Television has been blamed for the dumbing down of the American public since the ascendance of the boob tube in the 1950s. But in Italy, where scandal-plagued prime minister Silvio Berlusconi controls the flow of information through his monopolistic holdings in that nation’s biggest media conglomerates, there is a more insidious aspect to the chronic press muzzling at RAI and trashy tits-and-ass programming that predominate on his Mediaset channels. If you want to get a sense of how the billionaire entrepreneur’s televisual imagination has transformed the political and mass-media landscape in Italy, Erik Gandini’s cunningly choreographed documentary Videocracy provides plenty of food for thought, taking a gimlet-eyed view of the Berlusconi phenomenon. But instead of stampeding into this tangle of cultural conflict with rhetorical guns a-blazing, Gandini, an Italian-born filmmaker based in Sweden (Gitmo: The New Rules of War), adopts a far subtler, more intriguingly first-person approach.

The film, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival, opens with grainy, black-and-white footage of a popular, late-night cable-access quiz show Berlusconi produced in the '70s, in which slinky housewives disrobed every time a call-in contestant answered a softball question correctly. This montage melds into the present day, when thousands of young women aspire to be veline: silent, scantily clad Vanna White–type showgirls who populate the airwaves, often becoming the wives of footballers or assistants to heads of state. Narrating in English with a voice that’s part spook-house docent, part Grand Inquisitor, Gandini burrows into the sleazy superficiality of this celeb-obsessed, gossip-fueled playworld by profiling four of its most embedded denizens: white-clad, Mussolini-adoring TV agent Lele Mora, who lives in a luxurious villa surrounded by all the young talent he's cultivated; Fabio, manager of a TV control room ("the secret aquarium") where an Italian version of Big Brother is produced; Fabrizio Corona, a rogue paparazzi-turned-felon, now a huge celebrity himself in Italy; and Ricky, a Bergamo factory worker obsessed with landing a spot on television as a Jean-Claude Van Damme-meets-Ricky Martin star performer. Then there's Berlusconi himself, gloating at press conferences and flashing a million-dollar smile that never seems to end. Gandini's film is provocative (the trailer was banned from RAI state-owned television) but coolly personal, too, an exile's view of a national culture's puzzling decline.

Filmmaker spoke with Gandini about Berlusconismo, the society of spectacle, and why people with no ideology are scarier than dictators.

Videocracy opens Friday at the IFC Center in New York City.


Filmmaker: You moved to Sweden from Italy to study filmmaking. Did you have an interest in documentary from an early age or did it spark after you landed there?

Gandini: My mother is Swedish. It was a tradition at home that we should go to Sweden to learn the language and it was also a great reason for leaving Bergamo, a very small town, very provincial. In the ’80s, Italy was really under the boom of Berlusconi television. When I came to Sweden, the situation was bizarre because there was no commercial television until ’89 or ’90, so it was like going back ten years. And Swedish TV had this very strong tradition of documentary which the school I went to was following big time. There was a huge enthusiasm about it. I remember a couple of months after I came to Sweden, they were showing Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah on prime time television. Coming from Italy, it was like science fiction. So yes, it was encountering a whole way of working that for me was very inspiring.

Filmmaker: You mention in your director’s note that your exposure to the cultural climate in Sweden made an impact, and that you were drawn in part to a genre that is regarded there as a cinematic artform, “creative documentary.” Can you explain what that means to you?

Gandini: I like the idea that docs really are not a neutral portrayal of reality. That’s such an old idea. When I was going to film school, we were taught “take off your questions, never manipulate with music” or whatever. I remember when I saw Let’s Get Lost, the Bruce Weber movie; it was so personal, and that was exactly what inspired me, the idea that documentary is really a subjective view. Then of course you have the political Michael Moore genre that is very explicit. All that for me has been a very welcome tendency that also underlines the fact that documentary is probably the freest, cheapest way for a person to express themselves cinematically.

Filmmaker: And giving up the pretense to objectivity must be part of that sense of freedom.

Gandini: Yeah, I like not knowing exactly what your film is going to be in the end, because the scriptwriting for me is the editing. If you work with television only, you will pressure yourself to guarantee how the drama and the plot will develop. It’s the opposite of what I’m looking for. Even aesthetically, I like the idea that you can show reality as it feels, more than as it is. And this opens up a huge range of storytelling options, even aesthetically and musically, for film language.

Filmmaker: The most obvious form that a film about the Berlusconi media empire could have taken would have been an exposé. Your approach in Videocracy is much more personal, and also, I felt, almost mournful. There’s something elegiac about your tone here.

Gandini: It’s a choice, of course. I am not Michael Moore. I’m not very confrontational. I’m more of an observer. It was really inspiring for me to be among these people who are very different from me and my friends, [who have] different values. They made me understand the whole logic, the whole system of values of what I call "Berlusconismo." For instance, I don’t think Lele Mora’s really a fascist, it’s more like [he has] a lack of ideology, which is scarier to me. In Italy, there is a tradition among the left of criticizing and attacking Berlusconi in a way that has become predictable and even boring. People are tired of that. Oh, the conflict of interest! Ironically, [when it comes to] talking rhetoric and good arguments, he wins all the time, because he’s a TV guy. He makes his point in a much more emotional way, through images and feelings. For example, he always presents himself as a martyr, as a victim, which is incredible because he is the man with the highest privileges in this country. When he was hit in the face a couple of months ago, that was the best Christmas present because he had been struggling for some time to really look like a martyr but now he really was, with blood on his face.

Filmmaker: Let’s talk about this idea in the film about the flow of images and the flow of power. On one hand, there’s the force of Berlusconi’s personality literally channeling itself to a viewing public, and on the other side there’s the shaping of a mass sensibility and the dreams of everyday people, like Ricky and the girls who want to be veline. I’m interested in how you arrived at that concept as the driving force for what you wanted to accomplish here.

Gandini: If you ask Ricky who has power, I don’t think he would say politicians, he would say the VIPs, the celebrities. In the same way, there’s a great tension in Italy now, it’s like a war being fought in the arena of television and pictures and gossip magazines. There’s a number of stories, like this prostitute who Berlusconi had an affair with recently. She recorded everything on her mobile phone and even took pictures of the toilet inside [his house]. You have a feeling that a character like Ricky wants to get inside television, he wants to empower himself that way. Berlusconi made his power on television, and it’s the only country where TV and politics are so enmeshed—in that sense he’s an icon now—so if you live in Italy, the word “television” has different connotations.

Filmmaker: Fabrizio Corona, the self-fashioned rebel paparazzi, identifies with Scarface and has empowered himself in a completely different way.

Gandini: The reason why Corona could promote himself as a rebel is because of what he said when he came out of prison: “Look, all these people smiling on your TV set, they have the power, so I take this camera and I get something back from them. I extort money from them.” And that’s his definition of a modern Robin Hood. So he became in the eyes of these people a rebel. And he’s not a rebel at all. As you see in the film, he is a big Berlusconi fan, he’s a reactionary, there’s nothing new in his ideology. What really interested me with Corona is that he plays a lot on the idea of the truth. First, he took these pictures of celebrities, showing how immoral they are. His idea was basically they are smiling, they’re false on TV, look how they behave in the nights—they have mistresses, they do bad things. Gossip is an offspring of Italian television, it’s a project of diversion where people are interested in truths that are totally irrelevant.

Filmmaker: One of your films, Surplus, was centered around the ideas of John Zerzan. And this film made me think of people like McLuhan, Debord, and Baudrillard, not only because of the coinage in your film’s title, but because of the banality of image consumption as it pertains in their work. Were your thoughts at all informed by theories of mass media?

Gandini: Yeah, of course. I’ve always been interested in the society of spectacle. But in the end, I’m much more interested in confronting the reality of videocracy. The director of the Big Brother show—he’s an old friend of mine—was telling me that here, in this business, they have a saying that “television is fun to do, but not to watch.” [Laughs] And his idea that Berlusconi’s television is like mirror of his own personality made me think a lot. We have become like Berlusconi because we’ve been exposed to his subconscious. It’s ironic that this country which has such a traditional culture and superior qualities in culture now has reduced itself to this. It is bizarre.

Filmmaker: I thought it was an interesting choice for you to profile a male performer, Ricky, as opposed to one of the velina wanna-bes. Why did you make that choice?

Gandini: I really liked him. And the logic of his own thinking was for me totally revealing of the power of the system, like when he says that on TV, you get ten times bigger, you become immortal. I think to me that was much more unpredictable than having a poor velina who is of course the symbol of the biggest group of discriminated human beings in Italy: women. The idea of being willing to, as he says, sacrifice a part of his body for a career, you could easily translate that to a whole generation. It’s a question of how much you’re prepared to sacrifice to get inside television. When you make a film, it’s easy to think Oh, I should have someone who’s against all this, an expert in Italian politics. I’m trying not to be ruled by fear when I do these films and try instead to just portray what I find in my journey. And I found a very male-dominated world where women are in the background and that’s what I end up showing.

Filmmaker: There’s an old adage among literary authors and people who teach creative writing, which is "Show, don’t tell." You’re giving viewers the Berlusconi experience by immersing us in the world he lives in and that he’s created, rather than having talking-head experts explain it all.

Gandini: Exactly. I had huge pressure from the BBC, which was involved in this project. We had an argument exactly about those things. And I know it’s risky because in some countries and probably in the U.S., too, where people don’t know much about Berlusconi, certainly they’d like to have some hard facts. But it’s something you can easily find, you know? [Laughs] The BBC were really trying to push the film in that direction. They wanted a lot of irony. You know, there’s a debate going on in the documentary community. Some people argue that you can get a lot of emotion through facts. Doing the research, I’m really interested in facts and numbers. As a matter of fact, in Italy, a lot of things you can now measure. Like mamismo: I read this number that Italian youngsters are really the ones who statistically move less from home in Europe. When I make film, it’s different; [I use] all the elements, like music and editing.

Filmmaker: You mention that Fabio was an old friend of yours. For the rest of the dramatis personae here—Marella, Mora, Fabrizio—these are people who are very sophisticated about image control and representing the way their clients are depicted in the media. They’re grooming themselves as well. I found it surprising how nakedly honest they were with you. How did you peel the skin back of this media world and find your way in?

Gandini: I was really interested in Corona and Ricky, who I got close to. I made other interviews with people who can talk for hours without telling you anything. That’s how they work. They found it unusual that I was so interested in them. I was not there for ten minutes and then [gone]. And they are very used to that—the fact that I was working for Swedish television was sort of a guarantee. I was very open about what I was doing. Essentially, they don’t know what documentary is and they don’t care. They live in a world where documentary doesn’t exist, it’s an abstraction for them. Especially Lele Mora, there’s a clash of different media realities. In his world, there is no such thing as an independent filmmaker. He would think I was sent by someone else, because that’s how it works in Italy. But then he got very angry with me because he went on TV several times and said I told him this film was only going to be in Sweden, which is bullshit. I don’t understand why he showed [off] his swastikas like that. He knows very well that it’s not a good symbol, but it says more about Italy that it’s not been a problem for him.

Filmmaker: Fabrizio Corona was literally naked for your cameras in one scene. That was an incredible show of self-preening machismo.

Gandini: I love that scene. For me, that’s exactly what you said: show, don’t tell. And I really think that this kind of behavior—super-powerful, alpha-male behavior—works much better in a country ruled by television, where there’s a whole culture of drama and strong emotions, strong gestures, et cetera. It’s very scary when you realize people are buying this image. That’s scarier than a dictator who looks nice. [Laughs]

Filmmaker: Can you talk about the sound design, which added so much to the subjective aspect of what you were doing, and all the work that went into editing all the trash-TV imagery and footage of Berlusconi at press conferences?

Gandini: During the first three or four months of editing, we had a friend who composed a lot of music for the film which was very moody, electronic music that was also very depressive. It was more a reflection of our feelings toward the characters, their stories, and it really didn’t work. The film became too depressive and dull. And then we realized that musically, we had to go with the characters, not against them with emotions they didn’t have. Lele Mora, for instance—he’s happy about his life, he’s a calm person, so we have this harp [for him]. It’s all music from an archivist we discovered who had a lot of music from postwar East Germany, so it’s basically old film music that we rearranged. The idea of having ironic narration absolutely wasn’t necessary, because you can make a lot of points with music, which is more subtle and more interesting to work with. There is I hope a sense of an external observer, like Alice in Wonderland, that’s you’re looking around this world where things seem normal, but they’re not.

Labels: Director Interviews, Erik Gandini, Fabrizio Corona, Lele Mora, Silvio Berlusconi, Videocracy

# posted by Damon Smith @ 2/10/2010 07:44:00 AM Comments (0)

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

MARTINA EGI, BAREFOOT TO TIMBUKTU 

Ernst Aebi, the subject of Martina Egi's keenly observed new documentary Barefoot to Timbuktu, is something of a renaissance man. Artist, SoHo real estate pioneer and social activist, he is full of paradoxes: easy going yet driven, humble yet self-assured, a man of much wealth who nonetheless spends his leisure time among the dispossessed. Egi profiles Ernst with affection, but she doesn't shy away from examining the effects of his restless nature on his family and friends. His often rocky family life, along as his many guises and activities, are only the preamble to Egi's portrait of the subjects very real and lasting manifestations of his humanitarian commitment,

While on a trip to the Sahara in the late 80s, Aebi came across the destitute settlement of Araouane, a barren collection of buildings that is a long camelback ride away from Timbuktu in central Mali. Without any infrastructure, agricultural tradition or reliable source of water, this was an endangered community. Aebi dropped everything and settled there, using his expertise to help the town's people make their settlement a viable one. A new vegetable garden, school and hotel rose from the barren Sahara sands in the three years Aebi spent there. As Egi's film deftly explains, a civil war broke out in the country that forced Aebi to leavea place that had truly become a second home. When she picks up his story, he's on the verge of returning for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Barefoot to Timbuktu opens at Manhattan's Quad Cinema on February 12th.

Director Martina Egi and Ernst Aebi. Courtesy of A Mesch and Ugge productions.

Filmmaker: When did you first encounter the work of Ernst Aebi?

Egi: I was first struck by Ernst's work when I notced an attractive book cover. It was an image of a village drowning in sand. I picked up Seasons of Sand. It a book by Ernst Aebi that Simon & Schuster put out in 1993. I was in a Greenwich Village second hand bookstore when I found it. While reading it, and with my old fascination for the Sahara, it became almost an obsession trying to bring the story to film.

I contacted the author, Ernst Aebi, in New York. Already from that first conversation on it seemed filming his story would be made easy by his gung ho attitude. “Can’t be done” is missing from his vocabulary. Beat Hirt, my boss at Mesch & Ugge AG, the film production company I work for in Zurich, Switzerland, liked the idea of creating Barefoot to Timbuktu. Off we went.

Among many other things, Ernst Aebi told me how in the early nineties an American film company, MPI, had filmed extensive footage about his Sahara project. Apparently that footage had never been used. Once I knew that, I was even more convinced that his story was a perfect match for the needs of a documentary. Aebi's biography reads like a filmscript. The difficult thing was to find the right focus.mSo I decided to zoom in on the Sahara aspect.

Filmmaker: What are the primary means of financing projects such as this in Switzerland?

Egi: Switzerland is small. 7.7 Million people, four different languages - German, French, Italian and Rhaeto-Romanic. Films are usually financed with the support of the National Broadcasting Enterprise and also with some help from cultural institutions. The road of financing is long and rocky. Fortunately documentaries are very popular. I think, Switzerland is the country where you can see more documentaries in the cinemas than anywhere else in the world. So I was in an advantageous position to complete this project, being a Swiss documentarian making about a Swiss personality.

Filmmaker: Do you think you discovered what informs Ernst's impulse to selflessly serve the people of Araouane?

Egi: I think, the film shows Aebi's character quite well. There are things I never understood. For exemple, his impatience. His restlessness was quite a challenge for the whole film crew. His children and also his friends describe his character better than he does. There's an essential lack of self-consciousness. There is one part in his personality, that I couldn't reveal and which only apears in the things he does.

At first it's difficult to understand, why he spent tree years in the middle of the Sahara in a village, whith no vegetation, no shade, just sand and rubber and swarms of black flies. Even the governor of Timbuktu said that there was no hope for that place. They had given up on the village because it's so far away from anything. This is probably exactly the reason why Aebi did it. He's like that. Nobody believed, that anything could be done in Araouane and nobody really cared, so he took up the cause and made it his mission. Aebi was looking for a challenge in his life. I think he needed a project like this. He wanted to do something "impossible". It's not only some "selfless" impulse. Each moviegoer should discover for himself, who the real Ernst Aebi is, but I this is at the heart of what I discovered about him. I think different answers are possible and that makes his personality so interesting.

Filmmaker: There's archival footage from Ernst's first trip to the area, but had anyone ever made a film before in Araouane before your arrival?

Egi: I don't know if there is any other footage of Araouane prior to Aebi's arrival. I don't think that the place ever looked different or had any other history of development in the immediate period before he arrived. However, we know from the history of the region that Araouane once was an important meeting place for the salt-caravans and even bigger than Timbuktu. When Aebi arrived, there were only a few people and houses left. After 40 years of drought, most of the wells had dried out and the caravans had taken different routes. The inhabitants were about to abandon the place. Aebi took some pictures with his videocamera at the very beginning of the project. We could use very few of them. They were too shaky. Although he is many things, he isn't a cinematographer! The footage that was provided by Bob Marty, who visited Araouane after Aebi had been working there for three years, is the primary archival footage source. Without that footage, we would never know how the garden in Araouane looked like and it would be very hard to imagine.

Filmmaker: How did the local people react to your presence as a filmmaker?

Egi: The poeple in Araouane didn't know, that Aebi would visit their village after 20 years. So they were just surprised to see Aebi and also our guides from Timbuktu, who grew up in Araouane and are rarley able to visite their hometown and families.The local people in Araouane were very friendly. It took a while, until the women dared to come out of their houses. Conversation was nearly impossible. The people in Araouane have their own language. The men brought us tea and the children followed us in groups to all the places where we were filming. For me, arriving in Araouane was quite a shock. I had studied the footage and had heard a lot of stories beforehand, but as Araouane emerged out of the dunes after 2 days driving in the sand, I probably had similar feelings to what Ernst had 22 years ago. He wrote then in his diary: This is hell on earth. I'm glad that this was only the first impression and things have improved since he left.

Filmmaker: What was the most difficult aspect of your journeys with Ernst?

Egi: Ernst is probably the easiest protagonist I ever worked with. He made everything possible, even certain things he was not very happy about. For example was he totally against a military troop, who accompanied us from Timbuktu to Araouane. The armed troop for the protection of the film crew was a set term by the governor of Timbuktu. Ernst had some bad experiences with those troops who "prefer to shoot befor they think" as he said. So we had to persuade him on that point. I'm very happy that I had the chance to meet Ernst. He is a very creative person and his view of life gave me new inputs and power for further projects.

Labels: Director Interviews

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 2/03/2010 01:30:00 PM Comments (0)

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

JUDITH EHRLICH AND RICK GOLDSMITH, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA 

As a history lesson, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s enthralling new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, is as solid as a textbook, stitching together old broadcast footage, first-person testimony, tart excerpts from the Nixon White House tapes, and noirish recreations into riveting, revelatory political drama. The name “Daniel Ellsberg” probably doesn’t trigger the same flurry of associations as Deep Throat, the shadowy antihero of the Watergate scandal, but it should: An ex-Marine, former assistant to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and highly respected analyst at the Rand Corporation, Ellsberg leaked a 7,000-page study detailing the top-secret Southeast Asia policies of five presidential administrations to the New York Times, resulting in a landmark court case, attempted cover-ups, and a nasty smear campaign, all culminating in the ignominious resignation of President Nixon. To be sure, the spy-grade story of the Pentagon Papers controversy has a lot of rich angles, including government secrecy, first-amendment rights versus executive privilege, and the rise of the national security state. But it’s also a conversion tale deeply concerned with the burden of conscience that Ellsberg felt as a government insider to tell the public what he believed they had a right to know, and his desire as a newly minted dove to change the course of the Vietnam War.

Part journalistic exposé, part overdue homage to one of the last century’s most notorious whistleblowers, Most Dangerous Man is a pressurized piece of filmmaking, resonating with issues (civil rights, the press, the conduct of war) still worrying the national conscience. With considerable flair backed by exhaustive research, Ehrlich (The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It, 2001) and Goldsmith (Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press, 1996) guide us through the corridors of power where the Vietnam war was seeded and then bloomed, often against the private advice of military analysts. Ellsberg himself provided McNamara with evidence of “atrocities” that helped push the war along, then reversed course after a two-year stint in Saigon with the State Department convinced him it was not only a lost cause, but a moral travesty based on years of prevarication. Seen then and now, he emerges as a man of principle, sincere and articulate. His fascinating chronicle of that time is augmented by a carousel of outspoken interviewees, including old colleagues like Anthony Russo (the Rand associate who persuaded him to Xerox the papers), Nixon officials John Dean and Bud Krogh (who authorized the break-in at Ellsberg’s doctor’s office), and general counsel James Goodale, who soothed the nerves of the Times’ top brass. Winner of the Special Jury Award at IDFA, and recently shortlisted for the Oscar, Most Dangerous Man is able-bodied and slyly entertaining, and has plenty to teach us, especially in these times, about the power of dissent.

Filmmaker spoke with Ehrlich and Goldsmith about crises of conscience, fair-use issues, and why you won’t be seeing Dan Ellsberg on any talking-head news programs.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers opens Friday at Cinema Village.

DIRECTORS JUDITH EHRLICH AND RICK GOLDSMITH. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES.

Filmmaker: How and why did you decide to anchor the film around Daniel Ellsberg’s narrative and personal voice as opposed to approaching the story of the Pentagon Papers leak from a more general point of view?

Ehrlich: It was something we struggled with a lot. I always wanted it to be more character-driven and more biographical, not just a generic story about the events. The idea of whether it would be Dan’s voice or not was still up in the air until very late. I think Rick wanted it to be more journalistic and objective, but we compromised. I always felt [his voice] would make it a stronger narrative. For one thing, Dan lives right near us, he’s extremely articulate, his writing is wonderful, and most of the narration is adapted from his [book]. To me it seemed a no-brainer not to use him—it would give it that much more authenticity. But I think Rick’s points were legitimate, so that was a complicated decision.

Goldsmith: I’d actually approached him with a film about the Pentagon Papers and it didn’t get off the ground. Then Judy came to me about a year later with a film about Dan Ellsberg. Some of the initial questions were, Do we have a film about him or do we zero in on the Pentagon Papers? The personal transformation story, obviously, was the kickoff for the whole event, and we spent over a third of the film on that, and then got into the event itself. I don’t know if “morality play” is the right word, but it triggers questions of conscience, not only in Dan Ellsberg, but in so many of the characters that we have onscreen, starting with Randy Kehler and then leading to the newspapersmen, Hedrick Smith and Max Frankel, the Times lawyer, and the congressman. They all had crises of conscience. The Nixon administration, people like John Dean and Egil Krogh, all had to face very big questions that hopefully we all face on some level.

Filmmaker: Was Ellsberg amenable to participating when you first presented the idea, or were there negotiating points in terms of how his story would be told?

Goldsmith: It was a process. We approached Dan when he appeared onstage before a local high school in Oakland with his wife Patricia, where they talked about their remembrances of that time. That was the first time we talked face to face with him about it. He had had other filmmakers approach him about the subject matter, [but] he had not wanted to do anything until he wrote his own account [Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers], which he did in 2002. This was late 2004, when we spoke. He was protective of his story, for sure, and wanted to know what we would do with it, so it was not a slam dunk that he was going to go with us.

Ehrlich: Also, I think there was an intervention by some mutual friends too, who made them feel like we would do a fair job. But I think they had reason to be nervous, because Dan had had a hatchet job done on him by an author. F/X had done a made-for-TV version of the Pentagon Papers, with James Spader playing Dan, except [the producers] never talked to them, they cut them entirely out of the process. I don’t think they felt burned by that, but they certainly were cautious. We were lucky they chose us.

Filmmaker: There’s a confessional aspect to the film that calls to mind The Fog of War. Was this another opportunity for Ellsberg to set the record straight in a different medium?

Ehrlich: Dan’s very quick to accept guilt. That was his motivation for doing what he did. There were moments when we had to be sure we didn’t look too much like Fog of War, because it was the same period, with similar characters. There’s a lot of resonance here between the two films, and we wanted it to feel different.

Goldsmith: I don’t think Dan needed to unburden himself. I think he felt deeply about what he had done, planning the war and helping it along, and he felt very passionately [that leaking the papers] was the right thing. I think he was intrigued with the idea of somebody other than himself telling the story, and was ultimately convinced we would do it justice.

Filmmaker: How long did it take you to gather all the archival footage, as well as selections from the Nixon tapes that were used in the film? Did you have issues with clearances?

Goldsmith: It took four years. The archival stuff started with articles from the time period, and then we went to D.C. to do some filming in 2007. All that broadcast material of Howard K. Smith and Walter Cronkite is in the National Archives, because somebody in the Nixon administration was given the job to tape the nightly news and every public-affairs program. The Nixon tapes were also there, and it took a lot of digging and research by our team to get them. Those were free, but with a lot of the broadcast material, it was kind of an unknown whether we could claim fair use. Often we did, and used that as a way to not break our budget. We also spent a lot for CBS News, which was probably our biggest check, for their footage on the war and everything else.

Ehrlich: We had a very interesting experience with the fair-use issue. I don’t know how much you’re familiar with Pat Aufderheide and that whole movement, to make that more clear and get filmmakers the right to do it legally. We used a lawyer, Lisa Callif, and she went through every single clip a number of times and confirmed that each one of them was within the “safe harbor” of fair use, as she called it. And the quality was good enough we could go straight into DV-cam. I think that’s a great opportunity for anyone who’s looking at this period, to be able to access that material.

Filmmaker: In terms of visuals, the graphics, animations, and cloak-and-dagger-style recreations add another layer of tension and moody suspense. Were those part of your original plan for the film, or did they come later in the process?

Ehrlich: I think we were a year into editing by the time our assistant editor, Lawrence Lerew, came up with the recreation idea. I jumped on the bandwagon immediately and worked with him. It took a long time for Rick to decide it was going to work. So we did a bunch of rough versions and eventually we all got on board.

Goldsmith: The recreations and animation were the last productions we did. For obvious reasons, you want to to have every piece in place and know what part of the story you can [illustrate]. It’s true, Judy was pushing more on that. I like the idea of recreations, but the extent to which we ended up with them, I was skeptical at the beginning. I was concerned with losing a little bit of credibility [if we made it] too first-person. It was a process. But because there were a lot of creative minds on it, it worked.

Filmmaker: You’ve corralled quite a roster of talking heads in this film. John Dean and Bud Krogh’s participation seems essential, given their role in the Fielding break-in. Were there other key players you sought to interview who didn’t make it onto film?

Goldsmith: The idea from the beginning was to get as many people [as possible] who were really there. You’ll notice there are very few people onscreen who didn’t actually participate in this story. Robert Ellsberg, Daniel’s son, was Xeroxing the Pentagon Papers so we went after him. Mort Halperin was head of the study so we went after him. We wanted to get Kissinger and couldn’t get a call back, and we wanted to get Alexander Haig, who was peripherally involved.

Filmmaker: You did get Kissinger virtually.

Ehrlich: We actually made him look good! [Laughs] That’s the one thing I kind of regretted about the film. He’s the voice of reason compared to his boss.

Goldsmith: One of the people we tried hard on, and I had at least four or five conversations with on the phone, was Harry Rowen, who would have been a very interesting interview. That was Dan’s boss at the Rand Corporation. He got the shit when the leak happened. I’m sorry that we couldn’t win Harry over to agree to be on camera. But we tried really hard.

Filmmaker: Considering that both of you come from television, what was different for you about the experience of making a feature for theatrical release?

Ehrlich: We were funded by ITVS, German and French television, so we always were making a film for [that medium]. When we saw the animal we had, we hoped it might be theatrical, but we certainly didn’t make it primarily for theatrical release. It had to be public television because we had their money.

Goldmsith: What happened along the way was that among ourselves, through Lawrence, we started to branch out and see more of the creative [elements] that could elevate it beyond the standard documentary. In May or June, even though we were very close to a final cut, we learned that Karen Cooper at Film Forum was interested in the film—we had sent her a rough cut—and also the Toronto Film Festival. However, we had already fashioned it as a more dramatic, dynamic show. We sensed down the home stretch that, hey, this thing is bigger than a TV or educational thing, and we need to make the most of it.

Ehrlich: What surprised me is the interest we’ve had with the film internationally. It won the Special Jury Award at IDFA in Amsterdam, which was really exciting and a huge surprise, since that’s the biggest documentary festival in the world. And we also have had amazing sales around the world. We didn’t think this film would really play that well outside the U.S., but it’s really striking a chord.

Filmmaker: What do you think is registering with people internationally?

Ehrlich: I think people want to hear a positive story about American conscience. [Laughs] We get so much bad press and people in Europe at least are crazy about Obama, they aren’t feeling the negative feelings that we’re having here as progressives at the moment.

Goldsmith: It has a universality to it. The crisis of conscience and the historical stage — it’s the Vietnam War, leading up to Watergate. I like to believe that the film’s pretty well made, too, but the story resonates on a lot of levels that transcend borders.

Filmmaker: Another part of the film deals with the power of the press and the conflict with executive privilege that Nixon invoked in trying to halt the Times’ reporting. It seems to have an extraordinarily urgent resonance today, with the folding of so many papers and news organizations struggling to develop new business models to stay alive.

Goldsmith: I think it points to a time when news organizations defied the government and that, too, I think gives people a sense of what can be done. To me, [it’s amazing] that young people don’t know this type of story, when citizens rise up and do something, when newspapers defy their government and print stories that their government not only doesn’t want them to print, but then goes to court to stop them.

Filmmaker: What were the biggest discoveries that you made in researching this film and interviewing the participants?

Ehrlich: For me, it’s the Watergate period, because I thought I knew that. One of the gifts of this film is that we have reinterpreted the history of Watergate in a more accurate way because of John Dean’s testimony, if we’re to believe his interpretation that it was the break-in to Dr. Fielding’s office, rather than the events of Watergate, that really brought down the Nixon administration. When we first started I thought, “Oh yeah, and it kind of has something to with Watergate, too, because the Plumbers started there and then they did the real thing nine months later.” But in fact the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was what brought [Nixon down], because that could be tracked back to the White House.

Goldsmith: For me, it was the extent that Daniel Ellsberg was not only inside the government, but actually took part at the top levels. He has incredible knowledge about how the government works, how the secrecy system works, how organizations like RAND work, and he has an incredible amount to add to the public debate about issues of war. We don’t hear [his voice], we don’t see him on the TV shows. Every time we’re about to go to war, from the first Gulf War to the Iraq war to Afghanistan, you see all these retired admirals and generals, but you don’t see the Daniel Ellsbergs who have as much information about government because they’ve been there. To me, learning that, learning how much he knows, was one revelation, and the other was how much he’s been shut out from public debate. And that’s a loss for all of us.

Filmmaker: So who’s the most dangerous man in America today? Is it still Dan Ellsberg?

Ehrlich: It could be. What he has to say is still pretty scary to the government.

Goldsmith: I think at that time, Dan did do this incredible act, but let’s face it, there was an entire anti-war movement that should not be forgotten. He didn’t exist in a vacuum.

Labels: Director Interviews

# posted by Damon Smith @ 1/27/2010 08:21:00 AM Comments (0)

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

JON AMIEL, CREATION 

The first non-Canadian film to open the Toronto film festival in quite some time, Jon Amiel's Creation seems to both embrace and shun the duties and limitations of the historical biopic. Paul Bettany stars as middle age naturalist Charles Darwin, well past his explorations on the HMS Beagle, who having settled into English country life with his children and wife Emma (Bettany's real life spouse Jennifer Connelly), decides to finally tackle writing a book on his nascent theory of Evolution. Haunted by visions of his recently deceased daughter and the notion that he may permanently alter man's conception of the divine, Darwin struggles through the completion of the text, sidetracked by tremors and sickliness. Containing a sophisticated and quietly engrossing look at a scientist's relationship to faith and family, Creation is that rare story of an important historical figure that seems intimate.

The film marks a return to indie filmmaking for Amiel. The director of Tune in Tomorrow (1990) and Queen of Hearts (1989) cut his teeth in the 80's directing the laudable British television mini-series The Singing Detective before a sustained run of star laden, Hollywood work in the 1990's such as Summersby (1993), Copycat (1995) and Entrapment (1999). His most recent feature was 2003's The Core.

Creation opens on Friday.

Creation director Jon Amiel. Courtesy of Apparition.

Filmmaker: You've made a historical biopic about Charles Darwin that in many ways resembles a horror film with its uses of nightmarish dreams and the haunting of a grown man by a dead child as a principle narrative device.

Amiel: Yes. When I approached this whole idea of making a film about Darwin, I started off with all the things I didn't want to do. Didn't want to make a biopic. Didn't want to make a dramatic documentary. Didn't really want to make a "period" film. Didn't really want to make a reverential portrait of a great man. I've seen films like that and they're dull. They don't really belong on a feature film screen. They're more the purview of documentaries, dramatized documentaries and the sort of thing you'd see on PBS.

What I discovered about Darwin excited me a great deal, much more than I ever expected. Reading about him, reading his letters to Emma and from Emma, his journals and the recollections of his children, this whole different human being emerged for me. He embodied many paradoxes. He was a great pillar of rational thought who was haunted by tremendously irrational fears, doubts and anxieties. He was married to a woman who was his best friend and yet with whom he held diametrically opposed ideas. He was writing a book that would change the world. The act of writing this so perturbed him that he became physically ill, vomiting, shaking, fainting. He had a number of other systems that we don't go into in the film. All of these things and then he was dealing with the most difficult thing a parent can ever deal with, the loss of a totally beloved child.

So what I set out to do with [screenwriter] John Collee was to get inside the mind of this man to understand what it must feel like to be a naturalist who sees the young of various species parish on a daily basis and observes them dispassionately as a simple fact of life. You're now looking a fledging baby rabbit being eaten, but now through the prism of having lost your own beloved child. You're looking at a decaying, decomposing baby bird and thinking about your own child decomposing in her grave. What were the thoughts and ideas rushing through his mind when he was working on this book that made him physically ill. So the film and the visual sequences that you're referring to are an attempt to get inside the mind of a great man. Some of the ways in which a great pillar of rational thought, The Origins of Species, may have come from processes that prove to be anything but rational at the time. We think of scientists as these cool, rational people in white coats dispassionately jotting ideas down, The fact is, weather you're talking about the story of Francis Crick or Galileo or John [Forbes Nash Jr.] from a Beautiful Mind, the product of science might be a rational thought, but the process of science is for the individuals themselves is frequently anything but rational.

Those are the things we sought to explore in the film to escape from the tyranny of the BBC costume drama set in the beautiful rolling hills of Kent. [Laughs]

Filmmaker: So it was very early on that you and John Collee decided to focus on the writing of The Origin of Species as opposed to the controversy that it set off or Darwin's travels on the Beagle.

Amiel: Feature films don't do abstract ideas so well. It deals with them best when it embeds those ideas in character conflicts. I think any great film that's produced any ideological change, weather it's Inherit the Wind or Z or Salvador, any film that makes a controversial, world changing statement, they all succeed primarily because they are great drama first. They're about people you care about. We started very much from that place with this film. We didn't want to make a tract; we wanted to make a film that shows the science that conceals science and the art that conceals art. We wanted to embed Darwin's ideas within the drama that was his daily life. A lot of those ideas are embedded in the dream sequences you mentioned for example, where you might have a young female Orangatang juxtaposed with images of his young child, who may also appear while poshing around the skeletonizing shed, killing pidgeons and analyzing there wing structures. So I believe a great deal of his thinking is there in the film.

As for the controversy, I really didn't want to see those awful scenes set in oak paneled room with a bunch of guys in black frock coats and big side whiskers standing up and going "No! Outrageous! Shocking! Scandalous!" [Laughs]. It seemed unnecessary to do that. We made the choice very early on to focus on the family and the process of writing Origin to allow the fact that the book is still as controversial now as it was then to take care of its self in effect. In other words we end with this great, world changing masterpiece trundling off toward London precariously perched on the back of a cart-

Filmmaker: I kept hoping he'd made a copy.

Amiel: Yes, one does feel that and actually I believe he did. What I found so alluring about this world changing masterpiece trundling off on the back of a cart, was, oh my God, what if it had fallen off? How fragile a thing that was at that moment, slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

Filmmaker: Did it make it any easier to craft the intimacies and painful conflicts of a married couple by having a pair of leads who themselves are married to each other?

Amiel: Working with this particular married couple definitely made it easier, yes. As well as having fifty years of camera experience between them, they were brave enough and smart enough and willing enough to explore painful, difficult aspects of themselves and their relationship in front of the camera. My job by and large was to get out of the way. It could have gone horribly wrong as a decision. If they had decided to gang up against me or if one of them comes in with a bad mood you know that the other one is going to come in with a bad mood, all of those things could have been pretty woeful, but they weren't. Partly because of their sheer professionalism and experience, partly because they are incredibly courageous actors and they're willing to go places that many actors are just scared to go to.

Filmmaker: When constructing the non-linear narrative in the editing room were there challenges you faced that you and John Collee hadn't anticipated in the script?

Amiel: I was enormously strengthened and embolded in both conceiving of the film this way and cutting it by the experience I'd had with The Singing Detective, the mini-series for the BBC I did many years ago which told a story in a very similar way. The cutting room is the last and most important rewrite you do and in a non-linear film the editing presents really particular challenges. Scenes can go together in many different ways, both the material in the scene itself and the order in which the scenes are presented. We had hundreds of post it notes all over the editing room wall, each one with a scene on it. Blue ones for past sequences and red one for present tense sequences. The order changed many, many, many times, despite all the wonderful work that John Collee and I and done on the script. All kinds of things reveal themselves once you've shot a movie. We were working right up until the last minute, polishing the way in which the scenes were presented to make the story as clear and strong and rich as we possibly could. It was a tremendous challenge to get that right, to tell a story that was non-linear chronologically, but had a powerful, persuasive emotional trajectory in it that would carry and audience through the story.

Filmmaker: What's the financing environment for a film like this right now where it's increasingly difficult for specialty films to get much traction in the market place? I imagine the financing was contingent upon the participation of you're two leads?

Amiel: You're right that the film itself is an endangered species. It's the kind of film that America almost didn't get to see and in coming years may very well not get to see. Partly because films of this sort can't find distribution, partly because they can no longer find financing. The way this came about was very simple for me. [Producer] Jeremy Thomas was the first person I pitched the idea too. I went to him with my research and a few key ideas John Collee and I had put together: that the spirit of his daughter would be a character in the story, that it would be non-linear, that we'd see Jenny the ape as anecdotes that are visualized, that this would be an emotional portrait of the man as opposed to a homilectic portrait of a saint. It was a five-minute pitch and Jeremy went "I like this very much, I think it could be very exciting!" Within a remarkably short time he had signed up and John Collee and I went off to write the script. Jeremy found the financing rather quickly. He confided in me last week that he believed if he tried to finance this film now instead of two years ago, he probably wouldn't be able to do it. The landscape has changed that much in just a few years. It's become a very difficult time to finance films for grownups. I'm extremely happy that I was able to slip under the wire so to speak and make this movie.

Filmmaker: You've made movies on broad canvases before, with large budgets in the studio system. This film was independently financed. How different was the process from the making of a Copycat or Entrapment?

Amiel: It's not nearly as different as one might imagine. The basic truth, weather you're making a studio movie or an indie movie, is that there is never enough time and never enough money. Somehow, miraculously, that always seems to be the case when you're making movies. Generally there's an equation, big money means big interference, less money means less interference. What one hopes for in an independent movie is the fact that you're spending less of other people's money means that you have less ambient anxiety to deal with and thus less interference. Sadly even that isn't always true. You can find even on a small independent movie, that you put together your financing from six different sources, all of whom wish to have a voice in how the film is edited, marketed and distributed. So I don't think the difference is really between studio movie versus indie movie. A lot more differences appear in the marketing and distribution stage of the film. That's when you really notice a studio's clout and marketing capabilities as opposed to independent distributors. It's all about with whom and for whom you're making the film. I got pretty lucky with Entrapment, Copycat, Summersby. I made those films with producers and for studios that essentially allowed me to make the movies that I wanted to make. I can look at all those movies and say, for better or worse, those are the movies I intended to make. I had relatively little interference and relatively substantial levels of support. That's as true of those bigger studio movies as it was of Queen of Hearts and Tune in Tomorrow, my first feature films and this one.

Labels: Director Interviews

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 1/20/2010 10:15:00 AM Comments (0)

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

ANDREA ARNOLD, FISH TANK 

Long before she became an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Dartford native Andrea Arnold settled on a path that was anything but conventional. After moving to London in the late ’70s, she worked as a dancer on Top of the Pops, and later became a TV presenter in Britain for Saturday-morning kids’ programs like No. 73, Motormouth, and the enviro-awareness series A Beetle Called Derek. Never entirely comfortable in front of the cameras, Arnold was always writing, logging story ideas and character sketches. She left television in the early ’90s, went to film school, and made two shorts that screened at Cannes. In 2003, her 26-minute short Wasp, about a chronically stressed, emotionally desperate single mother living in a Dartford housing project, nabbed an Academy Award for best live-action short. Then came Arnold’s Cannes Jury Prize winner Red Road (2006), a raw, suspenseful, ingeniously constructed personal drama set mostly in a dark CCTV surveillance office in Glasgow. It was the kind of film—moody, absorbing, nerve-jarring, expressionistic—that made you sit up and take notice of this remarkably assured new filmmaker, and wonder where she would direct her energies next.

With Fish Tank, Arnold revisits the distressed, working-class locales of her earlier work, telling the story of Mia (Katie Jarvis in a confident and steadfastly believable performance), a 15-year-old girl growing up in a nondescript council estate in Kent. Angry, alienated from her female peers, and frustrated with life at home—she’s always at odds with curvy-cougar mom Joanne (Kierston Wareing) and petulant younger sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths), the three of them continually trading obscenities and cutting remarks—Mia finds peace in solitary self-expression, dancing freestyle to hip-hop tunes in an abandoned flat. Things change when Joanne brings home new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender), a strapping presence in the all-female household who wins hostile Mia over with his easygoing, paternal airs, giving her the respectful attention and flattery she craves, but also stirring the volatile teen's first exhilarating pangs of desire. Arnold stays skin-close to Mia as the story develops, DP Robbie Ryan's camera tracking her every fitful movement, whether she's head-butting a rival, fleeing a menacing pack of boys, or woozily regarding Connor as he tucks her in. Even when their rapport takes on a troubling cast, Arnold never hits an obvious beat, which makes Fish Tank's mix of hard-knock realism and tenderly observed adolescent portraiture even more impressive (it won the Cannes Jury Prize last May), evoking the kitchen-sink-style Brit dramas of yesteryear as well as an angstier, often dizzyingly sensual spin on the coming-of-age tale that feels utterly fresh and contemporary.

Filmmaker spoke with Arnold about her faith in cinema, the simple act of observing everyday life, and why her New Year's resolution is to dance every day.

IFC Films releases Fish Tank on Friday.

FISH TANK WRITER-DIRECTOR ANDREA ARNOLD. COURTESY IFC FILMS.

Filmmaker: Do you consider yourself a watcher, an obsever?

Arnold: I think I must be. Because when people ask me where does your inspiration come from, I would say absolutely my first answer is life. You know, by sitting on the bus and looking at people or just walking around. I am always seeing things that kickstart my thinking. And that definitely seems to be what I get most excited about. So I’d say that I’m somebody who’s a watcher, an observer. I think we’re all a bit like that to some degree. People who know me well say I notice things they don’t notice.

Filmmaker: Does that mainly concern people and faces or do you think you’re noticing elements in an environment as well that other people might ignore? For instance, do you single out details in settings that are perhaps banal but that speak to you in some way?

Arnold: How something gets going is a mystery, really, isn’t it? For example, the other day I saw a woman walking up to the station. It was very cold, it had been snowing, and she had not enough clothes on for the weather. She had a load of kids and she was pushing a pram up the hill, and she was kind of shouting at the kids, I don’t know what they were doing. I could tell she was trying to hurry for a train. She had some track-suit bottoms on and they’d kind of slipped down, and you could see this expansive flesh at the back. It seemed such an intimate thing to me. I was behind her, and I just started imagining her whole life and a house and what it was like. And that is the kind of thing that I will go and write down and think about. And it grows. I’m always saying that my films have all started with images, so I would consider that potentially a starting place for a whole story. Sometimes the images are not things I see, but they come to my mind out of nowhere. But there’s probably made-up things too, and they’re stored somehow. That’s how I work. When people say “Where do ideas for films come from?,” I think, well, just walk down the street! There’s a thousand faces and you can imagine a thousand lives. Everybody’s life has got drama.

Filmmaker: How does that act of note-taking play more specifically into the craft of your filmmaking?

Arnold: Ever since I was very small I’ve kept notebooks and written down things I’ve seen. I can’t remember the first time I started doing it, but I was probably at primary school, I’d have been about eight or nine. Sometimes I’ll expand on an idea, I’ll write about it and see where it leads, and just write some notes down. I often find when I start writing a script, I don’t go back to those books. I might flip through and refresh my mind, but to be honest, I think it goes on and stays there, you don’t need a ntoebook. Your brain is the notebook. I don’t really use a lot of what I’ve written down. And if I’m writing, when I’ve got an image that I’ve decided I want to explore, I usually write around it and try and work out its context. I’ll let my brain be quite free and see what happens. Then it will take more shape.

Filmmaker: It plays out in the actual aesthetic of your films, too, in the sense that we have such a strong point of view, and perspective. In Red Road, for instance, there’s the surveillance aspect, but the information we receive is all through one character’s point of view. In Fish Tank, Mia’s point of view dominates the film. What is it about that approach that you think works best for the stories that you want to tell?

Arnold: I always make a decision based on what feels right. I really do trust my instincts. It’s not like I’ve made a plan to do that. I don’t work that way. Probably the script is written from one person’s point of view, and it just feels right to me. When you’re watching, if you’re going to get very involved with someone, it feels right to be with them all the time. In an earlier draft of Fish Tank, I experimented with having scenes with the mom by herself because I knew that, seen through Mia’s point of view, she was going to be hard to empathize with. I had a scene that got cut where Mia goes into [Joanne’s] room and she goes through a bag next to the bed and in it is all the things to do with her kids that she saved, little pictures and photos and certificates, all crumpled in the carrier bag. I think that would have said quite a lot about her mom, that underneath she does care about them. But when we put the edit together, it was one of those things that didn’t sit easily, so it didn’t get used, which I was always a little bit sad about but think was the right decision. So it does bring challenges doing it from one person’s perspective, but I think it also brings an intimacy. Sometimes people say to me, I feel like I’m in your film or I feel like I’m really experiencing it, it’s uncomfortable. I think that’s probably because of that very intimate perspective.

Filmmaker: On the other side of things, because you portray characters so honestly, warts and all, and because we get to see them in all their complexity—they’re not romanticized, idealized people—that brings us closer too. How do you get actors to embody these people in the way that you’ve imagined?

Arnold: I don’t know [Laughs]. I have this real faith in cinema. I’m always amazed when you finish filming and then you put an assembly together. I know this sounds really silly, but whenever I see it, I think wow, that’s a whole world that now exists! And it’s always a surprise to me, because making a film is so complicated. Every day is full of stops and starts, and it’s not a very fluid thing. It’s quite brutal and clumsy, the whole machinery of it. Then when you put it together and [see] this world that you’ve created, I’m amazed every time. Wow, look at that! I never sort of believe it’s going to happen.

Filmmaker: And the authenticity comes from ...

Arnold: One of the main things is casting. If you cast close to what you’ve written, then you’re almost there. For Fish Tank, I was always looking for a real authentic girl that was close to what I’d written. Although Katie isn’t Mia, she’s got the vulnerability and also the spirit of her. I didn’t ask her to really be anything other than herself. And that’s often what my main note is to the actors. If I’ve cast close, then I’m not really wanting them to be anything other than themselves. When I saw the assembly, I thought Oh, she’s not Katie, she’s Mia! Because I’ve written her lines and I’ve decided what she’s wearing and I’ve given her a place to live, all these decisions add up to this world being believeable. So it’s a combination of all those decisions that you make. Nothing gets put in front of the camera that you haven’t thought about. I didn’t know if it was going to feel like a performance or not, but I was really pleased and surprised to think, She is the girl that I wrote, because I wasn’t sure.

Filmmaker: Personally, I like films that are daring and bold and visceral and challenging, especially when they examine the lives of people we rarely see, people who are invisible and generally ignored by society. And I think there’s a great tradition of this kind of filmmaking in Britain, especially, beginning with the kitchen-sink dramas and Ken Loach, all the way up to the present, with Lynne Ramsay and Michael Winterbottom and many others, including you. What keeps you invested in working in that one milieu?

Arnold: I don’t have a choice, it just seems to pick me. I don’t think I have any say over what stories I seem. I told you about that woman I saw. I wanted to go back and write about her straight away. That’s how it works. I don’t have an intellectual thought about oh, I’m going to make a film about this world or these people or this subject or theme. It’s not like I have a plan, really.

Filmmaker: But location is very important to you, isn’t it?

Arnold: Because to some degree, with the stories I’ve been telling as well, where you’re born and where you grew up has a huge impact on how your life is. Your circumstances and the things you’re born into are everything, especially when you’re young. I think maybe that’s why I get wrapped up with the environment and location when I’m filming. It matters and it says something about people—who they are and how they live. All my films have had that element. When I think about the next thing I’ll do, I know I’ll do it again because it’s almost like a character, the location.

Filmmaker: I think it’s easy for people to describe these settings around the council estates as bleak because I see you as approaching it from a completely different place.

Arnold: Oh, thank you for saying that, because I hate it when people say “grim.” Somebody the other day said “Did you pick the grimmest places in Essex to film?” And I said, you know, I don’t see that place as grim. It’s brutal, it’s maybe difficult, it’s got a sadness to it, that particular place where they live in the film. There used to be a lot of industry and it’s all closed down. There’s a lot of unemployment. There used to be a big Ford factory, and great huge car parks. All those car lots are empty now and the grass is growing up in the tarmac. But it’s got a wilderness, and huge, great skies. It’s a mixed thing. I don’t want to see it as grim. I’m fed up with that word. I think people are always looking for simplistic ways for summing things up. So I’m really happy you said that.

Filmmaker: One of the things I notice about the atmosphere we find ourselves immersed in, as viewers of your films, is that there is a fairly constant and palpable tension, certainly in Red Road. And in Fish Tank, it erupts at a certain moment. There is a turn in the story where it becomes a different kind of film.

Arnold: People have asked me about this tension before. And I’ve been trying to work it out. When I first wrote Red Road and I gave it to some people to read, they said “It’s a thriller.” And I went, Oh, really? I don’t think it is. Someone said to me, in a thriller, the audience is supposed to know as much as the protagonist. That’s what they told me, from some school of filmmaking. Obviously, we don’t know as much as Jackie does. I was always trying to explore with us just watching her and not always having everything explained. I like to push that as far as I can. I wonder if it’s something to do with point of view, because if you’re living with someone that intensely, and if things are dramatic in their lives, I think you feel it with them more. I wonder if that’s where the tension comes from. You know as much as they do, and it’s a bit more visceral.

Filmmaker: In Mia’s case, there’s an emotional intensity she’s experiencing that we feel while we’re on this journey with her. The stress of her immediate domestic environment, the conflict she has with Joanne, which is masking all these competitive tensions between mother and daughter, and also the desire that’s she’s beginning to feel for Connor. Dance is an outlet for her, and becomes even a form of communication at one point.

Arnold: For me, the dancing in the film is about her having something that’s her own. She has to be quite defensive in her life and she seems to have nowhere she can be at home. Everywhere she’s got her guard up. So this is a place where she can let that down a bit. I wanted her to have something that was her own, so dancing seemed like a good thing. It’s one of life’s real pleasures. Apparently, there was a Cambridge professor who did a study on happiness—it took him five years—and he came back and said dancing made people happy. I could have told him that in ten seconds! [Laughs] You know, I’ve always loved dancing, but my New Year’s resolution is to dance every day. I just put on some music and dance. I don’t dance as much as I used to and I miss it, and I was thinking, why do you have to go anywhere? Just dance in your room. Maybe it was Mia who gave me the idea. [Laughs]

Filmmaker: What an amazing resolution. Reintroducing that in your life must also be a way of you connecting with somebody you used to be long ago.

Arnold: Yeah. What I love about filmmaking is that everything I’ve ever done in my life, it all seems to come into the filmmaking. Anything I’ve done. Dancing is something I used to do and when you’re working with cameras and actors, it is a bit like putting movement together and it reminds me of dancing, the choreography between actors and cameras. So that’s what I loved about it when I started. Everything I’ve ever done now makes sense. It isn’t redundant anymore.

Labels: Director Interviews

# posted by Damon Smith @ 1/13/2010 12:26:00 AM Comments (0)