In the field of documentary, John Walter has emerged as the medium's most eloquent and entertaining cultural historian. The Detroit-born director, who is also an unpublished poet, began his career in the film industry as a boom operator and worked in that capacity on Sam Raimi's Evil Dead II. In the mid 90s, he became an editor, beginning with Norman Reedus' Messenger (1994), and in 1995 he directed Edison's Miracle of Light, an episode of PBS' television series The American Experience. In 2002, Walter made his documentary feature debut with How to Draw a Bunny, a portrait of the Pop Art collage artist and prankster Ray Johnson, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Documentary. He has since directed the small screen doc The First Amendment Project: Some Assembly Required for Court TV and edited a number of projects, including Thom Powers' Guns & Mothers (2003) and Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That. He currently lives in New York City's East Village with his wife, filmmaker Adriane Giebel.

For years, Walter had been looking for an opportunity to make a film about the iconic German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht, a literary figure he has been fascinated with for two decades. The opportunity came when he was given permission to film the rehearsal process of the Public Theater's Central Park production of Brecht's Mother Courage and her Children, adapted by Tony Kushner and starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. Theater of War fortunately does not dwell on the minutiae of the show's preparation period or capture arguments between cast members, but instead uses the production as a conduit to discuss the play and its author, plus a number of other topics – Marxism, war, politics, art, parenthood – which logically arise in that discussion. Theater of War weaves together interviews with the theater principals (plus outside figures like novelist Jay Cantor and theater professor and Brecht acolyte Carl Weber) with archival materials depicting Brecht's HUAC interrogation, the original staging of Courage, and contemporary footage of war protests near the Public Theater, creating a vibrant and compelling whole.

Filmmaker spoke to Walter about convincing Meryl Streep to let him film her, working in the tradition of Citizen Kane and Rashomon, and making a film version of Moby Dick with real whales.



Filmmaker: How far back does your interest in Brecht go?

Walter: I guess I would date it from the late 80s, when I started watching a lot of Godard films. The name kept coming up and I started asking around, but nobody seemed to know anything about the guy so I just started reading books. The first thing I did was read Brecht on Theater, but I didn't really understand the context in these writings – it was like one side of a debate, and I didn't know what the debate was. I started reading Brecht biographies, and they were always referring to the plays so I started reading the plays and then I read the poetry. I was really fascinated with the way that a lot of his ideas of theater could be applied to film.

Filmmaker: Brecht was your way into Theater of War, so how long had you been planning to make a film about him?

Walter: Thinking about Brecht's approach to storytelling really helped me in my film about Ray Johnson, a collage artist, in making a collage form for the documentary. Brecht provided a lot of insight and he was a great jumping off point for me. I think by the time I finished How To Draw A Bunny, I was already thinking about the idea of doing a Brecht film. I was fascinated with his years in Hollywood and the romance of his unproduced projects, the movies that never were. He worked on all these film scripts and treatments and it's humorous how disconnected he was from what Hollywood was looking for. But I think he was actually profoundly subversive and he knew what he was doing. Several of the treatments are in his collected works in German, and they're fascinating.

Filmmaker: Had you ever considered trying to make some of these films?

Walter: With Brecht, there's so much written about him and he's such a complicated character, like Freud or someone like that. If you're doing a 90-minute movie, how do you approach the big subjects? I was always looking for a way in, some ground that hadn't been covered, a little way in that opened up, a tiny part of the big picture that gave a sense of the big picture without giving everything. So initially I wasn't going to film those scripts, but explore the movies that were never made.

Filmmaker: But ultimately the way into a film about Brecht came through this production of Mother Courage.

Walter: The approach I settled on was to find a single production of a single play and follow the actors as they learned the play, so the audience for the movie could learn the play along with the actors, and we only ever saw the rehearsal, we never tried to film the play.

Filmmaker: That's different from the usual format, which is to build tension during rehearsals towards the crescendo of the opening night.

Walter: Right. It becomes about that hackneyed storyline about “the tension mounts as we get closer to opening night and nerves are frayed, which leads to misunderstandings between the starlet and the director.” But I was not interested in backstage melodrama, I wanted to use a movie to explore theater and the drama of putting a play in particular moment in history that's trying to be a dialogue with that moment.

Filmmaker: But the film is a lot more layered and complex than what you've just described, as it goes far beyond the parameters of the play. At what stage did you decide that you wanted to branch off in those different directions?

Walter: That was always the idea, I just wasn't sure how I was going to do it. I was just gathering material, but I always knew that there was a lot of material that I wanted to get into the film. It's like this idea of dialogue: I was trying to create a dialogue between the 21st century production and the 1949 production, between what's going on inside the theater and outside the theater, between the ideas that influenced Brecht and Brecht influencing other artists, the balance between learning and entertaining. Also, for myself, I was wanting to explore what I could do as a filmmaker, how much could I fit into a movie.

Filmmaker: At first, the biggest obstacle seems to have been getting permission to film rehearsals, particularly as Meryl Streep was the star of the show. She's very private and protective of her process as an actress, so how did you manage to convince her to give you this unprecedented access?

Walter: I just approached her with the idea and, in a way, I was freed from all anxiety: I just knew either she was going to say yes and I was going to do the film, or she was going to say no and I wasn't going to be able to do the film. My intuition was that her motives for taking time off from her movie career and doing this play in Central Park were in an overlap with my motives for this film, and that my movie and her performance could be part of the same larger project. I didn't feel like I had to convince her of anything, I just said, “This is what I want to do, do you want to do it?” and she said she wanted to do it, so that made the whole thing possible.

Filmmaker: How quickly did everything come together once she'd said yes?

Walter: It had to come together very quickly because I didn't find out about the play until they'd publicly announced it, so it was shortly before they went into rehearsal that I got permission to do it, and then at that point we had to raise the money to put the whole project together. Jack Turner, the executive producer, was somebody I had known when he was an executive at United Artists and he was putting together financing for film projects. We had been talking about doing a film together so he was the first person I turned to and he was able to make it happen very quickly. I'm incredibly grateful to him. If he hadn't been able to raise the money, we wouldn't have been able to [make the film]. It was pretty amazing that he was able to put the budget together in a couple of weeks.

Filmmaker: Because of the necessary intimacy of the project, I assume you were only a two- or three-man crew.

Walter: It was a two-man crew, me and Felix Andrew. Felix does all the sound for Gus Van Sant's movies but he also shoots a lot of The Making Of films, so Felix and I would switch off. My first job in film was as a boom operator, so Felix would do the sound and I would shoot, and other times Felix would shoot and I would be booming. The only other person was my wife, Adriane Giebel, and she was the production coordinator, line producer and production assistant. After we did the rehearsals, Adriene and I went to Berlin for about a month, doing editing and also doing research and shooting out there.

Filmmaker: How quickly were you able to blend in and go unnoticed while you were filming the rehearsal process?

Walter: Well, we were never very close. There were two phases of the rehearsals. First, it was during the day at the Public Theater, and for that we really just had to stay far from the action – once they're in the thick of rehearsal, they've got bigger things to worry about. For the second phase of rehearsal, we were in Central Park after dark while they were lighting at night and rehearsing. At that point, they couldn't even see us, we were just lurking in the shadows, so we were completely invisible.

Filmmaker: One of the things you do so well in the film is really synthesize all these different aspects. When you started shooting, did you have a preconceived idea of how everything would fit together or did it happen more organically?

Walter: It's about 50-50. You sort of have an idea of what you want to do but then you really have to start to think with your hands, find the connections with the pictures and the sound in the editing room. For the actual process of making the film, it's not like I spent one year digging myself into a whole and another year clawing myself out. I was shooting what I thought would have a place in the film but I wasn't exactly sure how it would all fit together and I was trying to avoid thinking about how I would put the pieces together when I was shooting it because I didn't want to censor myself or not get something because I was nervous or not ask a question because I didn't have the answer to it.

Filmmaker: With the contemporary footage of anti-war protests, were you having to run off to shoot those scenes as soon as rehearsals were over?

Walter: Those protests were happening a couple of blocks away from the theater. We would shoot a rehearsal and then walk two or three blocks to Union Square, so they were happening on the street right outside the theater. I'd always imagined in the film that we're watching what's happening inside the theater and then we would go to the window and see what's happening on the streets too. What's happening on stage in dialogue with what's happening off stage. They wouldn't have been doing that play that summer if not for what was going on in the street.

Filmmaker: With How To Draw A Bunny and Theater of War, it seems like you've carved out a niche for yourself as the sociocultural historian within documentary film. Is that the kind of area that you want to occupy?

Walter: I'm never really sure. Both of the films are the result of blindly following my own enthusiasms, and there was also unoccupied territory in the sense that nobody had made a film about Ray Johnson and, as famous as Brecht is, there's no film about him for an English-speaking audience, which I found surprising. I'm fascinated by episodic structure, with stories about fairly extraordinary, meaty aspects of everyday life and, for me, the movies that I've always loved were films like Citizen Kane and Rashomon, and I feel like that's the tradition that I'm working. Not in that I'm making classic movies, but if you think about Kane and Rashomon, they're both “chopped up” and the journey of the filmmaker becomes a ghost narrative. There's always this ghostly figure of the storyteller and, in a way, that's always the protagonist.

Filmmaker: When did you last do it for the money not the love?

Walter: I never do it for the money. I can't bring myself to do it for the money – that's why I'm making films about Bertolt Brecht. [laughs]

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

Walter: I would probably do Moby Dick with real whales. I guess somebody really terrifying, like Antonin Artaud, would be my Ahab.

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

Walter: Well, it would have to be that I'm happy with the finished product. I feel like commercial success is such a random thing that I can't even bring myself to spend time chasing that. I have no idea what other people like.

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

Walter: There have been a few. I don't know if it was the biggest compliment, but one of the most gratifying moments in my film work was showing the film to Bertolt Brecht's family. That was very nerve wracking. They were very supportive. Barbara Brecht said, “I liked it, and I didn't know if I would.” [laughs] To me, that's a huge compliment.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 12/24/2008 12:03:00 PM Comments (0)

Rod Lurie has had remarkable success as a writer-director by focusing on his preoccupations with the worlds of politics and journalism. Born in Israel, but raised in Hawaii and Connecticut, Lurie is the son of esteemed syndicated political cartoonist turned foreign policy expert Ranan Lurie, and grew up with politics as a staple of everyday life. After attending West Point, Lurie served four years in Germany in the U.S. Army and then became a film critic, entertainment reporter and radio talk show host. Lurie made the transition from writing about movies to making them with his politically themed short, Four Second Delay (1998), the success of which quickly lead to him writing and directing two features set in Washington, D.C. The low budget Deterrence (1999) featured Kevin Pollak as the first Jewish president of the USA, while the much higher profile The Contender (2000) starred Jeff Bridges, Joan Allen and Gary Oldman, and centered on the controversy surrounding the attempted appointment of a female vice president. Lurie followed up with the prison drama The Last Castle (2001), with Robert Redford and Mark Ruffalo, and then took a sideways move into TV with the shows Line of Fire (2003), about FBI agents, and Commander in Chief (2005-06), which featured Geena Davis as America's first female president. He returned to the big screen last year with Resurrecting The Champ, the true story of an investigative journalist (Josh Hartnett) who finds a former heavyweight boxer (Samuel L. Jackson) living homeless on the streets.

With his latest project, Nothing But the Truth, Lurie revisits his favorite subjects: Washington politics and investigative journalism. The plot revolves around an exposé written by Rachel Armstrong (Kate Beckinsale) which reveals that Erica Van Doren (Vera Farmiga), the wife of a U.S. ambassador, is a CIA operative, and that her reports of another country's innocence in an assassination attempt on the American president were ignored by the government. Armstrong's story gets her a Pulitzer nomination, but her refusal to give up the name of her source has an increasingly destructive impact on her life, as well as Van Doren's. The film clearly riffs on the Valerie Plame scandal, but Lurie is more interested in examining the legal and political ideas that the incident stirred up (the role of political journalism, First Amendment rights, government intervention), as well as the human implications of the story, rather than sticking closely to the facts of the case. What Lurie delivers is both a compelling human drama and a tightly written political thriller, at the center of which is Beckinsale's career best performance as the resolute journalist who stands up to the system to defend her story, her rights and her principles. The always excellent Farmiga stands out among a sterling supporting cast that includes Matt Dillon, Alan Alda, Angela Bassett, Noah Wyle and David Schwimmer.

Filmmaker spoke to Lurie about his roots in political life, the sudden collapse of the film's distributor, Yari Film Group, and his next project, a remake of Straw Dogs.



Filmmaker: Your father was a political cartoonist, so when did politics become a passion for you?

Lurie: Throughout my entire childhood, our home was overrun by generals and governors and senators and congressmen and ambassadors. When kids my age were wondering who won the baseball game last night, I wanted to know how well Lowell Weicker did in the primary in Michigan the night before. Politics appeared to me to be some sort of contact sport, I was always really fascinated by it and I never lost my interest in it. Even when I was in college, my basis for study was political science and international relations. I always found it so interesting that I couldn't imagine others wouldn't find it interesting as well, so it seemed to me to be an obvious fit in the film world.

Filmmaker: After leaving the army, you became a film critic before transitioning into making films.

Lurie: When I was a little boy, I viewed film critics as the coolest people on earth because back in my day the movies you would go and see would be everything from The Sting to Taxi Driver to All the President's Men to Rocky – really, really unequivocally great films. Going to the movies was a cool thing back then, so it stood to reason that film critics must be the coolest people on earth. I really wanted to become a film critic and I even began a correspondence with people like Pauline Kael, Judith Crist and Roger Ebert. They were so mensch-y they would write me back: I was 12 or 13 years old and having a relationship with these guys. There was nothing better than going up to my bedroom and on my bed would be waiting a letter from Ebert who, very early on, became a hero to me.

Filmmaker: With Nothing But the Truth, it seems like you've once again drawn on your persistent passions and fascinations: investigative journalism, politics and movies.

Lurie: One of things I've been telling all people who want careers as directors and producers is, “Don't go to school to study film, because the only real education will be on a set eventually. What you need to study is what you want to make movies about. Become an expert on that, become knowledgeable about that. Study. Become smart, become educated, because it will become invaluable to you later on. I remember when I was a cadet at West Point, I became interested in things that are very important at West Point, which is history, the military, character, principle and leadership. Ultimately, everything I've ever done has been about those facets of life that really interest me.

Filmmaker: When people refer to Nothing But The Truth, they inevitably bring up the Valerie Plame case. How closely did you base the film on those events?

Lurie: It turned out to be a bit of a pain in the ass (and I really brought it upon myself), because what I did was I wrote a movie in which I put different women into a similar situation that [journalist Judith] Miller and Plame were in. [I was influenced by the case of] Susan McDougal, the woman who wouldn't testify against Bill Clinton in the Whitewater scandal for what she said were righteous principles. I think she stayed in [jail] for years – not just months, not just days – and that character fascinated me more as a personality than Judith Miller did. By the end of the film, maybe we reevaluate the motivations of the lead character a little bit, but there's no doubt that one way or another she's guarded by a very strong set of principles.

Filmmaker: Let's talk about the ending. We can't discuss it directly, but it makes you reconsider everything that's gone before.

Lurie: We do it for economic reasons – we want the people to see the movie a second time.

Filmmaker: Well, you seem to be joking, but one of my questions was about whether you had designed this to be a film people would feel compelled to watch again, because of the ending.

Lurie: I'm not joking – but I am speaking humorously... The point is that the movie does make you reconstruct the film in your mind, and when you can't do that, you simply choose to see it again. The ending was the first thing I wrote of this particular story. I just thought, “Wouldn't this be cool?” It presents the ultimate “What would you do in that situation?” I think one of the things I like the most about Nothing But The Truth is that it is indeed a movie where you have empathy with the lead character and try to figure out how you would behave in a similar situation. I love Iron Man and I love Batman, but I never found myself asking, “What would I do in Batman's shoes? How would I combat the Joker?” But you do ask yourself persistently, “Would I be doing what she's doing? Do I believe in what she's doing?”

Filmmaker: Presumably you could easily key into the mindset of Kate Beckinsale's character because you were once an investigative reporter yourself.

Lurie: I have absolutely been in those situations. I wrote a piece about The National Enquirer and about their news gathering techniques. In fact, they assigned a private investigator named Anthony Pellicano – who's now in jail pretty much for the rest of his life – to try to get the story killed and try to find out who my sources were. I do not profess to be a tough guy, but I'm happy to say that we remained very resilient in that case. But I really think that journalism is the among the most noble of all professions when done properly, when people keep their word and promise to report the truth.

Filmmaker: How did people respond to the idea of funding this kind of political thriller – obviously anything to do with Iraq at the moment is box office poison...

Lurie: One of the reasons why the primary conflict in the film is with Venezuela is because we didn't want to touch Iraq in any way, shape or form. You're right, it's box office poison. It's simply insane to make a movie set there – unless it's money that you're happy to lose, because you're going to lose it. Like The Contender, Nothing But The Truth was made at a budget that makes sense. Ultimately the film is going to be sold as a thriller, and it can attract a thriller audience. People who saw it immediately after it was put together thought it was a more commercial film than they had ever imagined. Time will tell if they're right or not.

Filmmaker: Your first two films were about presidents, as was Commander in Chief, and this film concerns politics also. I presume that you must still really enjoy immersing yourself in that world.

Lurie: It is very enjoyable, but my next film is Straw Dogs. I was advised by everyone from my wife to my partner, Mark Friedman, that my next film really should not have anything to do with politics or journalism or the media. It should be something outside of that very safe area in which I have lived, I should grab my balls a little bit and make a big ass commercial thriller, which will also have a lot of artistic merit, hopefully. As much as I enjoy it, it has become time for me to move away from it.

Filmmaker: How daunting is it to be remaking a film like Straw Dogs?

Lurie: I'm pretty much assuming that the bullseye is on my back for the time being with the critics, that there is going to be a predisposition to go to war with the movie even before they've seen it – but I would just really caution everyone to take a deep breath and wait until the movie comes out, and then let the arrows land where they may. But we're pretty confident that we have a really good screenplay, and it hasn't been cast yet but we have every confidence there as well.

Filmmaker: The distributor of Nothing But The Truth, Yari Film Group, went into Chapter 11 just a few days ago. Did you know at all about the situation beforehand?

Lurie: I didn't know. I found out about 6pm [on December 12] and it was really, absolutely shocking. At this moment, I still haven't spoken to Bob [Yari] and I'm sure he's got incredibly important things to do. None of us really knows what it's really going to mean, how it's going to affect the film. Probably it will have it's Academy [Awards] qualifying run and there's going to be a situation where it probably will have to get sold to another distributor. It's rather stunning. This town is littered with the corpses of movies that got trapped in bankruptcies and companies that went under and we just want to do everything we can not to become one of those films. It's very possible. I'm so proud of all the actors involved in this film, and I can't believe that I've spent over a year working on nothing but this – my whole heart is in it – and, “Goodbye, Charlie.” But hopefully it will work itself out, because the Yari people are good people, they just got really trapped in really horrible economic vise.

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

Lurie: The last time that I blubbered in a movie, like a baby, was 20 years ago watching Born on the 4th of July, and that scene where Tom Cruise comes home from the V.A. He knows that everything is fucked up, his family knows that everything is fucked up, and both are pretending that nothing is fucked up. We know the tragedy that is about to befall them, and John Williams' scores at exactly the moment that his mom comes out of the house. I remember being an absolute wreck at the end of that film, and then I saw it again when I showed it to my whole family, and I remember crying again. At the end of the film, none of us could really talk, we were just so swept away by the mountain of emotion that Oliver Stone had created.

Filmmaker: Is Hollywood going in the right direction?

Lurie: Hollywood is most certainly not going in the right direction. Unfortunately – and we have the economy to blame – it's impossible for independent films to get made with anywhere near the level that they were even two or three years ago, so there is an entire segment of entertainment that is going to go away. We're going to end up with some very valid films, but they will be safe films: franchises and sequels. This comes from the guy who's going to remake a film, but the film I'm remaking was not a big box office hit when it came out. And it is risky.

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

Lurie: I wish that I could make a greater contribution as a filmmaker. I'm proud of my movies, but I think that there's so much more that I would be capable of. I've never said this before and will probably regret saying it... I don't want to indicate that my films haven't been good, but I think that my best work will come when both my kids are in college and don't need me that much. The truth is that when you look at movies like Pulp Fiction or Citizen Kane or Apocalypse Now or anything that Kubrick made, you're looking at movies that were made by men that were absolutely obsessed, that they lived and breathed and ate their films 24/7. They either had no children or [laughs], I presume, ignored their children for a while. I have always gone to prep as late as possible because I want to spend as much time with my children as I can and I get back home as soon as I can and instead of working on my film at night, so I've not been able to give any one film the 110% treatment that is required to create great, soul-splitting art. That will come, but my kids will be in college, so a couple of years away.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 12/17/2008 10:18:00 PM Comments (0)

Nacho Vigalondo is part of an exciting new generation of Spanish filmmakers who are reinvigorating genre filmmaking with their creativity and invention. Born and raised in the insular town of Cabezón de la Sal, he grew up on 80s studio movies before discovering the work of cult directors like David Lynch and Peter Jackson, whose idiosyncratic visions inspired the teenage Vigalondo to eventually become a director himself. He studied Visual Communication at the University of the Basque Country, where he began making a series of playful and distinctive shorts which include Shock (2005), Sunday (both 2005) and, most famously, the Oscar-nominated 7:35 in the Morning, which quirkily combined obsessive romance, a musical number and explosives. As well as writing and directing shorts, the always active Vigalondo has also acted in a lot of his and other people's work and written for TV shows (including the Spanish Big Brother); he's also in the “electro-gothic” band Tentirujo.

While his shorts are predominantly fun, lighthearted affairs (sometimes with a dark twist), Vigalondo's debut feature Timecrimes shows just how mature and sophisticated he can be. The film begins simply enough: a man (Karra Elejalde) is moving into his new house and, while scanning the surrounding area with his binoculars, sees a young woman taking off her top, and then a sinister man with his face obscured by a pink bandage clutching a pair of scissors. While Vigalondo sets the film up with a hapless hero, a damsel in distress and a terrifying villain, the introduction of a time machine changes things radically. What follows is a truly virtuosic piece of filmmaking in which Vigalondo brilliantly deconstructs and reconstructs the narrative, adding layers and angles to the story with effortless sleight of hand, and ultimately creating an infinitely more complex and thought-provoking film than seemed possible. The young writer-director has an unerring grasp of the tropes and rules of genre movies and how to twist and subvert them, and watching him play with our expectations is a genuine pleasure.

Filmmaker spoke to Vigalondo about time travel movies, playing Norman Bates in a spook house, and his love for the films of Rob Zombie.



Filmmaker: What first got you interested in cinema?

Vigalondo: I wasn't raised as a young filmmaker because when you're living in Spain and you live in a town like mine – it's called Cabezón de la Sal, which means “big head in the salt” – if you're realistic and your family's not got very much money, you cannot think of yourself as a filmmaker. When I went to the movies, I saw those movies as something given by the gods. So when I started playing with a camera, I was in high school and I was making stupid things in front of the camera only for the pleasure of being able to watch it again. I started thinking of myself as a director when I was in college, and at that point I started making short films. I cannot say that I was this kind of child who knew that they wanted to make films from the very beginning, so my education is from the 90s – the Sundance years, Tarantino, Rodriguez – when there came along all these auteurs who showed to us that you were able to make genre films that at the same time were auteur films, so they were my heroes at the time.

Filmmaker: Did you watch a lot of movies growing up?

Vigalondo: When you're a child in the 80s, you're really into Indiana Jones, Gremlins, Back to the Future – Spielberg, Lucas, Zemeckis and stuff – and when you become a teenager, you escape from that. At that time, I discovered cult directors like Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson and David Lynch. David Lynch really changed my way of watching filmmaking because all these other directors are about architecture and logic, and David Lynch was all about magic – something that can't be explained, closer to poetry than narrative. When a guy is making poetry with a camera, you can realize there is a camera behind, so it's much more interesting. Terry Gilliam also comes to mind. I also discovered Spanish directors, and it's funny because I discovered them from the outside. I discovered Buñuel, Zulueta and, of course, Almodóvar and I started seeing things in a different way. But from the very beginning, I knew I was going to make genre films because my first concern when I write a story or make a film is to make something that isn't boring. For me, boring is the original sin. I don't care if I make something confusing or maybe too twisted or too dense, but if it's fun it's OK with me.

Filmmaker: I've seen a number of your short films, and they're really enjoyable to watch and seem like they must have been fun to make also.

Vigalondo: It's fun when you transmit this feeling, but making movies is never fun. Sometimes your mind plays tricks on you and you remember the shoot as that amazing moment in your past when you were younger and you were laughing all the time, but it's always a lie. It's not true – you were suffering all the time, because shooting is about repetition, and repetition is never fun. My short film A Lesson In Filmmaking was fun because there was only one take, because I didn't have the opportunity of repeating. In that case, it was OK but all the rest of the shoots are horrible.

Filmmaker: Considering that you hate repetition, it seems strange that you made a film like Timecrimes in which repetition is totally central to the movie.

Vigalondo: Repetition in real life can be horrible, but if you think of repetition in terms of sex, for example, it's great. Repetition can be related to pleasure but when you're dealing with repetition in fiction you have very big limitations because with repetition there are predictable elements, things that people are expecting to see again. If you are playing fair you are going to show a lot of predictable things in your movie and Timecrimes is dealing with predictable things. The challenge is, “How can we make a movie that is predictable in so many ways, but we find a way to show something new each time?” So when a movie is not about “what” but turns into something that is about “how,” it's pretty interesting. For example, my favorite part in Psycho is not the killing sequence in the bathroom. It's an incredible sequence, but what comes after is Norman Bates dressing the corpse, putting the corpse in the back of the car, taking the car to a swamp. There's nothing new in that sequence, but it's so well shot that it's the part where I almost get hypnotized by a guy hiding the corpse of a beautiful lady.

Filmmaker: I read that you've played Norman Bates yourself.

Vigalondo: Yeah, in a spook house. It was a gift from destiny for a film geek like me. One summer – maybe the best summer of my life – I had this opportunity: it was one of the first jobs in my life and I had to work as a monster in a corridor. I had to be Norman Bates so I was dressed as an old lady with a knife and I was chasing the people. It was not a big luxurious spook house and it was pretty dangerous: my knife was not a fake knife, it was a real knife with a blunt blade. I felt a bit unsafe with that knife because some of the people that went there did not feel the threat of a knife because they assumed it was a fake knife. There came a point where I decided to [not use] the knife and I took off one of my shoes – they were old ladies' shoes – and I took it in my hand. When the customers came and the lights went out, they saw an actor with a shoe in his hand and they were really terrified because nobody's going to stab you with a knife but maybe they can hit you in the face with a shoe, so they would go “Aaargh!” And I could actually hit them, and they were more terrified. I like the idea of playing with elements in mise-en-scène in terms of maybe attacking the audience from a different point of view so they can feel more surprised and more terrified. That's the reason I don't have a knife in my movie, I have scissors.

Filmmaker: How did you come up with the idea for Timecrimes? And how did you go about structure the script to make everything piece together properly?

Vigalondo: When you're dealing with repetitions, you're not only thinking about right and left but also up and down. It's pretty complicated because when you put in a new element, it's affecting what happens next and what happens before, so you have to be pretty careful. If you make all the pieces match together, if you make this mathematical equation work, you deserve a prize or something – but if the movie's boring, it's not a fair film. I think the first duty of a film is to make you forget about real time so for me the real challenge was making a fun mathematical equation rather than a perfect structure.

Filmmaker: The movie has some parallels with Shane Carruth's Primer, which also uses time travel in a logical and very inventive way.

Vigalondo: I have a little horror story with Primer: we were developing Timecrimes and were in preproduction and a friend told me, “You won't believe this, a movie about time travel from a logical point of view won Sundance. I saw a sequence on TV and it's about one guy looking at himself with binoculars.” I was like, “Oh, my God! Stop the machines, stop the machines. What's happening here?” I decided to move forward because you're going to face these kind of problems through all your career – it's happens to everybody. And when I finally saw Primer, I felt so glad because it's a great film but it's pretty different. It's almost the opposite, because it comes from the same starting point but the directions these movies take are the opposite. I love to think that Timecrimes and Primer are complementary in some way.

Filmmaker: They'd make a great double bill.

Vigalondo: I really like the first half of Primer: there are some devices related to the time travel technique that I really appreciate. In fact, I prefer that type of time travel to mine. in terms of a realistic approach, Primer's is the real time machine; mine is like a giant toy – it doesn't make sense at all. In fact, when we were making the film there were some teachers at the physics college [where we shot] and they were like, “How does your time machine work?” I was like, “Well, it's a tank filled with liquid...” He was like, “Liquid?! OK, forget about it. What is it about liquids? It looks like a porn movie more than a science fiction movie.”

Filmmaker: The film really plays with our expectations: we are anticipating a straight genre film at the start, but the film begins to reveal multiple layers and really transforms into something much more psychologically complex.

Vigalondo: Something I really don't like about modern films is that most of the time movies live up to the expectations of the audience. Movies seem to be what they really are and instead of playing with your expectations, they play to your expectations. I remember when I watched Fight Club in Spain. I went to the theater and was ready to see a movie about streetfighting and I found a movie about something much more complicated than streetfighting. I was amazed and felt shaken by the movie at the time because I didn't know what to expect next. I have to assume that part of the audience doesn't react very well to this playing with expectations; sometimes when you are not satisfying the expectations of the people there are people who feel you have cheated them, but I definitely love the idea of making films that play with audience rather than satisfy them in a plain way.

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

Vigalondo: In my personal case, the director, but I don't know if that's a good thing. [laughs] I'm ready to live the other situations. I love to be manipulated by producers and of course I love to be manipulated by stars. [laughs]

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

Vigalondo: I would give an Oscar to the British director Terence Fisher. He's a director of horror and he is, for me, not worse than Alfred Hitchcock. He deserves all the attention you can imagine. This is maybe a boring answer but I will give an Oscar to Rob Zombie too. I really love the work of Rob Zombie. This is not a joke.

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

Vigalondo: I have seen some filmmakers destroying their careers trying to transform reality in order to match with ideas, making something expensive or something that is really impossible to be made. I always recommend transforming your ideas to match reality – that's the best thing you can learn. If you are waiting five years in order to make a medieval short film, you're making a mistake. Experience is more important than anything else and five years waiting for a movie is five years waiting, not working.

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

Since she was very young, Elissa Down has been honing her skills as a director. Admittedly, it wasn't strictly conscious when she was writing, acting in and masterminding little drama projects as a kid growing up in Australia, or bossing her parents around when they were reading her bedtime stories. However, her vocation as a filmmaker became ever clearer as she grew older and by the time she was a film and television student at Perth's Curtin University, she had her eye on cinematic success. Her drive and potential were acknowledged when she was nominated for Western Australia's Young Filmmaker of the Year in both 1999 and 2000, and these accolades spurred her on to make no less than 10 short films between 2000 and 2004, including the prize winners My Outback (2002), The Bathers (2003) and Summer Angst (2004).

Down's debut feature, like a number of her shorts, is semi-autobiographical and draws on her memories of growing up Down Under. The Black Balloon is an extremely likeable coming of age story about 15-year-old Thomas (Rhys Wakefield), an army brat whose good-hearted but disruptive brother Charlie (Luke Ford) makes life tough for their pregnant mother (Toni Collette) and endangers Thomas' romance with girl-next-door Jackie (Gemma Ward). Down herself has two autistic brothers and here, with the help of co-writer Jimmy Jack (bizarrely credited here as Jimmy the Exploder), transforms her own childhood experiences into an accessible and moving narrative. She also has a great eye for conveying place and time with simple details and the performances she elicits from her young leads (especially Ford) as well as old hands like Collette suggest she has an innate understanding of how to get the best out of actors.

Filmmaker spoke to Down about drawing on her own childhood, her puzzlement at the lack of menstrual comedies, and her vivid memories of singing Michael Penn songs in her sleep.



Filmmaker: This feels like a very personal film. How much of this is from your own experiences?

Down: I have three brothers, two of which have autism and my youngest brother Sean is basically the Charlie character. We thought he would be a more interesting film character because we've seen the autistic savant many times – they're very interesting, but try living with the ones that hang from the ceiling and causing havoc and mischief everywhere they turn. [laughs] For example, we've had the shopping center temper tantrums, we've had child services come around and neighbors [getting involved]. We've had chewing of tampons and [incidents involving] poo, and chairs through windows. The emotional journey is very much those feelings that I'd felt and a lot of the stuff has happened, but we've mixed it up and changed it around so it works in a dramatic structure and can make an entertaining film.

Filmmaker: How was it for you, making that decision that you wanted to put this very personal story on the big screen?

Down: It was about the point of difference for the film: we've had many films about disabilities in all their different guises and forms, and in a way this film is an insider's view, which has been fantastic because so many people [have responded to it]. It's great to see what it's really like for family, for the siblings, the day-to-day living of that, [because] we haven't really seen that. I had to be completely honest. That was how I could tell that story, to be completely open and honest and go, “This is what it was like growing up,” because I didn't want it to be a study in autism or anything like that. A lot of people call it “the autism film,” but we don't have scenes where autism is explained at all and Charlie's only referred to twice as having autism; the rest [of the time], the audience learns by his behavior and everybody feels firsthand what it's like to actually be inside that house.

Filmmaker: Was this a film that was quick to write because it was semi-autobiographical or was it slow and difficult to draw out of yourself?

Down: It's so many different processes. At the start, I was being a little guarded and holding back a little bit, saying, “How much do I want to keep for me and how much do I want to show the audience?” I went to this great script lab in Australia called Aurora and Jane Campion is the patron of it. I met Jane and she took me under her wing and was a great help. She took me over to her house, showed me her storyboards and gave me all this great advice. She said, “Who cares what all these people think?” That coming from Jane, who's made all these amazing films and is such a pioneer, I was like going, “Well, yeah, of course – go hard or go home!” At that point, I was like, “OK, I have to be completely honest. There may have been other films about this subject matter, but this will be the film that tells you what it's like to live with it.” This is my first feature too, so I'm learning to write [laughs], and it was a process of going through from guarded to being open. I was working with someone as well, and he was also learning to write [features] during this time, so it was a really insane experience – you're never going to write your first film again, you're only a virgin once – and we were bumbling around, trying stuff out. It was an interesting journey and I've learned so much.

Filmmaker: How important was it to draw a line between your personal experiences and what you depicted in the film? For example, the protagonist is a teenage boy rather than a girl.

Down: It wasn't so much to draw the line. It wasn't making it different, it was just dramatically more interesting. If you think about it, if there was a girl doing the things that Thomas was doing, you couldn't have the bath scene, you couldn't have the scene where he beats the shit out of his brother and says “I hate you!,” and there'd be a lot of scenes that couldn't happen in the film. Also we still in a society that expects the sisters to help their mothers out, like the girl in the family is still today expected to help around the house more so than the sons. So by having Thomas as a son, you can explore Charlie's sexuality without it being icky, and you can have the fighting, you can have the physicality. It just sort of felt right, and it heightened the drama. I didn't want it to be, “This happened and then it was my birthday and then this happened...” It's the sum of things that happened to me over [my time] growing up from when I was like a young girl till I left home, so it's like 10 years of stuff put into a film.

Filmmaker: How much did you talk to your family to get their memories of this period and gain multiple perspectives on the events of your childhood?

Down: It was actually really important to keep speaking to the family, it wasn't just about me writing it all down. The writer also came to meet my family and spoke to my dad and my mom individually. There's a scene where the father says, “You're weak as piss if you can’t look after your own” – that is directly quoted from my dad [talking about] when he was doing tuck shop duty, helping out in the special school canteen. He met this beautiful blonde woman and she had this Down Syndrome child and her husband had left her straight after she'd given birth. He saw the child, said “That's your child” and walked out on her. My dad said, “How could you do that to anyone as beautiful as her and as beautiful as her child?” And then he said that line, and it was like, “Oh, straight in!” It was important to get that other perspective and for you to feel what it was like for the father and the mother and have that all fleshed out and see how each individual family member felt.

Filmmaker: In the film, I feel like you skillfully captured period detail and aspects of the story's Australian identity, but without making it too dominant and distracting from the accessibility and universality of the story.

Down: Well, all my short films are period films – I love history and things having a time and a place, but I think sometimes you can go for a period film and think, “Oh, I have to make it scream of the period.” Audiences know where they are. You don't have to cut to beehive hairdos and psychedelic dresses to say it's the 1960s, because not everybody wore them. I didn't want to go “This is the period,” I just wanted it to feel whatever it was like growing up, in its time and its place.

Filmmaker: It's funny that you said that all your shorts are period pieces, as Summer Angst is actually about a girl getting her first period.

Down: It's also set around the early 90s and I call that my period film about periods! A few people have now noticed that my signature [motif] is some sort of sanitary item or some reference to periods. They always find their way into my films. I absolutely love sitting in audiences waiting for the bit [in The Black Balloon] with the tampon because the squeals you hear from men and women of different ages. Old people lose it because it's something that they just don't expect and that always brings a smile. Even when we had a cast and crew screening, I could hear Toni Collette with her distinctive laugh just laughing. She just lost it and was like, “Oh, my God, I forgot how much I love that scene!” Add a sanitary item to any scene, it's going to make people laugh. [laughs]

Filmmaker: And yet menstrual humor is not very common.

Down: I find it funny because I've watched so many films and periods are experienced by 50% of the population – and also the other 50%, when they're in relationships, somehow have to deal with it, like “Sorry, hon, period...” – and I wonder why it's not in films more. Every guy and girl I know have great period stories, of springing a leak on a date or all this stuff, and I'm like “Why is this stuff not in movies?” In romantic comedies, where's the girl freaking out because she's bled over her skirt or it's the big night and it's her period and “Oh, do I tell him or do I pretend I'm not interested?” I find it insane that it's not used screenplays more.

Filmmaker: How was your transition from shorts to features?

Down: It really wasn't a jump, because I've made 10 short films and I've been waiting [laughs] so long to get a feature up. All my shorts were in preparation to do a feature, so it was a really seamless transition, and by the time you're shooting, you've already spent a year in preproduction or in pre-pre – casting, doing all the boards, doing all the meetings, getting all your photographs and everything ready – so it was actually great to get it done, to be on set and feel it all come together. Speaking to Jane Campion and Tony Ayres and other directors, they're all like, “It's all about keeping yourself healthy, like getting enough sleep,” so I really took their advice on board. I stocked up my cupboards full of soap, razors, tampons, aspirin, toilet paper, just so i didn't have to [deal with it during production]. I set up my rent, there was all this food, so I didn't have to do anything and just really looked after myself.

Filmmaker: Looking at your bio, it seems you've been consciously working towards your first feature. How far back can you trace your passion for film and directing?

Down: I remember as a very little girl, the first thing I ever wanted to do was be in films. So, of course, I was the little actress girl, putting on plays and stuff, but I always wrote the little skits I did. And I was very interested in photography and writing and costumes and makeup, so I'd be that little person wanting to do the makeup as well... I'd just be the one bossing everyone around in primary school and high school. I also did film and television in high school, and as soon the teacher would walk out the room, I'd start directing people. But I didn't realize what that was, I just thought I was a bossy boots. [laughs]

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

Down: That was when I was working in a clothing store when I was in uni. [laughs] Ever since I've been filmmaking, I've never wished that ever.

Filmmaker: What's the last dream you can remember having?

Down: Oh, God, I'm a big dream guru, actually. I'm always remembering my dreams and last night I was dreaming of the song, you know, [starts singing “No Myth” by Michael Penn], “if I were Romeo in black jeans / if I was Heathcliff, it's no myth / she's just looking for / someone to dance with.” In the dream I was singing that song, and I was with someone, but not someone I know.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Down: It was either E.T. or Annie – I can't remember which one came first. I think it would be Annie. It was just such an amazing experience because I saw it with my nana and she took me along to “the pictures” – you know how your nana calls it “the pictures?” – and I think I even got dressed up to go to the cinema, like little patent shoes or a dress.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 12/05/2008 06:10:00 PM Comments (0)