Still in her twenties, documentarian Astra Taylor has already brought a philosophical bent to non-fiction filmmaking and is looking to push the form in new and exciting directions. Taylor was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in 1979 and grew up in Athens, Georgia. She studied first at the University of Georgia and then got an MA in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 2001, she co-produced and co-directed the 45-minute documentary Miracle Tree: Moringa Oleifera, about infant malnutrition in Senegal, and the following year acted as associate producer on another doc, Allison Maclean's Persons of Interest (2004), which looked at the treatment of Arabs and Muslims following the 9/11 attacks. Taylor made her feature debut with Žižek!, a portrait of Slavoj Žižek, the inimitable “Elvis of cultural theory;” the film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2005 and was released in the U.S. by Zeitgeist later the same year to glowing reviews. Taylor, who is married to Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Mangum, currently runs Hidden Driver Productions with fellow filmmaker Laura Hanna.

With her sophomore feature, Examined Life, Taylor once again brings together her two main passions: film and philosophy. The title is derived from a quote by Socrates (who deemed that “the unexamined life is not worth living”), and over the course of the film Taylor introduces us to eight contemporary philosophers who delve into the issues and problems of the modern world. Though Cornel West talks to Taylor as they drive around New York, the other seven participants – Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Judith Butler, Sunaura Taylor and Žižek – hold forth on foot, as Taylor conceived the film as “philosophers on walks.” Going against the norm of “serious” documentaries tending to be depressing, Taylor here creates a film of substance that is nevertheless light on its feet. Neither the walking philosophers nor their conversations stop for a moment during Examined Life, so the result is physically and mentally energetic piece of filmmaking. And as the ideas in Taylor's film are engaging and thought-provoking without being overly complex, we are left invigorated rather than bamboozled.

Filmmaker spoke to Taylor about the challenges of making philosophy cinematic, following in Ari Folman's footsteps at Hot Docs, and why she always skips the previews at movies.



Filmmaker: How long have you been interested in or preoccupied with philosophy?

Taylor: Well, I've been interested in philosophy for many years. One of the definitions of philosophy that I like comes from Isiah Berlin and he said that philosophers are people who persist in asking childish questions, questions that often have no answer and that people often just want to put to the side. I think I got interested in philosophical thought as a kid. I read a copy of Peter Singer's Animal Liberation when I was 12 years old, so I've had a longstanding interest in this subject matter. I was always also interested in art and in activism, and documentary film is the perfect vehicle for me to mix all of these interests. The thing that attracts me most about philosophy and filmmaking is that both those disciplines are concerned with shifting perception, shifting the way you see a problem when you have a new theory – it's illuminating, you suddenly see the world in a new way. And going to a really good documentary film can have the same effect: your whole sense of the world is different.

Filmmaker: Did Examined Life evolve directly out of Žižek!?

Taylor: Yeah, definitely. Even when I was editing Žižek!, I had this strong desire to do another film about philosophy and to do an ensemble piece. I felt that it was such a pleasurable experience and the whole challenge of communicating abstract ideas in a visual format really compelled me. So when I was wrapping that film up, I was already planting seeds and writing proposals for what would become Examined Life, but it's interesting because right now I don't have that sense that a strictly philosophical film is on the horizon for me. I don't have the same desire to tackle it again and I feel like Examined Life is the culmination of approaching philosophy.

Filmmaker: How did you pitch the film to people?

Taylor: “Philosophers on walks.” That was it. I wrote a proposal for Examined Life, but I actually put it in the drawer in this self-defeatist way because I assumed that nobody would be interested in financing such a film. But then I met Ron Mann, a documentary filmmaker based in Toronto and an incredible guy, who mentioned he'd had a longstanding interest in doing an ensemble piece about philosophy, because he's got a history of doing these anthology films, like Poetry in Motion, on poets, and Imagine the Sound, about jazz. He'd seen Žižek! and we instantaneously had a very good rapport, so I got the proposal out of the drawer showed him what I was thinking about. Once I met Ron, everything came together with this amazing ease and enthusiasm. In fact, my producers believed in the film more than I did at first, because I wasn't quite sure I could pull it off. However, I did pitch the film at the Hot Docs forum, and – in my opinion – it went over like a lead weight. The people around the table, from one country after the other, told me, “The people of my nation do not want to see this movie. There's no audience for this. We wouldn't know how to market it or show it on television.”

Filmmaker: It's funny, I recently spoke to Ari Folman, the director of Waltz With Bashir, and he said that he had exactly the same experience at Hot Docs.

Taylor: It was really funny because it was in front of 500 people and 50 commissioning editors, and for the whole week these people in the audience – a lot of whom are filmmakers, so were at least sympathetic to me – would come and pat me on the shoulder and say, “Oh, philosophy girl, that was really painful... Good luck.” [laughs]

Filmmaker: How clear was your vision for the film? Did you have an idea how everything would cohere?

Taylor: The people I sent the proposal to had pretty strict requirements, so I ended up making a really in-depth 40-page proposal and was really challenged to create a vision and articulate it on the page. I thought that it was just jumping through hoops, but it was actually so helpful and it's kind of remarkable how the final product is so close to what I had on the page. I knew that I wanted to have some kind of thread or walk that recurred through the project and someone who served as narrator (or anti-narrator), but I didn't know that that would be Cornel West, that he would play that role. And then the focus on meaning and ethics, and the emphasis on what I would call the brokenness of the world and discarded populations and unfinished theories and social justice and inequity – all that was on the page, but I couldn't have imagined really how it would manifest itself. So in one sense my vision was quite clear but in another sense it was a total surprise when I got into the editing room and actually had to figure it out.

Filmmaker: And what about your conception of the visual style?

Taylor: I really wanted there to be a visual diversity and I wanted each section to feel like a short film that fit a person's individual energy, the theme they were talking about. [Cornel West in] the car diverged from the whole walking motif, but it's a way of updating the whole peripatetic motif: this is how we move through space in 2009. And the accelerated stop and start of me driving him around Manhattan really fits with his presentation. Also, I wanted to create the sense that the viewer was on the walks and that there was space for them to insert themselves so it would almost feel like a conversation, even if it was actually a monologue. My biggest thing was not wanting it to feel like a lecture that happens to be moving.

Filmmaker: Was the film conceived as a series of monologues or of conversations? We don't hear much of you at all but it feels very conversational.

Taylor: The thing is that they all are conversations: my style of interviewing is basically to have a conversation, so I had questions unique to each subject based on months of reading and research and thinking about how it would all tie together. But then, we would keep talking and just see where it was going. I would be walking backwards, typically speaking to them, so it feels like conversations because that's what they are, and I edited myself out as much as I could.

Filmmaker: The footage is extremely dialogue-heavy, so did you edit at all on paper?

Taylor: I experimented with that, and did that more than I did in the past. Mainly, it was because I had the luxury of having transcribers, whereas with Žižek! I developed my own crazy Žižek shorthand and my own bizarre logging system. I did do some paper editing, but because I'd already conceived the themes in advance, it was first a matter of instinct – picking out the great moments – and then building around them. One thing that did surprise me in the editing room was the lack of space for digression. I couldn't lose momentum. It's all moving so fast and the arguments are coming at such high speed that I wasn't able to go as off-topic as I imagined I would be. They all stay on-message [in the film] more than they did in real life.

Filmmaker: Avital Ronnell comments that she will only have 10 minutes in the final film. Did you tell everyone in advance about this? And do you feel it was helpful to do so?

Taylor: Yes. She did a great job of making it into a joke, but basically when I proposed this project to them, I said, “It's a series of walks, each person will get 10 minutes, and you won't get intercut with anyone else, so I'm not going to play your comments off someone else's You will have your own coherent universe, but we have to speak in a way that's free of jargon and directly relates to the audience's experiences and you'll have 10 minutes to do it.” People were very enthusiastic.

Filmmaker: One of the analogies I was thinking about for the film was that of a concert film, and it struck me that there's a certain resonance with films like The Last Waltz, which also showcases a series of great, virtuosic performances.

Taylor: Oh yeah, that's neat. It's interesting because The Last Waltz was the one film the producer from my previous film, Žižek!, made me watch. I do like the theatricality and formality of that film a lot. These walks in Examined Life are quite naturalistic but, obviously, they're a total spectacle and the subjects speak to the camera, so I really liked playing with that. I don't have any desire to portray something that seems authentic – in the sense of “Oh, they've forgotten the camera and now they're being themselves” – and showing these people at home having a sandwich. That, to me, isn't nearly as compelling as them staring into the camera and saying, “This is what I believe. This is my truth. This is where my conviction lies. This is me.” To me, that's far more authentic, even though obviously there's a six-person film crew and they're completely aware that they're being filmed. They were all very enthusiastic about the element of spectacle, that was something they all embraced readily. I expected that from Žižek, because I'd worked with him before and he has a great love of cinema, but everyone else shared this enthusiasm so that was a real pleasant surprise.

Filmmaker: The first films you were involved with, Miracle Tree and Persons of Interest, were both about global social issues, and then you shifted towards philosophy for your next two. Was there a particular reason for this?

Taylor: In 2001, when I was 21, I dropped out of grad school. I was doing a humanities based curriculum, and I felt this calling to do something more hands-on, a more direct to call attention to social injustice, so filmmaking seemed like a perfect forum for that. I think after my experience in West Africa dealing with malnutrition and then associate producing Persons of Interest, where my job was basically convincing people who were in very precarious positions to appear on screen, people who were risking a lot, I had an epiphany about the futility of documentary filmmaking as a direct step towards social change. But that liberated me to focus on film for its own sake, so it made sense for me to mix philosophy with cinema since those were the two things I really enjoy. Also, I think there's a shortage of films that are cerebral but entertaining. Seriousness is equated with sadness or staring into the heart of darkness, but there's space for a film of substance that leaves you enthused and maybe impassioned and emboldened. I'm not saying Examined Life totally does that, but that's the sort of emotion I'd like people to leave the theater with, to leave energized and elevated.

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

Taylor: I watched Blindsight, which is a great documentary by Lucy Walker, and the protagonist is such an inspiring, powerful woman that I actually just felt like I was wasting my life in isolation and I should just go and follow her example. But the real answer is that this is such a fucking privilege to be able to make a film and have it open in New York. At this point, I'm just awash in gratitude that I'm getting to do this work. So it would be hard for me to wish I was doing something else right now.

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

Taylor: No, because of the stupid advertisements. Last time I went early and saw the previews, they played some heavy metal music video for joining the army and I nearly killed myself. So I try to get there as late as possible without missing any of the film.

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

Taylor: I think that would be a deadly idea. I like things to be humble and organic and challenging, so the idea of having a limitless budget and access to anybody on the earth sounds terrifying and completely unappealing. I enjoy scrounging for things at thrift stores and having to make do with what I can find. The whole creative process is breaking boundaries and figuring out how to integrate the mess around you and give it form.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 2/25/2009 01:20:00 AM Comments (1)

Good things can always be salvaged from even the worst of circumstances, and that has seldom been more true than in the case of documentarian Morgan Dews. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1968 after his mother had run away from a troubled family situation to get married. He grew up oblivious to the difficult circumstances from which his mother had escaped, and then attended Rutgers University, where he studied History, graduating in 1990. Subsequently, he decamped to Spain where he became active in numerous and wide-ranging creative pursuits: he founded the arts magazine Snack and the performance space The Banana Factory, was a member of the electronica band Easy (for whom he also directed music videos), and worked in multiple capacities on commercials. In addition, he also acted, wrote poetry, journalism and short stories, and created installations, for which he won the Moebius Interactive Art Prize. In 2005, after Dews moved back to the U.S., his short film Elke's Visit premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Dews' debut feature, Must Read After My Death, is an intensely personal film and joins a growing subgenre of documentaries which reveal the hidden stories of supposedly normal, happy families. Following the death of his grandmother Allis in 2001, Dews discovered that she had left behind a stash of audio tapes, plus notebooks and home movies, which documented in shocking detail the relationship between Allis and Dews' grandfather Charley, and the devastating effect it had on the whole family. Must Read After My Death attempts the difficult task of creating a narrative from the hundreds of hours of audio tapes, with photographs and home movies providing a visual counterpoint; there are no voice-overs or talking head interviews, and Dews uses just a handful of captions. The result is a spare, taut piece of filmmaking which is utterly gripping throughout, and remarkably moving given the restrictions of its form. Despite his personal ties to the film's subjects, Dews commendably absents himself from proceedings, and neither sentimentalizes their situation nor holds back from depicting the tough truths of what transpired.

Filmmaker spoke to Dews about the discovery of this dark period of his family history, how he approached making such a personal film, and his love of the original Miracle on 34th Street.



Filmmaker: In a way, this film began with the death of your grandmother Allis, who you were very close with.

Dews: Yes, we were kind of each other's favorite. I was her first grandson and we were really close. I spent a couple of summers with her, I traveled in Europe with her when I was 17, and I saw quite a bit of her and talked to her quite a bit. We could talk about anything. So when she died, I actually got all the [family home movies] that I made the film out of. I had grown up playing with them, using the projector that Charley had, which still works to this day. It was one of these chain-driven old Bell and Howells that almost never break. I actually grew up watching them because as nobody would ever talk about that period of family life, it was sort of the only way I had of having any connection with that. It's great to see your parents as children, your grandparents as adults. It's a kind of magical time machine, as a kid.

Filmmaker: It was the audio tapes that were real revelation, though.

Dews: I found out about the [audio] tapes by chance. I was with my uncle's ex-wife and we were talking and she just asked very off-hand if I was using these audio tapes. I said, “What are you talking about?” She said, “Oh, my God, there are these audio tapes. You must know about them. Allis would drive around in the car talking and turn [the recorder] on surreptitiously in the dining room and make these crazy tapes.” So I called my family and said, “Hey, is that box of tapes what she's talking about?” I had suspected that those were just jazz recordings. So I got them all and I just put them onto my computer over Thanksgiving week – all 50 hours. I didn't listen to them, just put them on and then I started listening once I got home. Then I realized it was a very special private archive that could be a really amazing film.

Filmmaker: Do you think that it was Allis' intention to have this information widely disseminated, at least within the family?

Dews: I didn't know at the beginning. I spent two years working on the film until I found the file [marked “Must Read After My Death”] which the film is named after. I was talking to my family every week, talking to everybody about what I was doing and begging them for more information. Finally, I got in touch with Allis' dear friend and secretary of 25 years. I asked her, “Do you have any more information?” and she said, “I don't have any more films or tapes, but there is this file. I think your mom or one of your uncles has it. It was that thing they were supposed to read after she died.” It makes for really miserable reading. It's worse than the tapes because it's all very grim. In a way, it's like a case file from a Hoover-era federal case against somebody. “7 a.m.: Woke up, made eggs. 7:45 Charley said this...” She had spent the last 30 years of her life tidying up and organizing things, so it was certainly not an accident that [these materials] were still around.

Filmmaker: What was the dynamic within the family in response to you making this film and making this story public?

Dews: First of all, I made copies of the tapes for everybody, but nobody wanted to listen to anything. Then I said, “This is amazing, I'm going to make a film out of this and I need you guys to sign releases and give your permission. Or not, if you decide that's OK.” All of them said, “No, we're not going to sign the release. But you can make the film, and if we're OK with it then that will be fine.” They said to me, “Look, you've got to understand this is the worst moments of the worst decade of our lives and we don't even know what's in there because we can't even bear to even listen to it. And we don't know w hat you're going to do with it. As much as we love you, we're just not ready for that. So go ahead and make the film and then we'll say if it's OK or not.”

Filmmaker: Did the need to make something that would be acceptable to your family inhibit you creatively while making the film?

Dews: I don't think so. I think I was very true to the story, but also it made me work really hard to include my family in every step that I made, to keep them up to date with what I was thinking about, with what I was using, so that they weren't going to be so shocked when they saw it. Looking at it now, there's a lot of more explicit stuff about the infidelity that I just didn't feel that it added to the story. It was just a question of adding the right amount of everything, so I don't think there's anything I did that I would go back on.

Filmmaker: If this had been someone else's family history you'd been telling, would you have approached it differently?

Dews: My modus operandi was to try and pretend that it was a different family, that it was someone else's stuff that I had found and that I randomly had some kind of opportunity to convince the family to let me use it. Obviously, you're in a position where you would never get access to this material if it wasn't yours – nobody would ever allow you to listen to it much less publicize it if it wasn't yours – but you have to treat it as if they're just characters in a movie if you're going to make a movie. Otherwise you'd make to crazy paean to the thing that you love about your family, and I really didn't want to do that, so I was just trying to imagine it was just fictional characters. I was trying to tell their story and do away with the stories that I might have wanted to tell about my family because my voice wasn't as compelling as these voices from beyond the grave.

Filmmaker: Your voice is, in fact, totally absent from the film. Conventionally, we would have a director's voice-over, on-camera investigation, talking head interviews with the family, etc.

Dews: I tried some of that. I interviewed my mom, and then I looked at the tapes and it was so much less powerful than the actual [experience that] puts you in the living room that really works about the film. So I started rejecting that, and when I first started pitching it to television (which was probably a big mistake), people were after me, [saying] “This is your story, it's about you finding it, it's about how this affects you and your relationship with your family.” I just thought, “Guys, you don't know what I have in this box.” That could have been a thing, but I just felt that when you have this first-hand material of these moments unfolding at the time, you can construct a very dramatic narrative that just puts the viewer in the space. And then instead of telling stories about it, you're dramatically in these scenes. It just seems much more powerful to do it that way.

Filmmaker: The film is incredibly compelling because it's almost like a recreation of the experience you had of listening to these audio tapes for the first time.

Dews: That's exactly what I was thinking: “This is such an amazing experience I'm going through – why not provide that for people?” I'm now having fun with the DVD extras because I'm going to be able to put more raw material in there and leave tapes and films so that people can really see it unadulterated. I really was so fascinated by that experience of putting together that narrative, but also a million other narratives that I came across. It was just so compelling and fascinating being there and trying to piece things together, trying to figure out what it means. It's like a mystery.

Filmmaker: In theory, it seems impossible that this film should work, as it functions in this very narrow, minimal scope and is very claustrophobic, yet it is never anything but completely gripping. How long did it take to hone the film in the editing room?

Dews: It was two and a half years of every day looking at this stuff. I did a lot of weird things: I watched Grizzly Man with the sound off and took notes on the structure of it, I bought a Syd Field basic screenwriting book just to see how the three act dramatic structure works, and a lot of the cues came from the fact that Allis and everyone else in family tends to speak continually forever without a single let-up. I think that way people can't get away – you grab them and you don't even shut up. I heard that in these tapes and that sort of breathlessness seemed to work. I agonized over everything. I was very concerned that people would get tired of that if I didn't squeeze it all out in one breath. And it seems to work, so I will say that it's just a lot of trial and error and a lot of testing.

Filmmaker: The soundtracks holds everything together really well and, like the best soundtracks, is much more subliminal rather than noticeable.

Dews: Honestly, I had a second chance to do [the soundtrack] when Gigantic Releasing came on board. I started working with an aggressive electronic soundtrack, moody, melancholic bloopy stuff, and it really was right up in your face. Then I took it to festivals with that soundtrack – and argued with audiences about it continually. In Amsterdam, somebody said, “It's an amazing film but I just hated the music.” I said, “Well, how many of you hated the music?” and half the people raised their hands. I said, “Well, how many of you really liked the music?” and ten people raised their hands. I didn't know what to do and finally said, “Look, I don't have the money to do it again, so I won't. Screw it.” And then when Gigantic came on, they gave me the chance to do it with Paul Hogan, who's in this amazing band called Frances. It's much more appropriate, this neo-folk, as at the time this is happening my uncles were hanging out in cafes listening to and playing folk music. In a way, my whole process is trying things out, learning from my mistakes.

Filmmaker: There's a documentary subgenre that's developed of the family exposé, with films like Capturing the Friedmans and 51 Birch Street. Did you watch those films at all and pay attention to how they tackled similar territory?

Dews: It's funny, I totally did. I saw Tarnation, Capturing the Friedmans, and 51 Birch Street in the theater as soon as they came out. But I'd already become very stubborn about my ideas, so each time I walked out very disappointed there was nothing I could really steal from these films. I took this to the Sundance Producers Conference in 2006 and I met somebody there who said, “This is going to become a whole new genre,” and he was calling it “the accidental documentary,” where somebody just records oodles of footage, puts it in a box and doesn't worry about. But then later, further down the road, somebody picks that up. I think it's an exploding phenomenon. Some people have their video cameras running when crazy shit is going on and do it almost as a defense mechanism to isolate themselves against this trauma.

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

Dews: Oh, nothing. Nothing at all. If you got me next week, I might say something different. [laughs] Maybe five or ten years it was different, but now I can look back and say I've premiered at a top festival, have a really great friends, been in love three or four times. What else do you want? It's a good run so far.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Dews: I remember being a child and being excited every year that Miracle on 34th Street would be playing. I would go with that one, though I'm sure it'd not true. I have such a terrible memory.

Filmmaker: Is Hollywood going in the right direction?

Dews: I think it's always going in the right direction: every direction at once. I love Hollywood films, I really do. I think action films are maybe my favorite genre if they're done right. When I go to the cinema, I go to buy popcorn, though the last film I saw was Frozen River. But that was only because Coraline was sold out. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 2/20/2009 10:35:00 AM Comments (0)

German writer-director Tom Tykwer, arguably one of the most exciting auteurs in world cinema, has been immersed in movies since he was a child and always seemed destined to become a director. Born in the town of Wuppertal in 1965, by the age of 11 Tykwer had picked up a Super 8 camera and begun making films. At the age of 14, he got a job at Cinema, the local arthouse theater, where he would stay after hours, repeatedly watching Blade Runner. After completing his compulsory national service in Frankfurt, Tykwer spent 10 years working at a Berlin movie theater as a projectionist and then a programmer. He made his first short, Because, in 1990, and his first feature, the dark psychological drama Deadly Maria, three years later. In 1997, he attracted attention with Winter Sleepers, about the repercussions of a car crash in a small skiing town, and then had a massive hit with the kinetic Run, Lola, Run, whose stylish mix of sensory barrage and narrative audacity made Tykwer an international star. He followed up with the offbeat arthouse romance The Princess and the Warrior (2000) and then brought another unconventional love story, Heaven (2003), with a script by the late Krzysztof Kieślowski, to the big screen. In 2006, Tykwer directed a screen adaptation of Patrick Süskind's novel Perfume, about a murderous perfumer in search of the perfect scent, a work which had previously been deemed unfilmable. In addition writing and directing, Tykwer has also scored all of his films.

Tykwer's movies have always had thriller elements but, as he puts it, he always got distracted by other aspects. All along, though, he planned to make a straight thriller, and it finally has materialized in the shape of The International. With a script by Eric Singer, the film centers on the obsessive quest of Interpol agent Lou Salinger (Clive Owen) to take down the International Bank of Business and Credit, a shadowy power player in the global financial market. However, as Salinger and Manhattan Assistant D.A. Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) close in on the truth behind the organization's malicious dealings, they find that anyone who helps them is instantly “liquidated.” The International is a smart, classy thriller that harks back to the paranoia of Pakula movie's of the 70s but also has a certain post-Bourne hardness and cynicism. Tykwer clearly enjoys himself as he focuses on the mechanics of the genre and, while the movie is thoroughly entertaining throughout, the shootout sequence in the Guggenheim Museum is a truly masterful action set piece that takes The International to a another level.

Filmmaker spoke to Tykwer about working from another writer's script, the importance of his “family” of collaborators, and the joys of curating and then destroying the Guggenheim.



Filmmaker: What first attracted you to this project?

Tykwer: Well, I got involved in this over six years ago. Funnily enough, I did this full-on, big really demanding movie in between and all the way along I was continuing to develop this. When I read one of the very early drafts in early 2003 by Eric Singer, I think I was mostly attracted to the fact that here was a concept for what for could ultimately be a really exciting thriller. I had not done a genre movie, but I was always really attracted to trying to find one. I thought the dialogue was intelligent, really convincing and outstandingly well-carved out in this film, and there were really, really good ideas for what could ultimately become some spectacular set pieces, which I've always wanted to direct. So it was an arrangement of ideas that attracted me and, of course, one of the central ones was a political paranoia thriller where the system that the investigators are fighting is not anymore the idea of the world of secret services or the CIA or “The Company” or whatever, it is global finance and private banking firms and the corrupt elements within that system.

Filmmaker: With the exception of Heaven, this is the only film you've made which you haven't written yourself. How different does not being the writer make your approach as director?

Tykwer: I guess the reason it took so long is because I have to slip under the skin of the script, to make it my own in a very similar mode to when I write it myself. I also need to be really close to the writer and feel like it's a collaboration on every level, and that was just the case with Eric. He's a film maniac like me and he's quite obsessive about his work. He's fun to be with and we spent enormous amounts of time together, so I felt really part of the creation process. He's the writer, though. There's no doubt about that. At the same time, I think I really needed the script to transform itself into something that I really believed could be that somewhat defining thriller of our time. I didn't want to deliver a movie that feels like any other movie, and that takes time when you take on a thriller, because there's so much detail and logic that you have to really care for.

Filmmaker: What particularly did you feel you could bring to the thriller genre? Perfume and Run Lola Run have both had thriller elements in them already, without being thrillers.

Tykwer: I know. The Princess and the Warrior, Heaven, they all actually have. This is what I mean: it's been lurking around the corner in every single of my movies and I always feel like I've been chickening out, because I have too much respect for the real thriller. But it also had to do with the fact that I was obviously obsessed with all kinds of other issues and ended up making these hybrids where there are genres intertwining. I said, “Ultimately, I need to find something where it's kind of straightforward going full-on into this genre and it doesn't get lost in all the other interesting things you can make films about.” This was the first time that I ran into a subject and to a concept to a film that allowed this.

Filmmaker: The film's subject, namely the corruption of the banking system, is incredibly resonant with the current global financial crisis.

Tykwer: Of course. It's really about the potential for criminal or corrupt-spirited minds within the system and how much it offers them the opportunity to act outside of certain moral terms. And that's an old problem, a problem we've had for decades. Even the collapse of this bubble that the system has driven itself into is something that has been predicted forever. I think if there's any upside to this crisis – and the crisis itself is awful – it might be that we're much more aware of the complexities and intricacies of global finance nowadays. It has exponentially grown our knowledge of it just because of this massive shock that we're all under. Suddenly we really want to understand what's going on, we really need to understand what's going on because we're protecting ourselves.

Filmmaker: You've said that you're a movie maniac, so what were you influences for this film? You talked about paranoia and the thrillers of the 70s come to mind, especially those of Alan J. Pakula.

Tykwer: Pakula obviously is probably the quintessential filmmaker for what we would call the paranoia drama. Even though it's not so obviously politically related, even a film like Klute has that vibe where there's an uncertainty. There's a feeling that Jane Fonda's being looked at, there's companies and places that look so starkly cold and corporate, and there's human beings at the center of it that are just victims with no knowledge. That is the concept that drives all these movies, The Parallax View, All the President's Men, and I just believe that these films have some qualities that make them kind of timeless. You see All the President's Men today, and it's an amazing film because it's so intense and it takes the audience as serious partners in understanding and investigating this case. And there's other films like The Conversation, which is one of my favorites of Coppola. A very, very important film for me in particular relation to The International was Marathon Man, again more a film that focuses on the thriller than the paranoia, but still there's a company that's called “The Company” that works beyond the CIA or within the CIA – you don't really understand – and it all represents this kind of fear system that people obviously found a lot of truth in. It represented a contemporary fear, but it's now transformed into global economy representing this, much more our daily life being controlled by them than by the secret services. But I must insist that it's been a European film generation that we were relating to as much as an American, as there were filmmakers in the 70s like Francesco Rosi and a French director called Henri Verneuil who really did contribute very much to this genre and who had a strong influence on the filmmaking here.

Filmmaker: You shot the film mostly in Germany, and there's a fair amount of German money in the film so do you view this as being a German film or a Hollywood film?

Tykwer: It's a Hollywood film because it's a studio picture. I mean, 90% of the budget comes from Sony. There's some support from the German funding [bodies], which just happens when you spend that much money in Germany. And, of course, it gives me the opportunity to really work within my filmmaking system that I have individually developed to create a very particular style and to work within that group that I believe is inextricable from me. I don't actually exist as a filmmaker without the cinematographer Frank Griebe or the production designer Uli Hanisch or the editor Mathilde Bonnefoy, or the composers that I always work with. It's a very close family that creates these movies that try to be very identifiable in their language. If a studio like Sony approaches you, they know this is something that supports what they are looking for, because they are looking for a particular vision from somebody like me. They wouldn't want me to deliver something that at the end is not stylish or identifiable.

Filmmaker: Your last couple of films have been studio pictures, so do you see yourself now as a Hollywood director?

Tykwer: I don't really know what that is. I mean, I'm a filmmaker with a particular vision and a family of creative partners that I stick with and honestly I don't really care where the money comes from as long as I feel protected by the people who give it to me. And I was very protected in this case. I don't have any of the usual stories that you hear from filmmakers when they get involved with a studio. There's not a single moment in the film that I had to compromise on because they wanted something else than I did. I think from the start they knew what they were looking for and as long as they felt I was doing my best to deliver the particular vision that I'm able to create, they were happy.

Filmmaker: I've heard that there were some reshoots to add more action scenes to the film, though. Is that right?

Tykwer: I don't know where that came from, no. That's totally strange information that I've never heard about. I mean, more action – excuse me?! If you look at the script, which probably isn't so difficult to get, every second of action in the film is in the script. It hasn't been redone. Eric told me about [the reshoot stories]; he said, “It's so strange.” It's always a bit upsetting, but just because it's on the net everybody gets to read it.

Filmmaker: We must talk about the Guggenheim sequence because it's really one of the great action set pieces in recent memory. How long did it take to first orchestrate and then shoot?

Tykwer: Well, it's great to hear that, because it took quite a lot of work. There were times when we said, “Why do we still call this movie The International? We should just call it The Guggenheim – we're spending such an incredible amount of time just prepping this one sequence.” It had to do with a very specific architectural space and it's very individual demands. You can't really call the people who run the Guggenheim, “OK, we need to close down your place for two months and then practically tear it apart...” They wouldn't have enjoyed that. Luckily, they were super inviting and very curious about our film and very open minded about how they could support us. Ultimately, we ended up shooting a few days in the real one and then built an entire set that was a one-to-one reproduction of the interior space and shot there for nearly six weeks for a sequence that is something like 13 minutes. It's a little outrageous in the proportion, but when you see the sequence you probably know why it took us so long, because there was a lot of logistic demands involved.

Filmmaker: One of the things that intrigued me about that sequence was the art that you have in the Guggenheim. Did you replicate all the pieces from the Guggenheim for your fake Guggenheim?

Tykwer: No, no, this is the fun part about my job: I not only get to behave like an architect and a musician, in this case, one of the biggest fun elements of it was that I could become the curator of the Guggenheim museum. [laughs] So when we investigated the right choice [of art] to put in that museum for our film, the more I thought about it the more I thought about the fact that the movie is very much about a guy trying to hunt down a system that is very much virtual and not really there, that it's very difficult to get hold of these actual characters that are committing these crimes that they seem to be not really existent. They have a virtual presence. I ended up realizing that it would be really fascinating to work with video art, and also because of our wish to make the film as contemporary as it gets. This created a million new problems because you have light issues – you have to light a place and still be able to have enough light to light your characters but at the same time not too much light to blind all these screens of projections and stuff. So it was insanely complicated, also because shot partly here and had to do the installations here where the video rate is a different one than in Europe: you've got 25 to 30 frames difference, which gives a different reaction inside the camera and it's a flicker problem that you have to solve. It's been super complex mathematically. Ultimately, I was just insisting because I thought the idea was so good, but it brought some people to the verge of a nervous breakdown ...

Filmmaker: Perfume was often described as an unfilmable novel, and your next project, a version of David Mitchell's structurally complex Cloud Atlas, also seems inherently challenging to adapt for the screen. What attracts you to projects like these?

Tykwer: Just the fact that they are such insane challenges. I can't really attach myself to a film where I don't feel it's got the potential of really bringing cinema's language forward, and when you really have to confront yourself with questions of style and storytelling that have probably never been touched before. There is something insane about the work that we're doing: making a movie is such an extreme experience, it just has to be worth it. You sometimes blow your private life and all your social existence so totally to shrapnel, it just needs to be worth it, I guess. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Which phrase best describes your philosophy on life?

Tykwer: [laughs] I have no idea. I don't believe you can sum up my philosophy of life in one phrase. I just don't want it to be summed up in one phrase. [laughs]

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

Tykwer: Luckily, I've not run into that situation yet. It's really true.

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

Tykwer: I had one in my mind recently. Posthumously, Hitchcock. Obviously. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 2/13/2009 10:14:00 PM Comments (0)

German writer-director Veit Helmer is a true oddity, a creative mind whose films might well have been unearthed from a time capsule buried during the era of silent comedy. Born in Hanover in 1968, Helmer spent much of his childhood watching Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd and by the age of 14 had already made his first film. He studied at Munich's School of Television and Film, and made quirky shorts throughout his time there, such as the highly inventive Surprise! (1995). When Wim Wenders, a professor of his, decided to make a film based on one of his students' screenplays, he chose Helmer's submission. The resulting film, A Trick of the Light, playfully combined documentary and fiction and displayed the retro visual style which has become Helmer's trademark. In 1999, Helmer made his feature debut with Tuvalu, a festival hit about a crumbling bathhouse which was almost dialogue-free, was shot in color and black-and white, and tonally recalled both vintage silent comedies and the films of Jeunet and Caro. In 2003, Helmer followed it up with the much more conventional Gate to Heaven, a romantic comedy about illegal immigrants in Germany set in the present day.

Helmer admits that Gate to Heaven was an ill-advised attempt to prove he could make a “normal” film, but fortunately with his third feature he is well and truly back in his comfort zone. Inspired by a newspaper story Helmer read some years ago, Absurdistan is about a remote village where the women go on strike and refuse to have sex with their husbands until the pipe providing water to the village is repaired. Set against this Lysistrata-esque battle of the sexes is the central narrative, the story of Aya (Kristyna Malérová) and Temelko (Max Mauff), young lovers whose predestined union is threatened by the village rift. As with Tuvalu, here Helmer opts for visual storytelling over dialogue and uses both old-fashioned visual styling and silent comic routines. Though the story is straightforward, Helmer tells it with charm, imagination and gentle humor, creating a sweet and, yes, absurdist comedy that blends old and new in just the right way.

Filmmaker spoke to Helmer about his retro tastes, the international nature of his filmmaking, and the dangers of not recognizing Glenn Close.



Filmmaker: When and how did you get the idea for Absurdistan?

Helmer: I read a newspaper clip in 2001 about a village in Turkey where the women actually went on strike, saying to their husbands that if they didn't fix the water pipe they would not allow them to enter the bedroom. When I read that, I immediately knew not only that I was going to make a film about it but also I knew very much what the film should be about. It would be able a couple against the village, rather than men against women or women against men.

Filmmaker: Did you immediately also have a clear visual idea of the film in your head?

Helmer: I think so, but let's say the tone or the mood. I let myself be influenced a lot by locations and for this film it took me two years to find the appropriate village. I hoped very much that the village where the actual strike took place could be the village for shooting the film, but that was completely disappointing and also all other villages in Turkey which I visited could not become the right setting for the film, for different reasons. At the beginning, I felt it was really simple: I just need a little village in the desert. But the more I was looking, it turned out I had really specific ideas: that the houses should be very close to each other, that there should be a kind of urbanity in the village (it's not a village of peasants). I wanted some shops, I wanted that people should have social places where they could meet each other. I went around all countries in southern Europe, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and Central Asia until people then recommended I go to Azerbaijan, where I found two villages which I combined to make that place.

Filmmaker: How did you progress once you’d found your locations?

Helmer: I went there with my writer, my art director and my cameraman and we were then enriching the screenplay with more places that we saw. We eliminated some stuff from the screenplay that was weaker than places that we actually found in the town. It was a little small town that we found, but it was a rich village and had a 4,000-year-old history. We made a documentary about the making of the film and you can see some of the things I had to do to make the film happen, because that village really was nowhere. Also Azerbaijan is also not a country where they know how to make movies, so what I did after all the location scouting is I trained the film students in the capital of Baku to work with film, because all they do at the moment is to work on video. So two years before I started making the film, I started educating assistants for my crew. I could have brought all my crew from outside, but as the subject was very sensitive for a Muslim country I needed local help to make the villagers trust me that what I was doing was not a porn movie - and that was what they had always suspected! It was really funny because finally I needed also some nude scenes and then that was always a difficult communication: "Yes, we're doing nude scenes but it is not a porn movie." It's very difficult for people who don't know Western cinema or independent cinema.

Filmmaker: Location seems to really drive the inspiration for your work, whether it's the house in Surprise!, the bathhouse in Tuvalu, the airport in Gate of Heaven or now the village in Absurdistan.

Helmer: I would say that I really tend to conceptualize as much as possible, that I really go with some kind of preconceived vision, but then, on the other hand, I totally believe in the moment of shooting. I think that a director should let things happen so when the day of shooting comes and the actors and the costumes come to the locations, I really don't try to push that everybody delivers my two-dimensional prefabricated thinking. I want life to surprise me. I'm not a director who tells the actors how to move. I take a very long time to choose the people I'm collaborating with, and then I tend to trust them. For instance, actors usually know better what their characters should do. So even if my films don't follow the laws of realism, let's say, I still believe in the credibility of human behavior. I've also started to do documentaries, which really helped me to be more open to incorporate life as it happens in my life.

Filmmaker: You briefly mentioned cultural differences before, but what was the experience like of shooting in Azerbaijan?

Helmer: Azerbaijan is a Muslim country, less strict than Iran but maybe more like Turkey. I prepared myself very well, I wrote in the contracts of all the people coming from other countries that the men shouldn't look at the girls in the village, the women should dress appropriately so not to [cause offense]. When you've found such a nice place after two years, you don't want to lose it in the middle of shooting! [laughs] So I was really trying to take a lot of care, like a teacher who goes with his class to some place and asks everybody to behave really nice. I had to build the hotel, I had to set up a complete infrastructure: we had to import the camera, we had to bring our lights from Germany, a generator from Georgia. It was a very difficult logistical task. On Tuvalu, I went to eight different countries to look for actors, because there was no dialogue, and it was really nice. On Gate to Heaven, I had to do it [again] because it's about immigrants from different countries, and I went to 12 countries. With Absurdistan, I really took it to the top and really wanted to find actors in every corner of the world and went to 28 countries, which was another two-year journey, and finally I chose actors from 16 countries. So we were this really Babylonic team which came there. It wasn't like German and Azerbaijani people, it was people from everywhere. The crew already had to get along with each other, and then it was about this multicultural crew with the villagers.

Filmmaker: Were there communication problems with such a broadly international group of people?

Helmer: Because I did the casting myself everywhere, I knew that the people I was going to bring there were really going to do this film, they wouldn't ask for four star hotels and that they would work for a fraction of their usual salary. These people who came with me did it for other purposes, partly because it was a creative challenge but most people were fascinated to go to country that they had never even heard of before. Some people created personal websites about that journey, there were 17 relationships, three couples married after the shooting and I'm attending festivals all the time and have to go because babies get baptized. We have real community of people, and the real people of Absurdistan are now in the making!

Filmmaker: You have a very distinctive style, as your films have minimal dialogue and have a lot in common with silent comedies. Why do you develop that approach in your filmmaking?

Helmer: I think I like to take the best from silent filmmaking, as the visual language before sound came was much more elaborate than most of what we see nowadays in the cinema. Films were about visual storytelling at that time but I think I can combine the best of both because I like to work with sound. For me, sound has the same importance but I don't like to use sound just as dialogue and a little ambient sound and music in the background. Once you don't use dialogue, it means that you have an important task to fill that void with something which does not feel empty. I know how to cut the movie (anybody could cut my films), but to make the sound design is much more important so I feel misunderstood if people say it's a silent film just because there's no dialogue. I know you're not saying that, but people do say that and I always read it in festival catalogues. My sound designer is on the verge of getting a pump gun after working a year [on the film] and then reading that Veit Helmer made this silent movie. I like to play also with references to other films. When I was small, I saw lots of films by Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, but then when I was getting older I watched all the Nouvelle Vague, a lot of independent American films and I'm trying to see as much as film as I can. I love to watch movies and I've tried to see cinema as it evolves from all countries. I very much like simple storytelling from Iran and I like complicated, complex dramaturgies as well. I don’t only like films that are similar to my films.

Filmmaker: You lecture in many different countries and your films always have a real international flavor. Do you feel more global or German as a filmmaker?

Helmer: Looking out of my window, I can see Berlin around me. When I go to travel with my film, yes I'm presented as a German filmmaker but for me it's already hard if you ask me what German film is today. I'm not sure if German films are so fantastic, but I can guarantee that they're very diverse and in this big diversity is also me. One of my best friends, my neighbor Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov who made Luna Papa, he's from Tajikistan. That's the good thing about Berlin and Germany today: we are really becoming very cosmopolitan again, maybe what New York used to be. Traveling gives me inspiration and it gives me fulfilment and I travel five times making a film: I travel to find locations, to work with writers, to find actors, to shoot, and then I go to festivals. And, in between, I teach because for me there is no way to enter a country deeper than to work with a dozen enthusiastic film students for a week and make a short film with them. I feel bored sitting on a beach – I cannot sunbathe longer than five minutes or I get bored.

Filmmaker: Can you tell me about the experience of working with Wim Wenders on A Trick of the Light? The film seems to show the first signs of your cinematic style.

Helmer: Yes, I hope Wim Wenders gets asked sometimes how big was my influence on him, because in every interview I have to say what his influence was on me. I think he had a big influence in how he produces and keeps control of his films since Hammett. That was one lesson, and the other was how he keeps control by stimulating a crew, by given them responsibility and trusting them. I also learned from him how to teach. He taught us very nicely. He came to Munich Film School and said “Let's make a movie, now write a screenplay,” so we wrote screenplays. I was lucky he chose mine, and now I do things the same way when I go to all these cities and do these workshops. I think, “Let's get out of the classroom and shoot a film.” That's what I learned from him and I owe him a lot.

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

Helmer: I think it was Katyn, the Andrzej Wajda film, which I saw at the Chicago Film Festival in October last year.

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

Helmer: That's 18 years ago. I had to finance my study in Munich and I did some horrible TV work. I felt like a prostitute, but I think I was happy from that moment on. I even did lots of commercials and earned a lot of money, but I wouldn't say that I did it for the money – I really enjoyed doing them. But this TV work, I really have to say that it's really like a black spot on my conscience.

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

Helmer: I've received very many beautiful compliments – honors and awards and audiences saying very nice things – but the funniest thing was last year at Sundance. A tiny woman came up to me followed by this big tall man and she said she loved my movie. I didn't recognize her, but it turned out it was Glenn Close. She was running after me on Main Street in Sundance, and the guy behind her – this bodyguard, this gorilla – wanted to kill me when I asked her who she was. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 2/06/2009 11:00:00 AM Comments (0)