Since he was a boy, making films has been at the very center of Kurt Kuenne's life. He fell in love with the movies as a kid growing up in Silicon Valley in Southern California, and already at the age of seven began trying to emulate his heroes by shooting films on Super 8 and then later VHS cameras, using friends and family as actors. Kuenne studied film at USC's prestigious School of Cinema-Television (where he won the Harold Lloyd Scholarship in Film Editing), and there wrote and directed the short Remembrances (1995), which drew praise from Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis. After graduation, he completed a degree in movie music composing, also at USC. Kuenne made his directorial feature debut with Scrapbook (1999), an intense drama about two brothers, and followed it up two years later with the documentary Drive-In Movie Memories. In addition to scoring movies, since 2004 Kuenne has been working on a series of comedy shorts, including The Phone Book and Slow (both 2008), which have played extensively on the festival circuit and won numerous prizes in the process.

Kuenne's latest movie, Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, sees him return to non-fiction with one of the most searingly personal films in recent memory. It centers on the tragic story of Dr. Andrew Bagby, a lifelong friend of Kuenne's who was killed in 2001, and follows the Bagby family's quest for justice after the prime suspect – Bagby's ex-girlfriend, Dr. Shirley Turner – fled to Canada to escape prosecution. The film loosely takes the form of a letter addressed to Zachary, Bagby's son who Turner was carrying when he was murdered, as Kuenne interviews all of the dead man's friends and relations in order to let Zachary know about his father. The film is essentially all Kuenne's work – he wrote, directed, shot, narrated, produced, edited, recorded the sound and wrote the score – and because of his closeness to the subject he presents a highly subjective take on the story. This, along with the dramatic nature of the events depicted, gives Dear Zachary an incredible emotional power which is sustained over the course of this deeply memorable film.

Filmmaker spoke to Kuenne about his emotional journey while making the film, the importance of laughter, and how his film saved a 15-year-old's life.



Filmmaker: How old were you when you started making movies?

Kuenne: I started writing my first attempts at screenplays, however that came out, at age seven and I was using a Super 8 camera back then, but I started doing it more when I was 11 and started getting my hands on VHS equipment. Around that time, it was like junior high or so, I got a paper route and started saving my money and buying the best VHS equipment that existed in the day and the best editing machines. Everything was much more difficult to put things together back then than it is now with computers [laughs] – those machines were very frustrating. I keep thinking, “Man, if I'd had this stuff when I was a kid, my life would have been so much easier.” There was never really a time when I wasn't in the process of making something and that just continued on through high school and college and beyond.

Filmmaker: How did your friendship with Andrew Bagby begin?

Kuenne: I met him on the first day of first grade and I remember hanging out at recess. We just starting hanging out at each other's houses and overnights with other friends at his place. That was also the genesis of his parents becoming second parents to me, because literally every other weekend we'd be over at each other's houses. Eventually when I started actively making movies with whatever equipment I could get my hands on, I kept shoving him in front of the camera, forcing him to play all various manner of silly roles. The wonderful thing is that I kept all of the raw footage tapes in addition to the movies themselves, so in addition to him being in my films as a document for remembering him I still have all the tapes of him being himself between takes, which turned out to be the most valuable for me, personally and for this movie. We stayed friends all the way up through the time of his death.

Filmmaker: How soon after Andrew's death did you have the idea for the film?

Kuenne: I decided literally within about 24 hours of getting news of his death that I was going to put something together because I knew all of the friends and family would want it, some kind of a memory album tribute thing, and I know I certainly did. I was the only one who could do it because I was the only filmmaker friend that he had and I had his entire youth documented in one form or another. Even when we weren't shooting a movie, if it was just somebody's birthday party or hanging out, I always had a camera around someplace. I had tons of tapes around so I decided to at least put something together and then I started thinking, “Why don't I interview people about their memories?” So that was my original genesis: I was going to travel around and meet every last person that I could and collect all the stuff and have it in one place and have it for everybody who wanted it. Instead it being me, this weird guy, showing up to meet everybody, I have an excuse: I'm interviewing them for the film [laughs], so I don't just look like this grief-stricken guy who wants to meet everybody. That's what the original genesis of what we were going to do before there was any hint that there was going to be a baby.

Filmmaker: How difficult was it for you personally, in addition to all the usual challenges of filmmaking, to embark on this project and immerse yourself in this incredibly tragic event?

Kuenne: The shooting of it was really enjoyable and cathartic because I felt like I was doing something really important for people I cared about – Andrew's family and Zachary – and documenting and rescuing all this stuff before it disappeared or before people's memories faded or other people died and took their memories with them. So the actual shoot was pure pleasure because, if you think about it, it was me in a car driving around with my cameras and my lights, getting to meet a lot of really cool people and hear stories about Andrew. [laughs] And see all these places. So that actually was really wonderful. Obviously, there were horrible things going on at the time while I was documenting this that I kept hearing about through his parents. I was more upset and furious with the situation as it happened in life, and my movie was the way to make that liveable for me. There were two separate two-month blocks in the summer of 2003 and the summer of 2004 where I went on the road and just did [interviewed Andrew's friends and family[ for two months and those, honestly, were two of the most rewarding periods I've ever had. I look back on those and they were very, very special. I felt like I had left the rest of the world and I was just on this journey on my own, and it was almost like it's own bubble of time. I don't know how to explain.

Filmmaker: You wrote, directed, narrated, edited and produced this film, as well as writing the music, so basically made this on your own. Was it important to you that this be a solitary venture?

Kuenne: Kind of, yes. I tend to do that anyway, and I have a short film comedy series that's playing festivals all over the place at the moment that I've been doing for a few years, but I literally do all those jobs on that too. I've done that for a while and I guess I kind of like handcrafting something from beginning to end. I just enjoy doing all those jobs. I try to look at it like creating a movie the way a novelist writes a book: it's your own thing from beginning to end as much as is possible. I guess I just enjoy that, but this movie was, basically, “a gift,” if you will, and as such it was nice to be that personal gift from one person to another.

Filmmaker: What prompted you to decide that the film should be public, rather than just for friends and family members?

Kuenne: The outcome of this case was totally unacceptable and that's when Andrew's parents began speaking out in the media about bail reform in Canada and I felt very strongly about that as well. When I realized that Andrew's father was writing a book about everything that had happened too and that they did want their story told publicly, [I shifted my focus]. We never really had a specific conversation about it, it just sort of became implicitly understood that I was going to put this movie out there. I remember one day when I was shooting an interview with Andrew's folks and we were taking a break. Andrew's mom was saying to somebody on the phone, “We're really hoping that when Kurt's movie is finished it can really be something that can help the cause and be one of the first crime documentaries told from the point of view of the victim.” I was hearing this and thought, “Oh, they do want me to put this out.” [laughs] It just sort of evolved into that, it was an inescapable conclusion after what happened. If there had been a different outcome to the case, you wouldn't be interviewing me now.

Filmmaker: Your film is a very subjective portrait of what happened, which is almost inevitable given your closeness to the events. How did you feel about breaking that documentary norm of relative objectivity?

Kuenne: That didn't bother me at all because I felt the only reason this movie has any depth at all was because I have a very strong opinion and very strong feelings about what happened here. I felt like I wanted everyone to see what happened from our point of view. I hope [the movie] will make people as upset as we are about what happened and make them do something about it. I felt like if you just read the basics of something, you don't maybe get it or are moved to do anything about it, but if you know the people involved it's a completely different thing. You care and you want to do something, so my goal was to make people fall in love with Andrew and his parents the same way I had in real life. For me, it was completely about my subjective experience and I wanted to give the audience the exact experience I had through this in real time, knowing what I knew at each stage. As far as the case was concerned, I tried to give the facts as we were going through it and as far as the legal aspect was concerned give you the facts, but it's also pretty clear how I feel about it. I also have a belief that, as much as people say certain documentaries or fiction films or news reporting is objective, I really think that inherently everything has to be subjective because it's always being filtered through your point of view. And so I'm just fully admitting that, if you will. [laughs]

Filmmaker: The series of comedy shorts that you mentioned are polar opposite to this film, and I was surprised when I read about those.

Kuenne: Dear Zachary is an anomaly and a one-off for me. I have done another feature documentary before this, a very different documentary called Drive-In Movie Memories, about the history of drive-in movie theaters – a fun, upbeat, kitschy nostalgia piece – but, in general, fiction's much more my interest. I'm more in the Frank Capra, Preston Sturges realm of things. My principal interest is in creating movies that exhilarate people and are highly entertaining. I guess my work started taking a more comedic bent after Andrew was killed, I think because I'd been doing that was a little more serious before that and I sort felt like, "You know what? Life is sad enough. You don't need to create fictional scenarios to make people upset." [laughs] In Preston Sturges' movie Sullivan's Travels, at the end of the movie the character in that says, "There's a lot to be said for making people laugh. That's all some people have." I went through a bit of a [period of thinking] "Oh, my God, what am I doing with my life? He was a doctor and he was healing people, and here I am just making stuff up, Is there any value to this?" I finally came to the conclusion that a doctor heals the body and keeps people well, but after they're well they want to have experiences that inspire them and lift them up and thought that maybe the best thing I could focus on was making people happy and adding to their life in a positive way.

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

Kuenne: That would probably be an email that I received a few weeks ago from a 15-year-old who had attended a screening of Dear Zachary. He wrote to me and said that he had been contemplating suicide and very depressed and that seeing Andrew's story and the kind of person Andrew was and how many people he affected made him want to keep on living and try to be that kind of person that could affect that many people. Knowing that this film may have stopped somebody from committing suicide really – that's probably the best thing that somebody could say to me.

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

Kuenne: He's not living anymore, but Alfred Hitchcock. I'm a very big fan. Rear Window is my favorite of his and I also love Notorious – I just think that's a wonderful movie and a wonderful love story. Vertigo's great. To Catch A Thief. There's so many.

Filmmaker: Finally, which film do you wish you had directed?

Kuenne: E.T. is my favorite film, so why don't we say E.T.? I was eight years old when I first saw it and I still love it as much now as I did then. It was my first memory of being moved to tears by a movie at any time and there was just something so wonderful about the entire arc of the story and it kept surprising me from every angle. I think one thing that's so powerful about that movie, and maybe why it did so well all over the world, is that it is a basically a love story and relationship that is told with almost no dialogue. That's so hard to do. On top of that there's Spielberg's direction, which is phenomenal, and John Williams' music, which is my favorite film score – the package for me has never been topped.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/31/2008 09:41:00 PM Comments (0)

As a director who values realistic characters and emotionally resonant stories above all else, Gavin O'Connor is a young filmmaker who is keeping the values of a bygone Hollywood alive. The son of a cop, O'Connor grew up in New York on a diet of classic studio movies from the 30s and 40s then immersed himself in the great films produced by the New Hollywood auteurs of the 1970s. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania, O'Connor returned to New York, where he began writing plays (such as Rumblings of a Romance Renaissance) and the short films The Bet (1992), Ted Demme's directorial debut, and American Standoff (1994), which he also directed. O'Connor made his first feature, the gritty romance Comfortably Numb, in 1995 but only came to prominence in 1999 when he co-wrote and directed Tumbleweeds, a mother-and-daughter drama which won O'Connor the Filmmaker's Award at Sundance and earned numerous accolades and nominations for Janet McTeer's lead performance. It was another five years before he made his next film, Miracle, a Disney movie about the 1980 U.S. hockey team, which once again demonstrated O'Connor's ability to connect with the emotional core of material and proved he could make a film that was both a financial and critical success.

Pride and Glory, O'Connor's latest film, conceived with his twin brother Greg and written in tandem with fellow writer-director Joe Carnahan, has been in gestation for almost a decade. A richly textured and highly involving picture, it centers on the Tierneys, a family of New York cops made up of patriarch Francis Sr. (Jon Voight), senior detective Francis Jr. (Noah Emmerich), withdrawn missing persons detective Ray (Edward Norton) and his high-flying brother-in-law Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell). Following the brutal slaying of four cops who worked under Jimmy and Francis Jr.'s command, Ray is asked to head up an investigation into their deaths and starts to uncover awkward truths that test his allegiance to both the police force and his own family. Pride and Glory works so beautifully because O'Connor – backed by great performances from his entire cast – manages to make the personal and professional dramas in his characters' lives equally convincing and compelling, so that the film's quiet, intimate moments play as powerfully as the grand, almost Shakespearian conflicts between cops, criminals and kin. As well as being a gripping police procedural, the film wrestles with big ideas – family, loyalty, power and honor – and uses the microcosm of the police force to examine their relative roles in a modern American institution.

Filmmaker spoke to O'Connor about growing up in a policeman's family, his personal approach to filmmaking, and drinking raw eggs after seeing Rocky.




Filmmaker: You're from a family of cops. What was it like growing up in that environment?

O’Connor: My dad was an unorthodox cop in the sense that if you ask him what he’s most proud of, he would tell you that he never had to shoot somebody. He had the same partner for 10 or 11 years, another Irishman, Frank Keating, and they were sort of the oddball cops. My father would be in the squad car in the back seat playing his guitar, and Frank would read [James] Joyce, and he was obsessed with Thomas Jefferson. These were not your typical cops. I remember when we were little kids, Frank Keating, my father’s partner, gave me a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Beyond that, there was a lot of cops around that my dad was friends with, so I heard a lot of stories around the dinner table. There was a certain spirit to these guys, even the guys who were hardcore, old-fashioned New York City cops. It was my world, so I absorbed it like any kid would the world his dad lives in.

Filmmaker: How much of the darker and more corrupt side of things did you see?

O’Connor: I'd go to visit my dad as a kid and see crazy stuff, crazy things. It was shocking as a young boy to see some old woman who got taken into the precinct who'd just got raped or mugged. Stuff like that got printed on my brain. My dad was a cop in the 60s and the 70s and so there was a bit of a code among cops and criminals, but [New York City] was still a very violent and very corrupt place. There were certain accepted norms within the department that my dad was very uncomfortable with. His first day on the job, he was supposed to be a bag man. The sergeant said, “Go to this address and pick up an envelope.” That was what he was told to do, and that was what he did. He would have lunch with the sergeant and they would finish and he would just get up, and my dad was like, “Well, don't we have to pay the cheque?” “No, no, no, we don't pay the cheque here.” Growing up, if I ever mentioned wanting to be a cop, my father reprimanded me because that was not going to be in my future.

Filmmaker: If your father didn't want you to be a cop, how did he feel about you making a movie about cops?

O’Connor: When my father read the script, he did not like it at all. I tried to explain to him that what the essence of the movie is to me is the celebration of an honest cop and I have to deal with the negative side of that, he's got to come out of something. I don't think he ever got it until he saw the film. I screened a rough cut here in New York and I invited my dad, and he responded very positively. The one thing he said to me that was funny was “Am I the Voight character?” I said, “A little bit, Pop.” [laughs]

Filmmaker: How did the idea for the film evolve?

O’Connor: When you grow up in New York, you always hear that cops bleed blue. So you take the department that bleeds blue and then you take a family of cops – a blood family – that bleed red and those two worlds collide – what would happen? That was literally what started swirling in my head and I thought, “That's an interesting idea for a film.” Then there were things going on in the world, and as the script evolved things started getting informed about institutional corruption, whether it's this administration, Abu Ghraib, corporate corruption, all these scandals that were going on. I thought, “The institution that I know and am already exploring is the police department and that's as impenetrable as an institution is.” I thought I could explore these other ideas that had affected me that had gone on in the world that I'm curious about and take those ideas and put them in the blender with this other stuff going on in the department.

Filmmaker: One thing that links all your three movies, which all are very different, is the clear emotional connection you have with the material and how you really bring the stories and characters very vividly to life.

O’Connor: Well, with Miracle, what I said to them was, “The movie's about a man who puts his family on a shelf and chases a dream.” And I did that with my wife and child. It was painful to do, but it was a weird thing, I did it for the movie because it became personal for me. I also said, “It's about a mad scientist and these kids are his lab experiment.” That's what I felt like. I felt like, “I'm a retard, I can't believe the studio's giving me 40 million fucking dollars – that's crazy! But they're doing it, so OK!” I was grateful, and I became Herb [the team coach] to these kids, the actors in the movie. It was weird, I was very tough on them and it became very like life imitating art and art imitating life. That's the only way to make movies. I don't know how to do it without making it personal, somehow get my fingerprints fuckin' buried in the movie. I don't know how to do it any other way. I find a personal doorway into the movie and then make it personal, personal, personal.

Filmmaker: I can really see your theatrical background manifesting itself in Pride and Glory with the dramatic intensity you achieve in the film.

O’Connor: I believe you make the movie before you make the movie, so I sat down with almost every actor, from Edward on down. I had a six-week workshop just for me and my actors, and as more actors were cast I'd bring them into the workshop. It wasn't like we were reading the script, we did deep biographical work, connecting the emotional lines between all the characters. [A certain] number of hours a day they'd be out on the streets with cops and would come back and report to me, and that would inform the script. I looked at the script as a starting point and as my actors were getting information and bringing it back to me, we were sitting around carving this thing up like a play. We all just sat in my apartment every day and got into it, and we were there 12 hours sometimes. That's what we did, and you can feel it in the film. People can like the film or not like the film, but the thing I'm most proud of is just the honesty of it. We were going for the truth at all times and that came out of the [preparation] process. We do a lot of improvs and all the actors loved it. There were no egos, no star bullshit with their trailers and food and they have to have their alfalfa sprouts and Evian. None of it.

Filmmaker: The film very intelligently and coherently deals with some very big ideas like family, loyalty, power, ambition and honor without being reductive or simplistic in any way.

O’Connor: We confront those themes aggressively, and it was born out of writing it. It wasn't an intentional thing of “I want to deal with these themes,” it was just whatever is going on inside you when you're writing something is something you want to get out of there. There's a Greek tragedy quality to the movie and there's an operatic quality. When I was sitting down with my cinematographer, Declan Quinn, I was explaining to him the look of the movie and I kept saying, “There's an operatic quality to the film but there's also a very fly on the wall intimacy in the film and we have to strike that balance because I don't want it to feel like a movie. My goal is to pull the audience inside so that they're experiencing the movie rather than sitting there watching it.”

Filmmaker: I think the film also gains a huge amounts from having characters like Abby, Francis Jr.'s wife who's dying from cancer, and Tasha, Ray's estranged wife, as they add greatly to the emotional complexity and texture of the movie in a way that's very rare for a film like this.

O’Connor: I had more in the movie with those characters and unfortunately [I had to cut scenes]. We went deeper into those relationships, but it's weird when you put a movie together: the movie's bigger than us and it starts to tell you what it wants to be. When the movie started speaking to my editor and me, I felt “This just feels extraneous,” and as the story's unfolding colliding and everything's just elevating, that stuff just kind of slowed everything down. Those are the hardest decisions you make, because you go, “OK, I love this scene – but what's best for the movie?” It's like Fitzgerald says, you gotta kill your darlings, and there were a lot of darlings that got chopped up.

Filmmaker: Did you get cooperation from the NYPD for the movie?

O’Connor: I was so scared to give the cops the script for obvious reasons. I thought they'd be like, “Fuck this guy, he's out to tar and feather us!” It started with this guy Rick Tirelli, who was my technical advisor, and I said, “Look, this is what my movie's really about and I don't want the cops to think it's a smear campaign.” We brought in a lot of cops, and they all got what we were doing and it went all the way up the chain of command, and we got really high up. They believed in what we were doing, and when I screened a cut for them they fuckin' dug it. They got it. They gave me the stamp of approval, and you know you're getting the truth when they call and email you later, when they go the extra mile. No one needs to do that unless they're really enthusiastic.

Filmmaker: The film's depth and complexity seems to hark back to 1970s Hollywood filmmaking. Was that a conscious decision on your part?

O’Connor: I grew up on films of the 70s, that was my nourishment. When it got to the 80s, there were some good movies but I just kept going back to the 70s. The 70s movies just spoke to me in a way that was alive. I'm not intentionally doing anything but that's just what's inside of me. I just love those movies, I love them. They're the greatest, the best decade of films ever, I don't care what anyone says. There's nothing better.

Filmmaker: Which phrase best describes your philosophy on life?

O’Connor: [laughs] I have many philosophies, but I'm going to tell you the first thing that just popped into my head which is “Hope for the best, expect the worst.”

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

O’Connor: Never. I've wanted to make movies since I was a little kid. I don't look down my nose at anybody's job, but I've never, ever questioned what I wanted to do, so I'm living my dream.

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

O’Connor: I don't know what the first film was, but there were three movies that I can point to that [made a big impression]. When I was seven years old, I begged my father to let me see The French Connection. Rated R, not a seven-year-old's film, but my dad took me. That made had an indelible fuckin' impression, like a punch to the gut. I walked out and I was like, “Fuck! Whatever just happened – 'Pick your feet in Poughkeepsie' and all that shit – [I love it]. I don't know what that was, but I wanna do that!” Another movie, that I was allowed to see this time, was The Sting. I loved that movie as a little kid, loved it. And another movie that was a big influence on me as a kid was the first Rocky. When I saw that movie, I came home and did fuckin' one-handed push-ups, I was drinking fuckin' raw eggs. Really, I was. I wanted to run down the street and for the kids to chase me. I saw that movie recently and it holds up. It's a little movie, but the specifics of that film, the characters, it's fuckin' great. Great.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/24/2008 12:43:00 AM Comments (0)

After more than 30 years as a director, Abel Ferrara shows no sign of losing any of the raw intelligence, energy and vitality that have made him a continuing force in American cinema. The Italian American Bronx-born director, now 57, began directing shorts as a film student at SUNY Purchase in the early 1970s and made his feature debut in 1976 with the porn film 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy under the pseudonym Jimmy Laine. His debut proper was the legendary DIY grindhouse movie The Driller Killer (1979), written by his high school friend and regular collaborator Nicholas St. John, which he followed up with the female revenge movie Ms .45 (1981). The 1980s as a whole were not so successful for Ferrara as his bid for mainstream attention, Fear City (1984), flopped and he retreated to TV work, but in 1990 he broke though with the Christopher Walken-starring druglord saga King of New York. The brutal and depraved police drama Bad Lieutenant, arguably Ferrara's greatest movie, appeared two years later, but two subsequent bids at commercial success, Dangerous Game starring Madonna and Body Snatchers (both 1993), fell short of expectations. He followed with two more career highlights, the thoughtful black-and-white vampire flick The Addiction (1995) and the period gangster film The Funeral (1996). The usually prolific Ferrara was on hiatus between 2001's 'R Xmas and 2005's Mary, but returned in force with the burlesque drama Go-Go Tales (2007) and his first documentary, Chelsea on the Rocks (2008).

Mary, which finally gets a release more than three years after it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2005, is a dense, multi-layered and highly engaging movie in which Ferrara gets to tackle religion – one of his continuing preoccupations – more directly than ever before. Brilliantly weaving together several narrative strands, the movie follows brash actor-director Tony Childress (Matthew Modine), who has made a film about Jesus in which he plays the lead; Marie Palesi (Juliette Binoche), the actress who plays Mary Magdalene and flees to Jerusalem after losing herself in the role; and PBS-style talk show host Ted Younger (Forest Whitaker), who is having an affair though his wife Elizabeth (Heather Graham) is pregnant with their first child. Ferrara includes extended segments in which Whitaker's character interviews real-life religious experts on his show as well as extracts from Childress' film, using these elements to look at how religion is depicted in art and entertainment. Mary also draws on the Gnostic Gospels – apocryphal texts discovered in 1945 – to reposition Mary Magdalene as apostle rather than whore, asking questions about the place of religion and morality in modern society as the drama escalates towards its operatic climax.

Filmmaker spoke to Ferrara about religious films, Jesus as a revolutionary figure, and why Werner Herzog “can die in hell.”



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

Ferrara: The movie started to be about an actor or an actress because I was wondering, especially working with Keitel, "How do these guys go from one movie to another like that when they're deep into the role?" They really escape from the film, but I guess if you have the technique to do that... It's about the effect of the film on the actor. I'm playing Abel all the time – the director – I don't have to play someone else, but with a lot of these guys [it's very different]. When [Keitel] did Dangerous Game, it proved to me the journey of the actor is the key to the film – all the light, all the power, all the energy is on the actor as the character on the screen. So how do they get out of that? And then, somehow, [it came together with] the idea of Mary Magdalene, which has always intrigued me. I grew up in a church and we shot in the church where I grew up as a child, where I went to school. There was a crucifix, human size, and in kindergarten you were right at the front. Imagine you're five years old, and there's blood-dripping crucifix [right in front of you]. And when we get to the church, they have a silver abstract crucifix up on the wall. I said, "What happened to the fuckin' [big crucifix]?" "Oh, they've got it in the cellar." But as a boy growing up with nuns, the idea of Mary Magdalene was always very fascinating, so it was a combination of those two that lead us into [making this film]. When you shoot something like Scorsese's movie or the Mel Gibson, you're dead on, so we just wanted to tell it from that way.

Filmmaker: What was your reaction to watching movies like The Last Temptation of Christ?

Ferrara: The Last Temptation of Christ blew me away. I've seen The Last Temptation of Christ thousands of times. I remember the first time I saw it, it changed my life. I read the book twice in my life and both times I read it – when I was 16 and 30 – it changed my life totally. Really. And that movie did the same thing. Marty [Scorsese] may have his personal films that mean the most, but that means the most to me. It had a visceral effect, an intellectual affect, an analytical effect – there's an effect on every level when you watch that film. Or there is to me.

Filmmaker: With this film you're extending some of those same ideas into new territory.

Ferrara: We shot that film in Jerusalem – we went places that no one ever went to. It was like taking it back to the real root and reading the Bible as a revolutionary doctrine, which Marty was getting at. These guys are like Fidel and Che, you know what I mean? These guys were fighting the Romans. The Jews don't believe Jesus was anything more [than a prophet] because they said, "Hey, Jerusalem is filled with nuts like you guys." They thought Jesus was just another fuckin' nut, [laughs] the Romans thought he was just another crazy guy in a world of crazy Jews battling for their lives against a fascist dictatorship, which was the Roman Empire. So you see it that way and then you start to understand Jesus as a real man. Jesus was a rabbi, man. A rabbi has a wife. There's this idea of trying to turn Mary Magdalene – who could have been his wife – [into a prostitute]. That's a historical change, because for Jesus there wasn't eleven guys at the fuckin' Last Supper. There were women, there were men, there was a group of people. And that's what Da Vinci saw. I looked at The Last Supper a million times, but like a fool [I never saw it properly]. Like Da Vinci said, "For those who have eyes to see and ears to hear..." He's showing us right there: that's a woman sitting there right next to him. I've looked at that painting eight million times and I never thought [like that] because I was so conditioned to think by the Roman Catholic Church – which was set up by a bunch of Jews anyway.

Filmmaker: I believe Juliette Binoche was very interested in this subject also.

Ferrara: Binoche was trying to make a film about Mary Magdalene for five years. The first time I met her, I was meeting with her thinking, "I'm gonna cast her" – but she was interviewing me to see if I was up to the job. She'd read the script she had more notes on that script than there were pages.

Filmmaker: How much of a creative input did she have on the film?

Ferrara: You know, she was happy that we were going down the same track, that there was actually going to be a film. She was asked to do something that she was trying to herself get off the ground, and I don't know if she would have got it done. The guy that she was working with was one of the experts in the movie, that French guy. In 1945 in Nag Hammadi they found a jar and inside it were all the five gospels that we're aware of plus the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas - the gospels that they didn't get. Now, I'm sure that underneath the Vatican – that's the documentary that I want to make – you can imagine what they've got. If they've got the body of Peter, you can rest assured they've got these fuckin' gospels. But this is neither here nor there, the bottom line is that in 1945 the Gnostic Gospels were found, and we just quote right out of them.

Filmmaker: How steeped are you in the minutiae of religious history?

Ferrara: I knew very little. I mean, I'd read the Gnostic Gospels but that's the great thing about making films is that you get down to the subject. It's not a course in fuckin' required credit at university, you just get into it, it's your job to really understand it. The Da Vinci Code was the biggest selling book in the world, the Gibson movie was the biggest movie ever made and he had to make that with his own money. He distributed that with his own money. Whatever you think of that movie, the motherfucker rocked the world. He rocked the fuckin' world.

Filmmaker: You name-check Gibson and Scorsese's movie in the film, so was there a conscious attempt to be part of that tradition of films?

Ferrara: Yeah, you gotta reference every one of these films. You know, I went to Matera, the [Italian] town where they shot the Pasolini film [The Gospel According to St. Matthew] and where they shot The Passion of the Christ. I could see where Pasolini put the cross, and where Gibson [put his cross]. It's genre filmmaking, whether it's a vampire film or a gangster film or a documentary or a religious movie. It's like haiku poetry, man. We're working in a 90-minute format and trying to not put people to sleep. Although this movie definitely [laughs] will put you to sleep if you're not up for it.

Filmmaker: In the segments of the film where Forest Whitaker interviews real-life religious experts on his TV show, you're basically incorporating documentary elements into the film in a PBS-style format.

Ferrara: Yeah, he's playing Charlie Rose. It's basically a film about [people like] Charlie Rose and what their lives are like, how he's so involved and meanwhile these guys come to the studio, get in their limousines, go to their house, come back – and never set one foot out on the fuckin' street. People say, “How come you shot New York like this?” Well, that's how these people see New York. They're not in the subway, they're not hustling on the street, these guys are going from there to there and back. It's from a rich person's perspective, it's from inside a limousine. Until a rick comes through the window. Or the stock market crashes. Or your wife fuckin' aborts the baby. At some point, you've got to step out of the limousine and then you see who's got heart and who don't.

Filmmaker: Before I started recording, we were talking about the advent of digital filmmaking and how that's changed that's democratized cinema and will help directors with passion get their visions out there.

Ferrara: I hope so. Well find out, you know what I mean? Just because everybody can write doesn't mean they're William Gibson or T.S. Eliot, but I just knew too many creative people, too many talented people who just could not go through the fuckin' agony of having to raise so much capital to do their art. The thing about film is that it's the great place where business and art meet and it becomes a democratic artform, but I've seen too many butterflies ground up on the wheel, man. I wish they had an opportunity to do their vision without having to fuckin' go through what I know it takes to raise the money. We did a documentary on the two years it took to raise the money for Mary. It wasn't a lot of money, but forget about it. [In the end], we found one guy who wanted to make the movie in a small town in Italy. I mean, it was a miracle we found this guy – but then that's what makes movies: miracles. But it shouldn't be a “miracle” every time a guy has an idea and he wants to visualize it. And it shouldn't be that the best shooting I see is on some commercial. I just think it's going the right way; it's better than having six guys named Jack Warner and fuckin' Louis B. Mayer deciding what the whole world is going to fuckin' see. I mean, gimme a break. That went out with Mao Tse Tung and Stalin.

Filmmaker: What was it like directing the film within a film? Do you go into a different mode when you're directing those segments?

Ferrara: You say you are, you think you are, you decide to do it, but when you're on the set you're flying by the seat of your pants with this stuff. You go instinctively. It's not like Matty was directing it, but he was directing it by being the lead actor. By being Jesus Christ with these guys around him, and they're all good actors. It's like Walken said to the actors on King of New York right before [we started shooting], “I can't play a king. The king is a king in the way that people respond to him, look at him. So if I'm playing the king, you've gotta play it, you've got to make me the king. I can't play a king.” But Matty has that. It's hard to talk about, but I had the actors I wanted, everything I needed, we shot in New York, we shot in Rome, we shot in Jerusalem. We had everything we needed. There are no excuses. If you don't like this film, you don't like us.

Filmmaker: What are your feelings about Werner Herzog doing his version of Bad Lieutenant?

Ferrara: He can die in hell. I hate these people – they suck. A, he don't know me, couldn't pick me out of a line-up. B, I'm chasing windmills. Well, I'd rather chase windmills than steal other people's ideas. It's lame. I can't believe Nic Cage is trying to play that part. I mean, if the kid needed the money... It's like Harvey Keitel said, “If the guy needed the money, if he came to us and said, 'My career's on the rocks,' I'd cut him a break.” But to take $2 million – I mean, our film didn't cost half of $2 million. That film was made on blood and guts, man. So I really wish it didn't upset me as much as it does.

Filmmaker: You're going to be doing the prequel to King of New York soon.

Ferrara: So I'm ripping off Abel just like that too. [laughs] If I did King of New York, I'm not doing the prequel to Aguirre: the Wrath of God, OK? Let me put it that way.

Filmmaker: So they're making the film against your will?

Ferrara: Absolutely. Nobody asked us to do it. Nobody approached us and said, “Would you do it?” Give us $8 million, we'll come up with something. They give me twenty grand and say, “Go fuck yourself.” Gimme a break! They aren't paying Harvey anything, they aren't paying him two cents. Ed Pressman sucks cock in hell, period. You can print that.

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a kid?

Ferrara: Washing dishes in a hospital full of hot nurses. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Is Hollywood going in the right direction?

Ferrara: Yeah. Far away from us. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Finally, when did you last do it for the money and not the love?

Ferrara: Every time. I never turned down a job in my life.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/17/2008 10:27:00 PM Comments (2)

Still only 27, Marianna Palka has achieved notable success early in her career because she knew what she wanted and showed an adventurous spirit in going out and getting it. A first generation Polish Scot, Palka grew up in the depressed working class Glasgow neighborhood of Maryhill, where at an early age she displayed an interest in theater and cinema. In her teens, she began making what she calls “video art” projects which depicted the world around her, such as By My Very Self, a portrait of her bipolar sister, Nina, and her father, who suffers from Huntington's Disease. The title of another teenage effort, For My American Friends – which focused on life in Maryhill – referenced her long-held ambition to become an actress in New York and when she was 17 Palka did indeed relocate to NYC to study at the Atlantic Theater Company's acting school. Since her graduation, Palka has lived in New York and London, but she is now based in Los Angeles, where she recently founded the production company Morning Knight with her partner and fellow Atlantic alum, Jason Ritter.

The intrepid Palka makes her big screen debut as writer, director and producer with Good Dick, an unusual and surprising film in which she also stars opposite Ritter. The pair play the movie's lonely, unnamed protagonists, a sweet-natured, hapless video store clerk and an awkward, reclusive young woman who rents pornographic videos from him. Smitten, he forces himself into her life, determined make her love him despite her seeming ambivalence. The decidedly unconventional (non)relationship between these two damaged individuals is played out with sensitivity and subtle humor, making Good Dick a strange kind of romcom with characters whose neuroses and imperfections are drawn from the gritty side of reality. In front of the camera, Palka has real presence while as writer-director she demonstrates a mixture of assurance and raw talent that bodes very well for the future.

Filmmaker spoke to Palka about being penniless in New York, the meaning of “good dick,” and watching Wajda and Kieslowski movies as an embryo.



Filmmaker: From what I've read, already in your teens you were making films in Maryhill.

Palka: The video art – which was really just my own work for myself – came out of a necessity of being working class and voiceless. You're just stuck there and there's some kind of emptiness that's there. But I never found it depressing to be there, I found it really engaging – there's so much richness to every single moment because people aren't really leaving. The stuff that I did specifically was for my friends to see, little videos – hour long movies or half-hour long movies, shorts – about Maryhill, the housing issues there, the way the buildings were left to disintegrate. There would be a family with little kids living on the second floor of a building where the rest of the building was totally falling apart, had broken windows and had so many health issues. It was very intense: there was one street that had row after row after row of houses like that and the kids would be playing on the street with broken glass. It's just the reality of those neighborhoods that we don't see on TV.

Filmmaker: Were you influenced by theatre as well in what you did?

Palka: Yeah, I was very influenced by Polish theatre, like Tadeusz Kantor, for example, was really an influence. Some Polish theatre companies would come to Edinburgh for the Fringe festival or visit Glasgow and they would stay with us when I was a kid. I was very intrigued by them and also felt like they could just, you know, change the world. They were all very physically fit, really articulate, they always stood up straight and I thought, “That's what I want to do.”

Filmmaker: Did you have a conscious desire to escape to New York?

Palka: It was a need, you know? I really needed to do something that at the time was really courageous. Looking back on it, I didn't know anybody and I didn't have any money at all. If I had to be homeless on the subway, that was fine. My whole dream was to do plays and be a penniless actor in New York; that was the end goal of the move. When I found Atlantic, I found people who were really like-minded, people who understood me, who were very welcoming, and it was just a really incredible match.

Filmmaker: So did you go there with nothing and no place to stay?

Palka: Yeah, I told my mom, “I'm going to New York for two weeks. I'm going to stay in this youth hostel and look at places to study,” and then what happened was the Friday before the Monday I was supposed to leave to go back to Scotland, I was in Brooklyn looking at Manhattan and it was magic hour, and I had a sort spiritual moment. [laughs] I realized, “Man, if I go back, I'm going to have to work for a year before I can afford to come back to New York again. And that's not OK.” So I called my mom and said, “I'm going to stay here, I'm going to find a school, I'm going to find a life here.” When I made that decision, I had $100. I was like, “This is great, Mom,” and she said [laughs], “I don't know if this is a good idea...” I went home to Glasgow for the summer, worked as a waitress, and then came back out and started studying at Atlantic, and that work was really important to me and kept me very sane. It was a wonderful part of that time of my life.

Filmmaker: It seems surprising that you ended up in L.A., given your affection for New York.

Palka: Well, I like the sunshine [laughs], first of all, and the people that I know here are like my family, basically. My friends here are so important to me and I'm in this community of artists that are really incredible. You associate L.A. with bleached teeth and going to the beach and high-fiving or whatever, but my friends are really different than that. [laughs] Sometimes we high five, but you know what I mean. I think that they're really important and I think that L.A. is a great place to shoot an independent movie and it was a great place to shoot a guerrilla movie. We made this movie for not a lot of money and we felt really supported here and that it's the best place to shoot a movie, because you can be truly underground here. I just love it, and there's a quiet and a peace that came into my life when I moved here that I had never had at all. The way that the city is set up, the fact that you have to spend so much time in your house, you can't just go out onto the street to cafes and meet people and talk to people.

Filmmaker: The film tackles the subject of dislocation and the difficulty of connecting with people in L.A.

Palka: Right, and everybody's so isolated in their car. The way that he meets her is so similar to what people are going through every day here. People are walking on the street and they don't know where they're going, and I always wonder about those stories of the people who are walking. Because if you don't have a car in L.A., you're kind of lost. I think if I'd moved here and I didn't have the friends that I have, I'd have left.

Filmmaker: Where did your ideas for the characters in the film come from?

Palka: Well, I would go to Cinefile, the video shop which is a real place in Santa Monica, and I would rent videos from there. The guys in there would sit around, eat food and talk about films; they're kind of like librarians, but also keepers of the kingdom, in the sense that they just know everything about every film that was ever made, good and bad. They can talk to you about a Fellini movie the same way that they can talk to you about a kitsch, weird, bizarro film that nobody's ever seen except them and their friends, so I got the idea all of a sudden that it would be so funny if a girl came in and rented from their erotica section. I was thinking that would rock their world, so that's where the idea for the movie came from. And then I started to write and research the film and I started to rent erotica, because I was going, “What is this exactly? What kind of movies would she rent?”

Filmmaker: How did people respond to you renting these pornographic movies?

Palka: [laughs] I was doing research for a film so... It's interesting, I think a lot of women watch porn and rent erotica and do all sorts of stuff. I think there's this weird exchange in Cinefile, because half the store is like wild, crazy films and half the store is really great, brilliant films and whenever anyone is renting from the dodgy section there's an understood silence. Instead of “Did you see 8½...?,” there's a quiet understanding of “I know that you know that there's nothing to talk about right now,” and I think male or female, that's the same. I think more and more as porn overtakes the internet and as the way sex is being portrayed in conventional cinema continues to happen we're losing that gracefulness. There's so many people who haven't seen the movie who think they know what the movie is: “Oh, this chick's renting porn – checks don't rent porn!”

Filmmaker: What was it like being the director, writer, producer and lead actress on your first film?

Palka: Really easy, because I was prepared for every aspect of it from doing the theater that I'd done. I hadn't ever directed anything before, but because I'm an actor I wasn't weirded out about talking to actors. My mom's a photographer, so I had an understanding about cameras and I wasn't freaked out about talking to the D.P. There was nothing that was scary for me except that I knew that it was going to be basically a shitstorm crapshoot no matter what, so I had to be as prepared as possible. I prepared in every way that I possibly could and I was really compartmentalized. When you're the captain of the ship, people are like “What's this?” “Do you want the pink or the blue one?” “Are we doing it at seven or eight?” I think that if you're saying something that you feel is important then it's much easier to direct the film than if you're just going there to get paid.

Filmmaker: The film, in terms of its subject matter, is quite intense, but all the behind-the-shots I've seen show everybody looking very happy and relaxed.

Palka: On set, it was very relaxed. I really believe in that, in everybody on set being equal members of a club. I hate this idea when you go on a set that there's a hierarchy, because the reality is that everybody's just trying to get the film made and if it wasn't for the P.A.s, if it wasn't for craft service, if it wasn't for every single person who's there that day then the film wouldn't be what it is. This idea that the actors have to be treated with kid gloves and put in their trailer and all that stuff wasn't anything that I ever jived with. I come from this school of thought where a film is a community of people making a little village, so it's really lovely and everybody gets to be part of something.

Filmmaker: Was Good Dick always going to be the title? It seems very provocative.

Palka: The title Good Dick means different things to everyone, but for specifically these two characters it means positive persistence, or just persistence. I think that it's wonderful in 2008 to explore sexuality in a way that has nothing to do with the one-dimensional version of what we're offered. There's way more to it and it's interesting to talk about and it's interesting to make films about. When I was writing the script, I was really asking the question, “What is sexy? What does that actually mean for people?” and in doing that, Good Dick was just naturally the title. “Good Dick” is... it's like titling a poem or something. You have to title it, you can't just call it These People.

Filmmaker: Talking of titles, I thought it was very interesting that neither of the two main characters have names.

Palka: That was just because I really liked the idea of us getting very close to them and feeling really intimate with them and then realizing, “Oh, we don't even know them really. They could be anybody.” It's going back to the idea of L.A. and seeing someone in a car next to you, or wanting to know people but not being able to. There's a book called Rebecca and the lead character in the book is never named, and I read that in school and thought that was such a good idea. It really endeared me to her and I thought, “That's me! If she doesn't have a name, that's me!”

Filmmaker: If you had an unlimited budget and could cast whoever you wanted (alive or dead), what film would you make?

Palka: It would be a well-written film [laughs], and I would cast Meryl Streep and me and... that's its! [laughs] It would be me and Meryl Streep loving each other.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Palka: It was probably a Polish film, either a Kieslowski or a Wajda movie. Probably Danton or Man of Iron. [I started watching them] when I was, like, an embryo. And then when I was born, I remember using my toddler toys in the same room as the TV was in. Other kids watched cartoons and stuff.

Filmmaker: Finally, what's your biggest extravagance?

Palka: Organic vegetables and fruit. [laughs] Very expensive.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/10/2008 03:17:00 PM Comments (2)

For all the current talk of the sky falling on American independent cinema, you don't have to look any further than Peter Sollett's recent experiences to see how tough things have become for even the most gifted indie writer-directors. Thirty-two-year-old Brooklyn native Sollett grew up in an Italian-Jewish neighborhood in Bensonhurst and studied film at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1998. In 2000, he directed and co-wrote, with his partner Eva Vives, the short filmFive Feet High and Rising, about Victor, a Latino teenager living in New York's Lower East Side. The film won best short at both Sundance and Cannes, and its success allowed Sollett and Vives to develop the project into a feature. The resulting film, Raising Victor Vargas (2002), used the same two lead actors, Victor Rasuk and Judy Marte, and returned to the story of the eponymous Victor, his romantic exploits and oddball family. Released in 2003, the film was both a critical and financial success and gained five Independent Spirit Award nominations, however Sollett subsequently struggled to set up his follow-up project and took five years before making his next film.

Sollett's long-awaited sophomore effort is Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, an adaptation by Lorene Scafaria of the bestselling novel of the same name by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. While its title references the Thin Man movies of the 1930s and 40s, the protagonists (played by Michael Cera and Kat Dennings, respectively) are a decidedly contemporary pair, two indie loving kids who meet and fall for each other over the course of one night in NYC – despite the myriad obstacles presented by their exes, unreliable friends and Nick's ailing Yugo. Sollett's connection with the characters and their lifestyle is very apparent in his affectionate portrayal of
these two smart but unlucky-in-love teenagers, though the film is as much a love letter to New York at night as it is to adolescent romance. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is funny, sweet and unashamedly enjoyable. As hinted at by the title, the film has an excellent soundtrack, featuring artists like the National, Richard Hawley and the Shout Out Louds, which perfectly complements the action and lends the proceedings some serious musical cred.

Filmmaker spoke to Sollett about the challenge of getting his second film made, crying at The 400 Blows, and the wisdom of John Cassevetes.



Filmmaker: Tell me about the five-year period between Raising Victor Vargas and now. I think it's been a lot longer than anyone would have expected before your second film appeared.

Sollett: Well, I was absolutely trying to make a film. I went back with my co-writer from Victor Vargas, Eva Vives, and we wrote another script which we set up at a studio and we got stuck in development for quite a long time. That took up a long while and then, while we continued to seek financing for that film, I started to get involved in screenplays that were written by other people. This is the first one where all of these pieces of the puzzle came together.

Filmmaker: It seems strange that after Victor Vargas you had such difficulties given the film's success.

Sollett: Well, it was interesting because I feel very confident (unfortunately...) in the fact that I'd not be able to get Victor Vargas made right now and, as everyone has been talking about quite a bit recently, things have changed dramatically in the independent world. I don't think that something happened very suddenly this year, I think that something happened very slowly over the past few years and I think that between what I expected would happen after Vargas, and what did happen, is explained by the shift in that sector. You know, I was trying to make another movie in a similar way to the way we made Vargas and we really couldn't get anywhere. So, in a way, what I've been doing is learning a different way of making movies, which is the way one makes movies inside the system. Because I've had to.

Filmmaker: Did you turn your focus to other people's screenplays in order to help your chances of getting projects off the ground?

Sollett: After coming out of a long development situation on the movie that Eva and I wrote, so much time had gone by that I felt like I needed to increase my odds of making another film in as dramatic a way as possible. I remember Eva saying to me at one point, “I think the only mistake for you right now would be to not make a film if you can find the opportunity.” I got into this because I wanted to make films, not because I didn't want to make films. For those years, I wasn't making anything and it was incredibly frustrating and I found it very upsetting.

Filmmaker: A lot of directors who have projects stuck in development hell often turn to directing TV to keep working. Was that something that tempted you at all?

Sollett: Absolutely. I mean, I would do television. The majority of the best filmmaking right now is on television – I'd love to work, and it's a great way to keep working, but I didn't do any of that after Vargas. I did a couple of television commercials and I started teaching at Columbia film school – which I loved and want to do more of – but no TV, unfortunately.

Filmmaker: Your short film Five Feet High and Rising and your debut feature, Raising Victor Vargas, were both about the same set of characters. Was it daunting or liberating to leave that world behind?

Sollett: I actually found it very liberating. I love the short movie and I love the feature very much, but they were built around, and for, very specific people – I'm talking about Victor Rasuk and Judy Marte and Melonie Diaz. In a way, I felt very liberated but I also knew that I couldn't go backward. They were growing up, their lives were starting to change, they started to move to L.A. and act in other people's films. I treasure my experience with them and it's been really amazing to make a film about someone else and someplace.

Filmmaker: What particularly attracted you to Nick and Norah?

Sollett: Well, I read the script and I was shocked because it was kind of like something autobiographical that I wished that I'd written. It was actually much closer to my personal experiences than Victor Vargas was, in that it was about kids who lived just outside the city who liked to come into the city to spend time and live their lives and meet people. It's about people who are passionate about music, especially new music, and most importantly because it's about falling in love in the East Village, which is something that I've experienced. I read the script and I said, “My God, I feel expert in many of these areas! I have to do this because I think I could do this pretty well.”

Filmmaker: It feels very much like the flipside to Victor Vargas.

Sollett: Yeah, they're set in the same place virtually and it's not a stretch of the imagination that Nick and Norah are down the street at Arlene's grocery and at the other end of the street is Victor trying to charm Judy.

Filmmaker: You mentioned your passion for music. When you were a teenager, did you fanatically make mixtapes like Nick?

Sollett: Pretty much, yeah. I just wrote these liner notes for the soundtrack, which just came out, and I wrote about being a teenager and working in a record store, which is a treasured memory. At that time, I was really just obsessed. It was before [mp3s] had come [into being] and working in a record store meant that I could pretty much listen to anything I wanted to in that shop, so every time I went in there was a major discovery. People came into the record store and wanted to talk about music and it was really a new way of relating to people for me.

Filmmaker: How heavily involved were you in choosing the songs on the soundtrack?

Sollett: I was very hands on. It was really a collaboration between myself, Myron Kerstein (who also cut Vargas and edited Garden State and was very involved in that soundtrack) and our music supervisor Linda Cohen. For the most part, what you hear in the movie is songs that I emailed to Myron while we were shooting that he placed in the film. That was one of the most pure aspects of the movie, the songs that are in it – they're really only in there because we liked them there, there's no other commercial agenda. I'm really proud of that, because I really feel you can always smell that on a soundtrack when they throw in a cover of something that was previously a hit or something like that.

Filmmaker: With the Devendra Banhart cameo and Bishop Allen playing live in the film, it really just seems like you were having fun with the musical aspects of the film.

Sollett: Yeah, it was a total dream come true and I was telling Myron that I'm not sure if I will ever get to make another film that's quite this... cool, where musically speaking we get to follow our interests as much as we did on this. I think I got lucky because the financier and the studio, there was nobody in that group who knew all that much about music or the music that we had in the film, so there were really not that many voices in there. I kind of felt like it was Myron and me in the editing room getting giddy on the possibilities of the music we could put into these scenes. It was pretty thrilling that way.

Filmmaker: When I spoke to Greg Mottola when Superbad was released last year, he was rhapsodizing about working with Michael Cera. He said he was just hugely advanced for his years.

Sollett: Yeah, it's true. I think Michael may be a genius. [laughs] I don't really like that term, but I don't really know how else to explain it because his performance appears – and I know for a fact it's not – completely effortless, completely honest. He is just thoroughly accomplished for his age and I don't know quite how to account for it. He's an incredibly intelligent guy and he's certainly wise beyond his years, and he's an incredible pleasure to be around. It's very, very impressive. He's a very impressive guy.

Filmmaker: There's one shot of him in the car where he's smiling, and it seems so natural and unmannered that it feels as if there couldn't be a camera there.

Sollett: Yeah, I think he's a terrific actor who's at an amazing age, and I just can't wait to see how he's going to evolve as a performer, as an artist. It's going to be thrilling to see it happen.

Filmmaker: What are you working on at the moment?

Sollett: I'm reading scripts and trying to figure out if there are any out there that I can make well. That's really the criteria that I'm using: I'm trying not to think too much about “Is it a studio?” or “Is it independent?,” “Is the budget high or is it low?,” I'm just trying to figure out how I can try to make a good film, which is the only way I can tell how to do it right now.

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

Sollett: That's a tough one. I'm not a big crier, but I cry every time I see The 400 Blows. But I haven't seen it in a while. That's my big cry movie. Poor Antoine just can't catch a break.

Filmmaker: If you could do it all over again, what would you change?

Sollett: I would say yes more often. I think that it would widen me. I have a tendency to not try new things when I should, but if you don't go, you'll never know. I'm trying to say yes as often as I can now and I think that is ultimately the key to continuing to make films. It's just never the perfect time – it's like having a kid, you know what I mean? [laughs] It's never the right time, the script's never just right, the edit is never just right, so it's always a leap of faith. For me, it's a question of training myself to take bigger leaps of faith. Dave Eggers wrote this essay, maybe in McSweeney's, and one of the sentences was “No is for pussies.” Now, Dave is not afraid to say no [laughs] – I've gotten to know him a little bit – and he may have been talking to himself a little bit in that piece, but I kind of agree.

Filmmaker: Which phrase best describes your philosophy on life?

Sollett: I don't have a [phrase that describes my] life philosophy, but I can start off with a movie philosophy. My favorite Cassavetes quote – here it is, very simple. He said, “You're either going to make the movie, or not make the movie.” What he meant by that was we're never going to have the money we need or the time we need or the help we need, but in spite of that we need to make a choice. Are we going to or are we not going to do this? I definitely apply that to my life too. It's always going to be kind of a mess, but either we're going to trudge forward and do this, or we're not. And to choose not to do it is no way to live. That's been a helpful quote from John for me. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Finally, which classic film are you most ashamed to admit you've never seen?

Sollett: The Thin Man. My excuse is that I didn't want it to shade my direction of Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. [Rachel Cohn and David Levithan's novel] was an hommage to those characters and the quality of their banter.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 10/03/2008 03:16:00 PM Comments (0)