If Paolo Sorrentino represents the future of Italian cinema, then the country's filmic output certainly should be exciting in years to come. The highly accomplished writer-director was born in Naples in 1970, and first became involved in filmmaking in the mid-90s when he was an assistant director on a couple of films, The Gas Inspector and Drogheria (both 1995). Finding himself poorly suited to production work, Sorrentino transitioned into screenwriting, jointly penning Polveri di Napoli with the film's director Antonio Capuano in 1998. The same year, he wrote and directed the short L'amore non ha confini, and in 2001 he made his feature debut as writer-director with One Man Up, a comedy drama about the parallel lives of two Neapolitan men with the same name. The film starred the revered Italian actor Toni Servillo, who also played the lead in Sorrentino's second movie, The Consequences of Love (2004), a poignant crime drama about a lonely Mafia accountant which was a critical hit and gave Sorrentino an international profile. In 2006, he followed up with The Family Friend, about a loan shark who becomes obsessed with a client's daughter, and also made his acting debut with a cameo role in Nanni Moretti's The Caiman.

Sorrentino teams up with Toni Servillo for the third time in his latest picture, Il Divo, in which Servillo plays Giulio Andreotti, a titan of Italian politics who was the country's prime minister seven times during his long career in government. Andreotti is a figure loved and hated in equal measure who allegedly had close links with the Vatican, the Cosa Nostra and the fascist masonic lodge P2, has been given numerous nicknames (including Moloch, Beelzebub, The Black Pope and, yes, Il Divo), and yet remains enigmatic and essentially unknown. Rather than producing a dry biopic of this sphinx-like statesman, Sorrentino has made Il Divo as extravagant as Andreotti is restrained, fashioning a “rock opera” (as he calls it) about Italian politics' great superstar. This intoxicatingly cinematic movie employs bold colors, flashy captions and slow motion shots aplenty, along with anachronistic pop numbers, to bring the theatricality and lavish grandeur of Andreotti's world to life at every possible moment. Crucially, however, its spectacle is offset by Sorrentino's inventive and insightful script which mixes fact, conjecture and fiction in its attempts to reveal the essence of this fascinatingly inscrutable man.

Filmmaker spoke to Sorrentino about his desire to tell Andreotti's story, the film's stunning stylistic aspects, and his dream of directing a Bond movie.



Filmmaker: How long have you been interested in Giulio Andreotti?

Sorrentino: I have always been interested in him. I had an idea to make a film about him when I was 20 or so, but it was impossible when I was 20 years old. I did a short film about him then, but I didn't finish it. So it's a very old idea to make a film about him.

Filmmaker: When you were growing up in Italy, what was your consciousness of Andreotti?

Sorrentino: In Italy, for all of us he was the most important Italian person and the most known Italian person abroad. Everybody knew him. I had an idea that he looked like my old aunt. We always spoke about him, and my father said it was incredible how similar they were to each other. She wasn't very beautiful...

Filmmaker: It's such a paradox that Andreotti is such a shadowy, enigmatic figure who is simultaneously very famous and an unknown quantity.

Sorrentino: Yeah, yeah, all things about him are very close to paradox because everything in him is double. A lot of people love him and a lot of people hate him and he has the ability to be very popular and but at the same time is very reserved and very snobbish. There are a lot of examples of this kind of thing. He is a complex phenomenon and it's not easy to understand the reasons for his success. Actually in the film I don't reveal these reasons, but most important is this strange thing that he is very mysterious and his actions are never clear, but at the same time other people voted for him. It's not healthy for a democracy. It's just not the Italian people – this happens in a lot of countries.

Filmmaker: You said that you'd first had the idea for an Andreotti film when you were 20, so had you kept thinking about it from that point on? Did you have clear ideas about how you were going to tackle his story?

Sorrentino: In truth, in these past 20 years I have always censored myself about this project because I always believed that it was impossible to do. And I was not far from the truth because when I tried to do the film, nobody wanted to finance it. So just two or three years ago when I started to write the script, I studied him seriously and I decided to tackle him.

Filmmaker: How much research did you do and what resources did you have access to? In the film we see the massive Andreotti archives and hear about the diary he kept.

Sorrentino: It was impossible to get access to the archives then, although now it's possible. He donated his archives to a foundation, but before that I believe that he removed some things. He always used his archives against his enemies: any time that somebody was against him, he told the newspapers "I have archives where I can [dig up something on] this person." It was a kind of threat for everybody, but a lot of people believed there wasn't anything in the archives, that it was a fake. Sorry, I've forgotten the question...

Filmmaker: I asked about the research you did on Andreotti.

Sorrentino: I did research on him for a year and then I was tired. At the end of this year I knew a lot of things and the knowledge of many things is dangerous for the imagination, so I stopped the research. I did research in books, read articles in newspapers and then I met some people who, in the passing of time, met him.

Filmmaker: Why did you choose to focus on this period of his life in particular?

Sorrentino: Because I think it's an interesting period in his biography because it was a moment of transition for him as he crossed from success to decay. It's always interesting for me as a spectator of cinema to see decay of people, how people become weak when before they were strong. At the same time, the 90s is a period that's less known in Italy and less documented in cinema.

Filmmaker: The film is so incredibly rich in its visuals. After doing a year of research, was it very clear to you how you would tackle the film stylistically?

Sorrentino: For Italians, Andreotti is a sort of pop icon so I approached the movie like a movie about Iggy Pop and tried to make a sort of rock opera about a man who's very close to that world – because he's very popular – but, at the same time. for style and for culture, is very far from the rock world. I was scared to do a classical biopic that could be boring.

Filmmaker: How did people respond to the rock opera idea? Was your unconventional approach one of the reasons you struggled to get funding?

Sorrentino: No, really the problem with financing wasn't about that. They were excited about the script but they were a little bit concerned about the possibility of having enemies in the world by doing this kind of film.

Filmmaker: Is Andreotti still seen as somebody powerful to be feared?

Sorrentino: Some people believe that he is a powerful man now, but really he is not. But he was powerful for 40 years and he has a lot of friends that respect him. A lot of his friends work in the world of cinema, and they don't want to be disrespectful.

Filmmaker: Going back to the visuals, every shot is beautiful and seems very carefully composed. Did you storyboard a lot of the film and how much time to you spend planning shots?

Sorrentino: I spent a lot of time planning. After I wrote the script, I started to make the storyboard and at the same time I scouted locations, and I did new storyboards after I found the locations.

Filmmaker: What kind of influences did you have for the look of the film?

Sorrentino: There are influences, but they weren't conscious. Elio Petri is a director that impresses me a lot, and I like Fellini and Scorsese too and I think they are serious influences for this movie.

Filmmaker: The subtitle for the movie is "The Spectacular Life of Giulio Andreotti" and the film seems to be very much about spectacle: it's operatic, theatrical and grandiose.

Sorrentino: It's pretty realistic. He was very defining for us, and it's the idea that we have about him so I put the idea in the movie. And with the subtitle, "The Spectacular Life..." is a little bit ironic because his life is so spectacular. The context is spectacular, the background: the 70s and the 90s are periods full of murders and deep changes in Italian society and it's a spectacular moment.

Filmmaker: But there seems to be a conflict between the quiet restraint of the central character and the bold color, the grand scale and the vibrant pop music of the film. They are opposites, almost.

Sorrentino: One of the reasons for doing this film was the contrast between him – very quiet, very subdued – and the idea that the world around him was very chaotic and dynamic. I thought it was interesting to capture this contrast between him, who is static and decides thing without doing anything, and the world that moves very quickly.

Filmmaker: You said before that people were worried about offending or upsetting Andreotti, but in the film you liberally mix fact with conjecture and fantasy, with the lines sometimes blurred between these things.

Sorrentino: With his public life and the trials, I was very close to the official acts and public documents because I was scared to be sued. [laughs] With his private life, I invented a lot of things because it's very difficult to have access to [that information]. It's interesting because when he watched the film, he told me that I was very precise and very aware of his private life and I was not precise with his public life. He completely inverted the perspective. He was sure that I had information about his private life, but I didn't know anything. I had an idea about his character and I thought it was possible that he talked with his wife in this way and he said those things.

Filmmaker: What was the context in which he saw the film and talked to you about it?

Sorrentino: He watched the film after it was first screened. Through mutual friends, I invited him to watch the movie but I didn't go to see the movie with him because I was afraid. [laughs] I didn't talk with him after he'd watched the film but he saw the film with some journalists and they told me what he said.

Filmmaker: What has been the reaction from the political establishment in Italy to this film?

Sorrentino: They didn't react, just Andreotti because he was involved directly and some people close to him that are involved with the film. But all the rest of the political people they avoided talking about the film. I don't know why.

Filmmaker: Are you disappointed?

Sorrentino: No, I am delighted about this because in Italy there is always a lot of controversy about everything and I was scared that this film was going to be a fire of controversy for everybody and my hope that was that the film was accepted as a film. Fortunately, the silence of the political world was a good thing for the success of the film.

Filmmaker: I want to talk about Toni Servillo, who has now worked with you on three films. How important to you was it that he play Andreotti?

Sorrentino: For me, it was very important that he accepted because it's not an easy role and in that age range of Italian actors I don't think I had the possibility to choose between many people. It was very difficult to think of that movie without him. At the beginning when I told him I'd like to make a film about Andreotti, he didn't understand what I wanted to do, so he told me, "No, I won't do it." But he's an actor, so after a week he started to think and it was a very attractive idea for an actor to play so strange and mysterious a person who was so important in our lives. So he called me back and said he was interested.

Filmmaker: So how closely did you work with him on constructing the Andreotti we see on screen? It seemed like you can to create your own Andreotti for the movie.

Sorrentino: Yes, we used some two or three things about Andreotti that are very clear and very typical of him, but for the rest me and Servillo invented our own character. In fact, [Toni Servillo] didn't watch footage of him or study anything about him, he prefer ed to work from the memories he had of him because all Italian people have an idea and a memory about him.

Filmmaker: Which film do you wish you had directed?

Sorrentino: That film by François Truffaut,The Man Who Loved Women. And all the films about 007, especially the films with Sean Connery. My big dream is to do 007.

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

Sorrentino: At the beginning of my career, I worked in film production and I was a real disaster. I used to lose the film. But I've just worked in film: I was a screenwriter at the beginning and then in production, [and finally a director].

Filmmaker: What's your best piece of advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Sorrentino: I think it's a good idea to watch bad movies because I think that a director can learn more from bad movies. He can look at a film and say, "I must not do this, I must not do that." It's more dangerous to watch good movies.

Filmmaker: Finally, should a director always take risks?

Sorrentino: Yes, I think. But it's also very important that a director has fun. I think cinema is a big game and it must remain a big game.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/24/2009 10:59:00 AM Comments (2)

Along with Martin McDonagh and Conor McPherson, John Crowley is part of a recent wave of Irish theater influx into film. Born in 1969, Crowley is a philosophy graduate from the University of Cork in Ireland who first became involved in theater as a student, seeing it as a way to get into directing film. He began directing plays in Dublin in the early 90s and was successful enough that already in 1996 he was working in London's West End. After a few years, he was asked to become an associate director at the prestigious Donmar Warehouse by Sam Mendes, then the theater's artistic director. In 2000, he directed Come and Go as part of the “Beckett on Film” series and made his feature debut with the boisterous Dublin-set comedy drama Intermission (2003), starring Colin Farrel, Cillian Murphy and Kelly McDonald, based on a screenplay by playwright Mark O'Rowe. In 2007, he reteamed with O'Rowe for the somber BAFTA-winning drama Boy A, about a young man's return to civilian life after incarceration for a brutal childhood killing, which was made for British television but was released theatrically in the U.S. last year. Additionally, Crowley helmed the hugely successful London and Broadway runs of Martin McDonagh's play The Pillowman in 2003 and 2005 (for which he was Tony nominated), directed Neve Campbell and Cillian Murphy in the West End production of Love Song in 2006-7, and in 2007 filmed a television version of Harold Pinter's Celebration starring Stephen Rea, Michael Gambon and Colin Firth.

In many ways, Crowley's latest film, Is Anybody There? is a companion piece to Boy A, in that it is another portrait of a childhood overshadowed by death. Edward (Son of Rambow's Bill Milner), our young, slightly awkward, death-obsessed hero, is a 10-year-old boy whose home, much to his chagrin, has been turned into a nursing home by his parents (Anne-Marie Duff and David Morrisey). Though he shuns the company of the doddery old fogies who have taken over the house (he's more interested in trying to locate the ghosts of the recently departed residents), he slowly establishes a relationship with the newest arrival, Clarence (Michael Caine), a grumpy ex-magician. Crowley has elsewhere acknowledged the influence of Hal Ashby, and certainly here there are echoes of that director's Harold and Maude, a film about another young-old partnership which tackles the subject of death with a similar charm and lightness of touch. Is Anybody There? is old-fashioned in spirit, telling us to embrace life and not fear death, and much of its success lies in the partnership of Caine and Millner, while a chorus of wonderful elderly British character actors, such as Leslie Phillips, Sylvia Sims and Peter Vaughn, provide great value as the supporting cast.

Filmmaker spoke to Crowley about the diversity of his directorial projects, the challenges of working with such an aged cast, and the moment it all clicked for him.



Filmmaker: I wanted to start off by asking how you choose your film projects.

Crowley: I guess I don't want to make the same film twice so I tend to get drawn to material which, quite naturally, is different to anything I've done before. I'm drawn to strong character material and to stuff which is usually quite dark but which you can work towards the darkness through humor. I tend not to want to make films which refer to other films and am more comfortable with films that hover uneasily between a couple of genres. But, other than that, it's as intuitive as reading something and getting excited about it and thinking, “Yeah, I wanna make this.”

Filmmaker: Was it like that with this film?

Crowley: When I read the treatment for Is Anybody There?, I had that reaction – I knew I was going to make it as a film, and I've never had that from a treatment. It chimed very strongly with something I was looking for post-Intermission which was a film through the eyes of a child protagonist, where the world looks slightly topsy-turvy. I was thinking of films like My Life as a Dog and sections of Together, and this felt like it was in that territory, a rather gentle story whose primary interest was not so much the story itself but the emotional depths one would get to within the story and the relationship rather than the freshness of story. I hadn't seen any films set in a retirement home, probably for obvious reasons, that people tend to shy away from old age on film, it tends not to be something they get excited about. But I quite liked the idea of the casting possibilities and bringing a great ensemble together, and I just felt like exploring the idea of aging and dying through the eyes of a child was quite interesting.

Filmmaker: There's a real stylistic diversity in your work, and all three features are incredibly different from each other. What are the challenges – and also the upsides – of doing such radically varied films?

Crowley: I guess it means that you're now branding yourself imaginatively, you're not trying to do a “John Crowley film” in any way, and I don't take that credit in films either. I come from the theater and I love working with writers and at the moment the films I'm interested in working on are about trying to not make the same film a second time. I realize that that can sometimes feel like you're reinventing something each time you do it, but also I'm not the same person I was when I made Intermission. It's somehow about trying to be true to the nature of the material rather than building a body of work or situating yourself in relation to other filmmakers. In terms of how I approach theatrical filmmaking, really it comes from the theater and is about trying to find the nub, the kernel of the script. When you have your “Eureka!” moment, you know totally how you're going to build an aesthetic for it. Those things come from the essence of the material, and I don't think what I do is close to what auteurs do. And yet, material always excites me or not, so that will always be the “me-ness” in it, but you add the dots backwards, you can't add them up forwards. You just get led by instinct.

Filmmaker: Is it a problem for you that you don't follow the auteur route, and that people do not think of a particular kind of film when they hear your name?

Crowley: Of course. It's a style of directing that I favor which is that I'm never very interested in work that screams “Look at me!,” I'm always much more interested in the work itself. Oftentimes, films that say “Look at me!” will get more notice than films which are just films, which are what they're about. There are times when I think I should do something which is more self-consciously stylish, but then I think “Why?” I've never done anything to do it for a career move, I've always done it because it's drawn me and interested me and I've thought, “I'd be happy making this for a year.” It took a very long time to develop Is Anybody There?, and I decided it was going to be my next film. After Intermission had opened, I was offered a lot of big films and I think back, “I should have been directing more.” Not necessarily the big films, but I don't think I would spend the same amount of time not actually putting work out, as I did in the lead-up to this. You know that you can hold out for it, that you're capable of turning stuff down that might be a lot splashier and a lot more lucrative and might get you in s different place on the chessboard – but what do you do then? Then you're only going to want to do something bigger and better on that level. Trying to figure a way through who you are and what you can infuse your work with is very hard, but much more interesting to me.

Filmmaker: The relationship between Michael Caine and Bill Milner's characters is central to the film, and so were you able to gauge if there would be a chemistry between them prior to shooting the film?

Crowley: No. What you do is you trust the piece of casting in itself. I knew that Michael wasn't a tricky customer, in the sense that he's constantly professional. When we met for lunch, we talked about the script, we talked about films, about everything, and after about an hour he looked at me and went, “We're going to be alright, aren't we?” and I went, “Yeah, we are.” I think Michael can turn up and work perfectly well with people he doesn't get on with and then go home, so I didn't think that I was trying to cast two very prickly characters. I knew that if we got [the actor playing] Edward right, there wouldn't be any reason Michael couldn't work with him because he didn't feel like that kind of creature. He just needed to trust that we got the best actor for the role and there was no question of that because, very quickly, they started sparking off each other in a way that was very organic.

Filmmaker: You mentioned that you'd never seen a film set in a nursing home before, and I'd imagine there were unique challenges to working with such a predominantly elderly cast.

Crowley: Things moved very slowly in between set-ups. The minibus would arrive on set every morning and disgorge these gorgeous but rather slow-moving actors who would all begin talking at me simultaneously (“Hello, darling, how are you?!”) and that would be the way it was. It was great fun, but yes, there were challenges. The insurance was quite scary, and especially when we were going to stand all of them out on a freezing cold November afternoon and rain on them. We had a sea of people standing by with pneumonia blankets and heaters to leap on them after this one take. I love being around actors and I love being around older actors, and I find their dignity that comes with people who have raised children and grandchildren in one of the most precarious professions in the world is incredible. And that they're still able to do it. The amount of experience and the stories and the 50s in the theater, I'm a sucker for all that kind of stuff, so it was amazing, it was quite special. They all sort of knew each other – there were a few old spats that hadn't been sorted for many a year that were solved on that set, so it was good fun.

Filmmaker: You had an incredibly successful run with Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman in between making Intermission and Boy A. How integral is theater directing to your artistic identity at this point?

Crowley: Well, I'm sort of in a luxurious position where if Martin McDonagh comes to you and says, “Here's a new play, have a look at it,” it's amazing. Filmmaking excites me beyond belief, and growing my own projects from scratch and developing them with writers is the thing that I want to do. Theater and film complement each other in an odd way: what you do is still directing actors but it's to very different ends. I do love the filming process – I love the length of it, the fact that meaning gets fundamentally turned on its head and pulled apart and distilled in the editing process. But then you have the preview process in the theater: two of the most thrilling nights of my life were the first previews of The Pillowman in London and here on Broadway. You've got an audience who knows nothing about it, and every beat is unfolding for them for the first time. There's a charge in the air which is incomparable, and that's written on the wind. If you weren't there, you weren't there. There's no record for it, and that's quite sad because with film if you get it, if you nail a performance and the camera's in focus, you've got it. I think that I quite like doing the two, but film has more focus for me really.

Filmmaker: I believe you were at the Donmar Warehouse in London under Sam Mendes.

Crowley: Yes, Sam was the one who brought me in there for the first play I directed there, and then he asked me to become an associate director there, which meant basically having a desk there and doing one or two plays a year there. We were quite different and I think that's what drew him to me, because we had quite different tastes and different styles and aesthetics as directors. When he went to make films, it was amazing that he leapt straight in with American Beauty – and quite inspiring – but he was on a very different path from what I knew would be the truthful one for me to start making films. He's carried on on that level and it's just a sort of different approach to doing what you do, but it's no less true to who each of us are. What was interesting was that in one film he put paid to the notion that theater directors can't make films, even though you can point at countless examples since the invention of cinema. [laughs] Some directors are more cinematic than others, but it's not a race, it's “Is it any good or not? Is it truthful or not?”

Filmmaker: What's the strangest experience you've had during your time in the film industry?

Crowley: The very first thing that I did was a Beckett film, Come and Go, as part of the Beckett on Film series, and it was a one-day. I was terrified because I was the only person on set who hadn't been on a film set before. It was on a soundstage and at 8 o'clock the actors turned up and were ready to go, and the second I got on the soundstage I felt an eerie calm come over me. I suddenly felt, “Oh, my God, I've never felt this relaxed in the theater.” It was weird.

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a kid?

Crowley: When I was very young, it was a fireman because I wanted to be like my old man. Then, actually, I got interested in films, but in that way that you love films and you don't quite distinguish that somebody directs them and somebody acts in them, you just want to be in them. Somewhere around 17 or 18, the idea of directing films appealed, but it felt so miles away from anything you could do in Ireland. It was pre-camcorders, and getting your hands on the actual resources to do it felt akin to joining NASA. So I stumbled into the theater that way but, if I'm to be honest, the desire to make films was always there.

Filmmaker: What's the smartest decision you ever made?

Crowley: I'm still waiting for it to happen, to be honest. [laughs] I can't look back at one and say, “Oh, that was really smart,” I've just sort of stumbled blindly from mistake to mistake and somehow it works out OK in the end. [laughs] It works out, but it never looks that way when I'm pointing forward. It looks like chaos.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/17/2009 10:01:00 PM Comments (1)

In terms of the sheer number of great filmmakers it has produced recently, the North Carolina School of the Arts is pretty much untouchable, and its latest alum in the spotlight is writer-director Jody Hill. Hill, a native of North Carolina, attended the university along with a prodigious group of classmates including directors David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel and Jeff Nichols, as well as writer-actors Danny McBride and Paul Schneider, D.P. Tim Orr and soundman-turned-writer Chris Gebert. After graduation, Hill briefly worked in television in Los Angeles, then moved back to North Carolina to make The Foot Fist Way, a comedy which featured a virtuoso performance by McBride as bullying Tae Kwon Do instructor Fred Simmons. The team of Hill, McBride and fellow NCSA alum Ben Best all wrote and acted in the film, which premiered at Sundance in 2006 and – despite not getting released until more than two years later – became a cult hit within the Hollywood comedy community. Hill, Best and McBride also recently created and wrote Eastbound and Down, a six-part series for HBO about McBride's washed up baseball pitcher Kenny Powers, for which Hill also directed two episodes.

While Hill's big screen debut was a zero-budget indie, his sophomore feature, Observe and Report is a big studio movie. Its plot centers on mall security chief Ronnie Barnhardt (Seth Rogen), the self-important, socially maladjusted hero of the piece, who sees an opportunity to make a name for himself – and win the affections of mall bimbo Brandi (Anna Faris) – when a flasher starts exposing himself on Ronnie's turf. Though he commands a group of adoring underlings, Ronnie's quest to catch the pervert is complicated when his jurisdiction is infringed upon by an actual policeman, Detective Harrison (a self-parodying Ray Liotta). Despite being promoted as a goofy, gross-out comedy, Observe and Report is, in fact, a significantly darker and more interesting film in which Hill offsets more traditional comic elements with an unflinching portrait of his severely damaged protagonist. Allusions to Taxi Driver are not unfounded, and it is greatly to Hill's credit as writer-director – and Rogen's as the film's star – that the contrasting elements coalesce so well as the film builds to its surprisingly intense conclusion.

Filmmaker spoke to Hill about the Scorsese influence, his preoccupation with psychologically damaged protagonists, and making a Peckinpah-esque remake of Armageddon.



Filmmaker: With The Foot Fist Way, there was a period of over two years between it premiering at Sundance in 2006 and finally being released. Was that time very difficult for you?

Hill: [laughs] I'll tell you this: it's probably for the best that the film didn't explode like Napoleon Dynamite. Everybody wants their film to explode and wants as many people to see it as possible, but that being said hopefully there will be some kind of longevity in it. [laughs] The film was always made to be like a punk band's first album – we figured we didn't have the money to make it look great, so we made it fuzzy, and there's hisses all over it and none of the edits are soft, they're all hard and choppy with the music. I think probably what happened was for the best, but it was kinda surreal: we got there, we sold the U.K. rights, everybody in the crowd seemed to really enjoy the film, the word of mouth grew after each screening, but after it was over it kinda died down and we walked away without a deal. Then it got passed around in Hollywood and we got invited to the set of Knocked Up which is where I met Seth Rogen and Judd Apatow, and then we got a call from Will Ferrell and Adam McKay and they said they wanted to put it out through Paramount Vantage, and again we were like, “Wow, the film's going to get out there.” And then, for some reason, the film sat on the shelf for two years.

Filmmaker: That must have been tough for you.

Hill: I'm not going to lie, that was disappointing. We missed any chance of getting nominated for any kind of independent award because of that. We couldn't go to any festivals because the film was in the studio's court. I have no clue why they decided to [do that] – maybe because, on the outside, it looks like a more mainstream movie [they thought] that this could be Juno or something, but it's really about a dark protagonist and the story's not a happy story, so I think they started to get scared once they had the film. It was kind of a buzz kill when it's sitting around for two years, and it's pretty lame when they're like, “Oh yeah, summer's not a good time to release a movie... Spring's not a good time to release a movie...” You find yourself believing it at first, and then you're like, “So, there's just never a good time to release a movie?!” [laughs]

Filmmaker: Warners think that spring is a pretty good time to release Observe and Report, so let's move on to that. Tell me about how you originally conceived the film. Did you have Seth Rogen in mind for the film when you wrote it?

Hill: I sold this project in February or March 2006, pretty early after [The Foot Fist Way played] Sundance, and I had just met Seth and talked to him about this project. I was a big fan of his from Freaks and Geeks and he really liked Foot Fist Way so it was kind of dream to work with him. It just so happened that he wanted to do it! [laughs] I had told him about it when I had just sold the pitch so I talked to him right from the get-go.

Filmmaker: You've talked about Scorsese's influence, and it's very apparent in Observe and Report, particularly Taxi Driver.

Hill: In all this, I feel like I talk about Scorsese too much [laughs], but it's pretty obvious. Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are the films that I was watching most when I was making the film. Scorsese has a huge influence on the style and a lot of the tone but I think a lot of the films from Peckinpah [were an influence] as well in terms of thematics. I think it has something to do with the post-war climate of the 70s where you were dealing with a lot of these characters who were trying to make their way in the world and coming up with a code on the screen. I've always been drawn to that, a group of outsiders who try to make their own way in the world and make their own rules. If you look at some of the themes that are running through this movie, I always felt drawn to a lot of the films of the 70s like that. And then when you look at how we handle comedy, it's less like the comedies you would have seen in the 90s; it's more like Shampoo, like some of the Hal Ashby films where the comedy is played exactly like a drama. We're trying to be funny but I personally like to draw the dramatic storyline first and I really try to never wink at the camera or sacrifice a character for jokes. Alexander Payne does that as well, and I really admire the way he does comedy, if you want to call them that.

Filmmaker: Was there a conscious decision to go darker than Foot Fist Way?

Hill: Um, yeah. You know, with Foot Fist Way I kind of enjoy exploring a normal guy that goes insane – suburban insanity – and I wanted to take that further with this movie and just have it be a little dangerous and just see how far I could go with that. I think I went about as far as you could go. [laughs] I tried to. The reason I came up with the whole mall thing is that I hate malls and so I can't be in the for very long. You always have to go buy a pair of jeans and it always ends in disaster where I yell at my wife [laughs], so a mall seemed like a good place. Plus, I wanted to choose a symbol, kind of like a world inside of a world, like the taxi in Taxi Driver.

Filmmaker: Coming out of the movie, I was so strongly reminded of the 70s and I felt like you'd got one over the studio by getting this movie made. Did you have a lot of conflict with producers and executives?

Hill: Thanks for saying that because, honestly, my favorite movies are from that era and it's because of exactly what you said. There is independent film now where you can make whatever you want to make – there's no rules – but what I like about the 70s is that you're getting these movies that have what we would now consider an independent mindset but yet you have the budget to make something that's really big also. It's everybody's dream to make a personal film on a large scale. I think just coming from independent film just gave me a mindset going into the studio, a bit of a “take it or leave it” attitude, because I figured I could maybe just go raise the money at home or something. [laughs] I mean, there were certainly arm wrestling matches that went along with this: they wanted to make the character more likeable. And that was a big thing, that he wasn't likeable enough. And then they were talking about “Does it go too far? Can the audience recover?” and there were a lot of arm wrestling matches. But I've got to give Warner Bros. credit because they really did take a risk and really embraced what was going on in the long run. Of course we were going to have discussions and arguments about it, but I've got to say that the finished product is something I really feel I can stand behind.

Filmmaker: I think the film is a lot darker than the trailers have led people to expect. Do you feel like you had to market the film as more a traditional comedy just to get people into the theaters?

Hill: I think that the trailer should be dark as hell. [laughs] I would like to see all the advertising more character-driven, because that's the kind of thing I'd like to see if I was sitting at home, but of course [the studio is] going to market it and try to get the biggest audience they can. I hope it works. I just hope that people give it a chance. There was a mall cop movie that came out [earlier this year], and I'm happy that that movie did really well and I certainly can't fault anybody for having a hit, I just hope that people are willing to give this movie a chance because I do feel like there's something going on with the movie that's a little bit more than just a premise.

Filmmaker: Contrary to what I'd thought before, I think of not as a comedy director but a drama director who happens to do comedy.

Hill: I'm really, really excited you said that. I don't hear it that often, but I feel like you nailed it because if you look at Foot Fist Way or Observe and Report as a drama – that has jokes in it [laughs] – I think you're going to enjoy it more and understand it more than if you look at it as a comedy. If you're thinking of it in those terms, you're going to be disappointed because there are parts of it where it's sad, and it's legitimately sad. It's not funny sad, it's just sad. And it's scary, and we try to make it legitimately scary. And sometimes it lonely and downright depressing, and we try to make the action as real as possible. I think [Eastbound and Down] helped sell that style, but a lot of that comes in a reaction to a lot of comedies. I don't really watch comedies, I don't really like them but I do watch Paul Thomas Anderson. [laughs] I feel like that's why comedies in this world are disposable, because there's no real stakes involved. Most comedies that I watch, I watch for the first hour and I might laugh and then when it gets to the end and you need something more in the movie... It's like it's great to eat candy for a while, but then you need something that sticks to your ribs. I'm glad you said that, because that to me is the key to both films.

Filmmaker: It seems like you have a fascination with difficult, abrasive, mentally scarred, possibly psychotic characters, which is where the comic and the dramatic converge. Where does that fascination come from?

Hill: I think a couple of places. First, it's the films I grew up liking. It's weird because you mentioned drama and comedy, because I laugh more at Goodfellas than I do at most comedies. It just seems funny to me when they're yelling at each other. Whenever I see something that really follows through good and bad, it's something that I remember. Secondly, it's just a reaction to the stuff that I don't like in movies. Everything's so fucking safe these days and I enjoy a movie where it's rated R and you go sit down and you feel like anything could happen. I don't feel a lot of danger out there anymore and it's almost like TV's more dangerous than movies, and I feel like it should be the opposite.

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

Hill: Oh, wow! Let's see... I would cast Warren Oates, Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty and Robert De Niro. [laughs] And it's like a mission to save the earth where they have to go into space and blow up and asteroid.

Filmmaker: So you're basically remaking Armageddon.

Hill: Yeah, except that it would be like a Peckinpah movie and they'd all be struggling to live by a code, [laughs] and it would be really long, natural takes. They're all talking about how they don't deserve this and stuff and they're not right for it.

Filmmaker: What were you at school: the smart kid, the class clown or the dunce?

Hill: Probably the dunce. I wasn't the best filmmaker in college, so I was probably the dunce. In high school, I was kind of the weird guy. I had a small number of friends. [laughs] I probably should have said the jock or something, which is totally a lie. [laughs] I should rewrite my bio.

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

Hill: Probably during the test screenings. [laughs] Warner Brothers won't be happy about that one. [laughs]

Filmmaker: How much did the movie change during testing?

Hill: It kinda went on a cycle. I turned in my director's cut and then because of test screenings I lost a few battles and the score ended up going down, so I went back to my director's cut and work on that. And then the score went back up. I would say I sacrificed absolutely nothing, and the final product is exactly what I wanted, so I think going around your ass to get to your elbow ended up being a good thing for us.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/10/2009 07:50:00 PM Comments (0)

The image of Kazakhstan and its cinema took a hit recently with the unwanted attention of a certain Borat Sagdiyev, however the rise to prominence of the highly talented writer-director Sergey Dvortsevoy should help redress that national image problem. Dvortsevoy was born in the Kazakh city of Chimkent in 1962 and initially had no particular interest in film. After high school, he attended aviation college in the Ukraine and the Radiotechnical-Institut in Novosibirsk, Russia, in order to become a radio engineer for Aeroflot, the Russian aviation company, a job that required him to travel throughout the former Soviet Union. In the early 90s he decided to study writing and directing at the Moscow Film School, where he was part of the documentary department, and following his graduation he began making a reputation for himself as a gifted shortform documentarian, winning numerous prizes at film festivals around the world. His first film, Paradise (1996), depicted the life of a nomadic Kazakh shepherd, and he followed it up with Bread Day (1998), about poverty in a village outside St. Petersburg. He returned to a Kazakh setting with Highway (1999), which profiled life on the country's main road, and in 2004 made In the Dark, a poignant portrait of a blind man living alone with his cat.

Dvortsevoy's first feature length film, Tulpan, is set in Kazakhstan's Betpak Dala, the “Hunger Steppe,” and centers on everyman Asa (Askhat Kuchinchirekov), who returns from naval service to live with his sister, her husband and their three children in their yurt. Asa plans to become independent, however the only eligible girl for miles, Tulpan, turns down his marriage proposal because of his big ears, thus scuppering his chances of becoming a shepherd with his own flock (for which he must be married), a job he anyway seems ill-suited to. Though with Tulpan Dvortsevoy has moved into fiction filmmaking, here he uses a cinema vérité approach to present an immediate and vivid picture of the unforgiving life of nomadic shepherds on the steppe. The movie portrays an unfamiliar world, but Dvortsevoy taps into the universality of his story by imbuing it with a gentle humor and populating the narrative with distinctive, memorable characters, from Asa's sidekick who constantly blasts Boney M's “Rivers of Babylon,” to the steppe vet who is followed everywhere by a camel. And the film's great set piece – a 10-minute scene of a sheep giving birth – is one of the great filmic moments of recent years, capturing life at its most vital.

Filmmaker spoke to Dvortsevoy about his reasons for giving up documentary filmmaking, the challenges of capturing a live sheep birth, and working with an actor determined to sing on camera.



Filmmaker: Tell me how your background lead you to make Tulpan?

Dvortsevoy: I was born in Kazakhstan and I lived there for 28 years. I worked for Aeroflot, the Russian aviation company, and I lived in the city but I knew the Kazakh countryside very well. Then I joined film school – that was completely by chance, by the way – and after that I decided that I must make a film, a documentary about Kazakhstan [called Paradise], and I used my past experiences. After Aeroflot, I knew all the steppes and the shepherd's way of living and I knew the Kazakh countryside quite well. For me, it was quite easy to decide what kind of film I had to make. Now in live in Moscow but, for me, Kazakhstan is not an exotic place, it's just my motherland. Also, I met one man in Kazakhstan with big ears and he had this problem, he could not marry because of his ears.

Filmmaker: Had you wanted to make a fiction feature for a long time?

Dvortsevoy: You know, I joined film school completely by chance. I never dreamed about filmmaking at all, and for me it was a very strange decision to change my life to join film school. It was also a spontaneous decision to make documentary films, and I was quite successful at it. But then after a while I realized that I didn't want to make documentaries anymore, because it's very difficult for me morally. Usually I live for a long time with my characters, and I spent much time with them. In a way, I use their private life and I make some kind of art of it. It's very painful for me because usually you disturb people, you interfere with their life, and you don't know if they will be happy with this or not, because you're making the film specially for them. In Russia, all filmmakers consider our films as art, but you deal with reality, and it was painful for me. Once I decided I had to stop this, now I want to make fiction. It was a conscious decision, but a very painful one.

Filmmaker: You make a distinction between documentaries and your non-fiction films which you call “life cinema.” Can you explain the difference?

Dvortsevoy: I like reality, I like to observe everyday life and I would like to find some unique moments in real life, and that's why I say “life cinema.” I don't like too complicated stories but, at the same time, I think there is cheap simplicity and very important simplicity. I would like to achieve real simplicity in presenting everyday life, and I want somehow to show that reality and everyday life is beautiful. Usually people think that everyday life is just boring and uninteresting, but I like everyday life and I want to share its beauty with the audience.

Filmmaker: How much of a difference do you see between Tulpan and your previous films? This film seems to bridge fact and fiction.

Dvortsevoy: On the one hand, it's very close to my documentaries because I use the same method of observing animals and people, for example. But, on the other hand, it's a fictional story and I have actors – some professional, some amateur – and set up everything. For me, it was very important to combine all this. I want the audience not to feel “This is the fiction part” and “This is the documentary part,” I want people just to see these lives. To me it's a great compliment if the audience says, “We can't believe that these are not real people, that these are actors.” People know that I use actors but, at the same time, the life that actors show them is like real life. For me, it was very important to achieve this level of truth that animals give.

Filmmaker: Do you feel your cinematic style or approach has changed significantly by shifting into fiction?

Dvortsevoy: I don't know. Sometimes I try to analyze but I'm afraid to think much about my style and how I present my stories. I think it's very important to just save my own voice. I make films by intuition – I never calculate. Always what I show comes from my soul, from me. I think for the future, it's very important to save the possibility to present life without thinking about my own approach. And, for me, it's all about the characters. Everything comes from the characters.

Filmmaker: How carefully scripted was the film? Were you very open to improvisation and unexpected deviations during shooting?

Dvortsevoy: Well, initially I wrote a regular script of 100 pages with my co-writer [Gennady Ostrovskiy]. I didn't know how I would make the film, but when I started I realized that a script is a script, but life is life. For me, it was very clear that I didn't want to make a standard fiction film. It was not interesting to me to copy the script, to just mechanically transfer this literature to make a picture. I tried to find the film language to tell this story in images, and then I realized I had to find the images for every scene. Then I realized I first had to shoot the very important scene [of the sheep giving birth]. We started the shooting of the film from that key scene. We spent much time preparing these scenes, but after we shot the key scene of the sheep giving birth, it was so strong, so powerful and so unique – and, at the same time, ten minutes long – I didn't know what to do with it, how to cut this scene. In the script, I had two minutes for this scene and now I had 10 minutes. But it was not possible to cut this scene because when you cut, you lose the power, you lose the uniqueness of this scene. So I realized either I had to cut this scene and make a regular film, or save the scene and redo the script. And I decided to redo the script. After that moment, I changed a lot of the film, and in the end I think I have just 20% of the initial script.

Filmmaker: The 10-minute scene of the sheep giving birth is obviously real, so I imagine you must have had a lot of difficulty capturing it.

Dvortsevoy: [laughs] Sometimes the audience can't believe it. They say, “Is it real, or did you fake it with computers?,” because people now are used to computer effects. But it's real, of course, and it's 10 minutes long without any cuts. But it was an extremely, extremely difficult scene because the sheep in Kazakhstan are very wild and they don't allow people to follow them or to be close them. And when they give birth, all the more! It was very hard just to go close to them to just see how they give birth, but due to my documentary past I knew that it would be very difficult and I told my camera crew and director of photography that we had to spend much time just to catch this scene. My camera people didn't think it could be so difficult but, day by day, they understood that it would be very hard and they spent maybe two weeks just following the sheep with little video cameras and then with big cameras. I said, “Listen, we have to get this in one take,” because I wanted to have this scene completely live. No cuts. Because it's truth, and I wanted the audience to believe this is real. Also, I never tried to rehearse with the actor – that was my condition – because I wanted him to do it just once, and for it to be the first time in his life as well.

Filmmaker: What was the experience like of making the film on the steppe? Were you essentially a part of the community there?

Dvortsevoy: Yeah, sure. This film was a real challenge, not only creatively but also physically. It's a real steppe and we lived 500 kilometres from the closest city. It's really a very hard place to live, and for us it was a challenge to live there because every morning when we woke up we had to look in our shoes and be very careful because there are many poisonous spiders and snakes there. It was very hard because of all the insects, because of nature, because of this strong permanent wind and dust. It was very hard just to live there, let alone make a film. To make a film was doubly challenging. But for us it was really like school – life school.

Filmmaker: Almost all the actors in the film played characters with the same name, so did you encourage people not to break character when you weren't shooting?

Dvortsevoy: My main actors were from another part of Kazakhstan and they didn't know this place or this way of life because in the north of Kazakhstan they live differently, like a European style of life. For example, they don't live in yurts, they don't eat on the floor. First of all, I wanted to help them get used to the steppe life, to feel that this is their life also, to be closer to the children ((who were from one local family from a village 25 kilometres from where we shot), to be closer to the animals. That's why I asked them to keep their original names, and why I asked Samal Yeslyamova [the lead actress] to live with her [screen] husband and their children for one month just to get used to one another as a family. They spent much time living together and I also asked the camera people to have their cameras with them as much as possible, to help the children to work with this strange approach. We did a lot of things for this, but it was very hard to achieve this family atmosphere.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Dvortsevoy: [laughs] I lived in Kazakhstan [when I was young] and very often I went to see films at local cinemas. I remember very well from my childhood when I saw an old French movie Fantômas. It's like a thriller and the main character is called Fantômas, a very dangerous bandit. I was just an ordinary guy and saw French comedies and Indian Bollywood movies – it was the time of the Soviet Union and we saw many Indian films and also some Russian comedies and trailers. I saw all these films, all this rubbish, though sometimes some funny or interesting films too. But when I joined film school, then I started to see classical films and historical films.

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

Dvortsevoy: You know, I realize now that I don't want to have a big budget for my films. First of all, I want to make films that are exactly what I want to be about, I want to feel that I control the process. I want to feel that I can achieve the result that I want, and I realize very well that the more money you have the less freedom you have. I hope I could find more money now because Tulpan was quite successful, but for me it's very important to save my freedom. It's very important for me to have the ability to tell my story, to use my approach, to use my own voice, and I will fight for this.

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

Dvortsevoy: [laughs] I must say that I never cry in films. I don't know why. Sometimes it's very moving, but I'm a person who never cries. Unfortunately. Not even once. I never cry, in real life as well. Maybe I am Iron Man. You know what, sometimes I feel very moved and I feel like I am about to cry, but maybe there is a physical problem, I don't know. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Finally, what's the strangest experience you've had during your time in the film industry?

Dvortsevoy: It was very difficult to work with the [actor playing the] oldest shepherd because he was originally an opera singer from Almaty, the [former] capital of Kazakhstan. In the film he doesn't allow his daughter to sing, but it was very hard during the whole shoot because he tried to convince me, “Give me the possibility to sing somehow.” He's a singer in real life but his part was completely different and it was really funny because all the time he was trying to convince me to let him sing. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/01/2009 11:38:00 AM Comments (1)