In this excerpt of our interview with Lee Daniels on his award-winning film Precious, which will be in the upcoming Fall issue, Jason Guerrasio talks to the director-producer about his connection with the book the film is based on, molding first-time actor Gabby Sadibe into Precious and his conflicts with the crew while making the film.

Precious screens at the Toronto International Film Festival this evening and will be in theaters in November.




Filmmaker: Did reading Push bring back any memories of what you went through growing up in Philly?

Lee Daniels: I had not experienced the things that Precious had experienced. Maybe a little bit, but I knew so many Preciouses in my life. I didn’t have to deal with obesity but I knew all those nuances. I brought my world, the world that I grew up in, to Mary’s (Precious's mother's) home. The living room in Mary’s home from the wall paper to the portraits on the wall to the couch, they’re all memories of my childhood.

Filmmaker: Did you ever ask Sapphire why she reconsidered and let you adapt her book (before producing Monster's Ball, Daniels approached Sapphire about him producing an adaptation of the book, she declined)?

Daniels: No. [laughs] I was too nervous that the no was coming. I was just grateful that she did.

Filmmaker: Did she come on set?

Daniels: She has a small part. She takes Precious’s child at the end when she’s about the walk up the stairs to the office. She was also on set one day, and I was really nervous, and it was when Mary (played by Mo'Nique) tells Precious that her father is dead. I just remember her laughing because I was laughing. And it’s a very serious scene and Mo’Nique was laughing, so we all were. And I asked Sapphire recently why are we laughing in the most politically incorrect places and it’s because we understand it on another level.

Filmmaker: I think what people will be surprised about when watching the film is that it’s okay to laugh.

Daniels: When I introduce the film I always say it’s okay to laugh. Embrace it. And I think we laugh because we’re not supposed to. Nervous laughter.

Filmmaker: Were there things you learned from doing Shadowboxer (the first film Daniels directed) that helped you direct this film?

Daniels: I guess subliminally. I brought the same energy, the same person, the same everything. I didn’t do anything different, even as a producer I had the same spirit. My boyfriend says this, I don’t know, but he says that I was much more serious for this one. I think what happens is you get older. And I was a little smarter, I knew what I wanted in a take faster so I could get in and out quicker. And this is my second time working with Mariah (Carey) and Mo’Nique so there was a shorthand that we had. There were just grunts, literally, I would just grunt or use my eyes or hands and they would get what I meant.

Filmmaker: Then you have Gabby and she’s in every scene and she’s never acted. So I guess you were able to mold her into the actress that you wanted.

Daniels: Yeah. It’s brilliant how you can have that type of relationship. She was a godsend. I mean, you can’t call up an agency and say give me a 300 pound woman so we did an open call and it was really hard. I had over 500 girls audition across the country and we did a Precious camp where girls worked with my acting coach, they came from Philly, Baltimore, Chicago, New York and L.A. But the thing was they were very true, they were Precious and Gabby is not Precious. What you see in the fantasy scenes, the way she talks, ect., that’s her. Gabby wasn’t even in the boot camp, she came out of nowhere and just showed up in an audition one day. But she plays the role so convincingly that people will meet Gabby and think she should be talking the way she does in the film, I even did. When she snapped out of it I would go, oh, that’s right.

Filmmaker: Did you have to put her through language training to make her speak less educated?

Daniels: Yes, that was hard. And you know I used to be a manger for talent and I remember that when I had African-American talent during the ’80s and they would go in for auditions the casting director would say, “Great, but can you do that a little more ghetto?” [laughs] So I felt like oh my god this is not happening because I’m here telling Gabby to do the same thing. But we worked on deepening her voice, working from the gut because in real life she speaks from the head, and slowing down the speech. Often times just thinking about how my cousin spoke. I mean the guy who wrote the script, Geoffrey Fletcher, is an incredible writer, Ivy League school, teacher at Columbia, so it was written how you and I speak and we’d have to go back and remember how certain words were said or phrased at that time.

Filmmaker: Did you guys go back and forth on where you would set the film, present day or period like the book?

Daniels: We went back and forth and it was the general consensus that we do it in the ’80s because I don’t think it would have the impact if we set it in the present, especially the AIDS issue because back then if you got it you were going to die. No questions.

Filmmaker: Did you underestimate how hard it would be to shoot in New York City?

Daniels: Yes. In the back of my head I believe that I can get anything [for my film] but when you have so many obstacles in front of you I started to question myself. It was a very hard experience and I had no idea how radical and difficult it would be.

Filmmaker: How so?

Daniels: I don’t know, I just think I am who I am and often times I’m misunderstood and you can take my laughter and wanting everyone to get along as me being passive but a good portion [of the crew] didn’t understand the vision or what I wanted to execute.

Filmmaker: I’ve read that you fired d.p.’s, editors and sound people.

Daniels: You know it’s okay because people think that once that train leaves the station that you cannot get fired, that they are going to do their own twirl and do what they want to do and when you see that your vision isn’t executed to exactly how you see it in your head and ignore what you want, yes, you have to stop and I think filmmakers have to know that. You should never work in fear, nor should you work with people that don’t get you. The problem was the people who I’ve grown close with were unavailable because we got the money so last minute that everyone that I wanted was working. So I had these new people, all from New York, and I was forced to work with this person or that person. What? So now suddenly the painting’s supposed to happen? No. It’s painful. The actors were great, you’ll never hear about me firing an actor but I think this was a very difficult shoot and ultimately I fell in love with my editor and d.p. and production designer and costume person. I mean, it takes a minute to understand who I am too. I’m not easy. [laughs] And let me tell you, people will compromise your vision, they will compromise your work and that’s when you have to stand up for it and that’s painful. I think we want everyone to like us so we just smile and then the minute you stand your ground and say no this is not what I want and they say this is the way it should be that’s when they have to leave.

Read the complete interview with Daniels in the Fall issue of Filmmaker on stands in October.

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 9:02 AM Comments (0)

Chaste is not a word often associated with the films of Jane Campion. From the boudoirs of The Portrait of a Lady to the rough frontier bedrooms of The Piano (1993), Campion is known for her steamy, sultry visions of intimacy. But in her latest film, Bright Star, the only female filmmaker to win the Palme d’Or puts the gloves on, telling the tale of British poet John Keats and his love, Fanny Brawne, with modesty and restraint.

Keats died at the age of 25, before he could find the critical and financial success to wed his beloved. Yet Brawne, an accomplished seamstress, was committed to their relationship despite his worldly circumstances. Campion considers her a “love rebel,” a woman who could have hoped to for a wealthy husband, but instead chose to follow her heart. “It’s quite difficult to imagine the extent to which marriage would have ruled us girls and women,” Campion explains. “At the time, I think a good marriage was like a good job—one that would allow you to live the way you wanted—as opposed to be a crummy job. As long as the boss and the hours were okay, the job was great.”

For Campion, Bright Star reflects an interior mood, and grew out of a personal quest to understand Keats’s poetry. During time away from filmmaking after her contemporary thriller In the Cut, she felt a growing connection with the poet. So much so that when pre-production on the film began, Campion found herself startled by her project’s physical realization. “I can remember feeling overwhelmed in rehearsal when we always had so many people in the room; thinking, ‘What the fuck’s happening?’ she confided. “I’d spent most of my time alone, and then suddenly, in rehearsal, there were always four or five people around. I realized, ‘Oh! That’s because Fanny was hardly ever alone.’ That was the whole idea in those days—there was chaperoning in order to prevent what happened between Keats and Fanny from ever happening. Once people’s hearts are involved, it’s terribly difficult to undo it.”


Filmmaker: What brought you to Bright Star?

Jane Campion: This project was a surprise to me. After In the Cut (2003), I decided to take four years off. I made that choice as a mother, to be present bringing up my daughter, who was then eight or nine. But I also sensed, in a simple way, that I didn’t know who I was. I was 15 years old when I began filmmaking; I was curious to spend four years living quieter and finding out how I feel about things these days. Nobody thought I could manage it because I’m quite high-energy person. (Laughs) But I spent my time sewing. I embroidered pillow slips for my daughter and my friends.

I had read a biography of Keats by Andrew Motion [Keats (1998)] while researching In the Cut. There, I was creating a character that was a creative writing teacher. I felt vulnerable because I didn’t know much about poetry, something my character obviously would have been quite at home with. So I thought, “I’ll give myself a big delay with the writing, read this big fat biography, and I’ll maybe learn something.” About halfway through the story, Keats met Fanny, and from then on it was such a powerful tale of romance that I couldn’t believe it wasn’t better known. When you start reading their letters, you get an incredible sense of immediacy—they’re exactly the words Fanny would have read. For me, Keats’s letters were a portal into his poetry. I got the [Robert] Giddings book of his letters, and read them all. I found Keats absolutely adorable—so fresh and funny. His philosophy—his thoughts about negative capability, for example—were intriguing, and understanding him as a personality gave me courage to approach his poetry. He didn’t feel so different from myself.

I couldn’t imagine what the film’s story might be, however. I don’t really like biopics—I find them quite difficult. People these days, including myself, feel alienated from poetry, so a film about John Keats, the poet, seemed to me the most unwanted object in the world. (Laughs) But I hit upon the idea of telling the story from Fanny’s point of view, which would set some restrictions. I said to myself, “I won’t look at anything that she didn’t personally know about.” So it’s Fanny’s Keats, really. I also see it as a kind of ballad: The Ballad of Fanny and Keats. Of course it’s not the truth; I created a lot of scenes, like their first meeting and, well, ‘most everything. I kept the parameters of what I knew and what could be known to restrict and encircle me. I also didn’t try to up the ante. Instead of saying, “What interesting way could I do this?” I thought, “What is the most probable way that this would have happened?” I was relaxed and had very low expectations for where it might go. I just thought, “Well, this seems to be what I love,” and went ahead like that.


Filmmaker: Sewing and filmmaking share historical echoes; in early cinema, there were many women editors and editing was seen as a type of sewing. On your time off, did you sew pillow slips like the one Fanny makes in the film?

Campion: I didn’t do one as beautiful as that! (Laughs) I did one with horses for my daughter—she was crazy about horses at the time—and I probably got that idea for her pillow slips from my own sewing, yes. Fanny was an amazing seamstress. In her time, that’s how they made their wardrobes: by hand. Her sewing also represents a kind of patience that women had to have, or still have to have—a kind of patience that they learn. Sewing is a literal metaphor for making one’s will, stitch after stitch. Louise Bourgeois also has a lot of sewing and waiting in her work. I love that this film is an opportunity to look at the world, or look at an event, or at Keats happening, through the eyes of someone who was a sew-er and a wait-er.

It’s hard to make generalizations because there are a lot of patient men, too, but in times where opportunities were restricted, women managed to gain some great qualities—like patience. Patient people they do a lot less damage in the world. It’s the action heroes you’ve got to watch out for.

Filmmaker: Are you patient?

Campion: I think I am. I’m very persistent, and I take a long view. I always think in five- or three-year terms. I never mind what happens in the end, as long I like what I’m doing at the time. For example, if this film had never materialized, I still would have enjoyed writing the script. It always feels like it’s not going to happen, but I’m quite comfortable with that. I ask myself, “Am I enjoying what I’m doing what I’m doing right now?” And if I am, then it’s okay. The high moments are so fleeting. Going to Cannes, having your film in competition... That would seem like a high moment, but it really is over in the click of the fingers.

Filmmaker:How does Bright Star fit aesthetically with the stylized look of Sweetie (1989), Peel (1982) or your other films? Some directors’ visual styles define them, while you seem unusually comfortable moving between aesthetic realms.

Campion: For Bright Star, I wanted to experiment; to forget any “branded” look and find another way of looking at things. This story is so gentle and simple that I didn’t want you to feel any overreaching style. I wanted to disappear, really; that’s what I tried to do. What I cared about was the presence of those people, and any signature look would have been threatening to the more serious endeavor. Some people comment, “Oh, the film is very beautiful,” or whatever—that’s funny to me, because I never tried to make this film beautiful. If it is beautiful, it’s because of the sensations that it creates. In production, if a shot looked too beautiful we would say, “No. This isn’t right for this film, it should feel simple.”

During my time off, I started to do something that I’d never really done: go backwards and look at early films. My assistant was at film school, so she had access to lots of films. Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) was so tense and so simple—I really loved it, and you’re influenced by what you really love. I fell in love with his sense of classicism, and re-invented myself as a classicist. (Laughs) I put classicism down to ideas or thoughts about purity and simplicity. Not wanting to create sensation; not having an end in mind; letting the work discover its own impact. I realize that this story is very emotional, and the last thing I want is for people to feel manipulated. They’re going to have whatever reaction they have to it. Within my ballad idea, I just told it as straightforwardly as I could. When you see people who are trying to create a style that is impressive or something you just feel annoyed, “Oh, God. Sit down.”

I think I was more controlling in the earlier days. In Sweetie, I was straight out of film school and was experimenting without really knowing I was experimenting. We couldn’t afford all the tricks of the other guys, but we could afford to be daring about how we did things. I love Sweetie, it’s one of my favorite films. There’s nothing like innocence; you can never recreate it. Sweetie’s just Sweetie. But I didn’t think you could keep going that way. You just have to be where you are.

The Piano was experimenting with more epic kind of views, especially in regards to landscape, whereas Bright Star is more intimate. The English landscape isn’t as impressive as the New Zealand landscape, but it’s very darling. We were on location when we discovered that we were in a paddock with daffodils, or on the bluebell walk, for example. A lot of surprises popped up across the seasons as we were shooting. People are surprised that there are all actual real flowers, and that everything’s real in the film.

Shooting in London was difficult, because there was very little left from early 19th-century England. We worked at a place called Hyde House, which was about an hour from London. It was the first location we looked at, in fact. I thought, “Are we being very lazy?” (Laughs) We went upstairs and were exploring around when we saw a framed picture of the family after a hunt and in the background was a sign for a pub that said Bright Star! We thought, “We’re supposed to be here,” so we went to the pub and took a photo of the sign, which was a gorgeous deco-looking thing. I had it on my computer screen for a long time.

I love that things can work that way. Over time that we just kept using more and more things that they had on the estate that we weren’t expecting to use. We were lucky to have the Georgian house and the smaller one that we could use as a cottage on the property... Instead of thinking, “What’s the best, what’s the best? Ooh, I want that!” My experience is that the quieter you are, the more you notice that everything you need is around you.

Filmmaker:How does Bright Star fit in with your ongoing exploration of sexuality, and women’s sexuality in particular? Your representation of John and Fanny’s relationship is very chaste in comparison to other relationships that you have explored.

Campion: I think it was a chaste relationship. It definitely seems to have been so. I was grateful that that was the case, because I think an attraction of the story was its innocence and purity—not that sex isn’t innocent and pure, too! I’m sure that they did whatever they could; from the quality of the letters and the way that he talks to her, it seems pretty clear that they were close. The tenderness really struck me about the story; it provided the opportunity to explore delicate feelings as they first arise between people. How confusing and powerful they can be! The first indications of people being mutually interested are probably much tenser than the actual consummation of that interest.

Filmmaker: Do you think that is similar to the way that the characters of The Piano or The Portrait of a Lady (1996) viewed marriage?

Campion: See, I don’t think so. Each of those characters were in a kind of quarrel with their hearts and with good sense, which evaded them all. Isabel Archer made a devastating marriage. At least she knew it, and that could empower her at the end. Ada was pregnant without being married, so something had happened, some sort of passion or rebellion. In a quiet way, Fanny is also a love rebel. She chose for her heart, rather than for economic sense. It cost her a lot. It could have cost her almost her life, in a way, because she didn’t recover from Keats for many years. She wasn’t actually married to Keats, but she acted as if she was. After he died, she didn’t get married again until she was 33—for a beautiful young girl, that would have been a fairly devastating choice—and even then she married someone who was 21, perhaps remembering Keats’ youth.

Filmmaker: I love the friendship between the two men in Bright Star, and between the women in In the Cut and An Angel at My Table (1990). The women cuddle and share secrets; they have a unique kind of comfort with each other’s feelings and bodies.

Campion:Yes. In In the Cut, there was a moment between Jennifer Jason Leigh and Meg Ryan’s characters when I felt deeply thrilled because I guess it’s always been a latent mission to show that closeness that women have, the love they have for each other. In this film, it’s very clear that in a way, it’s a love triangle, because Brown really, really loved Keats too. Brown died in New Zealand, actually; he immigrated and died shortly thereafter. On his grave he had it read, “Friend of Keats.” So did Samuel [Brawne]. So did [John Hamilton] Reynolds. The sort of friendship they all had was probably the most powerful thing they had in their lives.

I really relate to that because I remember being at university in the days when you were flatting with your friends. The friendships were so powerful. It was probably the most joyous thing in life, that you had these great friends that you were going to do things with, explore the world with. I think Brown felt like he probably wouldn’t be able to realize his poetic hopes, but this guy Keats would. I think the feeling around Keats at the time from his friends was that Keats was somehow a genius. He had the right attitude and the right nature and ambition to achieve what they perhaps wanted to, though they could see they didn’t have quite the same talent.

Filmmaker:Is that similar to relationships that you’ve experienced?

Campion: I don’t think so. When you experience other talented people around you and are moved by their talent, you wonder what’s going to happen to them. Sometimes terrible things happen. The girl I think was the most brilliant in art school had a mental breakdown--like her mind was on fire and she just tipped over. She was an unlikely person, an Italian immigrant from a very conservative family who didn’t have any idea what she was thinking or doing.

The combinations required to bring a working relationship with your talent to the world are curious and strange. I’ve seen a lot of young women, whose work I thought was just amazing, just drop out. People I consider vastly more talented than myself… It’s heartbreaking. They cannot bear the stress, I think, of criticism. You ask, “Why didn’t you make another one?” It’s not worth it to them, it’s just too much. Too tough, too cruel, too intense.

In film school, we supported each other. A group of us used to work at night rather than during the day hours. We’d arrive at three in the afternoon and work through to six a.m. There was no one else in school at the time and it was fantastic. Those students taught me what I know.

Filmmaker: How would you describe your current collaborations?

Campion: As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more relaxed about collaboration, and more grateful for everything that it brings. When I was younger, I felt a lot of stress about controlling the project. I wasn’t very adaptable to seeing in a different way, or seeing how other people’s contributions could add to what we were trying to do. It could feel like a threat. “Not my way!” (Laughs) Of course you’re careful to choose people where you like what they’re doing, and now I really enjoy what different people can bring.

On this film, I worked with quite a lot of people, and many who are quite young. Janet Patterson, of course, I’ve worked with forever. During those four years off, I made a little short film for the United Nations where we tried some of these young people. We had to, because we couldn’t afford more collaborators, but it was also a conscious decision to work with some new people. Greig Fraser, who is the D.O.P., and Mark Bradshaw [the composer] also worked on that short film—and I really enjoyed the way they did their work. I thought they were fantastic: the energy, the way they approached things. It was pretty easy choice to work with them again, although some people would’ve thought it was risky to use a 23- or 24-year-old composer without any credits. (Laughs) He’s got a credit now! But I thought, “Hello, Keats was 23 when he wrote his major works. When is anybody going to trust anybody?” At 15, I remember feeling like, “I know everything that the adults know. I haven’t had any experience with it, but I can see the same things.”

I really think there’s nothing stopping what a 23-year-old doing what a 32-year old could do. It’s quite thrilling, in a way. Looking back at a different time—the 19th-century, the 1820s, when so many died so young—there was a feeling that if you were talented, get on with it, because your life might not last very long. Now’s the time. So when Keats wrote, “When I have fears that I may cease to be/Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,” he must’ve felt, “God, I’m going to die not having done what I can do!” He keeps calming himself by looking at the wide world and feeling his smallness.

Filmmaker: Is that odds with being patient?

Campion: Definitely. Keats always worked in opposites. He often talked about wanting the stability—as in Bright Star itself—of a distant star, which seems ever steady; but at the same time, wishing for the closeness of breath against his cheek or something, and knowing the two things were incompatible. I guess that’s the charm of humans: wanting the impossible.

Filmmaker: I’ve often noticed your characters’ animal impersonations. In your third short film, there’s an intense sex scene between the two young people who begin by imitating cats.

Campion: I don’t know why, but I love cats. When I first saw Ben Wishaw, I thought, “Oh my God, he’s a cat.” (Laughs) He was waiting outside the audition doo, and he just looked like the most beautiful black cat you’d ever seen. I think there is a mysterious quality to people that apparently can be brushed over because they speak. (Laughter) But it’s their creature quality that I fall in love with. I like people who don’t talk.

Oh, the casting process! It’s quite frightening, I think, because you’re making the most important decisions about your film—when you know the least about it. (Laughs) In this situation, I didn’t even get to see Ben and Abbie together. I had photographs, could blow them up so they can be whatever equivalent size and put them together, could find out their heights, but I couldn’t know in advance how they’d look, how they’d be.

Filmmaker:Did they look and work together the way you expected?

Campion: It was better than I was hoping, actually. They really liked each other, in an animal way, immediately. Both of them are bad liars, so it wouldn’t have worked otherwise. (Laughs) You have to be an incredible optimist, and a pessimist at the same time. You have to imagine all the problems, and then take a cheery attitude and work it out.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 5:49 AM Comments (0)

Here's the way it used to be. You made an edgy, well-received independent film, one that showed your facility to tell a story and work with actors, and the smart Hollywood scripts — quality writing that required the touch of someone outside the system — would arrive in those expensively-printed agency binders. And that's the way it seemed to be playing out for Karyn Kusama, who made an excellent debut with her gritty, low-budget Girlfight, a female boxing movie that launched the movie career of Michelle Rodriguez. But then a couple of things happened. First, her follow-up, Aeon Flux, was an appropriately youth-centric picture produced by MTV Films... that morphed into a would-be studio tentpole movie. And then, Hollywood stopped making those smart Hollywood scripts that required an indie filmmaker's touch.

Fortunately for Kusama, her story doesn't end there, like it unfortunately does for so many independent filmmakers. Her third picture, Jennifer's Body, opens in theaters next week, and it's exactly the sort of smart studio picture that has been elevated by being directed with ambition, intelligence and a respect for the emotional lives of the characters. Diablo Cody lives up to her hype (and her witty Twitter stream) with a smart script containing not only her trademark teen-speak but also a canny reworking of horror movie tropes and feminist film theory. And then there's Megan Fox, for whom this movie is a coming-out party designed to prove that the Michael Bay-discovered magazine and 'net fetish object can carry a movie. She capably does, dishing out Cody's sarcastic one-liners with deadpan zeal while also nailing quite unexpected deeper emotional notes as the movie goes progresses.

I spoke to Kusama by phone, as she was waiting her flight to attend the film's premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.



Filmmaker: How did you get involved with Jennifer’s Body?

Kusama: I happened to get the script from my agent. I had been getting a lot of genre scripts that were the most watered down versions [of these kind of stories], and this felt so original and crazy. The script is even crazier than the movie. I felt I had to try and land it. I realized recently, after I finished the movie, that it is one of those rare Hollwyood releases that doesn’t originate from a game, a ride, or another movie. So part of what makes it original is that it is original.

Filmmaker: When you say that you had to try and land it, what did that involve? And, specifically, how did you sell yourself as being able to handle the incredibly tricky tonal balancing act of the movie?

Kusama: Because the tone is as tricky as it is, I put together a very expensive book of images that helped people see the direction I wanted to go in so that it felt clearer. It is a tricky tonal exercise navigating between three genres: comedy, horror, and teen angst. While I believed the emotional reality of the characters and narrative is a heightened one, I also believed in the opera of the emotional dynamics. And if you can believe in that stuff, then you can commit to treating some things even with your tongue firmly in check, and you can commit to taking other things seriously. Or, to take the material seriously but then have a sense of lightness at points.

Filmmaker: Both of your films have been tough and dramatic; you haven’t been known for comedy.

Kusama: No, I haven’t! Luckily for me, I connected to a lot of the comedy. There’s a certain kind of teenage banter, [use of] teenager secret alphabets, that felt real to me. As much as I have only made two films and not proved facility with comedy, I also have a real worship and love of a certain kind of teenage movie, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Valley Girl — movies that were aggressively quotable. So having the mind of a fan, like I do, the producers knew I would treat the material with a lightness when it was called for. What was interesting during the process of making the movie was finding out that quite a bit of the comedy hit the cutting room floor because it upset the emotional balance [between the characters]. A lot of the comedy was scaled back.

Filmmaker: In addition to the tonal challenges, you had others as well. One was the pressure of directing the next Diablo Cody script, the follow-up to her immensely successful Juno. How did her fame affect you and the process of making the movie?

Kusama: It was key that she had just won an Oscar and was in the very, very distinctive and unusual situation of being a “famous screenwriter.” In some ways that allowed for an internal discussion between me, [Diablo] and the producers that was very fruitful. We could make changes and rethink sequences without having a huge amount of studio interference. We could talk realistically about actors, locations, and what those factors of reality brought to the story. She had a certain amount of power so we could introduce a new idea, or alter an existing idea without executives breathing down our necks.

Filmmaker: What horror films are important to you, and were they influences on Jennifer’s Body?

Kusama: I feel like you can’t consider Jennifer’s Body without addressing the crucial importance of Carrie, and that relationship was even more profound in earlier cuts of the movie, when the main characters returned to the dance to face down the band. There was a very real reference, but it was also a question of the tonal relationship. I wish I could say Rosemary’s Baby, a film I love, was a huge influence on this film, but I’d be lying. It would make more sense to say that Joe Dante’s The Howling, which as a tonal relationship.

Filmmaker:How conscious were you of some the feminist horror film theory written by writers like Carol Clover? The movie seems to reference her “final girl” theory while also scrambling it up.

Kusama: I think we were very conscious of [these ideas]. The covert feminism that I think is implicit in what we come to experience as slasher movies but which are really female survival movies was important to Diablo and me. It was interesting to be aware of how we experience the villain, the monster. We assume the villain is always Jennifer but later in the film you see her as both villain and victim. There was something interesting about holding off on revealing what happened to her, holding off on exposing her trauma — it makes you reconsider her as a villain. But maybe the trope we were more interested in upending was the idea of the unstoppable killer. Narratively you are in an endgame when you have an unstoppable killer. You can make movie after movie, but there’s not a lot of tension involving the villain. So, as much as we were playing with gender ideas, we were also playing with a more complicated depiction of the villain. Ultimately, the true villain is the band and ambition in general.

Filmmaker: Jennifer’s backstory — the origin sequence, I guess — which occurs late in the film was extraordinary in how it was both horrific but also quite painful and sad. Was it always that place in the film? Did you ever have a more linear construction?

Kusama: It was always in that place. What could have been more up for grabs, if you asked the studio, was the tone of that scene. I think luckily for everyone, Megan and I had agreed early on that the scene had to be terrifying but also, as you say, painful. You had to be shocked by how exposed and vulnerable the character was. At that point the movie steps outside the more surface humor and glibness and becomes a lot more serious, and I was thankful we could achieve that. It would have been easy to make that scene not serious when the fact is that it is very serious. You have to take responsibility when you depict violence on screen. You have to show the humanity that is being compromised in both the victimizer and the victim.

Filmmaker: Tell me about the visual design. The film is dark, with a very defined palette, and it’s quite lonely. There are bit open spaces — streets, school fields — and not a lot of people. It’s a bit more stylized than most of today’s horror films.

Kusama: For me, the visual design was pretty much based on taking a look at northern Midwestern towns and thinking about collision between wider natural spaces with the feelings of living in small towns. That helped me find those frames that were particularly stark. Even though there was that sense of loneliness and spooky solitude, I also felt it was important to pay attention the colorscape and textural landscape of the movie. Even when a movie is supposed to look low key and un-showy, it is important to me that it have a kind of form. The problem I have with a lot of genre filmmaking is that it doesn’t take its visual logic very seriously. So I tried to sneak [the stylized visual scheme] by because ultimately I think these movies are more interesting if you are able to pay attention to the style. You know, it doesn’t cost money to discuss and plan. I wanted to make these choices [in pre-production] and not to leave things looking shabby.

Filmmaker: How much of the color palette was shaped in the DI?

Kusama: We were actually pushing the color and the light when we were shooting, so the DI became a faster process. The only place we did [image] manipulation was a series of shots at the end of the movie that are very slo-mo, and these shots were done on an HD camera and required a huge amount of DI work. When converting it back to film we had to do so much work to make it seem like the same medium.

Filmmaker:That dark and ominous street that Jennifer lives on — tell me about that location. I almost thought it was a matte painting.

Kusama: That’s a real place, a terrifying housing development in Vancouver that was under construction. It’s a real scary place, with train tracks that run next door. It was freexzing when we were shooting, and we used one of their unfinished houses to shoot the interiors. Lighting it was tricky because it was such a large amount of space to even just edge light so you could see the space.

Filmmaker: Okay, so in addition to directing “the next Diablo Cody” picture, you were also entrusted with, really, the first film that Megan Fox is expected to carry. She’s been anointed as Hollywood’s next big star, and I imagine there was tremendous pressure with regards to her and her performance. What were your initial conversations with her like?

Kusama: More than anything, what Megan communicated to me, both directly and indirectly, was that she wanted to not take herself too seriously but that she wanted to be taken seriously in the process of making the movie. And I could only respect that position. She knew that she had a lot to prove with the movie, and she was really open to trying different things and talking about her character. Once I saw that, I found it really easy as a director to take care of her, which is what she needed and what she’ll need as her career gets more insane and complicated. She’s very young. That’s the interesting thing about Amanda [Seyfried], Megan and Johnny Simmons — they are young people! And then to add insult to injury, they are actors, who are removed from reality for a very formative part of their life. So part of the job of being a director was to be be den parent and to make sure that people get a good night sleep before showing up to work.

Filmmaker:The movie’s quite canny about her stardom. It starts off with her as the Michael Bay-styled uber-babe cracking the kind of deadpan one-liners that she’s great at on talk shows and on the red carpet. And then her character gets more complicated, and you deconstruct her image in scenes in which she looks completely plain and normal. How self-aware was she of the ways in which the movie is commenting on her stardom?

Kusama: She’s very self aware. She’s really smart and funny and very blunt. There’s a lot of humor that comes out of youthful frankness. And from my first meeting on, she felt that this movie was an opportunity to distort her image, which, ironically, an actress does every time she takes on a role. For Megan, though, she has this lopsided image because her image outweighs her work. There just hasn’t been enough work to prop up this image that people fetishize. So, here she was able to play with ideas of beauty and desirability and all of that. I mean, she runs into the same female insecurities that all actresses face but she was game. But when you say she looks like a normal girl — that’s a lot of makeup to make her look normal!

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 8:30 PM Comments (0)

With their latest film, How to Fold a Flag, documentary filmmakers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein have come full circle. Their first feature was 2004's Gunner Palace, which told the story of soldiers in the Army's 2/3 Field Artillery as they patroled the streets of Baghdad in late 2003 and early 2004. Told in a gritty style that threw viewers right into the midst of conflict, the film resisted an overt political agenda, focusing instead on the daily lives of the troops. The Prisoner: Or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair followed, a chillingly Kafkaesque story of an Iraqi journalist who is sent to Abu Ghraib after being mistaken for an assassin sent to kill the British Prime Minister. Their next film, 2008's Bulletproof Salesman, looked at the war from as sidelong angle, focusing on a German businessman who profited from the conflict by selling armored vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, Tucker and Epperlein premiere at Toronto what they say is the final film in their series. How to Fold a Flag makes the natural journey from the Mid East to the States as it follow four soldiers, all featured in Gunner Palace, as they adjust to so-called normal life. There's Jon Powers, who decides to run for Congress in Buffalo only to be attacked by his Republican opponents for "not having done anything with his life." (And that's after a tour of duty in Iraq and starting a charity for Iraqi war children.) Michael Goss returns home to his wife and family but struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder as well as the military, who initially deny him the care and benefits he deserves. Wilf Stuart (pictured at top) is a bearded death metal singer who works in a Circle K and just wants to move on, which is hard to do with an anxious mother and a brother in Afghanistan. And, finally, there's Javorn Drummond (below), a perpetual outsider unable to escape the low-wage rut, whose life is complicated when his mother is diagnosed with cancer. "We went to war as a unit and came home alone," Drummond says.

Any written summary of How to Fold a Flag must necessarily focus on these characters, four men who served in the same unit but whose various socio-economic and racial divisions separate them when they return home to America. But what starts off seeming like a traditional "vets returning home" documentary subtly morphs into a nuanced portrait of a country trying its best to emotionally distance itself from the reality of its foreign policy. Filmed in the months leading up to the election, the psychic temperature of this movie is far from the "Yes, we can!" moxie of those days. Indeed, Tucker's keen-eyed cinematography captures an anxious America, one wrapped in the language of patriotism but unsure of its future. How to Fold a Flag is a moving film that has as much to say about America's future as it does its recent past. I spoke to Tucker by phone a few days before he and Epperlein took their film to Toronto, where they also premiered Gunner Palace.

Filmmaker: You’ve done four films in a row now that have dealt in some way with the Iraq conflict. How has your filmmaking changed during this time?

Tucker: Each one of the films offers a difference facet of the Iraq experience, but it’s always kind of a work in progress. You hope you get better, and you learn from audiences. When we did Gunner Palace, it was so fresh and so new. With this film, we had just moved back to America from Berlin, I had been gone for 12 years, and Petra had never really lived here. We had just come out of the experience of making The Prisoner. Both of us love that film a lot, but we realized a disconnect between its public and its subject. People watched the film as if it was happening on Mars. They didn’t connect with it. There was outrage, but it almost like knee-jerk outrage. It was kind of like, “Okay, next.” [With this film], the goal wasn’t to make a film about four guys returning from Iraq, it was to portray the way the country has changed and is changing. And was about being more cinematic, and trying to make people feel things, which we haven’t done before. One of the intents of the film was to capture an emotional texture. It’s a difficult film to talk about. On the surface it looks like one thing but the deeper you get into it it becomes about this texture. Also, the film was kind of necessary for us to make because it gave us a little bit of closure. One thing for me was coming to terms with loss and how indifferent the public has been to this event. Rather than being bitter about it and full of rage, we tried to offer the audience [a way] of understanding.

Filmmaker: How would you articulate the film’s vision of America?

Tucker: America is a very unique country, and that’s spelled out in the film by the presence of the flag. As much as we tried not to film the flag, the flag is everywhere. But if you had lived in Germany for 12 years, people would find that abhorrent. We’re just so wrapped up in this patriotic sense of ourselves. It comes out from the left and the right. It’s that manifest destiny kind of thing: “America is a very special place.” I don’t know how to describe it, and maybe that’s what the film is about. We just have such a unique way of seeing ourselves. Our ideology is very distinct, and it transcends politics. As an American, I too get choked up in my American-ness, and I don’t know many Europeans like that. We’re just sort of a weird bunch. That’s okay, but how do you harness that power, that feeling? It was harnessed in the election of Obama, but where has that gone? It’s evaporated. It’s so fleeting. I looked at the New York Times this morning, and the presidential approval ratings are crap. People feel lost. And then I watch Javon and his mother and think, “How can people debate health care reform when there are people suffering like that?”

Filmmaker: How did you find your subjects?

Tucker: All these guys were in the unit that was featured in Gunner Palace. We stayed in touch with soldiers and their families. John, the one running for Congress, he did a lot of press for us for Gunner Palace. The first time he spoke about the war was at the Toronto Film Festival. Through his exposure doing that, he found he had a voice, and he started getting backers who urged him to run for Congress. Now he’s a prominent voice about foreign and veteran affairs, which is a nice byproduct of a film. Because of the nature of documentaries, you often don’t find good things happening [afterward to documentary subjects]. Javon, he did some music that was in Gunner Palace, and he wrote me and said he was going to school down in Fayetteville. He said, “You should come down and see how I live.” He was frustrated at his life and his lack of opportunities. So I went down. He’s probably the person I spent the most time with when I was shooting. His fighting in the war did not make anything better for him. If anything it made it more complicated. Stuart, the guy with the beard, he was heavily featured in Gunner Palace. I’ve gotten close to him and his mom. To me he represents the most universal experience. He had no idea what he was getting into, he went to war, and now he wants to forget about it but can’t because his three brothers are all in the military and his mom is in continual state of panic. Yet his experience was so matter of fact. Like, “Yeah, I did that.” Deep inside of him he’s probably proud of his service but not necessarily proud of everything the military represents. Stuart and Javon probably think, we did [our service] and what did we get out of it? Why after service are we still rejected by the general population? But in general we don’t pick [our subjects]. They end up coming to us. We started filming a wider group of people [for this specific film], and these turned out to be the most articulate. Again, probably, there was something unique about them while we also felt that their experiences well represented what all these guys had gone through.

Filmmaker: It’s interesting how the film starts by focusing on individuals, and then their specific issues that partly arise from their role as veterans, but then, finally, it moves towards expressing a more complicated view of America. Even though it’s about veterans and their issues, I didn’t come away thinking of it as an “Iraq veterans film.” In fact, even though your photographic styles are quite different, I flashed on Robert Frank’s The Americans with its fascinated yet somewhat ambivalent X-ray of the American psyche.

Tucker: I actually have a copy of The Americans sitting right here. But, yes, it’s not a social issue film on post-traumatic stress disorder or vets committing suicide — it’s about all the other things that people are dealing with. We struggled to find a balance because too often vets are written about in a general sort of way. There’s a lot of mythology around veterans, especially since Viet Nam, and we are aware that the Hollywood version can become a revisionist history. Viet Nam films defined the conflict more than the conflict itself. You watch Coming Home, well, how much of that is based on reality? The Deer Hunter is full of this mythology that is kind of hurtful, that doesn’t represent the veteran experience. Nor did we want the film to wallow in pity. I don’t see these guys as struggling. I see them as guys trying to find their way.

Filmmaker: How do you finance your films?

Tucker: Up until a couple of weeks ago, we’ve always used our own money. Everything including this film to what’s been done with it to date has been with our own money. We did take a small loan from a friend who has a producer credit. But our films have been successful. We make a living. It’s not glamorous but we have a nice life, and we’ve always kept our expectations in check. If you can make a film every year or 18 months, that’s a living. Again, it’s not super glamorous, but I love what we do. My daughter is 14 now, and she was just down in Louisiana shooting with us.

Filmmaker: So you’re making a living off the sales?

Tucker: Yes. Mainly television, foreign television. We have a fantastic sales agent, Annie Roney, from San Francisco. Josh Braun has repped all of our films. Dana O’Keefe at Cinetic has repped them all. It’s a fantastic team. We’ve done well with the BBC, but in the U.S. the TV market is bad and the license fees have dropped so low. A couple of years ago you’d get offered $200,000, and now people will offer you $10,000 with a straight face. And of course, there’s theatrical, which some people out there are doing on their own with some degree of success.

Filmmaker: Are you tempted to throw your own hat into the DIY theatrical ring?

Tucker: I’m not a film distributor. I make movies. There’s also a whole business that has grown around DIY — a lot of consultants making money. DIY can empower filmmakers, but do you want to be selling DVDs out of your living room or making movies? I don’t want to sell DVDs out of my living room. And for every Valentino there is a film that doesn’t do shit. A film like Valentino or Every Little Step, those are films that have built in audiences, and they are also offering a certain level of entertainment.

Filmmaker: What about films like yours that can target not just film audiences but also political ones?

Tucker: There’s not just a DIY movement right now, there is also a social issue movement, but I don’t think the two go hand in hand. Not every film can be a theatrical film. You have to be realistic about it. [Having subject matter] that becomes part of the conversation is critical. You can’t think that you can just throw a social issue doc into theaters and people are going to rush to theaters to see it. That was something we learned on The Prisoner: people were not going to rush to see a film about a prisoner torture. But this film we hope will promote debate, and I think it has theatrical legs to it.

Filmmaker: What do you think about online distribution?

Tucker: We reject the whole online [free streaming] thing. It’s insane. The idea of people giving out stuff for free and ghettoizing the value of art is unforgivable. It’s horrible to see a film in a 320x240 window with Ivory Soap ads alongside. They say, “You’ll have your world premiere [online],” but what is the point? You see the numbers, that your film has been rated 25,000 times. Okay, that’s a sizable audience, but one would hope you get 200,000 people to see a niche movie. Gunner Palace did great numbers on DVD.

Filmmaker: So you’re against online delivery?

Tucker: No, I’d like an [online] platform where people can watch my movie for four bucks and I get 1.50. Like iTunes. That’s how we get our media. We don’t have cable. But I find it frustrating, all the elements to have a successful business [distributing films online] are there, but there are a lot of forces running contrary, having to do with greed, especially in the online world. It’s all about companies wanting to aggregate 500 titles and creating value for themselves.

Filmmaker: With license fees coming down and these new ways we’re being encouraged to screen our films, are you able to have hope for the future?

Tucker: It’s tough right now. [Independent filmmakers] still need critical champions yet critics are dying left and right. You need Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, people who understand film and can write about it and can champion it. But newspapers are dying. Bloggers are growing, but it will take a while for bloggers’ voices to grow to become trusted voices. Without those [newspaper] reviews and a theatrical release, it’s hard to do anything with a movie. But, right now, the technology [of production] is amazing. The level of image quality you can get with a $6,000 camera, the level of image control, is amazing. You can sit at a low-end workstation and color correct in your living room. You go to the IFP and see budgets for first-time documentary filmmakers, and they are crazy. There is no reason for that — you can make a film for almost nothing. You see filmmakers with all these excuses for not being able to make their films. Well, the time you spend writing proposals can be spent making the film. A $6,000 camera and a few thousand dollars of audio and storage is not a huge investment. Anybody with half a brain can come up with that money from somewhere, even if it’s just by doing paying work on the side. The price of admission has been adjusted over the years. Making a film is not the hard part. The hard part is distribution and marketing.

Filmmaker: What advice do you offer beginning filmmakers?

Tucker: I had somebody call me recently for advice. They were offered a low [TV license fee in a specific market]. That’s pretty standard these days, so be happy and move on. Don’t get uppity and greedy. People expect this Spurlock-ian success, but Morgan is the exception. Those little sales, those $5,000 here and there, add up. It’s nice for us to have enough films out there that every three months we get a check. The films exist, people are watching them and that’s how we make our money. If you can make $150,000, $200,000 a film — and that’s what we live off of — that’s a living. That’s the reality, not that that somebody is going to give you $500,000 and then spend another $500,000 on P&A.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 3:45 PM Comments (0)

The Further Adventures of Death Tripper, Ouroboros and What lies Beyond Jupiter

Cannes, France. In a cinematic year filled with visions of extreme sex and violence, the enfant provocateur of French cinema Gaspar Noe illuminates a phosphorescent direction forward. In person Noe could be mistaken as the progeny of Aleister Crowley with sunken-in, charcoal-lined eyes and shaved head. But lurking behind this visage is a filmmaker who courts controversy with vivacity and confidence. The last time Noe was at Cannes was to premiere his film Irreversible; he ingratiated himself into the hearts and minds of audiences willing to be subjugated to his extreme vision of rape, revenge, murder and ultimate transcendence. This year, Noe unveiled his psychedelic mind-bending odyssey of life after death, Enter the Void. A philosophical tour de force disguised as a generational drug film. The film’s hypnotic imagery and unnerving soundscape is at the forefront of cinematic revolution — it is a work of startling complexity, paradox and perversity. A film born of the avant-garde tradition of Paul Sharits, Peter Tscherkassky and Kenneth Anger. Noe is the inheritor of this tradition in the 21st century and the film can be seen quite liberally to have transposed the ’60s fascination with occult mythology, Egyptian monuments and sacred sites for the totems and taboos of the new millennium cybernetic generation of virtual reality. One could imagine Noe directing the film through a PS2 video-game joystick to capture the stunning array of hypnotic imagery and virtuoso ballet mecanique camera movements. In the crackpot Cuisinart of ideas that propel the narrative, Noe creates a cosmology composed of DMT shamanic drug lore, Nietzchean eternal recurrence theories and Buddhism’s transmigration of Souls.

The story opens with Oscar, a lanky twenty-something Canadian expat, as he lights up a drug pipe in the shabby Tokyo Shinjuku apartment he shares with his kid sister. As Oscar inhales DMT, a concentrated form of ayahuasca, one of the strongest pyschedelic substances on earth, Noe invites us to slip through the proverbial rabbit hole and trip the lights fantastik with his protagonist as he drifts into a DMT day-glow slumber in a visual sequence mirroring a Buddhist mandala cornucopia that plays out in the real time of the six minutes it takes the drug to intoxicate the system. Oscar receives a call from a friend to join him at a nearby Red Light District bar. Oscar is initially too stoned to make it out of the house, but convinces himself otherwise when his friend Alex shows up and begins ranting to him about drugs and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The two friends trot and stumble to a nearby Kabuki-cho bar called the Void, a sort of post-modern Karova milk bar for acid freaks where images from Kubrick’s 2001 play on TV monitors; no doubt an homage to the maestro whose visual lexicon presides as patron saint to this film.

After a skirmish at the Void, a result of a drug deal gone wrong and a betrayal by a friend to the cops, Oscar is shot in the back several times by the local police and lies dying in a urinal. The camera takes on the subjective perspective of Oscar’s spirit, a bird’s eye viewpoint that most of the film is seen through. We are witnessing the out-of-body experience of death and the camera soars with an omniscience that defies rules of logic, merging cinematic space in a collected amalgamation of associative memory, sensorial experience and projected fantasy and nightmare. So Noe invites us to Enter the Void. A virtual universe governed by the psychic abilities of the mysterious pineal gland or third eye with the only travel guide a copy of the Bardo Thodol (or, Tibetan Book of the Dead). Noe forces his audience to contemplate themes of life after death with a tricky formalism that exists on a plane of its own unique in the world of cinema.

The narrative structure although seeming to appear as a series of complex interrelated flashbacks is actually operating on principals similar to what is encountered in Proust’s masterwork and conforming to the structural logic of the Bardo Thodol. As Oscar's spirit journeys through his own consciousness and awareness of events immediately post mortem, he is processing his own resignation to let go of his corporal body and begin his journey into the next stage of incarnation.

While dismissed by some viewers and critics as a trite and illogical series of flashbacks, the seemingly random connection of scenes Noe portrays have the narrative arch of how memory functions often incomplete and without clear definition or traditional dramaturgical structure. As Oscar has taken DMT at the opening of the film we are literally viewing the entire film through an unreliable narrator’s subjective viewpoint amidst the quagmire of a hallucination, further enhanced by the cerebral construction of his death trip. Enter the Pineal Gland, Dr. Strassman and Terence McKenna

The pineal gland is a cone-shaped pea floating in a small lake of cerebrospinal fluid that sits on the roof of the third ventricle of the brain; it is also referred to as the third eye chakra. It is the first gland to be formed in the fetus distinguishable by the third week. When our individual life force enters our fetal body at seven weeks, the moment in which we become truly human, it passes through the pineal and triggers the first primordial flood of DMT. Much speculation over this mysterious gland has occurred throughout the ages as it is the appendix of the brain, serving no known function in the body, and therefore prompting a vast degree of conjecture, especially amongst poets, priests, writers and shamans who value the mystic experience. Dr. Rick Strassman, while conducting DMT research in the 1990s at the University of New Mexico, advanced the theory that a massive release of DMT from the pineal gland prior to death or near death was the cause of the near death experience (NDE) phenomenon. Terence McKenna — writer, philosopher, psychonaut and ethno botanist who served as the inspiration for the Dr. Jacoby character in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series — believed the pineal gland to plays a role in mediating the visual effects of natural dreaming, near-death experiences, religious visions and other mystical states. Rejecting any monotheistic tradition, McKenna praised DMT as trans-dimensional travel…enabling an individual to encounter aliens ancestors and spirits of the earth. Also stating that as the life-force leaves our body through the pineal gland, a naturally occurring tryptamine trace amount of DMT floods the brain mirroring the experience of life developing in the first weeks of fetal development. The set of theories about the pineal gland offer a cyclical structure to the emission of DMT in the body upon birth and death and present a fascinating parallel to the Buddhist conception of the universe and the cycle of reincarnation. Enter the Bardo Thodol.

The central tenet of Buddhism states that all life is suffering and one is destined to pass through the cycle of suffering and rebirth, samsara, until a soul can progress to a state of Nirvana. Rebirth is a process whereby beings go through a succession of lifetimes as one of many possible forms of sentient life, each running from conception to death. Noe’s cosmology is a hybrid of Buddhism’s cycle of life and the idea of Eternal Recurrence, an idea posited by Pythagoras, Ouspensky & Nietzche. The eternal recurrence is a concept that posits that the universe has been recurring and will continue to recur in a self-similar form an infinite number of times. A cycle of non-linear time where moments are destined to play out and cycle infinitely. Imagine being able to walk into the house you grew up in and discover that you are still sitting there as a child as if the memory plays out consecutively with the same moment you are currently living. Enter the Search for Lost Time.

As in Irreversible, Noe centers his story on the idea of origin points, a Manichean battleground from which all went wrong — as if signaling for a return to the innocence before all was perverted & corrupted. As Oscar’s spirit hovers through the realm of his memories, his soul is trying to process his previous existence as if searching for reconciliation with his past. He can’t get over the random stroke of fate that has rendered him alone in the world with his sister. One of the most shocking memories recounted in the film involves a car crash that both Oscar and his sister survived but which killed their parents, rendering them orphans. Oscar cycles through a rapid series of memories that intertwine; many tender moments with his kid sister are seen as halcyonic and nostalgic. The brother and sister made a bond that they would always be together in life, and Oscar’s spirit watches his sister with a vigilance that verges at times on eroticism and voyeurism. As Oscar’s web of memories become more conflicted, it feels as if his soul is being punished. Somehow the memories he has accumulated in his lifetime are the sole company he has to keep in the afterlife, and the traumas and elation that compose our emotional life are what must be processed in order to let go in the spirit realm and reach the next level of incarnation. As the narrative reaches a climax, Oscar enters a Tokyo Love Hotel where the camera surveys a series of rooms with lovers in the peak of copulation. A phosphorescent array of colors emanate from the couple’s genitals as if potential souls are awaiting penetration in hopes of reincarnation. The final stage of the Bardo Thodol speaks about karmically impelled hallucinations; men and women passionately entwined. Oscar’s spirit discovers his sister in a room having sex with his friend Alex. Oscar enters his sister’s body where he is witness to the sexual act, eventually merging with a fertilized egg. His soul is reincarnated as an infant, born inside his Mother’s womb again; somehow destined to relive his life over again.

Speaking with Noe after the film about the elusive meaning of the film’s ending, he laughed hysterically saying, “The cock comes all over the audience….” Perhaps the answer lies in what is perhaps one of the more unique close-up’s since the famed closing of Hollywood Boulevard. Perhaps Oscar has reached the final frontier of cinematic reincarnation, a phosphorescent sludge fest for the eye.


After graduating from Tisch School of the Arts, Michele Civetta signed a production deal with HKM Productions / Directors Bureau. Since that time he has helmed numerous projects for an array of commercial clients ranging from Martini & Rossi, Cingular Wireless, Badoit, Dunkin' Donuts, Coca Cola to The Partnership for a Drug Free America. Civetta has also directed music videos for artists such as Lou Reed, Sparklehorse, and Yoko Ono. In 2006 he wrote and directed the critically acclaimed musical feature for Sean Lennon's Capitol Records release Friendly Fire starring Lindsay Lohan, Asia Argento, Carrie Fisher & Devon Aoki. Civetta is currently in pre-production on a film based on the international bestseller Coin Locker Babies that is scheduled to shoot this Fall in Japan. The film is a co-production between Don Murphy's Angry Films and French company Wild Bunch and stars Gael Garcia Bernal, Jamie Cambell Bower, Rinko Kikuchi, Asia Argento, Tadanobu Asano and Val Kilmer. Mr. Civetta is also prepping a film with Agnes B/ Love Streams productions based on the life of the Chevalier de Saint George.

Mr. Civetta currently resides in Rome with his wife Asia Argento and their two children. The couple produce a radio show featuring lost eclectic music for broadcast all over Italy and are preparing a new film for Mrs. Argento to direct.

# posted by Scott Macaulay @ 10:03 AM Comments (0)