SEBASTIAN JUNGER AND TIM HETHERINGTON, “RESTREPO”

Originally posted online on June 23, 2010. Restrepo is nominated for Best Documentary.

Most documentary filmmakers attempt to see the world through the lens of the subjects they’re shooting, but few put their lives on the line to do so. That perhaps is what most separates first-time directors Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington from a few of their colleagues who didn’t take home the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Their award-winning Restrepo is the result of a near yearlong embedment with the Second Platoon, Battle Company in eastern Afghanistan’s deadly Korengal Valley, during which they survived like soldiers wielding cameras in lieu of guns. While the two don’t lack name recognition — writer Junger is the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, and along with prizewinning photojournalist Hetherington, is a longtime contributor to Vanity Fair — they’ve used their critical prestige to shine a light on the identities of the little known. Like “Doc” Restrepo, a platoon medic killed in action but not forgotten at the outpost that bears his name.

Filmmaker: So how did you two meet and what prompted you to want to collaborate on a film?

Tim Hetherington: Sebastian had an idea that he wanted to follow a platoon of soldiers for a year.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah, I’d been going to Afghanistan since 1996 and always covered the story from the perspective of the civilian population, for obvious reasons. When it became clear that the U.S. was going to be engaged in a long and complicated war I was embedded with a battle company. I was so impressed by those guys. I had never been with a professional army before. I’d never been with the U.S. military. I thought that if they go back I wanted to follow one platoon back to Afghanistan. Not Iraq. I was not interested in Iraq. But I wanted to follow one platoon of 35 men for an entire deployment [in order] to write a book, make a documentary. I would pay for it by turning … Read the rest

A DAUGHTER’S TALE: DEBRA GRANIK’S “WINTER’S BONE”

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).

The Ozark mountain holler that is the setting for Debra Granik’s fierce and extraordinary Winter’s Bone seems carved away from much of what signifies as “contemporary America” in cinema today. The movie, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year, dwells in a landscape that imbues it with the starkness of classic Western frontier drama. Seventeen-year-old Ree Dolly is the single-minded heroine who has to venture into the wilderness to save her family home — the dwelling of her younger brother and sister and infirm mother — from repossession. To do so, she must find her wandering father, who, after a prison stint, is rumored to have died in a meth-lab explosion. Relying on little more than information meted out by her father’s estranged brother, Teardrop (superbly played by John Hawkes), and confronting a group of meth producers who do not want their secrets poked into, Dolly takes us into a world that is both of this country and defiantly sheltered away from it. Her journey, of course, is something of a coming-of-age tale, but Granik shies away from any of the genre’s more sentimental flourishes. Dolly’s efforts do lead to her father, but the film is as much about her education in the ways of the criminal subculture she’s been brought up around and the family ties that may keep her from ever entirely escaping it.

Winter’s Bone is Granik’s second feature, premiering in Park City six years after her debut, Down to the Bone. In that similarly tough-minded film Vera Farmiga played a mother struggling to kick her drug addiction while holding down low-wage work and raising her children. With this new film, Granik and her producing and writing partner Anne Rosellini enlarge their canvas considerably, venturing into an Ozark community that has rarely been portrayed so realistically on screen. Shot on the RED One in chilly blues and grays … Read the rest

Fraud Alert

Charles Ferguson follows up his hard-hitting Iraq War documentary, No End in Sight, with another investigative look at a complicated and controversial subject: the global economic crisis. In Inside Job, Ferguson indicts the growth of the banking industry for causing the global economic crisis, asking why not a single person has gone to jail because of it. By Scott Macaulay

TIME’S UP: KATHRYN BIGELOW’S THE HURT LOCKER |
By Nick Dawson

Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed The Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow for our Spring 2009 issue. The Hurt Locker is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Bigelow), Best Actor (Jeremy Renner), Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Best Cinematography (Barry Ackroyd), Best Editing (Bob Murawski and Chris Innis), Best Original Score (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders), Best Sound Editing (Paul N.J. Ottosson) and Best Sound Mixing (Paul N.J. Ottosson and Ray Beckett).

Now that the end is in sight for the Iraq war, hopefully the whole cinematic idea of “Iraq War fatigue” will go along with it. The phrase has been thrown around by industry journalists as a catchall term to describe the average American’s ostensible lack of desire to watch films set against the Middle East conflict. But if there was ever a director who could turn the tide, it is Kathryn Bigelow, who has returned to features for the first time since 2002 with her new movie The Hurt Locker.

The film tells the story of army bomb disposal expert Sgt. Will James (the superb Jeremy Renner), who must survive the final 38 days of his detail in Iraq if he is to make it home to his wife and child. However, unlike the other two soldiers on his team, Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), James thrives on the intense risk and danger of having to diffuse roadside bombs and IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in the Baghdad war zone, day in and day out. His gonzo approach to his job makes him, for Sanborn and Eldridge, just as dangerous as the snipers on top of the surrounding rooftops.

Written by investigative journalist-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, who embedded with a volunteer army bomb disposal squad in Iraq in 2004, The Hurt Locker is a riveting movie that vividly conveys what it’s like to be on the ground in Iraq. It concerns itself not with the politics of the war, but with the … Read the rest

PUSHING AWAY: LEE DANIELS’S PRECIOUS |
By Jason Guerrasio

Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Jason Guerrasio interviewed Precious director Lee Daniels for our Fall 2009 issue. Precious is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Daniels), Best Actress (Gabourey Sidibe), Best Adapted Screenplay (Geoffrey Fletcher) and Best Editing (Joe Klotz).

It’s November 2007 and manager-turned-producer-turned director Lee Daniels is shooting a film in New York City for the first time. Having already been shut down by the NYPD for going over his permit time in Harlem, he’s now in a cramped apartment in the Chelsea section of Manhattan working with a crew he’s not clicking with and horrible reviews of his previous film hang over his head. But none of this seemed to be bothering him when I meet him on the Precious set. With his infectious laugh and signature unkempt hair, Daniels walks around the set like a mad scientist. Discussing the previous shot with his d.p., he then heads to the makeup trailer to look over Mo’Nique’s physical transformation into Mary, his film’s grotesque vision of motherhood. Finally he returns to his trailer and sinks into his couch. Unseen by the rest of the cast and crew, he seems exhausted. “I find myself weaker each time I do a movie,” Daniels sighs. “It takes a bit of my soul.”

Before Daniels made his mark as a producer with the Oscar-winning Monster’s Ball, he was on a mission to make Precious, an adaptation of poet and novelist Sapphire’s acclaimed novel Push. It’s the story of Claireece “Precious” Jones, an overweight 16-year-old who battles illiteracy and has given birth to one child by her father with another of his on the way. She has also learned that he has transmitted HIV to her. Made fun of at school and abused at home by her mother, Precious is given the opportunity to change her life by enrolling in an alternative school, and Sapphire tells her story in a harrowing stream-of-consciousness that has a distinctive … Read the rest

IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER: JASON REITMAN’S UP IN THE AIR |
By Scott Macaulay

Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Scott Macaulay interviewed Up in the Air co-writer-director Jason Reitman for our Fall 2009 issue. Up in the Air is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Reitman), Best Actor (George Clooney), Best Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner).

Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, which debuted at Telluride and went on to critical acclaim at Toronto, is a perfect film to watch at a film festival. It stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a frequent-flying corporate downsizer whose Zen of life consists of collecting miles, amassing perks at his favorite hotel chains, crashing parties with great hors d’oeuvres spreads, and the serendipities of chance, no-commitment hookups. Indeed, one colleague said to me at Toronto after seeing the film, “I don’t know whether I liked the film because it’s a good film or because I think I’m that guy.”

But if the above makes Up in the Air sound like a light-hearted boomer comedy, a Wedding Crashers of the skies, that’s far from the case. Bingham’s job as he jets from city to city is to fire people. Lots of people. He’s brought in to do mass layoffs, and while his smooth talk applies a psychological salve to the destroyed egos of the suddenly unemployed, neither Bingham nor Reitman are under any pretenses that it’s anything more than a temporary Band-Aid intended to keep them from falling part before they leave the room. One of the astonishing things about Up in the Air is the clear eye it casts on 2009 America and a workforce undergoing the shock treatment of recession, outsourcing and the creative destruction of so many of our traditional industries. Reitman cast real fired workers in his film and what might have become a casting stunt is quite the opposite: Their voices are honest ones that humanize the employment indices that scroll along the bottom of our flat … Read the rest

THE MOURNING AFTER: TOM FORD’S A SINGLE MAN |
By Peter Bowen

Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Peter Bowen interviewed A Single Man co-writer-director Tom Ford for our Winter 2010 issue. A Single Man is nominated for Best Actor (Colin Firth).

Although fashion and film have always been closely intertwined, Tom Ford may be the first fashion designer to cross over to the role of filmmaker. To be sure, his debut feature, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, reflects his immaculate sense of style. But its story, a melancholy tale of a day in the life of a middle-aged college professor (Colin Firth) who is still mourning the unexpected death of his longtime lover Jim (Matthew Goode), is a far cry from the sex-saturated tableaus that Ford created for the fashion world. The novel, which at its inception reflected Isherwood’s own fear of losing his lover Don Bachardy to another man, is a very internal work, capturing through its interior dialogue the profound questions that the most banal events in one’s life inspire. To translate the book to film, Ford reworked its plot so that protagonist George Falconer now plans to commit suicide at day’s end, making his every moment charged for us by the realization that it is among the last of his life. His dalliance with an infatuated college student (Nicholas Hoult), his drunken dinner with Charley (Julianne Moore), his best friend from London, and even his painful run-ins with dolefully conventional neighbors the Strunks all resonate with the singular sense of mortality. The novel’s title, after all, underscores the inescapable individuality by which each of us must confront life and death as much as it does George’s marital status.

When Ford left the design house Gucci five years ago, he talked about wanting to make a feature film, although what and when remained open questions. In 2006, he acquired the rights to Isherwood’s A Single Man, started reading up on directing, and wrote and rewrote the script about 15 times. Ford … Read the rest

JUDITH EHRLICH AND RICK GOLDSMITH, THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN IN AMERICA |
By Damon Smith

Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Damon Smith interviewed The Most Dangerous Man In America directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith for our Director Interviews section of the Website. The Most Dangerous Man In America is nominated for Best Documentary.

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 (… Read the rest

ANDERS ØSTERGAARD, BURMA VJ |
By Nick Dawson

Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Burma VJ director Anders Østergaard for our Director Interviews section of the Website. Burma VJ is nominated for Best Documentary.

Danish cinema currently has numerous talented fiction directors – everybody from Lars von Trier, Christopher Boe, Ole Bornedal, and Susanne Bier to Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Nicolas Winding Refn and Lone Scherfig – and now Anders Østergaard is bringing attention to the country’s documentary output. Born in Copenhagen in 1965, Østergaard studied at the Danish School of Journalism, graduating in 1991, before deciding to eschew a career as a journalist to become a documentarian. Throughout his career, he has been concerned with the boundaries of non-fiction and with the idea of documentary itself. Østergaard’s debut film, Gensyn med Johannesburg (1996), was about filmmaker Henning Carlsen’s return to the eponymous South African city, where 35 years earlier he had shot the docudrama Dilemma. Since then, Østergaard has become particularly interested in documentary reenactments: he recreated the death of Swedish jazz musician Jan Johansson in Troldkarlen (1999), and in Tintin et Moi (2003) he used 3D animation to explore the previously two-dimensional world of Hergé’s cartoons. In 2006, he scored a big hit in his home country with Gasolin’, a portrait of the Danish 70s rock band of the same name, and in 2008 followed it up with Så kort og mærkeligt livet er, about Danish poet Dan Turéll.

Østergaard’s latest film, Burma VJ, once again grapples with how and why we capture the world on film. It was initially meant to be a small-scale film about “Joshua,” a junior video reporter living in Rangoon, the largest city in Burma, who is part of the Democratic Voice of Burma (or DVB). Though any journalistic activity is banned under the current Burmese junta, the DVB risk their lives and freedom to secretly document government suppression in the country so that its own citizens, as well as the … Read the rest

A KNOCK ON THE DOOR: OREN MOVERMAN’S THE MESSENGER |
By Ira Sachs

Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Ira Sachs interviewed The Messenger co-writer-director Oren Moverman for our Fall 2009 issue. The Messenger is nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Woody Harrelson) and Best Original Screenplay (Alessandro Camon and Oren Moverman).

The two Iraq war soldiers played by Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson in Oren Moverman’s astonishing directorial debut, The Messenger, serve in a different kind of military theater. It’s not in the Middle East but at home, here in America, as they are dispatched by the Casualty Notification Office to tell family members that their sons, daughters, brothers or sisters have been killed in combat. As he undertakes this mission, Foster’s character is just out of a military hospital and still traumatized by battle. He’s paired with Harrelson’s character, a senior officer whose precisely delivered speeches and irreverent personal credo are his own form of armor. As the two men become friends, exposing to each other their vulnerabilities, fears and failings, Moverman depicts an America in which the violence of the war has been refracted through language, belief systems and the ways we interact with not only each other but also ourselves. But as much as this film is about words and speech, it’s also fiercely visual, with compelling compositions underscored by occasional blasts of speed metal and coiled editing rhythms. With The Messenger, Moverman has made an ambitious, compelling debut that announces his arrival as one of our major directors.

Moverman is well known to Filmmaker readers for his screenplay work. He’s carved out a unique career writing or co-writing scripts for some of today’s top auteurs, including Alison Maclean (Jesus’ Son), Todd Haynes (I’m Not There) and Ira Sachs (Married Life). He’s also got scripts in the works for Scott Free, Joel Silver and Jean-Luc Godard. (Moverman is scripting an adaptation of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million for the legendary Swiss director.) And … Read the rest