CAVE DWELLERS: “127 HOURS” DPs ANTONY DOD MANTLE & ENRIQUE CHEDIAK

This piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. 127 Hours is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (James Franco), Best Adapted Screenplay (Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy), Best Editing (Jon Harris), Best Original Score (A.R. Rahman) and Best Original Song.

When director Danny Boyle first got in touch with d.p. Anthony Dod Mantle about 127 Hours, the film following their Academy Award-winning collaboration Slumdog Millionaire, Dod Mantle remembers him saying that “he was convinced that the only way to get through this [movie] would be to subject an actor to a pretty extraordinary physical experience in as intense a period of time as possible. His believed it would be necessary to build real canyon walls on a set and make them physically as impossibly difficult [to shoot in] as they are in real life. He told me briefly his plan was to ‘go for the real thing’ and to shoot as quickly as possible because he didn’t think an actor or a cinematographer could handle [the shooting conditions] for too long.”

That led to the second part of the conversation. Boyle had the idea to work with two d.p.s. He asked Dod Mantle, “Can you share this with someone else?” Reflects Dod Mantle, “We [cinematographers] are creatures of control. We have to be. Otherwise we’d be fired. So, to suddenly be put in a saucepan with another guy who you barely know — Enrique [Chediak, d.p. of such films as 28 Weeks Later and The Good Girl] and I had to iron out any potential problems of ego very quickly.”

Agrees Chediak, “The first thing we had to do is drop our egos. You are working as a team, like in a rock band with two guitar players.” Of Boyle’s decision to split the job, Chediak says, “I think Danny wanted a little bit of chaos. He said after India he loved working in a chaotic environment, and bringing in another d.p. might have helped [create that for him].”

Boyle now says the impetus for his hiring decision was to inject variety and another point-of-view … Read the rest

MICHELLE WILLIAMS Q&A

LISA CHOLODENKO, “THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT”

Originally posted online on July 7, 2010. The Kids Are All Right is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Annette Bening), Best Supporting Actor (Mark Ruffalo) and Best Original Screenplay (Lisa Cholodenko & Stuart Blumberg).

It’s been eight years since Lisa Cholodenko’s last feature film (six if you count her TV adaptation of Dorothy Allison’s novel Cavedweller), but for the 46-year-old writer-director of 1998’s High Art (winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance) and 2002’s Laurel Canyon (starring Frances McDormand and Christian Bale) the time has, if anything, only sharpened her wits and powers of empathic observation, not to mention her considerable talent for guiding seasoned actors to perform at their finest. Her interest in chronicling the mid-life anxieties and self-doubts of artsy, sexually unorthodox women (Ally Sheedy’s druggy boho photographer in High Art, McDormand’s bisexual record-biz maven in Laurel Canyon) have aligned her in some ways with the lesbian community, but it doesn’t do Cholodenko justice to assign her body of work to any narrow cultural niche. Her films are far too personal, her characters too honest and generous, too universal in their familiar foibles, for such descriptive shorthand.

Cholodenko’s latest, The Kids Are All Right, co-written with Stuart Blumberg (The Girl Next Door), tells the story of a blissfully married lesbian couple, Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening), raising their college-age daughter Joni (Alice in Wonderland’s Mia Wasikowska) and teenage son Laser (Josh Hutcherson) in Southern California. Without informing their parents, whom they affectionately refer to as “Moms,” the kids decide to seek out their sperm-donor father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a boyishly handsome, motorcycle-riding restaurateur who leads a harmlessly decadent life but has no family of his own. After an awkward first encounter engineered by Joni, the effortlessly charming, laid-back Paul meets the rest of the clan and, with Jules and Nic’s ambivalent approval, begins to edge into their lives in unexpected ways. A wise, tender, sexy, disarmingly funny portrait of modern family life that won critical acclaim at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals for its … Read the rest

WHEN I GET OUT OF HERE: DANNY BOYLE’S “127 HOURS”

This piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. 127 Hours is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (James Franco), Best Adapted Screenplay (Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy), Best Editing (Jon Harris), Best Original Score (A.R. Rahman) and Best Original Song.

When Werner Herzog made his 1982 true-life inspired tale of a Peruvian capitalist transporting a giant steamer across dry land, Fitzcarraldo, he famously replicated the ordeal, lugging with his crew an even bigger ship across the Amazon jungle in one of the most strenuous and demanding movie shoots of all time.

Before its release, Francis Ford Coppola said of his own legendary production, “Apocalypse Now is Vietnam.” Decades later he elaborated to the Sunday Times, “I made it in a style I felt appropriate to the war itself: high amperage, big production, almost out of control. It wasn’t comfortable but I think it was right.”

“It wasn’t comfortable but I think it was right” — Coppola’s quote would fit right into my interview with Danny Boyle, in which the British director describes the making of 127 Hours, his follow-up to the Oscar-winning worldwide hit, Slumdog Millionaire. And while the decidedly more minimalist, intimate tale Boyle has chosen to tell couldn’t be further from Herzog’s and Coppola’s epics, he still shares with these directors a willful, obstinate, but finally thrilling belief in the relationship between a film’s production techniques and its emotional integrity.

Adapted from his memoir, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, 127 Hours takes us through almost a week in the life of Aron Ralston, an extreme “canyoneer” who, after falling into a quarry, is pinned to a rock for days until he engineers his release by self-amputating his arm. Boyle shot partially on the real location, with Ralston himself looking down as James Franco acted out the accident that almost killed him. For safety reasons most of the film was shot on a nearby stage, but if you think that resulted in a comfy shoot, think again. As he explains, Boyle created challenging and adverse shooting conditions in order … Read the rest

DAVID MICHOD, “ANIMAL KINGDOM”

Originally posted online on August 11, 2010. Animal Kingdom is nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Jacki Weaver).

Like his stunning short films Netherland Dwarf and Crossbow, David Michod’s terrific and terrifying feature debut, the 2010 Sundance World Dramatic Competition winner Animal Kingdom, is a smoothly photographed, moodily scored tale of a trapped, dim and docile young man who suffers at the hands of a careless and, in this case, criminal family. As in his previous work, Michod relies on an insistent voiceover to provide biting interiority while the unrelentingly grim working-class Melbourne milieu is strikingly depicted in slow-motion shots and even slower push-ins. James Frecheville is stoic and sullen as the lead, who we first glimpse as he’s watching a rancid television gameshow next to an unconscious woman who turns out to be his just recently heroin OD’d mother. Brought into the fold of his criminal clan of uncles by his complicit grandmother, he quickly becomes their errand boy and accomplice in the brutal revenge murder of a pair of policemen.

Michod, co-star Joel Edgerton and editor Luke Doolan, who are just a few of the members of a promising bevy of Australian filmmakers working under the Blue Tongue Films moniker, specialize in unforgiving worlds. In Animal Kingdom, like Mr. Michod’s previous work and Mr. Doolan’s Academy Award-nominated short Miracle Fish, they bathe both us and their characters in a constant atmosphere of dread. Here, these characters are well drawn by a strong ensemble cast of actors that, save Guy Pearce as a detective, is made up of performers who, while well known in Australia, are scantly recognizable on this side of the Pacific. Jacki Weaver as the grandmother and Ben Mendelsohn as the most sadistic and yet emotionally needy of the brothers Brown turn in a pair of near-perfect performances. This is as impressive a debut as you’re likely to see all year. Sony Pictures Classics begins rolling the film out on Friday.

Filmmaker: You’ve been working in collaboration with a tight-knit group of Australian filmmakers for some time now. How has that collaborative network … Read the rest

JENNIFER LAWRENCE Q&A

This piece was originally printed in the Spring 2010 issue. Winter’s Bone is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence), Best Supporting Actor (John Hawkes) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Debra Granik & Anne Rosellini).

It’s not often a striking young girl makes it in Hollywood without accentuating her looks, but Jennifer Lawrence is not your typical 19-year-old actress. While many of her peers go for lightweight parts in bubblegum teen comedies, Lawrence has taken a more serious route, filled with dark roles that deal with issues well beyond her years.

The Kentucky native left home for L.A. at 14 and after getting bit parts on TV shows like Monk, Cold Case and Medium, landed the role of daughter Lauren on the TBS series The Bill Engvall Show in 2007. A year later she was cast in her first leading role in The Poker House, an intense drama playing a young girl whose mother is a prostitute. She followed that with Guillermo Arriaga’s moody directorial debut The Burning Plain, where Lawrence once again is a teen dealing with mom issues. So when her agent handed her the script to Debra Granik’s adaptation of Daniel Woodrell’s gritty novel Winter’s Bone, Lawrence had no doubts she had what it took to play the demanding role of the book’s lead, 17-year-old Ree Dolly. Covered in a bulky jacket, winter cap and her face chapped from the cold, it isn’t Lawrence’s physical traits but her tenacious performance that grabs our attention and draws us deeper inside Ree’s struggle to find her crystal meth-making father in the Ozarks.

Gaining high praise at this past Sundance, where the film won the Grand Prize, Lawrence has continued her good fortune as she’s recently wrapped her next film, The Beaver, a dark comedy starring Mel Gibson and Jodie Foster, who also directs.

Filmmaker talked to Lawrence over the phone about her performance as Ree, which has already started Oscar buzz.

I believe in an interview you did at Sundance you said that your mother read Winter’s Bone some time ago and told … Read the rest

PETER WEIR, “THE WAY BACK”

Originally posted online on January 19, 2011. The Way Back is nominated for Best Makeup (Edouard F. Henriques, Gregory Funk and Yolanda Toussieng).

A pioneering figure of the new independent Australian cinema in the 1970s, 66-year-old Sydney native Peter Weir (The Truman Show) gravitated to Hollywood in the mid ’80s, found success with a handful of well-crafted studio pictures (Witness, Dead Poets Society), and never really looked back. At least that’s how it might appear after a cursory glance at his unusual oeuvre, which encompasses everything from 1975’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (an oneiric film awash in foreboding, in which a small-town community disintegrates after a group of elite-school girls eerily vanish en masse during a lunchtime hike) to the rollicking high-seas adventure of 2003’s Master and Commander (about the friendship of a British captain and a man of science in the Napoleonic Wars era). Weir may have forsaken the interior horror of early work like The Last Wave, wherein a lawyer representing Aboriginals is afflicted by disturbing visions and revelations, but his interest in human responses to other kinds of awakenings—grief and trauma in the case of Fearless, for instance—has remained consistent.

For his first feature film in seven years, the independently financed The Way Back, Weir tells the story of a group of men determined to survive at all costs after escaping a Soviet gulag in the dead of winter. Based on a semi-fictional memoir by Polish writer Slavomir Rawicz (The Long Walk), the movie depicts the efforts of Janusz (Jim Sturgess), a young Polish man sentenced to 20 years for espionage, to trek across Siberia with a motley band of inmates, including Zoran (Dragos Bucur), a cynical American who calls himself “Mr. Smith” (Ed Harris), and tattooed gangster Valka (Colin Farrell), the only one among them toting a knife. With a bounty on their heads, they soldier through a gauntlet of endurance challenges, first in the wintry desolation of Siberia and then, reaching the border of Stalinist Mongolia, across the endless empty plains to the equally forbidding … Read the rest

TURN OUT: DARREN ARONOFSKY’S “BLACK SWAN”

This piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. Black Swan is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Darren Aronofsky), Best Actress (Natalie Portman), Best Cinematography (Matthew Libatique), Best Editing (Andrew Weisblum).

Darren Aronofsky was developing a project based on Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1846 novella, The Double, when he happened to go to a production of another Russian work, Swan Lake, the 1875 ballet composed by Peter Tchaikovsky. Seeing the ballet’s White Swan and Black Swan played by the same ballerina, Aronofsky experienced what he called a “Eureka” moment, realizing that The Double’s themes of splintering identity and possible schizophrenic breakdown could be found in the classic ballet.

Something else could be found there too — an early incarnation of the highly disciplined, sometimes punishing work ethic and training regimen that turns the most gifted students into beautiful ballerinas while clouding the futures of those with less talent. Swan Lake has been produced in many versions over the years, but the roots of most contemporary productions are the 1895 Russian production choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov. The Italian ballerina Pierina Legnani danced both lead roles, and she famously introduced the physically demanding 32 fouettés into the ballet’s “Black Swan Pas de Deux.” After Legnani, fouettés became a standard requirement of a ballerina, with the ability to do 32 a certification of her skill and endurance.

In Aronofsky’s darkly seductive, deliriously entertaining Black Swan, Natalie Portman plays Nina, a New York City Ballet ballerina whose life is still defined by the dreams a young girl has of dancing on the big stage. When she’s not rehearsing she lives with her clingy, slightly bitter and overprotective mother (Barbara Hershey) in a run-down Manhattan apartment building. In Thérèz DePrez’s production design, her bedroom is that of a child’s, its fairy-tale furnishings now more disturbing than playful. She has no romantic relationships and, indeed, as articulated by the company’s brilliant director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the question of her ability to perform the lead role in Swan Lake has more to do with unlocking her sexuality … Read the rest

THE WAY WE WERE: DEREK CIANFRANCE’S “BLUE VALENTINE”

Here Oscar-winner Robert Benton interviews Derek Cianfrance. The piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. Blue Valentine is nominated for Best Actress (Michelle Williams).

As a child, Derek Cianfrance always worried his parents would divorce. When he was 20 his fears were realized. Both upset as well as curious about his own emotional antennae — how he somehow sensed discord in his parents’ relationship — Cianfrance decided to tackle the subject head-on with a movie. After gaining notice in the indie community with his debut feature, Brother Tied, in 1998, Cianfrance got to work on Blue Valentine, a storied film in the New York production community on account of its 12-year, 66-draft journey to production.

Blue Valentine stars Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams as married couple Dean and Cindy Periera. Struggling to regain the spark in their relationship, Dean, a house painter, and Cindy, a nurse, try to hide their increasing disinterest in one another from their young daughter, Frankie (Faith Wladyka). But when Dean attempts to spice things up by setting up an evening in an adult-themed motel, Cindy’s true feelings explode on screen in a display of ferocious honesty that is at times hard to watch. The heartbreak of this good couple in present day is underscored by the film’s structure, which flashes back to scenes capturing the romantic thrill of their courtship.

After years of developing the story (five years with Gosling and seven with Williams) and falling in and out of money, Cianfrance finally had his window last summer and shot the film in 30 days using Super 16mm for the past and the RED One for the present. Premiering at Sundance in January, many critics compared its realism to the work of Cassavetes, and the gripping performances by Gosling and Williams could garner them both Oscar nominations.

No discussion of films about marriage and divorce would be complete without a reference to Kramer vs. Kramer, Robert Benton’s film about a recently divorced father’s attempt to care for his son while engaging in a custody battle to keep him. It swept … Read the rest

JOHN CAMERON MITCHELL, “RABBIT HOLE”

Originally posted online on December 16, 2010. Rabbit Hole is nominated for Best Actress (Nicole Kidman).

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Rabbit Hole might seem like an odd choice for helmer John Cameron Mitchell, a director whose reputation wasn’t gained built on tasteful, upper-middle-class family dramas. Perhaps he’s mellowed, and given the results, why not? The film’s story of parental grief, that of a Westchester County couple (Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman) who, eight months later still lack the emotional wherewithal to deal with the accidental death of their young son, may seem like the stuff of so many Lifetime Channel weepies. But in the hands of this 47-year-old writer, actor and director, it’s a surprisingly understated and buoyant glimpse at the aftermath of personal tragedy. Shirking off the baroque directorial flourishes of Hedwig and the Angry Itch (2001) and the untethered, sexually adventurous performances of Shortbus (2006), Mitchell takes a headlong dive into movie star corralling in Rabbit Hole, and in the process elicits a surprisingly dexterous performance from Kidman and fascinating supporting turns from Sandra Oh and Dianne Wiest.

An army brat turned musical-theater wunderkind, Mitchell studied at Northwestern’s theater school in the early to mid ’80s before cutting his teeth in the Chicago theater world and network television as an actor. He won an Obie for the stage version of Hedwig in 1998, before hatching a film version three years later that won him Sundance’s best director prize and a Golden Globe nomination. He quickly became a cause célèbre, a new standard bearer for indie cinema’s transgender niche, a notion that was broadened by his even more provocative follow up, Short Bus. While his newest project will surely lead to yet another reevaluation of this gifted and beguiling stage dynamo-turned-auteur, a strong throughline of personal storytelling and project-driven aesthetic choices have quickly become his calling cards.

Rabbit Hole opens this Friday.

Filmmaker: When, if ever, did you see Rabbit Hole on stage? Did you see making this film as an opportunity to return to your roots in theater?

Mitchell: Funny thing, I … Read the rest