Immediately distinguishable by his understated good looks, laid-back, drawling English voice and, of course, the boom mike seemingly always in his hands, Nick Broomfield is an iconic figure in documentary filmmaking, as well as one of the form’s most talented artists. The son of English photographer Maurice Broomfield and a Czech refugee, Broomfield went to a Quaker boarding school before studying law at Cardiff University, political science at Essex University and finally film at the National Film School in his hometown of London. Combining his interest in sociopolitical issues with filmmaking, Broomfield made his directorial debut while at university with Who Cares (1971), a short documentary about the slum clearance in Liverpool. Broomfield’s early films tackled racism, juvenile delinquency, and working class poverty and were often co-directed with his wife, Joan Churchill. His profile increased after making Driving Me Crazy (1988), the first documentary in which he was a prominent presence, and the following year he made his fiction debut with Dark Obsession, a thriller about the cover-up of a hit-and-run death by British soldiers. Over the past 15 years, Broomfield has had huge success making personality-driven documentaries such as Tracking Down Maggie: The Unofficial Biography of Margaret Thatcher (1994), Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1995), Kurt & Courtney (1998), Biggie and Tupac (2002) and two films about the serial killer Aileen Wournos, Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003).

In 2006, Broomfield returned to narrative filmmaking with Ghosts, an account of the death of Chinese cockle pickers in England in 2004. He continues to blend fact and fiction in his latest project, Battle for Haditha, about the 2005 killing of 24 Iraqi civilians by U.S. soldiers. With a cast made up of ex-Marines and Iraqis, Broomfield’s film examines the events surrounding the killings from the perspective of Iraqi insurgents, Iraqi civilians and the U.S. Marines. It effectively utilizes a naturalistic, documentary style in presenting a balanced account of the massacre which humanizes the actions of each faction in an attempt to understand why these tragic deaths took place. Immediate and immensely powerful, Battle for Haditha is simultaneously sympathetic and critical of the actions of the insurgents and occupying troops but offers hope for the conflict with the idea that each side should attempt to understand the other.

Filmmaker spoke to Broomfield about his shift to fiction filmmaking, the current political malaise and his aborted attempt to make a funny film about a tax office.



Filmmaker: Before I started recording, you were saying that you are currently having to do a lot of commercials because of how much of your own money you sunk into Battle For Haditha.

Broomfield: Well, I inadvertently ended up sticking my salary in it, which was pretty bad. I have this particular deal with Film Four where I pretty much keep the back end so I’m used to subsidizing the film and trying to pay myself back from the back end. There definitely will be a back end on this film, I just think it’ll take a lot longer than with other films. I’ve always found that quite a good exercise in a way, a good discipline – I did it with all my documentaries. Sometimes my budget is for five weeks and I end up doing it for 14, or however long it takes to make the film. You always have to try and make the film that is there rather than the film that fits in the budget, which is a good discipline for any filmmaker. It’s just that this has been a much bigger shortfall than I’ve had on my other films.

Filmmaker: Did you go over schedule?

Broomfield: No, we kept to the schedule but there was a shortfall of $1 million. I was slightly over-optimistic about how easy it was going to be to get it, so basically I’ve had to defray a million dollars pretty much myself, which is a lot of money. Filmmaking is a gamble and one of the prices of being an independent filmmaker is that you take on as little money as possible that will compromise your independence. When you get lots of people involved, their money always comes at a heavy price.

Filmmaker: What lead you to make the shift from straight documentary to a mix of fact anf fiction?

Broomfield: I just decided that I wanted to do a different kind of film. It’s taken what I’ve learned in documentary – which is how to work with real people who have an amazing story to tell – and blending that with a more structured storyline or script, with a beginning, a middle and an end. Because of the technological changes a new kind of cinema is possible, and that involves using real people and real locations and shooting in a style which is very much like documentary. In other words, long takes and editing in real time. It’s potentially a much more powerful cinema than we have at the moment and it could lend itself to action and comedy as well. I’m just playing around with it, really, but I’m sure that a lot of other people will start working in that form in the future. I think it will be an enormous and overdue change in cinema. It's an exciting future, actually.

Filmmaker: How different was your preparation for this film from what it would have been for a documentary? Presumably both involve very rigorous research.

Broomfield: I tend to do the research on the documentaries as I’m shooting the films. Normally I do a fair amount of preliminary research, but what I like most about documentary – and there are lots of different styles and ways of making them – is to have them being very spontaneous and a quest, rather than it being all sewed up with your beginning, middle and end all worked out. Why not go and make a feature film if you’re going to do that? So my documentaries are less researched than this film. On this film, I met the Marines from Kilo Company, spent quite a few days with them, met all the journalists, not only who worked on the Haditha story but journalists who had generally been covering the Iraq war. I then went to Oman and met with survivors of the massacre and insurgents and people who knew about the insurgency. It was probably a much more thoroughly researched film than one of my documentaries would have been at the outset. We wrote the script very much from that research.

Filmmaker: How detailed was the script? How much room did you leave for improvisation and spontaneity?

Broomfield: I would say that the overall structure of the film very much reflects the script that we had. The scene breakdown was pretty detailed as to what was to happen in each scene but the Marines and the Iraqi actors all brought a lot of their own experience to it. One of the problems of the tradition of writing scripts is that often the scriptwriter doesn’t know as much as real people who’ve lived it. He’s only in his Hollywood bungalow, or wherever, he hasn’t been to Iraq, he doesn’t know any Iraqis, he doesn’t know anything about Muslim culture, so a lot of it’s imagined. It’s a great luxury to have those people with you and it’s better for them to say “Actually, we don’t do it that way,” “We don’t say that,” “We don’t clear our house this way.” So you defer to them, which is very much like making a documentary, and I’ve always enjoyed that process of having a sense of the film you’re making but allowing the people to define it in the detail.

Filmmaker: How much did let the action just play when you were directing?

Broomfield: I certainly let the action play at the beginning because I’m fascinated to see what they’re going to do with it and sometimes they do things that are very unexpected and sometimes what they do is a damn sight better than what you had in mind. They surprise you. It’s bit like with a documentary: you allow those surprises to happen, which is the joy of making those films. It’s often the unexpected that is revealing and fantastic. And then I would define it more; often it’s cutting down dialogue. People tend to speak too much and they speak a lot of rubbish sometimes, so you say “Do the action, but don’t feel you have to talk so much. Just talk when there’s something worth saying.” Sometimes the first take’s a great one, sometimes it’s take 48.

Filmmaker: There’s a scene in the film where the insurgents coach a young girl as she is giving her testimony on camera. Is this something you ever are tempted to do or need to do when making one of your documentaries?

Broomfield: I would never do that. Maybe when I was a film student. Last night a young student asked me about ethics and I always think the litmus test as a filmmaker is to sit through your film without squirming. If you set people up, it’s just an uncomfortable thing. I don’t think you ever need to. If you pre-interview people, they will inevitably say things better the first time so then you try and coax them into saying what they said the first time and it never works, and you learn to shoot them the first time.

Filmmaker: I asked you about that because some people try to make their documentaries totally unambiguous.

Broomfield: Everyone got all upset about whether the Queen had walked in the room before or after [her infamous walkout in the BBC documentary A Year with the Queen], or whether the shot had been the other way around. That guy [BBC One controller Peter Fincham] resigned over it. I mean, let’s get real here: there are some issues that are worth getting upset about, like Tony Blair and George Bush lying to the whole world about why they were going into Iraq. That’s something worth getting into. Do I give a fuck about whether she had an argument before a shot was taken? No, I don’t care, and I think it’s all a storm in a teacup, it’s evading the big issues. We’ve lived in a decade of evading any real issues, and people in Britain and America feeling completely impotent to make themselves heard. So people seize on irrelevant things and address non-issues. The real issue is most of the electorate in both countries was against the war. We still went to war and we’re still fighting this war five years later. People have said we’re against torture, and we have an American president that’s saying waterboarding’s OK. I think people feel it doesn’t matter what they say, so many rules are being broken, they’ve lost power, they don’t have a political party that represents them anymore – it’s a terrible, dangerous apathy. That’s why all political films, not just the Iraq films, are doing badly. Any film that’s to do with anything vaguely political is doing badly because people feel impotent.

Filmmaker: You write in your director’s notes about your hopes for what the film can achieve, but how can you overcome that Iraq movie apathy?

Broomfield: One of the sad things about all the Iraq films that have been released by the studios – and I’m not including the documentaries in this statement – is that none of them have had any Iraqi characters in them, which is kind of telling. You would think one of the things is that we’d learn who some of the Iraqis are, what their culture is, how they see the world. That’s the way forward, but unfortunately none of the films have done that. I think that’s indicative of something. Around the time of Vietnam, there was a feeling that people could do something – it was power to the people, and people were demonstrating. It was a very political time when people believed that what they said mattered. There was the civil rights movement, there was all that political fervor, and this is the opposite to that. This is a period where two million people did march in London [in opposition to the war], but it didn’t make any difference. People think, “Let’s look at Britney’s tits instead.” Part of what a democracy is about is that people are supposed to be active and they feel that their vote counts and what they say matters and I don’t think there’s that belief anymore.

Filmmaker: It’s very true that previous Iraq films have had a purely American focus, but this film is the exception to that rule. You break the situation down into the three factions and then sympathetically show each side of the story.

Broomfield: Well, that’s how we move forward, a recognition of who your so-called enemy is – which in this case is the people we’re supposed to be liberating. [We need to show] a respect for their culture, a respect for their religion, their lives. Obviously, that hasn’t happened at all.

Filmmaker: Over the course of making the film and recreating the Haditha massacre in Jordan, did you see any signs of hope?

Broomfield: I think what cinema does – or can do – is stand back from the plethora of news reports and newspaper articles and give you a context in which to look at it. That’s what I hope the film will do really, but it also needs to be reflected in a change of political administration or direction or vision. Maybe after the election there will be a change, there will be a new vision, a new approach, and then people will be more receptive to actually engaging and working out what that way forward is and have more of an interest in who the Iraqis are.

Filmmaker: What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?

Broomfield: Making a film about a tax office which was supposedly to be entertaining and funny, and realizing that it was just the most boring place. It was in the days of the union film crews so I had an enormous crew and a cameraman who refused to use a zoom lens, so if I said “Go in tight,” he would actually walk up to the person and, not surprisingly, they’d stop talking. It’s the only film I never finished. We shot for two days and just said, “Look, it’s not going to happen.”

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

Broomfield: To not wait for the money, to believe in the idea and borrow a camera and just go and shoot it.

Filmmaker: Finally, what was the first film you ever saw?

Broomfield: It was probably Charlie Chaplin, maybe The Gold Rush or something like that. My father had a projector and I remember he used to rent Charlie Chaplin films, so he was my hero. He was always somebody who managed to say lots of things that were worthwhile saying in an extremely entertaining and funny way (look what happened to him…), so I guess that’s something worth emulating.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 5/07/2008 10:37:00 AM Comments (0)

When you meet Garth Jennings, it is immediately apparent where much of the energy, enthusiasm and imagination in his films comes from. The effervescent Jennings, born in Essex, England in 1972, attended the Central St. Martin's College of Art & Design in London where he met Nick Goldsmith with whom he formed the creative partnership Hammer & Tongs. Though the pair have always collaborated closely on everything, over time Goldsmith has taken on production duties while Jennings now directs. The pair are most famous for their innovative and quirky music videos, such as Blur's 'Coffee and TV,' Fatboy Slim's 'Right Here, Right Now,' and REM's 'Imitation of Life.' After winning numerous awards for their pop promos and television commercials, the pair moved on to features and in 2005 Jennings directed the long-gestating movie of Douglas Adams' cult novel and TV show The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with Goldsmith producing.

Jennings' follow-up feature, Son of Rambow, is a project he and Goldsmith had been trying to get off the ground years before they were offered Hitchhiker's. Based on Jennings' childhood experiences, it is the 80s-set tale of Will Proudfoot (Bill Milner), a naïve young teen whose family belongs to a Christian sect, the Plymouth Brethren, and who is sheltered from modern evils. A chance encounter with school scamp Lee Carter (Will Poulter) introduces Will to the wonders of movies – and specifically Rambo: First Blood. His unlikely friendship with Lee (and their collaboration on a Rambo sequel) threatens to cause a rift between himself, his family, and the Brethren. A charming crowd pleaser with great performances from its two young leads Son of Rambow is smart, sweet and funny in its nostalgic recollection of Britain in the 1980s. Writer-director Jennings creates a vivid and colorful world for his young protagonists and, like them, shows so much passion for movies that it is infectious for the audience.

Filmmaker spoke to Jennings about 80s movies, the pressures of making Hitchhiker's and playing a crackhead in Hot Fuzz.



Filmmaker: You have an extremely close creative relationship with the other half of Hammer & Tongs, your producer Nick Goldsmith. How exactly do you function as a team?

Jennings: We met at art school 17 or 18 years ago, so we've been friends an awful long time and we've been working together for 10 or 12 years. We worked together on everything from the start and it was only as things started to go well that we realized that he suited production more than I did and I suited direction more than he did. And there's our third member, Dom [Leung], who became the editor, even though he's a director too – everyone can do all that stuff in their own way. We've always had a very hardworking ethic and for us the majority of the film is made in preproduction: I spent three months storyboarding Son of Rambow, then I went through it all with Nick and Dom, and prior to that Nick and I worked out the script together. I am technically the writer, but that's more because it came from my experiences and I brought the premise to the table and could join the dots. [Nick and I] worked on that outline together and he read every page as it came in and responded to it, so I feel like it's a 50-50 relationship.

Filmmaker: From a practical point of view, what is it like to have the film so clearly defined in your head before you start shooting?

Jennings: I just find it really relaxing, everyone knows what they're doing. Everything changes on set, as you know – the sun goes in, the guy hurts his foot... Someone's always hurting their foot, I don't know what that is. It's always like, “Where's so-and-so?” “Oh, he's hurt his foot.” And when they hurt their foot, you have to switch and find something else but if you've got this brilliant map that everyone, even the runners, know what they're shooting today, it's amazing how much energy and enthusiasm you can get from a crew. It galvanizes people when there's a common goal and it's OK to then deviate from that.

Filmmaker: What sort of obstacles did you have in making the film?

Jennings: No one would finance us. We couldn't get any financing and none of it came from the U.K. in the end. We saw everybody, absolutely everybody – most of them twice – over the period of about two years. [The reaction] mainly was “Boys, you're making a film that you say appeals to everyone. Well, how do we market to everyone?” Also because we'd done a big sci-fi movie it was like “What's this then? Surely more robots, puppets...” Luckily there's two of us, so we'd pick each other up, but it was really hard because it wasn't just being rejected, it was being told that you're absolutely wrong, that this will not work. There was one guy sitting there saying “Adults are not going to see a film with children in it,” and behind him on the wall was a huge poster of Billy Elliott. I remember thinking, “I've got a choice on this one: either I pick him up on this and tear a strip off him, or I just realize that this is just not the right man to be making the film with.”

Filmmaker: So let's talk about your childhood and 80's cinema...

Jennings: [puts on psychiatrist's voice] “Go back to your childhood...”

Filmmaker: So, tell me about your mother...

Jennings: [laughs] “What's your relationship like with your mother?” I do actually have officially the best mum in the world. She's brilliant, she's the business. She'd come on Friday with cakes to the set. She's amazing. It'd be a hallelujah moment for the crew. Why was I talking about that...?

Filmmaker: I was asking about your childhood.

Jennings: Oh yeah. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars... We got a great chunk of movies to grow up with. The first film I ever saw was Star Wars when I was five years old. It blew my head off, and from then on I loved films. But then First Blood came out when I was about 12 and it blew my socks off because it was the first film I'd seen that wasn't meant for my age group, and it was also a brilliant, brilliant film. We used to play in the forest every day in Epping and then here's this guy in the forest who's got a stick and a knife and he's taking on 200 men, he's sewing up his own arm – it was brilliant! Survival, a man on his own, a guy who has to outsmart the enemy and they're all after him and they're all unreasonable – that's how you think of adults when you're a kid. Even though it's a cliché, it's true. Even your parents, they're sort of the enemy, they get in the way of what you really want. It struck so many chords that my friends and I decided we should make our own film. It was sort of my production: we got my dad's video camera, even though we had no idea how to use it, and we made this action movie called Arran, Part 1. It was a tremendous hit! It was a day shooting, it was 10 minutes long, it was cut in camera.

Filmmaker: That's quite an achievement at that age.

Jennings: I didn't think so at the time. I thought it was cool, but I look back and I think, “Brilliant, we did so well.” It was so lovely because it was all my friends, my sister, my dad played the getaway driver for the terrorists who kidnapped the head of the M.o.D., who's me. The P.L.O had kidnapped me. We had no idea who the P.L.O. were. No idea. We'd heard this name on the TV. So the P.L.O capture the head of the Ministry of Defense and they hold him hostage, and it was in my mum and dad's shed which they doused with water (which was supposed to be petrol) and threatened to burn me alive unless they get the money and the terms they're after. My friend Arran comes to save me and burns them alive in a shed. That was our little film. My sister was the fiesty reporter going live to the scene. We had scrolling credits, a soundtrack. It was amazing, really, and so I just kept doing that. About eight years ago, I was talking to Nick about how great it was to be that age and not give a shit about the consequences, never worry about screwing up or whether what you were doing was stupid or if you were good at something, you just did it. Even though we liked the idea of kids making a film, it was more important to us to capture that lovely feeling we had.

Filmmaker: How difficult was it on Hitchhiker's to not worry about screwing up?

Jennings: Initially I turned it down because I wanted to make Son of Rambow with Nick. We were getting ready, starting to cast it and everything, but I grew up with Hitchhiker's and was a huge fan and when I read Douglas [Adams]' last draft of the script I thought, “This is amazing!” In terms of the outside pressure, the first thing I did was meet with all of [Douglas Adams'] family, especially his widow and his daughter, because they had to like us. There was no point in forcing ourselves on them, they had to like us and what we were doing. They did, so did his mum, so did everyone else, but all the people on the internet – who are either pro us or against – I don't know them, and I don't actually have to meet them. They can write their silly things, even if it's nice, but when you're making a film, I can't tell you how abstract that becomes. There's a guy knocking on the door saying, “We need to approve the molds for this thing by three o'clock or we're fucked,” or “The set's going up now and we've chosen the wrong lighting. Can we please go and correct it?” There is absolutely no time whatsoever to worry about [internet opinions], you're just trying to do this good thing.

Filmmaker: How was it working with the kids in Son of Rambow? Obviously so much rests on finding the right child actors in a film like this.

Jennings: Everything does, everything does. Most of the time it's hard to get young actors right, and it can be quite hard to watch when they're bad. So we took five months to find them, but when we found them they were perfect. They'd never acted in anything before. Well, one of them had been in a school play, but that was just as a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. It was such a pleasure to have such genuine [kids]. They were self-confident, but still kids. They hadn't been to any acting schools, they were still themselves. They were quite happy to play and if you wanted them to cry, they weren't worried about not looking tough in front of anyone. On the second day of shooting, we were shooting the end of the movie in the cinema. I thought, “This is going to be too much for little Will Poulter sitting there.” I'm talking to him off-camera about what he's looking at and there's all these people sitting there in complete silence. He started to well up, tears start rolling down his face, and I was just thinking “Holy Jesus Christ, this kid is amazing! He has no idea, absolutely no idea how much he has just made my day!” They're also two of the nicest people I've met. Their enthusiasm - they're like, “Wow, we get to swing off a crane!” - is infectious to all of us. The crew had seen it all, they've been on The Bourne Supremacy for nine months, they've done it all, but these children reminded them why they got into it in the first place.

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?

Jennings: I think I'd probably do well in about the 1950s, around the time of The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and things like that, films where “We don't care if we can see the strings.” I'd go to the Ed Wood era and try to make some ludicrous monster movie.

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

Jennings: When I saw the White Stripes playing live. I know the guy who owns their record company and he invited me to stand in the wings and watch them play live. I watched them and I really, really wanted to be in a band. I've always secretly wanted to be a rock star, and when I saw that I really wanted to be a rock star. I was really envious of that, and it wasn't because I don't like my job it's just because that looked much better at the time.

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

Jennings: I was a crackhead in Hot Fuzz. In the opening montage of Simon Pegg's character's reveal of his many talents, one of his talents was to shoot a crackhead who was holding a family hostage. And that's me. [I was] standing in for that, waiting all afternoon with sores all over my face with a Kalashnikov rifle, thinking “This is really weird, really, really weird.” Being in front of the camera is a lot weirder than being behind it.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 5/02/2008 02:41:00 PM Comments (0)

At a time when the popularity of documentaries is at an all-time high, Canadian director Yung Chang is not only telling stories as compelling as his peers', but doing so with a truly cinematic sensibility that is often lacking in his field. Born in Whitby, Ontario, to first generation Chinese immigrant parents, Chang studied film production at Concordia University, graduating in 1999. He was also a student at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, where he learned the Meisner Technique. He directed the short film The Fish Market in 2002 and the following year made his documentary debut with Earth to Mouth, a National Film Board of Canada commission that chronicled the existence of a Chinese immigrant farmer in Canada. The film won prizes at a number of film festivals including Rencontres Internationales du documentaire in Montreal, the city where Chang is currently based.

Like Earth to Mouth, Chang's latest film, Up the Yangtze, sees the director drawing on his cultural heritage as a source of inspiration. The documentary takes as its subject the Yangzter river's Three Gorges Dam Project, a symbol of Chinese progress – and the flooding and eradication of whole towns that is a result of this "step forward." The film focuses on the lives of two young employees working on a Yangtze “farewell cruise” (to see towns before they are submerged), shy Yu Shui (“Cindy”), a studious but impoverished girl whose family home will soon be lost to the rising waters, and Chen Bo Yo ("Jerry"), an arrogant middle class teen intent on making his fortune. Chang ably balances the different elements in the film, making it both epic in its depiction of the changing countryside and intimate in the tender way it depicts its inhabitants. He offsets the tragic story of the Yu family with Jerry's almost comic subplot and never takes us too far beyond these personal perspectives, resisting the temptation to make some forced grand argument out of their lives.

Filmmaker spoke to Chang about his experiences filming in China, the future of documentaries and the meaning of “Chinese time.”



Filmmaker: I believe you got the idea for the film on one of the “farewell cruises” on the Yangtze in 2002.

Chang: That was the first time I went to the Yangtze River, and that particular trip was with my parents and my grandfather. It was a very different context to be traveling with your family but also to be slightly aware of what you're about to embark on. I had a video camera with me and I filmed a little bit of that trip. That initial process of taking that boat was, for me, sort of cautious and what I was really inspired by at that moment was to tell a story much more about the culture of tourism and the tourism of culture, but it became much more over the many years that I was developing it.

Filmmaker: How did you first make contact with your subjects in the documentary, because at the start of the film they have not yet started working on the cruise boat?

Chang: The timeline worked very well. I found them in March 2006 through the recruitment process, when the ships go to look for new employees they go to all the local rover towns. They canvas at the high schools and kids will sign up for interviews. So Yu Shui signed up, Jerry signed up. I was with the managers during the signing up, so it was sort of a natural casting process where I could filter through who I wanted to have as my main subjects. Through that process I found Yu Shui, and then went back and found the family. The kids weren't scheduled to go onto the ship until summer, and I followed that natural timeline so I had the timespan between the winter and the summer to work with the family at their home base.

Filmmaker: How much time did you spend building trust and getting to know the family?

Chang: A long time, I would say a few months. Right from the get-go in March I went to the family home, spent time there and didn't bring a camera. I explained what I was trying to do and I think the family looked at me as a mentor for Yu Shui, because she would be leaving home for the first time. They looked at me as someone that would be there with her during that process, so that was a special relationship. Something that I learned along the way was that in order to not exploit your subjects you have to make them aware that you're in it for the long term. In order to make that relationship work intimately, and for the camera to have that emotional intimacy, you have to maintain that connection. Even to this day I'm still in touch with the family, and Yu Shui calls me her big brother, so that was important.

Filmmaker: It seems like you had a planned narrative arc for the film going into production.

Chang: Right. I'm pretty consciously driven by telling a narrative story and I think that the timeline for the film had this built-in structure where I knew that at some point the home was going to be flooded by the river, so everything seemed to reach to that moment. Then I had that special arc of seeing the transformation of Yu Shui on the boat and the sudden, unexpected things that happened along the way. And then what happened with Jerry, and how that complemented within the general story structure. Having lived in Chongqing and shot the film for a year in that location, I think you really get a sense of the rhythms and patterns of how things develop.

Filmmaker: How much did people try and affect you in the way you portrayed the impact of the dam?

Chang: It happened a lot, even within my Chinese documentary film crew. I'm considered an “overseas Chinese,” but I'm an outsider. That position is unique: being Chinese, being Western-raised but having that sensibility of speaking Mandarin. It put me in a weird position to be able to have this debate with my crew, and it even filtered through to the very frontline level where my crew were wondering why I wanted to show negative aspects of China, which I firmly disagreed that I was doing. I think by the end of the filming, my crew were on my side, they could really see that the story of a peasant family spoke volumes to the kind of social conditions of this new progress in China. If you just peel back that first layer, there are many people that are discontent and it was not uncommon for me to be driving from location A to location B and run into a protest on the highway, protests against corruption or land development, so that was eye-opening. We would arrive in towns and villages and pull out our camera and people would think we were from the local TV station, so they would come up and tell us about some kind of local corrupt official or some restaurant selling bad food. It was interesting to be in that position.

Filmmaker: In regard to the Chinese authorities, how careful did you feel you had to be in terms of what you said and filmed?

Chang: The greatest irony of how it works with the Chinese is that even though there are plenty of documentaries made by Chinese filmmakers that criticize their own social issues – I'm thinking of To Live Is Better Than To Die or some movie by Wang Bing – these films are loaded with commentary, but the minute that an outsider steps in to make that same sort of point of view, they're going to be lambasted for that. But I think I was careful and I definitely tried to play up the fact that I'm Chinese, I'm an overseas Chinese, that I do have that connection to seeing both perspectives, the Western and the Chinese.

Filmmaker: Has the film played in China?

Chang: We've shown the film to a salon environment of filmmakers and producers and it went very positively. We're even looking at the potential of having the film slightly recut for a broader audience in China, perhaps broadcast it. We're working with a Chinese producer to do this.

Filmmaker: What kind of cuts would you have to make?

Chang: I think any sort of comment about the central government would have to be taken out. I think I may have to lose the antique dealer [scene]. I think that's the most politically charged sequence in the movie and unfortunately that would have to go. I think what's awkward is that it's so emotional.

Filmmaker: So many documentaries prioritize capturing certain footage and proving certain points ahead of being cinematic in their presentation, but this is not the case with your film. Was having that cinematic quality important to you?

Chang: That was really, really important. I had created a banner in our production office that said “Cinema Not Documentary.” It was really important that we maintained this idea of capturing something that was emotional on a human level, that was not going to be didactic and try to explain something or give some sort of background information. The dam structure for me only exists as a sort of abstract monument in the film and I didn't want to fill it with statistics. That just wasn't the point of the film so I made sure that we focused on the human aspect.

Filmmaker: How did Jerry and Yu Shui and her family respond to seeing the film?

Chang: When I finished the film, the first thing I did was go back to China and show the movie to all the participants. Yu Shui was very emotional when she saw herself depicted in this documentary. You can imagine. She said that through her film she was able to see her fate and her destiny, which is quite a heavy thing to say. As a result, she decided to leave the cruise boat and go back to high school, so our production company stepped in to pay for three years of her high school tuition and now we've started a fund for her family. We've raised quite a bit of money now and we're continuing this fund and branching the fund out to help other migrant families of the Three Gorges project. Hopefully we're going to lift the family out of their poverty, buy a plot of land, start a business.

Filmmaker: What about Jerry?

Chang: I'm not worrying about Jerry. Jerry saw the film and in very typical Jerry fashion he wished that the story could have been more focused on him. [laughs] He said that he wanted a greater storyline. All the tragedy that occurred and his arrogance in the film went completely over his head. [laughs] He subsequently asked us about applying to the Dramatic Arts Institute in Beijing and perhaps pursuing a career in acting, which would be very interesting. [laughs]

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

Chang: Well, I think what's interesting is that it'll last and I think it's because the definition itself is being explored right now. You've got films all over the place like Behave, a Brazilian film. It's about the judicial system in Brazil and [the director] wasn't allowed to film the prisoners or the children that were under trial, so she filmed the judge and the conversations between the court and then she reversed the camera and filmed kids portraying being on trial. There's a very natural feeling in the documentary. In fact, it questions documentary, and I like that. I like films that are pushing those boundaries. Even Jia Zhang-Ke’s Useless is very good, one of these narrative or non-linear documentaries that border between fiction and documentary. I think that's where things are going. And Herzog does it too, so I like that.

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

Chang: Last night I saw a movie by a Malaysian director called Flower in the Pocket. It won the top film at Pusan. I just met the filmmaker, he's a little elfin guy, 27 years of age and he made this movie with a mini DV camera. It's completely raw, the sound is horrible but the story of these two kids (it's about young brothers) is absolutely heart-wrenching. There was a moment that reminded me of my relationship with my brother and that brought tears. I cry a lot in movies. [laughs] In fact, I feel like if you don't then something's not right.

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

Chang: Well, I'm a bit of a stick, if I miss five minutes of a film I'm very upset so I try to get there early. But because I'm from Montreal and work on Chinese time as well, I'm always a little bit late. [laughs] I always arrive somewhere between the previews and the beginning of the opening credits but I missed the first 10 minutes of There Will Be Blood. I heard I missed the film, basically, so I need to get back into the theater to see it again.

Filmmaker: Can you explain what being on Chinese time means?

Chang: It's kind of arbitrary. Living in the South of China, you don't pre-arrange things: when you call somebody on the phone there are no answering machines or voicemails, you have to talk directly to the person. I think Chinese time is something that is very... inexact.

Filmmaker: In The Visitor, one of the characters talks about being on Arab time, which I believe involves being about an hour late for everything.

Chang: Well, Chinese time is not late time, it's just “you don't know if it's going to happen” time. [laughs]

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/25/2008 01:35:00 PM Comments (0)

Best known for his fiction films, Scott Hicks has returned to another form in which he has also distinguished himself: documentary. Usually identified as an Australian, Hicks was in fact born in Uganda and lived in Kenya until the age of 10, before his family moved to England and then Australia. He studied English, Drama and Cinema at Flinders University of South Australia, and made his directorial debut the year of graduation with the ultra-low-budget drama Down the Wind (1975). After working as an assistant director for the remainder of the 70s, Hicks returned to directing with the road movie Freedom (1982), the kids' film Sebastian and the Sparrow (1988) and the true-life heist thriller Call Me Mr. Brown (1990). He had notable success with his documentary series The Great Wall of Iron (1989) and Submarines: Sharks of Steel (1993), both of which gained record-breaking ratings on U.S. television. In 1996, Hicks had his breakthrough success with Shine, a biopic of pianist David Helfgott which won an Oscar for its lead, Geoffrey Rush. Since then, Hicks has written and directed two literary adaptations, David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars (1999) and Stephen King's Hearts in Atlantis (2001), and last year he remade the German hit Mostly Martha as No Reservations.

Like Shine, Hick's latest film Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts is a compelling portrait of an enigmatic musical genius. Commissioned to mark iconic composer Philip Glass's 70th birthday, it captures 18 months in his life as he puts his seemingly boundless energy into a symphony, an opera, several film scores, and performances both as a solo pianist and with his ensemble. In addition, Hicks is there to document Glass' family vacations, visits to eminent friends (such as artist Chuck Close) and his multi-faceted exploration of his spirituality. Hicks’ film is respectful and never invasive, yet Glass is sufficiently open and uninhibited that we get a genuine insight into his life, and come away feeling that we know the artist, though the man remains somewhat obscure, perhaps even to Glass himself.

Filmmaker spoke to Hicks about returning to his filmmaking roots, editing over the internet, and watching The Red Balloon at a drive-in in Kenya.



Filmmaker: What was the first contact that you had with Philip Glass?

Hicks: It was actually when I was editing Snow Falling on Cedars back in 1997 or '98, and I was using (as so many filmmakers do) some tracks of Philip's music as temp score to edit to. I made contact with his management just in case we wanted to actually license the music and Jim Keller, his manager, actually realized that I was a Glass fanatic and so he arranged for Philip and I to meet when we were in Los Angeles at the same time. We kind of hit it off together. Philip is a very easy person to get on with and I just found him wonderful, charming, delightful company, basically. Over the ensuing years we would get together from time to time when we were in the same city, be it in Sydney, L.A. or New York, and a friendship grew out of it.

Filmmaker: What was your initial conception of the documentary?

Hicks: I bought an HDV camera and I flew to Nova Scotia to where Philip was on vacation with his family. I just took a sound recordist and an assistant to help, and I thought I'd just film a lot of background material to put in the bank for when I had a proper crew and a budget and could do it the way I imagined. But something remarkable happened, which was that my presence in the room with this little camera was somehow so non-threatening and unintimidating that everybody responded as if it was just me being there. Even on the very first night, Philip started making pizza for his family and was talking about the eighth symphony he was working on. I realized that something special was happening, because how often do you get into that sort of intimacy with a major artist who's executing an enormous piece of work? And here he is talking about it when he's chopping onions! It's like a dream. At that point I thought,“Maybe this is more than just background material I'm getting.”

Filmmaker: The intimacy of the documentary is what makes it special, so how much of that came from the existing closeness of your relationship with Glass?

Hicks: I'm sure that had a lot to do with, but I think a lot of it is just Philip's nature. When I was filming him for the first time, he started chatting to me and I was thinking, “Wait a minute, I'm supposed to be a fly on the wall, and you're talking to me! What's going on?” [laughs] What he was doing was acting as if the camera was not there, because that's exactly what he's like. He's very easy to get on with, he's sociable, he's funny and I felt that this was a side of Philip that the world at large had not really had much exposure to. That's really what the mission of the film became, to capture the human elements of Philip's life.

Filmmaker: How much of a technical challenge was it? I'm imagining it must be a long time since you were your own camera operator?

Hicks: It's the first time I've ever done it and so it was enormously challenging, but oddly liberating as well. Although I've done a lot of documentary work in the past and I've worked very closely with cameramen in documentaries and in features, now it was down to me to find the moment, find the framings. I take a lot of stills so I'm used to looking through the lens, but to my delight I discovered I could find the shots you could never describe to someone unless you were looking through the lens. So it was a very exciting process for me. At times I would go, “Am I missing something?” When you're directing, you scan the horizon and you can nudge the cameraman over to something that's out of their vision, so I began to wonder if I was missing everything that was really going on. [laughs] It was like going back to my roots as a filmmaker, thinking back to early days when you really wanted to make a film, you got a group of people together and you went out and did it, regardless of how it was going to be financed or what it was going to entail.

Filmmaker: Glass comes across as very unguarded, but there are a few moments where his family say things like “Hopefully you'll edit this out” and “Don't quote me on that.” Did you feel awkward leaving moments like that in the film?

Hicks: I think when a sophisticated and intelligent human being is talking to a camera and they say “Don't quote me” and they're laughing, I don't feel there's any betrayal there. It's disingenuous to think that that's seriously going to end up on the cutting room floor. I think if you steal those moments or try to catch somebody off guard without them knowing that you're recording them – because there were instances where people asked us to turn the camera off.

Filmmaker: What was the film like to edit?

Hicks: Steven Jeffs, who edited the film, was an incredible collaborator and he stepped forward at a time when I really didn't know where I was going to start. He had edited commercials for me and this is his first long-form work. He lives in New York and I live in Adelaide, and we cut this first film together over the internet for a six-month period. He would cut and post his cuts at four or five o'clock in the morning my time, I would get up, I would download his cuts, we would link ourselves together with a piece of software which locked our two computers into perfect sync, and we would view the cuts and talk about them across the internet. And that's how we worked. Without the technology, and without his energy, none of this could have happened. It was something that just could not have been achievable a few years ago.

Filmmaker: I believe Philip Glass did the music for your movie No Reservations, which you were shooting at the same time as this.

Hicks: It was a bit like being woven into a double helix because I would be with Philip looking at cues and how they worked with the movie and I'd have my camera there on remote in the corner, thinking we might have an interesting conversation that might end up in the film and then I'd go to adjust the camera, and Philip would say, “Now look, Scott, what film are you making at the moment? Are you making No Reservations or are you making the documentary?” [laughs] In the end, I had to turn the camera off because I had to focus on the film, but it was an interesting point at which it would have been better to have someone else shooting.

Filmmaker: What has Philip's reaction been to the film?

Hicks: Naturally, it was complicated. My heart was in my mouth when I showed the film to him. I said after showing the film to Philip that the closest experience I've had of that was the time I showed Shine to David Helfgott — the main difference being that Philip wasn't clinging to my leg at the time. When you're showing someone a film that is about their life, it's a very exposing thing. We never see ourselves the way the world sees us, but he's a man lacking in vanity to a high degree so I don't think it weighs too heavily on his mind.

Filmmaker: What was the first film you ever saw?

Hicks: The Red Balloon, Albert Lamorisse. I was born in East Africa, I grew up in Nairobi [in Kenya] and my parents took me to the drive-in one night. I was probably five years old. I didn't see much cinema because there wasn't a lot in Nairobi and there was no TV, but that film (and subsequently the book) made a huge impact on me as a kid. Years later, I went to stay with Max von Sydow in Provence after Snow Falling on Cedars and we were wandering around his property. At one point he said “Oh, that's my neighbor, Pierre Lamorisse,” and it turns out it was the little boy [from The Red Balloon] who was Max's next door neighbor. I thought that was an interesting journey for me, 50 years later.

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

Hicks: When I was a restaurant photographer in 1976. [laughs] I had that job where you go around and photograph people in restaurants: you'd disrupt their dinner, make them sit in arrangements they don't want to, flash a thing in their face, rush away to develop the film, dry it with a hairdryer, spit out prints of it and then slap them back on the table to hit them with a huge bill before they left the restaurant. [laughs] I didn't enjoy that. That was my last attempt at having anything approaching a real job – since then I've only worked as a filmmaker.

Filmmaker: Should a director always take risks?

Hicks: I think it's always good trying to explore. Rather than falling back on how you've done something before, thinking “How can I do this different to the way I've done or seen this before?” Whether that's a risk or not, I don't know, but it's about trying to keep some level of challenge in what you're doing.

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

Hicks: I worked on a number of film crews for terrific directors in the 70s in Australia, as a production assistant, a 3rd A.D., a 2nd A.D. Very early on in that experience, before I really knew my way around a film set properly, the 1st assistant director took me aside one day and said, “Your job is to watch me and anticipate what I'm going to ask you to do. You have to know better than me what has to happen next.” I thought “Crikey!” The next morning we're out at dawn, we're shooting in this forest and I'm poised at the edge of the set, my eyes are riveted on him and I'm trying to read his mind. [laughs] He turns to me and he makes a gesture, and I'm completely startled, I've no idea what he's talking about but he makes it again and so I wave back. I turn and blunder away into the shrubbery in the dark, thinking “Oh God, what does he want? I've no idea! This is catastrophic, I'm going to be fired...” I'm blundering away from the set, completely lost, when I hear music and I think “Oh, they shouldn't be playing music, we're recording dialogue – that's what it is!” So then I started to work my way to the source of the music and I found somebody with a radio on back in the basecamp and said, “Turn that off, turn that off!” Then I rushed back to the set and got to the edge of the magic circle around the camera and [the 1st A.D.] just turned around and he nodded. [laughs] He was like some kind of sensei, and I'd learned something.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/18/2008 02:18:00 PM Comments (0)

Television directors often go through their careers dreaming of striking cinematic gold like Stephen Walker has. The 46-year-old Brit is a veteran of the small screen who plied his trade at the BBC before setting up his own production company, Walker George Films, with his producer and life partner, Sally George. Walker has directed narrative material, including Prisoners in Time (1995) starring John Hurt, but is best known for his TV documentary work. He won acclaim for Hiroshima – A Day That Shook The World (2005), a drama-documentary that was nominated for three Emmys, including Best Director. Other highly regarded documentaries he has directed and produced include Hardcore (2001), an unflinching portrait of the pornography industry, and Waiting for Harvey (1999), a light-hearted look at the Cannes Film Festival. He has also written two books, Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima (2005) and King of Cannes (1999).

Walker's latest project, Young@Heart, is a documentary about the Young@Heart Chorus, a choir of septuagenarians and octogenarians from Northampton, Massachusetts who sing rock 'n' roll songs. It began life as a documentary commissioned by the UK television station Channel 4. After a highly successful showing in November 2006, Walker submitted the film to the Los Angeles Film Festival, where it took the Audience Award and was snapped up by Fox Searchlight. While Young@Heart still has the look and feel of a low-budget TV documentary, the inherent strengths of the material and the unexpected emotional power and intensity of the story allow it to rise above these limitations. Beyond the inherent appeal of seeing a group of eightysomethings singing The Ramones and Sonic Youth, it's Young@Heart's motley cast of characters that makes it such an engrossing, heartwarming and ultimately very moving film.

Filmmaker spoke to Walker about the conception of the film as a rock opera, the transition from small to big screen, and choosing Halloween 4 as an antidote to plane turbulence.



Filmmaker: What was your initial contact with the Young@Heart Chorus?

Walker: One night I was coming back from a shopping trip and Sally [George] was sitting in the kitchen brandishing a couple of tickets for this performance of a show called Road to Nowhere, named after the Talking Heads song, with a bunch of old people from America who sing rock 'n' roll music. I remember thinking it could be a good idea, but I was definitely skeptical. I went along to see the performance and I was completely blown away by it, partly because the audience were so blown away by it. I also just thought the music was great, and what they were singing about was great because all that rock 'n' roll stuff suddenly became different when it's sung by people in their nineties. 'Should I Stay or Should I Go?' becomes a song about death, 'Road to Nowhere' becomes a song about the celebration of life on the road to death, and 'I Wanna Be Sedated' becomes a song about what it's like to be in an old people's home. There's still a punk edge to it – you don't have to be 18 to be a punk rocker, you can be 80. I just thought “Wow!” and them I walked away from that and Sally and I were very revved up afterwards and we were saying “There could be an amazing rock opera about old age here.”

Filmmaker: So the rock opera was conceived in a similar vein as the choir's music videos in the film?

Walker: Yeah, the music videos were very much part of what we wanted to do. We knew we were going to make them, and we knew we were going to make them part of the film. I was always excited by the whole Dennis Potter, Singing Detective and Pennies From Heaven territory, and I thought that would be a fun way to go when you break out of time and play around a bit. Because you get bored. You have to keep making documentaries fresh and I didn't want to make just a classic observational narrative feature, I wanted to do different things. I wanted the film to be very personalized, I wanted to travel that journey with them. I'm shooting a lot of it myself and they're looking straight at me, which means they're talking straight at the audience. There's intimacy there, which I like.

Filmmaker: So when did it go from rock opera to documentary?

Walker: In a sense, that's a very good question. The operatic qualities of the film were always going to be contained within some sort of documentary narrative. The story was constructed, and in some ways it was an artificial story that we constructed – but not entirely, because the chorus do do this. The tension was to construct a show, for the chorus to spend a couple of months working towards that show with new songs, and the show would have a climax, a big pay-off at the end. And along the way there would be other shows, like the jail show. We had to select the songs they were going to be working on. [Choir master] Bob Cillman came up with the idea of bringing back these two [former choir members] that had been sick into the chorus because he felt they had recovered sufficiently to be able to perform a song. The song he thought would work very well was 'Fix You,' the Coldplay song, and we thought that was a really good idea. As we started to meet people and cast it, the elements of narrative structure began to form themselves. The key element of the narrative structure that we could never anticipate was that two of the characters that we concentrated on would actually die. That did change the narrative, obviously, quite remarkably.

Filmmaker: It must be very conflicting for you as a documentary filmmaker to have those sorts of things happen because on one hand it's obviously very sad, but it also adds great power...

Walker: Of course, and I'm not unaware of that. It would be a complete lie to sit here and say that I'm not aware of that. I've considered the point that you're making before and I've had to really try and put myself back into that time. I think my initial reaction was certainly not “Gosh, this is going to add hugely to the power of the film,” it was utter shock. I actually remember the shock most of all in both cases, but really with Joe, in the second case. It was real shock and you're dealing with that first of all. I remember the initial dilemma that I was dealing with to begin with was actually not between “Wow, this could be really amazing and a great bonus to the film!” and “Oh, but I'm emotionally engaged...”, but actually “I'm so shocked, how do I go on and make the film?” It was very intimate: you're talking to somebody, and the next time you see them – in both cases – is in the coffins, with the lids open. It's never happened to me before, and you cannot overestimate what that feels like. I thought that was it, that the whole film should just stop at that point, the concert would be canceled, there was no way it was going to go on, and I would just put a caption [on the screen] and the film would end right there. Obviously later, when I was in the cutting room particularly, I began to realize the power of the material I had as I started to put all those elements together. Not cynically, but professionally. Although the film is rightly being marketed by Fox Searchlight as a crowdpleaser, to get people through the doors, I'd like to think that it's a hell of a lot more than that. It is actually quite uncompromising in certain places when we approach the subject of actual death, virtually in front of your eyes.

Filmmaker: How do you feel about that marketing tactic of playing up certain aspects of the film just to get audiences through the door, rather than giving a totally accurate impression of the movie as a whole?

Walker: We chose Searchlight, and we had a lot of offers – some very good offers – from Hollywood studios when we took the film to the Los Angeles Film Festival. We won the audience award and everybody was all over us and it was great, but we chose Searchlight. We had a very extensive series of meetings with them about what they were going to do with this film, and I was really tough about that and felt really strongly that you've got to have the right people behind you. What often happens with all this stuff – and it has happened to me before, and I can see now I'm growing up – is that you're just the next piece of meat, and they just want to bit of that meat. They don't know if you're going to be big, hot, useless – but you could be money. I'm a grownup, I'm not a kid – I'm in my forties – and I knew that I had to be really careful of all of this and be very grounded, not like some 20-year-old kid, and look at this and say “What is best for the film? Who is best for the film? Leave the money aside.” So we're sitting there thinking “Who's right for this film?” and we liked them. They were very passionate, they are also brilliant marketeers – they do know what they're doing.

Filmmaker: When was the decision made to send this made-for-TV documentary to the Los Angeles Film Festival and to try and get it distributed as a theatrical film?

Walker: What actually happened was that we made the film, it went out on Channel 4, it had this fantastic reaction. We started having private screenings in London, just for fun, and we had these amazing communal reactions and people were really enjoying watching it together with other people. I was thinking, “God, maybe there is a theatrical life here somewhere. Maybe, maybe, maybe.” Everyone knows it's fucking difficult to get from television to the movies, it hardly ever happens but we all dream. So what we did was we decided to submit to the L.A. Film Festival because there's a lot of distributors in L.A. and they might actually come and see it if we can drum up a bit of interest. We got accepted by L.A. and went out there with the film. I didn't have any money, and I spent all the money I didn't have on getting a marketeer to do some stuff. We had tons of leaflets made up at the local copy shop, Kinko's, and I was out there walking the streets handing out flyers. We got a guerrilla publicist on board who did it for virtually nothing, Mickey Cottrell, who was great. Suddenly we started getting distributors in there, and then suddenly it went wild. For the second screening, I remember there was a queue about 150 yards long. It was really starting to fill, and it became huge very, very quickly.

Filmmaker: So what changes were made to the film to adapt it from a TV documentary to a theatrical film?

Walker: When Fox got it, I insisted on going back to the cutting room, because there were things I wanted to change. So I made the film much more cinematic: I changed the opening to make it much more theatrical; I made it about four minutes shorter; I had to kill the commercial breaks, and that's very complicated because it's not just about closing gaps, it's about a different structure and it's quite complicated. New graphics went in and much more importantly than all of that, we also put totally new sound in there. We just had a stereo mix of compressed sound, and what we did was we decompressed everything right back to the bare recording and reconstructed everything. It took weeks and weeks at Pinewood and also the studio at Technicolor – we reconstructed it all for the cinema and turned it into this huge sound.

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

Walker: I've seen some terrible movies on planes but I can't remember the names of half of them. I'm now trying to think of the worst movie I've seen in my life, but I don't know. I hate horror films, and I think I remember seeing something like Halloween 4 – one of the really late, downstream ones – and I remember thinking it was [dreadful]. I can't remember why I watched it. I was trying to scare myself on a plane, I think. Maybe we were bouncing around in turbulence and I wanted something else to take my mind off it that was scarier.

Filmmaker: What was your cinematic epiphany?

Walker: I grew up in that whole era of Scorsese and Coppola in the 1970s – I'm 46 now – so [I was] growing up and watching movies like Taxi Driver, The Godfather and even Apocalypse Now, which is brilliant but flawed. I just thought they were extraordinary. I thought, “God, what an amazing experience to do something like that.” I'm not a Star Wars person – I was too old for Star Wars, it's not my kind of movie – but those movies I thought were great.

Filmmaker: What's the best piece of advice you have for aspiring filmmakers?

Walker: Don't do it. [laughs] No, “Perseverance” I suppose is the right thing to say, isn't it? Genuinely, it's not perseverance, as that's a kind of obvious thing to say, but keep a really open mind. I wasn't at all convinced about Young@Heart when I first heard about it and look what's happened to it. Whether you're going to be a documentary or narrative filmmaker, the world of stories is all around you, all the time. Every day you read the paper, go down the street, sit on the subway, wherever you are, keep an open mind. Keep it open, because openness brings fertility and fertility can bring amazing results.

# posted by Nick Dawson @ 4/09/2008 02:18:00 PM Comments (1)