Following in the footsteps of such filmmakers as James Marsh (Man on Wire), Stephen Walker (Young@Heart) and Parvez Sharma (A Jihad For Love), Havana Marking is the latest director of a British TV-funded documentary to find her film in the theatrical spotlight Stateside. The intrepid director went to school in Dorset, England, before studying Anthropology at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Subsequently, she began working in documentary television, progressing from researcher through to producer, on shows as disparate as Himalaya with Michael Palin, the Gordon Ramsay studio cooking show The F Word, and the environmental investigation What Would Jesus Drive?. She made her debut as a director in 2005 with The Great Relativity Show, a series of animated shorts explaining the Theory of Relativity which won a Pirelli Science Award. In 2007, she directed a half-hour documentary about disabled strippers, The Crippendales, which was made as part of Channel 4's New Talent program. Marking currently runs the Redstart Media production company, and has also worked as a freelance journalist for the British newspapers The Guardian and The Observer.

Marking's feature debut sees her capitalizing on her first-hand knowledge of the documentary genre's populist offshoot, reality TV. Afghan Star focuses on the TV series of the same name, a talent show along the lines of American Idol which aims to find the newest and best singer in a country where - until the Taliban's rule ended in 2001 - music, dancing and television were all banned. Marking's movie follows four hopefuls from the final 10: handsome Rafi, a 19-year-old with real pop star charisma; gifted 20-year-old Hameed, a classically trained Hazara musician; Lima, a 25-year-old woman from ultra-conservative Kandahar who has to practice her music in secret; and rebellious 21-year-old Setara, who sees music as a vital part of her self-expression. Afghan Star, which won Best Director and the Audience Award in the World Documentary section at Sundance this year, is a refreshingly different look at the shifting social and cultural landscape of the Middle East which uses the familiar TV talent show format to underline the differences and similarities between Afghanistan and the West. Marking depicts a much more complex and progressive Afghanistan than we are used to seeing, though the film dramatically and compellingly underlines the genuine dangers the contestants face by so forcefully leaving behind the restrictive religious traditions of the past.

Filmmaker spoke to Marking about the experience of shooting in Afghanistan, her Sundance success, and her memories of watching Bambi and Gandhi as a child.



Filmmaker: How did the project originate?

Marking: I really wanted to go to Afghanistan, and I was looking for a film that I could make that would be different. You risk your life out there, so you don't want to make just another film about an orphanage or something. I don't want to sound flippant, but you want something different that's also logistically possible and safe and doesn't involve some kind of frontline craziness. In that research, I spoke to a brilliant journalist called Rachel Reid, who's now actually a Human Rights Watch officer out there. She told me about Afghan Star, so we developed the project together and she introduced me to the people who own Tolo TV. It's one of those things where you sit up immediately and know that this is an extraordinary way in. Just from my own personal experience, you try to read a book about Afghan history and by the third paragraph you're confused, because it's just so epic, [laughs] there are just so many chapters in its history, in its ethnic diversity, in its attitude to women, all the different warlords. There's so many names and it's very complicated. Not only was this an interesting look at media in general, but it was a clear and easy to understand structure and way into what is otherwise a very complicated society.

Filmmaker: Because we're so familiar with shows like this, it's a perfect vehicle to underline the differences between what's culturally familiar to us and what's not.

Marking: Exactly, and also the familiarities. That's what's lovely about it: you can see so many things that we take for granted here that are really magnified through this format that we all know.

Filmmaker: How familiar with that format of show, because the prototypical show, Pop Idol, comes from the UK?

Marking: When Pop Idol started, I really liked it. That was one of the things that really made me fight for it as a project in terms of getting funding, because I just knew that I was the right person to make it. Now I'm bored of those shows and I think they've pushed it to extremes to keep their ratings up, which I don't like, but at the very beginning I used to cry at Pop Idol every single episode. It is the rawest form of people's hopes and dreams and this idea that everyone's got a chance, wherever you are, whatever your background, and people are generally amazing.

Filmmaker: I was looking at your credits and, as you say, the range of documentary formats you've worked in seemed like ideal preparation for this.

Marking: In Britain, there's a very established factual TV industry and I have deliberately worked – as a researcher, as an assistant producer, as a producer – on serious one-hour polemics or documentaries but also on factual entertainment and studio shows as well. So I know what creates the tension, what works, what doesn't work. But having said how brilliant that training is, I actually made the decision about three years ago that I was no longer going to work on certain shows. The TV industry in Britain has become very corrosive and I made the decision not to work on that kind of popular TV anymore because I was finding it difficult to balance my moral and ethical stances with the way that people were being treated – either people on the show or the audience.

Filmmaker: Was that part of the reason behind your move from producing to directing?

Marking: I did always want to become a director and this was a brilliant way into it, but getting funding for your film as a relative unknown is very difficult. I've been in situations before where I've had ideas commissioned and funded, and then they say, “Actually, we think someone more experienced should direct it,” which is just heartbreaking. But, at the same time, they're giving you the money so you sort of go, “Alright...” On this one, I really worked to make sure that it was me that directed it. I've also got a background in traveling, working and living in Asia, the developing world and Islamic countries, so I just knew that it was my project.

Filmmaker: What was your comfort level in Afghanistan? How much experience had you had specifically in the Middle East?

Marking: Not the Middle East exactly, but I've both lived and worked in Egypt, and also India, which is not Islamic but you've also got developing world issues there. I'm absolutely fine about roughing it. I don't require hairdryers... I suppose that's not true, I go to salon's for blow dries. But I'm completely fine being somewhere a bit scary and different, where there's no central heating, no running water. I'm fine with that – I love it, in fact. I thrive on that.

Filmmaker: You were in Kabul for about four months. Did you feel out of place there as a Western woman?

Marking: Kabul's so international that people are not called Westerners, they're more called “internationals” because there's a community of non-Afghans that includes people from India and Japan and wherever. But as an international there, yes, you're outside of [the norm]. In the evenings, Afghan families are very interior, they stay inside because it's very dangerous for them, so there is a separate world – the international world – and then there's the Afghan world. But it was such an honor to live and work every single day in an Afghan company with Afghans, hanging out in Afghan houses. On those terms, on a day-to-day basis I was completely felt at home there. In terms of the filmmaking, people were so glad and happy that you were talking about something that wasn't fundamentalist Islam, terrorism, or mad, crazy, bearded people (without meaning to sound tabloid...). It was such a relief to everyone to talk about music and culture and art and freedom and exciting things. People loved that.

Filmmaker: How much did you have to adapt your lifestyle while you were there?

Marking: You have to cover up with a headscarf, and depending on where you are the size of your headscarf changes. There are all these subtle nuances in terms of dressing based on who you're going to be meeting. I would wear salwar kameez, Indian long shirts and trousers underneath – nothing figure-hugging. “Kabul chic” is actually great, and headscarfs, if they're done in the right way, can be very glamorous, [laughs] and we all quite enjoyed that. That's a key thing, but more importantly in Afghanistan they have key and very strong etiquette, respect, and ways of doing things. If you go into someone's house as a guest, it's not just how you say hello, who you say hello to first, how you greet people, it's where you sit, how you sit, who gets the food first. It's very structured and you have to absolutely be sensitive to those cultural things. If you treat people with that kind of respect in terms of understanding their culture and working that way – and also understanding your role as a woman, because you do subserve to the man of the house – you then get absolute respect back. Working there as a woman, as a director, actually I found that people were very willing to do what I asked and take direction, because I had proved myself to be respectful of Afghan culture.

Filmmaker: It seems like a lot hangs on choosing the right subjects to follow when you're doing a documentary about competitors, because if the film's protagonists get knocked out too early then you have no story. How did you deal with this problem?

Marking: The brilliant thing about a talent show is that the reason why someone's going to be good in my film is the reason they might get to the top three. The main thing I was really keen on doing was finding characters that absolutely highlighted different issues, and I think we were really lucky to do that. The two women in the top ten, we knew we were going to follow them from the word go, and again we were incredibly fortunate that both women we so different and had different reasons and came from different areas and had completely different attitudes. With the two guys, Rafi does have a pop star charisma and he's interesting because he really shows you the similarities in the world. And we were completely lucky that Hameed did so well. We did follow other people who didn't make it, but they were left on the editing room floor. We were luckily there for such a long time and with such free rein that we could follow whoever or whatever.

Filmmaker: There's an amazing moment where Setara dances, which is completely taboo. Were you at all prepared for that to happen?

Marking: I completely had absolutely no idea that was going to happen. We were backstage, and it was an electric moment for everyone. Thank God, my cameraman was on the ball because I burst into tears, actually. There's that one shot where her headscarf's off and she's pointing at the camera and it's just such a defiant image, such a moment of liberation. She's not saying “Fuck you” or anything like that, [laughs] she's just doing it because she just has to express herself. It was so very, very powerful to be there at that moment. It was always going to be a nice film that gave you insight into the youth of Afghanistan was thinking, but that moment – and the effects of that moment – turned it into a political thriller with a fiction drama tension. That was just one of those things that happens. It was an astounding thing.

Filmmaker: You only shot this last year, so you had a very rapid post-production period.

Marking: We finished in March 2008, and then finished editing three months later. It was a quick turnaround, but that's something I've learned on the international documentary circuit is that people seen to take years editing their films. Because I come from a TV background, we had deadlines and you just stick to them. Obviously it's a huge luxury to have time, but at the same time if you have a deadline, you finish. If it could stretch on and on, we'd never finish. Technically our film may not be perfect, but what it has is an energy and a spontaneity and a heart to it, and I think that comes from a combination of [the speed of editing and] the liberation of filming under those conditions. We just had to follow action: the kidnap threat meant you couldn't plan anything in advance, you couldn't tell people to be somewhere at some time, you just had to wait for them, so the conditions enforced cinéma vérité on the film.

Filmmaker: How significant was your success at Sundance, where the film won the directing and audience prizes in the World Documentary section?

Marking: Phenomenal. Just being at Sundance is fantastic; to win two awards is just stunning, and took us completely by surprise. The lovely thing was that we had our Afghan co-producers with us. This was the first film partly produced in Afghanistan that has ever got to Sundance, and it's an exciting thing. For our Afghan co-producers, and indeed the presenter of the show who was there, it was wonderful for them to see the impact of what they were doing. They're brave, they're risking their lives as well, so for them to know that what they're doing can have this impact is fantastic.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Marking: Gandhi. It made a huge impact. In fact, it wasn't the first film I ever saw – that was probably Bambi – but it was first film that had a proper impact on me. I was about seven, and I cried and cried and cried and everyone started thinking they'd taken me to the cinema too young. It had an impact both in terms of the effect that the screen can have on you, but also how important messages of peace and hope are.

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

Marking: Well, I make documentaries so, hell, I'm going to stick to the same theme: Gandhi. Imagine filming that march, a longitudinal film about him going from a lawyer to the one of the most inspirational figures on earth. It would be incredible.

Filmmaker: Finally, will the current interest in documentaries last, or is it just a fad?

Marking: As long as the documentaries are good enough, it'll last. There are a lot of boring documentaries out there as well, so I'm hoping that there are going to be pressures now on funds due to the recession and that quality will come to the top.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/26/2009 03:12:00 PM Comments (0)

Being an independent filmmaker is difficult enough without adding the further challenges of animation, so it's always a pleasure to see the emergence of a visionary talent like Tatia Rosenthal. The Israeli writer-director and stop motion animator was born in Tel Aviv in 1971 and explored some very diverse avenues before deciding on her current profession: Rosenthal was in the Israeli Defense Force for two years, spent a period of time at medical school and then studied photography in Paris for a year. She finally found her niche while studying for a BFA in Film & Television at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts when she discovered an aptitude for stop motion, and particularly for claymation. During her time as a student she made Breaking the Pig, based on the short story of the same name by Etgar Keret, and in 1998 she directed Crazy Glue, also based on a Keret short story. Between 2000 and 2005, she worked as an animator for Nickleodeon on shows such as Blue's Clues, Wonder Pets and Piper O'Possum. In 2005, she made A Buck's Worth, a 6-minute animation voiced by Philip Baker Hall and Tom Noonan.

A Buck's Worth was, in fact, made as a proof of concept short for Rosenthal’s now completed first feature, $9.99. The claymation stop motion film is, like all of Rosenthal’s previous work, derived from tales by Etgar Keret, with this production synthesizing six of the short story specialist's literary thumbnails into a cohesive panoramic narrative. The title comes from the price of a book promising the secret of happiness which is bought by Dave Peck, a man in Sydney, Australia, who feels that his neighbors – including an elderly man with an angel as a house guest, a man who neglects his fiancée in favor of two-inch-tall party animals, and a dent-ridden magician plagued by repo men – could benefit from the volume's wisdom. The first Israeli-Australian co-production, Rosenthal's film features the voice talents of such antipodean actors as Geoffrey Rush and Anthony LaPaglia, and loses nothing from the transposition of the action from the Middle East to Down Under. Keret and Rosenthal's sprightly script stays true to the spirit of its source material despite the change in medium and location, while Rosenthal's animation creates a cinematic look, bridging the realistic and the fantastic, that brings the world of the film colorfully and vividly to life.

Filmmaker interviewed Rosenthal over email and discussed with her the slow and painstaking process of making an animated indie, how she came to make $9.99 in Australia, and her discovering the existence of oral sex thanks to The World According to Garp.



Filmmaker: Can you tell me about your formative years in Israel and how you first became interested in animation?

Rosenthal: Like most kids, I loved animation since I can remember and it was through a piece of animation that I was first inspired to become a filmmaker. I was eleven or twelve and I watched The World According to Garp, which was amazing (and the way I found out that oral sex existed). But that one moment when Garp's drawing of his hero pilot dad comes to life in animation was the moment that I fell in love with film. Later, on my first day of film school at NYU, they showed us some of the professors' show reels. The scene from The World According to Garp was screened because its creator, John Canemaker, was the head of the animation program. I was truly elated, it was one of those moments when you feel that you're where you're "supposed" to be. Mr. Canemaker later became my thesis advisor and a continuing source of inspiration.

Filmmaker: Were you always drawn to stop motion? What in particular makes you like it? What makes you well-suited to it?

Rosenthal: To be completely honest, once I'd started to take animation classes and realized one has to draw thousands of minutely different drawings in order to make even the shortest of shorts, I started doubting I would have the patience to do it. Then I took Dean Lennert's wonderfully diverse stop motion class and fell in love with the various techniques and their richness of textures. We tried our hands in coffee grain/sand animation, cut-out paper animation, oil paint under the camera and finally puppet animation. I was hooked. There is something very emotional and beautiful in puppet animation and I think it has to do partly with its invitation to project the audience’s emotion onto its own touching yet limited expression.

Filmmaker: What effect did your experiences in the Israeli Defense Force, in medical school and studying photography have on you? Did they help you realize the direction you wanted to take in life?

Rosenthal: My military service was quite miserable, which in retrospect was a great gift. When the going got tough on $9.99 – and the going got tough on $9.99 – away from home, making a film on a shoe string budget for a two year stretch... I would think back on how it felt to be in the army for two years, and knew I could survive it. There's a lot that can be said for discipline. Medical school was a really short stint, and there I learned that I need to have passion in order to be voluntarily disciplined... I didn't have the passion for it. However, I was quite serious about photography. My portfolio for film school consisted mainly of photos and paintings. Film is really the ultimate art form for those who can't or don't want to chose between their artistic inclinations.

Filmmaker: What impact did your time working at Nickleodeon have on you?

Rosenthal: It was a great experience, I learned a lot about animation but also editing, and indirectly about directing. Dave Palmer, Blue's Clues's director and my first boss in the industry, is a real role model. I feel very lucky to have worked for him for as long as I did.

Filmmaker: Do you see yourself as an “adult-oriented” animator? And do other people see you this way? Do you feel you have been marginalized at all because your work is not aimed primarily at children?

Rosenthal: Marginalized is a strong word... But yes, animation for grown ups is still a start-up of sorts. I wasn’t aware of the extent to which it was considered a risky venture when we started pitching it ten years ago. Now I really think it’s starting to shift with films like Persepolis, Waltz with Bashir, Sita Sings the Blues, $9.99, and Mary and Max, which will keep getting made, I believe.

Filmmaker: Your films so far have all been inspired by Etgar Keret’s short stories. Do you share a special affinity with his work? What makes you keep returning it?

Rosenthal: I really admire his writing – it's funny, imaginative, utterly original and most of all he describes the world in ways I recognize as true – albeit a fragmented truth. He expresses his ambivalence toward "greater truths" without being indifferent, which I find deeply moving.

Filmmaker: Independent animated films are rare, especially ones that are truly independent such as yours. How much thought did you give it before embarking on such a daunting and difficult task?

Rosenthal: I had no idea what I was taking on. Not in the slightest, nor will I want to make another film in the same way for such a long stretch of time, but having said that, I'm really glad I did. After finishing the film, I went back and re-read The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (I've always wanted to remake that film...) and was tickled to realize that one of its themes was that in order to achieve the impossible, one has to be ignorant of the obstacle along the way. It was very true in my case.

Filmmaker: How did you go about taking short stories, which are all by the same author but otherwise unconnected and create a single film out of them? How closely was Etgar Keret involved at this stage?

Rosenthal: It was a wonderful process and I've learned a lot from Etgar while we were adapting it. First I picked ten of my favorite stories, and we pared them down to six, based on the fact that they all dealt with yearning in one way or another. Then we started uniting characters, i.e making the love interest of story A become the newly invented brother of the protagonist of story B etc... We wrote drafts two and three, which were the most significant drafts of the script, while together in the same country (in Israel and at Sundance where we workshopped the screenplay between those two drafts.)

Filmmaker: What was it like going to the Sundance Writers Lab as an animator?

Rosenthal: I always felt and the directors of the Filmmakers Labs Michelle Satter and the late Lynn Auerbach agreed that because puppet animation engages real space (albeit in 1/6 scale) and $9.99's screenplay was a fully realized dramatic/comic screenplay, Etgar and I would benefit from the labs as much as live action writers and directors. It turned out to be very true.

Filmmaker: How clear in your mind was the vision of the physical world these characters lived in?

Rosenthal: The overall visual tone and color scheme was quite clear, I also knew who the puppets should look like and how they should be painted. But the full visual world came from collaborating with Melinda Doring our production designer and Philip Beadsmoore our puppet master and their great teams.

Filmmaker: How did the film come to be set in Australia and have an Australian cast?

Rosenthal: Emile Sherman, our Australian producer, was interested in being the first to use the Israeli-Australian co-production agreement, which was in place for more than a decade. He heard about Etgar from two writers he had previously worked with. Etgar pitched him our screenplay, which Emile loved immediately, but he was apprehensive about producing an animated project. I flew to meet Emile right after showing A Buck’s Worth – our $9.99's proof of concept short – at the Annecy Animation Festival. It had had a successful run. The timing couldn’t have been better. Once Emile was on board, Etgar recruited Amir Harel who was producing Etgar and Shira Geffen's Jellyfish, and the co production was on its way.

Filmmaker: After spending 10 years on this film, do you feel able to make another in this manner? Do you have ways to make the next film a quicker process?

Rosenthal: I would love to make another stop motion feature, if only to implement all that I have learned on $9.99. But as I mentioned, I wouldn't want to make another film on such a tight budget for such a long time.

Filmmaker: Do you view your animation work as a bridge to other things? If someone were to offer you live action directing work, would you be interested?

Rosenthal: Bring it on!

Filmmaker: Do you feel as if there will be any impact from the release in a brief period of time of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and your movie? Do you think or hope that there will be a wave of yet more innovative Israeli animators who will be inspired by these films?

Rosenthal: Our two films are as different as two animated films for grown ups could be... and I think the fact that they came out roughly at the same time is coincidental as far as the Israeli animation industry is concerned. However I do think and hope that the fact that they both got made is probably quite inspirational for Israeli animators.

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

Rosenthal: Does laughing so hard I cried during The Hangover count? If not, then the last time before that was during most episodes of John from Cincinnati to which I'm currently catching up with as a part of my latest obsession with David Milch's work.

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Rosenthal: Only if the risks are in the service of their true vision, not just for the hell of it.

Filmmaker: Which actor would you pay to see in anything?

Rosenthal: Ian McShane.

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

Rosenthal: There's a big Ingmar Bergman shaped hole in my cinematic education.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/19/2009 05:53:00 PM Comments (1)

Most young filmmakers quickly define themselves in terms of both their creative roles and genre specialties, however Daryl Wein has so far benefited from doing exactly the opposite. Born in Santa Monica in 1983, Wein grew up in Connecticut and commuted to auditions in New York City as he pursued a career as a child actor, mostly in commercials. At the same time, Wein's father's interest in chronicling their family life on home video lead the young thespian to become fascinated with being on the other side of the camera. At the age of 16, he made Life is a Train, a short film which won him an award at the International Young Filmmaker's Festival in New York, as well as the inaugural You Belong in Connecticut Young Media Maker Award. He went to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts to study drama and film, and also appeared in small roles in the films Magic Rock (2001) and The Hebrew Hammer (2003) as well as the Comedy Central TV movie Porn 'n Chicken (2002). In 2007, he co-wrote, directed and edited the short film Unlocked, starring Olivia Thirlby and executive produced by director Stephen Daldry, which played at the Tribeca Film Festival. Wein's first narrative feature, Breaking Upwards, which is based on Wein's relationship with actress Zoe Lister-Jones and features the pair playing versions of themselves, premiered at SXSW earlier this year.

It is demonstrative of Daryl Wein's openness as a filmmaker that, despite his strong acting background, his first feature length film is, in fact, a documentary. Sex Positive is a portrait of Richard Berkowitz, a figure now penniless and forgotten, who was a fearless and controversial AIDS activist in the 1980s and, along with Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and actor Michael Callen, one of the architects of the safe sex movement. Berkowitz was hugely unpopular for his contention that the AIDS epidemic was exacerbated by the gay community's promiscuous lifestyle, however, he responded to accusations of being “sex negative” by proposing that responsible actions, such as condom use, should not inhibit sexual activity. Sex Positive has the virtue of not only telling an important story but having, in Richard Berkowitz, a fascinating subject truly worthy of scrutiny. Berkowitz is a compelling presence who talks candidly about not only his activism and his own battle with AIDS but also his time as an S&M hustler and drug addict. Wein ably balances historical background and his focus on Berkowitz, while the handsome work by DP Alex Bergman adds further character to the piece.

Filmmaker spoke to Wein about his discovery of Berkowitz's story, the blurring of documentary and fiction, and why he was recently sitting naked on a unicorn.



Filmmaker: Tell me about the starting point for this film.

Wein: I met Richard Berkowitz at a Passover Seder in 2007. He is really good friends with my girlfriend's mother; they've known each for 20 years. It was a gathering of lots of progressive types at this thing and at the time I'd just graduated from NYU a year before and I was looking for my next project. (Before I'd done a short film that was at the Tribeca Film Festival.) I was happy to do documentary or fiction, I just wanted something that I felt passionate about. Zoe, my girlfriend, said, “You should really meet Richard because he has an incredible life story – he used to be a sex worker and he was a controversial AIDS activist.” I said, “OK, that sounds interesting,” and then I spoke with him and he was very sweet, and I could tell he had a lot to say. [laughs] Then I read his book, Staying Alive: The Invention of Safe Sex, and I think that's what really did it for me. Reading that, I realized “This is such an important story, and such a fascinating slice of history that I don't know anything about.”

Filmmaker: Did you become friends with Richard before you had asked to make a film about him?

Wein: Not really – we kind of started right away. He had an implicit trust in me because he knew I wasn't a complete stranger who was going to exploit him and his story, because his lifelong friend's daughter was my girlfriend. That allowed him to trust me, and I think also Richard had been waiting for someone to give him the opportunity to share his story again. He's had so much trouble getting his writing out there and so this was a really good chance for him to just rehash a lot of the old ideas. I just wanted to start right away anyway. Of course, at first I thought I probably should get to know him and be familiar, but the second he started talking, everything that came out of his mouth was so brilliant. It was amazing sound bites from the first interview, which was five hours long and actually is the interview I ended up using as the basis for the story.

Filmmaker: What was your motivation for the film? Did you see it as a character study? Were you more focused on the LGBT angle? Or were you trying to make a case for Richard Berkowitz's historical significance?

Wein: I would say that first and foremost it's a portrait of Richard's life, but I think from that it opens up a door to a lot of other areas. I was interested in exploring all of the early history surrounding the controversy around HIV and AIDS theory. I was kind of enraptured by all of it, I thought was really interesting.

Filmmaker: Were you already aware of or interested in LGBT issues?

Wein: No, I didn't have any specific interest in the LGBT community, it wasn't an area I had done any film work in the past. It was totally new to me. I'm a straight young filmmaker and Richard's in his fifties and gay, so everyone wonders how we come together. It's funny, Richard always says it had to take a straight guy to make this story, because he doesn't know why a gay man hasn't made this yet.

Filmmaker: The film is very personal and you get a real sense of the trust that developed between you and Richard, but there are also times when you push him to be more revelatory, specifically to do with his hustling and more sexual aspects. How easy was that for you?

Wein: I guess he was pretty open with everything. I think what was difficult was he didn't want to feel like parts of his life were being taken out of context, like I was doing an Enquirer version. His sex work was an extremely touchy subject, and there was a point in time when I felt like I could make this whole movie about Richard as a sex worker. It really is its own story. And there was also another point at which I felt like I could probably just cut this altogether. But I think it's so important to show that he was deeply immersed in that world, and it's that world that lead him to meet Dr. Joseph Sonnabend and begin to take action as an activist and really understand what was happening medically and scientifically. He was experiencing all that firsthand, he had thousands of gay men coming into his apartment while working as an S&M top, and so I think that's what really set him apart.

Filmmaker: How does he feel about those aspects of the film, and also the bits that deal with his drug use?

Wein: I think it's hard for him to see them, but I think Richard prefers to be portrayed as a complex person. He doesn't want to leave anything out. He doesn't want to be portrayed as a total saint, so he understands that showing some of the dark patches is important. I mean, he says in the movie that the reason he was doing all those drugs was to numb all the pain and there were times when it became so hard he just couldn't resist.

Filmmaker: How did Richard view this film? Did he see this as his chance for redemption, or is that too melodramatic an interpretation?

Wein: I think he definitely saw this as a chance to redeem himself and receive some credit that was due. I think it was also another chance to try and promote the cause that he was originally espousing with Michael about safe sex. It's such a convoluted history: even if you go online and type in “the invention of safe sex,” the chances are you're not going to find any kind of concise story or version of it. I think now, with this film and his book (which he's written a new forward to), and all the film festivals he's going to and the people he's talking to, he can get back to what he originally was professing about importance of safe sex, which a new generation might not know about. I think we both feel that's a crucial part of history that may be lost if we don't work hard to really try and clarify aspects of it.

Filmmaker: Documentaries, particularly first features, often do not put a high priority on good visuals, but Sex Positive looks really great. How important was that to your vision of the film?

Wein: Well, I have to mention my director of photography, Alex Bergman, who shot it for me on the Panasonic HVX200. It's an HD camera but we used 35mm lenses so it gave it that depth of field to make it feel a bit more filmic, because I can't stand that sharp video look. We did the best job we could to make it cinematic feeling. The decision to be handheld and not like completely locked down was just to give it an extra sense of rawness and authenticity, and we did color correct it, which I think helped bring out the richness of the different interviews.

Filmmaker: This is a documentary, you're an actor as well, you've now made a fiction film also, so how do you describe yourself to people?

Wein: I would say I'm first and foremost a filmmaker. I went to NYU for acting and I used to act more, but I'm not really interested in acting. I acted in Breaking Upwards because that was about my relationship with Zoe in real life and it made sense because of our chemistry together and I thought it would be more interesting if we played ourselves as opposed to hired two actors. But I just really want to focus on directing.

Filmmaker: You said Breaking Upwards is about your relationship with Zoe Lister-Jones, but it's a fiction film in which you two play characters called Daryl and Zoe. It seems as if you're playing with the divide between documentary and fiction filmmaking.

Wein: There's a lot of elements in that film that are based in reality, but we fictionalized all of it, for the most part. Zoe and I really did experience an open relationship similar to that, we did sit down and strategize and come up with rules to try and eventually break up or take a break or whatever. There are some people in the film, friends of ours, who are our real friends who are not actors, but we didn't really want to call attention to what was real or wasn't real, we just wanted to leave that up to the audience's imagination to try and deduce. I think it helped give the film a sense of authenticity. But it's all kind of a blur, that fact-fiction thing.

Filmmaker: So after these two films do you feel like there's a logical next step for you as a filmmaker?

Wein: Zoe and I just finished writing a political thriller about the future of genetically modified food in America. We're just now trying to put that together. I don't want to do one thing, I just want to tell stories that seem relevant and important now to me and it's fun to jump into different genres and different forms. If there was another amazing documentary story that just fell into my lap, like this one did, I would probably pursue it.

Filmmaker: I saw your short film, Unlocked, which I noticed was produced by Stephen Daldry. How did he get involved with that project?

Wein: I worked for Stephen Daldry as his assistant when he was putting together Billy Elliott [on Broadway]. I showed him Unlocked and we became friends, and he said, “Anything I can do to help...” So he came on as an executive producer, and that was just really cool of him, because I admire his work.

Filmmaker: Do you aspire to be making films in Hollywood like Daldry?

Wein: I just aspire to be able to make films that I want to make. If I can have the luxury to be able to make something that I'm passionate about, whether it be in Hollywood or independent, that's all that matters. Obviously my roots are independent and all my films have been made that way; I've had to scrounge together people and money and I have been a producer on all of my films. I've worn many hats, which I like doing because it helps to have that control, it's very liberating. But I also don't like to wear all the hats all the time. [laughs] If I could have a big crew and other people to be able to help and be able to pay them, it would be absolutely great. So I would love to work in Hollywood.

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

Wein: Someone after one of the screenings at SXSW said that Sex Positive saved her life. I think she had two people in her life, very close family members, who had died of AIDS and the film and Richard's story were such an inspiration to her that she felt like she could continue living. That was a pretty remarkable moment to realize that a film that I was making was actually making a difference in people's lives.

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

Wein: The best advice I have is just to do it yourself and just don't be lazy. Get out there and try to make it work. And if you fail, great, you'll learn along the way. Don't be afraid to just do it. Don't take no for an answer. If people don't want to give you money or people don't want to give you the opportunity, then say “Fuck it, I'm just going to get a camera and friends together and make it.”

Filmmaker: What's the most embarrassing film you watched the whole of on a plane?

Wein: [laughs] Oh, God! It might have been Sex and the City. [laughs] It also may have been a rough cut of my own film, Sex Positive. There's so much graphic material in it that I think the person sitting next to me was so weirded out. So one of those two.

Filmmaker: The Sex double bill – Sex and the City and Sex Positive. Soon to be available on double DVD.

Wein: [laughs] Sex Positive and Sex and the City, they go naturally together. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Finally, when was the last time you burst out laughing on set?

Wein: I think when we were shooting the rap video for the Breaking Upwards viral campaign. I had to pretend that I was sitting naked on a unicorn and we were laughing so hard when we were doing that. I was holding my privates, and trying to be serious, but we couldn't really hold it together.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/12/2009 03:12:00 PM Comments (0)

Artists' creativity is sometimes directly proportional to their life experience, and Estonian writer-director Veiko Õunpuu has more than enough to draw on. Õunpuu was born in 1972 on Saaremaa, the biggest island belonging to Estonia, and graduated from high school in 1990 just as the country was glimpsing independence due to the dissolution of the USSR. Over the next 10 years, Õunpuu had numerous identities: a tyre repair worker, an asylum seeker in Finland, a student at the Estonian Business School, a failed carpet salesman in Sweden, a driver on Hardi Volmer's Estonian movie All My Lenins, an advertising agency employee, a backpacker in Asia, and finally a Literary Theory and Semiotics student at the University of Tallinn. In 2000, he began to focus his energies on film, starting his own production company, Sugar Films, which made Marko Raat's Agent Wild Duck before going under. After a hiatus as a painter and a social-critical essayist, he returned to filmmaking in 2006 by writing and directing the 40-minute film Tuhirand (Empty), starring Rain Tolk, based on a short story by Estonian writer and theater director Mati Unt.

Õunpuu once again draws on the work of Mati Unt for his first feature, Sügisball, adapted from Unt's 1979 novel of the same name, and has Rain Tolk reprising his role from Tuhirand of Unt's literary alter ego, Mati. Sügisball is a kaleidoscopic portrait of Tallinn, the Estonian capital, and the disillusioned, alienated residents of one highrise apartment building. It focuses on a disparate group of characters: writer Mati, who has just been left by his wife; lonely single mom Laura and her young daughter; elderly barber August; self-involved architect Maurer and his long-suffering wife; and coatroom attendant (and unlikely ladykiller) Theo. Unusually for a film like this, these understated stories of quiet desperation only occasionally overlap, instead sitting side by side, the emotional resonances playing off each other. Stunningly shot and with a brooding soundtrack featuring post rock outfit Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Sügisball looks, feels and sounds dark, and Õunpuu employs an absurdist sense of humor reminiscent of his near-neighbor, Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki, though somewhat bleaker. Though just at the beginning of his career, Õunpuu is a filmmaker who already has a distinct and original vision, and Sügisball is as exciting and promising a debut as you will see all year.

Filmmaker interviewed Õunpuu over email, and talked to him about the cinema of urban alienation, the production company he named after his cat, and gluing studs on rally car tyres while in a giant spacesuit.



Filmmaker: You’ve done a lot of different things so far in your life, from selling floor materials in Sweden to backpacking in Thailand and India. How important were those experiences in making you ready to be a filmmaker?

Õunpuu: I just wasn’t able to hold a job or set into anything for a longer period. So I was sort of drifting, and becoming more and more desperate until me and some of my friends decided to make a small film.

Filmmaker: Now that you are directing, do you feel like this is the job you were meant to do?

Õunpuu: It works out surprisingly well, but I’m not sure if I was meant to be a film director. If your question means whether I’m happy to be able to make films then answer is yes. My life makes a lot more sense now.

Filmmaker: How much of an impact did your painting experience have on your artistic style as a filmmaker?

Õunpuu: Painting experience was for me pretty much the only thing to cling on to when I started out – the first film I made was just a series of compositions. I’ve just barely began to grasp the other aspects of filmmaking.

Filmmaker: Your production company is called Homeless Bob Production. Where did that name come from?

Õunpuu: Some years ago I took in a stray cat that I gave the name Bob. I set up the company around that time and the name was there, walking around in my apartment, demanding to be fed.

Filmmaker: Do you see an overlap between the work you did as a social critical essayist and in how you portray the world in Sügisball?

Õunpuu: To my mind there is very little social criticism in Sügisball. It is just a bit of poetry, or rather an attempt at a bit of poetical generalization on some basic problems in our lives. I actually tried out a very “anti-Marxist” idea that the quality of our existence is not conditioned by our social status and a position in the hierarchies of the world.

Filmmaker: This film and your previous movie are both based on stories by Mati Unt. What especially attracts you to his work? In your opinion, what makes him such a good writer?

Õunpuu: I like the way Mati Unt wrote, how he constructed the sentences, the text being of a high quality but always fluid. And I like his mixture of existentialism and irony. The man was a genius. He was also a very good theatre director.

Filmmaker: Your comic style has been compared to Aki Kaurismäki, but is darker and less obviously funny. Are you directly influenced by him, or is your sense of humor more of a regional thing?

Õunpuu: I love Aki Kaurismäki’s films and I’m very flattered to be compared to him. What comes to my sense of humor... Some things make you laugh but bring tears in your eyes at the same time… I guess this is the kind of humor that I enjoy the most in films.

Filmmaker: Do you see Sügisball as being part of a tradition of kaleidoscopic films portraying alienated people in a specific city, like Altman’s Short Cuts or Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland? Did any of these films influence you?

Õunpuu: I haven’t seen these films that you mentioned. Only after making Sügisball did I come to an embarrassing realization that so many of films like this have been made before. I just used the characters of Mati Unt’s book and generated my own events around them, hoping to achieve some sort of generalization on the subject of solitude. As I was heavily into Cassavetes at the time, I stole a scene from Love Streams but never had anything to do with Altman or Winterbottom. I guess it is very hard to come up with something truly original.

Filmmaker: In Sügisball, Theo brutally beats a famous actor-director known for his relationship comedies. Is that a personal comment on your feelings on that genre?

Õunpuu: You bet. The whole genre is a massive bullshit generator and the pushers of this vile junk, the directors and screenwriters of this kind of cinema; they should all be jailed in my opinion.

Filmmaker: In your director’s note, you quote Beckett saying “When you are up to your neck in shit the only thing to do is sing.” Is it just the characters in the movie that are up to their necks in shit, or do you think it is all of us?

Õunpuu: In some sense it’s all of us. But you know I shot the film almost three years ago. A lot can change in a man’s life during three years. I still love Beckett though: “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness.”

Filmmaker: You say that the film is “quite simple… but not outright stupid.” When you are dealing with emotions, as you do in this film, are ideas of intelligence and stupidity important?

Õunpuu: They are important to me personally, yes. I’m striving to be as intelligent as I can be even when dealing with emotions.

Filmmaker: How difficult has it been to start a film career in Estonia? I believe your previous production company Sugar Films went bankrupt, so did you have to risk a lot to return to filmmaking?

Õunpuu: I don’t particularly like the word “career,” it sounds too pragmatic and way too ambitious for my taste. Even the sound of the word is ugly, like something has stuck in your mouth. I’d rather call what I’m doing just making films. Which in Estonia can be a struggle sometimes, but I’m not complaining and I haven’t really had to take any risks worth mentioning.

Filmmaker: How important has the success of Sügisball been to the kind of isolated, alienated Estonians it portrays?

Õunpuu: To my mind the film is not only about Estonians, or not even about isolated or alienated people. It’s a film about this kind of solitude that we all share but what is emphasized to the extreme in the cases of the film characters.

Filmmaker: The film seems to be a period piece seemingly set in the late 80s or early 90s, but it still feels very reminiscent of life today. Did you intentionally try to stress how little had changed?

Õunpuu: I’m greatly surprised that you perceived it as a period piece. My hope was to generate a sort of timeless space by mixing different decades. The time of the film could maybe called “Eastern Europe during the turn of the century”.

Filmmaker: Fernando Pessoa, John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman are all referenced in the film in one way or another. Have all of these artists been an influence on you? If so, in what way?

Õunpuu: These are some fine artists I admire greatly. Reading Pessoa has somewhat improved my sense of poetry, the example of John Cassavetes has been good for the soul, and, even though the reference to him in the film is almost ironic, Bergman has shown us the great altitudes the cinematic art can achieve.

Filmmaker: You worked with a number of the same people on Sügisball as in Tuhirand. How important is it to you to keep working with the same creative group?

Õunpuu: They’re my friends. It is good to work with the people you know and can trust. I also worked with them on a new film (The Temptation of St.Tony) that I just finished and I guess I’ll work with them on the next one should the capricious God of cinema funding still favor us.

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

Õunpuu: At the beginning of the nineties I managed to go through a whole year being a carpet salesman without selling a single square meter of carpet. That was pretty weird. But I have also lived for a while in a trailer in Finland, putting studs in the winter tires of rally cars. The studs went in with glue which was very toxic, so I had to wear a suit which looked like a giant spacesuit and it was thickly covered with glue. I was sitting behind this machine and I had to push two pedals with my feet – left one raised the tire and the right one inserted a stud. I’ve had better jobs since then.

Filmmaker: What was your cinematic epiphany?

Õunpuu: There’s so many of these films that I really love. To choose just one would mean to do injustice to others… I was greatly impressed by the early films of Kaurismäki and Jarmusch, when I was a teenager. Later in life there came Bergman, but also Tarkovsky who has not made a single dodgy film. Real epiphanies have been Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew and Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence and Love Streams. I also love filmmakers like Ozu, Bresson. Herzog, Bunuel etc. etc. At the moment I’m very much into older films that were made before or right after the Second World War. The very recent discoveries were Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying. Also Jean Renoir’s La Bete Humaine and La Chienne. I was greatly impressed by King Vidor’s The Crowd that was shown at the Sodankylä Film Festival last year.

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Õunpuu: The greatest risk of all is surrendering to the Almighty Dollar. We need to strive to find fresh approaches to the image and to the way we depict our world as everything that is fresh is instantly taken from us and put to the service of commerce and only by always inventing new can we hope to survive as species capable of thinking and feeling. If that means taking some risks now and then, then we should take the risks.

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

Õunpuu: If the world ended tomorrow I would be sad about all of us who hadn’t achieved our very best.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 6/03/2009 11:12:00 PM Comments (0)