LARS VON TRIER IS CANNES’ “PERSONA NON GRATA”

By Scott Macaulay

I missed the Wednesday morning Melancholia screening, having to moderate a table at the Producers Network breakfast the same time, but afterwards I happened to catch a snippet of the press conference. I tweeted a few comments, namely ones in which the director talked about this relationship with the film’s d.p., who started the project by telling him not to behave like so many “old or middle-aged directors and make [his actresses] younger and more naked.” “Don’t tell me that,” Von Trier said he told the cinematographer. Watching press conferences on those little TVs in the basement of the Palais is always kind of boring, so I went to explore the market… and missed the pyrotechnics that followed.

By now, you’ve undoubtedly read this elsewhere, but in the event that you haven’t… The Danish director has been officially declared “persona non grata” by the Cannes Film Festival for comments made during the press conference concerning Hitler and Nazism. (These comments followed a question about von Trier’s recently discovered German ancestry and began with a swipe against fellow Danish director Susanne Bier, and grew progressively dicier in the logorrhea that followed.) I don’t know enough about Von Trier’s relationship with Bier to know what he was initially trying to do here…

His comments:

For a long time I thought I was a Jew and I was happy to be a Jew, then I met Susanne Bier, and I wasn’t so happy. But then I found out I was actually a Nazi. My family was German. And that also gave me some pleasure. What can I say? I understand Hitler. I think he did some wrong things, yes absolutely, but I can see him sitting in his bunker in the end. I think I understand the man. He’s not what you would call a good guy, but I understand much about him and I sympathise with him a little bit. I don’t mean I’m in favor of World War II and I’m not against Jews, not even Susanne Bier. In fact I’m very much in favor of them. All Jews. Well, Israel

… Read the rest

SCORSESE AND VON TRIER OR SCORSESE, DE NIRO & FELLINI?

By Jason Guerrasio

We’ve kinda been down this road before. In early 2010, around the time of the Berlin Film Festival, reports rumors hit the blogsphere that Lars von Trier, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro were planning a remake of  Taxi Driver in the vein of The Five Obstructions by making it five times, each with rules created by von Trier.

Now out of Cannes, Scorsese and von Trier are bringing up the idea again. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Scorsese project to be dissected has not been decided yet but shooting will begin after Scorsese is done with the Daniel Day-Lewis-starrer Silence.

This news got me thinking about another project Scorsese has on the back burner — he and De Niro making a Fellini-like film that looks back on the tandem’s incredible collaboration. The idea, created by screenwriter Eric Roth, goes like this: While making their next film The Irishman — an adaptation of the book I Hear You Paint Houses, which looks at the life of alleged Jimmy Hoffa murderer, Frank Sheeran and also stars Al Pacino and Joe Pesci — Scorsese would shoot a side project that meshes footage from the film with a story based on he and De Niro’s experiences in Hollywood that would be in the style of an 8 1/2 or La Dolce Vita.

Now it goes without saying that pulling this off is a gargantuan task, even for Scorsese and De Niro, but when I spoke to De Niro during the release of Limitless he said he still wants to do it and it still might happen. It probably was a long shot then, but what does the von Trier news now mean not only for the possibility of this project but when The Irishman will be made?

Time will tell. But for now let’s have some fun.

If you could only see one, would you rather see Scorsese and von Trier remake Five Obstructions or Scorsese and De Niro make a film on their careers through the style of Fellini?

 … Read the rest

ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT: LOOKING AHEAD TO THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL

By Livia Bloom

In a time zone six hours away, the espresso is stockpiled. The line-up is out. The hotels are booked. The contestants are in their corners. It’s time for the industry’s storied annual trade show/summer camp, the Cannes Film Festival. Actors, producers and executives will tend to prioritize networking events, while film programmers, distributors and journalists will gorge on films until the juice runs down their faces. I plan to gobble movies until my eyes glaze over, flickering like bionic screens.

A colleague recently complained about the tendency of festival goers to refer to films not by title but by the director’s name, which strikes him as pretentious. For instance, as avid fans and Filmmaker readers are discovering, trailers and teaser clips have already trickled online for hot-ticket items like The Terrance Malick (Tree of Life), The Lars von Trier (Melancholia) and The Pedro Almodovar (The Skin that I Live In). (Click the links to see the trailers for yourself, and let us know what your think in the comments section below. For me, these inspire an icy finger of fear–-surely the new films from these contemporary auteurs are not as bad as their trailers make them look appear?)

In defense of, ahem, anyone who would do such a thing, may I plead poor memory and poorer pronunciation? For example, loyalists affectionately know one of the most anticipated films in the festival as The Lynne Ramsay. The actual title is… There’s Something About Kevin? Let’s Talk About Kevin? What We Talk About When We Talk About Kevin? Make that, We Need to Talk About Kevin. Not only does the director-moniker nickname avoid confusion and inaccuracy, it also offers the pleasure of remembering, each time one mentions a new and unknown work, the cinematic pleasures that director created before. The previous Lynne Ramsays are Ratcatcher (1999) and Morvern Callar (2002), both brilliant and beloved favorites.

Another film whose presence on the Official Competition slate made my pulse quicken was The Aki Kaurismaki (Le Havre). This is the second time … Read the rest

SIX ASIDES ON “PARANORMAL ACTIVITY 2″

Paranormal Activity 2 is not an avant-garde film, but only because no one has argued that it is.

1. The Importance of Framing
The difference between commercial culture (pop culture) and the avant-garde is a matter of rhetorical framing. Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, created the conditions for the New Wave not only through his films, but through his words about his films, and about cinema in general. Confrontational, witty, manifesto-like, Godard framed the way people saw his films. Godard was an auteur of language, not just cinema. “A movie should have a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he famously said, “but not necessarily in that order.” Or “The cinema is truth 24-frames per second.” Like Lars von Trier (“it’s always been a lie that it’s difficult to make films”) he brought his ideas to a boil in public so that watching his movies became inseparable from recalling what he said about his movies or about cinema. (At the opposite end of the spectrum, there is the relative silence of directors like Stanley Kubrick or Terrence Malick, whose public withdrawal itself constitutes an aura of mystery.)

2. Creative Restraint
In his excellent book How a Film Theory Got Lost, in the chapter “How to Start an Avant-Garde” Robert Ray explores how, against our intuitive sense that the avant-garde strives to separate itself from the mainstream, in fact just the opposite is more often true. To those who caution that, in today’s environment of rapid cooption there is no room for the avant-garde to thrive separate from mass culture, Ray reminds his readers of how “the avant-garde itself has, throughout its history, promoted its own acceptance.” He notes, for instance, how many avant-garde movements have a “star” associated with them, someone who attracts the attention and publicity of the mainstream, such as Picasso (Cubism), Breton (Surrealism), Warhol (Pop Art), Godard (The New Wave), Johnny Rotten (Punk), or Derrida (Deconstruction). Were the Sex Pistols any less radical because of their notoriety?

Paranormal Activity 2’s fixed cameras constitute a form of creative restraint that push the boundaries of cinematic narrative. … Read the rest

TRAILER WATCH: KIRSTEN DUNST IN LARS VON TRIER’S “MELANCHOLIA”

By Scott Macaulay

The trailer is both gorgeous and slightly perplexing — and after Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, seems to be continuing a trend of arthouse psychological planet movies. In truth, I can’t wait for this this new, presumably Cannes-bound pic from Lars Von Trier.

Melancholia from Zentropa on Vimeo.… Read the rest

FILMMAKER FLASHBACK: FALL, 1995

By Scott Macaulay

A number of cool things about our Fall, 1995 issue. First, the cover portrait of Tim Roth was an original by Nan Goldin, which was a pretty amazing coup for us at the time. Roth was one of the stars of Four Rooms, a now barely-remembered omnibus film all set in a hotel with segments helmed by Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell. Roth had shaved his head for a part when this photo was taken, so he was kind of unrecognizable, but we were still thrilled to have an original of Nan’s. L.M. Kit Carson did the interview with all the directors. The film? Well, the standard deal with most omnibus films is that one segment is great, one is terrible, and the rest float somewhere in the middle, making the completed films somewhat lumpy viewing experiences. This one was no different.

Here’s the entirety of the Tarantino interview. (The bracketed parts are from Carson.)

Carson: Want to talk about Four Rooms?

Quentin Tarantino: [Laughs and laughs.]

Carson: Say “No.” Just say “No” so I can quote you.

Tarantino: No. [Laughs.] You gotta get famous. [He is scrambling through boxes of free merchandise sent to his office.] Look, they just give you all these things. Free shoes. [He holds up a pair of oversized fire-engine red tennis shoes.] Odd fact is: I had co-producer slot on a small studio movie (a whole other story) shooting at the same time back in December. And I’d drive, 12 minutes from this small set, to the big studio lot for meetings. And driving through the studio gates was like driving into a Magritte painting. The place was motionless. Stop-frame. Semi-surreal. Echoing footsteps. Maybe some lone figure standing insecurely in a long slanting shadow. Like: nothing going on here. Except the feeling of gigantic corporate secrets hatching someplace deep inside this joint.

[Fact is, corporate-land was making big changes. Disney/ABC. Westinghouse/CBS. Time Warner/Turner. And they tell us: this is the Future.]

But I’d go back and forth from the ever-more-monolithic studio to this rackety rolling-and-tumbling Four Rooms

… Read the rest

NICOLAS WINDING REFN, “VALHALLA RISING”

By Lauren Wissot

Valhalla Rising, which stars Mads Mikkelsen (best known for playing the much more suave devil Le Chiffre in Casino Royale) as a one-eyed, mute, enslaved gladiator who joins a group of Viking Christians on a conquest that turns into an existential journey to hell, is certainly not what one would expect from Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. And that’s part of the beauty of the film. Before this latest atmospheric mood piece containing echoes of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Refn helmed the hyperkinetic Bronson, about England’s most dangerous criminal turned cult hero who never seemed at a loss for words or fists. Prior to that Refn made his name crafting stories from the drug-dealing underworld in his Pusher trilogy (which, incidentally, was Mikkelsen’s launching pad into film). Refn it seems is less like his fellow Dane Lars Von Trier and more like American Steven Soderbergh, both directors in constant motion, striving less to create important art than to simply surprise themselves. And by doing so, they often achieve both.

Filmmaker: Watching Valhalla Rising I kept thinking of certain American movies, but maybe that’s just because as an American most of my touchstones are American. The film felt like 2001: A Space Odyssey with the sound design from The Shining. Also, Malick’s The New World once the characters reach “The Holy Land” chapter. But once again, this might just be because I’m a huge fan of Kubrick and Malick. Who or what were your influences going into production?

Nicolas Winding Refn: Yeah, there’s 2001, a lot of that in Valhalla. There’s also El Topo, the Jodorowsky movie. The film was very much a mixture of the films I grew up watching.

Filmmaker: Was The Shining in there at all? I kept hearing Kubrick.

Refn: Ah, I think probably in the use of non-music — but not so consciously. The music itself was very much inspired by experimental sound like Einstürzende Neubauten.

Filmmaker: Really? I’m a big fan of Nick Cave. (Interviewer’s note: Einstürzende Neubauten’s lead vocalist and guitarist Blixa Bargeld is … Read the rest

VON TRIER/SCORSESE/DE NIRO MAY BE PONDERING “TAXI DRIVER” REMAKE

UPDATE 2/16: Screen reports that the remake rumors are just that.

The biggest news so far to come out of the Berlin Film Festival is on a film that was made 36 years ago.

Spreading all over the blogs, Lars von Trier and Martin Scorsese are supposedly mulling over the idea of remaking Taxi Driver with Robert De Niro to reprise the role of Travis Bickle. In Variety, Gunnar Rehlin reports:

The idea behind the project is similar to the film The Five Obstructions that von Trier and Danish helmer Jorgen Leth made in 2003. In that film, von Trier challenged his colleague Leth to do a remake of his own 1967 film The Perfect Human. Von Trier gave Leth the taks of remaking five times, each with a different obstacle, such as making the film animated.

Now don’t head over to the ledge just yet. So far no one is talking but that should change as both Scorsese and von Trier are in Berlin and there’s supposed to be a statement coming out shortly.

Scorsese has always toyed with the idea of making a sequel to Taxi Driver, but I don’t know how a remake could be (dare I say) watchable. To be continued…… Read the rest

LARS VON TRIER, “THE BOSS OF IT ALL”

By Nick Dawson

JENS ALBINUS AND IBEN HJEJLE IN LARS VON TRIER’S THE BOSS OF IT ALL. COURTESY IFC FIRST TAKE.

Lars von Trier, the enfant terrible of world cinema, is always looking for the next thing to surprise or wrongfoot audiences. He made only three features in the first decade of his career, and though The Element of Crime (1984), Epidemic (1987), and Zentropa (1991) were all critical successes that ably demonstrated von Trier’s cinematic gifts, it is since then that he has truly excelled. In this period, not only has he founded the revolutionary Dogme 95 movement, but completed the Gold Hearted trilogy – made up of Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998) and Dancer in the Dancer (2000) – and made the first two parts of his American trilogy, Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005). All of these have been provocative, emotionally intense and technically innovative movies, cinema which has challenged the norm and polarized opinion. Though hailed as one of the saviors of modern cinema, von Trier often seems more comfortable in his self-assigned role as villain, and reports of brutal, bullying treatment of his leading ladies (Björk and Nicole Kidman, in particular) have only compounded this image.

All of this makes The Boss of It All, his latest film, all the more surprising. Though flashes were visible in The Idiots, this is the first time we see von Trier’s subversive, almost zany, sense of humor really come to the fore. Ravn (Peter Ganzler), the head of an IT firm, has always told his staff that there was a mysterious, absent boss so that when difficult decisions needed to be made, he could put the blame on someone else. However when he wants to sell the company, he is required to get this shadowy CEO to appear and sign away the firm, and must get an unemployed actor, Stoffer (Jens Albinus), to play what becomes the role of a lifetime. The film deals with sex, power, and manipulation – all trademark von Trier themes – and is shot with Automavision, an innovation in which the camera … Read the rest

REVITALIZED VON TRIER

By Scott Macaulay

Adam Dawtry reports in Variety on the latest in artistic gamesmanship from Lars von Trier, who announces a “Statement of Revitality” on the eve of shooting his new film, The Boss of it All.

Reacting against various elements of the financing and publicity machine for arthouse cinema, Von Trier has put the last film of his Brechtian America-set Dogville trilogy on hold and is searching, as he did when he created “Dogma 95,” for a new way of working.

Here’s his statment:

“In conjunction with the departure of Vibeke Windelov, who has been my producer for ten years, and the arrival of Meta Louise Foldager in her place, I intend to reschedule my professional activities in order to rediscover my original enthusiasm for film.

Over the last few years I have felt increasingly burdened by barren habits and expectations (my own and other people) and I feel the urge to tidy up.

In regards to product development this will mean more time on freer terms; i.e. projects will be allowed to undergo true development and not merely be required to meet preconceived demands. This is partly to liberate me from routine, and in particular from scriptual structures inherited from film to film.

I will aim to reduce the scope of my productions in regards to funding, technology, the size of the crew, and particularly casting, but I should like to expand the time spent shooting them.

I want to launch my products on a scale which matches the more ascetic nature of the films, and aimed at my core audience: i.e. my films will be promoted considerably less glamorously than at present, which also means without World Premieres at prestigious, exotic festivals.

With regard to PR, my intention is for a heavy reduction in quantity, compensated for by more thorough exploration in the quality press.

In short, in my fiftieth year I feel I have earned the privilege of narrowing down. I hope that this attempt at personal revitalization will bear fruit, enabling me to meet my own needs in terms of curiosity and play, and to contribute … Read the rest