For someone who says his main creative motivation is boredom, Robert Siegel has done rather well for himself. Born and raised in the Long Island town of Merrick, Siegel graduated from the University of Michigan 1993 with a B.A. in History, after which he followed his then-girlfriend to Madison, Wisconsin, where she was studying for a PhD. In addition to working for the local newspaper and volunteering at Madison's public radio station, Siegel started writing for a small satirical rag that was given away free in the town's coffee shops, The Onion. In 1996, he became editor-in-chief and began masterminding a major expansion of the paper, putting it online, making it a national and then international publication, and conceiving a number of Onion books, including the hugely successful Our Dumb Century (1999). One of the paper's less successful side projects was The Onion Movie, a sketch comedy film which was finally released on DVD in 2008 but was conceived and written long before Siegel left The Onion in 2003. It did, however, introduce Siegel to screenwriting, which he chose as his next career. After writing a number of as-yet-unproduced comedy scripts for studios, Siegel was approached by director Darren Aronofsky, who who'd been impressed by Siegel's screenplay Big Fan. Aronofsky commissioned Siegel to write the script for The Wrestler (2008), the Oscar-nominated movie which would become his first script to make it to the big screen.

There's a pleasing circularity about the fact that Siegel was inspired to direct Big Fan because of The Wrestler, and even began shooting his own movie the day after Aronofsky's wrapped. The movie's eponymous protagonist is 35-year-old Paul Aufiero (Patton Oswalt), a perpetually single parking garage attendant still living at home with his mother and whose dull existence is made meaningful only by his all-consuming passion for the New York Giants. One night, Paul and his best friend Sal (Kevin Corrigan) spy Giants linebacker Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm), and when they follow him to a club, Paul gets beaten up by his idol. Big Fan is a smart and thoughtful exploration of American sports fandom, a modern religion of sorts, and what happens when allegiance to that guiding force is tested. The film is ultimately something of a surprise, as its humor is slyer and more subtle than we might expect and Siegel interestingly avoids the darker, more obvious direction his script could have taken, instead choosing a nuanced, bittersweet narrative for Oswalt's poignant and lovably pathetic Paul.

Filmmaker spoke to Siegel about the personal nature of Big Fan, his transition from topical satire to movies, and his very unusual introduction to Star Wars.



Filmmaker: How did you transition from an editor at The Onion to a screenwriter, and how long that had been percolating?

Siegel: Well, I left The Onion in 2003 and then I transitioned into screenwriting directly from there. We did a movie at The Onion called The Onion Movie which was this ill-fated, Hollywood-destroyed sketch comedy movie that I was one of the co-writers of. That came along at a time when I was kind of getting tired of doing The Onion. I had been there for 8 or 9 years at that point, so it was really refreshing to have the opportunity to use this other part of my brain. I had that repetitive motion and I had overdeveloped one muscle and needed to use other parts of my body or brain. I really like screenwriting and really responded to the form. There were fewer words per page, which appealed to me.

Filmmaker: Instant gratification.

Siegel: Yeah, you can fill up a page in about 30 seconds, the margins are 3 inches on both sides and it's just that narrow column in the middle which is kind of a breeze when you're used to a full page of text. It clicked and I just liked it. Then I started writing while I was still at The Onion. I messed around and wrote a lot of comedy scripts that weren't very good, just really mediocre comedies. They got progressively more competent, but not more inspired or original. They read like the kinds of things I imagine low-level script readers read, 24-year-olds paying their dues at a big studio who are reading shitty scripts all day long.

Filmmaker: Were you sending these out to people?

Siegel: No, I had the good sense to keep them to myself, although one of them I got an agent off of. He said he saw potential in it. But finally I had this idea for a script that wasn't a comedy, which was Big Fan. It was the first script I ever wrote that, if I may be so bold, is “decent” or “good.” That kind of became my calling card. It served as my escape pod from The Onion because it got me work – rewrite jobs and a couple of original assignments from studios – for three or four years. And then maybe in 2003 or 2004, Darren Aronofsky got in touch with me because he liked Big Fan a lot and wanted to meet with me about possibly directing it himself. He never wound up directing, but then he called me up and said, “Would you be interested in possibly writing a script about a wrestler?” I immediately responded [to that idea].

Filmmaker: How much did movies play a role in your life when you were growing up?

Siegel: Up until about three weeks before I started directing, I never thought about myself as destined to do that. I wasn't a video store clerk, I didn't usher at a movie theater in order to see Kurosawa double features for free. I transitioned into screenwriting out of a desire to [do something different]. I think my main motivation is boredom, because I've made most of these movies less out of a desire to do something than a desire to no longer do the thing I'm doing. I was tired of writing for The Onion. I loved it, but I was ready to try something else. And by the time I was done with The Wrestler, which was many years and many drafts, many gruelling months of years of rewriting, I just couldn't work up the life force necessary to open up a new Final Draft document and start up a script from scratch.

Filmmaker: Had you always thought about coming back to Big Fan?

Siegel: A lot of why I directed it is rooted in pragmatic reasons, meaning it was the only thing I actually owned and controlled. It had spent the better part of four or five years bouncing around from one director to another, and then by the time I got done with The Wrestler and I had to decide what I was going to do next. I didn't want to start from scratch with another screenplay, so I looked at my options and said, “Hey, Big Fan's still there.” It's like in When Harry Met Sally, where you discover that your best friend has been waiting for you all these years and they're the one. The script just was still there. It was my baby, it was very dear to my heart, it was the first thing that I wrote, it was my breakthrough script, it was personal to me. So partly out of strategy, partly out of the itch to try something new, I decided to direct it.

Filmmaker: Tell me about where the world of Big Fan comes from. In your director's notes, you say that it partly derives from your love of sports as a kid.

Siegel: I wasn't a comic book geek as a kid, I was a sports geek. I collected baseball cards and I really loved watching sports constantly and I constantly listened to WFAN, the sports radio station in New York. You'd just hear these callers and they made an impression on me: I didn't think about this at the time, but I connected with the voices I heard the same way I connected with movie characters later in the movies I liked. When I started getting into movies, I always gravitated towards these blue collar, misfit, beautiful loser characters, that Midnight Cowboy, “guy walking through the dirty streets of New York” movie. So I wanted to write the kind of movie that I loved and bring this fresh subject to it. It's a subject that I know and have a great affection for and it hadn't really been done before. There's never been a movie that explored sports fandom in America in a serious way, just like there was never a movie that took wrestling seriously before The Wrestler.

Filmmaker: How did the script change when you knew you were going to shoot it?

Siegel: It got tighter, everything got shorter, and dialogue was cut. The biggest change was I took out a whole relationship subplot involving a woman. It was these two lost, misfit souls, but I felt it just didn't need it. It's just more unusual and original to have a movie that doesn't have a love relationship. But, having said all that, it is ultimately is to me a love story between Paul and the team, between Paul and Quantrell Bishop, the football player. That's his true love. Obviously it's not a traditional romantic love, but it's a love nonetheless. The original poster for the movie had the tagline, “A tale of unrequited love,” and that's how I've always seen the movie. What do you do when the person or thing you love doesn't love you back? How do you deal with that rejection? In this case, the player he loves most, his idol, literally and figuratively punches him in the face and he has to sort through the emotions after this happens.

Filmmaker: How much preparation did you do once you knew you'd be directing this yourself?

Siegel: I didn't go to film school, and I knew I wasn't going to learn how to be an experienced director – there's no crash course in that. But I did feel prepared in that, even in preproduction, I could already tell that directing would call upon a lot of the skills that I had at The Onion. Being a director is very much like being an editor running a newspaper: you're delegating, you're making decisions, you're vetoing things, you're keeping an eye on the big picture. There are directors who micromanage, who need to know how to operate the camera, and there are those who can leave that to their DP, and I was more one of the delegating type. Because I don't know how to run a camera.

Filmmaker: Were you on set during the filming of The Wrestler?

Siegel: Yeah, I was there maybe half the days. I probably should have been studying Darren, but instead I was just going around poaching crew members. I would go up to the sound guy and ask if he had an assistant who could be my sound guy, so a lot of the key positions on Big Fan were filled by apprentices of people who worked on The Wrestler. It was a lot of 24-year-olds, like a really talented costume designer who's never really [had a break before]. Hopefully when you look back a lot of the people in the crew will be famous.

Filmmaker: How long did you spend looking for the actor to play Paul? He is really the whole movie, so obviously getting that right was pivotal.

Siegel: That's where I learned the most from Darren, watching the whole process of casting of Mickey Rourke. He knew right away that was who he wanted for the role, but he had a bitch of a time getting funding with Mickey, which is funny now looking back. People are so full of shit because there are so many of them now saying, “Obviously, it was brilliant to cast Mickey Rourke,” but nobody was saying that at the time. “No, are you crazy?! He's box office poison! He's difficult, he has no value...” Not that it was like that with Patton, but what it taught me was that it's arguably the most important thing in the entire movie – particularly if there's one guy who's carrying it, then you've got to get the perfect person.

Filmmaker: It was brave of you to cast Patton Oswalt, as he's never done anything as heavy or serious as this before.

Siegel: I just thought he could. I wouldn't say it was brave. The whole "comedian as dramatic actor" thing isn't an issue. I think that's only an issue when it comes off as stunt casting, and then that's a little bit of a concern. But just in general, comedians have no problem playing dramatic roles. Going the other way is a problem. Try to make "Mr. Big Star" funny, and it's not going to happen, but comedians are definitely in touch with the dark. Most comedians have a dark side.

Filmmaker: You said before that you get tired of things and then stop. It sounded like you're fed up with screenwriting, so will you be focusing on directing now?

Siegel: I'm now a writer-director or a director. It would be very difficult to go back to writing for someone else, having now written and directed.

Filmmaker: It says on IMDb that you’ve got projects in the works.

Siegel: It's a very rare inaccuracy, one of the few on IMDb. It says there’s an Untitled Robert Siegel Project, which I think sounds cool, very top secret government. But I don't know what that is. I have no idea what they're referring to. [laughs] It could be my plan to babyproof the locks in my apartment for our toddler. I honestly don't know what I'm doing next.

Filmmaker: Talking of your son, how were shoot days when you were coming off sleepless nights?

Siegel: I just hated it. I understand why directors develop coke habits. I didn't because that's not my thing, but I get the appeal of cocaine when you're directing. Coffee was not enough.

Filmmaker: What's the first film you ever saw?

Siegel: It was probably Star Wars. I was six when it came out, and that was awesome! Like everybody else at the time, I was insanely excited to see it. I remember we got to the theater early and I accidentally went in while the previous showing was just still finishing. Some dude was putting an Olympic medal on a big hairy bear. It's like hearing the punchline to a joke before you hear the joke, and you're like "What the fuck could have lead to this medal ceremony with the giant 7-foot tall bear?" And Han and Luke and Leia were all lined up and I didn't know who they were, but they did something medal-worthy. I was like, "Oh my God, I've got to find out!" It was kind of a cool way to be introduced to it.

Filmmaker: When you were a teenager, whose pin-up poster did you have on your wall?

Siegel: Matthew Broderick. It was a Ferris Bueller's Day Off poster. All my friends had Kathy Ireland or Christie Brinkley, and whenever I saw them I was torn because I thought it would be pretty awesome to have hot chick on my wall to stare up at. But I felt really awkward and uncomfortable about having that kind of overt statement of sexuality in the same house that I shared with my parents, even though they weren't in my room. My bedroom wasn't this lair for vice and sex and drug use, it was very chaste and wholesome.

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

Siegel: Airplanes are a really good test of your love of movies. I'm one of those people who says "I love movies so much, I'll watch anything," but then you look through the guide of what's going to be playing on your flight and it inevitably involves Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey or Sarah Jessica Parker. I'm sure it was one of those movies like Forces of Nature, Laws of Gravity or The Proposal or The Ugly Truth. Planes are where all the movies that I don't see end up, so the nice thing about flying is that you're never going to get a movie you've seen before.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 8/28/2009 05:14:00 PM Comments (0)

Over the course of the past decade, Lucrecia Martel has established herself as one of the most gifted and original filmmakers around. The Argentine auteur was born in Salta, a city in the northwest of Argentina, in 1966, and spent her teenage years capturing much of her family's daily life on film. In 1986, she studied Communication Science and had stints at two film schools, Avellaneda Experimental, studying animation, and the National Experimentation Filmmaking School in Buenos Aires. However because she never finished her film studies (one of those schools shut down due to lack of funds), she ultimately completed her cinematic education on her own and considers herself to be self-taught. In the late 80s and early 90s, she made a string of short films, starting with the animations El 56 (1988) and Piso 24 (1989), and culminating in the award-winning live action Rey Muerto (1995). Martel subsequently made documentaries and children's programs for Argentinian television, and in 2001 she got her breakthrough with her feature debut, La Ciénaga, an unsettling, off-kilter portrait of a family's summer slumming it at their crummy country home. The film premiered at Sundance, won the Alfred Bauer Award at Berlin, and received rave reviews wherever it played. Martel's 2004 follow-up, The Holy Girl, about the sexual and religious passions of two Argentinian teenage girls, premiered at Cannes and consolidated Martel's reputation as one of the finest emerging talents in world cinema.

Martel's third feature as writer-director, The Headless Woman, sees her return once again to her native Salta, where her previous two movies have also been set. The film's protagonist is Verónica (María Onetto), a glamorous middle-aged dentist whose comfortable, untroubled existence is disrupted when she runs over something in the road. She initially thinks she just hit a dog, but over time she grows convinced that it was actually a person. Inspired by nightmares Martel herself had of having killed someone, The Headless Woman has a strange dreamlike quality, existing in a world that feels both palpably real and strangely detached. Martel's movie is not plot-driven, but instead focuses on conveying Verónica's disintegration as she becomes consumed by guilt for what she has – or thinks she has – done. Though complex, challenging and sometimes frustrating, The Headless Woman, with the superb Onetto's underplayed, nuanced performance at its core, is also haunting and mesmerizing, and possibly the purest piece of cinema you will see all year.

Filmmaker spoke to Martel about turning nightmares into films, her fascination with water and the Spinoza quote that encapsulates her worldview.



Filmmaker: What was your inspiration for this film? In your director’s statement, you say that your nightmares about killing someone led to the idea.

Martel: Nightmares were useful for me even though the film was not at all based on those nightmares. Like many people, I have sometimes dreamt that I have killed. They are not dreams where I am in fact in the middle of killing or about to kill someone, but dreams where I have already killed and there is nothing that can undo that horror. The most anguishing thing in my dreams is that I am being protected by the people who love me to avoid anything coming out. That mechanism of oblivion, of pretending that nothing has happened, is, in its core, the most frequent horror of our society.

Filmmaker: How did you translate the feeling of a dream to the film? And did you try to apply dream logic to the events?

Martel: I don’t know how that is done, I don’t even try to. Maybe that is the consequence of an attitude that I keep during production: when I look through the camera, I feel that there is something about to be revealed and which is actually not what I am seeing. I believe that generates a certain unreal atmosphere.

Filmmaker: How personal is this film to you? How much of yourself and your view of the world is in each of the films you make?

Martel: I believe that making a film is the search or the will to try and transcend the solitude of the body: to make everyone else participate in a certain perception of the world and to put it in check between everyone. It is not possible for me to construct those tricks that are films if I don’t do it based on those experiences and emotions that we have lived.

Filmmaker: The film is set in Salta, where your films always take place. Is that location very important or evocative for you?

Martel: I was born in Salta. It is my native city, and therefore a mythological landscape where one brings together all times and all affections. It is where spaces overlap. It is a fake geography, because I don’t believe it is Salta anymore, but the wish of bringing a sense to things, even if it is just for seconds.

Filmmaker: How do you construct a film? Do you plan out each scene and each shot exactly, or are you much looser?

Martel: The script is very similar to the film. I hardly improvise anything. Of course, there are times when things happen during the shooting and one can incorporate those, but I am always very careful with that. The system that I use to write is very similar to the sound mix. It is like an overlap of different layers that I mix in different proportions in each scene. Those different layers are always present throughout the film. When one works with such system, improvising can unbalance the film completely.

Filmmaker: What are your scripts like? Your films are less about the words spoken by the characters than they are images, sounds, moods, so do you write all of that down?

Martel: They look a lot like the films, I think. There are three things that define for me the way I approach cinema: my mother tongue (Spanish), the oral tradition of storytelling (above all, from my grandmother and my mother), and my ideas for the soundtrack. But they are things that come before the script, and the script is formally the same as any script, I think.

Filmmaker: María Onetto is in almost every scene of The Headless Woman and the amazing performance she gives is at the very center of the film. How closely did you work with her? Did you give her very clear notes on Vero’s thoughts and feelings in each scene, or did you leave it up to her interpretation?

Martel: The only thing that worried Maria and me was not to construct a character around guilt or the amnesia. She is an incredible actress who takes very mysterious paths. Secrets enchants me and Maria can make a sea of secrets out of nothing.

Filmmaker: People have tried to understand The Headless Woman in very literal terms. How do you feel about that? Is there one correct way of interpreting the film?

Martel: Well, a film is an emotional and intellectual process (that to me is almost the same) that only has meaning in the relationship that's established between spectator and the film, but not from itself. Literalness is the desire or the misfortune of not being able to establish that relationship.

Filmmaker: Death (or the shadow of death) is very present in both this film and La Ciénaga. Is it a major theme for you as a filmmaker?

Martel: No, my main preoccupation and diversion concerns perception and all the moral issues that arise from its domestication.

Filmmaker: Water is a motif in all your films, in this case the storm. Do you still live on a boat? And what special significance or meaning does water have to you?

Martel: I believe that you have misinformed. I have a small boat, but never I have lived on it. I am an inexpert sailor but a great lover of boats. It is in the combination of the narrowness and the infiniteness of the landscape where the boats move. And, of course, they float, which fascinates me. Perhaps water fascinates me. I hadn't realized this until they asked me this question to me on each of my three films.

Filmmaker: You describe yourself as self-taught, so do you see yourself as part of any particular cinematic tradition? Who are the filmmakers who you most admire or want to emulate?

Martel: I am in cinema because of the influence of my grandmother, who told stories to me, and because of my parents, who told me films and stories. In the world of the cinema, I feel like an impostor. I belong to the ranks of family conversations, stories at siesta time, long telephone calls, etc. I admire very many film directors, but like distant relatives who you wouldn't invite for Christmas.

Filmmaker: What influence did your training in animation have on you?

Martel: It made me understand that movement defines the characters.

Filmmaker: You said in a previous interview that you were adapting a comic book about the Cold War in the 1950s. Is this an American project? Do you want to make movies in other countries?

Martel: I was working on that. The process of adaptation is fascinating. But now I have returned to a script that I was writing before The Headless Woman which is also in the fantasy genre, and also is about a deadly invasion.

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

Martel: It is the most distressing question you can ask someone who does not have a clear vocation.

Filmmaker: Which phrase best describes your philosophy on life?

Martel: It's from Spinoza: "Nobody knows what a body can do."

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Martel: Well, to have one's own way of seeing the world is a risk. But it is clear that that is not necessary to make a film. Thousands of hit films confirm this.

Filmmaker: Finally, what's the last dream you can remember having?

Martel: I am walking along Loyola Street, in my neighborhood. Everything is exactly like in waking life, except that I suspect that I am dreaming. I try to pay attention to things, front gates, poorly maintained paths, the noise of the cars, the people who I pass, but I do not find anything to confirm my suspicion. Contrary to how it may seem, it is a funny dream. There is a construction site which has a sign on the front that states the characteristics of the building. In dreams, I can never read: if a letter or anything I need to read appears, I wake up. I approach the sign to confirm that I am dreaming, but before I can get there a neighbor asks me something from the front path. I can't hear them well, and they repeat the question, calling me by another name. I look at my hands, and they are not mine. I do not remember any more, but I did not awake up then.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 8/19/2009 10:23:00 AM Comments (1)

Robert Stone may not be the most famous documentarian, but he is one of the most accomplished and important non-fiction directors working today. The son of eminent British historian Lawrence Stone, Stone was born in England in 1958, but grew up in both the U.S. and Europe after his father left Oxford University to teach at Princeton in 1960. Stone studied history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating in 1980, and thereafter spent seven years turning the subject of his thesis project, the U.S. nuclear tests on the island of Bikini, into the documentary Radio Bikini (1987). The film was Oscar nominated for Best Documentary Feature, and established Stone as a talent to watch. Next he made documentaries on America's response to Sputnik, Satellite Sky (1989), and the 50s obsession with flying saucers, Farewell Good Brothers (1992), and then continued to explore mid-20th century American history with a massive installation on John F. Kennedy for the JFK Library in Boston. After the faux documentary World War Three (1998), he returned to non-fiction filmmaking with a portrait of Atlantic City, American Babylon (2000). In 2004, he directed the acclaimed Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst and revisited the subject of JFK with Oswald's Ghost (2007), a thoughtful examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy's death.

Movies about green issues are very much in vogue at the moment, but Stone's latest film, Earth Days, is a distinctly different kind of environmental documentary. Instead of focusing on a particular aspect of the planet which is under threat, Earth Days takes a step back to examine the first wave of the environmental movement which, despite being somewhat forgotten now, enjoyed great popularity and achieved much in the late 60s and early 70s. Stone uses the principal figures who first championed green issues – such as politician Stewart Udall, Earth Day organizer Dennis Hayes and Whole Earth Catalog creator Stewart Brand – to focus the narrative. By providing this historical perspective, Earth Days puts the current environmental movement in context and in doing so strikes a cautious note of hope, with the on-camera subjects underlining the achievements of the past as well as the challenges of the future. Stone's film is also ultimately celebratory, as the expansive cinematography shows the beauty of a planet that is not yet lost, but must be fought for.

Filmmaker spoke to Stone about returning to his cinematic roots, the aesthetics of non-fiction filmmaking, and why he will never work for Court TV again.



Filmmaker: Earth Days begins with a speech on the environment by JFK, which seems to be a nod to your previous film, Oswald's Ghost.

Stone: It kind of just turned out that way. I was trying to figure out how to introduce the movie without setting the whole thing up and introducing all our characters in the traditional way. I remembered the ending of The Marriage of Maria Braun, the Fassbinder film. It's a whole movie about this woman in post-war Germany and at the end he flashes photographs of all the chancellors of Germany from World War Two to when he made the movie, and it totally makes you think about what the movie's about in a completely different way. I always thought that was amazing, so I kind of cribbed that. With Kennedy, it was just a fluke. It turned out that, by virtue of the influence that Stewart Udall had on Kennedy, he was the first president to really address the environmental crisis and population and warn that bad things were coming.

Filmmaker: I sense that the film is very personal to you, although you don't place yourself in it at all or present anything but an objective view.

Stone: Yeah, it is deeply personal to me. As a small kid, I was profoundly impressed by Earth Day. It really changed my thinking and everybody of my generation that I've spoken to all had a similar experience. Take something as simple as littering: before Earth Day, you would take the candy out of the store and throw the wrapper on the ground; after Earth Day, that was taboo. It seems like a small thing, but it was quite a big deal – you just start to think about things differently. As a kid, I was very interested in the space program and watching the men land on the moon and seeing the earth from space. In so many ways, the movie is the story of my life in seeing the environment deteriorate, seeing farmland near where I grew up become housing developments. But at the same time, seeing things get a lot better: I've got two small kids, and we go swimming in the Hudson river – when I was kid, that was unthinkable. Air pollution in New York City was just incredibly bad when I was a kid, and now it's not anywhere near as bad as it was. People forget that this movement arose and actually did succeed in really improving things dramatically. I think there's this impression that everything's gotten progressively, but some things have and some things haven't.

Filmmaker: Earth Day in 1970 was also the starting point for you as a filmmaker.

Stone: Yeah, it the first documentary I made – though you can't really call it a documentary. It was one roll of Super 8 film that I made with my friends around the time of the first Earth Day, it was about pollution in my little town and it was called Pollution. I still have a copy of it. We just had one roll of film, we edited in camera, and we actually had this crude way of doing sound. We had a tape recorder going and we had this idea we were going to sync it up, but I don't think we ever actually did. That was my first film. I showed it in class and got a big applause, and I was like, “Ahh, being a filmmaker – this could be kind of cool...” I don't think my view of the world has changed very much, I've just been able to articulate it better over the years. Looking at that film now, it's surprising how similar my ideas are about the film. So it is kind of ironic that I've come back to this all these years later. There's certainly a direct line from doing that to Earth Days.

Filmmaker: And what did make you come back to this, to explore the roots of the environmental movement?

Stone: Around the time An Inconvenient Truth came out, there weren't a whole lot of docs like there are now on the environment, but it was certainly in the air that this was a renewed topic of conversation. The whole issue of climate changed was universally agreed upon as a problem, and we were just waiting for Bush to leave. Everybody seemed pretty bummed out about the war, bummed out about Bush, bummed out about 9/11, bummed out about everything. It seemed everybody was making movies about Iraq at that moment and I felt that with the environment there was a sense that a wholly new movement that was arising, a wholly new awakening to the crisis. Remembering back to my childhood, I thought, “Wait, this isn't true, this is just a rebirth of something that's been dormant for a long, long time.” I felt that putting all of this in context would be a really good and interesting thing. It just seemed like a completely forgotten story. When most people think about the '60s and '70s, they think about Watergate, they think about Vietnam, they think about civil rights, they think about the hippie movement. The whole environmental movement got lost even though it was most profound thing to come out of that period, long term, and it crystallized a lot of the questioning about some very fundamental things about how we organize society. As time's gone on, with all these environmental documentaries and all these books and television specials, I think people are so overwhelmed. I personally feel overwhelmed with bad about one shocking disaster after the other. I think it's important to put this all into some kind of larger context – these are all symptoms of a bigger issue.

Filmmaker: I want to talk about the stylistic approach you took with the film, for instance the lack of a narrator.

Stone: Well, I've never used narration. I feel as a filmmaker that it's cheating and I think it puts a distance between you and the audience, like you're lecturing at them rather than them discovering something themselves. My basic approach to documentary filmmaking is that I think all films basically function the same way, whether they're documentaries or dramatic feature films, in how they work on an audience. A film succeeds and is at its most satisfying when there's a process of discovery or a feeling that you've watched something and put two and two together and come up with a new way of thinking about something. Rather than been lectured to. With a subject as vast as this, I felt it was vital that it was firmly grounded in personal narrative so finding characters whose personal life journeys mirrored the journey of the film was step one. We set out to follow their trajectory from being kids and understanding the motivation that generation had coming out of the 50s to go out and remake the world, explaining the psychology behind it and then showing what happened and how it all fell apart.

Filmmaker: What about the visual aspects?

Stone: Stewart Brand said that our problem with the environment is one of perception, and if we perceive the problem better then we'll be more motivated to take action. His whole thing is that technology allows human beings to see the world in a way that we're not biologically capable of doing. We can go into space, and no other animals can do that. We can go up in an airplane and fly like a bird. We can use film to speed up things, like you can you see a smokestack from a factory spewing smoke. It might look rather benign, but you set up a strop-motion camera for a day and reduce that to a minute and you say, “Oh my God, there's a huge amount of pollution going into the air.” It's not faking it, it's real, it's just taking out of our human timeframe. The whole thing of technology allows us to see things different became a running theme in the film and really helped us establish a visual palette. A lot of what's being said is essentially unfilmable – they're ideas. Also, being able to do CGI was great, like the thing with the tablecloth. Exponential growth is such an inherently unfathomable thing to understand, so I asked Dennis Meadows, “How do you explain this when you're talking to students?” He told me this thing about the tablecloth, I took it to our effects house and they were actually able to do it. It's great that you can do that sort of thing now as a documentary filmmaker, which you couldn't 10 years ago.

Filmmaker: It seems as if you place a lot more emphasis on the beauty of the image and being cinematic than a lot of documentarians these days, which works really well for the subject matter.

Stone: I don't want this to sound pretentious at all, but my filmmaking hero is Stanley Kubrick. I don't compare myself to him in any way at all whatsoever, but 2001 is the reason I became a filmmaker. That movie made a huge impression on me as a kid, and I drew on my impressions of it in making this movie, with those long takes with a meditative aspect to them and dealing with these really, really heavy ideas and having a shot that lets you sort of think about an idea. Instead of using 10 shots, use one shot and really linger on it and let an idea unfold – he was really fantastic at that. I was really worried while making this film that young people wouldn't like it because so many films now are all hyped up and you have to cut every five seconds and it's like whoosh, bang, boom! This is very not that. We showed 40 minutes of it at the Sundance Institute six months before we finished to a bunch of young filmmakers all in their 20s, and they loved it, they totally got it. That was a huge relief to me. And they liked it because it wasn't like everything else that they were seeing, because it wasn't fast and hyped up.

Filmmaker: How do you view yourself as a filmmaker? You're a history grad, so are you a historian working in film? Or a documentary maker with social and political preoccupations?

Stone: It's a good question. I'm a filmmaker first, I'm not a political activist who's using film as a soapbox. When I was younger, I wanted to go off to Hollywood and I've long wanted to make dramatic films. I thought I'd end up in Hollywood or making independent feature films, but I ended up doing documentaries. My father was a history professor at Oxford and later at Princeton, so I grew up with that, it's in my blood. It just seems very natural to me to combine my interest in film, my interest in history, my interest in politics and also my interest in exploring this crazy world that I grew up in. My dad was a social historian who’d written about the English Civil War and he was really fascinated with the 60s when it was happening. He took me around as a little kid: we flew to Paris in May '68, we sat and watched the entire Watergate hearings together when I was 12 years old. And my mother read me Silent Spring when I was about eight, so I was exposed to all this stuff and I think I spent the rest of my life trying to make sense of it. Fortunately a lot of my generation are also trying to make sense of it, and also so much of it is coming around again.

Filmmaker: How do you choose your subjects? Are you always aware of the balance between your personal interest in a topic and how commercial it will be?

Stone: Well, if you've seen Oswald's Ghost you'll know that I don't really care about the commerciality of my projects. Obviously I want to reach as wide an audience as possible, but I also know that I am who I am and I have to make a film that satisfies me. If I start thinking about what an audience is going to think about too much, I'm never going to able to function. Fortunately, I've got a niche of people who go to see my films and that's cool. I'd love to have a hit like Michael Moore, but I don't think I'm Michael Moore. I don't have that populist thing in me. I like the gray areas too much. I think in some ways my films are sort of similar. I don’t do this consciously, but I've made a bunch of films and looking back, the films that are most me that I've made, that are closest to my heart, are about this intersection between fantasy and reality and how we perceive the world. That fascinates me. Being able to work with film, which is such a visual medium, you can really probe that. We all live in our own little fantasy worlds and perceive reality in a different way, and we're all convinced that our way of seeing reality is “the true way.”

Filmmaker: Talking of the mix of fantasy and reality, you made a faux documentary about World War III which used real archival footage in a fictional context.

Stone: I think anybody who makes documentaries, particularly using archival footage, at a certain point realizes, “Wow, I can do anything with this! I don't have to tell the truth. I can manipulate things and tell something that's completely untrue.” It could be as simple as interviewing somebody and then recutting the interview so that they say something that's the exact opposite of what they actually said. Or doing what I did with World War Three, which is just using real characters and real footage but putting them in a completely fictitious context. Part of it was just poking fun at the medium itself and how easy it is to manipulate people.

Filmmaker: You got an Oscar nomination for Radio Bikini. What was it like to have that level of success so early on?

Stone: It was weird. In one way it was really great, because I sort of got it off my chest. I came from a very high-achieving family so there was a lot of pressure to succeed, and I think if I hadn't succeeded with that first film, I would have probably done something else with my life. But, it did come very early and I made a lot of bad career decisions. [laughs] You know, I got a little cocky, and it took me a while to regain my stride. But it certainly has been incredibly helpful in raising money: every time I'm introduced anywhere, it's always as an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and that's just a wonderful thing. So it was a blessing to have that at such an early age. And I had a lot of girls. It was definitely good for meeting girls. [laughs]

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

Stone: Jesus, there have been so many... The whole business is strange, it's strange that I'm even making films, it's strange that I'm, like, alive and making a living.

Filmmaker: What was your dream job as a kid?

Stone: My dream job as a kid was a Formula 1 race car driver, but I'm partially blind in one eye so it wasn't an option. But I cherished that idea into sixth or seventh grade, and then I wanted to be an architect and then I wanted to be a filmmaker. And everyone wanted to be Mick Jagger.

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

Stone: Ah, that's a good one! The last time I did it for the money was in 1998. I did a television documentary for Court TV. It made me feel like I should get out of this business or start making independent films again. I went and made Guerrilla. I'll never work for Court TV again, but that's OK, I don't want to. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 8/14/2009 10:25:00 AM Comments (1)

Every film movement has its (sometimes reluctant) leader or trendsetter, and in the case of mumblecore, that person is Andrew Bujalski. The soft-spoken writer-director and sometime actor was born in 1977 in Boston, where both his parents worked in business. His mother had previously been an artist, and Bujalski seemed to inherit her more creative inclinations, which lead him to study film at Harvard's Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. Bujalski was particularly fortunate to have the legendary Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman as his thesis adviser, who helped him find the lead actress for his thesis film, Maggie Hatcher. In 2002, Bujalski made his feature debut with Funny Ha Ha, a 16mm movie about a twentysomething woman fresh out of college trying to find her place in the world. The film, which Bujalski self-distributed, was critically lauded and is now considered the first mumblecore movie. He followed it up shortly after with Mutual Appreciation, another low-budget tale of arty twentysomethings, this one centered around an aspiring indie musician played by Bishop Allen frontman Justin Rice, self-releasing it in 2005 to more great reviews. Subsequently, Bujalski went on hiatus from writing and directing, taking time out to act in friends' movies, such as Joe Swanberg's Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), the Zellner brothers' Goliath (2008) and Dia Sokol's Sorry, Thanks, and to work on an adaptation of Benjamin Kunkel's novel Indecision for Paramount.

Bujalski's third feature, Beeswax feels somewhat distinct from his previous films, not least because Mutual Appreciation was shot way back in 2003. Moreover, Beeswax is about a more grown-up world than Bujalski has shown us before, depicting the lives of a pair of twins, wheelchair-bound Jeannie (Tilly Hatcher) and her sister Lauren (Maggie Hatcher). Both are in flux, as Jeannie's business partner in her vintage clothing store is (maybe) threatening to sue her, which prompts Jeannie to reestablish ties with her law grad ex Merrill (Alex Karpovsky), and Lauren is between jobs and weighing whether she should accept a position in Kenya. The film's main preoccupations are family (sometimes in a broader sense) and communication, and the intersection of the two. Though the threat of the lawsuit seems as if it will be the driving force of the movie, Bujalski doesn't take a conventional approach with this narrative device and keeps an all-important sense of naturalism and believability. Beeswax is blessed with two great performances from its lead actresses, and the Hatcher twins' charm and energy is perfectly showcased within the structure of Bujalski's tighter but still very organic film.

Filmmaker spoke to Bujalski about working exclusively with non-professional actors, the indie auteur as small business owner, and looking for film critic David Edelstein in a fake graveyard in Virginia.



Filmmaker: I'm interested in how you feel looking back on mumblecore, and how much you perceive it as a help or a hindrance to where you are now.

Bujalski: Well, I guess I'm not sure where I am now. [laughs] I don't know how much the blogosphere affects reality per se. [laughs] When that movie After Last Season came out, I went and saw it with some people and I loved it and had a great time. But going there, I wondered, “Who is going to be in the theater? Because the blogs are ablaze with this!” And, of course, there was just me and the group of friends I went with. I thought, “OK, maybe a thousand blogs doesn't actually mean one viewer...” So I actually have no idea. The fact that mumblecore has been hotly debated on the internet may or may not have anything to do with anybody coming to see the films. I don't think it hurts – in terms of the concept that there's no such thing as bad publicity – but it certainly has nothing to do with what I was trying to do as a filmmaker and a storyteller.

Filmmaker: Was Beeswax a conscious decision to try and move on from mumblecore?

Bujalski: When you make small films that get some attention, a lot of people whisper in your ear that you should try to take it to the next level. Which means make more commercial work. That's certainly something that I do have an interest in, but on this film if anything I had a perverse desire to try to stay in a similar realm to where we'd been, because I felt like there were more stories that I wanted to tell coming out of that way of filmmaking and, in some weird way, stay the course of the thing that people least wanted from me, which kind of made want to do it.

Filmmaker: What kind of progression do you feel you've made since Mutual Appreciation?

Bujalski: I don't know. I can tell you that my life feels very different and I can tell you that anytime an artist is lucky enough to survive making something, of course you're going to look at that thing and take some positive lessons and some negative lessons and also a desire to try out new things from it. It's hard to quantify what those are exactly. I don't think that much in terms of logical progressions, I think those are structures that we impose after the fact.

Filmmaker: This feels like a more adult and responsible world than the ones in your previous movies.

Bujalski: I'm sure it is. I'm sure that has something to do with my thoughts going into it. At the risk of tying things up too neatly, I think in the first film I did, the Marnie character is a wandering soul, which is more or less how I felt when I was in my early twenties and writing it. And in Mutual Appreciation, the Alan character is a struggling artist on the make, which is kind of how I felt then. [laughs] In this film, the character is a small business owner, which certainly has something to do with a couple of years spent self-distributing my films.

Filmmaker: Is the small business owner a pertinent analogy for the contemporary indie filmmaker?

Bujalski: I've certainly known people who did work that I thought was really terrific but that, because they didn't have that small business owner mentality, didn't want to put in the miserable hustle it took to get people to see their work. So a lot of good work goes unseen, and I admire those people because ultimately they have a real artist's soul: they only care about making the thing. But I have this nagging sense of obligation – I feel like if we've put so much into this then I can't really tear myself away from getting people to see it. Certainly most of the people who do the festival circuit have that hustle, and I think that's a lot like being a small business owner.

Filmmaker: In the film, Jeannie's vintage clothing store is described as a good little business that will always make a small profit. Is that an allusion to your self-distribution experiences as well?

Bujalski: It's funny because I think a couple of people thought that that line was an external meta-reference to the films themselves. I wish that the films were a reliable small profit generator – that would be great! I've never come anywhere near making a living off these films. It's an uphill battle for sure.

Filmmaker: How much did your move to Austin inform Beeswax?

Bujalski: The shoot occurred before I moved back here, and moving back was an indirect result of shooting here. I've done three features now: all of them I've written in a different place than I ended up shooting them, and none of them did I think I'd end up shooting them where we did. On this film, there was no obvious place to do it. I was living in Boston and I was working with the same team of people I'd worked with in the past in New York and L.A., and Tilly was living in Atlanta and Maggie was living in New Haven. So nothing was particularly central for anybody – though I guess Austin is kind of central geographically. I was leaning more toward doing it in Boston because I was lazy and it was going to be easy for me. We talked about doing it other places and the only city that made sense besides Boston was Austin, because I had lived here in the past and I did know people and that there was a community that was going to be not that difficult to plug into.

Filmmaker: You mentioned your lead actresses, the Hatcher twins. Their performances are so central to the film's success.

Bujalski: Absolutely, and I wouldn't have written a word of this film if I didn't know them and weren't thinking of them for it. I met Maggie in college. I was doing my college thesis film and Chantal Akerman was my thesis advisor, which was an amazing experience. Chantal discovered Maggie walking down the hall. [laughs] She was a rugby player and I think she had just torn her ACL and had surgery, so she was walking on crutches. I don't know why, but Chantal stopped her and said, “My student needs you for his film,” and so I ended up meeting Maggie and putting her in my college thesis film. Shortly after that, I met her sister Tilly. I find them immensely charming individually, but together as a duo there was a kind of magic there that for many years I fantasized about trying to harness in a movie.

Filmmaker: So they were the initial spark for the movie?

Bujalski: Yes, and from there I was thinking about family – it seems like the thing to think about when you're doing a movie about twins. And I think this whole lawsuit aspect came from anxieties in my own life, but also it seemed like it was at the opposite end of a spectrum from the way that problems are resolved in a family. This is a story about two people whose personal relationship has broken down and now have to turn to this legalese. I wanted to pit that against family coming together to try to take care of each other.

Filmmaker: You've always worked with non-professional actors. Why are they so important to you?

Bujalski: I think that they communicate differently. I think actors are trained to communicate very clearly, and I didn't want that clarity for these films because the films are, on some level, about people trying to find their way through these situations in our lives. I wanted to get it to a place of unpredictability from second to second, and a kind of freshness. And also freshness for the audience. I love as a moviegoer discovering a new performer who I don't know, and there's something remarkable and amazing about how that never goes away. Even if you've seen a hundred Robert De Niro movies, you can still watch Mean Streets and feel like you're discovering him. So I like trying to get that from people, and obviously a non-professional is better equipped than anybody to give you that real freshness.

Filmmaker: The film feels very spontaneous and naturalistic. Did you stick closely to the script or give your actors a lot of leeway?

Bujalski: There's always leeway, and it depends somewhat on the actor. Every actor has a different comfort zone. Some people are at their best or happiest when they're making it up as they go along, and other people really want to get something just right. This film has generally shorter scenes than the last ones did and a lot more specific exposition that has to be thrown out. There was a ton of exposition and that was the real challenge to keep it feeling alive amidst all of these points that the actors had to hit. So there was less room for goofing off and generally the actors were less inclined to goof off than in previous films.

Filmmaker: The way that you use the lawsuit is very interesting, because you introduce it as a conventional narrative device but don't execute it in the way we might expect.

Bujalski: The film is ultimately about anxiety and fear. Who knows what it's about, but that's what's driving a lot of the characters' actions. This relationship between Jeannie and Amanda has been recontextualized through this threat of a lawsuit as Jeannie's rushing back to this document, saying “I thought our relationship was what we've developed together as people and friends, but now I have to go back to this document we wrote years ago that we don't necessarily understand to find out what our new relationship is.” In our first press kit, we were calling the film a legal thriller and getting into a little trouble for that, but when I was writing it I did think about borrowing some of the structure of a legal thriller for completely other purposes and deviating from that structure with it. I feel like anybody who's been involved in a legal conflict would not feel like it was “thrilling,” and I was trying to get to some of how these things actually impact our lives.

Filmmaker: I wanted to ask you about the title. It seems like people have been very keen to derive their interpretations of what the film is about directly from the title.

Bujalski: It's interesting. I was surprised at how enigmatic the title seemed to be for a lot of people. I wasn't necessarily trying to make a tease out of it, but having done that now, I want to stick with the enigma. I feel like when you've got something like that that is engaging people on that level and they're looking for meaning, that may or may not be a dead end to unlock the secrets of the film through the title but I'm happy that people are taking the time and engaging with it and trying to make sense of what they see, because that's part of what the film is there for.

Filmmaker: I was thinking of asking about the meaning of the title, but I guess, as the saying goes, it's really none of my beeswax.

Bujalski: In fact, that was the joke that Tilly made in Berlin when we were asked that in Q&As. It's a joke, but it's right on the money and it also does answer your question.

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

Bujalski: There was one night at the Virginia Film Festival where we piled into a car with the guy from the Mekons and the critic David Edelstein to go see a Kiss cover band play in an abandoned potato chip factory on Halloween. Edelstein wanted to come along because he loved the Mekons, but then he didn't really want to go to the show so he walked away, and then I felt bad and tried to find him. There was a tombstone showcase factory across the street – a place where they made tombstones that hadn't been inscribed yet – and I was walking around in this kind of fake cemetery looking for David Edelstein, across the street from the Kiss cover band show at the abandoned potato chip factory.

Filmmaker: Is Hollywood going in the right direction?

Bujalski: No.

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

Bujalski: Don't think about your career ever.

Filmmaker: What should be your focus then?

Bujalski: Making good movies.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 8/07/2009 10:14:00 PM Comments (0)