As he himself puts it, writer-director Michael Almereyda loves to make movies like a fighter likes to brawl, and over the course of his directorial career he has sought out an intriguing variety of creative challenges. Born in 1959 in Overland Park, Kansas, Almereyda spent his formative years in the Los Angeles area, where he discovered cinema and became a voracious moviegoer. Almereyda attended Harvard as an art history student, but dropped out in order to pursue his film career. He made his debut with the short film A Hero of Our Time (1985), and in 1989 directed his first feature Twister, a rural comedy about an oddball family in Kansas. Another Girl Another Planet (1992), a relationship drama shot in Pixelvision, was followed by Nadja (1994), an offbeat indie vampire movie starring Elina Löwensohn and produced by David Lynch. Almereyda made a more conventional horror movie, Trance (1998), before making his most high profile film, a modern-day version of Hamlet (2000) starring Ethan Hawke at the head of an all-star cast. He tapped into a similar mix of experimental and mainstream in his Pixelvision-shot drama about modern identity, Happy Here and Now (2002), which was set in New Orleans. Following two arts-based documentaries, This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss (2003) and William Eggleston in the Real World (2005), Almereyda returned to New Orleans for the post-Katrina companion pieces, New Orleans, Mon Amour, a fiction feature, and the documentary Big River Blues (both 2008).

Almereyda's latest effort, Paradise, sees him staying within the realm of non-fiction. The film is comprised of video footage shot by Almereyda over the past decade that captured the world as he saw it, often while traveling abroad. With no narration, captions or music, Paradise provides the audience with no clear context for each of the little episodes presented, yet one can detect recurring themes – the act of watching, children, innocence, the wonders of nature – which loosely tie together these snapshots of life. There are more recognizable episodes (a Sonic Youth concert, a visit to the set of Terrence Malick's The New World), yet the most beguiling moments are simpler: old men going to swim in the Irish Sea, a man in a drunken stupor with dog faithfully sitting by him, a baby suckling his mother's breast for the first time. Almereyda has a great eye for the beauties and idiosyncrasies of life, and while each episode is meaningful or resonant in its own way, the film's different parts chime and resonate with each other to create an almost hypnotic emotional experience.

Filmmaker spoke to Almereyda about the decade spent shooting Paradise, the overlap of life and filmmaking, and the influence on him of the late Manny Farber, to whom this film is dedicated.



Filmmaker: The footage in Paradise was shot over a long period of time, but at what point did you get the idea to make the film?

Almereyda: Well, the film's distilled from about 10 years of shooting. About five years ago, as my Eggleston documentary was almost finished, it occurred to me that this would be worth making into a movie, that it could be sustained and find a form and a shape to link all these fragments. The immediacy of the fragments could be retained, but these episodes might add up to something beyond their fragmentary nature. I applied for a Guggenheim Grant in 2004 and it was hugely helpful to have that. But the film took a long time to sift through, organize and edit. It really came into focus in the last two years.

Filmmaker: When you started filming stuff 10 years ago, how discriminating were you about what you were filming? Were there certain things that you were looking to capture?

Almereyda: I'd have to say no. It was all instinctive. It was truly like keeping a journal. I was interested in keeping track of experiences, people, places. Often as not, I carried a camera when I was traveling, visiting people I cared about. It was a way of holding onto things that I considered worth paying attention to. And over time these images and episodes become surrogate memories. Heightened memories.

Filmmaker: So it was like taking snapshots, but on video.

Almereyda: I guess so. A lot of my “professional” filmmaking would often be suspended -- I couldn’t find money for movies -- but my amateur activities offered a kind of cure. I sometimes feel like an out-of-work boxer who can’t stop getting into bar fights. But anyhow yes, basically, when something interesting was happening, I was glad to have a camera to record it.

Filmmaker: How many hours of footage did you end up with over those 10 years?

Almereyda: I would venture to say “countless.” [laughs] There were hundreds of tapes, and it’s fair to say that the most challenging aspect of this was the process of searching through them. Before I even worked with the editors, I’d have to review the material. It isn’t always easy to face your own messy life and camerawork.

Filmmaker: You said the filming was instinctive. Was it the same with the editing process?

Almereyda: I have a pretty good memory, so I'd be looking for specific things on the tapes - making an association, recognizing contrasts and connections. It grew organically over time. A basic element of editing is that you cherish things that are alive, that stand up to repeated viewing and, as Walter Murch says, you “Throw out the bad bits.” All the same, the film grew into four distinct sections, connected by dissolves to black, framed by a prologue and a coda. It’s meant to feel rough and loose, even slapped together, but there’s a structure.

Filmmaker: Once you'd conceived this as a film, did you find that the way you were documenting things changed? Did your focus widen or narrow?

Almereyda: I think inevitably there was more focus. I became aware of gaps that I wanted to plug. Specifically, there's a scene from Poland in 2008. I realized my life was limited. I don't have much exposure to working class environments or people, and when I was in Poland I specifically went out of my way to shoot people working in a factory, putting together some furniture. It was at Off Camera, a very generous, wacky festival in Kraków. Usually when I go to festivals, I do my best to escape, to experience the surrounding city. That was one of those occasions.

Filmmaker: With the exception of the segment on the set of The New World, the film is notable for the fact that its focus is on life beyond filmmaking, as opposed to your life as a filmmaker.

Almereyda: That's fair to say. But I wouldn't exactly say “beyond filmmaking,” because as you can see from this movie, life and filmmaking can get intimately tangled.

Filmmaker: One of the themes of the film is the act of watching, which somewhat comments on the relationship between filmmaker and audience.

Almereyda: John Berger wrote a line, and Chris Marker, probably independently, wrote something similar, that when you take a picture, part of the act of looking and taking the picture has to do with the response of the person being photographed. Part of what it means to take a picture is tied up with how you respond to people, the exchange, the interaction. At any rate, the film is meant to be about looking as an active part of life, rather than a passive one. It's about consciousness, awareness. If you're awake and alert, a lot of your life is more interesting than if you're not, [laughs] and that for me is a way of defining Paradise. If you can be excited about small details and commonplace events and the people around you, then life isn't so bad.

Filmmaker: One of the great issues of documentary filmmaking is the influence of the camera. Was that something that you gave thought to on this film?

Almereyda: Sure, you can’t really argue with Heisenberg's uncertainty principle – the notion that the observer changes the event. That’s old news. Not really a dynamic debate to me. Of course, the camera changes reality, but it doesn’t necessarily warp it. For all that, I’d say a common flaw in most contemporary documentaries is tangled with the use of music, the score pushing or milking an emotion, revealing an underlying impatience or lack of faith. Reality TV is, of course, a sham, wallpapered with music. So this film makes the most of natural sound – or the illusion of natural sound – with just a bit of music, courtesy of Paul Miller, to bracket the beginning and end.

Filmmaker: The film has a very rich subtext, because we're never given much context for each little scene and so are left to imagine the circumstances surrounding what we see.

Almereyda: In photography books, you're presented with a world of images that are seldom connected directly, but you feel and understand that the person who made these images is expressing a view of the world – reflecting a world of experience, but also organizing it, reshaping it. And the titles of the photographs seldom give you anything more than the place they were recorded. Paradise came out of that model, and the basic impulse to record things like in a journal. Other influences were Jonas Mekas' Walden and Sadie Benning's Pixelvision shorts – they have an immediacy I love and was hoping to emulate. Whether the people recorded are strangers or friends – and Paradise is evenly divided between them – as long as there's that immediacy, a connection, an emotion flares up from it.

Filmmaker: The film is hypnotic and enthralling, but very different from mainstream cinema.

Almereyda: But it’s meant to be accessible. Something about the length of the episodes and the pacing, the constantly re-starting rhythm - it's meant to be fun to watch. And then the layers of meaning and emotion should sneak up on you. Some people are going to be more patient than others. Of course, there’s no story, strictly speaking, but it's the nature of movies: you throw narrative out the door and it comes in through the window or up through the floorboards. There are narrative elements, repeated themes.

Filmmaker: The film's hypnotic quality and its fragmented nature made me think it could also work in a gallery as an installation.

Almereyda: I wouldn't mind straying into that world. It's not completely foreign to me, but I think – like everything else – that it's a bit of a racket, and I don't know the people who might be inspired to smuggle this work into a gallery. But my very first movie had a clip from Bill Viola's early work, and it's not like I'm oblivious to video art. Paradise is a kind of hybrid, and it wouldn't be out of place in a gallery.

Filmmaker: On the subject of its hybrid nature, I find there's a will to explore in your work generally that I think makes you difficult to categorize.

Almereyda: It’s worth talking about Manny Farber here - he died last year, and this film is dedicated to him. I met Manny when I was a teenager and he had a big influence in shaping the rest of my life. Manny, of course, set up an aesthetic standard that's been simplified as the “termite” versus the “white elephant.” He was on the side of the termite, the artist who explores and crosses boundaries, heedless of classification. This was also something of a curse for him as an artist - a writer who was equally invested in painting. I'd like to think that I'm working inside Manny’s tall shadow, guided by his example. When you look at my movies, it's not like they're esoteric, it's not like they're hard to uncode. That is, I hope they're not wilfully complicated but rich, because life is rich.

Filmmaker: Why exactly did you call the film Paradise.

Almereyda: When the title came to me, it seemed that it fit. I'm not convinced that there's much beyond the immediate life that we're living. Paradise is what we're in – this is the best we've got, here and now. It goes back to the idea that if you're awake and aware, life is very rewarding. But it's always vanishing, it's always slipping away, so there's an ache in it, a sense of yearning in the title. Derek Jarman wrote: “All home movies aspire to a vision of paradise.” How’s that for back-up?

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

Almereyda: I’d rather, glibly, quote Robert Frank, when he answered that question last year at Lincoln Center: “Keep your eyes open.” Simple, but you can forget to do it.

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

Almereyda: I don't think I've ever wished that. It's part of my curse: I like my job and wish I was working more.

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

Almereyda: I think I had the walls blank. I was an odd teenager.

Filmmaker: Did you have idols then?

Almereyda: Yeah, too many of them. One of my biggest was James Agee – that's an unlikely one to have at 14. I would have had a big poster of James Agee. [laughs] Like Manny Farber, he wasn't only a critic, he was a fierce, unclassifiable guy, and something like a recording angel. When I first met Manny, I asked him about Agee – they were good friends – and he invited me to San Diego to talk more. So that was the spark for that life-changing encounter. It all connects back to Agee.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/24/2009 08:01:00 AM Comments (0)

From Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez to Bryan Poyser and the Zellner brothers, Austin is a hotbed of gifted directors, and Bob Byington now emerges from there as another talent to be reckoned with. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Byington studied at UC-Santa Cruz before going to graduate school at the University of Texas, where he used his American Studies major to indulge his newfound love for the movies. In 1995, he cut his teeth as a production assistant on the indie hit The Last Supper, and the next year wrote and directed his feature debut Shameless, about an Austin-set, Generation X love triangle. His next film, Olympia, the story of a Mexican soap star who dreams of competing in the Olympics, was the opening night movie at the SXSW film festival in 1998. However, Byington then all but dropped off the map for a decade, only reappearing briefly in 2005, when he won the Austin Chronicle's short story contest. In 2008, though, he returned with the edgy comedy RSO [Registered Sex Offender], which premiered at SXSW 2008 before getting a roadshow release as part of Todd Sklar's Range Life Entertainment tour. Byington also had a cameo in Beeswax (2009), the most recent film from Andrew Bujalski, who himself had appeared in a small role in RSO.

Seemingly making up for lost time, Byington has rapidly followed up RSO with Harmony and Me, an offbeat comedy which was aided by an Annenberg Film Fellowship grant from the Sundance Institute. The film revolves around lovelorn Harmony (Justin Rice, the Bishop Allen frontman and Bujalski regular), who is still recovering from being dumped a year previously by his ex-girlfriend Jessica (Kristin Tucker) – and lets everybody know about it. Trying to help him (or not) recover from his heartbreak are a motley cast of friends and co-workers, and the members of his oddball, dysfunctional family, with Alex Karpovsky, Kevin Corrigan, Pat Healy and Byington himself turning in great performances in these roles. Harmony and Me, clocking in at a slim 75 minutes, has a real sweetness and freewheeling charm thanks to Byington's script and Rice's perfectly pitched lead performance. And though its subject matter, indie cast and loose, vérité cinematography are somewhat redolent of a mumblecore movie, its rich humor – sometimes dry, sometimes much more direct – recalls the New Hollywood comedies from the 70s.

Filmmaker spoke to Byington about the inspiration Harmony Korine provided the movie, the film's musical aspects, and his "God-imposed" hiatus.



Filmmaker: Before the interview started, you mentioned Harmony Korine and said that he was an inspiration for the character of Harmony.

Byington: He was in my mind's eye when I started. I had seen him at Telluride in the mid-90s, and his personality had a big impact on me. His demeanor in the world was one of the inspirations for the character. That was blended in with seeing Justin Rice in Mutual Appreciation, and sort of writing it for him in my mind's eye also. And then I was also writing it for the guy who was in Registered Sex Offender, Gabriel McIver. But then Justin basically emerged out of that rubble.

Filmmaker: Did you ever approach Korine about playing the role.

Byington: No. I don't know him. But I think he's a very compelling presence on screen. I know he's in Gummo very briefly, and I wish he'd be more of a presence in his own work.

Filmmaker: Considering you partially wrote it for Justin, how much did you have to adapt it for him once he committed to the role? Were all the musical elements were already there?

Byington: There were musical elements, but it was truly an accident. I had tried to stay away from his music, except for Mutual Appreciation, where he's a musician. I tried to stay away from Bishop Allen while I was writing it, for reasons I'm not super clear on. I just didn't gravitate to it. Maybe I didn't want it to be a like an indie rocker in the lead, But then when he got there, he was really good and really interesting when he'd play instruments. He was doing these piano lessons in the movie, and he was genuinely curious about the piano in a way that really worked for the scene. He genuinely wanted to learn how to play better with his left hand, and he wanted to use the pedals, but he'd never really learned how. So he took those two curiosities and really there was no acting or faking, it was all real. Those scenes have a real documentary quality: he comes in and says, “I want to learn this and this.”

Filmmaker: Was there a lot of improv in the movie? There are not scenes that feel much more improvised than others.

Byington: It depended. For instance, the wedding singer was a friend of mine and I really like him a lot as a performer, but he's not an actor, so we were much better off saying, “OK, we're doing this and this in the scene,” than trying to use a script with him. [The woman playing] Justin's mom is not an actor, so we were going to be much better just describing the scene to her, whereas with Karpovsky, Healy and Corrigan, you want to give them scripted material. They can improvise, but can also make good scripted material great, whereas the wedding singer would make great scripted material very bad.

Filmmaker: There's a moment in the film where Jerm Pollett says to Justin Rice's musical style is "playful and absurd," sometimes desperate but with a lightness to it, and that for me summed up the movie as well to a degree.

Byington: Good, I think that's what we were after, in a way. Playful, for sure. I know that I wanted to make an open-hearted movie, and I felt like I was able to put that idea into Justin playing the lead, extending across these scenes. You always want to try to create a tone for your movie, but you're always leaving a lot up to accidental elements that make their way into the tone.

Filmmaker: What were your tonal influences?

Byington: A tonal influence, no question, would be Stroszek, the Werner Herzog movie. The way he worked on that movie, he was really interested in seeing how things would play out in a scene and he brought a rigorous curiosity to the process. And he cast a non-actor in the lead so he would have that [freshness]. I also talk about this other film, Days of Being Wild, the Wong Kar-wai movie. There's something about the tone of that that really gets me. It's so... [long pause] This interview could come to a screeching halt while I try to figure out the word! It just flows.

Filmmaker: When you mentioned Herzog casting a non-actor in Stroszek, it made me wonder whether Justin Rice can still be considered a non-actor.

Byington: I don't know. Great question, great question. I think he brings a lot of qualities [of the non-actor], but he's very good with scripted material and he was very prepared like an actor. You should ask him – I'd like to hear his answer.

Filmmaker: Do you feel Justin approached the material in a markedly different way from trained actors like Pat Healy or Kevin Corrigan?

Byington: We didn't really talk about character at all. I gave him a Buñuel book, My Last Sigh, and that was really my only explanation for what I was after in the movie. He read the whole thing the next day on a five-hour flight, and once I knew that he'd read it I sort of felt like there wouldn't be any communication issues about the character after that. He also pointed out my favorite paragraph in the book, so I was like, “OK, I don't think we need to worry about this anymore.” And that turned out to be true. We got on really well too. I had made Registered Sex Offender and fought a lot with the guy playing the lead, so I had been bracing myself for fights with Justin, but we never disagreed.

Filmmaker: Is it true that the documentary style you used for RSO led to the way you shot Harmony and Me?

Byington: Yeah, no question. It was learning how to do that on RSO and then applying those lessons on Harmony. I shot RSO myself and then worked with a D.P. on Harmony, but ended up shooting about half of the film. We would hand the camera to the sound guy and let him shoot. People who like cinematography would probably slam the movie by saying, “It looks like the sound guy shot it,” and he did shoot some of it! He directed a couple of scenes too. He plays the little brother. He worked on RSO with me and we knew he was going to work his way into Harmony.

Filmmaker: The whole family were great, and really reminded me of more old school Hollywood comedies.

Byington: I wanted to play the older brother so that I could be mean to Justin without being mean director-to-actor. Instead, I got to be mean as an actor and he got to be mean to me back, so any potential fight we might have had would have been diverted and run off to those scenes. It's a very effective method.

Filmmaker: You're extremely funny in both this film and Beeswax, but in both you play seemingly rather dim characters. Or at least very laconic.

Byington: I really wanted to play the character in Harmony like he's a Republican and give him an obduracy – the way he looks at his brother is very narrow. And doing that was really fun. It was not to make fun of anything or because I hate Republicans, I just wanted to play my idea of a very narrow perspective. It was like, “This is my brother. I think these four things about him, and everything I say is a subset of those four things.” It was fun! Like him asking me for money – I've asked so many people for money that it was so fun to play the guy that was being asked for money. “I get to play that guy?! Awesome, let's go!”

Filmmaker: The subtitle of the movie is “A physical comedy about yearning.” Can you explain that a little more fully? It's not a physical comedy in the traditional sense, but my take is that it refers to the physical manifestations of yearning.

Byington: That's very good – that's way better than I could say. I'm serious! That phrase popped into my head, and I was aware that it's not in the strictest sense a physical comedy, but then I like the notion of wearing your heart on your sleeve in a physical way. I like the physicality of his journey: I wanted to do a wedding scene, I wanted to do a funeral scene, I wanted to do a scene in a hospital. There's a physical element to that, and that's why it's a “physical comedy.” When we want something and we can't hide it, it's awful, in a way. But there's a lot of humor in that too. When you're trying to get over somebody and you're talking to your friend about it for the tenth time and want to rephrase it so that they're interested this time: “OK, I know that I bored your ass off about in this past, but this time I'm going to say this in a way that you'll actually get it, you'll understand everything.”

Filmmaker: Looking at your bio, you made a couple of movies in the 90s and then had a decade-long hiatus.

Byington: You always want to have a story for a hiatus, but I don't know if I have a story for the hiatus. I could make one up, but there's no real story. Should I make one up? Maybe you could make one up!

Filmmaker: Was it a “self-imposed” hiatus? Or was it just things not working out?

Byington: If you believe in God, it was imposed by God. If you don't, I guess it was self-imposed.

Filmmaker: All I have down as happening in between you making Olympia and Registered Sex Offender is you winning a short story contest run by the Austin Chronicle.

Byington: Yeah, I spent all that time working on that short story! I really wanted to win, so I spent seven years on that story. One word per week. That's a great story for the hiatus!

Filmmaker: It suggests a Knut Hamsun-like dedication to your craft.

Byington: Well, winning that contest did give me a little boost of confidence going into RSO. RSO was off the ground already, but out of over 300 entrants it was nice to win. I think I won because it was the shortest story that they had to read. That's my recommendation for a short story contest: keep it really short.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Byington: I don't know what the first one I saw was. I remember seeing Star Wars – everyone remembers seeing Star Wars, right? (I don't want to date myself... I saw it in the womb.) I remember seeing Chinatown when I was a freshman in college and I had never experienced the feeling that there was an intelligence behind a film until I saw that. When I was walking out of the film, I thought, “Somebody made that movie.” I remember seeing Annie Hall again and then thinking, “Yeah, somebody's making this movie.” And that was weird. And cool.

Filmmaker: If you could travel back in time and be able to make movies in a time and place of your choice, where and when would it be?

Byington: Wow, great question. I've romanticized that Dostoevsky was writing in during the late 1800s, and the Russian milieu he was writing in, and I'm very interested in the comedy in his work. He's a very funny writer to me, so I think I would like to make a Dostoevskian comedy in that era. The Idiot is a tremendously funny novel. Everyone talks about how bleak it is – which it is – but it's also hilarious.

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

Byington: I saw Failure to Launch on an airplane and there's no question that it's hands down the worst I've ever seen.

Filmmaker: I interviewed Rob Siegel recently, and he said that there's a subset of movies that you see on planes that star Matthew McConnaughey, Sandra Bullock, Kate Hudson and...

Byington: ...Sarah Jessica Parker! It's a miracle I remembered who's in it, a miracle.

Filmmaker: Finally, which film do you wish you'd directed?

Byington: Chinatown came to mind when you said that. I've now seen it 30 times. I'm in awe of how accomplished that movie is. Oh, and I wish I'd directed the first scene of Inglourious Basterds. You're like, “Holy motherfucking shit, this guy's a motherfucking director!”

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/18/2009 05:05:00 PM Comments (0)

Joe Berlinger is a filmmaker who makes documentaries that tell important stories with integrity, while still always entertaining his audiences. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1961, Berlinger studied English and German at Colgate University, and got his first taste of the movie business while working on TV commercials at an advertising agency in Frankfurt. After deciding he wanted to make films, he moved to New York City, where he got a job working for the Maysles brothers. Berlinger’s first foray into directing was the documentary short Outrageous Taxi Stories (1989), and he made his feature debut in 1992 with Brother’s Keeper, a non-fiction film about a man accused of killing his brother, co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky. The film became a self-distributed hit for Berlinger and Sinofsky, and the pair returned to the subject of small town murder in Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), which won huge acclaim and has become a cult classic. (A follow-up film, Paradise Lost 2: Revelations, was released in 2000.) Berlinger briefly moved into fiction filmmaking with Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which he co-wrote as well as directed, but returned to portraying real life extremes with Sinofsky on Metallica: Some Kind of Monster (2004), a documentary about the turbulent genesis of the iconic rock band’s album “St. Anger.” Berlinger is also active in television as the creator of such shows as Iconoclasts, FanClub and The Wrong Man, and the director of TV documentaries like Gray Matter and Judgment Day: Should the Guilty Go Free. Berlinger’s latest film, Crude, is something of a departure for the director as it presents a story on a much bigger scale than his previous documentaries. The film focuses on the horrific damage done to the Ecuadorian rainforest (and the impact on its indigenous inhabitants), and the efforts of oil worker-turned-lawyer Pablo Fajardo to hold the oil behemoth Chevron accountable. Crude has aspects of both the environmental documentary and the David and Goliath tale, but adds up to an even more intriguing film than it might seem on paper. Berlinger uses the case as a way of scrutinizing the inadequacy of the judicial system to handle such an incident, while also addressing other problematic aspects of the lawsuit such as Fajardo’s backing by a large legal firm that is bankrolling him purely for profit. While previous Berlinger movies such as Brother’s Keeper and Paradise Lost have shed light on a situation in the hope of affecting positive change, Crude shows progress being made in the case (Fajardo being backed by the Ecuadorian president and becoming a minor celebrity), but ultimately leaves viewers with the feeling that nothing – not even victory in the courts or a big payout from Chevron – will come close to putting things right. Filmmaker spoke to Berlinger about his decision to make an activist film, the dangers of going up against a corporate giant, and his love of Planet of the Apes.



Filmmaker: How did you first come across this story?

Berlinger: This was not something I thought was going to be my next film. My aspirations at the beginning were quite humble and in fact I found myself really not thinking I was going to make this film. I had a lot of hesitation about it. Steven Donziger, the plaintiff's attorney, came to my office. Steven started talking about the case and all of my red flags went up because at the time I didn't know there was a Pablo Fajardo, at the time I didn't know there was going to be some present tense inspections – all I knew was that he was telling me about this 13-year struggle.

Filmmaker: Obviously, that was problematic to you because that set-up is hardly very cinematic.

Berlinger: Yeah, I'm a present tense, cinéma vérité filmmaker and it seemed like I'd missed the story. If it's a 13-year legal struggle, how am I going to dramatize it? That was the first red flag, and the second red flag was this was a plaintiff's attorney clearly with an agenda and I am not that kind of a filmmaker. My films are very humanistic. Brother's Keeper and Paradise Lost deal with some very serious social issues, but I consider myself a storyteller first and a journalist second. I make these ambiguous human portraits and this was a guy who had a message and wanted to bang that message over people's heads. I said, “I'm not sure I'm the right filmmaker for you. There's Robert Greenwald, there's Michael Moore – people who make films with a very specific and clear point of view, and I'm not one of those guys. I'm also not sure how to film a story that's 13 years old – maybe this is a 60 Minutes news piece.” It didn't have the right aesthetic criteria for me and the biggest thing was there was no central character. You need a good central character to get your teeth stuck into.

Filmmaker: And yet you got hooked by the story.

Berlinger: Steven's a very charismatic, persuasive guy and he convinced me to take a trip with him. I said, “As long as you know I have lots of reservations, sure I'll go. I've never been to the rainforest and it sounds like an adventure, but I'm dubious that this will be a film.” He just kept saying, “If you only see the pollution...” When I went down, it was 10 times worse than I imagined, it was far worse than he had explained. It was horrifying, I could not believe what I was looking at. Here is a place that's supposed to be a paradise on earth, but there's these noxious pits leaching shit into the environment – it was shocking. I just thought to myself, “This may not have the aesthetic criteria that I usually look for, maybe I won't have a central character and maybe there won't be present tense action, but I'm just going to start documenting this.” I felt like I couldn't turn my back on these people, and that's really why I started the film.

Filmmaker: How much of a factor was funding in your decision?

Berlinger: When Bruce Sinofsky and I made Brother's Keeper, we rolled the dice, we maxed out 10 credit cards, put all of our savings into it, really took a chance – the typical story. Then we got into Sundance, won a prize and our careers were established. But ever since Brother's Keeper, I swore I wasn't going to do it again, so going down to South America, one of my biggest concerns was how I was going to fund it. But when I got home I thought, “Technology is so cheap, I own these little HD cameras, and what's a couple of plane tickets? I'm going to just start making this film and not worry who's going to pay for it, not worry about distribution.” So I threw myself into it and made a commitment that I'd go down there every couple of weeks and see where it went, while doing other things – like Iconoclasts, commercials and myriad other things – which gave me the financial freedom to do it. The funny thing is, once I allowed all my aesthetic and financial criteria to be thrown out the door, things started materializing in a very Zen-like way. On the second trip, I met Pablo Fajardo, a guy who just oozes credibility and authenticity. I was just awestruck by this guy. I knew I had a juicy character and I started feeling, “This could be something...” And then on the third trip, they started talking about these judicial inspections finally being approved. It's only one phase of the trial, but in the movie it stands in as the trial and provides the thing I never thought I'd have, which is this great present tense device. How dramatic to have these lawyers in jungle gear arguing their cases in front of these pollution sites in the middle of the Amazon. During the first inspection, I thought, “This could be a movie.” But I have to be honest, during the entire process I was wondering, “Does an American audience really want to see this?” Even when I was cutting it, I was thinking, “I think this is good and important, but God knows if this is going to see the light of day.”

Filmmaker: How much do you feel your presence as a filmmaker had an impact on what transpired? I suppose it's one of the quintessential questions for a documentarian.

Berlinger: Yeah, it's a fascinating question that I'm endlessly interested in with all of my work, the Heisenberg principle of documentary making: do you change things by observing? As truthful as I think my films are, I'm a firm believer that no film is the objective truth about anything. With Metallica, Lars [Ullrich] has said many times that the cameras were like a truth serum, that had they not been there the therapy would have ended unsuccessfully and early and the band probably would have broken up. In Brother's Keeper, I definitely feel like the making of the film brought more people out to support [Delbert Ward] and increase the level of support. With this film, however, I actually think the presence of the camera was truly invisible, because I didn't make it known that I was a filmmaker. I was fearful for my life throughout the making of most of this film, so I did not announce who I was or what my intentions were, and I certainly didn't let Chevron know I was making this film. We had a small crew and because there were a lot of NGOs (like Amazon Watch) and local media down there observing the trial, so I just kind of fit in.

Filmmaker: You always bring to your films nuance and complexity, and here you very interestingly juxtapose Steven, a toughened lawyer who coaches Amazonian Indians on what to say in front of the Chevron shareholders meeting, with the pure and untarnished Pablo.

Berlinger: What I like about this film is that I think it subverts many of the conventions of normal advocacy filmmaking. It's really not about the lawsuit, it's about a much larger issue. I'm not smart enough – I'm not a lawyer, I'm not a scientist – to tell you that Chevron has not wrapped itself up in enough legal technicalities that it might possibly prevail in the eyes of the law, but from the moral standpoint the culpability lays at their door. It's a portrait of how we see justice in the world and the inadequacy of the legal structure to really handle these kinds of humanitarian and environmental crises, because the thing has gone on for 17 years and it could go on for another 17 years. The other way I think it subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking is that it allows Chevron to have their full say. I worked really hard to get them into the film, I thought it was really important. The reason is you want the audience to be presented with the pros and cons, weigh them, and come to their own conclusion as opposed to being lectured to. The film has all sorts of nuance and observations that you don't usually find in this kind of a film. I think that's why it works as a film.

Filmmaker: You said before that you were fearful for your life for much of filming. Were you afraid of what Chevron could do to you then? And what's your relationship with them now?

Berlinger: I want to be very clear: I don't think the executives in San Ramon would ever order a hit on a filmmaker. I'm not that jaded. Often the home office contracts with a local company that also contracts with local people, and sometimes those local people – in order to protect that chain of employment – take matters into their own hands. So that doesn't mean Chevron said, “Hey, go knock off Joe Berlinger,” but the local people could easily say, “We don't want this being exposed. We've got to take care of this guy.” Even if that just means roughing me up. I was very aware of those stories, and we were also a couple of miles from the Columbian border, where the FARC was very active, where drug runners are very active, where American oil industry executives have been kidnapped for ransom. I just wanted to fly beneath the radar. [laughs]

Filmmaker: You have interviews with Chevron staffers in the film. At what stage did you tell them you were making the film?

Berlinger: I waited until I felt like I had the film in the can. From about August 2007 until August 2008, I pursued Chevron. The jungle part of the film was done. They took it as a bad sign that I hadn't told them, but I told them, “I was filming your lawyers, but now I want you to participate. I have your version of the story via the trial, but it would be much better if U.S. executives explained your position in English.” I sent them all my films, then delay, delay, delay. They missed every deadline I gave them. Finally round August of 2008, I said, “Look, the Sundance Film Festival rough cut deadline that I'm gunning for is mid-September. The movie is 90% edited, and I'm really down to the wire. I'd love to have you in the film, but you've got to make a decision.” So, finally, they said, “Yes, we'll do the interviews.” They bought a hotel room suite, and they gave me the two people. The funny thing is, when we're setting up, another crew walks in. I was like, “Are you guys in the right place?” They said, “Yeah, we're here to do the Chevron shoot. We're here to film you.” Then the Chevron media spokesman came in and said, “Yes, I hope you don't mind but we're going to film this so we have a record of it.” That was their way of putting me on notice. I thought it was very funny. It was kinda smart, it was their semi-intimidation tactic to say, “Don't manipulate the edit, because we have a record of it.” Not that I would. That was joke – I didn't need to manipulate it! [laughs]

Filmmaker: What was your cinematic epiphany?

Berlinger: I started off my career in advertising. I was a language major and because I spoke a bunch of languages I ended up getting this great job when I was 23 producing television commercials in Frankfurt. So I stumbled into being on a film set because of language skills, not because of desire to be a filmmaker. That job in Frankfurt took me to London every two weeks for coordination meetings with clients. One day I walked into a theater to watch a movie in Piccadilly Circus and I saw Birdy. I thought that was the most amazing film. I had been on a shoot and it was one of the first shoots I'd been on, and I thought, “Oh, my God, I want to tell stories!”

Filmmaker: Which phrase best describes your philosophy on life?

Berlinger: I don't know if I have a phrase, but one of the reasons I wanted to make this film – and one of the single most important things I've learned over my lifetime and the thing that I most want to impart to my children – is that the good guys aren't always who you think they are.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Berlinger: There are two early formative films. My earliest filmgoing memory is actually Planet of the Apes, and that was a terrifying experience. It blew me away with its message. Believe it or not, the original Planet of the Apes is on my top 10 list. Maybe it's just because I was a kid, but I'm sorry – and I've been ridiculed for this – one of the greatest moments in cinema for me is when the astronauts are in that field with the mutant humans, and the first time that they realize they're going to get hunted down, and all of a sudden the apes appear on horseback. The original time that happened, that was one of the great moments in cinema. Then the first horror movie I saw, when I was nine, was Tales from the Crypt, which was a compendium. I recently saw it and the blood was so fake, I can't believe it scared me. My father took a bunch of kids to that movie – I think I was probably too young to see it – and he just stopped the car and turned the engine off and turned the lights out in the middle of the road, just to scare the shit out of us. Then he got out of the car and ran around, and we were all scared to death.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/09/2009 05:18:00 PM Comments (0)

If there's a restlessness to the filmmaking of Alexis Dos Santos, you only have to look at the background of the young Argentinian writer-director to understand why. Born in Buenos Aires, Dos Santos relocated with his family to a small village in Patagonia when he was eight. He returned to the capital city to study Architecture at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, then moved on to study acting, and finally settled on filmmaking as his vocation. After completing his undergraduate studies at the Universidad del Cine, he moved to Barcelona for a screenwriting course, and then on to London, where he studied under Stephen Frears in the directors' program at the National Film and Television School, getting in on the strength of his black-and-white short Meteoritos (1998). During his time at the NFTS, Dos Santos made more shorts – Watching Planes (1999), Axolotl (2000), Snapshots (2001) and Sand (2001) – which played at festivals worldwide, winning both prizes and acclaim. After an extended period in London, he returned to Argentina to make his debut feature, Glue (2007), the story of three awkward adolescents coming of age in his own hometown in Patagonia.

Dos Santos' latest film ,Unmade Beds is his second feature, though it is a project he has been developing since 2001, when he was still at film school. Set in London, the movie presents a double narrative as it follows two attractive foreigners, messy-haired Spaniard Axl (Fernando Tielve) and pretty but delicate Belgian Vera (Déborah François). They are two lost souls looking for answers: Axl has come to London to track down the father who abandoned him as an infant, while Vera is recovering from a painful break-up. Dos Santos' sophomore effort enthusiastically conveys the energy and vibrancy of London's hipster squats and live music scene while offsetting this with two sensitive, emotionally insightful portraits. Featuring a smart, original script, a great indie soundtrack and strong performances from its cosmopolitan cast Unmade Beds is a charming and idiosyncratic crowd pleaser.

Filmmaker spoke to Dos Santos about the film's long gestation period, his justification for throwing parties on the set of Unmade Beds, and his desire to work with Macaulay Culkin.



Filmmaker: There was a very long gestation period with Unmade Beds. Didn't you start writing it first in around 2001?

Dos Santos: Yeah, I think I was still at film school when I started writing notes about the film, so it's been a long time. But in between there were probably 20 drafts of the script and hundreds of pages of notes and characters' diaries and things.

Filmmaker: From what I've read, you don't always write a conventional script.

Dos Santos: The thing was, I was working on Unmade Beds for quite a long time, and then I wrote a little story that was Glue. I went to Argentina and shot something, and it ended up being the whole film. It was all based on improvisations, but that came out of being tired of the process of writing and rewriting and just thinking, “You can make a film even if you don't write every single line of it.” Things are going to change anyway with the actors and in the edit, and I like improvising as well. I went back to [Unmade Beds] after I finished Glue and we made a final draft, and that was what we shot.

Filmmaker: How fleshed out was the script? Did you still leave room for improvisation?

Dos Santos: Yeah, because my experience with Glue was very good, very positive: I worked with the actors and basically we wrote and shot a film in three weeks. That gave me the confidence to keep improvising, and I felt that I needed to be not very respectful with material that I'd been working on for very long. With lines of dialogue that I'd written years before, I'd be like, “Whatever, change it. I don't care.”

Filmmaker: How clear a picture of the characters and the story did you have when you went into production?

Dos Santos: It was somehow very clear because they've been with me for such a long time. Character is the thing that I develop the most. I write notes on characters for a very long time usually, and during rewrites I always go back and write characters' diaries; I had hundreds of pages of Axl's diaries and Vera's diaries and their thoughts.

Filmmaker: How much does that picture you have of characters change once you've cast the movie?

Dos Santos: In this case, the nationalities changed, for instance. And then they become real, because suddenly they're a person and it's very different. When I write, I tend to think about someone even if I know that they're not going to be right or they're going to be too old by the time I make it. [laughs] With Unmade Beds, for a while I had different people in mind but then whoever comes brings a lot of their own world as well.

Filmmaker: Almost every single movie with a twentysomething boy and girl is a romance between the two of them, but you changed it up with a parallel narrative about two people who are not, in fact, destined to be together.

Dos Santos: It was always in my head that you were witnessing these two lives and sharing stuff with them. Maybe we're so used to romantic comedies that we think they're probably going to meet at the end, but it doesn't make sense for them to have anything. And then what they have is this night that one of them doesn't remember. I think it was more about the challenge because I didn't have any models to follow. When you look at films, you think “Oh, this is like this other one,” or it's like The Catcher in the Rye. But I didn't have that with Unmade Beds because they are two different stories: one is a love story and the other one is a father-and-son kind of thing.

Filmmaker: Glue was about struggling with growing up, and this feels like a continuation of that sort of narrative.

Dos Santos: Something that I realized when I was doing Glue was that the film was mainly focused on the boys, and the character of the girl grew a lot when we were shooting because of course we were improvising and she was really good. Then I realized that I was almost doing the Unmade Beds thing and going into her point of view. Because it hadn't been planned – it came halfway through the film – I quite liked this idea. Splitting your point of view is something that you can't do in life, but that you can do in fiction. [laughs]

Filmmaker: Axl wears a school blazer and you wear an identical one. Does that mean the character is partly based on you?

Dos Santos: I don't know if Axl is like me. [laughs] You know, I put myself in a lot of the characters somehow and I don't look at them from a distance. I tend to put little personal things inside each one, but then they are their own people and they have their own stories and they're fiction. The first note that I wrote about Axl's character was based on something that happened to me, which was one morning waking up and not remembering [what had happened the night before]. I had in my pocket a book of poetry in German that it was dedicated to me, and I had no idea where it came from. Or why. And I don't even read German, so why would I have that? And I sort of remembered kissing someone but I wasn't sure if I did or not. Or who it was. So then I started writing notes about someone who doesn't remember the night before, and that's how I first thought of the character. That's the only personal trait. [laughs]

Filmmaker: It seems like the vibrant London you portray is something you maybe experienced yourself while a student at the National Film and Television School.

Dos Santos: The world of music is something that I discovered a bit later in London, because I was at film school eight hours a day or watching films at home. Suddenly I saw how all artforms are melting together. The people doing art and music and film and fashion all live in the same area of London and all hang out in the same places. There were people from all around and I tried to do things that were creative and quite fun. And then the other thing was that I was hanging out in a couple of squats, and one of them was where my best friends were living. I shot a music video there, and that's where the idea of the squat [in the movie] came from.

Filmmaker: How much do you feel your identity as a Latin American filmmaker is present in this film?

Dos Santos: The thing about nationality is that I've been living abroad for 12 years so I don't know how I feel about putting [that tag on myself]. I don't even think most Argentinian directors want to see themselves as that. It's weird, if you ask me how I see myself amongst contemporary British filmmakers, I would probably find my place better. I think probably the only other Latin American director that I relate to is Gerardo Naranjo, who is making films in Mexico. But otherwise I don't know. I haven't seen so many films, because living 12 years in Europe you don't get access to everything produced here.

Filmmaker: A lot of people talk about your work and the French New Wave. Was that a big influence for you?

Dos Santos: It was when I was in film school, like early Godard films, and I was watching obsessively Wong Kar-wai for a period. But when I was shooting the film, I was really just trying to do my own thing and make a film that belongs to its own world and try to not really have references [to other films]. I have them anyway in your head because my whole idea of film language is based on films that I've seen, but I don't go back to them before filming and study them.

Filmmaker: What was your set like? It seems like you were surrounded by friends, and I'd imagine it was a fun place to be.

Dos Santos: It was mainly friends, partly because we were working low budget and we had to keep the crew quite young, but also because I quite liked working with people of my generation. It was fun. We were throwing parties in the squat location because we needed the trash from the parties for the art department. That was our excuse. [laughs]

Filmmaker: At film school, you were taught by Stephen Frears and Joachim Trier was one of your classmates. What memories do you have of your time there?

Dos Santos: It was good to have Stephen around when I was editing two of my shorts; he would sit there and watch things with me. He doesn't tell you a lot or come up with stories. When you ask him “How was this film?”, he's always like, “Oh, I just happened to be there. They're just great actors and did a good job.” But when I was editing, he made me go back and forth between rushes and what I had cut and look for new things. That was the one thing that I learned from him. And me and Joachim just talked about film constantly for the three years, basically. He was the only one I had an affinity with in terms of film interests, so we became close friends.

Filmmaker: Before you went to film school you were an architecture student. What did that training teach you that you have managed to use as a writer-director?

Dos Santos: I think it helped me to visualize things and to have an idea for a project and how to work [towards that]. It made me understand scriptwriting and I think because of architecture I've developed an eye for framing. It's weird, they're such different disciplines. I was doing acting at the same time as architecture. It kind of makes sense that acting and architecture would add up to film directing.

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

Dos Santos: [laughs] Yesterday. Because I don't know what to do with my life at the moment. Now I have to write a new script, and I see myself painting and playing the guitar and doing things that have nothing to do with writing.

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

Dos Santos: Macaulay Culkin. [laughs] I'm looking forward to seeing another film with him, but I don't seem to be able to find him anywhere. I think the last thing I saw him in was Party Monster. That was a while ago. I would love to make a film with him.

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

Dos Santos: I would do a contemporary interpretation of Ernst Lubitsch's Design For Living with Macaulay Culkin, Michael Cera and probably Soko (I'm betting on Soko although I haven't seen her acting yet). Design For Living is an amazing film, so avant-garde for its time and when you watch it now it still feels incredibly contemporary. At the moment I'm finding Lubitsch films incredibly inspiring.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 9/02/2009 11:27:00 AM Comments (0)