Some people age more quickly than others, and Matt Wolf – both in person and in his work – displays a confidence and maturity that belie his tender years. Twenty-six-year-old Wolf was born and raised in San Jose, California, and spent much of his teenage years watching movies. He won a full-tuition fellowship to study film at NYU, where he made a number of shorts including Smalltown Boys (2003), an experimental biopic about AIDS activist David Wojanorawicz. During this period, he also interned for and became friends with documentarian Sandi DuBowski, the director of Trembling Before G-d. He currently produces short films for both the New York Times and the Sundance Channel.

Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, Wolf's highly assured debut feature, is a biographical documentary about Russell, the late cello-playing disco pioneer and avante garde musician whose work was relatively unknown during his lifetime but now, 15 years after his death from AIDS, has attained cult status. Initially conceived as an experimental response to Russell's music, Wolf's film evolved into an exploration of Russell's life as well as his work when the director met Tom Lee, Russell's lover, and Chuck and Emily Russell, his parents. Though it has the usual music doc tropes of archival footage and talking head interviews, Wild Combination distinguishes itself both by its selective focus and Wolf's use of experimental techniques. Rather than being exhaustive and heavily fact-based, Wolf dwells on people's emotional response to Russell and his music, and complements songs with imaginative images that at times blur the line between fiction and reality.

Filmmaker spoke to Wolf about his distinctive documentary approach, his plan to eat his way through Queens, and working in a gay coffee shop run by heroin addicts.



Filmmaker: From what I've read, you were interested in Arthur Russell before you ever heard his music.

Wolf: Yeah, a friend had described Arthur as this gay disco auteur who wore farmer plaid shirts and would ride the Staten Island Ferry back and forth listening to mixes of his own cassettes and that image really intrigued me. I wanted to make a film around that image more or less, but then I heard his music shortly after and then became really obsessively involved in listening to it. I think I just started getting a sense of imagery that I was responding to that would relate to the music, and I always had this sense that I wanted this imagery that I was associating with the music to have a somewhat narrative component that I was immediately compelled to explore Arthur's biography.

Filmmaker: So how did your initial conception of an experimental response to the music evolve into a biographical documentary?

Wolf: Well, I think the first aspects of it were meeting Tom Lee, Arthur's boyfriend. He still lives in the same apartment that he and Arthur once shared in the East Village, next door to Allen Ginsberg and above Richard Hell. When I had the idea to do an experimental project, I found Tom's contact information online and I reached out to tell him what my idea was. Months later when I heard from him, I went to visit him in that apartment and I was just really inspired by Tom and I knew that there was a really substantial biographical dimension that could be explored, that there was emotional substance not only in the music but in Arthur's story. So Tom started introducing me to a few other people from Arthur's life and the next people who really intrigued me were his parents, who still lived in his childhood home in Oskaloosa, Iowa. As I started talking to these people, I knew it was necessary for there to be a full-fledged narrative, for the film to take on a documentary approach and tell a story.

Filmmaker: Did you initially plan it as a feature or a short?

Wolf: Well, to be honest, the original idea that I had was that I'd make as series of chapters that would each correspond to a different thematic or topical element of Arthur's music or story and that those short pieces could be experienced non-linearly on a DVD or in some sort of gallery situation. But I realized that it would be more effective to evoke the emotional resonance in Arthur's story by just telling a linear, full-length story.

Filmmaker: How did you gain the trust of your interviewees? People tend to be very guarded initially.

Wolf: I think the biggest concern I would have about being in a documentary about somebody I was close to or cared deeply about is that this thing that I was invested in, that I opened myself up to, would never be completed, which I would feel like was a real violation. I tried to inspire confidence in the people in Arthur's life, [saying] that my intentions were serious, that I was determined to complete my project. In terms of building trust, I really think it's the result of developing a long term relationship with people and communicating with them more than once before interviewing them and really having a shared context or a real relationship to build upon within a conversation on camera. In a posthumous documentary where you interview people, the arc of the story that happens within an interview is always the same because it's going to peak when the person that they're speaking about died, and you're going to have bring the person back in the process of that interview. I realized while making the film that a film that centers on someone's death needs to help the audience feel a sense of catharsis and experiencing that in interviews helped me envision the overall structure of the film.

Filmmaker: The film really doesn't try to be an exhaustive biographical documentary, but is much more focused and measured.

Wolf: I was pretty conscious of some of the traps of music documentaries, where there's an overemphasis on musical lore, where minutiae and details related to musical production. There are a lot of interesting and significant anecdotes that are not in the film [because] I just really chose to focus on Arthur's boyfriend, Tom, and his parents, Chuck and Emily. I think the biggest creative decision I made that prevents it from being a definitive or encyclopedic biography is that I really narrowed the focus of the amount of characters in the film because I wanted each character to feel recognisable and that you understood who they were when they were speaking and their frame of reference and the facet of Arthur's life or career that they represented or had a perspective on.

Filmmaker: A huge part of any biographical documentary is the archive footage, but for a more obscure figure like Russell I presume that finding that footage wasn't easy.

Wolf: There's not that much stuff and I think that was always my concern, that I wouldn't really be able to flesh out this film because there was a no material of Arthur. There is material of Arthur and I think the scarcity of it makes it kind of even more special, but also that restraint or limitation became productive for me and forced me to create a more unique visual language to deal with that lack of Arthur. And I think that lack of Arthur characterizes the film, in certain ways. I was structuring certain scenes around dream archival footage that I didn't know if I would find or not.

Filmmaker: How much digging did you have to do to find archive footage?

Wolf: A lot. The archival research process was as sustained and long-term as the entire filmmaking process. We were finding key clips three weeks before locking the picture that generated new scenes in the film, and we were finding stuff at the beginning of the process that was guiding the overall structure of the film, so the archival stuff was just a tremendous aspect of the project.

Filmmaker: I think something makes the film so strong is that the parts of the film which are not interview or archival footage don't feel like filler at all, but a true component of the film. Presumably that all goes back to that emotional response to Russell's music.

Wolf: Yeah, and I think my starting point was the visual language, it wasn't an afterthought that complemented the story. I think a tendency I've seen in a lot of documentary filmmaking – and in a lot of filmmaking in general – is decorative use of visual material in collage-like montages. In this film, I was concerned about not being decorative or collage-y. I wanted the visual material in the film to push the story forward and to develop and illustrate ideas that were being explored and to build upon each other to form a larger vocabulary that emphasized and augmented Arthur's music. I wanted the visuals to have a narrative quality to them, but still in an experimental vein. We shot these re-enactments that are more like evocative recreations or experimental dramatizations, where you don't see actors' faces. We used Arthur's real clothes, and we shot in outmoded VHS or Super 8 negative and gave a real texture and materiality to the quasi-narrative [sequences] that we were augmenting the story with.

Filmmaker: I thought it was really interesting and effective how those recreated segments blurred with actual archive footage, because you intentionally shot them on similar formats.

Wolf: There's an integration between fake archival material we shot and real archival material that at times makes it indecipherable which is which. Audiences have sometimes been a little confused about that, but to me it's about representation and using representational techniques – I'm not concerned about the ethical polemics of that. Some bloggers have mentioned that, but I'm like, “Whatever...” It's a story, we know Arthur's not around. It's filmmaking. I think of the film as an arthouse film, not necessarily a documentary in the traditional sense, and the discrepancy between narrative and documentary feels really blurry and irrelevant in relation to this particular film.

Filmmaker: Given that this began as an experimental film and morphed into a documentary, which of those two styles of filmmaking do you now feel more allied to?

Wolf: I'm now interested in making feature films. It's been powerful to see the way feature films can be deployed to the world and also to get a sense of how audiences respond to emotionally effective storytelling and how that experience in the feature length impacts on people in a unique way. I want to continue making feature films and I now do identify much more strongly as a documentary director. I love conducting interviews and I think that's one of my real strengths as a director, but that being said I'm not interested in taking conventional approaches to documentaries. Constructing a unique and strongly realized visual form will always be a central concern for me, fiction or non-fiction.

Filmmaker: How influenced were you by your time working with Sandi DuBowski?

Wolf: I was Sandi's intern in college and we became really good friends. Sandi gave me incredible friendship and advice throughout the process [of making the film]. I think something I learned is that there's never too many questions to be asked: I never regret asking any of the questions that I've asked, and I've learned so much from other people, and that we're not reinventing the wheel. Sandi was always a really huge source of advice and wisdom that I was lucky enough to have in my life. We have a food club together, the Queens Food Caravan – I should give that a plug. We go to restaurants in Queens with big groups for less than $20. Our goal is to ear our way through Queens. That's Sandi's and my personal project, you could say.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Wolf: Bambi, but my first double feature, which I remember very fondly, was The Little Mermaid and Troop Beverly Hills with Shelly Long. It was the latest I'd ever stayed out. In high school, I didn't have that many friends and I was a bit of an outsider and went to the movies by myself every weekend. I think the experience of going to the movies from a very early age became a big priority for me.

Filmmaker: What's the worst (or weirdest) job you've ever had?

Wolf: In junior high, I worked as a spokesperson for Yoo-hoo, handing out free samples of Yoo-hoo and evangelizing about its nutritional value. (Apparently it has more vitamins than milk, so it's more healthy.) I got 80 cans of Yoo-hoo in addition to my measly paycheck. Also in high school, I worked in the only gay coffee shop in the San Jose area. It was really cool, it was in this old abandoned bank but the owners were heroin addicts and would shoot up in the vault. I was 15, and paychecks were bouncing and checks to vendors were bouncing and I would serve decaf coffee because we couldn't pay the bills to pay for the coffee deliveries. That was another cool job I had.

Filmmaker: Finally, if the world ended tomorrow, what (if anything) would you be sad about that you hadn't achieved?

Wolf: I think being an old person. I really feel like and identify with senior citizens. Just my sensibility sometimes feels really senior citizen, and I think on some level I really look forward to understanding what it's like to be an old person. Sometimes I really feel like a 70-year-old deep down inside and I think I would regret never really knowing what it's like to have that much life experience and that much earned crankiness. I haven't earned any of the crankiness that I have.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/26/2008 02:04:00 PM Comments (0)

Wayne Wang's work has always been about a balance of contrasts, whether it be Chinese and American, classical and experimental, or independent and Hollywood. Wang was born in Hong Kong in 1949 and moved to the U.S. in his late teens to study film and television at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He made his directorial debut in 1975 with A Man, a Woman, and a Killer (on which he is co-credited alongside Rick Schmidt) but it was his sophomore effort, Chan is Missing (1982), an intimate and realistic portayal of Chinese Americans, that brought him to prominence. He continued to depict immigrants and first generation Americans in Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart (1985), Eat A Bowl of Tea and Life Is Cheap... But Toilet Paper Is Expensive (both 1989), while in between helming a Hollywood movie, the erotic thriller Slam Dance (1987). Following a studio adaptation of Amy Tan's seminal Joy Luck Club, Wang teamed with novelist Paul Auster on Smoke and its unscripted companion piece Blue in the Face (both 1995). With the exception of his 2001 The Center of the World, an erotic drama on which he again collaborated with Auster, Wang has spent much of the last decade working within the studio system, helming a multicultural melodrama (Chinese Box), a handful of family friendly dramas (Anywhere But Here, Because of Winn-Dixie and The Last Holiday) as well as the hit romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan).

Wang returns to his roots with his latest film, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, an independent movie about the Chinese American community. An adaptation by writer Yiyun Li of her own short story, A Thousand Years centers on the relationship between Yilan (Faye Yu), a naturalized Chinese immigrant living in a small American town, and her estranged widower father (Henry O), who comes to visit her. Father and daughter struggle to connect with each other, and focus their energies on other, more tenuous relationships, but ultimately face up to the ghosts of the past and the paths their lives have taken as a result. Wang cites the movies of Ozu as an inspiration for this intimate and tender drama, and approaches the material with a commendable sparseness and emotional restraint. For the majority of the film, he lets the simple, resonant situations play out, eliciting excellent performances from Yu and O. Another Yiyun Li adaptation and Wang's companion piece to A Thousand Years, The Princess of Nebraska, is being released on YouTube in October.

Filmmaker spoke to Wang about coming back to indie filmmaking, his attraction to making two movies back-to-back, and nearly choking watching Charlie Chaplin.



Filmmaker: When did you first Yiyun Li's short stories?

Wang: First of all, when I wanted to get back into doing something that was related to the Chinese community in the U.S., I realized that the biggest change over the past 10 or 15 years are the new immigrants from China, from the more urban cities in China not the Toisan immigrants from the old days. Because of the economic boom, they're able to come over here and buy up businesses. Anyway, when I read these two stories, they're both about the Chinese coming over to America more recently and I became very interested in both of them. One of them, A Thousand Years, I related a lot to because the daughter, Yilan, is very much like myself: she comes over here, learns a new language, becomes freer in the new culture and is running away from her past, and has a difficult relationship with her father. All that stuff intrigued me, but I kept obsessing about the fact that here's this other story that's about a younger woman who grew up during the economic boom in China, who has almost no past, because China basically erases that stuff from people's memories and all you care about is really the freedom to make money these days. I was very intrigued by that younger generation and more about her trying to find herself and find an identity for herself. When I finished editing A Thousand Years, I had a little bit of money left, so I was able to convince investors that we could shoot this other film. Hence the two films sort of side by side.

Filmmaker: They are incredibly difficult in style and pace, so how was it to go from one to the other?

Wang: Well, A Thousand Years is very classic, it's shot almost always with a master wide shot because it was conceived to be projected big in a theater and it's something that's observant rather than too manipulative in terms of its film aesthetic. It's very Asian in that sense, almost like an Ozu film. And Princess is like a jazz riff that was improvised and was shot with all different kinds of digital cameras, including cell phones, sometimes by the woman herself. It's a mix of all that stuff and all handheld and shot very close up, so it's almost shot for the very small format on a computer – but I wasn't conscious that it was going to be shown on a computer, I was just kinda doing it as a film language. So they're really different.

Filmmaker: Is it too simplistic to draw a comparison between Princess and Blue in the Face, your ad hoc follow-up to Smoke?

Wang: It is kind of similar, but Blue in the Face was very specific. We didn't have a script, we only had situations while Princess did have a script from beginning to end so in a way it was more constructed. So that's the only difference, but we shot in the same kind of spirit: very free, and very much like playing jazz.

Filmmaker: Do you feel you have to have certain temperament to be able to rapidly put together a follow-up project? I would imagine most people would be terrified and unable to do that, as presumably your prep time was minimal.

Wang: Very minimal, but you know usually the second film is done from the gut. People think that's easy to do, but you need a lot of experience and you need a lot of planning, in your head, at least. I would say that it's quite risky, you're always scared because you don't quite know how things will go, but you have enough to work with that you can kind of survive it. [laughs] But I really enjoy working in that process. A Thousand Years is very different in that it's very crafted: it's a script we worked on for a while, we rehearsed it, we shot it in sequence, we really worked at things, we tried to really work at trying to find authentic moments for every scene. It's like painstakingly doing a very realistic painting, as opposed to something abstract expressionist.

Filmmaker: When you read a short story like A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, how clearly do you see how you would want to film it? And also how quickly do you tend to realize that you want to film a particular work?

Wang: It's usually pretty clear that I want to make a film out of it. I'm now thinking back on Joy Luck Club and Paul Auster's short story Augie Wren's Christmas, and with these I almost immediately, instinctively said, “I want to make a movie of this.” How it looks and what I'm going to do with it is not that clear. You have a strong essence of why you're interested in these things and you take that with you. I enjoy working with writers who wrote the original piece and building something from there, and usually that collaboration ends up with something.

Filmmaker: This is the third set of companion pieces that you've made, after Chan is Missing and Dim Sum, and Smoke and Blue in the Face. Is there a particular reason that you're attracted to doing these?

Wang: Well, I started out as a painter and my whole undergraduate work was in painting. I used to do a lot of diptychs and triptychs. Recently I went to Spain to promote these films and I went to the Prado museum, and there was Goya's diptych, which I think is called “The Second of May 1808” and “The Third of May 1808.” There's these two big [paintings], one of the battle where it's really violent and there's a horse in the middle of the frame staring right at you, and the other is of the execution of these captured Spaniards, and they're staring at you, right down the gun barrel. To see them that big and to see those paintings hanging side by side was really interesting. There's something about two events or two stories that are side by side or connected, but then they're not. I find that really intriguing. It kind of breaks the normal perspective of how people just see one thing. Any time that I can go outside the box and break a perspective of something, I find it really intriguing, and this is kind of the most basic way to do it.

Filmmaker: I believe it was incredibly important to you that the two films would be seen in tandem, but today's distribution system doesn't really allow for that kind of thing.

Wang: It really doesn't. I don't think that Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez double bill [Grindhouse] helped. If that had done well then maybe there would be some chances, but that did not do well and commercially to put two films together in the theater is almost impossible. People are just impatient to sit that long, the theater would say “We're losing money, we shouldn't put two films into one.” That's why we creatively came up with this idea of putting one in the theater and one on the internet. No matter what you say, it may not be ready now but the internet will be a true option for independent films, more and more so.

Filmmaker: There was a viral video of David Lynch saying that anyone who had seen his film on an iPhone hadn't seen it at all. How do you personally feel about people watching your work on a small screen like that?

Wang: I love the iPod, but I don't want to see a film on it. It's just too small, but I watch a lot of movies on my laptop, which has a pretty decent sized screen, and I'm pretty happy with it. Sometimes when I feel like a movie has a bigger scale, I would then go to a theater and watch it, or put it on my big TV and watch it. I think it's a viable way of showing certain kinds of things, and as long as the theater and film doesn't disappear as an option, I think it's a good alternative. A friend of mine in London just shot a feature film completely on her cell phone, and she did it for so little money and it's a wonderful little movie and it's accessible and showable. That stuff is amazing. People ask me, “What's your dream project?” I don't have a big dream project that costs $100 million, my dream is that when I'm older I can take my cell phone and make a damn movie. [laughs] And show it also.

Filmmaker: This is your return to the indie fold after a number of years working in the studio system. Did you feel the need to return to more personal filmmaking?

Wang: There was pretty much a moment where I said, “I've done enough of these big Hollywood movies, I want to look at more personal stuff, I want to look at the Chinese American community and what's going on and try to do things on a smaller scale,” so I've gotten back into that. I've still got things developing on the studio stuff, but I'm also much more careful and selective about what I do there. Once in a while there's still a wonderful studio movie that comes out that has substance and tells a great story, so I'm still hoping. [laughs]

Filmmaker: I sense from that answer that you look back on your studio experience with mixed emotions.

Wang: I really love [Because of] Winn-Dixie and Last Holiday, I'm not ashamed of them at all. But I do have to acknowledge that these films are made for an audience and to make money, and they're made so they can go into the previews and really figure out how the audience are responding and adjust to it. There's no way around that. That's what they are and I signed on bright-eyed and clear about that, but sometimes it's difficult because you can't make decisions on your own and the pacing of these films are so driven by modern-day big movies that you can't even allow a character to breathe. That's why on A Thousand Years I consciously said, “Let's slow down. Let's watch these characters take a breath.” I have very shallow breathing, especially when I'm under stress, and for years I've been taking yoga and always the teaching is saying “Take longer, deeper breaths.” That's really the bottom line of life, [laughs] and all the big movies in a way are really just shortening our lives and shortening our breath of life.

Filmmaker: Are those big movies less creatively satisfying for you than a film like A Thousand Years?

Wang: I've always been completely mesmerized by studios movies. As a child, my dad brought me to movies a lot and I loved the experience of going into a theater, the light goes black, the film comes on and if it's good, you're completely sucked into that world. I wanted to experience creating that kind of film, and I remember on Last Holiday I went into one of the previews and I was sitting next to this guy. In the beginning, he was fidgeting around and then all of sudden something locked in and he was completely in with the Queen Latifah character and going with everything. I felt a sense of accomplishment, I felt like it's magical in a way, and I do enjoy that.

Filmmaker: Who's got the power: the directors, the producers or the stars?

Wang: Well, on independent movies the director has all the power, but on studio movies basically the studio has more of the power. It's frustrating on the studio movies, but the good thing with that is that most of the studio people I have dealt with at least respect that I'm a filmmaker and they respect my opinion. They might fight with me, they might say “Let's try this,” or “Let's do this here,” but still I think that respect is important otherwise I don't think I could survive any of it.

Filmmaker: Which film do you wish you had directed?

Wang: Lawrence of Arabia. I don't know why. I keep watching that film and every time I watch it I'm in awe of it. I wish I had made that film.

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

Wang: I think it's one of Charlie Chaplin's movies, and I don't know exactly which one. It may have been Modern Times. I laughed so hard I almost choked. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/19/2008 10:16:00 PM Comments (0)

There are many paths to cinematic success, some of them direct, some of them not, and it is fair to say that Irena Salina has taken a more meandering route than some to reach her current position. Born in Paris in the wake of May '68, she grew up in a theatrical family (her uncle was the late, great French actor Philippe Noiret) and initially aspired to becoming an actress. When her adolescence was disrupted by her parents' divorce, she chose to drop out of school and became a radio reporter at the age of just 15. After a stint in television, she moved to New York where she got a taste of the movies by working meager jobs on Hollywood productions as well as taking the occasional acting role, such as in Abel Ferrara's King of New York. Realizing her future lay behind the camera not in front of it, Salina wrote and directed her first short film, the darkly humorous romantic comedy See You On Monday, in the late 90s. She made her feature debut with Ghost Bird: The Life and Art of Judith Deim (2000), a documentary portrait of the eponymous St Louis artist who counted John Steinbeck and Federico García Lorca among her friends.

Salina's sophomore film, Flow is a documentary that tackles the question "Can anyone really own water?" and looks at a deteriorating global situation in which multinationals are wresting control of the world's water from the people whose land it runs through, and then trying to sell it back to them. However, more than just pointing the finger at the companies at fault or cataloging the ways in which our planet's water is being polluted, Salina's film provides examples of people who are countering the impending water crisis and fighting for what is rightfully theirs. Rather than making Flow a downbeat affair, Salina mixes the shocking statistics and exposés of unscrupulous corporate conduct with portraits of compelling and inspirational figures such as Rajendra Singh, the activist who has reintroduced rain harvesting to India and in the process turned numerous drought-stricken areas into lush oases.

Filmmaker spoke to Salina about activist filmmaking, falling foul of Nestlé, and working for the young Orson Welles.



Filmmaker: How did you first become interested in the role of water in the global economy?

Salina: It goes back to 2002. I had been collecting articles on water, and one of the them jumped out at me. It was from The Nation, the headline was “Who Owns Water? Is Water Going to become the Oil of the 21st Century?” and it was written by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke. Maude Barlow is an important character in our film. Inside the same article, there was a small story on New Orleans, because it was going to be the biggest privatization deal of water. So that was my first filming, going down there [to New Orleans] by myself.

Filmmaker: So did you just start by focusing on this one thing, and then it branched out?

Salina: Yeah, I was starting to be aware of the big questions: “Who owns water?” “What's going to become of water?” “Who controls water?” I was also looking at things [differently] after hearing Robert Kennedy Jr., who is an environmental lawyer with River Keepers, on the radio talking about pollution. I started reading about pollution, and I was like “Oh, my God, this is like science fiction!” It was really not talked about much then. There was some coverage in 2004 of male fish turning female, but I think the reason it's not been covered hugely is that there are huge lobby interests, whether it be huge agrichemical farming or hog farms or other industries. I just thought it was important. At the time, I didn't think of the consequences or how big of a company I was talking about, but I thought it was important and then people could do what they want with the information. I believe documentary films are a good tool to provide information that right now you might not find in the press under this administration.

Filmmaker: You went to a lot of places around the world, so how did the scope of the film develop?

Salina: There was a lot of research – I really like to look into things. There was almost too much research, and there were places I decided not to go because there would be a whole film there. It was a combination of major research, intuition, and meeting people. Then at the editing stage, there were too many stories and we had to [pick the best]. I didn't go the conventional way, I just talked a lot with the editor and we went back and forth. I wanted to do more but I learned that if you attack a big project, you are constrained to what finances you have and you just have to deal with that.

Filmmaker: There are some really fantastic real-life characters in the film. How did you find them?

Salina: Well, I met Maude Barlow very early on in the film. She's fantastic because she's an activist and many other things, but she's not like a screaming activist, she's like your aunt or the woman next door who is very sensitive and well-spoken. I wanted this film to be as accessible as possible, because too often things get put in boxes, [where people say] “This is the environment,” “This is activism.” But this is life and there are people who have decided to dedicate their life to exposing or helping or discovering. With Rajendra Singh, I had done a lot of research on India and one thing that kept coming back was rainwater harvesting. I came across a little article on him, I saw his photo and thought he looked like such a warm character. He was giving such intelligent responses that I said, “I really need to speak to him.” [It turned out that] he's huge, he's an amazing guy, and the president of India gave him an award but he couldn't come [collect it] because he was busy stopping a mining company from killing a river – so the president of India had to take a helicopter to come give it to him. I had no idea; it was pure intuition mixed with luck.

Filmmaker: I think what's interesting is that after highlighting these problems in the film, you are very positive about there being achievable solutions and things that we can all do to help the situation.

Salina: I'm so happy you mentioned that because often when people interview me they just talk about the “dramatic” parts, and I'm the one bringing them back [to the positive aspects]. I think it's very important because it's contagious and I've seen it. I think people power has always been [crucial], like the Margaret Mead quote, “Never doubt the power that one single individual can make a big difference.” There's something unbelievably rewarding when you get together with people for the betterment of the community, or [to fix] something that is not right.

Filmmaker: How has the film affected your lifestyle and worldview?

Salina: I'm the complete opposite now. I used to buy bottled water and recycle, but now not only do I not buy bottled water – unless I'm in an airport and I forgot my own water – but I'm so aware of everything. It's not only transformed me but also my friends, my daughter and her friends, the friends of the editor. There are now 150 people that are sending me articles on water that never paid attention to it. I completely changed, and that's why I'm hopeful that other people can change too. I'm much more aware of the connections too; there's a phrase I kept coming back to when I was traveling: “Everything is connected.” We're walking around with our iPods and seeing less of the connections because there's too much and people want to withdraw, but it's all connected. If you cut down the trees by thousands in the rainforests in Brazil, that rainforest is responsible for 20% of our oxygen everywhere. It's all connected. I'm going to say something terrible, but personally I love nature and I know nature is going to be fine. When there was a blackout in New York a couple of years ago, scientists calculated that the amount of pollution went down drastically. At the end of the day, it will be us that are not fine: there will be more cancer because of chemicals in the air and water, and it just goes on and on. I mean, have we given up on life? Do we not care any more about future generations? Or do we care? Maybe we need a boost of positive energy, whether we want it or not. We are completely over overwhelmed with what we are being told about the world, like Darfur, the tsunami, all of that on the one hand, and on the other hand we are living in this country under a political regime that has been so corrupted and secret that it's difficult to regain any positivity. So it's going to take a major shift...

Filmmaker: I believe you had a run in with a water company at a film festival recently.

Salina: Yes, it was at the Nantucket Film Festival a few months ago. It was sponsored by Nestlé and supposedly a woman from Nestlé came in and watched the film and she left, storming out of the screening. Another time, I was at a festival in California and my slot was at a ridiculous hour and it was not in the main movie theater. It was at quarter to ten in the morning and they had invited a school, but there was barely anybody there. One woman [from the festival] came up to me and said, “I just wanted you to know, we love your film but it was really difficult to get it passed by the board because Nestlé is our sponsor...” She said the one condition on which they said the film could be in [the festival] was that it was shown at an early time. But you need to think of those powers. If you look at the Al Gore film [An Inconvenient Truth], or DiCaprio's [The 11th Hour], they don't point [the finger] at anybody, they talk about the subject. Which is fine. But I took that risk because that's the way it is, because I felt it's about a cause and these days it's fine to stand for a cause, because there's so much going on that we have all talk about something.

Filmmaker: I read that you were a radio reporter when you were 15. I'm intrigued about what path you took from there to being a documentary filmmaker.

Salina: I quit school when I was 15. My parents split so I moved a lot, and then one day I decided I wasn't going to school anymore. So my mom said, “Well, if you're not going to school, you've got to work.” So I did theater, because I really loved theater at the time and because there are a lot of actors in my family, and then I started working for the radio. There were 10 young journalists and one main person doing the show – it was my first paying job and I loved it. We had this old-timer telling is how to prepare, do our research, cut the thing, do everything. Then I did some television, and then at 17 I announced to my mom I was going to New York and she was like, “Uh huh. Well, find money for your plane ticket...” So I did. I worked in a jewelry store or something like that, came to New York, and didn't speak a word of English. Somehow, I just managed little jobs here and there and even worked on films under someone else's name... [laughs] I remember working on Blue Jean Cop, True Believer by Joe Rubin, working in catering.

Filmmaker: So was that your first taste of the movies?

Salina: I'd been on my first set when I was really young because my uncle was Philippe Noiret. He took me to my first set, it was Liv Ullman and [director] Mario Monicelli. I spent 10 days in Italy and I loved it. I think it was a conspiracy between him, my mom and my grandmother to make me not like [films], because at an early age I'd expressed an interest. So he took me along and I just loved it even more. It didn't work! There was a whole family gang trying to make me not interested, but it didn't stop me from doing stuff. I remember in New York, I was in King of New York by Abel Ferrara. I was introduced to someone and before I know it I was meeting someone in casting, who said “But you're not American, you can't be in this film. You know what? There's this prostitute part – she doesn't talk.” I remember there was a scene where Christopher Walken is coming out of prison and is going to this bordello and that's where you see me in the end. I remember listening to the scene, and I'm kind of shy but I'm going, “They're making this scene and it's supposed to be in an opium bordello and there no smoke...?” Abel was like “What's that? Speak your mind!” As I was on set more and more, I realized I'm more of a director than someone in front of the camera. I like co-writing, I like holding a camera.

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

Salina: [laugh] Somewhere about four and a half years into making Flow. I was like, “What am I doing? Why don't I just open a little restaurant on a Caribbean island?” You know, just having my little joints with the people that I like and the cook and receiving people and serving simple food, and the next day is the next day.

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a child?

Salina: I was fascinated by archaeology as a child and also by theatre, but when I say theatre it was more like any cabaret and magic, any entertainment, any other world than the daily life. And archaeology, when you think about it, is like going into another time, discovering.

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?

Salina: With Orson Welles, I'd be his assistant. Young Orson Welles. Any period of his earlier films, or when he was doing Shakespeare in Harlem.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/12/2008 06:22:00 PM Comments (0)

Chris Smith is an interesting conundrum, a filmmaker who brings a narrative verve and energy to his documentaries and approaches fiction films with the delicate restraint and remove of a documentarian. A graduate of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's film program, Smith first appeared on the scene in 1996 with American Job, a low-key narrative feature loosely based on the work experiences of the film's star and co-writer, Randy Russell. During the editing of that film, he met Mark Borchardt, an oddball wannabe horror filmmaker who became the subject of Smith's next film, American Movie (1999), a crowd pleaser which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, became a major critical success and gained immediate cult status. Smith's follow-up, Home Movie (2001), focused on a series of peculiar domiciles, and in his subsequent documentary feature, The Yes Men, co-directed with Sarah Price and Dan Ollman, he followed a pair of political pranksters pretending to be members of the World Trade Organization.

After 12 years away from fiction filmmaking, Smith returns with The Pool, co-written with his American Job collaborator Randy Russell, whose Iowa-set short story provided the film's inspiration. The action, however, is set in Goa, India, where a young hotel worker, Venkatesh (Venkatesh Chavan), becomes obsessed with swimming in a backyard pool owned by a stern stranger (Nana Patekar). He ingratiates himself with the man by doing yard work for him and, along with his 11-year-old friend Jhangir (Jhangir Badshah), befriending the man's estranged daughter (Ayesha Mohan), however he finds himself becoming much more involved in their lives than he had expected. A highly involving and rewarding film, The Pool draws its power from the simplicity of its approach to the story. Smith, who also acted as cinematographer, elicits great naturalistic performances from his actors and distinguishes himself by focusing on the inherent, understated drama of the film's set-up without ever feeling the need to authorially or stylistically intrude into the proceedings.

Filmmaker spoke to Smith about the challenges of shooting in India, directing actors whose language you don't speak, and his love of Pirates of the Caribbean.



Filmmaker: When did you first read Randy Russell's short story? And when did you decide you want to transpose it to Goa?

Smith: I'm always looking for something that looks interesting and engaging. For me, it was one of those stories that I read and then came back to. It just sort of stuck with me; it was so simple and some of the themes seemed so universal. I thought back to the experience I had when I was in India about four or five years ago helping some friends shoot a movie, where we were living at that hotel and interacting with the roomboys and getting a sense of their lives. The idea of putting those two worlds together seemed really interesting to me, and I thought the two could be combined in a way that could provide a lot of rich material to work from.

Filmmaker: How much did you have to change of the fundamentals in order to move the action from Iowa to India?

Smith: It's a seven-page short story and it really was about taking the central theme, and from there it was completely rewritten. It was really just the idea that there's this main character who's obsessed with this swimming pool and decides to meet the people who own the pool in an attempt to swim in it. That's really the only part that we took from the story. To me, the theme of the short story was that you think you want something and then when you set about trying to get there, things change along the way. In the case of the short story, it was that the relationships became more important than the desire to swim in the pool. That sort of was the leaping off point for the film.

Filmmaker: Did you have a lot of prep time for The Pool to compensate for the cultural unfamiliarity of the situation?

Smith: No [laughs]. I had been to that city before and knew that I wanted to shoot there and at that hotel. Going into the project, I wanted to believe that we were going to make something very quick and easy but, of course, I got involved in it and it started to grow and change and become something that I was passionate about. At that point, I couldn't turn back and we ended up being in India for five months and shot for 65 days. Originally we were going over for six weeks. Kate [Noble], the producer, was pretty good about saying that at the end of six weeks, she just hoped to know if we were going to give up or plan to stay longer. We went over there and gave ourselves three weeks of prep. It was kind of an insane thing to try to do because you couldn't prep a film in that amount of time, but if we hadn't started shooting we couldn't have sustained the energy to stay the [course] for something that was so unknown. There were so many variables, we could have prepped for a year.

Filmmaker: A lot of it feels improvised, but how tightly scripted was it?

Smith: It was a lot more scripted than you would think. The kids didn't know how to read so for me it was more important to get a good performance than to get word-for-word. Generally the scenes would be written out. I was interested in going over there with a script but being completely open to experiences we had, observations we made and, most importantly, aspects from the actors' lives and trying to integrate those into the story. So once we found the actors, we did extensive interviews with them and then took a lot of that material and worked it into the script. Venkatesh, the main character, has a number of stories he tells the father throughout the movie and those generally weren't scripted out word-for-word, but there are a lot of other scenes that were very carefully constructed and needed to be done in a certain way otherwise the story wouldn't make sense. Because we were shooting out of order and it was a bit chaotic sometimes, the kids had a problem understanding the entire scope of the film, so for them it was important to be clear what the scenes and dialogue were, but if it was from real life I was always open to people trying to word things their own way.

Filmmaker: How did you approach the casting?

Smith: We had a contact in Bombay who put us in touch with a production manager in Bombay who then had his team fly with us to Goa, so we had a small production unit. For the most part they sat in a dark room, smoking cigarettes and watching cricket, and after a week we realized that that wasn't going to give us much. The only thing they showed us were photos of models from Bombay, people doing poses in studios, so Kate, myself and [creative consultant] Xav Leplae all took to different approaches. We did a lot of street casting and so after a couple of weeks we ended finding the four main characters. [Apart from the lead], the three other main characters all dropped out four days before shooting and we started with just one main character. Shortly thereafter we were at this bar and Kate saw Jhangir, the little kid, working and said, “I think this kid could be really good.”

Filmmaker: I believe you had a lot of trouble casting the role of the father.

Smith: We couldn't find [someone to play] the father character so we actually started the film with our production manager as the father. We shot with him a little bit but we had become so excited about the material that we had shot so far that we weren't 100% sure that this was the best that we could do. One day, this newspaper came under the door at this hotel where we were staying and Kate saw a photograph of Nana, this actor who ended up playing the father. There was this article where they asked him why he'd taken a year off from films, and he said there wasn't anything that he found interesting and that he was only going to work when he found interesting projects. Kate was immediately keyed into that and said, “We're an interesting project!” so she became obsessed with getting to him. [Eventually] we managed to get a meeting with him and went to his house. The first thing he said was “I'm not going to do your film but I'm interested in why you think I should.” We talked to him for about an hour about what we were trying to do with the film and he watched [footage from] the film. After watching it, he said very quietly, “I will turn myself over to you and do the movie.”

Filmmaker: How did you approach the challenge of directing actors who were delivering dialogue in a language you didn't understand?

Smith: To be honest, the scripted scenes weren't that hard because you could sort of understand in parts what they were saying and ultimately you're just listening for a good performance. That's all you can look for when you're rolling film, and then once you've got a take that feels right on an intuitive level you have to get it translated and make sure that the content is what it was supposed to be. That part was challenging because you couldn't adapt and improvise as much as you would be able to in your own language, but the hardest part was when you were improvising scenes. You wouldn't know when to cut because you wouldn't know exactly where you where or if things; they could be quiet but it could be this incredible dramatic pause. That was the hardest part, to try and feel the dramatic energy of when a scene was actually over. I was the shooting the film myself, so I had my eye to the camera; it was really just about trying to feel when that moment was.

Filmmaker: You haven't made a fiction film since American Job in 1996. What made you return to narrative?

Smith: I always intended only to make narrative films. I didn't have any hard and fast rule, I just never saw myself making feature length documentaries. I was interested in narrative, I was interested in American Job when we made it, and immediately went on to write a script with Randy that was the follow-up to that film. When I was writing, I was also getting nervous that it would be years before I would have a camera again and be shooting. I sort of ran into this guy Mark Borchardt [the subject of American Movie]. I was thinking it would be useful to continue shooting and being productive while I was writing because otherwise it felt like you could get to a point where years would go by and you would have this apprehension of actually picking up a camera again and filming something. I don't know why, but there was something in me that just felt like if you don't stay active in filmmaking you could easily never make a film again.

Filmmaker: Was there anything that you learned from documentaries that you brought to this film?

Smith: The thing that I learned most over the years from making documentaries that impacted the making of this film was just my ability to interview people and get stories and experiences out of them. [Also], in documentary you're forced to react very quickly to things as they're happening, and the way this film was made there were a lot of things that were changing on a minute-by-minute basis. Having the ability to roll with things as they happened is something I learned from documentary because you don't have the control that you would have in a narrative film. For instance, we went to shoot at a laundry but the guy went out for lunch, had a siesta, got drunk, passed out and never came back. I was sitting there with the crew and that was the second half of the day's shoot [ruined], but as we were driving back to the hotel, I drove by this alley and there was this beautiful light coming down. We stopped, and I had this idea for a scene between the two kids. It's one of the best scenes in the film but it purely came about because this other scene had fallen through, and it was looking at what we had available to us at the time.

Filmmaker: What was the film first you ever saw?

Smith: The first film I remember seeing the marquee for was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I always just remember as a kid trying to figure out what that film could be about from the title, and I remember finally seeing that film when I was in high school. That was one of the films that had an incredible influence on films that I felt that I felt I was interested in making.

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

Smith: I have a very low tolerance for bad movies. I try to protect myself by not even watching them, so most of the time on planes I won't watch anything rather than watch something bad. The best film experience I had on a plane was when I saw that film Pirates of the Caribbean – I remember watching it and thinking it was one of the best films I'd ever seen. It was so well done, so entertaining and such a great movie experience. I remember just thinking I didn't want it to be over.

Filmmaker: What was your cinematic epiphany?

Smith: I remember seeing Roger and Me when I was 18 in a mall theater in Michigan, where I grew up, and thinking how incredible it was that this guy who was 45 minutes away from me had made this film on 16mm and that it was playing at a multiplex. It empowered me to the point where I thought, “I can grab a 16mm camera and as long as the 90 minutes that I put in front of that camera is interesting, it can play anywhere that a giant Hollywood film can play.” My earlier inspiration was just starting to make films in high school, working with friends: we would go shoot these projects and then have a party and get everyone we knew in the neighborhood to come by and we'd project them on the side of the building. That, to me, was the most addictive experience. The feeling of getting the film ready and then showing it and having an audience come and enjoy it definitely motivated me to know that this was something I wanted to do.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/03/2008 08:51:00 PM Comments (0)