Avi Nesher seems to have had two careers as a filmmaker rather than just one. Nesher's dual identity partly stems from the fact that the Israeli writer-director spent most of his childhood and teenage years in New York and only returned to the country of his birth after attending Columbia University. Once back, Nesher wasted little time in establishing himself as one of the brightest young figures in Israeli cinema with hits like The Troupe and Dizengoff 99 (both 1979). In 1985, Rage and Glory, Nesher's film about the 1940s Israeli terrorist group the Stern Gang, caused massive controversy and the level of hysteria prompted him to leave for Hollywood. Feeling unconnected to American social issues, Nesher opted for a career as a director of old school B-movies and turned out titles like Timebomb (1991), starring Michael Biehn, and the Drew Barrymore vehicle Doppelganger (1993) throughout the 1990s. In 2003, he returned once again to Israel where he immediately reestablished himself as a critical favorite with the 60s-set crowdpleaser Turn Left at the End of the World (2004), one of the biggest Israeli box office hits of the past two decades, and the experimental political documentary Oriental (2004).

With his latest film, The Secrets, Nesher continues his current focus on Jewish identity, and once again shows a tendency to deal with provocative material. Co-written with polarizing female playwright and stand-up comedian Hadar Galron, the movie centers on a Jewish seminary in the sacred town of Safed where two students, bookish, headstrong Noemi (Ania Bukstein) and free-spirited French teen Michelle (Michal Shtamler), take it upon themselves to use kabbalistic rituals to help a dying woman, Anouk (Fanny Ardant), find forgiveness for the dark deeds in her past. Nesher's film ably combines in-depth theological ideas with audience-friendly melodrama as he puts the spotlight on orthodox Jewish society's designation of women as inferior creatures while also tackling themes of religious fanaticism and sapphic sexuality. Despite Nesher's sometimes titillating treatment of the lesbian angle, to his credit he never sacrifices the integrity of the story and ultimately manages to create a film which is both an enjoyable adolescent drama and a thoughtful engagement with genuine social issues.

Filmmaker spoke to Nesher about the quiet revolution depicted in The Secrets, his “fluke” of a Hollywood career and the time he nearly gave up on the movies.



Filmmaker: What were the roots of this project?

Nesher: In my experience, a movie is formed by having many difference influences falling into place. I went to a yeshiva in New York, which was a very interesting thing for a secular young Israeli to do. When I was a student at Columbia University, I was very fascinated by the whole notion of Kabbalah – we’re talking many years ago, before Madonna ever heard about it. [laughs] My interest then was the more political aspect of Kabbalah that lead to the formation of the Messianic movements in the 17th Century and I wrote a Kabbalistic thriller about the second coming – or perhaps the third coming – of a new messiah. I must have been 22 at the time. For a couple of months, a Hollywood producer toyed with the idea of optioning it and it almost happened. And then I think he died in a plane crash. Quite dramatic. I went on to make other movies but the whole notion of Kabbalah always stuck with me: it has an incredibly attractive element that appealed to my secular side, which is called Tikkun. Tikkun literally means “to fix” and is basically facing up to the responsibility of anything you did wrong in your life. [Recently] it dawned on me that women’s rights are a huge part of the Middle East crisis that no one really talks about. I found out that the fundamentalist Muslim society and the fundamentalist Jewish society are very much alike in that regard and I discovered, much to my amazement, that there is this revolution going on within the Jewish orthodox world. And then I got to this particular Jewish seminary where my interest in Kabbalah and in the women’s liberation movement all kind of met, so it became the perfect storm.

Filmmaker: And when did Hadar Galron, your co-writer, get involved?

Nesher: When I started researching, I saw her play Mikveh, which is truly extraordinary, and I met her. She’s a wonderful woman, amazingly bright and funny, and I just thought she’d be the right person to write the screenplay with so we embarked on this year-long journey into that specific world. I really like to make movies about worlds that are at first unfamiliar to me, because it’s interesting to me to have a whole new experience as I do research, and she was a very good guide. She’s an orthodox woman, she went to a seminary similar to the one in the movie, she had a lifelong dream of being a rabbi, she strongly believes in the values that the young women in the movie believe in and, in many ways, she made the whole thing much more accessible.

Filmmaker: Did you both view this a platform to convey this revolution and its ideas to a wider audience?

Nesher: To some extent. I was very interested in political cinema as a critic, so I’m very careful to not make movies that make blatant political statements because they tend to become obsolete within a year or two at best. Besides, if I wanted to do a political essay, I’d just write one. I think cinema needs to be much more complex and interesting and it needs to respect the views within the movie that it does not share and be much more all-encompassing. And Hadar agreed with me. It was very important for us to make a movie that would not be a pamphlet; we really wanted to get into the mindset of very young, bright, ambitious women in the orthodox world and not just raise the flag and wave it.

Filmmaker: It seems like casting Fanny Ardant was also a statement of intent, to make the film reach a broad international audience.

Nesher: I have this approach to screenwriting where I completely mistrust my imagination because I’ve seen way too many movies; I think anything I “invent” is probably something I saw in some movie. When I write, I like to interview a lot of people and then for everything in the movie to be something that someone has told me. This specific character is based on a woman that we met and we wrote her as a foreigner. The night before we met Fanny Ardant, I was at a dinner party and a man told me this really strange story about her. He said she was sitting at a diner party, she didn’t say a word for an hour and then, just before coffee was served, she spoke up and said, “You know, I have a knife in my handbag?” People were just flabbergasted and said, “Why a knife?” and she said, “I have this phobia that a huge tent will fall on me and I have to cut my way out.” The moment I heard that story, I knew I was going to like that woman and I knew she had something to do with the character.

Filmmaker: It seems like in making this film you must have come up against a fair amount of resistance.

Nesher: At first we had much resistance, but I rarely make movies about people or worlds that I do not respect and have some affection for. I think they understood that I was going to be dealing with an explosive subject matter, but I have no intention of crucifying anybody or making and indictment of Orthodox society – God knows there are many things that they do better than we do. The fact that I went to a yeshiva was very helpful because every now and then we would wander by some holy site and some rabbi would have an objection. I would just talk turkey with him. At the end, they were very cooperative and the only thing they minded was that there would be some nudity in the movie. I said, “Well, we have a mikveh scene. If you tell me rabbinically that you can do a mikveh scene with clothes on, I’ll be happy. But, of course, you can’t.”

Filmmaker: You seem to very carefully balance the theological and theoretical aspects of the film with the story, making sure the movie is always accessible.

Nesher: We wanted people to see the movie. I really believe that if you’re going to take two years of your life and you’re going to make a movie, hopefully people are going to see it. I really never care about commercial aspects and I’d happier if people didn’t have to pay to go to see, but for me it’s really vital to make movies that become part of the cultural and social discussion of the society in which they exist. When you live in a small country and you make a successful movie, it has an amazing impact. I was 23 when I made my very first movie and knew nothing about movies and about real life, and I thought it was always going to be like this. I remember the first time I went on a bus and heard people using dialogue from my movie – there’s something bewitching about the political and social possibilities and, as Delmore Schwartz said, with dreams come responsibilities. You become addicted to it and you really strive to make movies that become part of the cultural dialogue within the given society. It sounds a bit pretentious, but I believe that without pretension nothing interesting gets made.

Filmmaker: When I watched the film, I was thinking about your time in Hollywood and wondering what effect that had on the way you approached this film. Your career in America seems very much at odds with the work you’ve done in Israel.

Nesher: My Hollywood career was one of the greatest flukes of all time. I was one of those people who never really wanted to have a Hollywood career because I grew up in New York and there’s nothing you dislike more than the West Coast. When I was a critic, my specialty was the B-movies of the 40s and 50s and I was the consummate Don Siegel and Sam Fuller scholar. For me, it was something that fascinated me and my first movies were more like these ones. Then I made Rage and Glory and it was an unbelievably controversial movie and got me into hot water. From being a guy that everybody loved, I became a marked man – I got bomb threats, the works. I remember I was sitting in my apartment and I got an offer from some Hollywood producer to come to America and do a movie. The only American movies I wanted to do were science fiction because I didn’t identify with the American experience but I loved American filmmaking, so I thought it would be really great to go to America for a year and to make this kind of funky B-movie and get away from serious movies for a while. Off I went, and things just sort of took off. I made this first movie called Timebomb for MGM; I don’t think it’s a great movie but it has some entertaining elements to it. Before I knew it, people were interested in me making more such movies and I wrote another one, called Doppelganger, and Drew Barrymore was in it. It was OK. I made movies with my head not my heart – it wasn’t something that I cared about socially or politically or personally, it was an intellectual experience. I did this for a while until I got tired of it, and then I made this one American movie that I did kind of like, called Taxman. Then I thought it was time to go back. I just missed Israel.

Filmmaker: You’re an Israeli who spent most of your early years in New York. Did that lead to you having something of an outsider’s perspective?

Nesher: When I came to Israel to do my army service, my Hebrew was very poor, I spoke mostly English and I had a really good American accent and a really bad American accent in my Hebrew. I was such an outsider that within weeks, I had an accent in every single language I spoke. I want to make the point that I’m not only an outsider her, I’m an outsider there. If I don’t get the result of the latest New York Giants game, I’m very upset. There’s something in me that really relates to American culture and yet I’m completely Israeli, I care very deeply about Israel.

Filmmaker: There’s been a really great run of Israeli films recently, like Beaufort, The Band’s Visit, Jellyfish and Waltz with Bashir. What do you think is the reason for this cinematic boom?

Nesher: Well, it’s been a long time coming. People forget how young this country is because it’s spent so much time in the headlines that you feel it’s been here forever, but it's country is only 60 years old and so is the culture. People have not spoken Hebrew for 2000 years so it took a while to just master the art of having dialogue that sounds real, to understand the Israeli aesthetics (which are different from other aesthetics), to attain an Israeli identity, because the earlier movies tried to either American movies or French movies. [Joseph] Cedar, Ari Folman, Eran Kolirin are wonderful, wonderful filmmakers and they are the first generation that has really grown up on Israeli movies. It really just took the longest time [for Israelis] to make movies that were free of outside influences, for the culture to gel and for the people to grow up having their own identity and not having a borrowed identity.

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

Nesher: Never. No, that’s not totally true. After Rage and Glory, I thought that taking so much flak for a work of art was too much and for a whole 48 hours I considered leaving cinema. But then I realized there’s nothing else I know how to do.

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?

Nesher: As an Israeli filmmaker, now is a really great time but I’m really intrigued by old Hollywood. I can’t really imagine a whole town devoted to cinema. When I was at Columbia, Samson Raphaelson – the guy who wrote for Lubitsch – was one of our teachers and he had the most amazing stories about him and Billy Wilder and Lubitsch all hanging out in the commissary. Because I’m very fond of filmmaking camaraderie, I would have loved to be a part of that.

Filmmaker: Finally, what's the smartest decision you ever made?

Nesher: To come back to Israel to make Turn Left at the End of the World. I had this American career and my agent was talking to my wife about finding a mental institute to hospitalize me. He was going crazy because it made no sense to him at the time, because this was before Israeli cinema really took off and it didn’t seem like a good move. But I think you follow your heart, you do what feels right.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 11/26/2008 02:21:00 AM Comments (0)

Since she first came to prominence almost twenty years ago, Ellen Kuras has established herself as one of the most talented directors of photography working today. Film was not Kuras' primary focus when she was younger; the New Jersey native initially attended Brown to study anthropology but became interested in photography after taking a class at the nearby Rhode Island School of Design. Though she won a Fulbright Scholarship to go to the esteemed Lodz Film Academy, Kuras instead began working in film, taking numerous below the line jobs that taught her the nuts and bolts of the cinematic process. In 1987, she worked as D.P. on her first film, Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia, and in 1992 she won the first of a record three Sundance Cinematography Awards for lensing Tom Kalin's Swoon. Since then, Kuras has been prolific as a D.P. and established ongoing collaborations with Rebecca Miller (including Personal Velocity, another Sundance winner for Kuras), Spike Lee (from 4 Little Girls through to The 25th Hour) and more recently Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dave Chappelle's Block Party, Be Kind Rewind).

Ironically, Kuras' first film as director, The Betrayal (Nerakhoon), predates her career as a cinematographer, as she began the movie 23 years ago when she was just starting out as a filmmaker. What began as an examination of the impact of cultural assimilation became a decades-long documentary about a family of Laotian refugees and their remarkable story, from the secret war the U.S. fought against their country during the 60s and 70s through to their troubled existence in New York in the 80s and beyond. Kuras set out to blur genre boundaries with the film and artfully mixes stylistic elements of fictional and experimental cinema as well as documentary. The relationship between filmmaker and subject is also blurred, as Thavisouk “Thavi” Phrasavath, the film's main character, became Kuras' co-director, co-writer and editor. The time and emotional investment which Kuras and Phrasavath put into The Betrayal make it not only a poetic and intricate hybrid documentary but also a resonant and dramatic real life family saga.

Filmmaker spoke to Kuras about her epic career-spanning project, bribing Laotian officials to get stock footage, and her childhood memories of Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur.



Filmmaker: Initially, way back at the start of this project, I believe you were in contact with a different Laotian family who you were planning to film.

Kuras: I started filming this one particular family because I was interested in how they were picking up different elements of our culture. Coming from the East and being in a place, Rochester, New York, that was a completely different environment, what were they picking up and what were they thinking about American culture? The movie was about American culture as much as it was about them. I always knew that I wanted to make a film that was about their worldview and told pretty much from their perspective and their story, but it wasn't until I met Thavi, when I learned to speak Lao, that I realized that he understood what I was trying to get to because I was asking him so many questions about philosophy and worldview and mythology and how the Lao believed that the world began. It was a natural progression, after spending a year with him when he was giving me Lao lessons and I was constantly asking these questions and recording our conversations and then writing from them, that he would become part of the filmmaking process, and then eventually the subject of the film.

Filmmaker: This was before you were a D.P., so was this to be the first step of your directorial career?

Kuras: I was looking at myself as a filmmaker. Although I was very interested in political documentary, but I was thinking of this more as a film where I could look into or use elements of narrative and documentary. What happened was that I hired somebody to shoot for me and I told them what I was looking for, but I discovered that to be able to talk about putting meaning into the images is quite a challenge so I decided I would try it myself. And that's when I started shooting, because I started creating these stories in my mind while I was shooting and then eventually somebody saw my stuff on the Steenbeck and said “Would you come and shoot for me?” and that's how it all started.

Filmmaker: Did the scope of the project change once it was about Thavi's family?

Kuras: The scope changed in the sense that I was able to start realizing ideas that I had at the time, because I was writing a lot of poetry and this gave me material that I wanted to work with. It opened up the whole structure of what was possible and also all the stories in a poetic framework. People say to me, “What was it like doing a film over 23 years, and did you anticipate that it would take 23 years?” and I have to say, “No.” In the interim, I didn't have a firm deadline that I had to respond to and also the film represented to me many different things. In a way, it was my own personal notebook, it was a continuing dialogue with Thavi that we had about life and death and philosophy and everything that was happening in the community and the gangs. It was very enjoyable to be part of that process of making the film, of turning those ideas about themes of honor into the film.

Filmmaker: You're a very prolific D.P., so how did you approach making this film? Did you simply film whenever you weren't shooting for somebody else?

Kuras: Yeah, for the most part, whenever I had time, I would work on the film. Whenever I could, every moment I would. There was a period of three or four years where I didn't work on the film at all because I was really busy doing features back-to-back, but for the most part I did devote a lot of energy to the film on the side. But I've been so busy. Many people call me the busiest person they know because I have been really busy and I have shot a lot of things – I shoot commercials in between doing features. So, as I've said, it was part of that continuum, a way for me to get back into the space of my own mind and to be working on my own stuff, which enabled me to balance working on stuff for other people.

Filmmaker: What was the point at which you realized you should get the film finished and out into the world?

Kuras: Part of it was that someone came to me and said, “You know that film you're making, what's happening to it? I want to help you finish it.” That made all the difference in the world because I had been doing so much of it myself – the financing of it, the producing of it, putting it together – and so to have someone come on board to help me to carry the plan through was enormous and it really did help hugely to get to that next point.

Filmmaker: It seems like the film must have become this enormous life project for you, a little like the play in Synecdoche, New York.

Kuras: People would say, “So, what's going on with the film?” but eventually they would stop asking me. But my father nagged me incessantly about it: “When are you going to finish that film? When are you going to finish that film? When are you going to finish that film?” I always said, “I'll finish the film when I'm ready to finish the film.” To be honest, it was like an unfinished term paper and though I was encouraged by my father to move on, I didn't because I knew the story was way too important to tell to let it languish on shelves. I just knew, no matter how many years had passed, it was really important to get it out and that it was still timely. The fact that I had started it many years ago only lent to its power, because the time showed us how strong the example was and also enabled us to have this incredible [ability to] witness this family drama in a way that most people don't expect.

Filmmaker: How did things progress to Thavi not only being one of the subjects of the film but your co-director and essentially the main voice in the film?

Kuras: Thavi's a very incredible person: he's very insightful and philosophical and I recognized that about him early on, even though his command of English was spotty. I could see that he was literate in many ways, without being literate in English. Through the years, we spent so much time talking and I felt it was really important for him to be recognized as a co-director. There were times when I couldn't work on the film when he would continue in the editing room and try to carry it on and at least keep the process alive, it being his own story. But it was more than that: he really believed in what we had to say about what was happening in his community, about the gangs, about the more universal stories – the umbilical cord story, releasing the turtle and the themes of returning to nature – that affect us all. He understood that. But I felt it was really important for him to be recognized by his own people. The Lao don't have a voice, certainly not in the world of cinema and not in documentary, and I felt like it was important to give them a voice.

Filmmaker: Thavi edited the film as well, so were you aware of a struggle on his part to get enough objectivity on the material?

Kuras: There were a couple of moments when I would just take a step back and say, “Wow, this is wild! Here I am holding Thavi's infant daughter in the editing room while he's editing and the baby's great grandmother and grandmother are up on the screen and it's her story as much as it's his story.” That Thavi was the editor sometimes made me laugh because we would talk about the story and the characters and he would refer to himself in the third person and say, “Well, when Thavi does this...” and I would just laugh and say, “OK, Thav...” In a way, this could be a story about almost any family; it's family that goes through a crisis and comes out of it however damaged at the other end so it has very universal qualities. In that respect, it was interesting to have Thavi edit his own story. The biggest thing was, sometimes he wouldn't want to use a shot because he thought his teeth were too big and I was like, “Whoa, wait a minute... You don't get to decide that just like I don't get to decide if that looks like a bad shot or not.”

Filmmaker: I was struck by the amazing job you did with archive footage and b-roll, as every shot seemed very carefully chosen to resonate with whatever is being said at the time.

Kuras: Yeah, we really tried to put it together in terms of the beats of the frame and everything. The archival footage we chose because we felt like it was able to put you in the place of Thavi, the character, and in a way you were vicariously experiencing his memory of it. We found some archival footage of Laos and I managed to pay off the local Pathet Lao guy who was overseeing the archive so he would project for us a couple of Vietnamese propaganda films and it's from that material that I shot some of the more abstract images like, for example, the trucks going by. The whole story of the trucks, to me, was so important because even with those few abstract images of the trucks and the people going by in the night, it represented any culture where there's been a military dictatorship and people have been taken away by death squads in the middle of the night. It reminded me of Argentina, it reminded me of when I was in El Salvador and I would actually see them going by.

Filmmaker: You've worked for a lot of influential directors during your career but who would you say has taught you the most about directing?

Kuras: I have to say right off the bat, every director is very different in the way that they work and in their point of view. With Spike, it was very interesting because – particularly with films like Summer of Sam – he really encouraged me to follow my intuition and to explore and go for it in a way that was about ideas and the visual images. He presented a lot of challenges to me like the first time I would use two cameras all the time, how to light something where you're looking almost in every direction. Spike, in that way, was always kind of very encouraging of my muse, like “Follow your muse,” and Michel [Gondry] in an another way was very much about us being in the same world and me understanding what's in his head so that I could also contribute to that and add to that. Understanding Michel's way of working is very much like understanding a child who has a pile of colored construction papers with blunt scissors: they start cutting up all these pieces, “Oh, I can glue these three pieces together,” and then all of a sudden they have this incredible garden that they've made. I'm always in this process of discovery which I why I still say that being a D.P. is exciting to me and still fresh, because I learn and challenge myself with all the directors I work with.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Kuras: Aside from the cartoons that I used to watch as a kid, I'd say probably Ben-Hur. I very much remember all of the action scenes in the arena, the close-ups of the hub. I think about that every once in a while: “Isn't it interesting that they would use that and that it would remain in my visual memory all of these years.” I have these amazing shots of Charlton Heston very much stuck in my head.

Filmmaker: What's the strangest thing you've seen, or had to do yourself, during your time in the film industry?

Kuras: In Eternal Sunshine, being put in the scene. I have to say it was really bizarre being on the other side of the camera because I realized how incredibly difficult as actors to be in their mind's eye and to become the character in the film. I am so often looking around and being on the other side – if you will, the watchful eye over the actors in the scene – that for me to be on the other side of it, I just couldn't physically in my mind cross over the line.

Filmmaker: Finally, Should a director always take risks?

Kuras: Of course. Without risks you don't go anywhere, you don't learn anything and the movies that have been least enjoyable for me have been the ones that have kind of been by rote. Directors should always explore their boundaries – that's where really exciting things happen.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 11/21/2008 12:48:00 AM Comments (0)

Despite his youth, 31-year-old Josh Koury has already carved out quite a reputation for himself within the world of independent film. Born and raised in upstate New York, Koury studied fine art at Munson Williams Proctor Institute in Utica and then film at Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, where he also ran a weekly multimedia event. Following his graduation, Koury made his debut feature, Standing By Yourself, a documentary about problem teens in upstate New York, which premiered in competition at Slamdance in 2002 and was released to acclaim later the same year. Koury's own experiences on the festival circuit also prompted him to co-found the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival as a place to showcase smaller films, and he was programming director at BUFF between 2002 and 2006. Koury was also a programmer at the Hamptons International Film Festival and is currently a member of the film faculty at Pratt.

Koury's sophomore documentary, We Are Wizards, was inspired by his own love of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books and showcases a cross section of the Harry Potter fan scene. The movie primarily focuses on members of the “wizard rock” music scene, from leading outfit Harry and the Potters to The Hungarian Horntails, a band made up of four- and seven-year-old brothers Darius and Holden Wilkins, and also features figures like Heather Lawver, who launched the Potter War boycott of Warner Bros., and Brad Neely, the internet phenomenon behind the Wizard People, Dear Readers audio book and film. A mere 80 minutes in length, We Are Wizards is a little film with considerable charm that depicts its characters – and Potter fandom as a whole – with affection and integrity. The creativity and passion of the film's subjects is celebrated rather than mocked, and Koury even seeks out academics like Caryl Matrisciana, who po-facedly condemns the Potter books as evil, to add more diverse voices to the discussion of Rowling's cultural legacy.

Filmmaker spoke to Koury about the cult of Harry, his dual role as both filmmaker and film programmer, and getting into fights as a pizza boy.



Filmmaker: What was the starting point for this movie?

Koury: Gerald Lewis, the producer of the film, and I got together early on and discussed the idea of doing another documentary. We had a lot of ideas on the table and one of the ones that we kept coming back to was the idea of making this documentary about Harry Potter fan culture. It’s a huge pop culture phenomenon and it felt like it was almost too big for its own good, but when we actually looked into it we decided that we could really focus on certain key aspects of the fandom. We never wanted to make a “Trekkies” kind of documentary where it kind of pokes fun at people. We wanted it to be sincere and focused and as personal as it possibly could within the characters, so that's why we cherrypicked certain people that represent certain things.

Filmmaker: How aware were you of that fan culture before you began researching the film?

Koury: Not very much. I knew a couple websites and I'd heard of the band Harry and the Potters but I didn't realize there were so many bands and [the fan culture] was so expansive. I knew it existed because fan culture exists for all popular mediums but I had no idea what we would find when we actually started researching it. I think the bigger surprise was not that the fan culture was so large but that the fan culture was so developed and articulate and self aware and bright and funny. I never thought I would find people that I would want to have a beer with afterward – and I feel that way with almost all of them. All the characters that we focused on are great people and people that I could see being close friends with outside of this documentary, and that to me was a big surprise. We said from the beginning that we didn't want to make fun of people, but there's no reason to make fun of these people because they're just terrific people on levels.

Filmmaker: Do you feel that Harry Potter fans – in contrast to, say, Trekkies or Star Wars fans – are unique in the creative and diverse way in which they've responded to their particular cultural phenomenon?

Koury: I think that's partly because of the nature of what it is, that people who pick up Harry Potter are probably already readers or were interested in things outside of TV and film. Many of the people in the film don't even watch the movies, they're really into the books, which is what I was as well. I think it's also the era; the difference between this and Lord of the Rings or Star Trek is that at this particular time, with the internet and with communication being what it is right now, people can really reach each other and communicate in ways that they never could in the past. What I like about this particular fanbase is that it's not just in chatrooms, it's not someone holed up in their parents' basement with a computer – they take it out onto the streets and actually perform and have meet-ups and groups and collaborate and work together and communicate together. That's what fascinates me.

Filmmaker: How involved did you get in fan culture during the course of your research?

Koury: I did a lot of research: in order to find the people we found for our film we had to comb through a great number of different people. We were reluctant at first to bring more people into the process and some would argue it's already a crowded field of people for a film of 80 minutes. We had to consistently resist the temptation to add more; because it's such a huge phenomenon, we never got into slash fiction or fan fiction or any of the other mediums. There's just hundreds of things you can make movies about. You could make 20 Harry Potter documentaries and they'd all be kinda different, so we really had to be careful. My editor on the film, Myles Kane, really came through for me at the end and pulled things together. He had never read Harry Potter, he had never watched the movies – he knew that the main character's name was Harry, and that was all he knew. That excited me, because at the end of the day I wanted this movie to be for everyone, and not just pandering to fans. He was key to my keeping my head above water so I wasn't getting so into the fan nitty gritty and losing track of things.

Filmmaker: Were any of your subjects worried that the movie would make fun of them?

Koury: No. Honestly, I think we got on with the people in the movie right off the bat. I mean, Brad Neely was one of those classic characters who we sat down with [and got on really well with]. I'd known Brad a little bit beforehand but I remember the first lunch we ever had. I'd just met him and he was like testing the waters, saying, “You know what I don't like? When documentaries make fun of things...” [laughs] He was a little hesitant because he's very aware, but by the end of lunch we'd gotten a six-pack and were ready to hang out. We hit it off with a lot of the people in the movie, and there's an ingrown trust that has to be there in order to get what you need to get for the movie, but also that was the level that we wanted to be on. If it wasn't ever going to be genuine for both parties, we weren't going to do it. Even with the religious character, Caryl [Matrisciana], we were very upfront with her: we told her what the movie was about, I said, “I want to have your opinion. I know you're against the books because of their occult, witchcraft content.” But it was important to have that educated perspective – we didn't want somebody from a lunatic fringe, but actually have somebody who you can debate.

Filmmaker: With Brad Neely, was he already approaching the status of internet star that he now holds within certain circles when you asked him to be in the movie?

Koury: Well, I had known that he had done Wizard People, Dear Reader and the George Washington song at that point and he had got lots of recognition from that but he hadn't done his new comics, the Professor Brothers and Babycakes, yet so he wasn't a successful animator on a commercial level. That's his profession now, but at the time he had a couple of YouTube bits and I knew that he was destined for great things. We were very fortunate to have found him when we did. We hit it off very quickly, he trusted us and we love him. Brad is so reluctant to do these things – he was pacing up a storm when we were about to show the movie because he's nervous. He kept telling me, “I can't believe you got me to do this. What's wrong with me?” He was so nervous because he hates to put himself out there on that level and I've seen him reject other people who want similar things from him. But he's so happy with the movie, and that's cool, that's great. Because he is a picky bastard.

Filmmaker: Your movie seems to be part of a mini wave of documentaries about battle re-enactors and dungeons and dragons fanatics, films that showcase somewhat nerdy subcultures.

Koury: Yeah, those have been happening a lot – Darkon, Nerdcore Rising and another one, Second Skin, that we played alongside at South By Southwest. I think some of them are really good and some of them are not so good, and I hope that ours falls into the good category. If it's something that takes its characters very seriously and shows not just why they love these things but what it means to them and the stories behind them [then I think it will be a good film]. And yes, there's been a huge wave of these films. Documentary has become so popular in the last six years, it's scary. That's why I said I have to keep my ideas under the covers sometimes because it seems like docs come in twos. Ours came in two: there was another production company out there making something [on a similar subject]. I've got another idea that I'm working on and I fully expect to hear about another [rival project]. It just seems like there's too many filmmakers and too little ideas. We're all doing our best. [laughs]

Filmmaker: I want to talk about your film festival experience, because you started the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival in 2002. It's relatively unusual for filmmakers to be on both sides of the divide, as it were.

Koury: I'd taken my first film on the film festival tour and I knew there were a lot of great New York film festivals but I wanted to start something that was a little bit more for the smaller picture. Oftentimes Tribeca doesn't want films if they've played at a big festival already and the New York Film Festival is not really an option. The New York Underground Film Festival has closed so you're really limited to GenArt, Rooftop Films. I know that's a lot more options than a small town – but this is New York City. [laughs] We started it because wanted to give an opportunity for smaller films that maybe couldn't find a place. But, to be honest, the world has changed a great deal since we started it and there's no lack of outlets these days. The internet, YouTube and everything, has just blown right up and if you have something to be seen, you can have it seen. It was a wonderful experience and I also worked at the Hamptons Film Festival in the programming department. I made a lot of connections but I also got to see a lot of work and understand not just my underground and independent world but more complex narratives and higher budget documentaries and really see from the eye of the programmer. I think that helped.

Filmmaker: When was the last time you burst out laughing on set?

Koury: I think if you watch the movie there's a few moments with Brad Neely where you can actually hear me laughing out loud. It's so embarrassing. I wanted to go back in time and slap myself, but you can see the camera moving up and down because I can't control myself. He's just really funny. That's something I need to fix in the future: maintain control of my body when filming. [laughs] But anyway.

Filmmaker: Should actors sing and singers act?

Koury: I think that they definitely should because I think amateur singing and acting are extraordinarily beautiful things and if non-singers were singing more and non-actors were acting more it would be a much more interesting place. I really do believe that. I feel like it would be great if every documentary had to be turned into a musical and then you forced the characters to sing. It would be a mess, but a beautiful mess – and I love beautiful messes.

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

Koury: I was a pizza delivery boy from the age of 18 to 20. I delivered pizzas to rich kids and then they would yell at me because I was late. [laughs] There was this one gentleman who... Oh, that's a long story. I used to get into fights with football players and stuff like that. Maybe they'd be scared of me for some reason because I seemed to them to have some sort of authority even though I was a skinny guy. Like when they'd throw pizzas, I'd yell at them and they'd run away. And then I'd say, “Why are you running away? You could just destroy me if you wanted to.” [laughs] It was a really horrible job, but good stories.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 11/14/2008 03:53:00 PM Comments (0)

Coming from a family of actors, Damian Harris went against the grain when he chose to become a writer-director. Harris is the son of Richard Harris, the legendary British screen thespian, as well as the stepson of Rex Harrison and the brother of Jamie and Jared Harris, who are also actors. He got his first taste of the movie game when, at the age of 10, he acted alongside Tom Courtenay and Romy Schneider in the comedy Otley (1968). That experience, however, made him realize that his expertise was not in front of the camera, and prompted him to study film at the London International Film School and then screenwriting at NYU. He first gained attention in the mid 80s with the shorts Killing Time (1985) and Greasy Lake (1988), the latter starring James Spader and Eric Stolz and based on a T.C. Boyle short story. He made his feature debut as writer-director with the 1989 adaptation of Martin Amis' The Rachel Papers and followed that up with two movies for Touchstone Pictures, the Goldie Hawn psychological chiller Deceived (1991) and Bad Company (1995), a slick thriller with Laurence Fishburne and Ellen Barkin. He directed another feature with Barkin, the erotic thriller Mercy, in 2000.

After spending his entire career as a studio director, for his latest film, Gardens of the Night, Harris moves into indie territory; ironically, this "new" project was actually written over 20 years ago, before he had even made his first feature. The reason for its long road to the screen is the film's subject matter: it is a deeply unsettling portrait of lost childhood told from the perspective of two young children, Leslie (Ryan Simpkins) and Donnie (Jermaine "Scooter" Smith) who are abducted by two pedophiles, the avuncular Alex (Tom Arnold) and hotheaded sidekick Frank (Kevin Zegers). The movie is divided into two halves, first showing Leslie and Donnie's introduction to their captors' sinister world, and then revisiting them nine years later (now played by Gillian Jacobs and Evan Ross) when they are deeply troubled street kids prostituting themselves for drug money. Gardens of the Night is not a film for the fainthearted, yet its strengths are many. Elegiac and beautifully shot, it features excellent performances by its young leads as well as a remarkable turn by Arnold, and draws on Harris' many years of research to create an authentic and deeply unsettling depiction of children robbed of their youth and innocence.

Filmmaker spoke to Harris about his long quest to make the movie, his transition into indie filmmaking, and his dream project, Spartans.



Filmmaker: Gardens of the Night has been a long-gestating project that you first started working on in the mid-80s, and I believe the starting point for you was seeing a picture of a young girl on a milk carton.

Harris: It was my first time in Los Angeles, and then there was no notion of a child going missing – it just didn't happen in England. Or you would find them. But then you realize that America is so huge that once you go missing, the chance of being found must be minute. I wanted to discover more about it and I ended going to speak to a father who's son had been abducted and had been missing for a couple of years. He talked about [his experiences], he was convinced that his son was alive and he said, “I hope whoever has him is being kind to him. I want him still to have a childhood.” I thought, “That's the story I'm going to tell and tell it from a kid's point of view. Who does it make you become? How does it shape you?”

Filmmaker: How did you go about doing the research for writing the script?

Harris: Mostly it was talking to people. It started with talking to that father. It usually starts with the police and then at that time there were a lot of shelters for runaway and throwaway kids. You get a trust and then you end up talking to the kids themselves, and I went around America going to different cities. There was a sort of route that this street population went on, so I went to these different cities and would hang out with the kids and then they would end up trusting you and tell you their stories. From all that information, I started to get an idea of who the character was. The idea of there being two kids came from seeing two pictures, side-by-side in a shelter, of this girl and boy who'd been missing for 8 years, unrelated, and this counsellor saying, “You know what? They're fucked. They're either dead or they're so fucked up because of what's happened to them they may as well be.” So I thought I'd take two kids and make them have a different reaction to the same experience. It was looking at a relationship that is born in ground that's so traumatized and how it affects that relationship and who you become.

Filmmaker: What was the effect of doing this research? Presumably immersing yourself in these stories and in that world was quite troubling.

Harris: It was a dark place to be. It was a very dark world to be in for a couple of years and it was frightening to just be aware of how almost commercialized this thing was set up, and to realize this thing was going on. You got that through the police telling what they were trying to fight against. I was surprised at how prevalent it was, how accepted it was – it made me have more of a cynical view about what goes on and not seeing through those rose colored lenses where everything's happy and childhood is all so perfect and the world is such a great place. I went to New Orleans to meet up with the sex crimes police there and I was met at the airport by somebody else from the New Orleans police force. He was stopping me from coming and said, “We've just had to shut [the sex crimes division] down because we found that they were actually involved in a child pornography ring themselves.” They had to head me off and they were incredibly embarrassed that they had literally arrested these guys the day before. And then you're thinking, “Is it because they were drawn to it because that's who they were, or was the exposure of being around it suddenly open up something inside of them?”

Filmmaker: Was that something that you were concerned about?

Harris: No, but I realized myself that I was drawn to [this subject] because I'd been molested when I was about eight. It was something that I'd completely compartmentalized. It wasn't until way later in this process that I started to see, “Oh, maybe this is why I'm interested in this story.” At the time, I had not made the association and it was only literally once I'd written the script and I was working on it that I said, “There must be something that I haven't really worked out in myself that's in this story.” And that's why for me it's more important that it's seen as a film about dealing with that as opposed to something about abduction or pedophilia. It's about how you deal with something in your childhood so traumatic that shapes you as you grow up.

Filmmaker: I've read that you finished the script almost 20 years ago, so I'm presuming the wait had a lot to do with this being an extremely tough film to pitch.

Harris: Yeah, it was very hard and it got harder. When I finished the script, immediately there was a producer who came on board – a guy called Nick Wechsler, who'd done Drugstore Cowboy – and he said he wanted to produce it. He was managing Leonardo DiCaprio, who was just 17, and so he was going to play Donnie and we started to put a whole cast together. It was going to cost $4m and it was going to happen. And then, for non-financial reasons, it didn't happen that time, and every time I've tried since then it's gotten harder and harder, so the budget got less and less. In the end, I put the money up along with a couple of other people because we figured we could make it for very little and so would take the risk ourselves.

Filmmaker: I'm very intrigued about the way you worked with the young actors in the film, because obviously you couldn't tell them what the movie was actually about. Is it true you created a sanitized version of the script to get around that?

Harris: It was an alternate story. We said that the Tom Arnold character, Alex, had been left by his wife and so he was living alone with Frank, his good buddy, and he wanted a family so these two kids would become his children. There was not going to be a mummy, because the mummy had left. Frank was now jealous because he thought that he wasn't Alex's favorite anymore, so that's why he was being mean. Then for the specific scenes with Ryan, we'd come up with a scenario that fitted emotionally where she had to be, so we didn't have to tell them anything beyond that. I came up with that version of the story with Monique, who's Ryan [Simpkins]'s mother, and we kind of worked it out together.

Filmmaker: Did you grapple at all with the thought that 10 years down the line these kids may find out what kind of a film they were really in and regret their involvement?

Harris: I didn't so much worry about that because I was a kid actor myself at the age of 10, and I what I remember about that movie is the experience of being with the other people. I don't remember the scenes, I don't even remember what the film was, I just remember my relationship with my understudy, my relationship with the director and the producer and Tom Courtenay and Romy Schneider. I remember it being very boring. If the film had been about something else, I'd look back and go, “Oh, that's what it was,” so I didn't have that worry for [child actors] Ryan [Simpkins] and Scooter [Smith] in 10 years to look at this and feel that somehow they'd been tricked. They only really looked at it as dealing with this thing day-to-day that they turned up to do and it was never about the arc of Leslie or the arc of Donnie – in which case they would feel trick and say, “Oh, actually that wasn't our arc.” Every scene was, “OK, imagine that this is happening to you. Imagine your mum's not here and she can't look after you and you're feeling upset because where is she going to be.” We'd get them to an emotional level that fitted the characters' level and then you'd play the scene.

Filmmaker: Looking at your filmography, this is something of a departure for you, as you're moving from more Hollywood fare to independent filmmaking. How has that transition been for you?

Harris: Ironically, this is probably the first script I wrote. Right after this, I did The Rachel Papers, so I went to do that, and then I did some other films in Hollywood. I enjoy those kind of films and I kept thinking, “You'll earn enough credits to be able to then be able to do a film like Gardens of the Night.” Which is not always true. In one way, making a film like this was almost like going back to film school, because you really had to pare down your ambitions and be really specific about what you wanted to do. You're dealing with people who are kind of learning as well so you're fueled by enthusiasm and energy. I think what's been harder is after the film's done because you're on your own. It's down to you to. You can't walk away from it and you are the one who's banging the drum and you have to bug everybody and push it. You're the one who creates the momentum and traction, so that's a lesson. Hats off to guys who just do this the whole time, because it must be exhausting. You have to work out how to make money out of it. You do it out of love, but you have to pay the bills.

Filmmaker: Do you feel you've been able to work better with actors because of your father?

Harris: I knew what he looked for in a director, and I can understand the frustrations of actors and their temperaments, so it doesn't freak me out when I see that happening, because I get it. I understand that when things get explosive – which they can do – it's really about something else and not to get sidetracked. What literally helped me more was going and doing it. I studied acting at a drama school in Los Angeles, and that helps you more. To me, that helped me understand how to be spoken to and so how to speak about it.

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

Harris: I always wanted to work with my father. We were about to do a film before he died, this book that I optioned called Pop that's a grandfather-granddaughter story. I was going to do it with my dad because he had such a strong connection with my daughter and it became a huge thing for him in the latter period of his life. I mean, the main relationship that he had was with my daughter, so I optioned this book, did the script and I went to England to go into preproduction, and then he got sick and died. Therefore we were really going to work together; before that, we'd always [just] talked about it. I've always wanted to do the story of the Spartans, so I'd have him as Leonidas. He'd have been very temperamental, but I think I could handle him. I'd have him in his late 20s, early 30s and he'd play Leonidas, and you'd have Vanessa Redgrave as his wife and you could have Alec Guinness as the main Athenian and Javier Bardem as the King of Persia. I'd also like to add my brothers Jared and Jamie to the cast of Spartans.

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a kid?

Harris: I wanted to be a soccer player for Arsenal.

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

Harris: Stick with it and never take no for an an answer. Have a very thick skin and stick to your point of view.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 11/07/2008 08:23:00 PM Comments (0)