scene, there is something very sensual about the way she does it, it's very much in the moment.

Geffen: [I think about] details. It's like a man and a woman, it's the difference.

Keret: All my life, I needed to make up stories to make sense of all those arbitrary things that happened. Like the first story I invented, I never wrote it but I was 14 years old, I got on the bus and the bus driver got up, slapped me and he said, “If you ever get on my bus again I'll kill you!” I got off the bus, the bus drove away, and I had to walk to school. All the way as I walked to school, I was making up in my mind the story of why he did it, what made him do it. Did he mistake me for somebody else? Did something happen that morning? I constructed this story, and it protected me. I always need that; it keeps my sanity. There's something about Shira's confidence to be in the moment, so that if the bus driver slaps her she just feels the slap.

Geffen: [The difference is] very extreme, but in the film we knew exactly what we wanted to tell, so it was OK. We didn't argue at all.

Keret: With Shira and me, when we see a scene the same thing bothers us but our way of dealing with it is completely different. I try to deal with it through plot and Shira deal with it inside the moment. When something is wrong, we both feel that it's wrong; and when something is right, we both feel that it's right.

Filmmaker: Jellyfish feels very much like the cinematic version of a short story. I'm also intrigued that you both write in many forms but that neither of you have ever written a novel.

Keret: You're very correct but I think the film comes more from the world of poetry than even the world of short fiction. With me, the reason that I write short fiction [instead of novels] is that I write from a place where you lose control. As much as I'm looking for the plot, when I write things I don't construct them. It's like in a dream. I like to say that I write my stories as a reader – I write them in one hand while reading them in the other, so there is this feeling of urgency about it, almost like an explosion or a punch. So you can't punch somebody for 300 pages – without the police coming and arresting you. [laughs] I think with Shira coming from poetry, it's a little bit the same. When I first read the screenplay I had this strong feeling that it will work or not work on the success of whether you feel there is an emotion that is rolling between the three stories. Many people gave us this advice that the stories should interact more and we both felt that it was wrong, because the story wasn't about characters meeting each other. The connection between them was in the way that they mirror each others' situation. It's three different metaphors for the same thing, and that's much more of a poetic connection than a novel or classic screenplay connection.

Filmmaker: I'm interested to know what it was like for you two, as well as your actors and your crew, to be directing together? What were the practical aspects of that?

Keret: We didn't split our responsibilities, we did everything together. We would first talk to each other and we basically decided what we wanted to say and who would say it. It was much easier for Shira to explain things to non-actors, so many times if I had a remark I would explain it to Shira and she would tell them. Sometimes Shira could say to me that something bothered her with the cinematography and I would speak to the cinematographer. So we had this kind of war room, and then we came out with a decision.

Geffen: And it is a war room, you know? It's very manly to direct, and it's not a surprise that most directors are men. It's like being at war.

Filmmaker: Did you feel intimidated on set?

Geffen: Yes, indeed, and I was eight months pregnant at the time, so I was very womanly, very heavy. [laughs] I think it's a place for men, not for women.

Filmmaker: Your being so far along in your pregnancy must have been a huge added stress and physical strain on top of the pressures of shooting your first movie.

Geffen: I think because of the film I kind of forgot [I was pregnant]. It's a lot of money, a lot of responsibility. In the last minute, our baby said, “OK, I come first.”

Keret: Basically Shira had to go to the hospital just before the last day of shooting, so I was there by myself, but she didn't have the baby until after shooting finished. All the time we were on the phone, and I was asking “How are you feeling?” and she was saying “What are you shooting now?” It's two collaborations, having a baby and doing a film together and I don't think it's a coincidence that we've been together 10 years and never did anything together and the first thing we did [together] was during the pregnancy. It was kind of training for having a baby because we knew that we had to collaborate in that.

Filmmaker: Although you hadn't collaborated together before this, presumably you read each other's work and give each other notes on it.

Keret: The truth is that it's not something that's very dominant in our life. There is stuff that I've written that I never showed to Shira, but not because it's a secret. We give each other feedback but it's not a dependency and the thing is that Jellyfish was completely conceptual. It was also something that was obviously dangerous. It worked, but I'm not talking about how good the film came out. It could have come out good and we hated each other, or it could have come out crap and we hated each other. That we would survive it emotionally was not obvious.

Filmmaker: It wasn't necessarily an obvious decision for you to direct Shira's screenplay together.

Geffen: I searched for a director after I wrote it and good directors read it and didn't feel that it was a good script and didn't understand it. Etgar was with me all the way and liked it very much, and one day he told me, “I can do it!” [laughs] So I said, “O.K.”

Keret: It was kind of out of frustration because those really good directors and smart people would read the screenplay and they would either say you no, or ask for very radical rewrites. Because it was territory that Shira didn't know, when people constantly said that to her, she thought “OK, maybe they have a point.” At some point I realized, “Either we do it or the film will not exist.”

Filmmaker: Was part of the reason people were not responding to the screenplay a result of it not having, as you said before, a traditional three-act structure?

Geffen: Maybe, but I think the main reason is that when you read it you can feel the story, it's like pictures. I think there are very few directors who like the poetry world and know how to go into it.

Keret: I think there are a few reasons that are very specific to Israeli filmmaking that made people not connect to the screenplay. Traditionally, Israeli films are hyper-realistic, they almost always deal with an important issue, which could be the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the memory of the Holocaust, the kibbutz and its success or failure. This is the way that you make a film in Israel, and anything that is metaphorical [is not understood]. When we worked with [the actor playing] the policeman, who is a film director, he asked us questions about the character: “How much money am I earning?” “Why do I have a desk job?” “How many children do I have?” We said, “Listen, you're a giant who lives in a cave. Nobody comes to your cave. Whenever somebody comes to your cave, it soothes your loneliness and you try to make them stay as much as possible.” It took us a long time to make people think in that mode.

Filmmaker: And how did those directors who turned the film down respond after seeing it?

Keret: I met one of those directors at the premiere, Giddi Dar, who did Ushpizin. He loved the film, and he said to me, “You know, when you're a director and somebody gives you a script, it's all about probability. You say, 'What is my probability to come out with a good film?' When I read this script, I said 'I have a 4% chance to make this work, and 96% that it won't work.' I put it aside and I said, 'I'm not going to touch this screenplay.' Luckily for you, you reached that 4%, but I don't take back what I said before. It's like somebody giving you a recipe but not telling you what quantities to put in and then saying 'Think positive.' You put the cake in the oven and maybe it will come out alright – and you showed me it came out alright – but maybe it needed people like you that had very good intuitions to do all the things that were not that clear in the screenplay.”

Filmmaker: Given the success of Jellyfish, do you have the confidence now to each direct films separately, or will you keep on working together?

Geffen: I think now we will work on our own scripts or stories. I am working on a screenplay now, and maybe Etgar will direct it. I don't know. We don't think about it now.

Keret: Apart from this film, we also wrote a children's book together. I'm sure that we will collaborate together again, but I'm not sure if it will be co-directing a film. Maybe Shira will write a screenplay and she will act in it and I will direct. Or it could be a film that she will direct and I will write. It's not like we're the Coen brothers and are saying, “OK, we've found a way to do stuff.” It was all about experimenting. It's not as if we feel that we are completely proficient in what we did in this film, because I don't feel that I'm a natural film director.

Geffen: I think he is.

Filmmaker: Etgar, you've had over 40 short stories turned into short films, and Kneller's Happy Campers became Wristcutters: A Love Story. What are your feelings on the film adaptations of your work?

Keret: I think when it comes to an adaptation, it's really not about seeing my story it's more about seeing somebody reading my story. For me, a good adaptation is one that is not committed to the story but to the emotions the story evokes in you. With Goran [Dukic], what was very interesting for me was that being a Croatian and living in Yugoslavia during the war, even though the story has nothing to do with the war, I think it's the state of mind which young people have when they live in a place that is very violent, like when you're 19 seeing somebody's brains blown out. You've been through all those things and you short circuit emotionally. When Goran read [Kneller's Happy Campers], he said “Wow, this is like when I was 20 back in Yugoslavia,” and it took it to completely different places. There is something much more slacker-y and drunk in the original story, but I really loved it. I didn't to go the screening to say “You've got an 'A' for understanding.” It was like “You read it, you liked it, you created a world out of it.” And that's as good as it gets.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/04/2008 11:08:00 AM Comments (0)