™

F
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15
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a publication of
7

th
Anniversary
F
I
L
M
M
A
K
E
R
M
A
G
A
Z

going
I
N
E

electric Amir Bar-Lev’s

My Kid Could
Todd Haynes’s Paint That
V O L U M E

radical Dylanism: Anton Corbijn’s

I’m Not
Control
1 6 , # 1

Julian Schnabel’s
The Diving Bell

There
and the Butterfly

Strike strategy
Ryan Gosling interviews for independents
screenwriter Oren Moverman Planning your
post production
Tamara Jenkins’s
The Savages $5.95 U.S. / $7.95 Canada
Fall 2007, Vol. 16, #1

John Sayles’s
Honeydripper
www.filmmakermagazine.com
CONTENTS FILMMAKER FALL 2007 VOLUME 16 NUMBER 1

PHOTO BY: ETIENNE GEORGE

34 the jigsaw man
Todd Haynes examines the life and
mythology of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There.
By Howard Feinstein

40 THE OVERACHIEVER
Ryan Gosling chats with screenwriter Oren
Moverman about his latest achievements,
I’m Not There and Married Life, along with
the unique collaberative relationships he
has with his directors.

46 SENIOR MOMENTS
Nine yesrs after making Slums of Beverly HIlls,
Tamara Jenkins returns to feature films with 70
a comical but highliy emotional look inside
one family’s turbulent relationship with The
Savages. By Ray Pride

52 PRAY FOR ROCK ‘N’ ROLL

Jason Guerrasio sits down with John
52
Sayles to discuss the future of filmmaking
and the challenges of making his latest
film Honeydripper.

60 THE UNSEEN HAND

Amir Bar-Lev got more than he bargained
for when he followed child painter Marla
Olmstead and her family for a year in the
riveting documentary My Kid Could Paint
That. By Jason Guerrasio

66 THE LAST DRAFT

Justin Lowe talks to Andrew Wagner about his
sophmore effort, the deeply resonate drama
Starting Out In The Evening.

34 80
PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK

PHOTO BY: DOANE GREGORY

70 THE INSIDE MAN
In The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian
Schnabel makes Jean-Dominiqie Bauby’s
best-selling memoir into a funny, moving
and wise contemplation of morality and the
artist. By Scott Macaulay

74 SOMETHING MUST BREAK

Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis is put under
the microscope in Anton Corbijn’s debut
feature Control. By Nick Dawson

78 THE HOLLYWOOD LIFE

Anthony Hopkins blurs fantasy and
reality in the disorienting Slipstream.
By Scott Macaulay

80 MY SUPER SWEET 16
Jason Reitman delves into teen
pregnancy (with a little help from first-
time screenwriter Diablo Cody) in his
follow up to Thank You for Smoking, Juno.
By Lisa Y. Garibay

2 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 VOLUME 16 NUMBER 1 ™

PHOTO BY: DAVID DALTON

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86 EDIT POINTS SUBSCRIPTIONS
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chose to finish their films. COPY EDITORS

Lance Kaplan
90 ...AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH? Leah Dueffer
In attempting to define documentary
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
filmmaking Arne Johnson learns the line Mary Glucksman
between ficiton and non is very blurry. Anthony Kaufman
Bari Pearlman
92 CAMERA TEST Ray Pride
Jamie Stuart test out the Panasonic AG-HPX500P. Chuck Stephens

94 THE POWERS THAT BE CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

Henny Garfunkel
Alicia Van Couvering helps indies strategize Richard Koek
for the upcoming strike. Michael Lavine
Tom Le Goff
96 PLAY AGAIN Ilona Lieberman
Head Trauma director Lance Weiler on gaming PRODUCTION ASSISTANTS
and the worlds beyond independent film. Benjamin Crossley-Marra
Jeffrey Kunze
98 SUPPORT GROUP Gavin Mevius
Nathan Wagner
Scott Macaulay recaps the 2007 IFP
WEBMASTER
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CONTROLLER
COLUMNS
92 20 IN FOCUS
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30 Load & play Subscriptions, Merchandise, Back Issues

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32 The SUPER 8
Eight things that will keep you in the know.
REPORTS
8-18 The Orphanage; Handbangers Ball;
Canvas; MobMov; Mexican Revolution;
Maysles; Screenwriting book; IFP Market.
ETC.
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4 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

editor’s letter
In thinking about this editor’s letter and Filmmaker’s 15th anniversary issue, I was tempted
to ruminate about all the ways that independent film has changed in the past decade and a half. 104 West 29th Street, 12th Floor
But before I could do so, my mind wandered instead to all the ways in which the process of mak- New York, NY 10001
Tel: 212-465-8200
ing Filmmaker itself has changed in the last 15 years. In 1992, putting together this magazine was Fax: 212-465-8525
a very different enterprise. Without much in the way of office equipment and in-house design Email: NewYorkMembership@ifp.org
Website: www.ifp.org
expertise, we’d spend many evenings at a Chelsea design firm, waiting for the harried owner to
finish with his corporate clients and devote an hour or two to us. Articles would arrive by FedEx
on disk, with new versions often flying back and forth the same way in an editorial process that BOARD OF DIRECTORS
stretched out to weeks per piece. We’d get slides from publicists that we’d pay to have profession- Steven C. Beer
ally scanned. Pitches would come in by snail mail. People would have a hard time navigating our Jeanne R. Berney
phone system. (Um, I guess some things don’t change.) And there was no Filmmakermagazine. Anthony Bregman
com, no Filmmaker blog, no e-mail newsletter, and weekly online director interviews or video Mark D’Arcy
podcasts. Filmmaker’s audience was in the tens, not hundreds, of thousands. Ira Deutchman
Today, thankfully, things are a lot different. Faster computers and the Internet have accel- Matt Dillon
erated and streamlined our production cycle. Feedback from our readers is both immediate, Nelson George
through email, and public, on our blog. With his Panasonic HVX200P and Final Cut Pro, Howard Graff
Jamie Stuart singlehandedly creates for our website idiosyncratic yet gorgeous short films that Dan Klores
would have required the services of small crews years ago. Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
In looking then at independent film during a time that has spanned Pulp Fiction and Blair Jewell Jackson McCabe
Witch, mumblecore and Michael Moore, YouTube, Kazaa and Netflix, it’s easy to see that a lot John Penotti
has changed but a lot has also stayed the same. And while it may be easier — more efficient, Carole Rifkind
even — to make a microbudget film today, the kinds of inefficiencies that caused us to labori- John Schmidt
ously scan photos and FedEx edits still seem to exist when it comes to the distribution and Cyndi Stivers
marketing of indie movies. Hopefully as we approach Web 3.0 the business of independent Mark Urman
film will make it to version 2.0. We look forward to being hear to talk about it. I also want to Joana Vicente
take a moment now to thank Jay Milla for his great work as publisher over the last two years Lance Weiler
and to wish him well in his new position as publisher of Moving Pictures Magazine. George Zuber
Thanks for reading us over 15 years and see you next issue.
Thomas D. Selz, General Counsel
Frankfurt, Kurnit, Klein & Selz
Executive Director
Scott Macaulay, Editor Michelle Byrd

CONTRIBUTORS
Senior Director, Finance & Operations
Mitchell Micich

BELLE N. BURKE (pg. 110) writes, translates and follows film in New York and Venice. JAY CASSIDY (pg. 88) is a film editor IFP is a non-profit organization supporting
living in Los Angeles. His most recent credits include An Inconvenient Truth and Into The Wild. PAMELA COHN (pg. 18) is a independent filmmakers. Headquartered
freelance media producer, writer and filmmaker based in New York. She writes a blog on nonfiction filmmaking at stillinmotion. in New York City, IFP organizations can be
typepad.com. NICK DAWSON (pp. 74, 111) is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn. He is part of the programming team of the found in Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul,
Glasgow Film Festival in his native Scotland. HOWARD FEINSTEIN (pp. 26, 34) is a film critic living in New York. He programs Phoenix and Seattle. For more informa-
fiction and documentaries for the Sarajevo Film Festival. LISA Y. GARIBAY (pg. 80) writes about film, music and Latin culture for tion, visit www.ifp.org.
various print and online outlets. RYAN GOSLING (pg. 40) is one of the most talented actors of his generation. His breakthrough
role came in the 2001 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner The Believer. Last year he received a Best Actor Oscar nominated for
his role in Half Nelson. He will next be seen in Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl in the fall. ARNE JOHNSON (pg. 90) was a journalist for ten years before recently joining childhood chum
Shane King to make the feature Girls Rock! which will hit theaters in March 2008. Learn more at girlsrockmovie.com. LOREN KING (pg. 16) is a Boston-based film critic and features writer whose
work has appeared in The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Boston Phoenix and other publications. She is the president of the Boston Society of Film Critics. JUSTIN LOWE (pg. 66) is a freelance
entertainment journalist based in Los Angeles where he covers independent and international film. LIZZIE MARTINEZ (pg. 57) lives with her family in Austin, Texas. Her last article appeared in
Mothering Magazine. MIKE PLANTE (pp. 10, 14) is the associate director of programming at CineVegas and the publisher of Cinemad magazine. RAY PRIDE (pg. 46) writes about movies and
makes them, too. He is also a photographer. Links to his work are at raypride.com. DURIER RYAN (pg. 16) is a Philadelphia-raised filmmaker and currently is on staff at IFP in New York. JAMIE
STUART (pg. 92) is a New York-based filmmaker. His work has run exclusively online, and he currently operates the website mutinycompany.com. ALICIA VAN COUVERING (pg. 94) works
nebulously in New York independent film as a writer, actress and in production. Her credits include Junebug, Palindromes, Old Joy, Tadpole, Liberty Kid and Choke, as well as numerous music video and
multi-media projects. LANCE WEILER (pg. 96) has written and directed two feature films — Head Trauma and The Last Broadcast. Visit his website at lanceweiler.com.

CORRECTIONS: In our Summer 2007 (Vol. 15, No. 4) “25 New Faces of Independent Film” section, Craig Zoble’s film Great World of Sound was misspelled
(pg. 83). And in “Transart Film Express” (pg. 16) we didn’t credit photos of The Rape of the Sabine Women to Eve Sussman & The Rufus Corporation (Girls at
the Pool, 2005, photo by Benedikt Partenheimer (pg. 4); Disintegration at Hydra, 2005, photo by Ricoh Gerbl (pg. 16)). We regret the errors.

6 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

 REPORTS
HELPING HAND
With a Best Foreign Language Oscar nom-
ination for Pan’s Labyrinth and his member-
ship in the much heralded “three amigos”
— the others being fellow Mexican filmmak-
ers Alejandro González Iñárritu and Alfonso
Cuarón — Guillermo del Toro has enjoyed
an increase in notoriety within the last year.
Along with making more movies himself, he
hopes to leverage his critical and box office
clout to help lesser-known talents get their
films made. So far, his beneficence is paying
off with Juan Antonio Bayona’s chilling debut
feature The Orphanage.
Like Pan’s Labyrinth, the film mixes fantasy
and reality as the story follows a family who
moves into an abandoned orphanage on
the Spanish north coast with the hopes of
converting it into a home for disabled chil-
dren. Laura (an amazing performance by
Belén Rueda, The Sea Inside), who once lived
in the house when it was an orphanage, be-
comes uneasy when her son Simon begins to
talk about his imaginary friends and draws a
scarecrow-headed child that resembles some-
one from Laura’s past. The tension builds until
finally Simon disappears, leaving his mother
searching for answers, including calling on the
help of a medium (Geraldine Chaplin), who in
8 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
BY Jason Guerrasio
a spine-tingling scene, reveals a supernatural
presence in the house which may hold the key
to Simon’s whereabouts.
Written by Sergio G. Sánchez in the late
’90s, The Orphanage attracted Bayona’s in-
terest several years ago. But while Bayona
had already made a name for himself with
award-winning short films and music videos,
that experience didn’t help when it came to
financing the film. Having known del Toro
since he came to Spain to screen Cronos in
the early ’90s, Bayona asked his old friend if
he’d be interested in coming onboard as a
producer. “They were having huge trouble
raising enough money and getting the
right talent,” del Toro recalls from the set
of Hellboy 2: The Golden Army in Budapest.
“Frankly I read the script dreading the worst.
I thought I’d end up saying no because it’s
very rare that I respond to a screenplay, but I
was very happy when I read it and we ended
up getting financing rather quickly.”
Having del Toro fully endorsing the film
didn’t only get Bayona financing and a
stellar cast, but also sparked the attention
of an American distributor: Picturehouse
(which released Pan’s Labyrinth last year)
bought the U.S. rights during this year’s
belÉn rueda in the orphanage.
Berlin Film Festival. “Guillermo first told me
about The Orphanage about a year ago, and
when I saw the rough cut I realized he was
not exaggerating when he said it was both
frightening and incredibly emotional,” says
Picturehouse head Bob Berney via e-mail.
“We’re opening The Orphanage around the
same time we did for Pan’s. Guillermo’s film
opened a door for a wider release of Span-
ish language films, and I think Bayona’s film
will be able to benefit from that.”
Recently Bayona’s good fortune contin-
ued as The Orphanage received positive
reviews at the Toronto Film Festival for its
scares, gorgeous visuals and surprise end-
ing, and New Line announced at the fest
that it bought the rights to do an American
remake (del Toro will produce that as well).
But looking back, Bayona believes del Toro’s
greatest contribution to the project was
that he relieved the anxieties of making a
first feature. “The only pressure was to do
justice to the script and take it to the big
screen in the best way possible,” he says. “I
was able to make a film without compro-
mising my instinct or my creative freedom.
It was a blessing.”
The Orphanage opens December 28.
 REPORTS

Alvi and Moretti went on to shoot the

film in an incredibly quick 15 days — a
week in Baghdad, a week in Syria, and the
day of the band’s concert. They edited the
film from just 40 hours of footage. The
scenes of the band’s performance in the
film are tense as army officials, bombs and
electricity blackouts all are capable of stop-
ping the show. And while the goal of stag-
ing a heavy metal concert in the midst of
a war may seem crazy, these kids are just
trying to live normal lives. Wasn’t that the
goal of overthrowing Saddam?
Currently the band are refugees in Da-
mascus, Syria, and live under the daily threat
of being deported back to Iraq, where their
practice space has been bombed. The offi-
cial Web site for the film is taking donations
to help the band get out of Syria. “They can
get to a particular country where they can
arrive with Iraqi passports, which are not
worth the paper they are printed on,” Alvi
says. “But they need money when they land
so then they can go and claim refugee status
with the UN. Hopefully [the Toronto screen-
ings] will generate enough buzz that we can
create a strong petition for them to get into
suroosh alvi and eddy moretti's heavy metal in baghdad.
America. They’ll have support. They’ll have
a purpose. They’ll have something to do.

headbangers ball
They won’t just come and be a burden on
BY Mike Plante the system. They’ll have a chance at some
semblance of a normal life.”
Heavy Metal In Baghdad, a doc that recently premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, Although they have run a successful maga-
follows the Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda as they try to survive the war-torn city while practicing zine for more than a decade and have jumped
and scoring gigs. Directors Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti (of Vice magazine) offer a brave look leaps and bounds over the Internet — the
into the Iraqi situation. Proudly lo-fi and all the stronger for it, the film shows how totally fucked five-minute intro on heavymetalinbaghdad.
the band is amidst the war and occupation. In Iraq you can live 15 minutes away from your best com got more than a million hits on YouTube
friend yet go six months without seeing him for fear of getting killed outside your home. — Alvi and Moretti still covet a traditional the-
Alvi and Moretti jumped into this dangerous environment headfirst, drawing a powerful atrical release for their film. And they plan to
portrait of the occupation by not focusing on politics but rather by following the band as make “any distributor’s job easy,” Moretti says.
they stage a concert in Baghdad and, later, move to Syria. “We will get the word out and build an audi-
The doc is a continuation of the Vice team’s work in film and television. Their other projects ence. Getting into theaters is really important.
include The Vice Guide to Travel series and the Internet channel vbs.tv. When they started vbs. There is still this real excitement of a theatrical
tv Alvy and Moretti wanted to cover big news stories but without the usual pontificating ex- release — it creates a different kind of buzz in
perts. When Vice heard there were two-headed animals living in Chernobyl, they went to hunt the public sphere. It becomes an event where
them. Learning that there were two original Nazi-era Aryans living in Paraguay, they sent a the public can go together and engage in
black correspondent to confront them. “We’ve always believed that subjectivity is important something. The Internet is mostly old men
with Vice,” Alvi says. “But with substantiation as well, so it’s not just some guy ranting.” masturbating by themselves.”
For Heavy Metal In Baghdad the filmmakers hired a personal militia to take them every- After watching Heavy Metal In Baghdad
where and did all the reporting themselves. Contrast their approach with that of the news the term that came to my mind for the Vice
agencies, which send out Iraqi teams to get stories and footage after which their own cor- style of reporting was “gonzo journalism.”
respondents stand outside hotels and give the reports. But is that fair? “We weren’t in a drug-fueled
Alvi and Moretti began their film in 2005. Landing in Baghdad, they eventually located mission to Baghdad and partying in Sadr
the band — cell phones and wireless still work well in the city, they note. “For the first six City with Iraqi prostitutes,” says Alvi. “When
months of the occupation, postwar, whatever you want to call it — Baghdad had a 917 area we started the Vice Guide to Travel the mis-
code,” Moretti explains with amazement, “because it was being serviced by a cell phone sion was 60 Minutes meets Vice. Whatever
company from Westchester. That’s the first thing the Americans did when they went in.” label you can give that is what this is.”

10 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

 REPORTS

True to life DIY DRIVE-IN

by Jeffrey Kunze BY Benjamin Crossley-Marra

Schizophrenia is a very misunderstood illness in our culture, a fact that is reinforced by One of the last vestiges of the rapidly
what is commonly portrayed in films about the disease. Some medical professionals be- vanishing arthouse and drive-in theater
lieve that the one movie that’s come close to capturing its true nature is the 2001 Acad- cultures can be found, paradoxically, on-
emy Award winner A Beautiful Mind. Now there’s Canvas, a small-budgeted regional fest line. MobMov (short for “Mobile Movie”) is a
hit about a young boy (Devon Gearhart) who is forced to simultaneously cope with his ill Web-based organization which launched in
mother (Marcia Gay Harden) and workaholic father (Joe Pantoliano). States director Joseph 2005 that’s dedicated to guerilla film exhibi-
Greco, “the mental-health community has unanimously declared [Canvas] the most accu- tion across the globe, screening, well, what-
rate portrayal of schizophrenia ever seen in movies.” ever you want. “Did you just make a kick-ass
But getting the approval of the mental-health community was no easy feat for first-time di- documentary about the environmental im-
rector Greco, whose experience in the matter goes as far back as his childhood when he had pact of the factory in your hometown?” asks
to deal with his own mother’s schizophrenia. That firsthand experience is “one of the reasons MobMov founder Bryan Kennedy. “How
why it’s taken me so long to get the film off the ground,” he says. “I was reluctant to trivialize the about a martial arts action movie about nin-
subject by using clichés of what Marcia’s character goes through. I just wanted to tell an honest jas with a sleeping disorder? These are niche
story about an average blue-collar family that’s dealing with a very common problem. It’s not so films, and they won’t ever earn distribution
much about a mental illness as it is about the effects of a mental illness on a family.” rights. What MobMov does is combine the
After writing the script, Greco felt obliged to consult with mental-health professionals and enabling freedom of Internet distribution
make sure that what he did was both accurate and sensitive to the issue. The actors also felt the with the community experience of watch-
need to research their roles. “Marcia and Joey both asked me what they could do to prepare, and ing a film in a theater.”
I suggested that they go to Fountain House in New York City, which is a clubhouse for people MobMov basically brings the drive-in to
with mental illness,” says Greco. “They went for what was supposed to be only an hour or two you. Projectors are set up on the backs of
and they ended up staying most of the day. About an hour into the visit Joey said, ‘Where are all cars, a little promotion is done, and crowds
the crazy people?’ The person giving the tour responded, ‘Well, we’re the crazy people.’ He sud- gather in an abandoned part of town to
denly realized he couldn’t determine who had a mental illness and who didn’t. This was his first watch films broadcast against a wall.
foray into the world of mental illness, and he’s since really become an advocate.” “Face it,” Kennedy says, “the current
Once the initial cut of the film was complete, Greco wasted no time in sharing his passion movie-distribution system sucks. If
project with the very community he sought to help out in the first place. He showed an early you’re lucky enough to have the right
cut to the members of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) at their national conven- connections to make it to a big festival
tion in Washington, D.C. “I just wanted to make sure the film played well and to give them an like Sundance and then are willing to
opportunity to see it first,” he says. “I wanted to make sure that if I did anything that was going sell your soul enough to actually get a
to offend people, I would know about it before I finished the film.” But to his delight the film distribution contract signed, you’ll still
received two standing ovations and NAMI’s award for Dramatic Motion Picture. probably wind up in a handful of the-
“It gives you a sense of the humanity of a person struggling with the illness,” says Dr. Kenneth aters across the country that don’t even
Duckworth, medical director for NAMI, about the film. “The person comes first, and the illness bother to promote your groundbreaking
second. What you see in a lot of films with [mental-illness] stereotypes is that [people] simply film. It’s heartbreaking.”
become their symptoms or a vehicle for this evil force. But Canvas is genuinely authentic.” Luckily enough, getting a MobMov chap-
Since then, Greco has received dozens of invitations from mental-health organizations around ter together in your local community might
the country wanting to screen the film, and after having its world premiere last October at the not be as hard as you think. The Web site
Hamptons International Film Festival, has won numerous awards at regional festivals. Greco be- (mobmov.org) has all the necessary infor-
lieves the steps he’s taken to get his film seen will increase awareness for those in need. “If your mation on how you can set up a screening
heart is broken you get a pacemaker, but if your brain is misfiring it’s a different story. The reality and even advice on how to create your own
is the more people feel comfortable talking about it, the more people will be inspired to talk MobMov community. It’s easy, safe and com-
about it and then more people will get treatment as a result. Hopefully the tide is turning.” pletely legal; the site provides tips on reserv-
Canvas, distributed by Screen Media Films, opens in limited release October 12. ing space and preventing noise pollution.
The organization has enjoyed tremendous
growth over the last few years — including
impressive turnouts over the summer for
M dot Strange’s Sundance entry We Are the
Strange on the West Coast — and has grown
into over 158 chapters across 26 nations.
Kennedy stated that one of his favorite expe-
riences was watching films with the French
chapter under the Parisian sky.
joseph greco's canvas.

12 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

 REPORTS

In another director’s hands this would be-

come trite or obvious, but Reygadas keeps
the humanism intact. There is no black-
and-white in his world, only people getting
through unusual situations with their belief
system to guide them.
Star actor Gael García Bernal makes his
directing debut with Déficit, a character
drama of friends, family and laborers at
a house party, where loads of tension is
brewing under the surface. Simultaneously
enjoying and hating his sister, her friends,
and his own lifelong buddies, rich kid Cris-
tobal (Bernal) is soon leaving the world of
his distant, rich parents and even more dis-
tant girlfriend (on her way to the party) and
about to enter college. Enter hot friend of a
friend Dolores and the social status bubbles
over. Déficit plays to the indie film vibe with
multiple characters and a single house as
a location, with realistic atmospheres and
shooting style. While the film suffers from
Rodrigo plÁ's la zona.
too many characters and subplots that
don’t flesh out completely, there are some

mexican revolution
great subtle moments between the actors
BY Mike plante when they break away from the group.
The real find of the Mexican entries is
At the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival five Mexican-produced features Cochochi, winner of the festival’s Diesel Discov-
demonstrated the exciting range of talent coming out of that country’s growing film industry. ery Award. Hopefully the award will lead to dis-
La Zona, made by first-time director Rodrigo Plá, is a contained thriller. Small-time thieves tribution of the small and wonderful film.
invade an upper-class suburban neighborhood separated from neighboring poor society by Set in the Sierra Tarahumara of northwest
1984-style walls and security. Their simple plan of robbery goes bad when they unexpect- Mexico, Cochochi recounts the humble
edly kill an elderly woman. A disillusioned rich kid is caught in between the upper crust’s story of two Raramuri boys and their ef-
lust for blood and one of the scared teen thieves who hides in his basement. forts to find a lost horse. The search takes us
La Zona has a cable TV vibe (no longer a slam on a film!) with an extremely polished visual through their native land and life — a com-
style. Director Plá (from Montevideo, Uruguay) studied at the Centro de Capacitación Cin- pletely unique inside look, shot on location
ematográfica in Mexico City. He displays adeptness for solid filmmaking with flowing crane and with everyday people as the actors. The
shots, freaky security camera shots, and definitive genre characters. film is directed by first-timers Israel Cárde-
There are some confusing moments — it actually takes a while to understand how the subur- nas (from Monterrey, Mexico) and Laura
ban homes are a compound. Various jumps in time don’t help the plot structure. But the director Amelia Guzmán (from Santo Domingo, Do-
is obviously someone to watch. The film won Toronto’s FIPRESCI International Film Critics Prize. minican Republic, and schooled in Cuba).
Under the Same Moon is also very polished, dealing with U.S.-Mexico border issues. Patri- Reminiscent of the great Iranian filmmak-
cia Riggen's (from Guadalajara) feature debut, she's the first Mexican to ever win a Student er Abbas Kiarostami, Cárdenas and Guzmán
Academy Award (with the 2002 short The Cornfield) and she won Sundance’s Best Short Film capture real life so effortlessly and pure that
Award for Family Portrait (2004), her documentary on Gordon Parks. it becomes more than a documentary. You
The “hero” of Moon, nine-year-old Carlitos, cares for his grandmother in Mexico while walk alongside the “actors,” who never seem
his mom works in America, sending money back home and figuring out how to reunite like they are in a movie. Cochochi sends the
the family. When the grandmother passes away, Carlitos can’t stand waiting any more and audience deep into another world, where
bravely sets off to cross the border, despite the dangers of authorities and criminals alike. the local radio station, not a phone or com-
The film is played very straight — A to B to C — with solid acting and a nice look into what puter, is the most important mode of com-
illegal immigrants are going through on both sides of the border. An assured crowd-pleaser, the munication in the society.
film could be a nice success and even educational if it is marketed to families and teenagers. In recent years the Academy Awards have
I’m not taking a real leap by saying Carlos Reygadas’s new film Silent Light is a masterpiece. It taken notice of Mexican talent in cinema,
contains subtle and realistic acting, pacing that is stoic but gripping, and is layered with abso- but now many festivals are championing
lutely luscious imagery and sound — even a shitty ’70s American car looks mystical. The strange the next waves. The country currently offers
setting of Mennonites in Mexico provides magical reality as a farmer supports his wife and kids as much fresh excitement in new films as
but is having an affair. He doesn’t keep the tryst hidden because he believes it is all God’s will. anywhere else in the world.

14 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

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self-portrait Organic arc

PHOTO BY: KENDALL MESSICK

BY loren king BY Durier Ryan

Over the course of his 50 years as a film- Often relegated to the self-help section
maker, in such landmark documentaries as of the film enthusiast’s library, how-to books
Salesman, Grey Gardens and Gimme Shelter, on screenwriting have been a little passé since
Albert Maysles has humanized the eccentric, Brian Cox played story guru Robert McKee in
the ordinary and the extraordinary. One half Adaptation. But a new book by a well-known
albert maysles.
of the filmmaking team the Maysles broth- Hollywood script consultant, Dara Marks, is
ers (younger brother David died in 1987), shifting the how-to dialogue back toward the
who, along with Frederick Wiseman and D.A. Pennebaker, pioneered the “direct cinema” personal, character-driven ground historically
movement that revolutionized the documentary in the 1960s, Maysles rejected the voice- called home by the indies.
of-authority style that was the standard in the ’50s. Instead his camera sought random and In Inside Story: The Power of the Transforma-
intimate moments, lingering on a subject’s face, letting silence speak more eloquently than tional Arc (Three Mountain Press, 2006), Marks
words. Loose, occasionally messy and always raw, his films allowed the viewer to be both argues that “the arc inside the arc” — the
confidant and voyeur. emotional journey that’s taken by the writer,
Now, at 80, Maysles is turning his lens inward for an autobiographical film, Handheld and the character and the audience all at once
From the Heart, a title that references both his technical and emotional cinematic signatures. — is the actual essence of the story. “While the
Maysles decided to undertake the project when a producer for PBS’ American Masters series line of action tracks the protagonist’s engage-
approached him and said, “Let’s do you,” Maysles recalls. “I thought, ‘Why don’t I do me? I have so ment in an external conflict,” she writes, “the
much material, so many outtakes… I’ve been doing this for 50 years now.” transformational arc tracks the protagonist’s
In addition to his archival material, Maysles is shooting new footage as he traces his roots from internal struggle to rise to meet that external
his native Boston, visiting the neighborhood where he grew up as well as Boston University, where challenge by overcoming internal barriers.”
he earned his M.A. in psychology and taught for several years. He also reconnects with old friends While she describes her approach with
and even film subjects, such as one of the salesmen in Salesman, who is now driving a cab in Bos- a linear, three-act model (and supporting
ton. A meticulous cataloger — he shot so much good footage for Grey Gardens that he was able to triangular diagrams) that recalls the work of
release an equally startling companion film, The Beales of Grey Gardens — Maysles will dust off not her more mechanical predecessors, Marks
only outtakes but personal footage as well. He remembers when he and David went home to see eschews plot-driven tendencies in favor of a
their mother, whom Maysles cites as an important influence on his life. “She was getting an award more organically evolved character arc, ex-
from the American Jewish Congress, so we were going to film it,” he says. “I knocked on the door panding on techniques such as finding the
and my mother opened it, and there I was with my camera on my shoulder. She looked right into character’s “fatal flaw” and “turning theme
the camera and said, ‘Albert, you need a haircut!’ There’s so much stuff like that.” into character.”“When a story is told without
Maysles has always been prolific, but, as he enters his ninth decade, he seems to be working with that sense of the main character’s personal
even more urgency. He’s in production on In Transit, a film about the literal and metaphorical journeys growth,” she says, “it diminishes the quality
of people on trains all over the world. He was a cinematographer for the recent Gypsy Caravan and of the human experience.”
participated in From East Hampton to Broadway, a documentary about the making of the musical There’s a suggestive but respectful sensi-
Grey Gardens, the first stage musical to be based on a documentary. Unlike his earliest films, which bility in her book; she stresses the ultimate
had theatrical distribution, Maysles’s films in the last decade, such as Abortion: Desperate Choices and importance of working structurally but en-
Lalee’s Kin: The Legacy of Cotton, have found a comfortable home on HBO. But his films can still draw courages the writer, almost therapeutically,
crowds to the theater. The rarely shown What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA (1964) recently had to explore what they don’t know in order to
a sold-out engagement at the 1,000-seat Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles. find the story’s natural form. “Independent
Arguably his most famous film — one that the director never expected to be a hit — is Grey filmmakers have an opportunity to look at the
Gardens, which has inspired the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical and a soon-to-be-re- human condition in a more microscopic way
leased feature starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore. The enduring popularity of Grey Gar- that looks inward and tells a bigger story,” she
dens was never anticipated by Maysles, but, he recalls, Edie Beale herself predicted it. “When we says. For the writer
finished the film, we went over to visit them and screened it for [Edie and her mother],” he says. or writer-director
“When it was over, Edie said, in a very loud voice, ‘The Maysles have created a classic!’” who’s writing spe-
Maysles has long served as a teacher and mentor to young filmmakers. His sprawling pro- cifically for a smaller
duction offices in Harlem house the Maysles Institute and a program called On Our Side, which budget, Marks notes
has partnered with the Incarcerated Mothers Program to teach kids ages 8 to 12 how to create that “the cheapest
short videos of their lives. Maysles conducts workshops with the kids, teaching them technical money you’ll spend
skills as well as how to express themselves through filmmaking. He abhors much of commer- is making sure that
cial filmmaking, particularly television commercials, which he says is technically sophisticated what you want to say
but lacking in emotional or human elements. “They’re a visual jumble. It’s dehumanizing,” is on paper before
he says. “There’s no heart-to-heart connection.” you start.”
After 50 years and some 36 films, Maysles is still seeking that connection.

16 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

 REPORTS

PHOTO BY: MORGAN DOREMUS

Documentary ethics was just one of doz-
ens of subjects discussed formally at the con-
ference. With close to 30 panel discussions,
staged readings of the six scripts that were up
for the Emerging Narrative Screenplay Award,
a special preview screening and brunch put
on by the UK Film Council’s New Cinema
Fund, and seven hours of screenings every
day, it was busy. Filmmakers Laura Murray
and Misho Stawnychy, producers of Predator
House, which got a lot of good buzz, said, “Be-
fore the Market, we had a very difficult time
raising money and we were feeling disheart-
ened. However we had such a positive recep-
tion last week that we find ourselves in a great
position for raising finishing funds.”
meetings at the ifp market.
“What stood out to me most this year was
that, due to having the strongest staff that

MARKET watch
we’ve ever had, all of what we do at IFP had
BY pamela cohn a platform,” says Byrd looking back on the
Market’s 29th year. “It was a blend of the
“The challenge is keeping up with who the new players are, where the new money is [goals of the] organization’s founders with
(if there is any), and who’s got it,” says Documentary Spotlight Programmer Milton Tabbot those of the current generation of new art-
about the shifting sands of selling, marketing and distributing independent film these days. ists. The barrier between industry and film-
Hot on the heels of the Toronto International Film Festival, the annual IFP Market and Film- maker was very malleable and part of our
maker Conference takes place every year in downtown Manhattan at the historic Puck Build- plan for next year is to further sharpen this
ing. Right down the street from the Puck sits the Angelika Film Center, one of the premiere kind of integration.”
independent movie houses in the city. The theater hosts the week’s exhibition screenings A luncheon hosted by IFP’s Board of Di-
and has receptions in its spacious, sun-filled lobby, while providing an alternative place to rectors was held during the event to honor
meet for talks between filmmakers and sales agents. the following 2007 prizewinners:
Many of these filmmakers are also participants in other IFP programs like No Borders and The Adrienne Shelly Director’s Grant
the Rough Cut Lab, and during Market week, it’s not unusual for them to take as many as ($10,000 grant provided by The Adrienne
20 meetings a day. As filmmaker Cathryne Czubek, director and cinematographer of the Shelly Foundation and Artists Public Domain)
documentary A Girl and a Gun, says, “The advantage of pitching your project endlessly from went to Eunhee Cho for Inner Circle Line.
one meeting to the next is that, by the end, it really helps you clearly envision your film and The Emerging Narrative Screenplay
understand exactly what remains to be finished.” But as many filmmakers know, finishing Award ($5,000 grant provided by Artists
is just the beginning. How to build and engage your audience directly, and the necessity Public Domain) went to Avi Weider’s script
of creating constantly new and effective ways to do that, was a huge topic in panel discus- Zeroes and Ones.
sions, one-on-one meetings and casual conversations. IFP Executive Director Michelle Byrd The Rising Star Award for Emerging Narrative
says that the emphasis on the Market and Conference this year was to think about and Screenplay went to Nir Paniry, who received a
help implement “more proactive ways of helping filmmakers engage future audiences well production grant valued at $6,000 from East-
before they’re into production.” man Kodak for her script Kamikaze Dolls.
With DIY poster child M dot Strange (“YouTube was my film school”) blogging daily from The Fledgling Fund Award for Socially
a couch in the lounge and panel discussions on creating content for new platforms, 21st- Conscious Documentaries ($10,000 grant)
century film journalism, digital downloading and niche marketing, this year saw a strong went to Landon Van Soest’s Good Fortune.
presence of DIY-generation folk leading the charge toward new ways of making movies. The Fledgling Fund Award for Emerging
There is still a sense that this sea change in the industry is being met with a bit of resistance Latino Filmmakers ($10,000 grant) went to
from the more conservative old guard, but the creative and financial benefits of doing busi- Yolanda Pividal’s Tijuana, Nada Más.
ness on the Internet can be negated no longer. Panasonic Digital Filmmaking Grants
Despite the tidal wave of user-generated content and Web-based movie studio start- (with a total in-kind value of $54,000) went
ups, the consensus among most attendees I spoke with was that this year’s Independent to the following filmmakers: Frederic Collier
Film Week was permeated by the kind of creative juices that gets people excited. Dani- for M&N, Sean Patrick McCarthy for Moham-
elle DiGiacomo, Documentary Film Coordinator for IndiePix, a New York-based distributor, med and Mary, Eric Lane for Murnur, Jennifer
commented, “This year’s IFP Market was — and I am not being hyperbolic — the most in- Sharp for Native Honkeys, Phillipp Wolter for
vigorating yet. The projects I came across were uniformly strong.... As well, the panels were The State of Being, Nena Eskridge for Stray,
thought-provoking, the highlight for me being the contentious, yet enormously important, Paola Mendoza and Gloria LaMorte for We
documentary ethics discussion.” Can and Avi Weider for Zeroes & Ones.

18 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

COLUMNS

IN FOCUS Five new films in postproduction. By Mary Glucksman

PHOTO BY: MARTINA GEMMOLA

August
Wall Street is imploding in the month before
September 11 while two brothers struggle
to keep their dot-com going in August, the
second feature from XX/XY director Austin
Chick. “It captures a very specific time in
New York after the Internet bubble burst but
when [entrepreneurs] who were millionaires
on paper continued to lead lavish lifestyles,”
says Chick. “[The two brothers’] stock has
been plummeting, and they have a month left
before they can cash out. If they don’t find a
way to generate revenue, it’s over.”
Chick grew up in New Hampshire and stud-
ied art at Sarah Lawrence and film at SUNY
Purchase. His feature debut, XX/XY, starred
Mark Ruffalo, premiered at Sundance ’02 and
sold to IFC Films. August’s screenplay was
written by USC film school and writing divi-
sion chair Howard A. Rodman (Savage Grace).
Chick is making the equity-financed film with
Original Media producers Charlie Corwin and
Jace mclean and joe leonard’s sons of liberty.
Clara Marcowicz and 57th and Irving Produc-
tions’ Elisa Pugliese (The Cake Eaters).
“Austin brought me the script and it came ers and sisters in Christ. It’s a rare look at ur- Krissy Shield (2wks, 1yr) and newcomer Lau-
together fast,” says Corwin. “The images are ban Christians as complex human beings with rel Schroeder. The executive producer is Jason
iconic — it’s a story about hubris, a micro- doubts and sex lives, and it’s as much chamber Stephens and is a Split Pillow/Cone Arts co-
cosm of a time in America when we were still drama and dark comedy as thriller.” production. Cone says he’ll follow Christians
riding the high from the dot-com explosion Cone grew up in South Carolina, where with a dark comedy about two middle-aged
and felt indestructible as a nation.” his dad was a Baptist minister. He graduated true believers taking off to share the Gospel
The 35mm anamorphic August shot five from the University of South Carolina with a with the lost souls of the adult-film industry.
weeks in New York in April and May with theater degree in 2002, worked as a stage actor
Andrij Parekh (Half Nelson) as d.p. Josh and playwright in New York, Utah and Chica- Sons of Liberty
Hartnett and Adam Scott (The Matador) star go, and was twice a finalist for San Francisco’s Sons of Liberty is a comedy about three aim-
and supporting cast includes David Bowie, Bay Area Playwrights Festival. He made his less and indulgent Los Angeles roommates
Rip Torn and Naomie Harris (28 Days Lat- first short, Church Story, in 2005, and has the — an actor, an analyst and an artist — and
er). Composer Nathan Larson (Dirty Pretty Iraqi War-widow tale Young Wives entering what happens when the Marine husband of
Things) is writing the score. the fest circuit this fall. “I’ve been an aspiring one of their girlfriends returns from Afghani-
filmmaker all my life, but I stumbled on play- stan and prompts a sobering reality check.
The Christians writing and found satisfaction with it,” he says. First-time filmmaker Jace McLean co-directs
“It’s a story of spiritual dread somewhere be- “I’m inspired by the creativity of DIY projects Sons of Liberty with his long-time short-film
tween Children of Men and Eric Rohmer,” says from Mala Noche to Primer and the recent collaborator Joe Leonard, and he wrote the
Stephen Cone about The Christians. “It asks mumblecore films, but I didn’t want to make a script with significant input from Leonard
how far faith can take you in a world of doubt movie about my friends and their lovers with a and producer Jared Parsons.
defined by global unease and constant fear.” handheld DV cam and no lights. And I wasn’t Like the film’s characters, the three are room-
Cone’s micro-budget film is a chilling drama willing to wait two or three years for a half mates. “With all of us turning 30, we’re of that
about two Christian couples barricaded in a million dollars, so I packed my own obsessions generation,” McLean says. “[The film] is about
Chicago apartment following the release in the into one interior and added a bit of cash.” seeing the bigger picture and where you fit into
city of a biological weapon. When midnight The high-def Christians shot two weeks in it, but rather than being didactic we wanted to
comes and goes with no sign of the Rapture, Chicago beginning August 17 with 2007 ASC sneak up and tap you on the shoulder.”
says Cone, “[we see] what happens when their Heritage Award winner Brian Melton as cin- McLean is an accomplished stage actor, with
comfort zones crumble. They’re forced to con- ematographer. The film stars Arian Moayed dozens of credits from productions at the Ac-
sider each other as individuals as well as broth- (M.O.N.Y.), Rob Belushi (According to Jim), tors’ Studio, the Flea Theater and the Ensemble

20 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

 COLUMNS
Studio Theater, as well as a B.A. in political sci-
ence from Wheaton College in Illinois. Leon-
ard got an undergraduate degree in film from
NYU in 2002 and worked as director’s assistant
and assistant editor on The Architect and The
Great New Wonderful before moving to L.A. to
develop a feature version of his award-winning
short How I Got Lost, which he plans to shoot
this winter. The three filmmakers have worked
on each other’s projects since meeting 10 years
ago in the East Village; the micro-budget Lib-
erty is the first feature from the L.A. film col-
lective Blatantly Subtle Productions, which they
recently founded as the creative arm of a bread-
and-butter post division.
The HD Liberty shot for three weeks in
and around Los Angeles last February with
Chris Chambers as cinematographer. The
cast includes Benjamin Seay (Veronica Mars),
Peter Kenney (Nash Bridges), Jack Guzman
(Heroes) and Sarah Deakins (The Dead Zone).
True Adolescents
“It’s about masculinity, responsibility and
identity and making peace with what you can
be rather than what you’ve always dreamed
of,” says Craig Johnson about his first feature,
True Adolescents, a coming-of-age comedy
that’s also his thesis project for NYU’s grad
film program. The Seattle-set story stars
filmmaker Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair)
as a drifting indie rocker who finally grows
up when he reluctantly agrees to take his 14-
year-old cousin camping and ends up putting
his life on the line to keep the kid safe. “I’m
22 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
PHOTO BY: AMOS JAMES
david boyle’s white on rice.
trying to make a film that’s not only wildly
funny but harrowing, poignant and ultimately
uplifting,” says Johnson.
Johnson, 31, grew up near Seattle doing
community theater with a teenage Hilary
Swank and worked on some 15 stage projects
there as writer, director or actor after graduat-
ing from the University of Washington with a
theater degree. “We were laboring intensively
to make work that played to tiny audiences,
and I wanted to take a stab at having a greater
impact,” he says, “so I rolled the dice and went
to film school.” He’s making Adolescents with
fellow NYU grad film student Thomas Wood-
row, 29, who won the school’s prestigious Craft
Award two years in a row for producing before
graduating last year and being hired as one of
several producers on Shadows, made by NYU
prof Milcho Manchevski (Before the Rain).
Woodrow brought Gill Holland on board as
exec producer and raised Adolescents’ under $1
million budget through private investments.
The Super 16mm Adolescents shot four
weeks in Seattle and the area’s Cascades
woods and Olympic Peninsula beach begin-
ning August 11, with another recent NYU
MFA film grad, Kat Westergaard (Day On
Fire), as d.p. On the recommendation of ad-
viser Miguel Arteta, the film hired casting
directors Meg Morman and Sunday Boling
to help find the boys (newcomers Bret Loehr
and Carr Thompson); Melissa Leo and doc
director Linas Phillips (Walking to Werner)
have supporting roles.
White on Rice
“Hollywood movies promote a lot of mis-
conceptions about Japanese culture,” says
David Boyle (Big Dreams Little Tokyo)
about his second feature, White on Rice. “I
wanted to make a film about characters who
happen to be Asian, where their ethnicity
is secondary to their personalities and the
specifics of the story.” The offbeat comedy
tells the story of a shy 40-year-old Japanese
man new to the U.S. sharing a bedroom
with his Americanized 10-year-old nephew
and what happens when both are smitten
with a delicate young beauty who comes to
stay. Hiroshi Watanabe (Letters From Iwo
Jima) stars in a role Boyle wrote for him
after working with him on Big Dreams.
Boyle, 25, grew up in Tucson and studied
Japanese culture and literature at Brigham
Young University. The San Jose/Salt Lake
City–shot Dreams premiered at the AFI
fest in 2006 and drew frequent comparisons
to Napoleon Dynamite for its sly humor and
Boyle’s deft presence in a leading role requir-
ing him to emote in two languages. “I grew up
loving filmmakers like Truffaut and Jacques
Tati,” he says. “As a kid I found that the pro-
cess of reading subtitles made a moviegoing
experience much richer.”
Rice reteams Boyle with Dreams producer
Duane Anderson, also editor on both fea-
tures. The Super 16mm film shot in Salt
Lake City for five weeks beginning June 20
with AFI grad Bill Otto (Big Dreams) as
d.p. The cast includes Big Dreams costars
James Kyson Lee (Heroes), Pepe Serna
(Scarface), Mio Takada (Conan O’Brien)
and Lynn Chen (Saving Face). The juve-
nile lead is Salt Lake City local hire Justin
Kwong. PiL (Public Image Ltd.) guitarist
Mark Schultz — more recently composer
on Big Dreams and All the Boys Love Mandy
Lane — is writing Rice’s score, and the film
should be done in early 2008.t
contact information
■ August
Charlie Corwin
charlie@original-media.com
■ The Christians
Stephen Cone
thechristiansmovie@gmail.com
■Sons of Liberty
Jace McLean
mcleanjace@hotmail.com
■ True Adolescents
Thomas Woodrow
thomas.woodrow@gmail.com
■ White on Rice
David Boyle
info@bigdreamslittletokyo.com
COLUMNS
INDUSTRY BEAT
Poor documentary filmmakers. As if it
weren’t already difficult enough to follow
a subject for years on end, log hundreds of
hours of footage, scrape together financing
from grants, relatives and broadcasters and
craft an amazing nonfiction opus, the Acad-
emy Awards don’t want you.
Ever since they were announced earlier
this year, the new — and seemingly annual
— changes in the Oscars’ qualifications for
documentary films have sparked debate on
indie film blogs and at nonfiction film festivals
around the world. Some aspects of the modifi-
cations have been embraced; others have been
criticized. But one thing’s for sure: Oscar’s
new demands — and the subsequent outcry
— show just how much the stakes for docu-
mentaries have grown in the marketplace.
The most profound alteration is that in ad-
dition to a seven-day qualifying run in New
York or Los Angeles before August 31 — with
films requiring two screenings daily between
the hours of noon and 10 p.m. (eliminating
popular earlier start times of the past) — films
must also complete a multistate rollout of 14
engagements, of at least three consecutive days,
in 10 or more states, by November 15.
The new theatrically intense requirements
are a result of the Academy’s mandate “to
evaluate films in a theatrical world as opposed
to the television world,” argues Ric Robertson,
the Academy’s executive administrator. “One
of the reasons the rules are so convoluted is to
make sure that a film has legitimate theatri-
cal credentials. We don’t want to do anything
that opens the floodgates. Too many entries
don’t help us either.”
But in trying to winnow out nonfiction
small fries, the Academy is eliminating films
based primarily on economic criteria, not
aesthetic quality. As Academy member and
distributor Ira Deutchman contends, “It’s the
best documentary that should win the award,
not the richest filmmaker.”
“This year the changes were profound and
change the economics of the game complete-
ly,” echoes Mark Urman, head of distribution
for THINKFilm, which is qualifying some
six films for the category this year.
Among the chief costs for a documentary
film not delivered on 16mm or 35mm film
is an up-res process to meet Digital Cin-
ema specifications (23.98i) for the one-week
24 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
Indie docs struggle to satisfy Oscar. By Anthony Kaufman
ricki stern and annie sundberg’s the devil came on horseback.
qualifying run (approximately $8,000). Then
there’s the expenditure to fund the 14-city
rollout, which, contradictorily, doesn’t require
any technical minimums (theaters could show
films on DVD). The price tag for such a re-
lease, depending on chosen format, advertising
and marketing, ranges dramatically, however.
Teddy Leifer, producer of We Are Together,
an inspirational account of a South Afri-
can orphanage, says he’s hired veteran indie
Shadow Distribution to take the film out for
a price tag of about $12,000 to qualify the
film entirely separate from a planned com-
mercial rollout. “There are companies that I
know that charge $10,000 for the week and
another $20,000 for the 14-city run,” he says.
Many filmmakers choose to qualify with
the help of the International Documentary
Association’s DocuWeek, an exhibition pro-
gram aimed specifically at meeting all Acade-
my requirements. But the curated DocuWeek
program is also expensive. (Entry fees cost
$75.00; if selected, feature selections pay up
to a $3,500 co-op fee and, if they don’t have a
print, another $8,000 to 10,000 for the Digi-
tal Projection up-res, plus another $5,000 for
the 14-city rollout.)
IDA executive director Sandra Ruch com-
plains that the digital requirement is not only
costly for filmmakers but prohibitive because
the movie theaters that show docs don’t have
projectors suited to the format. “So we have
to bring in our own equipment to great ex-
pense,” she says, putting the price tag of the
machines at $16,000.
“It’s an unrealistic standard,” says Film Fo-
rum programmer Mike Maggiore. “And an
unnecessary expense that seems out of touch
with the way in which the majority of docu-
mentaries are shown digitally in theaters.”
Ira Deutchman, whose Emerging Pictures
theater chain has helped qualify at least one
feature doc, The Cats of Mirikitani, calls the
tech specifications “so ludicrous that it doesn’t
make sense.”
“We recognize that it’s a problem,” says AM-
PAS’s Robertson, who explains that the digital
requirement is all about “striking that balance
between setting a high standard and not penal-
izing the independent documentary maker.”
Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, co-di-
rectors of The Devil Came on Horseback, used
DocuWeek to qualify their previous film, The
Trials of Darryl Hunt, but this time around
they’ve decided to treat their qualifying run
as a legitimate theatrical release. Using mon-
ey from investors, they’ve funded a release
through International Film Circuit, which
they feel is far superior to what DocuWeek
supplies. “They’re not geared to grow a the-
atrical release,” says Sundberg. “If your film
does well out of DocuWeek, there’s no ability
to capitalize on that.”
Still, even though their film performed
healthily in release and they cite the likeli-
hood that they’ll make their money back,
Stern admits the reality of getting your doc
on screens is extremely difficult. Even an es-
tablished indie distrib like Magnolia Pictures,
see page 109
COLUMNS
FEST CIRCUIT
Toronto International
Film Festival
Howard Feinstein
All right, you do spend most of your time in
a shopping-mall multiplex. And the facades on
the busy streets of Yorkville are brutal at night
— their harsh lights are not kind to a festival-
goer short on sleep. I might also add, two nights
in a row I went to eateries that precooked their
hamburgers — a cardinal offense!
But as a festival, Toronto (September 6-15)
is a godsend. It is so all-inclusive that Venice is
dispensable (I stopped going three years ago)
and Cannes might be for those who don’t need
to see its offerings right away (I do). Most
of the good movies in the New York Film
Festival, barely two weeks later, have already
screened in Toronto. It is one-stop shopping
and so well-organized, especially for the press,
and the industry and staff are so nice. (Confes-
sion: The smoothness of it all makes me want
to hit someone, or at least yank their hair. I
can’t find the rupture I require.)
In fact, the festival is so large — 350 films
— that writing a coherent article summing
it up is near impossible. As I look at the
litany of titles I viewed in one week, several
common themes and genres emerge. I’ll try
to tackle this mountain from those angles.
(I will not use up too much space on films
I blogged about on Filmmaker’s Web site or
those I wrote about in the magazine’s wrap
piece on Cannes). And if I succeed in finding
some organizing principles, I’m going to treat
myself to a burger at New York’s Corner Bis-
tro — and I’m going to watch them cook it.
THE MUSLIM WORLD AND ITS DIASPORA
Canadians are generally more open-minded
than their southern neighbors, so an abun-
dance of progressive, politically oriented films
at the festival is the norm. Not surprisingly,
Islam plays a part in many of them. In the
brilliant Battle for Haditha, Nick Broomfield
restages the events, many as banal as life itself,
leading up to, including and occurring after the
massacre of 24 civilians by vindictive Ameri-
can soldiers in Iraq on November 19, 2005. It
followed an explosion by an IED planted in
the road by paid insurgents more mercenary
than ideological. Broomfield composes and
edits efficiently and dramatically, often with a
handheld camera, leaving the focus on the as-
26 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
Reports from Toronto, Venice and Edinburgh.
sorted characters, be they Iraqi lovers and their
families, the insurgents, their dogmatic bosses
or troubled young American GIs. Known pri-
marily as a doc-maker, the director makes you
feel the sounds and smells of an Iraq where ev-
eryone is afraid of someone.
Broomfield addresses the requisite military
cover-up, as does Brian De Palma in Redacted.
The crime here is the rape/murder of a 15-year-
old girl and the killing of her family in Samarra,
a vendetta by overtly racist American soldiers
(who De Palma unfortunately makes into psy-
chos) following the loss of a buddy. Unable to
move forward from his usual gloss, the ex-mas-
ter of neo-Hitchcockian suspense and atmo-
sphere, after a flirtation with Eurotrash flicks,
now fakes a doc. The effort is fraught with fraud
and overacted. As usual in his body of work,
everything is mediated: A soldier is making a
video diary, we see checkpoint harassment as
part of a faux French doc within the film, and
De Palma conveys way too much info via com-
puter screens and other electronic devices. It’s
like having plate glass between your nose and
fresh cuisine: You smell nothing.
Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor, Parvez Shar-
ma’s A Jihad for Love, and Marjane Satrapi and
Vincent Paronnaud’s Persepolis, from France,
give visibility to other Muslims, many of who
are on an immigration track. In The Visitor, one
of the finest films at the festival, a soulful young
Syrian player of the djembe, a kind of drum, is
ethnically profiled in a New York City subway
station and busted, detained in a windowless
Queens detention center, and ultimately de-
Tom mccarthy’s the visitor.
ported. (His girlfriend is an illegal alien from
Senegal.) Casting Richard Jenkins as the Con-
necticut widower who helps him was a stroke
of genius. Downplaying histrionics, Jenkins’s
performance does not interfere with the reality-
based drama of the one who really suffers.
While a missed opportunity on account
of incompetent direction and superficial in-
vestigation, A Jihad for Love does break new
ground in profiling gays and lesbians in the
hard-line Muslim world. Several of those
Sharma speaks to are of necessity in exile:
an Egyptian in Paris and two Iranians in
Canada. Based on Satrapi’s autobiographical
graphic novel, the clever, animated Persepolis
surveys 20th-century Iranian history through
her and her family’s experiences. Repression
under the Shah (who was shored up by the
U.S.) and under the Islamic revolutionaries
has not made for a happy country. The parents
of Marjane, her character, send her to study in
Vienna, where she is often treated as an un-
civilized outsider. Nostalgia gets the best of
her and she returns home, only to leave again
for France after a bad marriage and further
political disillusionment.
In Alexandra, by the Russian master Alek-
sandr Sokurov — arguably the best film of the
year — an elderly Russian woman ventures to
the breakaway Muslim province of Chechnya
to visit her grandson, a soldier who lives in a
makeshift military compound. She is haughty,
difficult, and neurotic, but somehow she and
the senior women of the nearby town, who
have been through hell, bond over their com-
COLUMNS
mon humanity. Sokurov seems to be asking
isn’t Russian vs. Chechen, Orthodox vs. Mus-
lim irrelevant at some primal human level?
ALL ABOUT WOMEN
Alexandra and Persepolis are two of the many
Toronto films in which females occupy center
stage. Toughest of all of these women is An-
gie, played by Kierston Wareing in a tour-de-
force performance, in Ken Loach’s troubling
It’s a Free World…. She is a feminine, plati-
num-blonde Barbie doll — in fact, slutty. And
this character construction is not accidental:
She’s also a working-class kid trying to bet-
ter life for her son and herself in a stratified
society and using whatever resources she can
muster. She starts a business hiring out most-
ly illegal immigrants for low, and frequently
unpaid, wages. Talking tough, she threatens
them. She embodies the crass capitalism that
has transformed the U.K. and exploits its new
arrivals. Even though the workers turn on her,
she manages to come out on top, a triumph
for social Darwinism.
Another survivor, if of better economic
standing and possessed of a little more social
conscience — oh, hell, she’s an aging actress,
a total narcissist — is Silvia Perez’s Erni in
Argentinean director Anahí Berneri’s En-
carnación. When she desires sex, she rings
the doorbell of a sometimes lover. She is in
control — the fact that she refuses to accept
a non-thesping job from him reinforces the
point. And though she feels close to her teen
niece in a provincial town, she doesn’t mind
making waves during the girl’s quinceañera
over her own sister and brother-in-law’s en-
croaching on a shared inheritance from their
father. Despite a hasty departure, she leaves
the niece the handsome local she’s had a fling
with, even though she might like it to con-
tinue: She’s not without heart.
Neither Angie nor Erni is as cold as Nicole
Kidman’s title character in Noah Baumbach’s
deftly directed Margot at the Wedding, about
sisters who disagree on a choice of marriage
partner for one ( Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Pau-
line). Kidman, whose newly unlined face
provides a Kabuki cover suitable for the part,
continues the Laura Linney role from The
Squid and the Whale: the selfish, affectless,
distant mother, a writer again, insensitive
to her young son’s needs. If only Baumbach
would advance from his seeming personal ob-
session with his own maternal line, his other-
wise nifty scripts would benefit.
Like people everywhere, some of the
28 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
women are weak. In Swedish filmmaker Åke
Sandgren’s To Love Someone, a TVish look at
the ambivalence a married woman experiences
when her physically abusive ex-boyfriend gets
out of the joint, the protagonist learns she has
no control over her attraction — even though
she has just been diagnosed with permanent
brain damage from the pummeling her ex gave
her a few years before. Yes, people vacillate, we
can’t help whom and what we are attracted to,
but there are limits. Sandgren stacks the deck:
The lover is much better looking than she, and
he never shows the intent to harm her again.
In fact, she is responsible for pain inflicted on
him and her husband.
More egregious is Ludivine Sagnier’s sexy
young Gabrielle in great Gallic director and
misogynist Claude Chabrol’s A Girl Cut in
Two. Not only does she allow herself to be
treated like shit by her married lover, an elitist
novelist 30 years her superior, but she testifies
against his memory in order to cash in from
the family of his killer, her superwealthy, on-
the-rebound husband (and also a passive-ag-
gressive sociopath). In spite of a final scene
in which she plays a woman sawed in half on
stage during a magic show, I do not have a
clue what the title means. In fact, I do not
have a clue why this film was made and why
its atmosphere is so rarefied.
Juliette Binoche stars in and waltzes
through Israeli director Amos Gitai’s preten-
tious Disengagement. Never mind that the
controversial Israeli pullout from Gaza occu-
pies the backdrop that foregrounds an inter-
national star. In just the opposite vein, Belén
Rueda (The Sea Inside) gradually moves to the
center of Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio
Bayona’s gothic The Orphanage. In spite of
the movie’s plethora of psychological horror
clichés — creaking doors, thunder, you name
aleksandr sokurov’s alexandra.
it — the astonishing Rueda makes it bearable
as a mother of an HIV positive child who dis-
appears from the family’s new home, a huge
seaside mansion that housed the orphanage
in which she grew up.
GENRE
Though way overrated, The Orphanage is
one of a number of genre films that thankfully
round out the festival’s artier fare. Several are
revisionist thrillers. The talented Serbian direc-
tor Srdjan Golubovic’s The Trap is a superior
suspenser embedded in the unpleasant political
and economic realities of post-Milosevic Ser-
bia. A man referred to as “ordinary” falls into
extraordinary circumstances. It’s bad enough
that the contracting company he works for will
survive only if a foreign investor buys it, but his
beloved only child requires heart surgery that
can only be performed in Germany and is not
covered by insurance. Out of desperation he
hires himself out as an assassin — we assume
it’s a political hit because several films with the
theme of political killing have emerged from
Belgrade in the past decade — but his mur-
der plotting simply revolves around a noxious
business rivalry, thus showing the mercenary
crassness of the new Serbia.
Also a variation on the classic suspense
film is Icelandic filmmaker Baltasar Kor-
mákur’s Jar City, one of the finds of the festi-
val. It is an original concoction with shades of
Hitchcock that interweaves a detective’s har-
ried investigation of a murder in the present
with a closed case involving a child’s death 30
years before. Kormákur has one of the best
eyes in filmmaking today. Sidney Lumet’s
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a studio-
like hybrid of the gangster and family genres,
a tale of disparate siblings so in need of cash
that they hire a thug to rob their own mother.
Typically for Lumet, it is set in New York
City. The direction is fine, but it becomes
mannered. Philip Seymour Hoffman and
Ethan Hawke are excellent as the brothers.
Reinventing film noir is a thankless task:
Already a parody of the German Expression-
ism that flourished in the teens and ’20s, the
genre is intentionally exaggerated in plot and
design. Hungarian Béla Tarr succeeds in bor-
rowing from it in The Man From London be-
cause the story contained in this adaptation
of a Georges Simenon novel melds well with
Tarr’s own propensity for black-and-white,
shadows, posing and extreme behavior. Ira
Sachs fails in Married Life, however, because
his color neo-noir about two friends and the
femme fatale they share is a well made but
empty exercise in mere style.

UNCATEGORIZABLE BUT HIGHLY

RECOMMENDED
It’s a “small” film, but The Pope’s Toilet, by
Uruguayan directors Enrique Fernández and
César Charlone, is a funny satire based on the
Pope’s actual visit to the poor village of Melo in
1988. A small-time smuggler who gets around
on a bicycle decides that building a usable toi-
let for the expected throngs will earn him the
money to send his daughter to school in Mon-
tevideo. You feel you are in the world of peas-
ants: the barbecues, the relationships within
families, the connection with community. The
Pope comes and goes quickly, causing all of the
town’s investors — in food and drink vending,
mostly — to lose their asses. As if the Catholic
Church hasn’t beaten them down enough.
From neighboring Argentina comes Lucía
Puenzo’s XXY, a “little” movie that’s a finely
drawn portrait of an intersexed teen whose
gender identification is called into question.
Like its protagonist, the film defies classifi-
cation. I also can’t put a label on New York-
based Lee Isaac Chung’s Munyurangabo,
an amazingly accomplished if low-budget
rendering of the friendship between two
Rwandan boys, a Hutu and a Tutsi, and their
increased awareness of the enmity they are
supposed to feel toward each other 12 years
after the genocide.
I don’t know what to call Julian Schnabel’s
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an exqui-
sitely drawn portrait of a man with locked-
in syndrome who can communicate, and
even writes a book, only by batting an eye.
The visuals are unforgettable, and this story
of an immobile man moves. Gus Van Sant’s
see page 110

FILMMAKER SUMMER 2007 29

COLUMNS

LOAD & PLAY Filmmaker’s look at the season’s DVD releases.

The Films of Kenneth Anger, Volume 2 Fantoma Films, October 2

Not a moment too soon comes the follow-up to Fantoma Films’ first collection of Kenneth QUEUE IT
Anger’s legendary short films. Again, the pristine new transfers, informative full-color booklet Titles coming out this season that
and extras make this essential to any Anger fan, and indeed, any aspiring filmmaker. This caught our eye.
round-up of his later shorts are nothing short of stunning, even today. Scorpio Rising sure didn’t
look like this when I saw it at film school! — André Salas October 9
BLACK SHEEP
The Weinstein Company
Manufactured Landscapes Zeitgeist Films, November 20 Directed by Jennifer MAN PUSH CART
Koch Lorber Films Releasing
Baichwal, this reflective meditation on how Earth’s natural environment has been manipulated and
destroyed by the industrial power of mankind is stunningly photographed by Edward Burtynsky. THE TREATMENT
New Yorker Films
The documentary’s main focus is on China, with scenes set at shipyards where old oil tankers are YOU KILL ME
destroyed, toxic recycling centers that comprise half the world’s discarded computers (referred to as IFC Films
“e-waste”) and massive-sized factories where workers endlessly toil on tedious assembly lines. It’s October 16
often bleak and depressing, yet the filmmakers don’t condemn the situation but instead reveal the CRAZY LOVE
Magnolia Home Entertainment
inevitable heartbreak of new-age industry on China’s once beautiful landscapes. — Jeffrey Kunze
A MIGHTY HEART
Paramount Home Video
Blade Runner: Five Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition THE TRIALS OF DARRYL HUNT
Warner Bros., December 18 Hardcore fans will spring for this collector’s edition, which touts THINKFilm

Ridley Scott’s new “Final Cut” of the film, the 1991 Director’s Cut, the international cut, October 23
the original theatrical cut and a never-before-seen workprint. Also included is the new film BREATHLESS
The Criterion Collection
Dangerous Days, a comprehensive documentary which includes interviews with Harrison
FIDO
Ford who, until now, has not spoken publicly about the film. On disc-four fans will find an Lionsgate
“Enhancement Archive” chocked full of new featurettes, trailers and other unique treats. For
October 30
a little extra, you can purchase the DVDs in a “Deckard” briefcase which contains produc- JOHN WATERS: THIS FILTHY WORLD
tions stills, toys and a personal letter from Ridley Scott. — Benjamin Crossley-Marra Dokument Films
TWIN PEAKS: THE DEFINITIVE GOLD BOX EDITION
Paramount Home Video
In the Spring ’97 issue of Filmmaker we asked a group of Directors to pay
WE ARE THE STRANGE
tribute to Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With the release of his 15 1/2-hour Berlin Alexander- Ryko Distribution
platz from Criterion in November we look back on Harmony Korine’s thoughts on the late November 6
German master. FOUR SHEETS TO THE WIND
It is known that Fassbinder’s ninth favorite actor was Zeppo Marx. Anthony Quinn’s First Look Home Entertainment

sixth favorite artist is Velazquez. In In a Year of Thirteen Moons, a crossdresser (Volker November 13
Spengler) takes a stroll through a slaughterhouse where cows are destroyed. This re- DECEIT
THINKFilm
minds me of Anthony Quinn’s face. In 1972, Fassbinder made a film called Jailbait
PARIS JE T’AIME
about a 14-year-old girl who falls in love with an older boy. When her parents find out First Look Home Entertainment
that their daughter’s hymen has been busted they have a private conversation:
November 20
Mother: The Nazi had their faults. COLMA: THE MUSICAL
Father: I would rather 100,000 Jews murdered than this happen to us! Lionsgate
It is also a well-known fact that Fassbinder GHOSTS OF CITÉ SOLEIL
THNKFilm
PHOTO BY: THE CRITERION COLLECTION

used to whore out his actresses for the pur-

THE LADY VANISHES
poses of financing his films. In an interview The Criterion Collection
Fassbinder mentioned that for one year November 27
straight he used to walk around with a copy THE NAMESAKE
of Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz 20th Century Fox

in his back pocket, but this got me upset VITUS

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
because the book is extremely thick, well
over 600 pages, and his pants at the time December 4
THE HOTTEST STATE
were very tight. There was no possible way THINKFilm
the book could have fit. It was around this
December 18
time that I lost interest in Fassbinder. Also, THE DRAUGHTSMAN’S CONTRACT
berlin alexanderplatz. Zeitgeist Films
Douglas Sirk makes me sick.

You can find Filmmaker’s take on upcoming DVD releases at filmmaker.com/loadandplay.

30 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

COLUMNS

THE SUPER 8 Eight things that will keep you in the know.

1 1 One Sheets To celebrate the influential artistic vision of two recently-deceased

directing legends, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, the Posteritati gallery in
downtown New York City is holding a special exhibit showcasing a compilation of posters
from their diverse, half-century careers, including such iconic classics as The Seventh Seal,
Wild Strawberries and Blow-Up. The exhibit will be held Oct. 2-Jan. 31, 2008 and is a must-
see for any appreciative fan of art and cinema. For further info, visit posteritati.com.

2 HD Tips For those of you that don’t want to keep buying $30 books every time a
new digital advancement comes along, head over to Mike Curtis’s HD for Indies Web site
(hdforindies.com) for the latest updates in the high-def world. The site has tips and tricks on
postproduction, cinematography and just about anything one would want to know about HD
production. There are also interviews and podcasts of top industry professionals discussing
the latest advancements in HD. And Curtis is readily available to answer questions.

3 Earth Cinema Circle With several filmmakers going green, it was inevitable
that a company would come along offering a way to spread their message to like-minded citi-
zens. Enter Earth Cinema Circle, a new eco-friendly subscription-based DVD club launch-
ing in January. Members of the EEC will receive three to six films every other month on such
hot button issues as endangered wildlife, eco-travel and a gamut of other important topics.
For more information visit earthcinemacircle.com. 

4 Danny Lyon Show On display at the Whitney Museum Sept. 7-Dec. 2 is a

PHOTO COURTESY OF: EDWYNN HOUK GALLERY, NEW YORK

retrospective of Danny Lyon’s work in film and photography. Lyon championed the “New
Journalism” movement, in which he became a participant in the subject that he was studying,
starting in the 1960s. His work projects an intensive study of different social situations, such
as the Civil Rights Movement in the south and a breakdown of the prison system in Texas.

5 OurStage.com This site serves as an open forum for aspiring filmmakers and
musicians to upload their work to be viewed and voted on by fans. There is a catch though:
The top-rated filmmakers and musicians receive a special one-on-one session with estab-
lished figures such as John Cameron Mitchell, Ryan Fleck and John Legend, who give advice
on how to start out and maintain success in the ever competitive entertainment business.

6 The Filmmaker’s Handbook The cornerstone for film 101 courses

across the United States, The Filmmaker’s Handbook (Plume, 2007) has just come out in a new
edition, which includes updated information on the latest digital advancements. This text
has received glowing reviews throughout the years and has led many film instructors to refer
to it as the “Filmmaking Bible.” Authored by film professors Steven Ascher and Edward
Pincus, the book includes information on everything from preproduction to distribution. 4
7 Toon Boom Studio 4 Described as an “all-in-one” animation program, Toon
Boom provides many advantages for a young filmmaker starting out in this field. Choose from
drawing your work digitally, scanning hand-drawn animations or quickly and easily importing ex-
isting artwork. This new version gives the artist additional abilities such as lip-syncing your anima-
tion, setting up action in 3D space and allowing you to format and display your creations on the
Internet, TV or even iPod. To get all the technical details, plus free video tutorials and examples of
what others have done so far with this progressive software, check out toonboom.com.

8 Brad Neely Anyone who’s seen Brad Neely’s hip-hop history lesson about George
Washington — a cult hit on YouTube — can attest to the cartoonist’s unique genius. Along-
side reinterpretations of Sodom and Gomorrah and the life of JFK, he has recorded Wizard
People, Dear Readers an adult version of the first Harry Potter movie’s soundtrack which can
7 be played while the movie is on mute. See these and more at creasedcomics.

32 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

 a
jigs w
THE
Todd Haynes’s first film, a 1985 student
short called Assassins: A Film Concerning Rim-
baud, focused in a manner both engaging and
Brechtian on the anarchistic French poet who
scandalized the bourgeoisie in 19th-century
Paris and London. Haynes was studying semi-
otics and art at Brown, and it’s not by chance
that he is one of the few directors working to-
day whose gorgeous images are wrapped in real
but sometimes indefinable meaning.
Now 22 years later in his magnificent film
essay on Bob Dylan, I’m Not There, he casts
the English actor Ben Whishaw as a Rim-
baudesque incarnation of the chameleon-like
composer-singer, a poète maudit whose oblique
responses to an unseen interrogator inten-
tionally sidestep direct discourse. Whishaw’s
34 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
MAN
Todd Haynes examines the
life and mythology of Bob Dylan
in i’m not there.
By Howard Feinstein
Arthur (the poet’s actual first name) is a rebel
living outside the system, much as Dylan, in all
his incarnations, has managed to do since the
late 1950s. The musician also went through a
phase (following his political activism period)
of doling out tangential, sometimes nonsensi-
cal, responses to queries. You can read some
of these in Nat Hentoff ’s revealing interview
with the usually guarded Dylan in the Feb-
ruary 1966 issue of Playboy (interferenza.
com/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm), which Haynes
kindly lead me to. A sample:
DYLAN: My older songs, to say the least,
were about nothing. The newer ones are
about the same nothing — only as seen inside
a bigger thing, perhaps called the nowhere.
But this is all very constipated. I do know
what my songs are about.
PLAYBOY: And what’s that?
DYLAN: Oh, some are about four minutes,
some are about five, and some, believe it or
not, are about 11 or 12.
PLAYBOY: Can’t you be a bit more informative?
DYLAN: Nope.
But then, all of Haynes’s cinematic stud-
ies have been about people who fall outside
the margins of general acceptability: young,
future-gay Richie in Dottie Gets Spanked; the
eponymous anorexic in Superstar: The Karen
Carpenter Story; each of the protagonists in
the three dark segments of Poison, Julianne
Moore’s environmentally allergic housewife
 PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK

cate blanchett in I’m Not there.

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 35

 “i actually don’t
think my concept is
imposing some big
interpretation on
[dylan] once you re-
ally examine his life.”
in Safe; Jonathan Rhys-Myers’s glam rocker in
Velvet Goldmine; and Dennis Quaid’s closeted
gay husband and father in Far From Heaven.
He has addressed celebrity culture in Dot-
tie, Superstar, and Goldmine — not to men-
tion Assassins. Isn’t Dylan a logical subject for
Haynes to tackle now at his most mature and
accomplished?
Whishaw is one of six thesps portraying
characters — an überAlienation Effect —
who are all aspects of Dylan, a man who rein-
vented himself frequently and who drove fans
desperate to pigeonhole him nuts and angry.
I’m Not There, from a song recorded during
the 1967 Basement Tapes sessions with The
Band and circulated only in bootleg copies, is
the perfect title for the film, as you can see in
Hentoff ’s interview:
PLAYBOY: Writing about “beard-wearing
draft-card burners and pacifist income-tax
evaders,” one columnist called such protesters
“no less outside society than the junkie, the
homosexual or the mass murderer.”
DYLAN: I don’t consider myself outside of
anything. I just consider myself not around.
Sometimes I have the feeling that other peo-
ple want my soul.
Dylan’s different personas are embodied in
Haynes’s film by a young black boy (Marcus
Carl Franklin, the only actor who does his own
singing, as Woody), a woman (Cate Blanchett
as Jude), and several adult males (Christian
Bale as Jack and Pastor John; Heath Ledger
as Robbie; and Richard Gere as Billy). Each
represents a relatively distinct period and/or
aspect of Dylan the man: the folk singer, the
activist, the electric guitarist, the misogynist
and failed husband, the Pentecostal, and the
country-and-western aficionado. Haynes at-
taches particular songs sung by both Dylan
himself and various cover bands to each.
If the black-and-white and color I’m Not
There (The Weinstein Company opens the
film in limited release November 21) needs
to be categorized, I would use the term “non-
36 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
co-writer-director todd haynes and charlotte gainsbourg on the set of I’m Not there.
naturalistic collage,” though that is mislead-
ing. Naturalistic sequences do creep in next
to those constructed from artifice and fan-
tasy. Yet the film is more than mere collage:
The complexity of its construction boggles
the mind. Haynes and his team utilize dis-
tinct film genres, costumes, and set designs
for each of the characters, with just the right
Dylan song performed at just the right mo-
ment. This is less Todd Solondz’s Palindromes,
where different actors portrayed one charac-
ter, than the documentaries of Holland-based
Heddy Honigmann, who frequently links
particular objects or songs to the people she
interviews in her films.
Fortunately for Haynes, Dylan’s son Jesse,
who introduced the director’s work to his dad,
served well as a gatekeeper. After watching
Haynes’s earlier films, the elder Dylan gave
him the music rights. (One condition was that
Haynes also create a stage version, which was
ultimately done by Twyla Tharp as The Time’s
They Are A-Changin’). It’s not surprising that
one artist recognized not only the talent but
the similar life passages in another. It is ap-
propriate, then, that we begin the interview,
done during the Toronto Film Festival, by
discussing a makeover in the director’s own
life occurring after his 2000 move from New
York to Oregon.
You moved to Portland from New York
City in 2000. I’ve read about a connection
between you and Dylan at that time — lis-
tening to his music, identifying with him.
PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK
Is that true? It’s all really true. I don’t know
what happened. I kind of crashed in New
York. I was in Williamsburg the whole time
I was there, for 15 years. I was basically hav-
ing life disappointments and romantic disap-
pointments at the end of the millennium. Af-
ter Velvet Goldmine, I took a break from films.
I read all of Proust over a year and a half. I
was depressed and sick of New York. There
I am recognized and can only be “Todd the
filmmaker.” I thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to
get out of New York.” I just didn’t know that
I needed something else, really, until I saw it
in a smaller city.
My sister lives in Portland, and she told
me there was a place free for three months. I
drove out there almost without stopping and
stayed in this beautiful Victorian house. I felt
good. I met fantastic people there. It’s just a
fantastic place. I let go of that guarded thing
I felt in New York. I took hikes, smoked pot.
Then I found out I lost my Williamsburg
apartment, so I stayed. More people in the
world are living in second cities than ever be-
fore, apparently.
So, did Dylan keep reinventing himself, or
did we keep reinventing Dylan? That’s a
good question considering how deeply Dylan’s
followers invest and interpret him. But I
think Dylan is the active party in the process
of reinvention. Too many of his changes have
been met with too much resistance or con-
fusion over the years — plugging-in electric
and converting to Christianity, to name two
biggies — for me to see it any other way. I
actually don’t think my concept is imposing look at the pillars of this, people like Woody the first real spokesperson of the followers
some big interpretation on him once you re- Guthrie and Bob Dylan and Ramblin’ Jack of the Woody Guthrie line, he just fell into
ally examine his life.  Elliott, you find at the root of it such perfor- hysterics, rolling on the floor in some bar in
Can you say a bit about the “Dylan” you see mance, such adoption of the kind of gestures Greenwich Village. It was like, “Bob, what’s
for each of the six main characters? Woody and emblems of what the grassroots experi- so funny?” and he just couldn’t answer.
is the young, aspiring Dylan under the spell ence is supposed to be. Woody Guthrie ba- Bowie was the one who said, “It’s the per-
of Woody Guthrie’s music and character. Ar- sically fathered it as a racket. You know, he son who does it second that counts.” I love
thur is Dylan the poet, rebelling against co- was a very educated New Yorker, an intel- the way Greil Marcus looks at America’s folk-
herent political intent and responding to his lectual guy, but he gets back on the road and lore and its roots [in his books]. He basically
offscreen interrogators in Dylanisms from his he has to do the “aw, shucks” hick show for looks at America as a place where reinvent-
famous ‘65 interviews. his fan base. He was aware of it and talked ing yourself is primary. It was a new world
Jack is clearly the early folk prophet of about it. And Dylan too, when he heard that where your past, your bloodline, your caste,
1962-64, and Pastor John the born-again Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s real name was really your class were all the things that were the
Dylan of 1979-81. Robbie is Dylan balancing Elliott Charles Adnopoz, some [ Jewish] kid first to go. It was almost required to adopt a
fame and a private life, incorporating aspects like himself, but from Brooklyn, and he was persona. So when Marcus talks about roots
of his early ’60s relationship with Suze Rotolo
with that of his marriage to, and divorce from,
Sarah Lowndes (1966-76). Jude is the electric
Dylan, born at the famous Newport perfor-
mance in ‘65 and dying with his motorcycle
crash in 1966. Billy is Dylan in exile, which
began in Woodstock following his crash, and
his turning to roots-inspired music (The Base-
ment Tapes), Bible-infused secular music (John
Wesley Harding) and country (Nashville Sky-
line) — let alone his part in Peckinpah’s Pat
Garrett & Billy the Kid. In many ways, Dylan’s
retreat from the pulse of modern life that he
experienced in the ’60s has never really ended. 
Can you tell me something about your de-
ployment of artifice as a vehicle in your
film? In Velvet Goldmine, the use of artifice
was all upfront, but here it is kind of a mix.
The whole question of America’s fixation on
notions of authenticity is such a fascinating
and delusional kind of infatuation. When you

HOW THEY DID IT

■ Production Format: 35mm, Super
8mm, Super 16mm, HDCAM.
■ Camera: Moviecm Compact.
■ FILM Stock: Kodak 5218, 5279, 5205 and
5274. (Black and White) Plus-X 5231 and XX-5222.
■ Editing System: Avid.
■ Color Correction: Cinebyte Digital
Inc. was the DI facility used for I’m Not There.
There were multiple formats used to create the
different looks in the film. We got HDCAM, D
BETA and BETA SP tapes that held Super 8mm
transfers, still photos and stock footage. We
also received Super 16mm film in both color
and black and white and 35mm in both color
and black and white. The 16mm and 35mm film
elements were scanned on our Northlight scan-
ner, super sampled at 6K resolution and then
down sampled to the working resolution of 2K.
The video images were transferred to digital
information using our in house proprietary soft-
ware. All images, once conformed to the edit
decision list, were made available to the Base-
light color grader. Once the film was graded to
Todd and d.p. Ed Lachman’s satisfaction, and
all of the main and end titles were incorporated,
along with all of the digital opticals, the film was
then shot on the Arrilaser film recorder.

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 37


“these characters are trying desperately
to escape these projections that are
coming from us.”
music and looks at the origins of American
folklore, he sees it as a process of masks, of
adopting guises and personas, not as the vali-
dation of some authentic core about “who we
are.” I think Dylan is the subject of such a
desire for authentic justification and valida-
tion in peoples’ deep identification with him.
They want to find some stable truth in the
guy. But his actual practice as an artist and his
lived history as this ever-changing and elusive
figure suggests exactly the opposite. But he
keeps stoking that desire all the more because
he doesn’t fulfill it.
The occasional facial blowups behind char-
acters remind me of the concept of the dream
screen. They go well with the film. Probably
not many people will think consciously about
this, but I see them as larger-than-life projec-
tions of dreams. Definitely. I just wanted the
sense of the projected image of a character to
start to become this oppressive and sort of au-
tonomous commenting source, sort of looming
over these characters, like when Jude is starting
to turn on his cohort.
I thought it was about us too, as spectators
— our projections. Absolutely. That’s what
this whole thing is about. These artists, these
characters are trying desperately to escape
these projections that are coming from us.
38 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK
marcus carl Franklin in I’m Not There.
I read that you watched a bunch of films from
the ’60s. One you mentioned was Fellini’s
8½. Are there other films or filmmakers that
you thought about when you were doing this
film? Oh yeah, totally. I wanted each story to
have a distinct look. I felt that the palette of
the film, the range of references, should all be-
long to the ’60s, At least, I limited myself to
that. It’s the decade that produced Dylan and
that he defined for so many people. 8½ was a
pretty easy discovery and a film that’s been ref-
erenced many times, but it seems to get to the
core of something that the Blonde on Blonde era
GO BACK & WATCH
■ Don’t Look Back
D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary on the
free-wheelin’ Bob Dylan follows him to Britain
where he sheds his identity as the voice of
a folk generation by electrifying his act and
confusing all his fans.
■ PETULIA
Richard Lester’s 1968 drama is a kalido-
scopic look at the ‘60s seen through the
story of a divorced doctor (George C. Scott)
having an affair with a kooky married socialite
(Julie Christie).
■ Hedwig and the Angry Inch
John Cameron Mitchell’s 2001 musical
about a transsexual German rocker takes the
theme of fractured identity (national, sexual,
anatomical, metaphysical, etc.) as its glam-
kicking premise.
was about, that Dylan was about, stylistically
and definitely in the literal, biographical pre-
dicament that he was in: being hounded for his
meaning and being questioned why he was not
doing what he used to do.
Jean-Luc Godard is really the keynote for the
Robbie story, the Heath Ledger story, those films
from the mid-’60s like Masculin, Feminin, and
the color ones I love like Two or Three Things I
Know About Her. They are also curiously symp-
tomatic of a kind of male prerogative view of
women from the ’60s that I found to be a really
useful vehicle for talking about Dylan and his
checkered relationship with women, or at least
an attitude toward women, depicting women in
his songs in a way that has been questioned in
some places. He’s written some of the most beau-
tiful love songs, but, as with Godard, there are the
more political and complex discussions they are
kind of exempt from, you know, so that –
Women become commodities. Yeah.
In the ’60s, they were the ones bringing in
the coffee. Totally, exactly. And then a penny
dropped, and you get women’s and gay lib fol-
lowing in the early ’70s.
It’s nice that you round him out in this
way. Oh, yeah. He’s too interesting to not do
that. The amazing thing was that Jeff Rosen,
Dylan’s manager, who was sort of our link to
everything, was open to all of this and let that
coexist in the film with everything else.
By the way, and I think I know the answer
— which of your talking heads is closest to
Joan Baez, Dylan’s ex-lover and friend? Ju-
lianne [Moore]. Yeah, she’s really kinda doing
a Joan Baez, in her lingo.
Yeah, but not a passive, victimized Joan Baez,
which I like. Yeah, yeah. It’s probably one of
the ballsiest roles Julianne has ever played in
any of my movies. She’s kinda like a little re-
sentful — she has a real ego, you know. We just
cracked each other up. She had to send me out
of the room when we did her scenes.
When you would use a song or write a se-
quence in the script, which came first, or did
it just depend? Rarely would just a song deter-
mine an entire scene. I was basically construct-
ing the film based on the idea that it’s almost
like the characters were these vials that I would
be filling with references from Dylan’s work,
from Dylan’s influences, from the political and
literary backdrop of the ’60s, from films and
visual references from the ’60s, and, of course,
Dylan’s music — the starting point. But there
are songs I would have preferred, for example,
from his Christian period — some of his beau-
tiful gospel songs that came out in the late ’70s,
more than the one I chose, “Pressing On.” It
is almost a throwaway song, but we made it could find something and then blend it with in North America. It’s really amazing. We
something really special. It’s a song that he put the street footage that we had done ourselves. lucked out with shooting there.
on as a sort of encore during those Christian It’s on 16mm so it has that extra grain. Have you met Dylan? Has he seen the movie?
concerts. But it is a throwaway on the record I have to tell you that the faces of the Que- I haven’t yet met or spoken to Dylan myself.
that it appears on, and it was never one that I becer extras all across the film are so extraor- Never felt the need to in order to make the
particularly knew or loved, but it made more dinary. The faces that you get in the Billy sec- film. The idea, in fact, seems stranger and
sense – “pressing on” — as a kind of continuum tion, the crazy, weird, rural stuff, and then the more preposterous the more people ask me
for the narrative. You are kind of taking a huge faces of the people at the banquet hall when why I never did. What was I going to do, ask
chance in resurrecting [a lesser known song]. Christian Bale is making his speech about him, “How does it feeeel?” I look forward to
Or maybe you are taking a bigger chance when [Lee Harvey] Oswald, they still blow me away meeting the guy at some point in the future.
you try to cover extremely famous songs that — they look like they’re from archival foot- And no, he hasn’t yet seen the film. We just
are so well-known. In this case it was John Doe age. It’s also that our hair and makeup team recently sent Jesse Dylan a finished DVD.
from the band X that did the cover of that par- was superb. Quebec is like a different world, I hope they’ll check it out together in the
ticular song, and it ended up being this beauti- it’s like nowhere else in Canada, nowhere else comfort of home.t
ful, really rousing cover. And what it does for
Christian Bale, who walks on looking very
much like the Dylan of that time in a way that
people can laugh at and kind of dismiss, the
song and its power somehow transcend that
and take you into the emotional power of how
Dylan must have been feeling about that time.
How were you planning to do the stage ver-
sion Dylan required as a prerequisite for
making the film before Twyla Tharp even-
tually did it? We [Owen Moverman and
Haynes] only got so far with the stage version,
but it began as an exciting process of finding
theatrical equivalents to do the various styles
for each of the stories; Medicine Show carni-
val theater for Billy, ’60s Living Theater-style
interventionism for Jude, and so on. But the
stage concept allowed for all the characters and
stories to coexist on stage in ways never quite
possible through cinematic intercutting.
How are you responding when people ask
about the budget? What are you supposed to
say? I forget what I’m supposed to say. It was
really about $17 [million], under $20. It was
between $17 and $20, and that’s amazing.
How long was the shoot? Forty-nine days.
Where did you shoot it? Everything in Mon-
treal. Everything.
How did you decide when to use archival
footage and when to recreate it? It all looks
so authentic that I was having déjà vu. Rec-
reations usually look so fake. Thank you.
The train scene that’s in the credit sequence
is one of two extended bits of archival foot-
age, except for obvious stuff like the civil
rights clips that you see halfway through. But
that stuff was supposed to be scripted, it was
supposed to be something we created for the
film, but we couldn’t find the train station
that we could use. Some things about match-
ing New York City to Montreal were just ab-
solutely impossible. And to find subway cars
that were correct in [the Montreal subway]
became absolutely undoable, so we hoped we

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 39

the
overachiever Ryan Gosling chats with screenwriter Oren Moverman
about his latest achievements, i’m Not There
and married life, along with
the unique collaborative relationships he has with his directors.
We don’t cover enough screenwriters in
Filmmaker, but that’s not entirely our fault. This
magazine is devoted to independent film, and
for many, the director is also the writer. Or the
script has emerged from improvisation or some
other nontraditional means. And while there is
a new breed of independent-minded screen-
writers today — Charlie Kaufman, Capote’s
Dan Futterman and Juno’s Diablo Cody come
immediately to mind — many of the “marquee
40 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
screenwriters” still work almost exclusively in
the studio world.
By virtue of the unique niche that screen-
writer Oren Moverman has claimed for him-
self, he is that rare top screenwriter who has,
until recently, operated primarily in indepen-
dent film. His special talent has been success-
fully collaborating with auteur directors who
have written their own previous work. To
their projects he not only brings the ability
PHOTO BY: ASHKAN SAHIHI
oren moverman.
to collaborate but also a wide-ranging knowl-
edge of art, philosophy, politics and literature
– material that enriches the worlds of the
films he contributes to.
In 1999, Moverman co-wrote Jesus’ Son,
Alison Maclean’s film version of the Denis
Johnson story collection. In 2002 he co-wrote
Bertha Bay-Sa Pan’s indie drama Face. And this
year, he shares screenplay credit with the direc-
tors of two of the boldest movies around. With
Ira Sachs he co-wrote Married Life, which
premiered at Toronto and is forthcoming from
MGM and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment in
February. And with Todd Haynes he co-wrote
I’m Not There, the profound and deeply satisfy-
ing journey into the various personas of Bob
Dylan. (He’s also adapting Orson Scott Card’s
sci-fi novel Empire for producer Joel Silver, but
we’ll leave discussion of that for his Fade In pro-
file.) He also plans to step out of the writer’s den
into the director’s chair this year with one of a
couple of projects he is close to financing.
We’re very happy that Ryan Gosling
agreed to interview Moverman for Film-
maker. Gosling is the star of such films as
Half Nelson (for which he was nominated
for an Academy Award), this year’s Frac-
ture, The Notebook and the Sundance Grand
Prize-winner The Believer. Like Moverman,
his interests are passionate and wide-rang-
ing, and he commits to challenging material
whether that hails from the independent or
the studio space. Gosling is also at work on
his own project as a director. He’s develop-
ing it with Moverman, and they talk about it

Pierce BrosnAn and rachel mcadams in ira sachs’s married life.
briefly at the end of the friendly, funny and
thoughtful conversation that follows.
Now, just because we’re friends, it doesn’t
mean I’m going to take it easy on you in this
interview. I owe it to your fans to ask the
hard questions. You realize that? I didn’t, but
let’s test our friendship.
I also want it on the record that in certain
independent circles I’m known as a kind of
edgy Barbara Walters. I will make you cry.
Well it’s very easy to make me cry. I don’t
consider that an achievement, you know.
So, my first question is, on IMDb, you have
interesting credits. “Uncredited Writer.”
“Special Thanks To.” First of all, if you’re
credited as the uncredited writer, isn’t that
a credit? I think that’s technically true. We
have to check with the Writers Guild. But
I don’t think I’m credited as an Uncredited
Writer, I think I have an uncredited role in a
movie, which is even more embarrassing.
See, I get right to the heart of it. What is it,
Oren? It’s a movie called Vanya on 42nd Street
that was directed by Louis Malle. I worked on
the movie — I kind of walked in off the street
and ended up being a PA. This was 1994. I had
come to the States in 1988 — after I finished
my military service in Israel, where I’m from
— and I worked for a few years at JFK airport
doing security. Then I was out of a job, and
had nothing to do except wait for my daughter
Maya to be born. I went to Brooklyn College
for a few years, studied film, but I didn’t know
anyone. One day I opened The New Yorker,
and there was a picture of Louis Malle, An-
dre Gregory and Wally Shawn — they were
shooting Vanya in the Old Amsterdam The-
ater. I don’t know what got into me, but I lit-
erally ran down there, met Andre Gregory’s
assistant, who allowed me to just stand in the
lobby, and walked up to the producer — the
security guard pointed him out and said his
name was Fred Berner — and I said, “Hi Fred,
I’m here for the job.”
“i come into [a collaboration] with the
need to tap into the director’s vision, to
understand what he or she wants as
opposed to what i want.”
[laughs] I like how in your version of this
story, you kind of talk like the guy from
Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. [laughs]
Oh, man, I love that film.
[in a Warren Oates impression] “Hey Frank,
I’m here for the job.” [laughs] That’s a great
movie.
“Do you think Alfredo would give a damn if
his head could buy us everything we’ve been
looking for? A way out?” How come you
can’t write stuff like that, Oren? Nobody
can write stuff like that. You can’t even make
a film like that anymore. And starring War-
ren Oates!
So you walked up and said, “Frank, I’m here
for the job.” His name was Fred — this is not a
I’M NOT THERE PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK
christian bale in I’m Not There.
movie, this is real! Let me write the end of this.
So he told me to go across the street to the pro-
duction office and ask them if they have any-
thing. So I went across the street and said, “Fred
sent me for the job.” They gave me the script
and said, “Come back tomorrow. We need PAs,
there’s no money but Louis Malle is directing.”
I knew his films and I loved some of them a
lot, especially Elevator to the Gallows and Au Re-
voir, Les Enfants. So I came back the next day,
met Louis, and he said, “Okay, I’m also going to
put you in the movie.” I ended up being in front
of the camera a little bit as an uncredited actor
as you so cleverly found in IMDb. And then I
started talking with this young actress on the
set, Julianne Moore. She said, “You should meet
my friend Todd because he’s a genius.”
All right! I rented Poison, watched it and liked
it. I wasn’t blown away, to tell you the truth, but
I was very impressed. And then I was invited to
the cast and crew screening of Safe, which blew
me away, and that’s when I met Todd. And the
rest is history — as you can tell from IMDb.
Were you writing at that point? I actually
was writing, but I wasn’t writing in English. I
wrote a screenplay in Hebrew. Then I wrote a
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 41

“my goal is to make the screenplay go
away, and to let it go, hopefully, because
the film gets made.”
film called A Hiding Place — later it became
Looking Glass — which was my first English
feature, and through some very weird circum-
stances, I actually got the money to make it.
And so a few years after Vanya, I was in pre-
production to direct the movie with money
from France when four days before shooting
the money was pulled. The film collapsed and
died right then and there. But I was left with
a script that became my writing sample, and it
really kind of made a career for me.
You have a lot of “Special Thanks” on your
IMDb page too, by the way. How special are
those thanks? Is it like, “Hey Oren, thanks
for coming into the editing room and mak-
ing sense of this mess,” or is it, “Oren, thanks
for letting us shoot at your house”? [laughs]
No one can shoot in my house, it’s too small.
No, they are all very friendly thanks that have
to do with me giving my two cents.
On Velvet Goldmine, for instance. On Velvet
Goldmine, I gave notes on various drafts of
the script, and I gave notes, along with a lot
42 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
PHOTO BY: JONATHAN WENK
ben whishaw in i’m Not There.
of other people by the way, on the edit. I did
the same thing on Far from Heaven. So by the
time we got to write the Dylan movie, I really
knew what a Todd Haynes script looked like
and what it needed to do. The others were
all about giving opinions, ideas about cutting
and things like that. And camaraderie.
You’re big on camaraderie, huh? I like cama-
raderie.
[laughs] I like camaraderie too. You’re never
alone with camaraderie.
Let’s talk about I’m Not There. I’m hoping
that this is the biggest movie of all time, be-
cause if it is, the studios are not going to know
what the hell people want to see and movies
are going to be so interesting for the next 5 or
10 years. But tell me how you go from read-
ing Chronicles [the Bob Dylan memoir] to
making a movie about Dylan without him?
Todd comes to you and says, “I want to make
a movie about Bob Dylan” and you say, “The
only way to do it is to have five people play
him!” I think that I’ll probably generate a little
bit of controversy in giving you my version of
this because, true to a Dylan project, there are a
few versions of how exactly the idea was born.
All I can do is give you my mine. And by the
way, the film was written before Chronicles came
out. What happened was after Velvet Goldmine
and before Todd moved to Portland, he was
in Brooklyn and we would see each other a
lot. My son Amir was born, my second child,
and I was a stay-at-home dad, basically. My
wife did the heavy lifting; I didn’t have much
work at the time. Todd would come by every
few days and we would be like an old couple
with a baby. We’d go have coffee while Amir
was napping next to us. It was great. Todd is
an incredibly interesting guy and you can talk
about anything with him. We probably talked
about politics more than anything else — more
than movies. And then one day, he came in to
the apartment and said, “I want to make a film
about Bob Dylan.” And being the visionary
that I am, I said, “Forget it — you’ll never get
the rights. And even if you get the rights, the
movie will be about casting, the whole thing
would be about “Where do you find a guy who
looks and sounds like Dylan?” We then talked
about it for a while and it sort of made sense
that if there were to be a movie about Bob
Dylan that nobody and everybody would play
him — it would just have to be the “Bob Dylan
experience,” a kind of non-narrative, nonlinear
film made of fragments of some of the charac-
ters Bob Dylan has been in his life, but none
would be called “Bob Dylan.” So Todd de-
veloped this whole idea and these characters.
In the beginning there were more characters
actually. I remember “Charlie,” a spin on the
Charlie Chaplin elements of Dylan’s early
years. Through various connections and Killer
Films, a short proposal got to Dylan’s manager.
He showed it to Dylan and Dylan said yes. I
think he liked the idea — the approach made
sense to him. But [Dylan] also wanted a stage
version. So I get the call from Todd, and he
says, “Guess what Oren, you are now ‘of the
theater.’ ” Killer sent me out to Portland, where
Todd moved to after a cross-country road trip
devoted entirely to Dylan, and we worked out
a stage version of I’m Not There. It was going
to be the same characters but the stories were
going to be different. It was very elaborate, and
then we worked out the stage design and how
it’s going to be divided up and how characters
are going to come in and out. I went back to
New York City, and started writing, but after
a while I realized that this was not happening.
[laughs] Dylan, or somebody, changed direc-
tions and it ended up going to Twyla Tharp,
who did her own thing. That’s a whole story in people, or are you just a masochist? [laughs] basic understanding about what the director is
itself. And so I was off the island, and I was do- That’s a two-part question. The second part trying to achieve that involves putting your ego
ing other things, writing other films, including first: I’m not a masochist. I do like collabo- aside. It’s kind of like learning a language that
Married Life with Ira Sachs. rating with people, but I actually think that you didn’t really speak before. Contributing to
Then months later I got a call from Todd collaboration is not one thing. There are dif- the process by always asking questions and try-
saying, “You know what, this is too much, I ferent types of collaborations, different flavors, ing to understand what the director wants so
need you to work with me on the film.” And I and most of them I like. My favorite type of I can give it to him or her. And it’s not that
said let me just give you notes and support you collaboration is with a director, although I’ve far from a director’s collaboration with the cin-
and do everything the way we always do it, be- had some really good collaborations with co- ematographer. I bring my lenses — my various
cause he would read my screenplays and do that writers who were not directing. I come into it ideas, my point of view — and I propose them
for me too. But he said, “No, this is a writing with the need to tap into the director’s vision, to the director and he or she can choose…
partnership, this has to be done right, this is a to understand what he or she wants as op- Right, but a cinematographer is not in-
lot of work.” So I packed my bag again and went posed to what I want. It’s a great exercise, and volved in the conception of the idea. I mean,
to Portland and we worked on the screenplay. I don’t think it’s that far removed from acting. you and the director are on each other’s
He had a ton of ideas and material. I remember It becomes similar in that you have to get some minds for a certain period of time and the
sitting down with him and he said, “Look, we’re
not writing a screenplay, we’re interpreting,”
which sounded very Talmudic to me. From then
on we started talking about every single word in
the screenplay, analyzing things from different
points of views and reviewing all the books and
research that we had done. From that point it
came together really fast.
And how did it come together financially?
What studio got behind it? Who made the
film? Originally we developed it at Paramount.
Then they had a regime change and put it in
turnaround, and then it was put together piece
by piece. Celluloid Dreams were involved in
foreign sales and John Sloss was involved at Ci-
netic. Jim Stern came on board and Soderbergh
got involved at a later point. But I can’t pretend
to know exactly how they pulled it off.
How do you pitch an idea that there’s no ref-
erence for? Because there’s nothing to com-
pare the film to, which from my understand-
ing in Hollywood, you really need if you want
to get something made. They need a com-
parison film. Did you talk about Bob Fosse
at all? No. The film is obviously unusual, but I
think the process of making it was also unusu-
al. I didn’t do that part of the labor. I know that
Todd met with people and described it, but it
wasn’t like Paramount came on board because
they “bought a pitch.” I think they knew it was
Bob Dylan, Todd was coming off the Acad-
emy Award nomination for screenwriting on
Far from Heaven, so I think there was just this
idea of “Okay, Todd Haynes wants to develop
an interesting film about Bob Dylan; that’s
potentially something.” Once the screenplay
became what it was and they took a look at it,
I know for a fact the quote was, “This is not a
screenplay, it’s a headache.”
You write scripts like a director, and you are a
director — you are going to direct your own
films. What’s it really like for you to col-
laborate? Do you really like writing for other

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 43


BILLY CRUDUP IN alison maclean’s JESUS’ SON.
script can go anywhere. And then at a cer-
tain point you kind of have to relinquish it.
Is collaboration a “letting go” process ulti-
mately? When do you, Oren Moverman,
start to say, “I should back out of this now?”
Well I think that my objective is always to let
go. I have this very pretentious approach to
screenwriting that I will now share with you.
Do you know Marcel Yanko?
No. He was a Romanian artist, a Dadaist. At
some point he moved to Israel and created an
artist colony. When I was a kid, I saw him
paint this beautiful painting on a woman’s
44 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
“i’ve been [in america] for almost 20
years, but there is still a limitation of
being ‘the outsider.’ but it’s also a very
liberating limitation.”
breast. [laughs] He was very old.
Keep it clean, Oren, c’mon. Breasts are clean.
Not if they’re painted on. It was a work of
art, and I remember being very impressed by
it but also for the first time being introduced
to the idea that there can be a sort of art that
is not permanent. I later learned that he used
to do assemblages of these machines that he
would put in museums and they would destroy
themselves after a while. I became intrigued
with this whole idea of art that destroys itself
or makes itself go away, and I kind of found
myself approaching screenplays that way,
which is to say if a screenplay is written and is
made, then truly for most people the screen-
play doesn’t exist. It goes away. It’s an interme-
diary kind of format designed to move ideas,
language and structure to the screen. And if it
doesn’t ever get made, aside from the pain it
caused the writer, it again doesn’t exist because
it never made it as a film. It froze and died.
People can’t have access to it. So my goal is
to make the screenplay go away, and to let go,
hopefully, because the film gets made.
But how do you turn off the part of you who
wants to be a director? Or is that not hard
for you? It’s not, because I try to think like a
director and to think of the needs of a direc-
tor and apply them to the screenplay. I try to
find the language that’s right for each project.
And then some directors direct you. I think
both Todd and Ira gave me directions, they
told me what they wanted. Todd told me to
interpret and Ira told me to be kind, because
every character was fighting a great battle.
Other directors I’ve worked with have said
things like, “Well I’m just going to ramble
for the next hour and you just take what you
think is good for you.” And then there are di-
rectors who say, “I trust you, come back with
something interesting.” If they do that, then I
go and I direct it on the page as well as I can,
and that’s the screenplay. Our good friend Noaz Deshe brought up an No, I try to be very respectful. I think at the
Tell me about Ira. You have a special thanks interesting question. Have you ever had to end of the day every movie is rewritten in the
on his film Forty Shades of Blue as well. Right. do a rewrite on a script in the editing room, editing room by the editor and the director.
That’s the thing — once they give me special like after a film has been shot? Not for re- Sometimes it’s extreme and sometimes it’s
thanks, they’re mine — they have to hire me! shoot purposes but for structural purposes? not. On Married Life, I think that film sort of
It looks that way. Ira and I had a mutual friend, And how involved are you in the editing found itself in the editing. Ira did a beautiful
Jonathan Nossiter, who directed Sunday, Signs process overall? So far I’ve been very in- job shooting the script, but then there were
& Wonders and Mondovino, and is now making volved and have always been welcome to con- certain things about it he liked more than
movies in Brazil. He wanted us to meet and the tribute. I’ve watched every cut of the films, others and certain ideas about what the film
official excuse was that we should meet because all of them, and I’ve gotten to give comments should actually be at the end. I really admire
people think we look alike [laughs]. We’re both and suggest changes. They don’t always listen him for that, it took an enormous amount of
bald, Jewish guys with glasses. So we met and we to me, but I think it’s my duty and privilege to confidence. We wrote some new voiceovers,
got along. What I didn’t know was that he was give notes, and sometimes they actually listen and it was a really great process discovering
auditioning me for work. I was dumb enough to and that’s very rewarding. what the film could be through the editing.
believe that we were meeting because… Do you get pissed when they don’t listen? see page 101
You’re both bald and Jewish and wear glass-
es? Yeah! After a while he said, “Do you want
to read a screenplay that I wrote really quick-
ly, a first draft? It needs work, but I think it’s
got something.” It was based on a book so I
also read the book and got some clear ideas
of what I thought the screenplay could be
and how it could be different. I talked to him
about it and then went off and wrote a draft
while keeping in close touch with him. He
looked at my draft, and we started working
on it together and shaping it, and that became
the film Married Life.
Do you want to talk at all about the differ-
ence in directing styles between Todd and
Ira or is that kind of like trapping you? Not
at all. They’re very different personalities and
have very different kinds of visions and ap-
proaches, but they are both obsessive filmmak-
ers in the best sense of the word. They are in
charge of every detail and really work hard to
control all the elements of their movies. So in
that respect, they’re very similar. Both are great
with actors. Obviously directing I’m Not There
is just a different process for anyone, no matter
who you are, because it’s a film about fragmen-
tation. When I was on set I would see a shot,
something they were shooting really quickly
before the end of the day, and I would have
no idea where the shot belonged in the film.
And I knew the screenplay inside and out! It
was so fragmented and all in Todd’s head. He
sketched everything out, had very extensive
storyboards, had done tons of research — he’s
always very organized about all that. He puts
together huge books of visual references for his
films. Ira does that too in a way. He just may
not put it all into one portfolio, but there are
always piles of books and references he pulls
out of thin air, and there is always stuff to talk
about, from photography to literature to music
to art. He’s a huge cinephile and there are hun-
dreds of movies in his head.

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 45

 PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.

the savages writer-director tamara jenkins.

 m
senior
Nine years after making
m
e
slums of beverly hills,
Tamara Jenkins returns to feature films
with a comical but highly emotional look

n
inside one family’s turbulent relationship with
The savages.
By Ray Pride

Note-perfect, Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages
was one of Sundance 2007’s stellar surprises.
Where another unlikely gem from the festival,
Once, was bittersweet in its simple romance,
Jenkins’s long-in-coming sophomore directo-
rial entry (after 1998’s Slums of Beverly Hills) is a
complex mesh of tones and social observations.
The film is witty about neurosis and unblink-
ing about mortality and is filled with the sort
of melancholy humanism we only get from Eu-
ropean features these days. Yet it also is imbued
with the observational precision and winning
performances of the best American comedies.
Jenkins’s Savages are a scattered clan. Fa-
ther Lenny (Philip Bosco) approaches his own
sunset in Sun City, Arizona; semi-estranged
daughter Wendy (Laura Linney) is a New
t
s
York City playwright who, after many years,
is surviving on temp jobs and her brother Jon,
played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is an aca-
demic struggling with an epic book on Bertolt
Brecht. The two siblings are brought together
after their father acts out against his nurse in
a scatological way and they have to find him
a new home whether their own or one in as-
sisted living. There are nicely nuanced side
characters and witty bits, but The Savages
belongs to these three actors, who are at the
top of their game. The film boasts some of the
most formidable comic dialogue of the year
and Jenkins’s screenplay is lovingly structured.
A sampling of her ear for dialogue: “We’re
not in therapy right now, we’re in real life”
and “I’m not leaving you alone, I’m hanging
up.” Mostly though, what Jenkins gets down
is behavior, and it’s exquisitely performed. We
spoke in late summer at a café near her apart-
ment in New York City’s East Village, which
she shares with her husband, screenwriter Jim
Taylor (Sideways, About Schmidt), and talked
about casting, tone, finding ways around writ-
er’s block and what it’s like to have so much
time pass between features. Fox Searchlight
opens the film in late November.
At film festivals, I’m not one of those people
who rushes to weigh in after premieres, but
after the Sundance press screening of The
Savages, I sat cross-legged in the Holiday
Village and posted a few notes right away. I
called it an unlikely mix of Annie Hall and…

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 47

The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. The [publicists] e-
mailed it to me and I was like, that is fucking
hilarious. Obviously you were responding to
something about the dialogue…
Where it’s witty but not necessarily a punch
line. Where it’s character observation. I ap-
preciated that because, well, it’s been an interest-
ing thermometer. Some people say [the movie]
is so funny, and some people say it’s so sad or
depressing. I was grateful you appreciated the
language of it, and that these are sort of hyper-
articulate people having to do something that
being hyper-articulate doesn’t help you with.
I always find it auspicious when a film like
this can deal with essential human pain,
mortification, embarrassment and humilia-
tion, and then find a way to laugh at it with-
out humiliating the characters. And one of
the cruel things in your movie is the title.
Was this family always going to be the Sav-
ages? I can’t remember when that happened.
It sets up that you’re going to deal with peo-
ple reduced to elemental, primal things they
don’t have defenses for. These Savages don’t
know how to make nice. Well, also there’s
something about just taking old people and
putting them in buildings and not dealing
with them — the sort of savagery of old age
and the way it ravages you and strips you of
48 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
anything that would be perceived as civilized.
The Savages opens and you have this geri-
atric dance number of sorts — it’s like the
June Taylor Dancers from the old Jackie
Gleason show — and we meet Mr. Savage,
Philip Bosco. Within five minutes, what
does he do to act out? He writes “shit” on the
wall. This scene, like so many others, is very
complicated tonally. Was the movie a tonal
nightmare to edit? Its scary tone is the tricki-
est thing in the world. So many ingredients
have to accumulate to create tone. It could be
music, it could be the tone of the comedy and
the tragedy and how you let them live inside
HOW THEY DID IT
■ Production Format: 35mm.
■ Camera: Arricam LT with cooke S4’s
mostly 32 and 35mm lenses.
■ FILM Stock: Kodak 5218 and 5205.
■ Editing System: Avid Adrenaline 2.1.8
Unity, 14:1 compression. Developed at
Technicolor NYC.
■ Color Correction: 35mm Digital
Intermediate: Northlite 4K Scanning at Laser
Pacific, Los Angeles. Visual Effects by Mike
Castillo at Laser Pacific. Lustre Color Correc-
tion by Dave Cole at Laser Pacific. Arri 2K Re-
cording at Laser Pacific. Digital Intermediate
Original Negative Output - Acetate 5242. Print
Stock - Vision 2383. Print/IP/IN/Answer print
at Deluxe Hollywood, L.A. by Harry Muller.
the same vessel and not undermine each other
but instead support each other. I’m very at-
tracted to holding funny and sad [together].
It’s an accumulation of all these little details
that you are putting into the same stew, hop-
ing that you can keep them within the same
vocabulary and that [the result] is not jolting
and melodramatic when it becomes serious.
As long as the material is truly driven from
character — if it truly is organically growing
out of character — you can get away with it.
Considering how wonderful Laura Linney
and Philip Seymour Hoffman are, it’s al-
most like after casting them as the two sib-
lings, your work as a director was done. I was
done — I didn’t have to do anything! No, the
process of casting in general was a long thing,
but in terms of getting Laura and Phil and
them just being so… [Jenkins smiles]. We had
very little rehearsal, just a couple of days in
my apartment. There is a certain truth about
actors that when you find the right person for
the part, and the dynamic between them is
working… all three of them really, Bosco too,
I just felt when they came over to my apart-
ment, and we were just reading through the
script, I was like, “Wow!”
As in, “Wow! Who wrote that?” It wasn’t that
the material was so brilliant, but the dynamic

philip seymour hoffman and laura linney in the savages.
it just felt like it would be believable, like I
will believe this. You can always just throw
three people together and put them around a
table and call them family. I see movies where
people are playing family members and some-
thing doesn’t feel right.
The larger feeling I took away from the
movie is the evocation of two siblings ap-
proaching early middle age who are still un-
formed as people. They’re still incomplete.
Do you think in these big terms when you
write? Or do you just write the characters
PHOTO BY: ANDREW SCHWARTZ
and let the larger themes emerge? It’s about
how quickly you become conscious of what
you are doing. I feel like the whole process of
writing is sort of being unconscious and then
becoming conscious. Unconscious, conscious.
If you are too pre-determined at the begin-
ning, then you are writing an essay [instead of
just] letting it go and then interpreting the tea
leaves of all this stuff that [bubbles] up.
You’re putting things on a clothesline, but
you wouldn’t see any relationship unless
they were all pinned there together. Yeah,
“i came up with the
idea of these
two going on this
journey like hansel
and gretel.”
filmmaking is so like that anyway because
that’s all you’re doing, putting one shot next
to another shot, one frame next to another
frame. The form is structured like that. But
there was a conscious moment at a certain
point [in the writing] about those siblings be-
ing kind of like Hansel and Gretel. You know
that book, that Bruno Bettelheim book….
The Uses of Enchantment? I’ve had it forever.
There’s something brilliant about that book.
I remember working on the script and there
were many siblings — a whole crew of them.
I was stripping it away and then I came up
with the idea of just these two going on this
journey, and then I was like, “Oh, like Hansel
and Gretel!” I grabbed Bruno Bettelheim and
wrote in my notebook something like, “their
journey through old-age land.”
So it’s a terrible fairy tale unfolding in
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 49

“i guess [the savages] pushes buttons for
people because there’s something about
putting a parent in a nursing home that
really flips people’s lids.”
front of them? Yes. Bettelheim talks about
how that story is about confronting mortal-
ity and that Hansel and Gretel are thrown
50 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
PHOTO BY: ANDREW SCHWARTZ
laura linney and philip bosco in the savages.
out of the house into the woods and into the
darkness. They lose their parents and have
to make their own way. And I was like, “Oh,
that’s what this is — they’re thrown into this
surreal weird world of old-age land.” It be-
came the way they became grownups, or truly
whole people, complete people, which is sort
of what Bettelheim talks about, individuating
and stuff like that. It was an interesting little
guiding principle, “Oh yeah, they’re like these
neurotic modern Hansel and Gretel. Yeah!”
So, where are the missing movies, Tamara, the
last eight or nine years? All those pictures?
You have Slums of Beverly Hills, this one film
largely about a teenager, and then you’ve got
the one that’s about middle-age siblings
and an old person. Where’s the twenty-
something bohemian movie? Where’s your
Laurel Canyon? [laughs] Laurel Canyon, that’s
funny. I know Lisa Cholodenko really well.
But I don’t know what to say. I spent a lot of
time writing, and I worked on a project for a
long time that never happened.
You’ve made a living, but a frustrating one?
In terms of trying to make motion pictures, I
mean, I made a living in various ways. I wrote
for hire, non-credited rewriting things. But I
didn’t direct a feature as we know, because it
would have been heard of! I worked on screen-
plays that I thought I would be able to make
that didn’t happen for one reason or another.
One in particular was a nightmare and many
years of wasted time. I didn’t own the project;
the producer had it. Then [The Savages] took a
really long time. I know that that’s going to be-
come a question — like what the hell have you
been doing — and I guess I’ve been writing.
Why did it take so long to make The Sav-
ages? I feel like I know so many people who
have made movies and then struggle so hard
to get their next movie happening. This al-
most didn’t happen like 100 times. Just get-
ting the financing…. [First] it was at Focus
Features, and they really liked it, they financed
the writing of the script, but then they were
dissatisfied with the casting, which was crazy.
And then we were out. They gave it [back]
to us so we could shop it around, which took
forever. We couldn’t get anyone to finance it,
even with Laura and Phil. People were scared
of the subject matter. I mean, try to get The
Death of Mr. Lazarescu financed in the United
States. Forget it! And there’s still a lot of anxi-
ety about anything that’s dealing with…. Peo-
ple had primal-like reactions when we sent it
around to all the various financiers. People
would get very personal about it, like, “Well,
my father died and it wasn’t like that” kind
of thing. I guess it pushes buttons for peo-
ple because there’s something about putting
a parent in a nursing home and confronting
that part of life that really flips people’s lids.
Or people have done it in a different way, or
people might say something like, “Well, why
would Jon and Wendy help their father? He
was such an asshole, I don’t believe it.” Any-
way we had a really hard time getting it going,
and it took me a long time to write it, too.
You did performance art earlier in your career,
which is an art form that provides immedi-
ate feedback. What sustained you as an artist
during the process of developing this film and
then trying to get it made? I have a really good
GO BACK & WATCH
■ Lovely and Amazing
Nicole Holofcener confirms her skill at bring-
ing out both the love and insanity that binds a
family in this 2001 comedy of three dysfunc-
tional daughters and their even crazier Mom.
■ Away from Her
Actress-turned-director Sarah Polley’s 2006
drama captures the tender and terrifying
emotions that occur when a husband (Gordon
Pinsent) tries to reach out to his wife (Julie
Christie) after Alzheimer’s has transformed
her into someone completely different.
■ Assisted Living
Elliot Greenebaum’s 2003 sweet-hearted
drama about a nursing home janitor being
mistaken by one of the residents for her son
was shot in an actual Kentucky nursing home
with many of the elderly residents as actors
and extras.
friend named Eric Mendelsohn who is a person
who made a lovely movie many years ago called
Judy Berlin and should also be making more
movies. I guess I have a group of friends, and
you know, I spend time at writer’s colonies and
stuff like that. Yaddo was very helpful for this
movie and for me. It’s a great place, and I was
surrounded there by [other kinds of writers].
As a screenwriter you always feel like you’re not
really a real writer, that real writers are novel-
ists, especially when you’re in a place like that
where John Cheever, Philip Roth and Sylvia
Plath — real writers — come from. I spent six
weeks there about four years ago. I had all of this
stuff assembled [for The Savages], all these ideas
and miscellaneous scenes and stuff that was also
building toward whatever the screenplay is, and
I went there for six weeks and kind of indexed
my brain. That really was the beginning of fig-
uring out what this movie was in a concrete way.
It’s almost like accumulating scraps and not
really ever having the [example to finish until]
I was around real writers. When I got stuck I
would pretend the screenplay was a novel, be-
cause screenplays are such haikus.
Poetry and carpentry together. Yeah, and
you’ve sucked out all the descriptive juices
because that’s what you’re going to see and
see page 102
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 51
 PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.

Honeydripper writer-director-edtor john sayles.

pray for
rock
‘n’
discuss the future of filmmaking and the challenges
of making his latest film HONEYDRIPPER.
roll
As I sit eating lunch with John Sayles in a
near-empty Mexican restaurant a few blocks
from his home in upstate New York, it’s easy
to listen to the maverick director and think
that he’s telling me stories about his travails
attempting to make independent movies in
an increasingly studio world. But while these
war stories could probably fill many a book
about independent film, right now Sayles is
just talking about the protagonist of his latest
movie, Honeydripper. Played by Danny Glov-
er, Tyrone Purvis is a down-on-his-luck juke
joint owner who will do anything to keep the
doors to his failing club open, except book the
more commercial electric music that’s begin-
ning to take the country by storm.
“[Purvis] has to decide if he’s going to go
with the flow or not,” Sayles says, wearing his
usual garb — a loose-fitting tank top and mesh
shorts. “He’s like, ‘I’m going to continue being
a jazz artist even though people are making
money playing this rock-and-roll stuff.’ It hap-
pens in almost every art form; there’s this new
thing and you either say, ‘I’ve got to eat so I’m
going to start writing or singing this new stuff,’
or you say, ‘You know what, I’m just going to
keep doing what I want to do.’ It’s not the club
that Purvis is worried about losing — he’s wor-
ried about losing his independence. Like he
Jason Guerrasio sits down with John Sayles to
says, ‘If I lose that then who will I be?’ ”
If Sayles is consumed by the kinds of anxiet-
ies that are tearing up Purvis, he doesn’t show
it. He has long since become accustomed to
the sacrifices required in the name of indepen-
dence and for 30 years has been making them
in order to see such landmark independent
films as Return of the Secaucus 7, The Brother
From Another Planet, Matewan and Lone Star
produced. As many of his peers have gone for
the quick buck in Hollywood or faded away
trying, Sayles keeps making films, and, aside
from his frequent (and well-paid) forays as a
screenwriter and script doctor, rarely plays the
Hollywood game. In his upstate town, sur-
rounded by antiques shops, farmland and wine
trails, the closest thing resembling the movie
business is the presence of his next-door neigh-
bor — friend and actor David Strathairn.
With longtime producing partner Mag-
gie Renzi, Sayles embarked on making his
1950s Alabama-set rock-and-roll fable by
self-financing the film and teaming with Ira
Deutchman’s Emerging Pictures for distribu-
tion. Honeydripper, which will open at the end
of the year, world premiered at the Toronto
International Film Festival in September and
many there called it Sayles’s best work in years.
The film tells a simple story, but one that’s
richly textured with powerful performances
from Glover, Charles S. Dutton, Lisa Gay
Hamilton and newcomers Yaya DeCosta and
Gary Clark Jr. It also boasts tart dialogue, an
appreciation of American history and Sayles’s
trademark themes of social progressiveness
and the struggle for racial equality.
So, Honeydripper is based on a short story,
“Keeping Time,” from your shorts anthol-
ogy Dillinger in Hollywood, right? It’s kind
of similar to what I did with Matewan. In my
novel Union Dues, a kid tells a story about his
grandfather, and that was the inspiration for
Will Oldham’s character. For Honeydripper
I was inspired by a character from “Keeping
Time.” But mostly, Honeydripper is based on
a rock-and-roll legend. There was this guy
named Guitar Slim, an early electric guitarist
out in New Orleans, and he had a big hit with
the song “The Things That I Used to Do.”
Guitar Slim was known for missing gigs. At
some point, a lot of these guys early in their
careers — Albert King, Albert Collins, B.B.
King — [would be approached by club own-
ers] who would say, “Well, you know how to
play this guy’s stuff, you be him tonight.” Back
then there were no album covers; people didn’t
know what you looked like. Also, [the 1950s]
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 53

“there’s something good about it being
hard [to make movies]. it keeps you from
making a movie just because you haven’t
made something in a while.”
is an era that I’m really interested in. Some of
the film is about the big changes happening
then — it’s the South before the civil rights
movement but we’re still going to have black
combat troops when we go into Korea. It’s
about that moment when something changes
rapidly and it’s about who is going to be able to
deal with that change and who’s not.
You often discuss America’s handling of ra-
cial issues in your films. What is it about race
that keeps you coming back to it? Well, I’m an
American filmmaker and in a lot of ways that’s
the story of America. And even when it’s not
involved specifically, to me it’s the most striking
metaphor for what we tried to do in this country
and are still trying to do — setting these very
high goals of liberty, fraternity, equality, inde-
pendence, freedom and then living up to them,
including having to rewrite the rules every once
in a while. Within [Honeydripper] the racial sit-
uation is kind of menacing. Stacy Keach and I
worked out the sheriff character so that he’s not
a psychopath. He’s not the guy Kris Kristoffer-
son played in Lone Star. In my bio for him I said,
“You’re a former boxer, George Wallace was a
boxer, and the way that you run things is you
like to keep people off balance.” So sometimes
he’s a little friendly or humorous, other times
54 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
danny glover in honeydripper.
he comes right at you. I think for me the most
powerful line about race in the script is when
the sheriff is in the car and he says to the kid:
“Take your hat off.” The kid forgot that’s what
you do when a white man addresses you.
How did Danny Glover get involved? Well,
as usual it wasn’t just, “Oh, we want to make
a movie and here’s the money.” For about a
year, before we actually stared down the road
of making it, we were trying to raise money.
When I was writing this the only actors on my
wish list who I knew [personally] were Danny
and Stacy Keach, so I approached them. I try
not to think about actors when I write because
you are so often disappointed — they aren’t in-
terested, they’re not available, whatever. Danny
got interested and as it turned out it took us
another whole year to realize that we weren’t
going to raise enough money to do this. We
had just enough money from what I’ve made
writing many, many, many screenplays [for
hire], and we decided to just finance it our-
selves. But Danny had two other jobs right
before us. So we only had five weeks to shoot
the movie, and we only had Danny for three-
and-a-half of them — and he’s the lead and in
almost every scene. So for a week-and-a-half
we shot every single thing we could without
Danny, including some scenes where he’s see-
ing other people — reaction shots. And then
Danny came in and was in everything else.
Which is one of the ways we get such good
actors to be in our movies — it’s kind of a vaca-
tion from their usual career, but it’s a short one
and it’s a finite one.
So since Silver City you’ve been figuring out
how to get Honeydripper made. Yeah. Just
figuring out how to do it. One of the things
I tend to do now is to have the idea for the
script, maybe write a little outline just for my-
self and then I’ll go scouting and see where
we’d be likely to shoot this. Can we find a place
that has some things already built? One of the
reasons we ended up in Alabama was because
in Aniston there’s still an army base and it has
some old barracks from World War II and the
Korean War. Then we went down to cotton
country and found some cotton fields, some
old general stores that could be converted into
the Honeydripper club and the town of Geor-
giana, where Hank Williams grew up, which
has the railroad tracks down the main street.
So when I wrote I had the places in mind. And
when you talk to agents and say, “Danny Glov-
er is going to be in it,” that opens a lot of doors.
We didn’t do the final casting until we really
knew we were going to go down and do it.
How did you find Gary Clark Jr. and the rest
of the musicians in the film? Our friend Louis
Black is one of the guys who started the South
By Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, and
he said, “Oh, you have to come and see Gary
Clark Jr. He’s this local kid who plays the gui-
tar.” I think he was turning 21 the night that
we saw him. He was just terrific and there are
just not that many young African-American
guys who play that kind of guitar anymore.
So we auditioned him at a friend’s house and
he was surprisingly good. After Gary this guy
Tim, who’s been helping us and who’s been
a manager for various rock acts, mentioned
Mable John, an old soul singer. She was the
first person signed to Berry Gordy’s label,
which eventually became Motown. And then
HOW THEY DID IT
■ Production Format: 35mm.
■ Camera: Two Arriflex Arricam cameras. One
was the Studio model and the other was the Lite.
■ FILM Stock: Fuji 8573 (500T) film. We
used Cooke S4 prime lenses.
■ Editing System: Avid Media Com-
poser-Meridien.
■ Color Correction: Quantel Pablo
at Orbit Digital/Postworks. Conformed and
color corrected on Quantel IQ/Pablo from 2K
scans. Scanning performed on Spirit 2K data-
cine, film record on ARRI laser, prints on Fuji.
the musicians mentioned other people. One
person led to another, basically. They’re all ter-
rific. After a two-hour rehearsal they went out
and did a great set at the Chicago Blues Festi-
val and now they are touring the country as the
Honeydripper All-Star Band.
Is Gary playing his own music or stuff you
guys wrote? Both. We adapted a couple of
songs. He sings “Blue Light Buggy.” We adapt
what sometimes is called the first rock-and-
roll song, “Good Rocking Tonight,” which was
done by Roy Brown. I wrote the basic melody
and some lyrics for “China Doll” and then my
longtime collaborator, Mason Daring, took it
over and made it much more musical.
Do you direct your actors very specifically
or do you let them find their own way into
their characters? Generally what I tend to
do is write a bio for every character, one to
five pages, and I send it off to the actors. In
Danny’s case it was his history — how he got
there, when he met his wife, where he learned
how to play the piano, where he’s from, that he
was in World War I, a story really. So a certain
amount of work has been done beforehand.
I don’t have read-throughs or rehearsals or
anything like that where you bring everybody
[together]. I just can’t afford it and it’s just not
my way of working. I start working with the
actors when we start doing the blocking. I say,
“No acting yet, let’s just talk it through and
see where you would go given these param-
eters.” And so a lot of [my direction is like],
“Okay, give me one this time where you’re not
trying to show how upset you are.” The scene
at night when the sheriff comes into the bar,
there’s a lot of ways that Danny could play it
and sometimes I want to see more than one.
It’s not the right way or the wrong way — it’s
about options.
This issue of Filmmaker marks our 15th year
of publication. Where do you see film 15
years from now? It is sort of where music has
already gone. Musicians, both newcomers and
known veterans, can record and either make
CDs or directly download their work more
cheaply than ever before. This will continue to
be true of filmmakers as well. The difference
is that musicians now have to tour to make a
decent living, and filmmakers don’t really have
that option. So I believe that independent film-
making will remain mostly the realm of new
directors. I’ve always said that to make your
second movie you either have to pay people or
get new friends. As people get older and either
join unions and guilds that have minimum sal-
ary requirements or move to straight jobs, the
openings are filled by a never-ending stream
of film-school graduates and hungry actors.
As it becomes easier to hook your computer
up to your giant flat-screen TV, middleman
vendors like Blockbuster, HBO and Netflix
will become less important. I imagine that
film fans of off-Hollywood stuff will have ac-
counts to clearing houses in the Amazon.com
model. The audience phenomenon will still
be dominated by corporate blockbuster mov-
ies that are massively advertised and depend
on first weekend revenue. Film clubs for non-
mainstream stuff may reappear, booking mov-
ies for a show or two over satellite.  It will be
harder and harder for independent filmmakers
to make a living at it.
Would you ever release a film through the
Web? It depends on what it is. It’s kind of
like the question that people ask me about the
capture format — digital, 16mm or 35mm?
The last two movies before this were shot on
16mm, just for the cost of it — it was cheap-
er. This particular film wouldn’t look good in
anything but 35mm. If I felt I could have got-
ten the look I wanted in digital with those
others we would have gone digital for the ex-
pense. But some movies I feel like you can’t
stop and start and really get the feel of the
film, and I think of digital and movies-on-
demand, or watching it on your computer, as
start-and-stop movies. There are some things
that really lend themselves to that, whereas
other things need an emotional flow. When
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 55
you break them up with commercials or with
people stopping their machine they just don’t
work as well. Every d.p. I know will beg to
shoot 16mm rather than DV.
If you look at the release slate this season
Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma
and yourself are all coming out with mov-
ies after long hiatuses and are doing them,
for the most part, on their own. Why do
you think that is? I think it’s that we’re
just all old enough [to realize] that the stu-
dios really aren’t interested in making risky
movies for adults. My agent told me that
one of the studios, I forget which one, is-
sued a kind of fatwa. They said, “We don’t
want to see any scripts that are period mov-
ies or dramas.” So what they meant was
[they only want to make] either the Judd
Apatow-youth comedies or Spider-Man. I
think having had our adventures in studio-
land there’s that point, like the phrase from
Vietnam, where we had to destroy the vil-
lage in order to save it. Well, getting a movie
made through the studio system can be like
getting a bill through Congress — it may
not be recognizable by the time it comes
out the other end. It’s amazing how many
movies with well-known actors never get a
theatrical release these days. That used to
56 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
be the guarantee and now it’s, “Oh yeah,
we’re not going to spend any more money
on this, maybe we’ll put it on video.”
That has to be very frustrating for some-
one like you. Yeah, but quite honestly mov-
ies do skew very young. I’m older than most
of the studio executives I talk to so it’s not
surprising, and it happens with every gen-
eration. I’ve met these guys like Stanley
Donen, Robert Wise and John Franken-
heimer, who were great filmmakers, but the
GO BACK & WATCH
■ Mo’ Better Blues
Denzel Washington plays a burgeoning trum-
pet player in Spike Lee’s 1990 ode to jazz
music. In the film Bleek (Washington) finds
himself in the midst of a rivalry with friend
Shadow (Wesley Snipes) that may lead to
disasters off stage.
■ Black Snake Moan
Rock-and-roll cures all in Craig Brewer’s follow-
up to Hustle and Flow. Christina Ricci plays a
tramp who just can’t say no, but when Lazarus
(Samuel L. Jackson) finds her on the side of the
road he decides to exorcise her demons with
some hard licks on his electric guitar.
■ Bird
This 1988 biopic on Charlie Parker stars
Forest Whitaker in a Golden Globe nominated
performance as “Bird” Parker and looks back
on the troubled life of the legendary jazz
saxophonist helmed with care by jazz aficio-
nado Clint Eastwood.
last 20 years of their careers were struggles
to get anything made. We’ve been very for-
tunate and very persistent — we have got-
ten to make 16 movies in about 30 years.
But the other side is that there’s something
good about it being hard. It keeps you from
making a movie just because you haven’t
made something in a while. Usually the
worst movies [by mainstream filmmakers]
are when another project fell apart, the
person hasn’t worked in a year-and-a-half
and there’s something else that’s ready to
go so they sign on. Sometimes they’re not
bad movies but they’re usually not their best
movies. And sometimes they are pretty bad.
So if it’s hard you really want to make that
movie. You know, Honeydripper is something
that a studio would make for about $25 to
$30 million, if they would even bother with
movies that small anymore. We had about
$5 million to make it and five weeks to
shoot it, and music rights ate up a certain
amount of that. So, what we had to actually
shoot was not that much. That’s the good
side of it, then — if you’re lucky enough to
get the chance to make this movie, [it’s a
movie] you really want to make. It can be
frustrating but who said that people should
be allowed to make movies?t
REACHING OUT:  
10 Years of grassroots casting for John Sayles. By Lizzie Martinez
men with guns.
MEN WITH GUNS        person stands up, introduces themselves and
It’s twilight in Zongolica, Veracruz, and I’m
standing on a table in the mercado trying to
mediate a heated quarrel between the meat
vendors (who happen to be large men carry-
ing machetes) and the other street vendors
— the ones who sell herbs, plastic baby Jesu-
ses, kids’ underpants and tropical fruit of every
variety. Everyone is shouting.
 Tomorrow is one of our biggest scenes: an
action sequence in an open-air market full of
people. I have about 100 extras coming from
all over this remote part of Mexico to be in the
scene. People with no phones who work in sug-
arcane fields who heard my brother (and as-
sistant) David make casting calls on the local
evangelical radio station. Tomorrow we’ll rise
before dawn to meet them.
 But that is tomorrow. Today the dispute is
over the amount to be paid to each vendor to
be an extra. The meat vendors want more than
everyone else. The hierarchy of power here
is slowly making itself clear to me. The meat
vendors have some kind of cabal-like control
over the mercado. The reality of this situation
and the current open forum of discussion in-
stigated by us have brought out some long-
held resentments amongst the other vendors.
They’re pissed.
About a month before we came to this iso-
lated mountaintop town to film, the towns-
people had lynched someone they accused
of rape. So I’m really feeling the need to keep
everyone calm.
 Suddenly from around the corner comes
another mob of people being led by a round
man in a maroon guayabera and a gold
ring — obviously the mayor. The mayor tries
to listen but the shouting increases. I’m still
standing on the table but they seem to have
all about forgotten me. “Al centro!” someone
shouts and everyone starts marching toward
the city hall. My brother and I look at each
other. We’re both exhausted. All we can think
about is our 4:00 a.m. call the next day. But we
join the mass of people knowing we must re-
spect their decision-making process. Besides,
we’re pretty much the ones who started the
whole thing.
 What follows is an interminable city hall
meeting where what seems like every citizen of
Zongolica stands up and vents some grievance,
related or unrelated, to the issue at hand. Each
then basically tells their life history, sometimes
circling back to the topic of the meat vendors,
for or against them, but sometimes not. Some-
times it’s just a very long story about Senora
Ramirez and how her goats have been cross-
ing into other people’s gardens for years. The
mayor listens to everyone. Finally it is decided.
The meat vendors will earn more tomorrow
because their stalls are wooden and must be
rented for the scene and everyone else is just on
a blanket vending their wares. We agree to this
because obviously the depth of the town his-
tory is deeper than our momentary influence.
It’s finally over. Old resentments are reaffirmed,
grudges are upheld. The mayor bangs his gavel.
Everyone goes home.
 I hardly sleep. Then, at 4:00 a.m. my brother
and I wait in the dark dirt road for the extras
and locals with bit parts to show up. It’s driz-
zling and we’re in rain gear holding Styrofoam
cups of coffee. Then out of the mist from the
mountains they appear. All of them. Right
on time. It’s incredible. Some have walked for
more than an hour from villages, high in the
mountains, most with no shoes on, to come
and make this scene with us. We scoop up
kids, pass out coffee and head off to spend the
day together. Another day in the life of a John
Sayles movie.
I met John Sayles and Maggie Renzi (his
longtime partner and producer) through a
little film festival I programmed 15 years ago.
The event introduced us, but what kept us
together as friends and collaborators over
the years was a genuine interest in and com-
passion for the world around us. Sayles really
does think everyone’s story is interesting.
 At that festival, we screened 16mm prints
of The Brother From Another Planet and City
of Hope at different housing projects in San
Antonio, Texas, on projectors we borrowed
from the library.  I wanted everyone to have
access to these films — to take them away
from art house cinemas and show them to
“the people.” My goals were lofty and Sayles
was patient. He answered questions, led dis-
cussions and used his free time away from
the festival to look about San Antonio and
get ideas for a story he wanted to tell called
Lone Star. And years later, when they came
back to Texas to make that movie, I went to
work with them.
 John Sayles’s films are as much about
a place as about its people. He and Renzi
make films not as a business but out of
curiosity for the world and the insatiable
desire to tell stories. Their compassion for
those around them and for those reflected
in their stories extends to their hiring prac-
tices and the spirit of collaboration in their
filmmaking. Not that Sayles’s films are col-
laborations. They are 100 percent his sto-
ries and vision. But Sayles and Renzi love
their friends.
And what better way to make a movie
than to surround yourself with people you
care about and to make something together
that you all feel has worth in the world. It is
a method that is underrated in our country
and, these days, seems almost nonexistent.
 
limbo.
LIMBO
It’s day three of one of our biggest extra
scenes in Juneau, Alaska. It’s a wedding scene
and the extras and small speaking parts are
made up of a who’s who from the communi-
ty. It’s been drizzling and we’ve all been stuck
in a tent together, 60 or so of us, with most
of the extras in their nicest clothes — heels
and tuxes. The first 10-hour day everyone
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 57
laughed and talked and enjoyed an interrup-
tion in their workweek. The second 10-hour
day, most people read. Now on the third day,
they’re getting antsy — actually, mutinous.
These are outdoors people — people who
hike and bike and fish and boat constantly.
This is the town where, upon my arrival, a
guy interested in being an extra asked me out
on a “date.” He says, “We’ll take a helicopter
to the top of mount so-and-so, jump out with
our skis on and ski down to where potential
avalanches originate to assess the situation.”
Do I want to come?
“Are you crazy?” I ask him. “I’m a brown per-
son from South Texas. Skiing is not in our DNA.
Nor do I think jumping out of a helicopter for
my first time ever on skis sounds like the safest
way to learn.”
Needless to say, outdoorsy people trapped
in a big tent in the rain in fancy clothes are not
a pretty sight. They are becoming downright
bonkers. So at lunch, I ask Sayles if he would
come and talk to them — pep them up a bit.
Right after we ate he comes and sits with
them for a while. He tells everyone the story
of the film, he talks about their roles and he
tells some anecdotes about other films of his
with other big groups of extras. He gets every-
one laughing. Then he leaves, and there is a
58 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
palpable calm. The extras are able to make it
through the rest of the shooting. They felt ac-
knowledged.
 Sayles hired me to do grassroots casting
for his films for speaking parts and extras.
Grassroots casting has all the elements of
community organizing. I entered each com-
munity with some knowledge of its history,
local politics and culture. I gathered as many
contacts as I could before I left, and then I
would just hit the pavement — meeting
people, talking, listening, following leads
and telling the story of the movie over and
over again. Afterwards, I always felt like I
could run for mayor.
 Since I was in the first wave of crew to enter
the town where we would film, it was always
foremost in my mind that our interaction with
the townspeople would set the tone for the
arrival of the whole crew. A film production
working within a community can either create
a harmonious, mutually beneficial relationship
or the town can, in the end, feel taken advan-
tage of with a literal wake of environmental
damage left to deal with.
 I used my office as a place where peo-
ple from the community could come and
ask questions, tell me their stories or tell
me about someone I should meet, a local
character or an old-timer. In turn, I encour-
aged people to audition for speaking parts.
I explained each part to them and how it
wove into the tapestry of the story. When I
would tell people the plot of the film, they
were fascinated that a filmmaker was try-
ing to tell a story about them, about their
history or about what was happening to
their community.
 After shaking the bushes around town,
I would start bringing people in to audi-
tion or taping them on the spot wherever
they worked. I tried to make the auditions
fun and relaxed. I explained scenes. I con-
textualized lines. I paired people up to read
together. I let people take their lines home
to practice. I found surprising performances
in bartenders, teachers, local politicians
and union organizers. I auditioned people
in hotel rooms, backyards, schools and on
the side of a mountain. I made up skits with
hundreds of school children and then filmed
each performance.
 In many cases, I tried to cast the real person
who was depicted in the script. For example,
in Alaska I found an Athabascan woman who
really worked gutting fish on a “slime line” to
play just that, a woman on a slime line. She
had a pretty big part and no acting experi-
ence. But she was open and natural and ready
for a challenge. Instead of bringing in an actor,
teaching them to act naturally while gutting a
fish and delivering lines, I just worked harder
with the untrained actors — practicing lines,
letting them know what to expect, guiding
them through the process.
 It helped that Sayles values every char-
acter and part no matter how small. He
watches all the auditions I tape. He writes
character biographies for every part in or-
der to help the actor understand their roles.
Each character is in the script for a reason. In
this way, the person chosen to play the part,
no matter how small, feel their own impor-
tance within the larger narrative.
 In rural Mexico, most people we worked
with had not ever seen a movie much less
been in one. So my brother and I would
gather people together with our little video
camera and act out their scenes ahead of
time — just to get them ready for what it
might be like when the big camera came.
We gave names to extras’ parts to help
them understand their role and give them
an identity within the story. In one scene,
a village is set on fire by the military. We
practiced the scene over and over again.
Afterward, a small boy who had practiced
running and screaming all day proudly told
everyone, “My name is The Burned Kid!”
 As in grassroots organizing, knowing
something of local politics is essential for
grassroots casting. In Mexico, we needed
to cast more than 50 speaking parts in six
different indigenous languages. Each rural
area we entered had a different political and
religious allegiance — for or against the Za-
patistas, evangelical or Catholic. Towns only
miles apart could be in solidarity or bitter
enemies. We had to earn the trust of each
village before we even started to audition.
 We found an indigenous theater collective
in southern Mexico whose reserved acting
style worked well as the doomed leaders of
the fictitious community. But because of the
true political turmoil of their region, they had
to be sure that they believed in the content of
the film, that it did not belittle the struggle of
their people, before they would participate.
 I’ve guided many untrained people through
the process of being in a film from start to fin-
ish, as an extra or a speaking part. But there
are few things as fun as telling someone they
got the part — like the naturally wisecrack-
ing ice-cream vendor who got cast as a pushy
tour guide in Casa de los babys.
 
lone star.
LONE STAR
I’m running down the street with a breast pump
in my hand. The extra dressed as a waitress has
started lactating and we don’t want to stain her
shirt. Shyly, she hands me the key to her house
and explains in a whisper what is happening
to her. I cast her because her serene face was
almost Arabic-looking, like some of the people
of Lebanese descent in this border region.  So
I’m running as fast as I can in flip-flops (which
I probably decided to wear because summer in
Eagle Pass, Texas, is brutal, not because they’re
good for sprinting) with a walkie-talkie slap-
ping against my leg, a massive notebook (all
my contacts and schedules) under one arm
and that breast pump under the other. A guy
see page 104
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 59
The Unseen Hand
Amir Bar-Lev got more than he bargained for
when he followed child painter
Marla Olmstead
and her family for a year
in the riveting documentary
MY KID COULD PAINT THAT.
By Jason Guerrasio
Amir Bar-Lev never intended on hurting
anyone. It was just an innocent fascination
with abstract art that got him interested in
making a documentary on Marla Olmstead,
a four-year-old painter whose work has sold
for thousands of dollars.
To make his film, Bar-Lev did what any
filmmaker making a movie about a child would
do — get close to the parents, in this case Lau-
ra, a dental assistant, and Mark, a Frito-Lay
factory worker. And while becoming friends
with Laura and Mark, he filmed the day-to-
day life of their Binghamton, New York family
— Marla and younger brother Zane — as they
were thrust into the spotlight of the art world,
attending gallery openings and appearing on
The Today Show and Inside Edition. But Bar-
Lev had only one problem — he didn’t actually
have footage of Marla painting. Whenever he
tried to capture her artistic process she would
just play around with the paint as if it was kin-
dergarten art time.
Then on February 23, 2005, six months
60 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
into his filming, the bombshell: A 60 Min-
utes report about Marla made the charge that
she was not a prodigy. It questioned whether
or not she did the paintings on her own, im-
plying that her father helped her. Suddenly,
Bar-Lev becomes the parents’ last hope to
clear their names, and My Kid Could Paint
That shifts from a film on the craziness of
modern painting to an investigative report
on possible art fraud.
Regardless of whether you walk away from
Bar-Lev’s film thinking Marla does the paint-
ings on her own or not, what My Kid Could
Paint That definitely demonstrates is that our
culture is obsessed with putting people on a
pedestal and then gleefully knocking them
off at the moment their talents are in ques-
tion. And, for filmmakers, Bar-Lev’s film is
a master class in the difficult decisions docu-
mentary makers face as they get close to the
personal lives of their subjects. Sony Pictures
Classics opens the film October 5.
When did you first hear about Marla? I read
about Marla in a New York Times story [in
2004]. To me, it was just an interesting story.
Number one, her popularity made me think
about the question of “What is art? How does
one judge art? How does one value art? Is it all
a big con or is there something to modern art?”
I also thought it would be interesting to follow
this family, which was not the type of family one
would normally associate with child celebrities.
Or just the art world in general. You’re
exactly right. Here was this family that
literally overnight had been pulled into
international art stardom. I wanted to see
where things went with them. Over the
course of the next half year or so I became
real friendly with the family. It proved very
challenging from the get-go to turn this
four-year-old into a subject of a documen-
tary for the very obvious reasons that all
she really wanted to do was play. She didn’t
want to be interviewed about the meaning
of representation [laughs]. So by the time

this surprise came six months in — that
possibly it was all a big hoax — I was closer
to the family than most documentary film-
makers get with their subjects.
How did you initially approach the parents
about making a film about their daughter?
I approached them right before this big gal-
lery opening. I said to them, “Look, I’ll shoot
all weekend because this is a very important
scene and at the end of the weekend we can
discuss it. If you don’t want to do [the doc]
I’ll just give you the tapes and we’ll go our
separate ways.” So when Sunday afternoon
rolled around I sat down with them and they
said, “We’ve been discussing it and asking
ourselves why we should do this. What’s in it
for us?” I mistakenly thought they were talk-
ing about financial compensation, and they
said, “No, we’re not talking about money,
we’re just wondering — you seem like a nice
guy, but why would we let some stranger in
our house to play with our kids?” It stumped
me, and then I answered, “Well, the only
“ultimately what i wanted to make the film
about was what happens when you let a
documentary director into your life.”
thing I can say is that I think that the film
might meet a deeper truth than some [of
the work] of these other news crews that are
coming in and out of your life. Maybe my
film will reach more people; maybe my film
will be something you will be happy to have
20 years from now because it will show what
this year was like in your lives.” So, fast-for-
ward to six months later when all of a sud-
den I’m confronted with the possibility that
they’ve been lying. My first thought, and not
for the last time did I have this thought, was
why would they have invited me into their
lives if they had something to hide? So I be-
lieved when I first saw 60 Minutes that this
was impossible.
Have you made up your mind on whether
PHOTO BY: MARK AND LAURA OLMSTEAD/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
Ocean by Marla Olmstead.
Marla gets help with her paintings or not? I’m
painfully aware of how important the subject of
their innocence or guilt is [to Mark and Laura],
but I hope that’s not all people think the film
is about. It’s not that I’m saying it doesn’t mat-
ter whether she had help with the paintings
or not, because I think it does. But ultimately
what I wanted to make the film about was what
happens when you let a documentary director
into your life — the issues around represent-
ing people on celluloid. What happens on a
human level. I definitely don’t want the film to
be construed as a knock against documentary
filmmaking. On the contrary, I’m just trying to
talk a little about the process of representation.
Whether you are painting someone, document-
ing them or writing a novel about them, there’s
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 61

“[documentary making is] not about
objectivity, it’s about evaluating your
own subjectivity.”
always this disparity between how you see
people and how they see themselves, and I just
wanted to point to that.
But this family, however, was looking for
my film to exonerate them, and I was unable
to find proof in either direction. I was not
able to prove that they were guilty nor was
I able to prove that Marla does all of those
paintings by herself, so then I was confronted
with the responsibility that every documen-
tary filmmaker has, which is to take that one
year of time and turn it into 90 minutes of
film. And whichever 90 minutes I chose was
going to have a major impact on this family.
In the absence of “proof ” there would just be
the way that I portrayed them.
What went through your head when you
realized you had to make a different movie
than you initially wanted? After the initial
shock my first thought was, wow, this is re-
ally interesting for my film. And then the
next thought was, boy, I feel parasitic because
this terrible thing has just happened to my
subjects and, as they rightfully say at the end
of the movie, “it’s documentary gold.” That’s
a weird feeling, morally, so I decided to try
and draw attention to that element of the
relationship between filmmakers and their
subjects; how complicated it is to be friends
62 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
PHOTO BY: MARK AND LAURA OLMSTEAD/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
who probably went into it with good inten-
tions but couldn’t control their lives once
they became an international story.
Some would argue that as a documentary
filmmaker it’s your responsibility to tell
all sides of the story and not give your own
opinion. I’m not sure I agree with that. I don’t
think it’s about not putting in your opinion, I
think it’s about scrutinizing your own opinion
and your own perspective to such a degree that
you stand behind it. It’s like the film is neither
true nor false; it’s just how I saw things. It’s not
reality — it’s a construction. I don’t think that
a filmmaker should exclude his opinions. You
can go one of two ways: You could choose to
try and make a film as objective as possible or
you could let the audience in on the fact that
this isn’t reality, this is a fallible person’s opin-
ion. You see in the film how much I struggle
with the conclusions I’m beginning to draw
and their potential impact on my subject, but
marla and laura olmstead.
I stand by the characterization. It’s an interest-
ing thing to try and define objectivity. I mean,
it’s important not to mess with the facts, that’s
for sure. It becomes complicated because you’re
omitting things [when you make a documen-
tary]. It’s not about objectivity, it’s about evalu-
ating your own subjectivity, and I find that
really interesting. Documentary filmmaking
with someone and at the same time want to is kind of like therapy in a way. You have to
tell an interesting story. I don’t think I did look at your own motives. At every juncture in
anything different than what every filmmaker any film you’re reducing weeks of time down
does, which is to ride this bucking bronco of to seconds, so it becomes less about objectiv-
reality where you are constantly trying to fig- ity and more about whether you are making a
ure out how you’re going to tell the story and sensational story or trying to get to the heart
adapt to reality. There is a moment in the film of the matter of how you really think things
where the gallery owner, Tony Brunelli, says went down.
that everybody is trying to shape the story How often would you go upstate to shoot
into something they want it to be instead of the family? With this particular film you end
letting the story be what it is, and I kept that up sort of partnering with your subjects in a
line in there not because I agree with it but way. They become your line producers. They’re
because I disagree with it. There is no story calling you and telling you when something
without a storyteller, and it’s not one person interesting is happening. You begin to ask
shaping the story, every single person is. yourself, is this a collaboration or is it journal-
You can see as the film goes on that the ism? A case in point was that as we began to
notoriety Tony and Mark get goes to their struggle to get the footage that would prove
heads a little. I would see this film as a cau- that Marla was single-handedly doing the
tionary tale to anybody who would decide paintings, the family said the reason we were
to let other people tell their story for them.
That’s what you do when you’re a celebrity. HOW THEY DID IT
Whether it’s the news or your publicist or a
■ Production Format: MiniDV.
documentary crew, you’re handing over the ■ Camera: PD150, DVX 100A, Canon XL2
story of your life to someone else and they’re with anamorphic lens adaptor.
going to draw their own conclusions. It may ■ Tape Stock: MiniDV.
■ Editing System: Final Cut Pro.
work in your favor and it may not, but you
■ Color Correction: Uncompressed
lose control as soon as you let other people HD Final Cut Online up-convert through Ter-
start telling your story. In one way that’s anex to 24fps HD at Final Frame Post NY and
film out at Alpha Cine.
what the film is about. It’s about this family
 PHOTO BY: MARK AND LAURA OLMSTEAD/SONY PICTURES CLASSICS
having trouble getting that footage was that
Marla had become too familiar with me and
my camera man and would be distracted every
time we came up. So what we came up with
was that I wouldn’t show up; I would get a new
camera man, one who they hadn’t even been
introduced to them to do the work. It became
this absurd type of shooting where we would
start out of New York City at six in the morn-
ing, arrive at nine because she paints in the
morning at nine-thirty, and we would stake
out their house. We would be outside drink-
ing coffee just waiting for the phone call, and
then the phone call would come, “She’s paint-
ing, send Nelson in!” So Nelson would come
in and just imagine he’s not being introduced,
he’s not even being acknowledged; she’s paint-
ing and suddenly this stranger comes in with
this camera. It was weird but it was also sad
because this accusation against them had
caused them to lose sight to a certain degree
my kid could paint that.
of some of their initial protectiveness of their
kids. We had reached a 180-degree difference
from where we started. At the beginning they really tough situation to find myself in because tion her parents’ honesty. Seriously, there were
had said, “We’re only going to let you into I just felt there was a lot at stake. Whatever times I thought that maybe I’ll just abandon
the house if you’re friendly with our kids” and happened or didn’t happen, certainly this little this project.
now it was the complete opposite — I was too four-year-old is innocent and I knew the film There are people who watch the film and
friendly with the kids. would live with her, potentially even shape her get frustrated that I don’t act like a better in-
What would you do when you weren’t shoot- recollections. So here I’m putting this docu- quisitor, that I didn’t become the type of per-
ing? Honestly, I became an insomniac. It was a mentary into the world that calls into ques- son who would be able to get to the bottom of

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 63


“i don’t think i would have done things
differently, i just think that documentary
filmmaking is complicated.”
this mystery. Some people ask, “Why don’t you
take Marla off to the side and ask her whether
her Dad was helping her?” Or, there’s one scene
where the family says, “Give us a polygraph.” I
don’t want to be the type of person who gives
people polygraphs. That’s just not who I am.
The nature of this particular mystery was such
that to really get to the bottom of it you would
have to have had to do something like that,
and it just felt cheap to me. Take the paintings
to fraud experts! I just didn’t want to do that.
So you never asked Marla if her Dad helped
her? I didn’t ask Marla for two reasons. One,
in some ways I guess I was afraid of the an-
swer and two, I feel that it’s in the film. I’m
not asking, but she does say stuff. The scene
where she says, “Zane painted the green one.”
I mean Zane didn’t paint the green one, you
know what I mean? But I know it is frustrat-
ing for some people and maybe I should have
[asked her]. It’s not a perfect film because it
was very muddy waters to tread in ethically.
Looking back on it, do you think you got
too close to your subjects? [pause] Um, I
don’t think so.
Would you ever get this close to a subject
again? Sure. I don’t think there’s any way of
getting around these issues. I mean, if you get
less close to your subjects you’re not going to
64 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
my kid could paint that director amir-bar lev.
get the material you need to get. I don’t think I
would have done things differently, I just think
that documentary filmmaking is complicated
and everybody needs to go into it understand-
ing what’s involved — which is that there are
going to be these two somewhat incommensu-
rate elements to your relationship with people.
One is your striving for journalistic integrity
GO BACK & WATCH
■ Who The #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?
When a 73-year-old truck driver buys a painting
for five dollars at a thrift shop she unknowingly
becomes the talk of the art world after realizing
she owns a Pollock. But there are those who
doubt the originality of the painting, which leads
to an often-humorous mission to authenticate
the work chronicled by director Harry Moses.
■ Overnight
Directors Tony Montana and Mark Brian
Smith document director Troy Duffy’s sudden
rise to fame after striking a movie deal with
then Weinstein-owned Miramax and the even
quicker fall from grace when the deal goes
sour. In the wake, Duffy alienates his contacts
and friends leading to a depressing finale.
■ F for Fake
Orson Welles’s 1974 free-form documentary
on fraud examines the value of art and (of
course) himself by studying the notorious
art forger Elmyr de Hory and his biographer
Clifford Irving, who also wrote the fraudulent
Howard Hughes autobiography. An “illusion-
ist” himself, Welles plays some tricks on the
audience as well.
and the other is your feelings of affection for
them. There’s no getting around that.
A good amount of people see the film and
conclude that there’s been no hoax what-
soever, which has been very gratifying for
me because I feel the confusion that’s been
in my brain has been spilled into the seats
of the cinema. The other thing is we pre-
miered at Sundance and we brought six of
Marla’s paintings. We borrowed them from
collectors just for display and somebody of-
fered $35,000 for Ocean, which is more than
anybody’s ever offered for her work. We’ll
see what happens moving forward when the
film comes out. I think that the paintings are
only going to rise in value.
Has everyone in the film seen it? Nearly
everyone’s seen it. It’s my hope that the
Olmsteads will warm up to the film when
they realize how many people come away
from it feeling the way about them that
they always wanted a film to make people
feel about them.
So they didn’t see it at Sundance? They’ve
seen it in the privacy of their own home but
they haven’t been at the festival screenings.
They weren’t at Sundance.
Have you talked to them since they’ve seen
it? Yeah. I talked to them. [pause] I’m hop-
ing that our relationship improves by the time
this comes out. And that’s all I want to say
about that.
Does Sony want them to do press for the
film? I think that Sony and I both feel the
same way, which is, we don’t want the film to
be the last word on the Olmsteads. I’m hop-
ing that they are interested in participating in
publicity in some way or contributing to the
DVD. [EDITOR’S NOTE: At press time, the
publicist for the Olmsteads says the family is do-
ing limited press and that there is no offical word
yet on their involvment in the DVD]. Even if
our perspectives aren’t exactly alike we need
for both perspectives to be out in the world.
Would you ever go back and re-examine
this, say, when Marla is a teenager? Well, I’m
hoping to do some of that with the DVD. I
really hope to do follow-ups with everybody. I
tell you what, though — somebody is going to
do [a follow-up years later]. It’s probably not
going to be me.
Do you feel any guilt over having made the
film? [pause] The answer is no but I feel sad
that I no longer hang out with Marla and Zane.
I thought those kids were pretty amazing and I
am concerned about the impact the film might
have on them. But when push comes to shove I
think the film is fair so I don’t feel guilty.t
 The Last Draft
Justin Lowe talks to Andrew Wagner
about his sophmore effort, the deeply resonate drama
starting out in the evening.
While audiences, critics and acquisitions
execs attending the 2007 Sundance Film Fes-
tival were flocking to a variety of high-profile
dramatic competition entries — many riding
a wave of pre-festival buzz — a quiet con-
sensus was developing on the excellence of a
small, Manhattan-set drama by writer-direc-
tor Andrew Wagner. Starting Out in the Eve-
ning attracted both critical and popular praise
for its smart, literate sensibility, outstanding
lead performances and dedication to the type
of thought-provoking character drama that
seems increasingly rare in contemporary cin-
ema. It also represented something of a quiet
milestone: Starting Out in the Evening is the
final film produced by the now shuttered
indie production company InDigEnt, which
found success for many of its ultra-low-bud-
get films at Sundance.
Wagner’s offbeat, semi-autobiographical
comedic drama The Talent Given Us, which
starred his parents and two sisters, appeared
at Sundance in 2005. Prior to his feature de-
but, Wagner earned an M.F.A. in directing at
the American Film Institute, made a series of
short films and took a feature adaptation of
the novel The Man Who Gave Up His Name to
the Sundance Screenwriters Lab before com-
pleting The Talent Given Us.
Starting Out in the Evening centers on Leon-
ard Schiller (Frank Langella), an elderly New
York City writer and former university professor,
struggling late in his career to complete a final
novel. In the decades since his first three books
found widespread acclaim, the literary world has
moved on, Schiller’s works have fallen out of print
and his reputation is courting obscurity.
When ambitious, vivacious young gradu-
ate student Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose)
tracks Schiller down and proposes to write her
thesis on his novels and career, Schiller is initial-
ly skeptical and declines to cooperate. Heather
persists, however, and gradually Schiller relents
enough to engage in her probing interviews, as
long as their discussions don’t disrupt his writ-
ing routine — although in actuality he’s mak-
ing painfully slow progress on the novel he’s
66 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
been writing for the past 10 years. Meanwhile
Schiller tries to provide encouragement to his
beloved daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), who on the
cusp of turning 40 is desperate to have a child
but is bereft of a suitable partner.
As Leonard and Heather’s relationship
becomes more personal, moving toward in-
timacy, Starting Out in the Evening adroitly
skirts salaciousness in portraying the conflicts
and aspirations of a talented, principled artist
challenged to reimagine his own creative life.
Wagner co-wrote Starting Out in the Eve-
ning with filmmaker Fred Parnes, adapting the
screenplay from the PEN/Faulkner Award-
nominated novel by Brian Morton, a longtime
friend of Parnes’. While many filmmakers are
searching for a hook that plays to investors, dis-
tributors and specific demographics, Wagner’s
film stands out from other independent releases
with its thoughtful tone, New York literary-
scene setting and emphasis on acting craft.
Star Frank Langella is a distinguished
veteran of American stage and screen with
a long list of honors, most recently for his
Tony-award winning best leading actor per-
formance as Richard Nixon in the Broadway
production of Frost/Nixon, a role he recently
reprised onscreen for director Ron Howard’s
film adaptation, scheduled for a 2008 release.
In his totally committed, fully inhabited role
as Schiller, Langella delivers an outstanding
performance that could attract awards-season
attention. Lauren Ambrose, who has built her
career with recurring roles on a variety of TV
series, including Law & Order, Party of Five
and an award-winning turn in HBO’s Six Feet
Under, engages Langella with equal intensity.
Starting Out in the Evening was shot on HD
in 18 days in New York City and completed
for just over $500,000. Roadside Attractions
will release the film in late November.
Starting Out in the Evening differs signifi-
cantly from your first feature, The Talent
Given Us. How did you select it as your sec-
ond project? It was in 2000 — I hadn’t even
made The Talent Given Us yet — and I was
walking the dog with my wife Chelsea and I
bumped into one of my good old friends from
my early days in Los Angeles, Fred Parnes.
Fred is an active filmmaker: He made a docu-
mentary called Spread the Word and he had re-
cently made his first narrative feature, A Man
is Mostly Water. He was walking in [our Los
Angeles] neighborhood holding this book
entitled Starting Out in the Evening.
He was about to embark on the idea of rais-
ing the money to make an indie film version
of the novel. And I promise you it happened
just like this: I had this incredibly powerful
feeling, just a wave of intuition that made me
say, “I don’t know where this came from — I
just had this flash that somehow, some way,
years from now, I’m going to be directing a
film based on Starting Out in the Evening.”
Sometime later, after having completed a
rough cut of The Talent Given Us [in 2004], I
was showing that version of the edit to Gary
Winick. Gary had started a company with
John Sloss in New York City called InDi-
gEnt, which was designed around the prem-
ise of making quality-driven, character-rich
films in very few days for very little money,
but with the intent of affording a director the
opportunity to realize a scaled-down vision
as freely as possible. And after watching The
Talent Given Us, he said, “Are you interested
in making a film with InDigEnt?”
That’s when the lightbulb went off and I
remembered my conversation with Fred that
night in 2000, now over four years ago, when
we’d talked about Brian Morton’s novel and
this small universe of characters who play out
their lives in New York City. [Fred] had run
into the usual impediments of getting Start-
ing Out financed and he happily agreed to al-
HOW THEY DID IT
■ Production Format: HD Cam 24P.
■ Camera: Sony HDW-F900 CineAlta camera.
■ TAPE Stock: Sony HD Cam.
■ Editing System: Avid Adrenaline 1.8.1.
■ Color Correction: Lustre at Technicolor.
low me to direct the film. We then [began] walks into the room and the electricity in that four-hour conversation and we talked about
our collaboration on the screenplay. I just had space becomes amplified — he just has that the material. A week or two later I flew to
this intuitive connection to the material, I de- much power. His call in playing Leonard was New York and we met at his apartment at 11
cided to trust in it and of course it was in the to hold his power within and to let it act as in the morning and I left 12 hours later.
months and years that followed in adapting water underground, something that collects Were you familiar with Lauren Ambrose’s
the novel that I came to truly find my love and breaks to the surface much later. Leonard work before casting her in the role of Heather?
for the book and then the storyline, but that’s is an emotionally sealed man who says and Of course I knew of Lauren from her portrayal
where this choice came from. expresses much less than he feels. of Claire Fisher in Six Feet Under and I had two
Was this your first time co-writing a script? How did you approach Langella and per- competing feelings at the time [we were cast-
It was; it was my first collaboration. I had been suade him to take the part? It was incred- ing]. One was that this woman is a remarkable
a solitary screenwriter for almost 20 years. My ibly simple on one hand and rigorous on the actress and the other was that [Lauren] was so
sister Emily Wagner, who is one of the featured other. It was simple because Frank’s agent distinctively Claire and she’s so distinctively dif-
actors in The Talent Given Us, had written a Bill Veloric read the script, liked it and gave ferent from Heather. I had to really work within
one-act play called Counting which years be- it to Frank, who had a very positive response myself to understand that it was [Lauren’s]
fore we had made into a 45-minute indepen- and said, “Well, let me meet this director.” talent and her craft that allowed her to be so
dent film. She and I had actually collaborated We met for dinner [in Los Angeles] and he convincing as Claire and it would be those same
on a feature version of that screenplay, but it walked in the restaurant and I said to myself, capacities that would allow her to transform
was her first time writing, so it wasn’t a tradi- “Leonard Schiller just walked into the restau- herself in portraying Heather.
tional idea of two writers coming together to rant.” He sat down, we proceeded to have a Starting Out in the Evening is really quite a
collaborate. This was for all intensive purposes
my first collaboration. This was [also] essen-
tially Fred’s first collaboration. “i just had this flash that somehow,
What types of challenges did you face in some way, years from now, I’m going to
adapting Brian Morton’s novel? I think we
were up against a number of core challenges. be directing a film based on Starting
The first was how to find a dramatic rela- out in the evening.”
tionship to the beauty of Brian’s writing. It’s
such a poignantly observed novel and Brian’s
ability to capture nuance and the essence of
character and language, which at moments is
singularly novelistic, [presented] us with the
challenge of looking beneath and around and
past the beauty at the core dramatic joints of
the story. And in looking at those we felt that
[our objective] was to heighten the drama of
the key relationships and push them toward a
more dynamic conclusion.
Were there any unexpected opportunities
that you discovered in translating the book
to film? I think the novel offered us two ma-
jor opportunities: One was to tell a compelling
story and secondly to embrace the particular
magic of film to explore the shadow regions
inside the characters, where the hungers of
the soul express themselves, often in mysteri-
ous ways. When I watch the film now, half a
year removed from completion, it’s gratifying
to have that step-back experience where the
characters come to life and reveal themselves
as if under their own agency.
Frank Langella has become such an iconic
American actor at this stage of his career.
What do you think he was able to bring to
the part of Leonard Schiller? Frank is a
force of nature and what is particularly ex-
citing about his performance was the call for
him to release his virtuosity, release the mas-
frank langella in starting out in the evening.
tery that has made him an American icon. He

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 67


“i try to keep it simple in my approach to the
films i want to make — which is, I need to feel
a passionate connection to the material.”
serious literary — and literate — drama. It
seems an exception when so many filmmak-
ers are looking for catchy concepts to entice
financiers and audiences. Did you feel like
you were taking a risk at all with the material?
I really try to keep it simple in my approach to
the films I want to make — which is, I need
to feel a passionate connection to the material.
My belief in film is born of the premise that
it’s an act of necessity. The need produces cre-
ative energy and the creative energy opens up
to possibility and I think that’s as much as you
can control. I’d like to believe that if the film is
alive, if it’s born of necessity, it will house a life
force that will make it appealing to people who
have to sit in the dark and take something back
from the story being told in front of them.
Years ago I walked through that door of
GO BACK & WATCH
■ Adaptation
Perhaps one of the most original looks at the
screenwriting process ever put on film, Spike
Jonze’s take on Charlie Kaufman’s struggle to
adapt The Orchid Thief has all the components
we love about a Jonze/Kaufman collaboration:
comedy, bewilderment and originality.
■ Ikiru
Kurosawa’s 1952 film charts the odyssey of a
retired city official (Takashi Shimura) stricken
with cancer as he travels through the failures
of his past, searching to create meaning and
purpose for his fading future.
■ Wonder Boys
Michael Douglas stars as a pot-smoking,
wisecracking literature professor who at-
tempts to complete his novel over the course
of one hilarious and life-changing weekend in
Curtis Hanson’s 2000 film.
68 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
lauren ambrose in starting out in the evening.
commitment where I felt my creative life had
to be about making films that could be trans-
formative experiences for myself, that had the
chance to move people in ways that film can.
I just wear those blinders when it comes to
thinking about the realities of the market-
place, because if you think about them, you’ll
never make a film you believe in.
What was your approach to financing the film
and partnering with InDigEnt? Somewhere
amid the journey of this film moving from the
screenplay form to before the cameras, the tra-
ditional InDigEnt financing model changed
and their films were no longer being financed
by the Independent Film Channel. We found
ourselves from a financing standpoint having
to become innovative in the more traditional
privately financed independent film [model].
So like an independent filmmaker must learn
to do, we asked — we asked for money. So be-
tween [Fred and I] we raised enough to shoot
the film, which was a quarter of a million. Then
on the day before production, literally, Gary
Winick and John Sloss’s efforts to cover the
rest of our budget met with success through
their longstanding relationship with IFC, who
introduced us to a Cablevison [division] called
Voom. Voom agreed to give us the balance of
the budget that we’d need to complete post
and that was roughly another quarter million.
Our total budget was just above $500,000.
How did you manage to work within the
constraints of InDigEnt’s stipulated 18-day
shooting schedule? In a way, it was just the
InDigEnt model and adhering to that model
co-writer-director andrew wagner.
from the start, we just moved forward with
those limitations in mind.
The film looks really great. How did you
adapt your production process to the limita-
tions of the budget? We owe so much to the
talent of our cinematographer, Harlan Bosma-
jian, who was able to achieve genuine beauty
and creative truth under incredible adversity.
From an aesthetic standpoint, we had a simple
premise, which was to concentrate on what we
could achieve, not on what we couldn’t. And
that pertains to the look of the film and the
emotional center of the film. We just wanted to
shoot an arrow to the heart of the story, which
was: “What’s in the hearts of these characters?”
And thankfully Harlan could achieve a lifelike
feeling where the light was concerned so that it
was not only naturalistic, but painterly.
You adopt a fairly classic directing style that
really lets the actors take the foreground in
the film. What was your approach to con-
ceiving and achieving the visual aesthetic
of Starting Out? We paid careful attention to
navigating that line between an observational
posture and a subjective [point of view]. This
wasn’t simply a vérité film where we just fol-
lowed the characters, documentary-style.
This is a man whose life, from an emotional
standpoint, is ordered and decorous and he’s
also a traditionalist, a classicist himself in his
approach to his art and in his approach to his
life and we needed to achieve a quiet elegance
in underscoring this facet of his character. The
classicism in composition grew out of the spine
of his character.t
 The
Inside
Man In the diving bell and the butterfly,
Julian Schnabel makes Jean-Dominique Bauby’s best-selling
memoir into a funny, moving and wise contemplation of mortality
and the artist. By Scott Macaulay
Most films draw us in with some promise
of possibility. Buy a ticket, sit back and have
your world expanded for a couple of hours. Be
someone new and go places you’ll probably
never see in your own life.
But there’s another sort of movie that derives
its drama from the opposite journey. Movies as
diverse as Jim Sheridan’s My Left Foot and Gary
Tarn’s recent doc Black Sun place the audience
within a world that’s drastically — and painfully
— smaller than their own. Through the strength
of their storytelling, these films both dramatize
their protagonists’ quests to conquer the chal-
lenges of their new worlds while confronting
viewers with the existential questions posed by
their dilemmas. Julian Schnabel’s third feature,
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, is a challeng-
ing, sagacious and unexpectedly sensuous addi-
tion to this genre. Adapted from the best-selling
memoir, the film tells the story of Jean-Domi-
nique Bauby, an editor at French Elle, who is one
day stricken with locked-in syndrome. Although
his mind functions perfectly, he is paralyzed ex-
cept for the ability to move one eye. In a harrow-
ing tour de force reel of filmmaking, Schnabel
shoots the beginning of the film almost entirely
from Bauby’s viewpoint, forcing us into the most
extreme identification with his character.
As the film progresses, however, it opens
up. The details of this world — the color of
the columns in the hospital hallway, the hue
of the linoleum on the floor — seduce us.
Bauby develops relationships with a series of
70 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
spectacular nurses who not only teach him to
communicate but also enable him to write
the book the film is based on. By the film’s
end, we are living comfortably within Bauby’s
world, like him no longer scared, and a simple
change of season provides all the excitement
and sense of accomplishment we need.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which is
Schnabel’s third film dealing with death and
an artist, won him the Best Director award
at Cannes this year (and will be released by
Miramax in November). It caps a typically
busy year for him that included not only his
art direction of the newly reopened Gramercy
Hotel in New York City but also his live theat-
rical staging of Lou Reed’s Berlin album in New
York, Sydney and Los Angeles. In Toronto, he
not only screened The Diving Bell and the But-
terfly but also his film Berlin, which should also
see a release sometime in the next year.
I read somewhere that you dubbed The Div-
ing Bell and the Butterfly a “treatise about
dying.” As an artist making a movie about
HOW THEY DID IT
■ Production Format: 35mm.
■ Camera: BOGARD 1 camera, ARRI
MEDIA Arricam ST full.
■ FILM: KODAK 5279 (500T VISION1).
■ Editing System: AVID adrenaline.
■ Color Correction: Chemical (no
digital grading).
another artist confronting mortality, how did
your own feelings about, and perhaps fears of
death and dying, affect your approach? Well
fortunately or unfortunately, I think coming
to grips with [the process of dying] is part of
what it is to be alive. It takes up a good part of
being alive, in fact. So I don’t really separate
his experience from mine — or yours — and
that’s probably what’s good about the movie.
But I guess the notion of transgressing death
by making art probably had something to do
with the making of this movie too.
You had a certain distance because it was
someone else’s story? I’ve never been able to
separate intellect from feeling. People who can
do that — I don’t trust them. Fred Hughes,
who used to work for Andy Warhol, had MS
and got progressively worse over the years. We
were friends and when he was lying in his house
and couldn’t speak anymore, I used to read to
him. His nurse, Darin McCormick, gave me
this book, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,
as a gift. One year my kids were out of school
for Christmas, and we were going to Mexico.
My father, who died on January 17, 2004,
[was sick] and I couldn’t bring him with us. I
thought of who could take care of him [when
I was away] and Darin McCormick came to
mind. He came to my studio one day in De-
cember, and it was the same day that the script
of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly arrived. So
I wasn’t analytical at all about it. [Making the
movie] had very much to do with me trying to
 PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.

the diving bell and the butterfly director julian schnabel.

 “[making the movie]
had very much to
do with me trying
to deal with my
father’s death. the
movie is really a
self-help device.”
deal with my father’s death. The movie is really
a self-help device.
When you say “the script arrived,” what do
you mean? Had you been developing it, or
was it something offered to you by a produc-
er? They had asked Johnny Depp if he wanted
to play this role and he wanted me to direct
the movie so the script was sent to me. [That
script] was written by Ron Harwood, and then
I worked on it. Like I said, I had had the book
for some years, but I didn’t plan on making the
movie. I did think about making a movie about
Fred, who I knew pretty well. I thought, here
he is lying in this bed, and I know all the things
that he did and what an active life he had. The
idea of this person being still and the audience
knowing what is going on in his head — that’s
a structure I like. I had written a script for the
book Perfume: The Story of a Murderer that was
similar in a way because the main character
had a sense of smell that was extraordinary. He
could travel through his olfactory senses in the
same way that Jean-Dominique Bauby could
travel with his imagination and his memory.
So I applied some of the [devices] I used in the
script for Perfume to the script that I received
that day from [producer] Kathy Kennedy.
How much did you change it? I made it into
French — it was written in English. I couldn’t
see having English and American people mak-
ing believe they have French accents speaking in
English and then watching a French audience
watch the movie in English reading French
subtitles. I also thought it was very important
to go to France and be at the hospital where this
[story] took place, where Jean-Do actually was.
The author wrote it based on the book, but I
went there and met his best friends and talked
to them and found out a lot of things that made
me change things or made things make more
sense to me. For example when his wife says to
him, “Do you want to see your kids?” and he says,
“No” — in the script he originally says “Yes,” but
the fact of the matter is that he didn’t want to see
his kids. Anne-Marie Perrier, who was his best
friend, picked him up in an ambulance one day
72 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
max von sydow (left) and mathieu almaric in the diving bell and the butterfly.
and took him to see another man with locked-
in syndrome who lived at home with his family.
The two of them sat facing each other and then
at the end of the day he was taken back to the
hospital. After seeing how another man who
had locked-in syndrome could still be a father, I
think he realized that he was still a father. Even
a shadow of a father is still a father, and I think
he came to understand that later.
How much of the characters of the nurses
are like those real people? To some degree,
the film almost has a quality like Fellini’s 8½
with this artist meditating all of these beauti-
ful and interesting women. The first lady you
see is his real nurse, and his physiotherapist,
this guy Daniel, the one who is holding him
in the swimming pool — he was his nurses’
GO BACK & WATCH
■ THE SEA INSIDE
Director Alejandro Amenabar (The Others)
won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language
Film in 2005 for his moving take on the true
story of quadriplegic Ramon Sampedro (Javier
Bardem), who was confined to his bedroom
for 30 years and fought for his right to die.
■ BASQUIAT
Julian Schnabel moved from internationally
celebrated artist to cinéaste in 1996 with
this portrait of his friend and fellow painter,
Jean-Michel Basquiat (a breakthrough role by
Jeffrey Wright), who tragically died of a heroin
overdose in 1988 at 27.
■ MY SEX LIFE...
OR HOW I GOT INTO AN ARGUMENT
After over a decade as an actor, Matthieu
Amalric came to prominence in 1997 in direc-
tor Arnaud Desplechin’s acclaimed three-hour
comedy drama about a self-involved young
academic caught at a crossroads in his life.
PHOTO BY: ETIENNE GEORGE
aide. All the medical details are probably about
95 percent accurate. We had people [in the
film] doing what they really did with Jean-Do
— they were the actual people who worked
with him. [But referring to the principal nurs-
es and the 8½ reference,] I think that’s true.
It’s my version obviously of how I see these
people. The [real] people are one thing and
the people in the movie are something else.
What I was more interested in was the bigger
picture of what he achieved rather than how
his girlfriend and the mother of his kids felt
about each other. The movie ended up being
about men and women and the way women
were able to really be many things to him. He
needed all of them in his life for different rea-
sons. One was able to teach him the alphabet,
one supplied him with some kind of connec-
tion to his kids, another one with a fantasy life.
One helped him finish his book.
Why was it important to shoot in that ex-
act hospital? Your film feels, quite precisely,
art-directed — it doesn’t have a doc-like feel
at all. I thought it was very important to go to
the hospital where Jean-Do actually was. The
tide goes in and out about 500 meters, back
and forth, every day there. It looks like you’re
on the moon. [ Jean-Do] wrote that you’re on
the far side of life when you’re out there, and
that’s definitely part of this [story]. I think I
saw a lot of Antonioni inside of the arch of
the hospital and the landscape around there,
so [his films] popped into my mind some-
times too. I also built the room that would
work for me in the hospital.
You sort of turned the hospital into a stage?
Yes. I made the floor with linoleum squares be-
cause I thought, okay, when people talk to you,
well maybe you don’t want to look at them,
even if they’re talking to you. You can look at
the floor, or their hand, or their leg. Jean-Do
could look up at the fluorescent lights and the
ceiling, particularly if somebody was telling
him something he didn’t want to hear.
Your films have always mixed score music
with very memorable source cues that seem
to be drawn from all over. How do you select
the music for your films and at what point
do those selections occur? I always listen to
music, carry it around with me; I know [cer-
tain songs] are going to pop up [in my movies]
some time or another. I always thought “Pale
Blue Eyes” was going to play in that scene on
that boat. Years ago I was going to meet my
wife — I was in Cannes and rented this Mer-
cedes convertible and drove 110 miles an hour
to meet her listening to “Ultraviolet (Light My
Way)” by U2, and I knew that I was going to
use that song with that girl’s hair flying around
way before I shot this movie. Paul Cantelon
[who composed the score] was a child prodigy
and then was hit by a car and had total am-
nesia. Years later, he was playing the piano
and said, “Hey Mom, listen to this,” and she
said, “That’s Bach.” So he identified with this
[ Jean-Do’s] life and his problem. One day he
came to me with these preludes he had written.
One of them was perfect, so that was it. There’s
some Nino Rota music [in the film] and also
Nelson Riddle playing the theme to Lolita.
Whenever I would watch the dailies I’d play
music and see how things fit. You try to invent
other kinds of music, but many times I’ll go
back to something I thought of originally. In
Before Night Falls I used the Popul Vuh mu-
sic from Aguirre: the Wrath of God, and there
was another bit of Ennio Morricone from The
Battle of Algiers.
You said you spoke to the real people who
were involved in this story, but obviously the
one person you could not speak to was Jean-
Do himself. Did making this film reveal to
you something you had not surmised about
his character? I didn’t realize that he probably
felt he was selected instead of cursed. It was as
if some, I don’t know, God or whoever, said:
“You can be a great artist and have no body or
you can be perfectly healthy and normal but
you’ll be an ordinary person: Which one would
you like to be?” I think he was an ordinary guy
who was talented when he was a magazine
editor but he became somebody else when he
became the author of this work.t

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 73

must
something
Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis
is put under the microscope
in Anton Corbijn’s debut feature Control.
By Nick Dawson
Anton Corbijn, the 52-year-old Dutch
photographer, music-video director, design-
er and now film director, almost didn’t direct
Control. He initially turned down producer
Orian Williams’s offer to make a movie
about Ian Curtis, the iconic lead singer of the
British band Joy Division, who hung himself
in 1980 at only 23. “I was so fed up with
people just calling me a rock photographer
when that’s really not what I’m doing,” says
Corbijn. “I felt if I did a movie that was con-
nected even slightly to music, people would
say it was a rock film and therefore not take
me seriously as a director. I felt it was not a
great start for me. But then I rethought [it]
after a few months.”
It’s a good thing he did. Control is not only
an exceptional debut but also one of the most
compelling, moving and visually arresting
films of the year. Though the idea of a film
about Joy Division — especially one made by
someone best known for being a “rock pho-
tographer” and promo director — inspired
dread in the hearts of the band’s fans, Control
avoids being a hackneyed biopic of Curtis,
the James Dean of the postpunk generation.
Corbijn instead creates a complex and deeply
human portrait of the man in the context of
the times he lived in. As one would expect
74 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
from someone with Corbijn’s background,
Control — shot in piercing black-and-white
— looks stunning, but his ability as a great
director of actors is the real surprise: In the
lead role, first-timer Sam Riley, an ex-indie
singer, is astonishing as Ian Curtis, giving a
performance that merits a Best Actor Os-
car nomination; Samantha Morton, one of
Britain’s best actresses, is typically excellent as
Curtis’s wife, Deborah; and Toby Kebbell, so
good in Shane Meadows’s Dead Man’s Shoes,
has a great scene-stealing turn as the band’s
manager, Rob Gretton.
Though Control’s script, by Matt Green-
halgh, was adapted from Curtis’s ex-wife
Deborah’s memoir, Touching From a Distance,
the film also draws on Corbijn’s own experi-
ences during the late 1970s when, as a shy,
young photographer (and Joy Division fan)
in Manchester, he was hired to take pictures
of the band. I briefly spoke to Corbijn after
the Edinburgh International Film Festival
awards ceremony (where both he and Riley
won prizes for Control), and then caught up
with him a few days later to discuss his mem-
ories of Joy Division, working with Riley, and
the film’s success at Cannes. The Weinstein
Company opens the film in October.
break
I believe you moved to the U.K. in 1979 be-
cause of Joy Division. I’d been there a couple
of times prior to that. I was sort of thinking
of leaving Holland anyway, and when that
music came out I felt I should really be there,
where the music comes from. So they were
the catalyst, in a sense. The few times I’d been
to England prior to that I felt that my pic-
tures were stronger when I took them here,
and that had a lot to do with the atmosphere
of music, which people took very seriously. It
was much more of a choice: You get a job, or
you go make music. And there was an inten-
HOW THEY DID IT
■ Production Format: Super 35, 1:2.35.
■ Camera: We had two cameras with us
all the time: one Panavision Millenium XL and
as a back-up we carried a Panavision Plati-
num. We used primo spherical lenses.
■ FILM: Kodak vision 5217, 200 ASA tungsten
for everything and only for the concert scenes we
had Kodak vision two 5218, 500 ASA tungsten.
■ Editing System: An Avid, I think we
used version 9 of Media Composer.
■ Color Correction: We did a 2K
scan on an arri scanner. The digital intermedi-
ate we did on Fuji color print stock (if that
did not change) and some prints on b&w
print stock. The DI was put on to film with an
Arrilaser. The colorgrading was done on a film
master from digital vision.
 PHOTO BY: DEAN ROGERS

sam riley in control.


“there was a beautiful thing about sam
[riley] that didn’t feel so much like an
actor and therefore would probably
be more believable.”
sity to what people were doing here too that I
didn’t feel so much on the continent.
What was it about Joy Division’s music that
you particularly connected to? It’s difficult
to describe. I guess I felt a kind of strength in
it, a gravity, a sort of weight and seriousness
that I must have responded to at the time. My
English was pretty poor, so it wasn’t the lyrics,
but maybe just the way that they were sung in
combination with the music. There was this
whole atmosphere about it.
I love that Control shows Ian Curtis’s warmth
and humor, particularly in the scenes where
he’s working at the job center. Were you per-
sonally very aware of that side of his person-
ality? No, not so much. Because of my lack of
English at the time, I wasn’t a great conver-
sation-maker. I was also a little shy and they
had a bit of an accent, so it was not that easy
for me to speak to them. They really liked my
pictures, and one time they asked me to come
76 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
(left-right) director anton corbijn, riley and matthew mcnulty on the set of control.
to Manchester. The initial picture I did in the
tube [station], where they walked away from
me, that was my idea and they really liked that
picture. I got a lot from the book [Touching
From a Distance] and from talking to people
for all these kinds of [personal] details.
GO BACK & WATCH
■ SID AND NANCY
Alex Cox’s 1986 movie tells the story of
the all-too brief life of Sid Vicious, the Sex
Pistols’ bassist who was the other notable
musical casualty of the postpunk era.
■ ANDREI RUBLEV
Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece is stunningly pho-
tographed in black and white and has a simplicity
and emotional clarity that is echoed in Control.
■ 24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE
Michael Winterbottom’s upbeat, raucous
film chronicles the Manchester music scene
surrounding Factory Records, the seminal
label founded by the great Tony Wilson (one
of Control’s producers as well as a character
in the movie), who recently died.
PHOTO BY: DEAN ROGERS
How did you approach the casting of the
film? It seems like you were trying to find
new faces rather than use well-known actors.
Well, initially there were some people involved
on the production side that would have liked
more well-known faces, but for the role of Ian
it was very hard to get a well-known person
to want to play that. I think it’s a very diffi-
cult role to play, very big shoes to fill. So we
talked to a couple of people but we also did
a lot of open castings both in London and in
the North [of England], and that’s where Sam
Riley was spotted — and I can’t tell you how
much of a blessing that has been for the film.
Did you know instantly when you saw him
that he should play Ian? Well, I saw him
on film initially, and when I met him I then
thought he was very much the only option
we had. There was something about him that
was very reminiscent of how I met Joy Di-
vision, who I also met in the winter. There’s
a Northern English thing where people un-
derdress and they don’t eat too much and
they have these long overcoats on and they’re
smoking a cigarette and trembling with their
hands. When I saw Sam doing that, I thought
that’s exactly what I remember when arriving
in England and meeting Joy Division. So that
was quite a good omen, I thought. There was
a beautiful thing about Sam that didn’t feel
so much like an actor and therefore would
probably be more believable, where you really
believe that the person you are watching is a
real person. I watched Kes, this Ken Loach
movie about a young boy, a couple of times
and he’s so believable that you really feel that
it’s a documentary. I was hoping to get some-
thing close to that.
What was your relationship with Sam like
during filming? Quite close. We were both
first-timers and a lot of our success depended
on the other. In a way he saw me as a father
figure [laughs] on the set, at least. I really want-
ed him to do well, and he was just amazing, he
didn’t need much pushing at all. He worked
very hard and studied everything that there
was to study. There was never a problem for
Sam that he didn’t give 110 percent, includ-
ing the epileptic fits, which are very hard to
do. And the fact that he had become a singer
helped us in the film, because initially I was
just going to do playback, but then the [actors]
became so good that they really wanted to play
for real — and thank God they did.
So the actors decided they wanted to actu-
ally play the Joy Division songs rather than
just mime? Yeah, they did. I just wanted them
to study [their instruments] so that they could
look believable for the playback, but they
wanted to go further. They rehearsed every
day with the musical director, so that was bril-
liant for those live scenes, but it was also great
for non-live scenes because throughout these
rehearsals there started to become a dynamic
that was like a real band.
Did you know that Sam had been in a band
when you cast him? I did, but the only thing
I thought was that it was quite good that he
knew how to hold a microphone and probably
had the right pose. But, of course, it might also
have been a hindrance because you probably get
used to your own pose at the microphone and
we wanted an Ian Curtis pose. But he did that
so well. I was quite adamant to get the live stuff
correct, because although it’s not a Joy Division
film, I knew that it would potentially be a film
that Joy Division fans would go to and that they
would be scrutinising the performances. [The
performances] are the only thing we actually
have film of. There’s nothing of Ian walking in
the street, that sort of film doesn’t exist.
How closely did Sam connect with the
character of Ian over the course of filming?
There’s a nice irony in that Sam and your ac-
tress Alexandra Maria Lara fell in love just
like their characters, Ian and his mistress
see page 105

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 77

 The Hollywood Life
Anthony Hopkins blurs fantasy and reality in the disorienting
slipstream. By Scott Macaulay
There are actors who direct and their films
seem like extensions of the personas they’ve
already developed in their screen perfor-
mances. For example: Clint Eastwood with
his lean, iconic dramas; Takeshi Kitano with
his bemused, off-kilter take on the cop movie;
Woody Allen’s New Yorkish blend of erudi-
tion and goofball comedy.
After seeing Slipstream, however, I think
it’s fair to say that there’s been nothing in
Anthony Hopkins’s onscreen work that could
prepare one for the path he’s taken for his
third directing effort. At heart it’s the tale
of a dying writer, Felix Bonhoeffer, and the
contortions of his mind as recent people and
events in his life merge with a crime thriller
screenplay he’s writing. It owes something,
perhaps, to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive
but also to Alain Resnais’s Providence, an-
78 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
other film about the blurring of perception
within the creative mind. But Hopkins,
working with d.p. Dante Spinotti and editor
Michael Miller, has scrambled all manner of
narrative storytelling convention, creating a
deliberately disruptive montage that conveys
the cosmic craziness of life itself while also
challenging the staid conventions of main-
stream storytelling.
I spoke with Hopkins by phone about his
decision to direct Slipstream, his thoughts on
the nature of time and what the film means to
him. The film will be released through Strand
Releasing in late October.
I read an interview you did about the film
and you talked about being fascinated with
the nature of time. I think you even said that
you speculate that God is, in fact, time itself.
slipstream writer-director anthony hopkins.
So with Slipstream, which came first: these
kinds of philosophical questions, or simply
the character of Felix Bonhoeffer? About four
years ago I just sat down at the computer and
wrote [Slipstream] as an experiment. I didn’t
set out to write it as a piece with any mean-
ing or message or any sort of significance. In
an offhand way I just said, “Okay, I’m going
to write something,” and that’s how I started.
I don’t want to [use] highfalutin words such
as “stream of consciousness,” but I think that’s
what it was. I started with scene one and let it
write itself. I tried not to edit my mind as bits
came out. I didn’t spend days intensely work-
ing — I’d write two scenes, maybe, and then
I’d walk away. Then I’d come in the next day
and do something else. I think I wanted to see
where it would take itself and how random it
would be. After a few months I read what I
wrote, and I thought, “Well, this is kind of in-
teresting,” and I let it go at that. Some other
people read it, and they said, “This is really, re-
ally weird and strange — what does it mean?”
I said, “Well I know what it means, but I can’t
actually explain it to people.” So I asked Steven
Spielberg to read it for me. A few weeks passed
and he phoned back, and he said, “This is very
interesting, a stream of consciousness, I guess.”
I said, “Yeah, I suppose”. He said, “You’re go-
ing to have a bit of a difficult time mounting
this. No studio will want to take on something
like this, but anyway, good luck with it.” Then
I examined [the script further] and I began to
understand what the meaning of it was for me.
It’s about the strange nature of time, and how
HOW THEY DID IT
■ Production Format: Sony HDCam SR.
■ Camera: Panavision Genesis.
■ Editing System: Avid Media Composer.
■ Color Correction: Conform on Qu-
antel IQ and Discreet Smoke; DaVinci 2K DI at
Company 3; film out at EFilm to acetate stock;
Prints on Kodak Premiere stock at Deluxe.
we can never grasp it. It’s so inevitable, such an
enigma. You cannot even grasp a microsecond
of it because it’s already flashed into the past.
Do you think our conception of time has
changed as the modern era has progressed?
Are things faster now? Is a sign of our times a
kind of disorienting “speed of life?” Oh I don’t
know. I think it’s always preoccupied people
through the centuries. It has preoccupied play-
wrights like Shakespeare and poets like Blake.
But as I’m getting older, I’m drawn back to the
past. I don’t live there, but I am drawn back to
the past, and my memories are clearer and clear-
er as I get older. I think what I have tread upon
[in Slipstream] is, what the hell is it all about?
Why are we here? But I didn’t want to put that
as a message in the film — there is no message
in the film. The other thing that I wanted to do
was, I suppose, to annoy the audience. I wanted
to provoke [the viewer] by doing the opposite
thing [you’d expect in the film]. For example,
the waitress in the restaurant [scene], as soon
as she takes the order from the two seemingly
main characters, the camera follows her outside
and then it goes off into tangents, picking up
on other peoples’ lives. And I knew there was
no logic, no good reason, why these two guys
[played by] Christian Slater and Jeffrey Tambor
would have any reason to hijack a café in the
middle of the desert. There’s no money. But I
put a red herring there that maybe Christian
Slater recognized Gina who nearly killed him
on the road at fast speed, and he may have re-
membered that she could have been a witness
in the parking lot the night before he mur-
dered Michael Clarke Duncan’s character. But I
thought, why do we have to offer explanations?
I’m not even going to explain it.
The scene in the desert and then the whole
film-within-a-film story with the crew mak-
ing a low-budget movie was a part of the film
I really enjoyed. I recently saw Frank Perry’s
film Play It As It Lays. Frank Perry?
Yeah, do you know that film? I know the
book, but Frank Perry directed The Swimmer,
didn’t he?
Yes. But Play It As It Lays also deals with a
kind of psychological breakdown that oc-
curs in the context of a film shoot in the
desert. What is it about the particular psy-
chology of the people that work in film, or
maybe that kind of impromptu community
of people that comprises a film set, that
interests you? They’re like circus animals.
They come into town, they arrive with their
big trucks and for a few weeks they become
a family. And then it’s all disrupted in the
end, and they all go their separate ways. I
“i began to understand what the mean-
ing of [the script] was for me. it’s
about the strange nature of time, and
how we can never grasp it.”
watch a movie and think, just off camera
you’ve got a whole crew with coffee cups,
and craft services and catering, and God
knows what. You’ve got the director who at
the end will say, “Okay, cut,” and eventually
someone will say, “That’s a wrap everyone,
thank you very much.” And everyone goes
back to his or her little boxes on the hill. But
in fact that’s what life is — it’s all a dream,
an illusion, and at the end of this film, par-
ticularly when Bonhoeffer is killed by the car
and lies there on the windshield, you realize
the whole thing was make-believe. It was a
film anyway. I perceive life as a game, a game
GO BACK & WATCH
■ Barton Fink
The Coen brothers’ surreal journey into the
dark side of Hollywood stars John Turturro as
a screenwriter who seeks help for his writer’s
block but winds up p[emomg one too many
doors to horror and absurdity.
■ play it as it lays
Frank Perry's 1972 dyspeptic Hollywood drama
stars Tuesday Weld as an actress recovering
from a mental breakdown and the suicide of
her nihilist movie producer friend.
■ last year at marienbad
Alain Robbe-Grillet, celebrated French novelist
of the nouveau roman, scripted this puzzling
art film for director Alain Resnais. In a stately
French luxury hotel, a woman, Delphine Seyrig,
tries to decide whether to run away with a
stranger with whom she may or may not have
had a previous affair.
christian slater in slipstream.
that we play at some unconscious level. We
have no knowledge of what lies deep under
it. Maybe if we were visionaries we would
but I don’t think many of us have any clue
what this is all about.
In some ways you could call Slipstream an
experimental film. It certainly rejects con-
ventional film storytelling and, specifically,
continuity editing. In devising the language
of this film, did you consider the work of
earlier experimental filmmakers? I tried to
stay as uninfluenced as I possibly could. I was
obviously interested in the way Oliver Stone
edited films like JFK, particularly those pe-
culiar flashes of images in the middle of the
scenes. But if I thought of anything it was
Last Year at Marienbad.
I love that movie. That was a really interest-
ing film that I couldn’t make heads or tails of.
I believe it was 1961 that it was shown, and
it deals with the nature of perception, the na-
ture of memory and the peculiar puzzle of life
and its repetitions, which I find really haunt-
ing. [Slipstream is] also based on one — well,
several — experiences I’ve had. I experienced
two or three concussions from accidents with
a loss of memory that lasted about an hour or
so. An acute form of amnesia. They were very
unnerving. The first time it happened, I was
doing a movie with Alec Baldwin called The
see pag 106
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 79
 My
16
super sweet
(with a little help from first-time screenwriter Diablo Cody)
in his follow up to Thank You for Smoking,
The pairing of writer Diablo Cody and director
Jason Reitman was one of complete chance, like
one of those cop-buddy movies where the grizzled
vet is set up with a renegade newbie and against all
odds the two wind up catching the bad guy with
everybody rooting for them in the end. Although
Juno is only Reitman’s second feature, he was born
into the film business; as the son of Ivan Reitman,
he’s been involved in the making of movies all his
life. Reitman’s award-winning short films played
the likes of Sundance, Seattle and the Los Ange-
les Film Festival; his feature debut Thank You for
Smoking was lauded by the National Board of Re-
view and Independent Spirit Awards.
Cody, on the other hand, arrived on the film
scene out of seeming obscurity with a ready-
made notoriety. Her blog Pussy Ranch, which
detailed Cody’s exploits as a stripper and phone
80 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
Jason Reitman delves into teen pregnancy
Juno. By Lisa Y. Garibay
sex operator, attracted the attention of a bored
’net surfer who turned out to be manager Mason
Novick. In 2004, Novick got Cody a book deal
for her memoir Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of
an Unlikely Stripper. On the heels of the book’s
success, Novick suggested that Cody try to write
a screenplay just to see what would happen. Cody
(whose real name is Brook Busey-Hunt) hit a
home run with her first shot at bat: Juno became
the hot script around town and was first handed
to Brad Siberling before ending in Reitman’s lap.
Reitman gathered a stellar cast that includ-
ed Hard Candy’s Ellen Page as the pregnant
teen who steals your heart and is as much a
cheerleader to her family, friends and audi-
ence as they are for her throughout her trials
and tribulations. Supporting Page are Allison
Janney, J.K. Simmons, Michael Cera, Olivia
Thirlby, Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner;
together, they form a circle of love and laughs
that has enveloped cheering crowds at Telluride
and Toronto. In the midst of year-end awards
hopefuls, Juno has come up from its unlikely
roots to prove itself a strong contender.
None of Juno’s successes is as coincidental or
far-fetched as it may appear. Reitman champi-
ons Cody as a born storyteller; he was so taken
by her work that he put aside a script of his own
in order to go after the chance to direct Juno. For
her part, Cody took advantage of her perspec-
tive outside the industry to think about the kind
of people she’d like to see on the big screen and
came up with a story that reflected the complex-
ities, strengths and smarts she wasn’t witnessing
in women’s roles these days. Here, Reitman and
Cody — who are still as much a team in the
Juno director Jason Reitman.
PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.
 PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.
film’s promotional process as they were during
its production — talk about how much Juno
meant to them and how they worked to make
sure viewers would appreciate the potential they
believe it always had. Fox Searchlight opens the
film in mid-December.

What are the most common reactions you’re

getting from viewers or the media about Juno?
Cody: I’ve been repeatedly asked — and I do
think this is a good question, it’s just difficult for
me to answer every time — the sort of all-purpose
“Where did the character of Juno come from?”
Which is difficult because when you’re a writer,
you just pull characters out of the ether that are
mutant babies from your brain. So it’s hard to de-
scribe that process; every time, I feel like I’ve done
it inadequately so I dread that question.
That would not be a question that I’d ask
because one of the reasons I liked the film
so much was because Juno reminded me of
myself and all my friends when we were ado-
lescents. She was so familiar to me. Cody:
Great! Bless you — I think that’s so cool!
Was the experience of making Juno anything
remotely close to what you imagined making
a movie was like? Cody: I could never have
imagined it would be this wonderful! I have en-
joyed every single moment of it. There does not
seem to be a downside to the process of making
and promoting this movie. It’s just been awe-
some. Obviously I’m kind of green, so all of this
is new to me, but this strikes me as great.
Do you feel — and Jason, you could prob-
ably speak to this — that people were pro-
tecting you by going the extra mile to make
it a good experience for you because you
were so green, as you say? Cody: I guess I
would agree with that except I have a lot of
friends who have also been first-time screen-
writers and they have not been protected in
the least. So maybe in this situation I have
just been incredibly lucky.
Reitman: I’ve always felt very protective of
Diablo, but as far as the experience on this film,
the reason that I always wanted her on set was
very selfish. I constantly wanted her input on
Juno’s life and how she spoke and what she’d
wear. On Thank You for Smoking, I thought I had
a pretty good insight into who Nick Naylor was
and I felt like I understood his voice. In a pinch, I
could write something on set. On [Juno], I would
never pretend like I could do that; it was always
very valuable to be able to turn to Diablo and
also Ellen, who understood what this character
was going through. Cody: How cool is that? You
don’t hear that from a lot of directors!
juno screenwriter diablo cody. Jason, your script for Thank You for Smoking got

82 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

 PHOTO BY: DOANE GREGORY
a lot of positive attention and racked up a few
awards. You obviously know what you’re doing,
so based on your experience and judgment, what
was it that Diablo did with the script for Juno that
was absolutely right and made it a strong, shoot-
able script? Reitman: What excites me about a
screenplay is [when it] takes on a tricky subject
matter, has a very original point of view and basi-
cally makes original decisions throughout. I was
actually writing another screenplay myself that I
was going to direct when I was given Juno. I read
it and I fell in love with it because it did exactly
that. It took something like teenage pregnancy,
which is a tricky topic that can easily get political,
yet this movie doesn’t get political at all. It’s filled
with human experience and human decision and
original choices from top to bottom. It was one of
those things where I started reading it and just a
few pages in I thought, “Wow, this girl can really
write!” Then, by the end of the first act I thought,
“Wow, this is a really good screenplay!” and by the
(Left-Right) Ellen Page, olivia thirlby and allison janney in Juno.
end of the screenplay I was thinking if I don’t get
the opportunity to direct this I’ll regret it for the
rest of my life. “by the end of [reading] the screenplay
Diablo, how did you go about prepping your-
self to write a screenplay given the fact that
i was thinking if i don’t get the opportu-
you had never done it before? Cody: It was a nity to direct this i’ll regret it for the
modicum of preparation to say the least. I think I
went into it as an experiment; I didn’t really have
rest of my life.”
a whole lot invested in it. It was more something
I just wanted to try. I had no idea throughout the to me because when we sent that screenplay cannot work if you are doing this sort of
process that this would ever wind up being a pro- out, it was riddled with typos and formatting thing!” I was like, “I think I did that a hun-
duced screenplay or that this would ever be cast errors because I had no idea what I was doing. dred times in Juno, lady, so back off! I really
with these amazing actors. There was absolutely [laughs] My manager, I think, was so stunned don’t think the spacing in this particular case
no pressure on me because I was just sitting in that I had turned out something vaguely coher- is very important to the story.” [laughs] I’m
Minnesota writing for my own edification. So I ent that he just said, “Let’s throw it out there into great grammar, don’t get me wrong — I
think that was freeing in a lot of ways. and see if anybody likes it.” We really didn’t don’t want people to scrawl shit in a napkin in
I’ve written a couple of features since then obsess; I think it was just a case of expectations crayon, but tone down.
and Juno was definitely the easiest even though being so low that there was not a lot of polish- Jason, did encountering somebody from out-
it was the first because there wasn’t that sense ing and spit-shining going on. side the industry as you did with Diablo help
of… I guess ignorance is bliss is the best way Reitman: I think the literary world and give you perspective on not just this project
of putting it. [laughs] The only thing I did was the screenplay world are very different when but also your approach to filmmaking? Re-
I went to Barnes & Noble and bought the it comes to grammar, per se. Thank You for itman: To be perfectly honest, I never re-
shooting script for a couple of movies that I Smoking had grammar mistakes all over it. ally thought of it that way. I grew up in the
liked so I could see how they looked on the Cody: You’d be surprised, though, Jason. business and Diablo grew up outside of the
page and that gave me a little structural guid- After Juno I was hired to work on this pilot business. In terms of perspective, when I was
ance. But that was all I did. and I made the smallest, the most benign for- working with Diablo on Juno, all I felt was
Did you do any work with your manager on matting error — like parenthesis were like a that I was working with a great storyteller
the script before it was circulated to get it tick to the left — and the show runner called and whether she’s industry-savvy or not really
shipshape? One of those cardinal rules you me and was like, “This is not acceptable! You didn’t factor into anything. That was never
hear in screenwriting classes or read about part of our conversations, really; they were
in screenwriting books is that your script HOW THEY DID IT about how we can translate the story into the
should be absolutely flawless because you’re ■ Production Format: 35mm.
screen and how I saw things and how she saw
competing with thousands of others out ■ Camera: Panavison Platinum, Panavision things. Whether she had shown up in Hol-
there and if you have the wrong act structure Millenium XL, Panastar. lywood the previous day or 20 years prior, I
or bad punctuation or any distraction in that ■ FILM STOCK: Kodak. don’t think I would have noticed.
■ Editing System: Avid.
regard, then you’ll get discarded immedi- ■ Color Correction: We did a DI over EFILM.
Was there anything that you pioneered or
ately. Cody: So I’ve heard! Which is so funny learned about your own style of filmmaking

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 83


(Left-right) Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman and Page in Juno.
“there were a few times jason needed
something and, as a writer, that’s the
most stimulating, fun exercise — being
able to sort of write on the spot and
create something right there.”
in Juno? New things that you tried or things
that you never thought you would do because
it was such a different script? And how did
you make decisions about what the visuals
were going to be to complement such great
dialogue? Reitman: I think Juno’s a much
more sophisticated film than Thank You for
Smoking. As for my directing, I’m much more
proud of it; the style’s more complicated, it’s
more real, it’s more honest and the screenplay
definitely offered the opportunity to do that.
On Thank You for Smoking, I was trying to be
a little more cute. I was definitely doing more
portraiture photography; it was a satire, so it
lived in a heightened reality. Whereas for Juno, I
was just constantly asking myself, “Is this real?”
and “Is my camerawork9/14/2007
filmmaker-final.pdf getting12:44:15
in theAMway of
telling the story? Is anything I’m doing as a di-
C Award-winning independent feature and documentary filmmakers,
M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
84 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
PHOTO BY: DOANE GREGORY
rector drawing attention to the fact that you’re
watching a movie?” Because I didn’t want that
GO BACK & WATCH
■ Fast Times at Ridgemont High
After 25 years this classic ode to teen awkward-
ness by Amy Heckerling (which started careers
for Sean Penn and Forest Whitaker) still holds
up, combining serious issues with comedy in a
way that is both realistic and relatable.
■ Junebug
Director Phil Morrison’s comedy/drama focus-
es on family issues while engaging the audi-
ence on several levels. Amy Adams steals the
show in a Oscar nominated supporting role
as a pregnant southern girl who makes up in
heart what she doesn’t have in smarts.
■ Election
Alexander Payne’s sophomore effort is a dark,
satirical insight into the confusing world of
high school and the pressures teenagers face
in an extremely witty and intelligent style.
educational film distributors, sound designers, and record producers
together in the East Bay Media Corridor’s premier media center.
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The last of the classic Bay Area recording studios
— I wanted the story to speak for itself.
Diablo, talk about how Jason involved you in
the production and about tweaking the script
during shooting. Cody: That was actually a
really fun process for me. Obviously, it was re-
ally righteous being on set; that was supercool.
There were a few instances in which Jason
needed something and, as a writer, that’s the
most stimulating, fun exercise — being able to
sort of write on the spot and create something
right there. So having had the opportunity to
do that a few times was really cool.
As a writer, those requests for changes
never bugged you? You weren’t concerned
with having your own vision of the story
changed? Cody: Oh, no! You don’t under-
stand how much I trust Jason. He could’ve
asked me to put in like a random competi-
tive-eating scene and I would’ve done it. I’m
not really precious about my writing.
Did you guys go out to specific people that you
had in mind for the cast? Reitman: I did some-
thing a little different on this. I had a few people
in mind right from the start, and I didn’t want
to do a traditional audition process; I didn’t
want to be going out to people and waiting. So
right off the top, I took Ellen Page, Michael
Cera, J.K. Simmons and Olivia Thirlby and I
went over to a stage at Panavision and we shot
something like 45 pages of the movie in one day,
shooting scenes on 35mm with a black back-
ground. Then I edited the whole thing together
and I presented it to Fox and said, “This is how
I want to start the cast — these four actors.” It
was really nice because instead of watching an
audition, which doesn’t really say much, they
were watching scenes that if you watch them,
there was no way that you could think that these
people were wrong for the film. So that became
the initial cast and we went from there.
Why do you think more filmmakers don’t get
their projects started this way — put some-
thing like this together? Reitman: I don’t
know…this is how they used to do it! I mean,
For information call
510.486.2286 or visit
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this is what they did in the ’40s — it’s a screen
test! Nowadays, it’s two things: one thing is
that many actors won’t come in for something
like that, but on top of that I think the audition
process opens, from a studio point of view…
I don’t want to say that. I don’t want to talk
bad because Fox is so supportive of me, I don’t
think they would have ever pushed me in a di-
rection I wouldn’t want to go. So it would’ve
been wrong for me to say that.
But I think that’s just what the process has
become, especially now with video — you just
set up a video camera in a room and it’s a simple
way to do it. I direct commercials and that’s how
we do casting on the commercials. But this is a
movie that’s all about relationships and the idea
of auditioning people outside of each other, one-
on-one with the casting director, didn’t make
sense. I needed to see how Juno and her father
were going to interact and how she and her best
friend would interact and how her and the guy
who got her pregnant would interact. So seeing
them do the scenes was really important.
Diablo, some writers entertain the notion of
becoming a screenwriter and breaking into
the business, but some are okay with never
going in that direction. Since it was such an
unexpected direction for you, would you be
fine if you never made another movie again?
Cody: No, I absolutely would not be fine. I’m
a complete junkie at this point. I’m like gear-
ing up for my next fix! [laughs]
Reitman: Diablo and I had this conversation
at one of the film festivals: We want to go to ev-
ery screening because it’s such a rush to sit there
and watch the audience laugh at the movie and
be moved. Once the film festivals end, it’s like,
“God, I need to go make another movie!”
Cody: I’ve been writing a lot since Telluride
and Toronto and I feel like it’s motivated by
the desire to do this again and again. I mean, I
love writing in general, don’t get me wrong. It’s
just when you write something and it becomes
a film that people treasure — and I hope some
people do — then the situation becomes epic.
But I’m happy writing in any form.
Jason, you talked about how Juno was a step
up from Thank You for Smoking in certain
ways. How has it changed you as a filmmak-
er? Reitman: I’m very proud of Thank You
for Smoking; it’s my first film, but this movie
seems to move people in a way that Thank
You for Smoking never had the opportunity
to. It’s exciting to watch Juno and see myself
growing as a storyteller and a filmmaker. Your
hope always is that you haven’t reached the
limit of your abilities and that you keep on
improving yourself.t

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 85

LINE ITEMS
EDIT POINTS
BENJAMIN CROSSLEY-MARRA reports on the different post production options four directors chose to finish their films.
Filmmaking is a career that attracts both art-
ists and technical professionals alike. Unfortu-
nately for those coming from a more artistic
or even literary background, the technical
complexities of the filmmaking process can
leave a novice feeling like a deer in headlights.
Even before a film begins principal photogra-
phy there are many important questions to be
answered regarding post production: Avid or
Final Cut? DI or no? Is a 35mm print really
necessary in today’s HD world?
There are no correct answers to any of these
questions. Instead there’s just that balance be-
tween ambition and what the circumstances
of one’s film and budget realistically allow.
Filmmaker visited four films, all with differ-
ent budget levels and workflows, in order to
see how filmmakers are navigating today’s
plethora of post production choices.
The Film: Antidote Films executive Jeffery
Levy-Hinte has produced some of the big-
gest hits on the indie scene, including Thir-
teen, Laurel Canyon and Mysterious Skin, but
now he’s putting the finishing touches on a
documentary he’s been shooting for over three
years to be titled either The Boat Movie or The
1 2
(1) Jeffrey Levy-Hinte’s The Boat Movie; (2) levy-hinte editing boat movie; (3) sam neave’s first person singular; (4) neave editing singular.
86 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
Sawdust Chronicles. Levy-Hinte’s passion for
film and post production (for years he owned
and ran the Manhattan posthouse Post 391) is
equaled by his enthusiasm for classic wooden
boat construction. With the film, he hopes to
reach an audience that shares in his interests.
The Workflow: Even though Levy-Hinte’s
$200,000 budget allowed him to shoot The
Boat Movie on Super 16, he hopes to pre-
miere the film using HD projection rather
than a costly 35mm blowup. Levy-Hinte is
editing the film himself on his 12-inch Mac
G4 laptop using Final Cut. Although he’s
worked with Avid before, the simple interface
of Final Cut is exactly what Levy-Hinte feels
this film needs. The 16mm footage was lab-
transferred to standard definition DV tapes
with the time code and key code burned in.
One problem that has arisen on the project
concerns audio layback. For the production’s first
two years, Levy-Hinte used a Fostex DAT ma-
“even before a film begins principal
photography there are many important
questions to be answered regarding
post production.”
chine as location recorder. This year, he switched
to a Sound Devices hard-disk recorder because
it’s able to record more tracks in the field. How-
ever when Levy-Hinte was ready to edit he dis-
covered that the dailies with audio transferred
from the Fostex were missing snippets of sound.
The DAT didn’t lock up quickly enough, so the
heads of some scenes were missing. Using all the
burn-in info on the dailies tapes, Levy-Hinte was
able to resync the sound himself.
After his final cut, Levy-Hinte will have an
HD master by scanning the original 16mm
negative and onlining. The film will then un-
dergo color-correction before an HD tape is
created for festivals. Filmmakers may want to
take a page from Levy-Hinte’s book and opt
for a 35mm blowup at a later date as most
major festivals now have HD projectors.
The Film: Another emerging filmmaker from
the low-budget spectrum is Sam Neave, who
PHOTOS 2 & 4 BY: ANDREI SEVERNY
3
got his start in post production and has been
editing and filming throughout New York for
the past nine years. His first feature, Cry Fun-
ny Happy, toured festivals in 2003 and he re-
cently wrapped principal photography on his
new drama First Person Singular. Described
as an intimate story about personal relation-
ships, Neave hopes to have the film on the
festival circuit early next year.
The Workflow: Neave shot more than 90
hours of footage using three Panasonic
DVX100A 24p cameras. His $25,000 bud-
get wouldn’t permit a multicamera HD
shoot. Also, the cost of downgrading HD
material to SD for cost-effective editing was
prohibitive. Even though Neave is from the
post production world, he did not want to
cut the film himself and so he hired editor
Anna Holtzman for the job. She digitized
all 90 hours of footage using her G5 desktop
equipped with Final Cut, and both she and
Neave began a 24-hour process of shuttling
tapes and filling up their Western Digital
hard drives (one terabyte and one 500 gig)
with footage. The two then split the edit-
ing process with Holtzman cutting together
the more dialogue-driven scenes and Neave
the atmospheric ones. Both appreciated Fi-
nal Cut’s multiclip mode, which allows for
watching a scene shot from different angles at
the same time. It was a helpful resource con-
sidering all the multiple-camera footage they
had. After three months of editing on the G5,
1 4
2
(1) jay cassidy’s into the wild work station; (2) james mottern’s Trucker; (3) DEIRDRE SLEVIN and MOTTERN editing Trucker; (4) sean penn’s into the wild.
the cut is almost done, and the edit now lives
on Neave’s MacBook Pro.
Like Levy-Hinte, Neave is unsure whether
or not a 35mm blowup is worth it. He knows
he wants to do a color correct and create an
HD master — as well as do a professional
sound mix — but he is unsure what technol-
ogy he will utilize as his budget is dwindling.
If worse comes to worst, he can always do
the color correct right in Final Cut. Until he
makes a definite decision, Neave continues
to tweak the film himself on his laptop and
steadily adds music.
The Film: Director James Mottern has al-
ways had a soft spot for the Southwest and
his film, Trucker, was shot on the open roads
that sprawl through the American deserts.
Michelle Monaghan plays a truck driver
who reunites with her estranged son and
the two of them begin a journey of recon-
ciliation (the film also stars Joey Lauren Ad-
ams and Benjamin Bratt). Coming from a
background in documentary television, this
is Mottern’s first narrative feature, and it is
produced through Plum Pictures on a mid-
seven-figure budget.
The Workflow: Mottern decided to shoot the
movie HD on the Panavision/Sony Genesis
camera, which allows for 35mm anamorphic
lenses. (The Genesis is the camera used recently
for Superman Returns and Superbad, among
others.) Although Mottern and d.p. Lawrence
Sher (Garden State, Dan in Real Life) experi-
mented with Super 16mm, Mottern was even-
tually won over to HD by the ease it promised
in post production. The footage was sent to
L.A.’s Laser Pacific for the downgrade to the
standard-definition DV tapes to be used for
editing. These tapes were then shipped to edi-
tor Deirdre Slevin (Because of Winn-Dixie, Last
Holiday), who worked out of the Final Frame
post production house in New York.
Even though the film was shot on HD (at
23.98), the downgrade to SD (29.97) was
necessary because editing on HD still requires
huge amounts of storage space and processing
power to handle the large files. The film is
being cut on Final Cut running off a Mac G5
quad 2.5ghz processor tower. Trucker is still
in the early stages of the director’s cut and the
filmmakers have begun to scope out various
DI suites, looking for the best price. They’re
going to do an HD online from the edit list
provided by the Final Cut system and create
an HD master for their color correct. Then
they’ll transfer the HD master to 35mm.
The Film: Film editor Jay Cassidy has had the
opportunity to cut all of Sean Penn’s films, in-
cluding his latest, an adaptation of Jon Krakau-
er’s novel Into the Wild. Penn wanted the film
to be shot in the exact locations that Chris-
topher McCandless (Emile Hirsch) visited on
his way to living in the wilds of Alaska, so the
production was a journey of North America
PHOTO 3 BY: ANDREI SEVERNY; (4) CHUCK ZLOTNICK
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 87
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and Cassidy got to go along for the ride.
The Workflow: Into the Wild is what is
considered a modestly budgeted studio pic-
ture — $45 million. And while the budget
allowed Penn and Cassidy more choices
than the filmmakers discussed above, their
desire to see high-res versions of the foot-
age throughout the editing process forced
Cassidy to be as efficient as possible when
constructing his workflow.
Wide landscapes and mountain vistas were
a prominent part of d.p. Eric Gautier’s (The
Motorcycle Diaries, A Guide To Recognizing
Your Saints) Super 35, 2.35 cinematography,
and when the negative was telecined to Digi-
beta tapes, Gautier made sure to be in constant
communication with the colorist at Company
3 in L.A. so that dailies would provide an ac-
curate representation of the film’s desired look.
Because Cassidy was on the film’s distant loca-
tions so much, he didn’t have access to a proper
editing suite. So both he and his assistant in
L.A. would receive the Avid media/bins that
Company 3 had digitized from the Digibetas.
Since they had the same media, his assistant
could organize the footage in L.A., and then
send the updates to Cassidy via iDisk.
Cassidy has always cut with the Avid soft-
ware, and while he admits Final Cut is an am-
ple enough program, he likes all the options
that Avid offers as well as its robust interface.
Once Penn and Cassidy finished their picture
edit, they scanned and conformed the 35mm
negative at 2K. The first HD tape output is
when they really began to see how beauti-
ful the film would be. The film still needed
some tweaking, however, and Cassidy contin-
ued cutting, reconforming and scanning new
material into the DI, basically treating the DI
suite like a big Avid but with the capability
of screening the film at its proper resolution.
After all was done, a pristine 35mm print was
generated for the theatrical run.t
88 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
FROM SCRIPT
TO SCREEN
Editor Jay Cassidy reviews the Avid ScriptSync.
In the craft of film editing, discipline does
not assure success. There are those editors that
can rip into the material right out of the gate
and brilliance occurs. I’m not one of them.
Throughout my career, I’ve found that a certain
amount of organization and study is necessary
to allow me to do what I do. “Memorize the
footage” is the school that I came from and,
over the years, I’ve adopted and discarded all
manner of different organizational methods,
first with film and now with Avid.
All of those organizational methods had
something to do with a script. By that I mean
“script” in the larger sense; it could be written
beforehand as in a dramatic film, a lyric sheet
for a music video, a transcription in a docu-
mentary or a pile of index cards of sequences
for projects with very unstructured shooting.
The goal has always been easy access to par-
ticular moments in the morass of material.
In March of 1998 when Avid version 7.0
was released, Avid representative, Michael
Phillips claimed at a seminar at the Sony stu-
dio that “the script software finally works.”
Script-based editing had appeared with Avid
version 6.5, however, the word was not good.
The frankness of his admission was enough
for me to give it a try.
As I understand it, Avid had bought the core
code from an older system called Ediflex, a sys-
tem I’d never used. It was software design circa
1985 — clunky and unforgiving but allowing a
dynamic connection from a line in the script to
a clip in the source monitor. Click on the line in
the script and it plays in the monitor.
This organization came with a price. The user
had to import an electronic version of the script
— fortunately the script program Final Draft
supported an export format that preserved the
page formatting — and then “line the script”
and add marks from the clip in the source bin to
make this dynamic link possible. Avid provided
a variety of helpful tools but, when the day was
done, it was still “find the line, place a mark, find
the next line....” A daunting task with the pres-
sure always to get cutting.
For me, the price was worth it. When
marked up completely, the script acts as the
only open-source bin when cutting. The cov-
erage is instantly clear. It’s possible to have
frame representations of each setup. We
evolved all manner of custom scripts to deal
with generic material. And, as re-cuts occur
weeks and months after a scene was original-
ly cut, the script stays invaluable in recalling
previously studied material.
Apparently I was in the minority in adopt-
ing script-based editing. Directors who knew
Avid would look at it and say, “I’ve never seen
that before,” and then become very dependent
on it. Clicking through every reading of a par-
ticular line at a moment’s notice was amazing
at first and now is so ingrained in my process
that I’d be hobbled without it.
Script-based editing did not change much
from 1998 until this spring when Avid released
a new version of the software called Script-
Sync, in which a speech-recognition engine

takes over the chore of marking the individual
lines. Script preparation has crossed a thresh-
old from “too daunting” to “why not?”
For those of us who have labored for nine
years with the manual marking, this was divine
intervention. But I have to keep telling myself
that they didn’t create this tool just for me, they
created it to allow others whose first impres-
sion was to dismiss script-based editing as too
labor-intensive to consider trying it.
I was tied up finishing a film until July so I
did not touch the new tool until I started a short
project in early August — a play-on-film of
Dalton Trumbo”s Johnny Got His Gun. In one
sense, this would be an easy test of the speech-
recognition abilities of ScriptSync because it was
one character shot on a controlled set. But the
play is 60 or 70 pages of very dense dialogue.
This is the moment in the article for a descrip-
tion of how to make it work. I’m going to skip
“Scriptsync... has crossed a threshold
from ‘too daunting’ to ‘why not?’”
that and refer you to the Avid Web site which
has nice Quicktime demos (avid.com/products/
media-composer/scriptsync.asp) and also to the
Editors Guild Magazine for the summer quarter
which has a detailed description in the “Tech
Tips” section (editorsguild.com/v2/magazine/
archives/0707/techtips_article02.htm).
Does it work? Yes, surprisingly well consider-
ing the variations that occur in real life. Put the
line on the script that covers the dialogue for
the particular clip in the source, trigger it and
watch the marks appear much faster than real
time. In fact, more marks than anyone would
do manually. But who cares if there are more
marks? The computer speed has overcome the
large file slowdowns of the past. Housekeeping
avid scriptsync.
is still necessary as actors read lines incorrectly,
transpose phrases, ad lib and so on.
What about resets and pickups within
the same clip? There’s no reason why a clip
can’t be lined several times for each internal
take. This was a solution before ScriptSync
and is still viable.
Anyone in the software industry knows that
the product is never done, it’s just the next re-
lease. The conventional wisdom is that the
software company listens to its customers and
adds features accordingly. ScriptSync is differ-
ent. Here was an underutilized feature — Avid
script-based editing — and no one was clam-
oring for speech recognition. By all rights, it
shouldn’t have been developed but there it is.t
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 89
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...AND NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH?
In attempting to define documentary filmmaking ARNE JOHNSON learns the line between fiction and non is very blurry.
“Look, it’s all fiction!” Haskell Wexler
practically shouts in exasperation. “Every
single bit of it is fiction.”
We’ve been talking about the search for
a definition of documentary film and where
you can draw the line between fiction and
non. Wexler was blurring those lines in Me-
dium Cool before I could tie my own shoes, so
his frustration is understandable.
“We’re conditioned to accept images and
sounds as truth which, in a sense, they are.
But they are selected by us as filmmakers, and
so they have a point of view. There is no fact,
no three-dimensional graspable fact... once
you filter what you do through a reproducible
medium, it’s not the truth of the subject, but
the truth of you that’s filming.”
I mumble something about filmmaking
being on a reality continuum rather than
divided up into categories like documentary
and narrative and he interrupts me.
“For instance in this article, after talking to
me for 40 minutes, you will write about what
I say and you’re gonna pick what I say that
will filter through your sensibility, your aper-
ture, and so there goes literal vérité.”
This is true (see sidebar). However, Ameri-
cans have a kind of plainspoken belief in the
truth of images that they don’t have about words.
It’s not clear whether this is because we are ba-
sically open, trusting people, or that our visual
media makers are just phenomenal liars, but the
result is that documentary film is invested with
a tremendous power of objective truth.
90 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
“any filmmaker who endeavors to enter
the world of documentary has to con-
front his or her own ethics and philoso-
phies about truth-telling.”
Any filmmaker who endeavors to enter
the world of documentary has to confront
his or her own ethics and philosophies about
truth telling, but perhaps just as importantly,
they will ultimately face the expectations and
perceptions of their audience. The first part
I tangled with early in the process of making
my first doc (along with co-filmmaker Shane
King), was about children. Before we ever shot
a single tape of Girls Rock!, we had extensive
discussions about our relationship to the sub-
jects, how we could avoid feeling exploitative
and what our overall sense of ethical bound-
aries were. Even still, along the way, we chal-
lenged ourselves while shooting (“should I put
down the camera and break up this fight?”)
and editing (“Do people really need to know
about her funny side?”) and mostly had to trust
our instincts in the moment rather than rely on
any clear documentary guidelines.
Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, the di-
rectors of Jesus Camp, another film about
children that is laced with themes about the
larger world, don’t feel one should back away
from that challenge.
“Rachel and I are really interested in all of the
ethical dilemmas that filmmakers undergo,” says
PHOTO BY: SHANE SIGLER
jennifer venditti’s billy the kid.
Heidi. “We embrace the fact that documentary
filmmaking is a series of ethical decisions. We
are very aware of the power in the editing room,
but people have trusted us so far.”
Rachel adds, “I actually find it appealing
that every day in this job you have to con-
stantly make ethical decisions.”
While Jesus Camp gives the kids plenty of
space to be themselves without judgment, the
use of some eerie electronic music and warn-
ings about the cultural war with fundamental-
ist Christians by a radio host tip their hands.
“With the 300 hours of footage Rachel and
I shot, would other filmmakers have made a
different movie?” Heidi asks rhetorically.
“Probably. Jesus Camp is a condensed, bottled
version of a one-year experience we had.
We selected the messages we wanted to get
across, but does that make it not true? Noth-
ing we put in there didn’t happen, but it’s real
murky sometimes.”
Sam Green, the filmmaker behind the
acclaimed doc Weather Underground, has a
fairly simple criterion for how he guides his
ethical hand.
“In the historical documentaries I’ve done,”
Green says, “there’s always been people involved,
and so I felt an obligation to them to be accurate
and fair. When you imagine showing them the
piece later, it’s a real test if you can look them in
the eye, even if you’ve been critical.”
In Weather Underground, a doc about the
radical group from the ’60s of the same name,
Green used aspects of each of the six main
subjects to illuminate the group, which led to
one ex-member being disgruntled with how
he was depicted.
“He said, ‘You just used me being critical
and that’s just a small part of what I feel; I’m
much more than that.’ And I said that’s true,
but I explained to him I was trying to show
a range of sensibilities and experiences in the
group, and I used different people as char-
acters. When putting together a doc, you’re
making a larger truth rather than accurately
representing each person.”
J’accuse!
Unfortunately no matter how much you
embrace the contradictions that are central
to documentary filmmaking, you can’t control
how people will perceive your film. At the
Maine International Film Festival, Jennifer
Venditti, the director of the wonderful Billy
the Kid (a coming-of-age film about a teenage
boy in a small town), told a story of her re-
view in Variety that was enough to make any
documentary filmmaker’s hair stand on end.
Here’s the key passage from the article:
“The major fallacy about Billy the Kid is
its masquerade as vérité filmmaking. On the
contrary: Almost every scene is a setup, with
sequences involving Billy and his would-be
girlfriend, Heather, shot from multiple angles,
but not, it seems, multiple cameras.”
The first irony of this criticism is that
though most people mistakenly blur the phi-
losophies of direct cinema and cinema vérité
together (people often use “vérité” as short-
hand to describe observational shooting),
the two movements that arose in the ’60s to
address documentary’s unruly relationship
to truth were sharply and even vociferously
differentiated. Jean Rouch and other French
filmmakers of the vérité school angrily con-
fronted Richard Leacock and progenitors of
direct cinema at the 1963 MIP TV conference
for not acknowledging their impact on their
subjects. Scholar Eric Barnouw describes their
different perspectives like this:
“The direct cinema documentarist took his
camera to a situation of tension and waited
hopefully for a crisis; the Rouch version of
cinema vérité tried to precipitate one. The
direct cinema artist aspired to invisibility:
the Rouch cinema vérité artist was often an
avowed participant.”
But for Venditti, those arguments are aca-
demic anyway — she was just trying to make a
film in the ever-shifting sands of an adolescent
boy’s life.
“I don’t think of myself as a documentarian
anyway, but as a filmmaker. I’m inspired by
narrative stories: to me, cinema and fantasy
are all around us. People would often ask me
if Billy was acting for the camera, and it’s like,
‘Yeah, he’s been starring in a role in his movie
for his whole life, that’s how he survived. He
does that when the camera’s not on too.’”
Later in the festival, while I was eating
at a diner in Maine with Jennifer, Billy and
his family, Billy looked up and saw a kara-
oke setup. He immediately turned to me and
said, “I do a great falsetto on the song ‘Dream
Weaver’” and then proceeded to sing the
whole 1976 Gary Wright song for the table.
There were no cameras. Was it real? Or am I
telling you this story in an exploitative way to
support a colleague?
“Everything that happened in that movie
was uncontrolled,” Jennifer says, still wincing.
“The only thing that didn’t happen on camera
was the clapping [a bunch of old fellas on the
street applaud Billy when he holds Heather’s
hand]. And that really happened, but we
missed it around the corner so we asked them
to do it again. In the scene with Heather [that
the Variety reviewer singled out], you’re seeing
10 minutes condensed out of 8 hours straight
of shooting. We, of course, were shooting
it thinking of coverage, moving the camera
around. There’s no documentary d.p. who
doesn’t shoot thinking how it can be cut.”
An additional irony is that the reviewer
goes on to criticize Venditti for not shooting
long enough (she shot for eight days), which
of course would have resulted in even more
footage that needed to be condensed down.
Knowing we shot nearly 250 hours for our
Girls Rock!, a shiver of fear went through me.
Isn’t this what we do? Shoot, edit and craft sto-
ries? I mean, I thought the role of writers, film-
makers and artists was to bring out the colors
and characters and stories that everyone misses
and show them to us in an artful way. If what
we want is unexpurgated reality, aren’t we all
already living the perfect documentary?
The history of documentary film is dotted
with attempts to pull apart a film and discover
where it was staged or altered in a way that
obscures reality, and the irony here is that the
very history of the form began in 1922 with
Robert Flaherty’s nearly completely staged
POLISHING UP
Wexler has a point. I definitely weeded out
some extraneous words and clarified some
grammar in his quotes... this sentence:
“There is no fact, no three-dimensional
graspable fact... once you filter what you
do through a reproducible medium, it’s
not the truth of the subject but the truth
of you that’s filming.”
Was literally transcribed like this:
“There is no fact, fact literally, third
graspable fact... once you filter what you
do through a reproducible medium, it’s
not fact. You are making a judgment, it’s
not the truth of the subject, but it’s you
that’s filming.”
Also, I really liked Wexler’s, “It’s all
fiction!” quote to open this discussion of
documentary truth, but then I spliced in
quotes from later in the interview that
follow the same train of thought.
This often happens to journalists —
what sounds like a great conversation in
the moment is actually filled with “um”s,
“er”s, distractions and digressions. So those
of us who tape-record clean things up so
they’re readable and coherent, and note
takers apply the filter through memory.
And yet, despite all that lying, reality
altering and fictionalization, in more than
a decade of writing profiles and interviews
I’ve never had a single person question an
entire article because I changed the order
of some quotes or cut out an “uh.” When
I became a documentary filmmaker,
however, I quickly realized I had entered
a different world.
Nanook of the North.
“You couldn’t come up with a definition of
documentary that would have Nanook in it,”
says Sam Green. “If someone made it now, it
would never be considered a documentary. It’s
a fiction film. That’s the great thing about it be-
ing the first documentary — it got to the heart
of a lot of sticky issues in documentary right at
the beginning, and I actually like that.”
Because of this slipperiness, even those we
think of as holding the highest standards of
observational ethics are not immune to attacks.
The Maysles Brothers were born right out of
the Direct Cinema crucible, and yet when
Gimme Shelter hit theaters, it was subjected to
vicious assaults on its methodology by Pauline
Kael and other critics and, for Albert Maysles,
see page 106
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 91
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CAMERA TEST
Jamie Stuart tests out the Panasonic AG-HPX500P.
I just spent two weeks staring at a big-ass
metal case on my floor. Yeah, I opened it once
or twice just to look at the big-ass camera in-
side. The big-ass camera does have a proper
name: the Panasonic AG-HPX500P, which,
for the purposes of this review I’ll be forced to
use — though for me, it’s still just the big-ass
camera in the big-ass metal case on my floor.
The HPX is a professional-minded camera
built on the same P2 system as the better-
known AG-HVX200P. What makes it more
professional besides the size? Greater stor-
age (four 16GB P2 slots) and the ability to
change lenses. It’s also designed with a shoul-
der-mount curve on the underbelly. A base
plate can be attached for tripod use as well.
I’ve been shooting Panasonic exclusively
for the past three-and-a-half years, primarily
with the AG-DVX100A, though recently I
rented an HVX for my last short, 12.5 Seconds
Later....That said, the HPX review loaner sat
on my floor for so long mostly because I was
trying to adapt my head to the camera’s size,
which is equivalent to that of a news camera;
I’m used to smaller, lighter-weight gear. I like
the idea of being mobile, and the HPX is not
what I’d consider mobile.
Strangely enough, around this time, I was
Web surfing and came across David Lowery’s
Drifting: A Director’s Log blog (road-dog-
productions.com/weblog), which, under a
post titled “More Blood” featured a photo
of the HPX with a wall of splattered blood
behind it. The HPX in the photo was on
legs and also had a matte box attached. The
camera was apparently being used to shoot a
vampire comedy called Blood on the Highway,
which David was helping to edit.
I asked him how he liked using the camera,
and he replied, via the comments on his blog,
“We haven’t really had to keep more than
one 16GB card in it at any time, but it’s nice
knowing there’s that extra space. The best
thing about it, in my opinion, is the fact that
you can put another lens on it. We put some
really nice glass on it, and that makes all the
difference in the world, especially since we’re
doing almost all night shooting.”
Okay. A proper production is one thing.
But using it in a manner to conduct a test
— a manner that would invariably be guer-
rilla — meant I needed an “in.”
92 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
“what ultimately
intrigued me was
the camera’s ability
to shoot variable
frame rates, a
luxury of its tape-
less workflow.”
What ultimately intrigued me was the
camera’s ability to shoot variable frame rates,
a luxury of its tapeless workflow. When
shooting 720P in the PN mode, which locks
playback to the chosen record mode — 24PN
or 30PN, for example — the actual record-
ing frame rate can be adjusted to overcrank
or undercrank in increments of two frames.
When you watch footage shot at 48fps, be-
cause playback is locked at, say, 24PN, it’s le-
gitimate slow motion, not the frame-blended
footage many have become accustomed to by
altering the speed in postproduction. In other
words, it basically works under the same as-
sumption as a film camera.
Once that decision was out of the way, I
still needed a subject. While brainstorming
for a topic, I considered that it might look in-
teresting if I were to capture a long tracking
shot at 60fps. I set up a shoot and decided
that the actual actions and coverage would be
determined only then.
As I started blocking out the shot, which
would ultimately stretch from one side of an
apartment to the other, to out into the hallway,
up a ladder to the roof, and then move from
wide to tight to wide on the roof, I realized
the inherent dreamlike quality of the piece and
started making some offbeat choices. This was
partly about aesthetics, but also, I had one seri-
ous technical challenge: adjusting the iris from
a dark, practical-lighted interior to an over-
blown exterior set against a wide-open sky.
I learned immediately that the HPX’s
built-in ND filters are operated by a knob on
the front of the camera. Unlike the DVX or
the HVX, which have an easy-to-reach switch
that when flipped automatically makes the
changes, here I had to reach around and turn
the knob without being able to see what I was
doing. Furthermore, as I turned the knob, I
could actually see the black borders of the fil-
ter wiping across the screen through the shot.
And that was awful.
Completely by accident, on the next pass,
I inadvertently left the #2 ND on and didn’t
find this out until after the take was over.
To my complete surprise, the camera was so
sensitive that I could see everything perfectly
during the interiors, and because the ND
was already on, I didn’t have to turn it on as
I approached the exterior section. This was a
positive derived from a negative.
At this point, I started blending techniques
that would both heighten the reverie of the
piece while also calling attention to the medi-
um itself. To affect the former, I manually set
the focus to roughly seven feet while keeping
the zoom completely wide; this created a look
where nothing is ever terribly out of focus,
yet the actual focal point can never really be
spotted. In relation to the latter, I left the iris
on auto, allowing for visible light adjustments
both inside the apartment and during the ex-
terior transition. I also made a point of not
being entirely smooth in my handheld cover-
age, rendering a floating image that’s not al-
ways accurate in its motion or framing.
After 16 takes, the post was simple: I just
FireWired the footage right into Final Cut Pro
via the Log and Transfer option. I was happy
enough with the ND-affected look of the im-
age that I didn’t even apply any color correction;
what you see is straight from the camera.
see page 107
LINE ITEMS
THE POWERS THAT BE
Alicia Van Couvering helps indies strategize for the upcoming strike.
It is contract-negotiation time in the movie
business with actors, writers and directors all
gathering for a standoff against the studios
set for June 30, 2008. While talks between
the studios and the unions become tense,
news of preliminary strike authorizations
have led to a rush of green lights as studios
get everything they can into production to
prepare for the possibility of a walkout that
could last months.
Hollywood may be quivering in terror, but
what about the independents? How does the
strike affect us?
Except for documentaries and very low-
budget films, most productions become sig-
natory to the same basic agreements with
the Writers Guild of America (WGA), the
Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Direc-
tors Guild of America (DGA). A strike
would shut down most independent produc-
ers while leaving the network and studio brass
at the negotiating table. However, the threat
of a strike may hold a silver lining for indie
producers accustomed to betting the house in
the name of their movie.
First let’s examine where we are now. Al-
though the WGA contract expires in Octo-
ber, if a deal isn’t reached by the end of the
month its officials are encouraging writers
to work until June. That way they could join
SAG and the DGA in a work stoppage, caus-
ing a near-total shutdown in projects utilizing
members of any of these three unions.
In Hollywood, lists of fast track projects
have been circulating for months, and devel-
opment assistants spend their days making
“pre-strike availability lists” for directors and
actors. Studio production slates must be full
in order to ensure product for next year. TV
shows like Heroes have been putting in double
orders for episodes and filming through their
hiatus to make sure they don’t get caught
without programming in the fall. Filming
days in Los Angeles are dramatically higher
than this time last year.
“It’s good in some ways,” says Cotty Chubb,
Executive Vice President of Production at
Groundswell Productions in Los Angeles of
the pre-strike frenzy. “There are opportunities
to get shows into production because talent is
motivated and so are their agents. But it’s dan-
gerous in others. Too much filming now can
94 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
“[if] a strike doesn’t happen, or even if it’s
over very quickly, all the studios will have
blown their annual budgets by the dead-
line. indie producers might be the only ones
fishing in a suddenly flooded talent pool.”
mean clogged distribution later. And no one
knows what’s going to happen next summer,
strike or no strike. Last time [the unions went
on strike], there was a real slump [after the
strike] in both development and production
since capital budgets were exhausted, and the
pipelines were full. People lost their jobs.”
Others on the ground are finding that all this
activity is making the business of producing
smaller-scale independent films even harder.
Because actors are worrying about a prolonged
work stoppage, it’s not easy to appeal to their
sense of art over commerce. “Most actors are
looking for a big payday right now and trying
to get studio movies,” confirms casting director
Adrienne Stern (Broken English). “Fear of the
strike isn’t making it easier to get cast attached
to a low-budget film.”
Even if cast is committed to an indie proj-
ect, however, strike fears can still harm in-
dependents. “Personally, I would be careful
starting anything in the next few months be-
cause you’re going in knowing that everyone
you’re going to want, especially for crew, is
probably already booked,” says producer Jeff
Levy-Hinte (Thirteen, The Last Winter).
But aren’t there eight months left between
now and the strike deadline for Hollywood
and the unions to make nice? Why is Holly-
wood acting as if the strike is a certainty?
One reason is the fierce saber rattling that’s
already occurred on both sides of the table. The
unions are demanding a bigger cut (in the form
of higher residuals) of the new media pie, while
some studio bargainers are suggesting that the
residual system be all but dismantled. The Al-
liance of Motion Picture and Television Pro-
ducers (AMPTP), a bargaining group made of
representatives from the networks and studios,
offered an initial proposal that sought to elimi-
nate the paying of residuals before a film shows
a profit. Variety quoted Warner Brothers’ Barry
Meyer as asking why his studio should have to
pay any residuals on a money-losing flop like
The Adventures of Pluto Nash. Seen widely as a
purely provocative “nuclear option,” the residu-
als scale-down was immediately rejected by a
union spokesperson who, in Variety, fired back
by dubbing Hollywood accounting “a fantasy
designed to pay talent as little as possible.”
The guilds, on the other hand, are arguing
that the current contracts don’t adequately ad-
dress a distribution landscape that now includes
iTunes, video-on-demand, Netflix, torrents, dis-
tribution over gaming devices and so on. Mov-
ies rented or viewed via these new outlets earn
writers and actors less in residuals than those
viewed on cable or rented from brick-and-mor-
tar stores like Blockbuster. The slow but inevi-
table rise of Internet-only entertainment, which
remains largely under the radar of unions, can’t
be ignored much longer. As the new models
overtake the old, the unions want to make sure
their compensation mechanisms can adapt.
They also argue that the current contracts don’t
reflect the state of more accepted media either.
Cable television’s revenues have risen from $2.5
billion in 1994 to $13.5 billion last year, said
The Hollywood Reporter, while actors’ minimum
salary requirements have risen only 35 percent
during the same period.
The studios counter that income from new
media distribution is essential to balance out
the pitfalls caused by the enormous changes
of the last decade. Bob Berney, the president
of Picturehouse (Pan’s Labyrinth, La Vie en
rose, El Cantante) confirms that the issues at
stake this year are highly volatile. “There’s
shrinking revenues everywhere,” he says, re-
ferring to the nationwide decline in box office
and DVD sales. “No one knows which of the
new revenue streams will become lucrative.”
These realities paint a grim picture, but as
mentioned before, some see a silver lining (at
least in the short-term). By mid-February ev
see page 107
LINE ITEMS
PLAY AGAIN
Head Trauma director Lance Weiler on gaming and worlds beyond independent film.
 The Evolution
Over the last six months, I’ve been experi-
menting with a collision of gaming, movies,
music and technology know as a MIG (me-
dia-integrated game play). The MIG is a
way in which the audience can experience a
story across multiple platforms and devices.
Characters from a film interact directly with
an audience via live encounters, phone calls,
text messages and e-mails. These interactions
lead to clues consisting of hidden media,
sites, blogs and social networking pages, all of
which extend the film’s storyline and provide
life for its characters beyond the screen.
The driving force behind my experimen-
tation is my constant quest to reach audi-
ences in new ways. The advent of DVRs
(digital video recorders), portable media
players and an increase in connectivity has
enabled a new exchange of media that is
social and places the power smack in the
palm of the viewer. A rapidly expanding
on-demand culture offers independent film-
makers new distribution outlets, modes of
interaction, promotion and revenue streams.
 
Beyond The Console
Often the term gaming conjures up the image
of first-person shooters like Halo, or old-school
console games like Donkey Kong. But the con-
96 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
ventions of play are changing thanks in part to
an emerging independent gaming movement.
From the ITVS-funded political ARG
(alternate-reality game) World Without Oil to
the controversial RPG (role-playing game)
Super Columbine Massacre, games are tackling
important social issues.
In other cases, ARGs and MMOGs (mas-
sively multiplayer online games) have become
hot new promotional and advertising platforms
for Madison Avenue and Hollywood. TV shows
like Lost and Heroes have employed ARGs to
expand the reach of their series beyond the set,
and upcoming releases by J.J. Abrams (Clover-
field) and Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight)
are using ARGs to promote the films far in ad-
vance of the theatrical release.
When it comes to massive multiplayer
online games, James Cameron and Steven
Spielberg are creating whole worlds around
their films complete with virtual currencies.
But the above are all studio-funded ven-
tures. What can independent filmmakers gain
from this convergence?
The Value
Hope is Missing is a MIG that my company,
Seize the Media, constructed to assist with the
promotion of Warner Brothers’ VOD (video-
on-demand) release of my independent film,
(left-right) lance weiler’s hope is missing MIG; j.j. abrams’s cloverfield ARG.
Head Trauma. At the heart of the MIG is the
story of a young journalism student named
Hope who returns home to find her mother
exhibiting strange nocturnal behaviors. As
she digs deeper she uncovers what is causing
these behaviors, but before she can notify the
authorities, she is abducted.
The narrative and game play are lead by
Hope’s fiancé, who is desperately searching
for her. This storyline then begins to blend in
elements of Head Trauma until the two be-
come directly intertwined.
The Hope is Missing MIG consists of the
following components:
MOBILE DRIVE-IN (mobmov.org screenings):
Characters lead audience members to secret
screening locations with phone calls and text
messages. During screenings audience members
can use their phones to interact with the film.
WEB SERIES: A four-part Web series is re-
leased weekly. In each episode a number of
clues — “rabbit holes” — lead players to hid-
den media and sites across the Web.
REMIX: Through a collaboration with eyespot.
com we built a special promotion that allows
players to become contributors. As players re-
mix media they unlock a series of hidden clues.
LIVE GAME BOARD: A map mash-up tracks
see page 107
PHOTO BY: (LEFT-RIGHT) WEILER PRODUCTIONS LLC; 1-18-08.COM
LINE ITEMS

SUPPORT GROUP
SCOTT MACAULAY recaps the 2007 IFP Narrative Rough Cut Lab.

Three years ago the IFP and I developed a
program called the Narrative Rough Cut Lab, a
sort of intensive mentorship in which filmmak-
ers who have shot but not completed their films
receive advice about the stages of the filmmak-
ing process that lay ahead of them. Completing
edits, sound design, festival planning, market-
ing and publicity, obtaining a producer’s rep and
even DIY and self-distribution strategies are all
discussed in a three-day series of small-group
meetings led by myself and, this year, producer
and HDNet Films exec Gretchen McGowan.
The idea for the Rough Cut Lab came
from the realization that while there are sev-
eral labs and seminars devoted to projects at
the script or financing stages, there are none
devoted to projects entering that often most
crucial phase: post production. One of the
many luxuries studio films have that inde-
pendents usually don’t is the budget for test
screenings, recuts and reshoots. If a studio
film doesn’t work, you can rest assured that a
team of people are busy figuring out why and
how to fix it. Independents, however, have to
gather their small teams of friends and col-
leagues and figure out how to address the is-
sue with minimal resources. And while sea-
soned producers know how to plan for their
optimum festival premiere, too many begin-
ning filmmakers accept their first invitation
and blow their shot at a potentially stronger
domestic sales landscape. Shooting People’s
Ingrid Kopp and indieWIRE’s Brian Brooks
discussed social networking publicity strate-
gies. And, finally, editors Sabine Hoffman
(The Ballad of Jack and Rose) and Kate Wil-
liams (Interview) watched all the rough cuts
and tendered specific editorial advice. From
the IFP Amy Dotson (Producer and Manag-
ing Director of Narrative Programming) and
Jihan Robinson (Coordinator of Narrative
Rough Cut Lab), produced.
After the Lab I asked the participants to jot
down a few notes on their experience — spe-
cifically, how their thoughts on their films have
changed after attending. Here are their replies.
Jeffrey Jay Orgill’s Boppin’ at the Glue Fac-
tory is the story of a strung out male nurse
at a convalescent home and it’s told with a
vibrant, kinetic visual (and aural) style. Ap-
propriately Orgill, who has been editing his
film for two years, describes the Lab as “re-
hab.” “I just couldn’t ‘see’ the film anymore,”
he says. “I was ‘blind.’ As quickly as I’d make
a discovery, I’d get bored with something that
was working fine and cut it up or cut it out.”
He credits Williams and Hoffman with tell-
ing him to “trust your performances, stop
overediting and let the story unfold,” and he
has now locked picture.
Sergio Palacios and Damian Rodriguez di-
rected El Coyote, a heavy metal scored revenge
drama set in a ghost town. Rodriguez also
credits Williams and Hoffman with helping
solve a seemingly insurmountable problem: a
slow opening. “With just a few key sugges-
tions they solved what we had been laboring
over for months,” he says. “After we made a
few edits and replaced some title cards with
a voice-over, it really changed the pace of the
cut. After watching our film so many times, it
suddenly felt new and alive again.”
Junko Kajino and Ed M. Koziarski directed
the ambitious The First Breath of Tengan Rei,
a drama about a young Okinawan woman
who travels to the U.S. to confront the two
Marines who assaulted her a decade earlier.
Comments Koziarski: “Through a thought
process that begun at the Lab, we recut our
film, resolving to trust our audiences’ intel-
ligence and the strength of our core mate-
rial. We pared away unneeded footage that
we were relying on to spell out the story and
had renewed confidence that our target au-
dience wants to be challenged. Indeed it is
our responsibility to our audience to chal-
lenge them. Likewise with music, we learned
not to rely on score to emotionally ‘wrap up’
difficult scenes and thus risk softening their
impact, but instead to let the score mirror and
see page 108

PHOTO BY: STEPHEN LOVEKIN/WIREIMAGE

platform for their domestic or foreign sale.
This year the Rough Cut Lab took place
in June and to help filmmakers make sense of
it all were a great roster of industry advisers.
To discuss distribution options were Melissa
Raddatz of Truly Indie and Ryan Werner of
IFC First Take. Composer Mychael Danna
(Little Miss Sunshine, Capote) listened to all
of the participating filmmakers’ music choices
and offered guidance on scoring. Scott Young,
Independent Liaison from the MPAA, talked
about the rating system. Filmmaker Lance
Weiler discussed DIY distribution and mar-
keting. Producers Karin Chien (The Motel)
and Joshua Zeman (Mysterious Skin) discussed
festival strategy. Publicists Jeremy Walker and
Susan Norget offered advice on indie film
publicity. Music Supervisor Tracy McKnight
and BMI’s Doreen Ringer Ross talked about
licensing music. Dana O’Keefe and Sarah Lash
The IFP narrative rough cut lab fellows with john sayles (center) and maggie renzie (holding poster).
from Cinetic Media sketched out the current

98 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

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100 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

The Overachiever
from page 45
You know, to me editing is screenwriting with
permanence. In the initial script writing stage
every idea in the world is available to you. You
can be overwhelmed by the fact that there
are no limits. In the editing you are limited.
You have the footage that you shot. That’s it.
But within that limitation you have so many
permutations and possibilities of arranging
things, rearranging things, restructuring and
literally rewriting with the cut. And so I think
every film ends up being somewhat rewritten
in editing. And then locked. And then it’s its
own thing. Forever.
I know that you have come in and rewritten
other writers’ scripts. How does that work?
It’s always a weird thing to come in and rewrite
someone else’s screenplay. It can feel uncom-
fortable, especially when you know another
writer has been fired or somebody has reached
a dead end. I just finished a script where a writ-
er basically worked for a couple of years on his
own idea. It was a spec script that got bought,
and he was working with the producers, and
was rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, and
they came to a mutual agreement that he’d
reached a place where he couldn’t go any fur-
ther in terms of what’s needed for the director.
So they called me in, they said would I be in-
terested, and my first question was, “Well, how
does he feel about it?” Because even though
it’s a Hollywood project and you don’t owe
anyone anything, it’s done all the time, and the
Writers Guild has strict rules about how to do
it properly — I would feel very awkward going
into a script where a writer has been pulled out
kicking and screaming and the producers are
upset and everybody feels like they’ve wasted
time. It’s not a happy place to visit.
Did you ever see that film The Five Obstruc-
tions? Yes I did.
What do you think about the concept of that
film? Do you agree that when you give your-
self parameters it forces you to imagine ways
out of them? I think limitations are essential.
I like working with rules, even if the rules are
“to go crazy” or “to be as austere as possible,”
which never happens, by the way.
Like what kind of limitations, for instance?
Like, say, “Okay, this is how we’re approaching
the film, this is how big it is. This is the style.
The aesthetics. The way these characters talk.”
The period of a film, is that a limitation?
Absolutely.
What about the fact that you’re not from
America but you write American movies? Is
that a bit of a limitation? I remember once
talking to an Israeli actor who said, “I’m a
really good actor here, but I’m not good in
the States.” There were characters and cer-
tain kinds of people that he’d been studying
his whole life who were specific to Israel and
who Americans would never understand.
He could only play a few types of people here
so he feels limited. That’s a great point. I’ve
been here for almost 20 years, but there is still
a limitation of being “the outsider.” But it’s
also a very liberating limitation. I think that
probably my limitation as a writer who didn’t
grow up speaking English is that I know few-
er words than most American screenwriters,
so I don’t need to get lost in trying to find a
great sentence. I just write down what I know.
Which is very limited.
[laughs] You know more words than me
which is embarrassing, but… I think it’s
true that this is not my culture, although now
[American culture] is everybody’s culture one
way or another. But being an outsider is a very
helpful limitation.
It seems to work that way. Every film is made
with an incredible amount of limitations, and
it starts with the basic limitation of the screen,
this rectangle that we can’t really go beyond.
Then there are the limitations dictated by
the budget. That’s a big one. The amount of
shooting days and the like. Limitations are
not really talked about in film reviews because
people like to watch movies and accept them
as the filmmaker’s ideal vision, or sometimes a
product of a certain powerful producer. But in
general, the limitations of budget and the eco-
nomic structure have a huge influence on the
aesthetics that define the filmmaker’s vision.
It’s not as if the director gets to play out every-
thing the way he wants. He works within limi-
tations, and fights against them, and they end
up shaping his vision. I think what ultimately
happens is that people become very creative in
working with their limitations. They are not
allowed to shoot in a certain place that they
really wanted or the day is over and they can’t
go into overtime or they suddenly can’t afford a
crane for the shot they designed — all of a sud-
den they come up with something else. Some-
thing inventive. Of course, limitations can also
be enormously frustrating.
It’s like the beginning of film: People were
trying to push the boundaries. There was no
sound, so then we were trying to figure, how
can we have sound? Everyone’s talking into
flower vases because that’s where the mikes
are, and then that’s not enough — we want
to move the camera, so let’s find a way to
move the camera and have sound. Then we
don’t like the fact that the image is just black-
and-white — let’s make it color. And then
we don’t like the fact that it’s square, so let’s
make it wide screen. There was a period of
time when we were experimenting like crazy.
We’re not really doing that anymore.Well, in
a way we are, I think, because there are two
separate issues. There’s the technology part of
it, and then there’s the creative part of it. I think
technology always wants to be new. There’s al-
ways a drive to come up with new things and
invent new gadgets, new formats, and excite
people in new ways. That’s human nature and
that’s also business nature. But I think that in
terms of experimentation in movies, in terms
of content, in terms of what people are doing
in movies structurally or even in terms of act-
ing, in terms of visuals, and how everything
pertains to financing, the limitations are be-
coming harder and harder to navigate. It does
feel like there is a certain sensibility, a certain
abstraction in movies of the ’70s that a lot of
people, including the people who get to green-
light films, liked and loved when growing up,
that the marketplace, whatever that is, is not
allowing right now. Earlier we talked about
Alfredo Garcia. I mean, Sam Peckinpah — can
you imagine him trying to make films today?
I guess at the same time you could say, could
you imagine somebody trying to make a Bob
Dylan movie where six people play him?
That’s basically a big studio experimental
film. Well I think that’s kind of a miracle. And
it’s not a true studio film.
Talk to me a little bit about your film. My
film? Well this brings us full circle — directing.
I started out trying to direct a film that col-
lapsed and broke my heart and gave me writ-
ing opportunities. And now the writing may
open up opportunities for me to direct again.
For a while it sort of became my hobby trying
to put a film together. A very serious hobby.
Looking Glass. Then another called Cordless.
And now it seems to be coming together and
I will be directing a film soon. But then again,
you never know, I’ve been here before.
Do you want to talk about casting? Why don’t
we not talk about it? I started approaching ac-
tors. But nothing is solid yet. You know how
actors are.
Oh man, they are flaky flakes — can’t trust
’em. Oh, but you’ve got to love ’em.
[laughs] Well, I can’t wait to see your mov-
ies. And I can’t wait to be in ’em. Mmmm.
Well, that’s gonna make me cry.
I heard and I read somewhere that you’re
working with Ryan Gosling. Oh, that’s un-
comfortable — that’s me. That’s a little un-
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 101
comfortable. I don’t mind talking about it be-
cause I don’t think he’ll ever read this.
[laughs] Yeah, we’re working together on the
film about child soldiers in northern Uganda.
Absolutely, and you’re my director, and I just
watched a bunch of stuff that you shot over there
which I have to say is absolutely gorgeous.
Yeah, it’s kind of cheesy though, don’t you
think? The footage is nice but we were
trying to get money for it so we cut it into
kind of a cheesy trailer. I didn’t think it was
cheesy. Why do you think it was cheesy?
Because it’s not trailer material. It’s just to
give you a sense of the life. It really should
just be watched without music and without
any cuts. It’s just something that’s supposed
to give you a sense of the place. To cut it up
and put music to it is really not what it is. It
brings us back to the fact that there are all these
kinds of very worthy films, films that could be
really important, innovative, or just interesting
and eye-opening, but they’re not pitchable. You
can’t make a trailer and sell them. So hopefully
there are other ways to get them financed, oth-
er ways than just studios and mini-majors and
traditional models of film financing. Finding
the alternative sources, finding new and in-
novative routes that are more independent by
nature, I guess, if that’s a word we can still use,
to make these movies.
Well, then, Mr. Moverman. Yes, Mr. Gosling.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
I hope I’m Not There and Married Life are
the biggest hits of the year. Thank you.
And good luck to you and your directing.
You too.
And I’ll talk to you as soon as we hang up. I’ll
call you when we’re not being recorded.t
102 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
SENIOR MOMENTS
from page 51
that’s what people are going to do. It helped
me when I got stuck to just pretend it was just
a novel, to just keep going and write this stuff
that I eventually would rip out, stuff that had
to do with describing internal states — things
that you would never really be able to have
in a screenplay. And it was really long — the
first draft of the script was 200 pages. In a
weird way, I felt like I wrote a novel and then
had to do an adaptation of the novel to turn
it into a screenplay, which brought it down to
120 pages. I spent a year going from 200 pag-
es to 120 pages, and it took me years to get
to the 200 pages. So a year to kind of, what’s
it called, reduction? When they do that to a
sauce, the reduction sauce?
What you’re saying about changing forms is
interesting. You were tricking yourself. It really
helped me. It freed my friggin’ brain. A screen-
play is a distillation of this other thing. It would
be writing the essence of something before you
know what the something is. If you don’t know
what it is yet, let it just be fat and sloppy and not
the distillation, and then find what you really
[mean]. It’s a slow [process], though.
Keith Gordon says he considers his job to
be a fund-raiser and every five years he takes
three months off to shoot a movie. Yeah, it’s
really hard to get them made. It’s demoralizing
and exhausting. You’ve got to be a real lunatic.
There are moments when it’s pretty bleak out
there, especially when you really are commit-
ted to one [project]. The first person at the
company likes it but then it has to go upstairs,
and then it’s like, “Well, he didn’t like it,” and
then you go to the next one. It’s just so much of
that: “We sent it, we’re waiting, so and so really
liked it, but the guy upstairs….” I don’t know
if and when it gets easier. I guess you have to
make something that really makes some dough
or something. You have to be such a dog with
a bone about it that you must be strange — I
mean, I think filmmakers are pretty strange
people. There’s something about when you’re
tenacious and intrepid and probably bizarrely
so. Like a normal person would take the hint
that this isn’t happening, but no, you don’t. I
mean, is it delusional to be running around and
trying to get your screenplay made for a couple
of years, or is it just that it’s so hard to get these
things made? I live in the East Village, and I’ve
lived here for a really long time, and I guess
[the character of ] Wendy was some sort of riff
on people who come to New York City and
have to do something to support themselves
but [still] have these dreams of making it in
the arts. How long can you sustain that double
life when it’s not really happening?
You worked on the script for a long time and
then suddenly you are making the film. Tell
me about your shooting schedule after all
that waiting. It was very short preproduction,
six weeks. That’s all we could afford to pay
people. Then we had 30 days to shoot. The
irony is you work on a script forever and try
to get it financed forever and then you have
to do it NOW!!! We got the film financed in
January and then we shot at the end of March.
We needed to shoot quickly because it needed
to look like winter in New York City and in
Buffalo. We shot every exterior first to avoid
foliage, green and [signs of spring]. We were
very lucky — it snowed in April in front of
the nursing home in Buffalo! So we managed
to have a winter movie in April and it worked
out okay. The 30-day aspect of it wasn’t fun.
Five more days would have made life easier.
But the adrenaline [needed for that shooting
schedule] can be kind of great. Sometimes
pricey Hollywood movies, they’re D.O.A.
They are too prepared, and there’s no energy.
As much as I can complain and wish I had
more time… there’s something about that
capturing of [real] life [on a quick shoot], and
that’s the most important thing — that sort
of lived-in feeling among these characters, a
messy, imperfect aliveness. Just having it feel
alive. When you see it in a movie, a flicker of
life, it’s so startling. Oh my God! That’s life,
actually life as it happens! They’ve captured
something human! It’s not part of the reper-
toire of things that we think are real because
we’ve seen them in movies.
How did you talk about color and framing
to your d.p. and production designer? Are
you a look-book person? A friend had given [their schedules with ours]. [While shooting] very much, but they’re stylized tableaux. They’re
me a book by Larry Sultan, this great photog- we had our trucks parked by a church we were very theatrical. They have a certain esthetic and
rapher, called Pictures from Home. It was for using for a home base, and I turned around whatever, but as you grow up, you start to figure
the Arizonaish part of the movie. And I also and there’s this crazy hedge! I thought, what a way of letting go while keeping your eyeballs
found that scouting and taking digital photo- if [the senior citizens] come out from behind open for things that crop up.
graphs myself was a huge aid in figuring out it? I dragged my d.p. over and I hid behind the You’re also keeping the writer locked up back
how the movie should look. I had gone scout- hedge and appeared, and [the scene is] now so in the writing room. It’s the director’s job
ing in Buffalo prior to meeting a d.p. and I much better than what it would have been. It once you’re on the floor. It’s interesting where
had taken tons of pictures of branches against looks like something you’d art direct, but ev- you let go and how much without losing con-
the sky, heavy clouds, traffic lights. They erything was really found, as eccentric as that trol. Working with actors, [what is] the balance
show up in the movie when Phil’s character is looks — the hedge, the women’s costumes, the of bugging them and getting in there, and just
driving on Percocet ­­— there are these loping 90-year-old woman tap-dancing on the as- seeing how something evolves and having the
low wires and bare trees against the sky. I took phalt. I guess that’s a big directing thing — you courage to shut up? It’s like, you’re called a di-
pictures like that while we were in the loca- get something in your head, a location, and it rector, I guess I should be telling people what
tion van driving around. Everything I saw out just doesn’t work out. Sometimes something’s to do all the time, but being okay with not
of the corner of my eye became a reference. sitting right in front of your face and you don’t talking is pretty important, too. The second
Location photos are usually like a picture of think about it until some limitation is placed. time [the actors] do a scene, it might be twist-
a room, but these were like my periphery, this Orson Welles once said that a director doesn’t ing and changing and growing organically. If
track that was running through my mind that take advantage of accidents, a director presides you just shut up and let it happen a couple of
I documented with this little cheap camera. I over accidents. There is something to that, times, it will emerge. I’m not that great at it,
took pictures constantly of anything that was something about the balance between aggres- but it’s something that I can see is important.
interesting. It could be an abandoned hospi- sion and passivity. Aggressively trying to get Stephen Frears has said the key thing he
tal where left on the bulletin board would be everything you need, and then being able to sit learned on his first shoot was to make a
a Christmas ornament or a horn of plenty. back and let things happen. Finding that balance choice, the blue shirt rather than the green
These little details — leftover, found things. — it’s like a Zen state. I think it’s an ideal state in one, say. Even if you make a choice and then
Were there any films that you looked to for life [laughs] and directing. And I think the more change it later, it’s good for the crew to see
inspiration? There’s a movie, I don’t think we you direct, the better you are at that. My [stu- that. That exhibits confidence? I wish I’d had
utterly achieved the look of it, The Beat That dent] short films are these tight, controlled little that anecdote under my belt! I don’t know if it’s
My Heart Skipped. Such a good film. It’s a things. These perfect little frames. I like them a gender thing or not, but I do feel like being
very specific kind of handheld-looking movie.
It’s available light, and it goes dark [at times].
There’s something about its organic [quality]
and the way the camera [views] the bodies of
the actors. We achieve [this quality] in certain
places, I think. We had a really great camera op-
erator, Peter Agliata, who handheld a lot of the
movie. When he would swing from one head to
the next [during panning singles] in a dialogue
scene, he had this enormous intuition about the
drama of the scenes and a great sense of when
[the camera] should swing [to the other person].
It was like he was in the scene with them. He
would sit there and read the scenes really closely,
studying them so he knew where the dramatic
points were, and he really paid attention during
rehearsals. He was an enormous asset.
The opening of the movie sets a tone that’s
quickly belied, with all the elderly people do-
ing what’s almost an old-fashioned TV vari-
ety-show number. I understand that a chunk
of that scene resulted from necessity rather
than planning. We never found a location
[for that scene]. There was this weird band
shell in Sun City [that we wanted,] but they
refused to let us use it. We were only in Sun
City for a very short time and we madly tried
to book these clubs [of senior citizens] — wa-
ter aerobics people, golfers — and coordinate

FILMMAKER FALL 2007 103

able to change your mind in front of a crew or
be unsure until you’re sure [is important too]. I
feel like a lot of stuff was very visible in terms
of the making of our movie. I sat there, people
could hear me talking to my d.p., changing my
mind, and I wonder… maybe Stephen Frears
was right, it makes you look weak...
I think he was saying the air of decisiveness
was the strength... But the irony is, it might
be perceived as a weakness from the outside
if someone sees that Stephen Frears doesn’t
know what color he wants, but the fact that
he’s open to changing his mind is brave. I hate
to say this, because it sounds so… but I’m a
woman, I’m making a movie, most of the
people who are making the movie, the crew,
are men. There can be a difference in the way
your authority is perceived if you [publicly]
exhibit [your decision-making process]. It’s
weird to be watched. It’s such a public job…
to be thinking out loud in front of all of these
people who are waiting for you. If you are
writing, there are not 20 people waiting to
take the next word and lug it across the room!
You’re making decisions constantly when
you’re writing, but no one’s watching.
Film directors generally don’t have the
chance, the leisure, to watch other directors
at work, and like Mike Nichols... Is he the
one who said directing is like sex?
Yeah, you’re always wondering how the oth-
er guy does it. You never know how good you
are because you never see anybody else do it!
Exactly. Crew people and actors see [other di-
rectors], but unless you’re hanging out on sets,
you really don’t. You have your own weird,
idiosyncratic way of getting your way. Some
people probably have a more strong-armed
way, others have a more roundabout passive
way of getting things.
[Jim Taylor enters; they say hellos before he
goes to another table.]
I guess we can talk about what it’s like liv-
ing with another writer now, being mar-
104 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
ried to another screenwriter? Just don’t take
pictures, the place is a mess! When you were
asking about a community… it’s interesting
living with a writer. He was a great ally on so
many levels with the movie, and when I was
going from the 200-page version of the script
to the more presentable 120-page version, he
read everything. [Screenwriting] is also such
a lonely, grueling process, although he doesn’t
have that because he writes with a writing
partner. They have a great thing, but when
you’re alone writing, it’s friggin’ lonely.
So Jim was more like an editor? Yeah, he was
a great eye. And Alexander [Payne] too. They
showed up at various stages of the editing pro-
cess. And also just like the moral support of it
all. When Jim and I met, I went to graduate
film school at NYU, but I was leaving NYU
when he was entering. His version of the story
is that we met for 10 years. He’d introduce
himself to me over and over again for 10 years,
and I never remembered who he was. And
eventually, whatever, we got married.
Now that’s a montage. His version of the story
is that he’d seen my NYU student short, which
had won prizes at school. When people were
applying to school, they would give them exam-
ples of the work that students were doing, and
he said based on that short that he saw, he de-
cided to go to NYU Film School and he had a
crush on me. It was a film crush, which is cute.
That’s a rarefied love story. It’s totally rarefied.
I dunno, writing is weird and lonely and makes
you grumpy and strange, and it’s nice when
somebody understands that. I also have a dog.
That helps. Makes you go out into the world.
Then your dog’s like, “Okay, I have to walk
you.” There’s something about moving and
thinking. A treadmill, working out, and your
brain just kind of makes connections. Moving
— being in cars, trains, being on treadmills,
they’re all really good for the writing brain. But
I haven’t written in a long time; I have to start
writing. To write you really should be writing
every single day to keep the muscle going. But
then if you write and make a movie, the year of
working on the movie goes by and then you’re
supposed to start writing again and you have
kind of forgotten how. So I have to start writ-
ing. I have to buy a new journal; I have to get
some nice pens.t
PRAY FOR ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
from page 59
on a Harley pulls up in front of me. He’s the
archetypal biker, which is why I cast him in a
bar scene a few days earlier. He asks if I need
a ride. Grateful, I hop on and beg him not to
go too fast. We pull up to the location, a local
restaurant, and the ubiquitous crowd is form-
ing outside. Since Eagle Pass has a depressed
economy, the jobs I offer to extras are some of
the best gigs in town. Each shoot day a small
crowd assembles to see if I’m going to need ex-
tra help. We have our own traveling day laborer
site. So we roar up on the Harley and the crowd
starts laughing and cheering. Look! The cast-
ing person on a motorcycle, riding with one of
the town’s scariest looking guys! He smiles and
waves, enjoying a moment of minicelebrity. I
hop off, pass the breast pump along and the
shooting continues.
 Eagle Pass is an amazing history lesson
disguised as a sleepy, dusty border town.
From the outside it looks like another small
town whose center was abandoned after the
local Wal-Mart opened. A town one thinks is
almost 100 percent Mexicano. But what I find
surprises me. There are Kickapoo whose chil-
dren migrate with the crops. There is a settle-
ment across the border of freed and escaped
slaves. They’ve been there for generations
now. There’s also a settlement of Japanese
from Okinawa who came after World War II.
All these people have blended together. The
local cemetery is testament to their lives cross-
ing, as names blend and combine to form new
generations of people.
 Local casting gives life and authenticity to
a film. Creating a relationship with the com-
munity in which you are filming adds a level
of richness to a story. When many people
feel as if they are collaborating on some-
thing that is important to them, the prod-
uct is filled with a palpable spirit. The com-
munity respects the film and in turn, the
crew learns from the people of the town or
country where the movie is made. Everyone
walks away a little wiser, a little more full.
 In my 10 years of grassroots casting for
Sayles I have had many intense, bizarre and
touching relationships with the people of
each community in which we have filmed.  I
have been serenaded in my office and
stalked (three times). I have been asked for
my hand in marriage — once by a man with
five other wives. I have been given many
gifts — a freshly killed salmon (slapped
onto my desk, twitching), original artwork
and homemade jam. I have taken care of
many children and had someone name a
child after me. I’ve been on cable-access
call-in shows and I’ve spoken at city coun-
cil meetings, bingo parlors, classrooms and
tribal meetings. I’ve encouraged and ca-
joled people. I’ve held the most fragile ego
and drawn out the shiest person. For every-
one, I’ve wanted their experiences (first and
probably last) with a film to be a good one.
For them to feel proud of what they did and
of how they tried. I wanted them to feel part
of the story being told about their people
or their town. I hope to have always done
right by them.
 John Sayles’s films speak to people. Po-
litical activists love how Matewan contex-
tualizes history. Gays and lesbians felt their
story was finally and honestly told in Lianna.
For many African Americans, seeing The
Brother From Another Planet was a seminal
moment. For me it was City of Hope. Sayles
sank a hook in me and shook me awake. I
thought, this film is about power and how
it works. Sayles’s films mark our path as we
move through the process of being human.
They capture single moments, periods in
history and geographic transformations.
They take a small relationship and show us
how it is connected to the larger narrative
of life. In this sense, he shows us again and
again, how we are, all of us, no matter how
small, part of the same story.
 
MEN WITH GUNS        great achievement for me. If I do [the visual
I’m in a minibus full of children from San Juan
Babilonia. We are driving them to a nearby lo-
cation to film a scene where they mourn the
deaths of their town leaders who were killed
by the army. The kids are excited to be wind-
ing through the mountains in this bus, and
have their faces pressed against the window.
They are dressed in traditional clothing and
speak to each other in Chol, the language of
their people. At moments, in the music of their
unintelligible words, I hear my brother’s name.
They are talking about my brother David. They
love him. They hang on him and follow him
around their village. I turn in my seat. “Sing a
song for me,” I say in Spanish. “Sing a song for
me in your language.” They giggle and talk to
each other. Then they start to sing. I have nev-
er heard anything so beautiful as their small
voices, the singsong pattern of their words
lifting us up over the green jungle as we rise
out of the clouds and toward the mountains
of Chiapas.  They sing the song over and over
again until we arrive.t
SOMETHING MUST BREAK
from page 77
Annik, did. Yeah, Annik said to me that she
thought that was the most beautiful thing
about the film, that in the afterlife, her char-
acter and Ian Curtis’s character fall in love.
That happened after the film. They’ve [been]
a couple now for a year.
Did you prepare especially for the aspects of
directing you were not so familiar with, like
dealing narrative concerns? Well, in pho-
tographs you tell a story too and in my little
[promo] videos I often make a little story. So
I think that’s something that I’d had some
experience with. How you tell the story was
the most important thing to me, and that was
through the actors and of course your choice of
framing and these kinds of things. But that’s
something I do quite easily, that’s not such a
side] well, it just comes very natural and, of
course, [cinematographer] Martin Ruhe did a
fantastic job. The other things I really had to
work on and I find that a much bigger achieve-
ment for me. To get the actors to do well, that’s
a very proud moment for me.
How did you decide on the look of the film?
At what stage did you decide to shoot in
black and white? Very early on. My own
memory of Joy Division is very black-and-
white because that’s all I shot in those days,
and also the album sleeves were in black-and-
white. The only magazines that published an-
ything on Joy Division were black-and-white
magazines because Joy Division were a cult
band. They didn’t appear in color magazines.
Were you concerned that people who didn’t
know Joy Division’s music wouldn’t appre-
ciate the film so much? No. The thing is it’s
not made for Joy Division fans. I was telling
Ian’s story and Joy Division is connected to
that. I thought if I do justice to Ian it’s going
to be fine from every angle you look at it. I
feel it’s a much broader film than just for peo-
ple who like Joy Division’s music. It’s a sad,
tragic love story.
You said before that you’re perceived as “just
a rock photographer,” but how big a passion
has cinema been in your life? I’m a photogra-
pher and as an artist I make little films and do
graphic design and some stage design and my
photography is quite broad. I’m interested in
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 105
artists, whether it’s musicians or painters, ac-
tors or directors, but I’m interested in people
who make things that I like and rock photog-
raphy is limited by what’s in the picture, not
how you photograph. [As for] cinema, I don’t
think I’ve seen a massive amount of films in
my life. I don’t really know a lot about film
but I’ve always liked [Andrei] Tarkovsky and
I also like [ Jacques] Tati. The Big Lebowski is
one of my favorite films of the Coen brothers. I
like Fargo, I like Blood Simple. I like the Italian
movies of [Federico] Fellini and [Michelange-
lo] Antonioni, and John Cassavetes and [ Jean-
Luc] Godard. I like Martin Scorsese — Taxi
Driver, Mean Streets, Raging Bull — the films
of my generation, as it were.
Were there any films that were particularly
an influence when you were making Control?
No, not really. I didn’t watch any films except
for Ken Loach’s Kes before I made this. I was
quite adamant about not seeing films that I
thought might influence me because I didn’t
want that. I think unconsciously [I was] prob-
ably influenced anyway by some of the people
I mentioned, but then it’s dreamlike. I don’t
think I’ve seen a Tarkovsky movie in the last
10 years, but maybe something of that creeps
into your work.
The film won three prizes when it pre-
miered at Cannes. How have you reacted to
that success? Well, I bought a smaller car! I
bought a hybrid car instead of a big 4x4. But
mentally it’s been great because as much as I
was focused on making the film, I think I was
very unfocused on what happens once you
finish the film, a little innocent to what was
to come. So to be asked to open the Quin-
zaine [The Directors’ Fortnight] at Cannes
was amazing, of course, and then to get the
reaction [the film] did was unexpected for
me. I had no idea that film was such a mas-
sive industry. When you walk in Cannes... in
photography that does not exist, let’s put it
that way! So that really overpowered me, and
it’s just been beautiful. You make the film you
want to make, so you love what you’re do-
ing, and when you send it out into the world
you’re just lucky that people want to see it and
react as well as they do.t
THE HOLLYWOOD LIFE
from page 79
Edge. I was suffering from hypothermia from
being in the lake, I didn’t want my body tem-
perature to drop and I started replaying in my
mind the journey on the road, two days before,
as I was driving up to Canada to make the film.
I slipped back into the minutes of that day. To
106 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
lose contact, to lose one’s mind in that way is a
horrible feeling.
What sort of direction did you give your
d.p., Dante Spinotti, on this film? Did you
work together with him to create a visual
language? Well that was the lucky stroke.
He came on board with such enthusiasm. He
decided that he wanted to [shoot it] digital
in high-definition, and it was quite extraordi-
nary. I’d come up with my camera shots and
he’d looked at them and smile and say, “Well
I think we can do a better shot here.” So I let
him do his thing. And then, in fact, it was
quite interesting because on the third day of
the filming I tore my Achilles tendon. You
know the scene when I’m running around the
corridors of the hospital?
Yes. Well I ripped my Achilles tendon, and
I was in a wheelchair for quite a bit of the
film, until it started to heal. At that time, I
thought, these guys know exactly what they’re
doing, so I’ll just leave it to them and I’d just
come up with some shots.
How did you approach the financing of the
film? We filmed it in two pieces in fact: The
scene in the desert when I meet Kevin McCar-
thy, we filmed that previously, a year ago last
February, because we had a producer who said
that he wanted to put up the money and then
changed his mind. So my wife and I decided
to put up some cash to shoot that week’s film-
ing just because Kevin is in his nineties. And
then after the wrap, we thought, where do we
go from here? We went through about three
or four different sources of money, producers
who gave us a smile and then said they want-
ed final cut and they wanted to talk about the
script. I said, “No, absolutely not.” I got tired
of talking to those guys. We managed to get
some private financing. Enough said.
How much of the visual scheme of the film,
particularly the optical-dissolve work, and
visual effects, was built into the script? Well
I planned most of that. I wrote copious notes
about what I wanted the effects to be, to flash
back in time, to have 3 or 8 or 25-frame cuts,
and I had an idea of where I was going to in-
sert them. I spent four months with Michael
Miller in the editing room, and Michael, who
has worked with Woody Allen, is a really fine
editor. I said to him, “You have to warn me
if I’m going too far into your ethics and your
integrity as an editor. I don’t want to do any-
thing to damage your reputation.” He just
said, “Whatever you want to do, let’s go for
it.” So we worked together. I said, “I just want
to knock everything on its head, want to tip
everything on its ass.” We had a great time.
Now that you’ve finished the film, what has
the completion of it meant for you, sort of
creatively? What has it meant?
Yes, I mean it’s a huge accomplishment to
direct a film, particularly one that’s not a
conventional film. What does it mean for
you that Slipstream now exists in the world?
As I was writing it I thought, “Well, this is
impossible. Nobody’s going to make a movie
like this. I’m living in a fool’s paradise.” And
as I kept going through it I thought, “Well
there’s nothing wrong with it, I’m just doing
it my way. I know people are not going to un-
derstand it.” I sent it to the various actors, and
people still didn’t get it. Christian Slater got
it, and John Turturro, I think. It was my wife
Stella who said, “Let’s not give up on it.” So
to have accomplished it and to have finished
it, I feel very pleased because it’s my movie.
I think, “Well, we did it.” And I’m thrilled.
I did it for my own pleasure really — for my
own insightful pleasure. Slipstream is my view
of the world.t
...AND NOTHING
BUT THE TRUTH?
from page 91
these attacks still sting to this day.
“Kael’s review was terrible, terrible,” mutters
Maysles. “The whole basis of the article was
that everything in the movie was staged. And
in trying to support that argument, which is un-
supportable, by the way, she also said that Paul
Brennan [from Maysles’s Salesman] wasn’t really
a Bible salesman. That we got him to play the
part. And that’s just provably false.”
Kael’s attacks are hauntingly similar to
those absorbed by Jennifer Venditti almost
40 years later. Because the Rolling Stones
had paid the Maysles Brothers to produce a
concert documentary, she assumed they were
intimately related to the events themselves:
“If events are created to be photographed,
is the movie that records them a documen-
tary, or does it function in a twilight zone? Is
it the cinema of fact when the facts are manu-
factured for the cinema...? It doesn’t look so
fraudulent if a director excites people to com-
mit violent acts on camera.”
The ironic thing is that in the end, docu-
mentary filmmakers are very much like writ-
ers, some hewing to a more formal nonfiction
style like Ken Burns, while others join Morgan
Spurlock (Super Size Me) and Ross McElwee
(Bright Leaves) on the New Journalism train.
Both writers and doc-makers take material
from real life and observation and cull out the
moments that resonate to them in some way
and then situate those moments in a story. In
fact probably the most interesting rumination
on documentary film in recent times was the
film Capote, through which Truman Capote’s
relationship with a killer delved into all of the
internal conflict and subsequent external at-
tacks a doc-maker braces themselves for.
Judy Irving, the director of the antinuke
doc Dark Circle, which spent several years
blacklisted from PBS for its “subjectivity,” has
another take on credibility attacks:
“When someone throws that at you, like
that your film does not have journalistic in-
tegrity, or it’s not objective, what they’re really
saying is ‘I don’t agree with you. My subjec-
tivity is different from your subjectivity and I
wish you had portrayed what I feel about the
subject rather than what you feel.’”
Red Herrings
“I’m not a journalist, I’m a filmmaker,” says
Irving. “I’ve got a strong point of view, and I
got that point of view by studying the issue
of nuclear power for 10 years, for God’s sake.
If you don’t develop opinions about issues,
you’re brain dead.”
I remember one otherwise positive festival
review of Girls Rock! said pejoratively that
“Filmmakers Arne Johnson and Shane King
have an agenda,” and I wondered at the time
how to make a film without one. Were we al-
ways going to dance between people who felt
we were hiding our agenda and others who
felt it was too open? That doesn’t mean, of
course, that Shane and I won’t always make
films with an eye toward truth and accuracy,
because that really IS our agenda.
“You are trying to create a truth on film,”
says Irving, “but it’s a different kind of truth
from the mundane minute-by-minute truth
we all live. If we had to watch that on the
screen, we’d all go nuts.”
“With all due respect to Haskell Wexler,”
says Green, talking gingerly and thoughtfully
through this philosophical minefield, “I don’t
agree with the notion that it’s all fiction. That
might be the way media-savvy people think of
them, but that’s not the way audiences watch
documentaries. People think they’re true. And
I do feel there are certain kinds of truth that
are important for society. Those kinds of truths
were ignored in the run up to the Iraq war, and
look what happened. The postmodern idea that
there is no truth, I don’t agree with that, and it
can lead to terrible things. There are things that
are true, and the stakes are really high.”
“At the end of the day,” says Morgan Spur-
lock, “ethically, you have no one to see in the
mirror but yourself. The more you can be
honest with yourself, the better your movies
are going to be.”t
CAMERA TEST
from page 92
In retrospect, as happy as I was with the
end result, the HPX was probably the wrong
camera for what I did — it’s just too big and
heavy. A shot like this would’ve worked bet-
ter with an HVX. But, I suppose, since they
both record the same P2 DVCPRO HD, the
ideal independent production might involve
both cameras. The HPX, with its adjustable
lenses, might make better sense for the bulk
of principle photography on a project, with
the HVX picking up the slack where greater
mobility or guerrilla methods are required.
Although the HPX, with its four 16GB
P2 slots, has plenty of storage capacity, dur-
ing the shoot I kept wondering why P2 cards
are even necessary and haven’t been replaced
by internal hard drives that can offer even
greater memory.
To answer that question, four days after the
shoot, I retired my old DVX for a brand new
HVX — only instead of getting it with P2
cards, I opted for a 100GB FS-100 FireStore
drive. Aside from the extra memory, the FS-
100 allows me to record my footage directly
to Quicktime without any translation; it plugs
into my Mac as any FireWire hard drive
would, and I can simply click and drag the
QT files right into a folder on my desktop.
Now I just have to arrange for UPS to pick
up that big-ass metal case from my floor.
See Jamie Stuart’s test footage from the
Panasonic AG-HPX500P at filmmakerma-
gazine.com/cameratest.php.
THE POWERS THAT BE
from page 94
ery studio will either be in production or about
to go into production. Actors will know their
schedules. As the spring unfolds, actors will
become available again and, if a strike is still
on the horizon, there won’t be new studio pro-
ductions for them to move onto. Indies — es-
pecially those with brave private financing and
without bond companies worried about sched-
ule overruns taking the shoot past the strike
date — could make actor offers in March and
be pleasantly surprised by the results. If, after
going down to the wire, a strike doesn’t happen,
or even if it’s over very quickly, all the studios
will have blown their annual budgets by the
deadline. Indie producers might be the only
ones fishing in a suddenly flooded talent pool.
Even if there is a strike, there may even be
opportunities for indies able to play fast and
loose with their schedules. Levy-Hinte re-
members producing Lisa Cholodenko’s Lau-
rel Canyon in the midst of a previous SAG
strike in summer 2000. Levy-Hinte brazenly
scheduled the film to start that September.
“We figured that the strike would be over by
then, and of course no studio can take that
kind of risk. Consequently we got the absolute
best crew in Los Angeles for that movie.”
As always, creative producers will find a
way to find water in the desert. And even sev-
eral months of work stoppage won’t shut the
movie business down forever. But what the
unions and the studios are (and should be)
worried about is how the majority of work-
ers in the film industry are going to earn a
living in this new media world. Bob Berney
observes that this strike is just the first spark
of a much bigger fire: “Everyone learned from
VCRs and DVDs that you can really miss out
if you don’t try to control the universe.”t
PLAY AGAIN
from page 96
elements of the game play and also holds a
number of hidden clues.
MOBILE COMMUNICATION: Characters call
and text audience members.
The Hope is Missing MIG was developed
for less than $1,000. It started by crafting the
game play and pitch. We built a pitch deck to
convey our concept and then targeted outlets
that could assist us with reaching a wider audi-
ence. To view a version of the Hope is Missing
pitch deck visit workbookproject.com/mig.
In the end we assembled an impressive
number of outlets and promotional partners:
MySpace, Stage 6, Xbox, Eyespot, Twitter
and Opera Mobile. This not only increased
our reach but also created an effective national
promotion for Head Trauma.
VOD releases tend to be fragmented due to
the number of varying outlets. A unified pro-
motional push can be difficult and costly. The
MIG concept will allow us to reach an audi-
ence of more than 30 million people, and our
promotional partners provided over $400,000
in placements across their networks and sites.
Once we had the commitment from the pro-
motional partners we were able to leverage ad-
ditional deals for the film and better placement
within VOD catalogs. Over the coming months
we will have a better understanding of the exact
conversion rates of players to VOD purchases
but we are seeing value from our efforts already.
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 107

New Streams Of Revenue
The other element of a MIG that is exciting
for independent filmmakers is that you can
creatively build a game around your film,
building and testing new storylines and prop-
erties in the process. For instance the Hope is
Missing MIG has lead to a number of high-
level discussions about turning the concept
into a fully funded, ongoing Web series.
 After the Head Trauma cinema game ex-
periments my whole focus around story has
changed. I am now considering creating a
world around each of my works — worlds that
can cross devices, platforms and audiences. In
fact, I have been writing game bibles (which
overviews games and their rules) at the same
time that I am scripting.  two carpet installers who “escape” the family
SAMPLES:
Hope Is Missing (hopeismissing.blogspot.
com): Promotion for Head Trauma.
ARGnet (argn.com): A comprehensive site
covering all things ARG.
World Without Oil (worldwithoutoil.org):
Ken Eklund’s social conscious ARG about
an oil shock.
Super Columbine Massacre (columbine-
game.com): Controversial RPG.
Cloverfield (1-18-08.com): Promotion for
the upcoming J.J. Abrams film.
Eldrich Errors (eldritcherrors.com): Interest-
ing horror ARG.
Perplex City (perplexcity.com): Immersive ARG
dealing with murder, intrigue and conspiracy. The
first season concluded and a second season is in
the works.t
SUPPORT GROUP
from page 98
emphasize the emotional discord of those
scenes. Three months later, we have a cut that
is tighter, more focused, more uncompromis-
ing in its vision and in a better position to
represent its distinctiveness in the market-
place.”
Alex Karpovsky directed General Impression
of Size and Shape, a genre-challenging story
about the hunt for The Ivory-Billed Wood-
pecker in eastern Arkansas. Editing issues
were also paramount for Karpovsky as he and
his editor had been wrestling with “act two is-
sues” for months. “My editor and I had slipped
deep into the murky twilight where perspective
and conviction begin to fade,” he said. “Having
two great editors at the Lab lend fresh eyeballs
and neurons to our little struggle, we were able
to talk specifically and tangibly about ways to
108 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
feather the birdwatcher into our story. Basi-
cally, we broke down the main birdwatcher’s
character arc into very broad and simple steps
— a process that, again, my editor and I had
trouble doing because of how close we had
gotten to the footage. Then we outlined the
main beats of the plot and discussed it. In a
way, it was kind of like psychoanalysis. Instead
of unloading a bunch of new ideas on how to
actually implement this or structure that, it was
more of them breaking things down into very
clear and straightforward terms and allowing
us to view them from a new and less cluttered
perspective; one that was much lighter on as-
sociations, stress, fatigue and doubt.”
Marco Ricci and Michael Canzoniero di-
rected The Marconi Bros., a comedy about
business for the comparatively more glamor-
ous world of wedding videographers. The Lab
helped them resolve issues brought up by an
overpowering temp score. “By removing the
temp score, we noticed audiences beginning
to discover our characters in a much deeper
way,” Canzoniero says. “As it often happens in
the post production process we had become so
familiar with our dailies that we assumed that
everyone was catching all the comedic nuances
in Dan Fogler’s performance and yet, as soon
as we removed the music, test audiences were
catching beats that previously had been lost in
the pace of the score.”
Chris Bower’s Moon Europa is an intriguing
and visually arresting science-fiction tale set
in a ravaged, depleted future. “I finished the
IFP Rough Cut Lab on June 14 and locked
picture on August 31,” he says. “It was sad to
let my film go, make that final edit.” A fan of
composer Danna’s work before entering the
Lab, Bower says his guidance was invaluable.
“Moon Europa is unique in that we have mul-
tiple composers attached to the project,” he
says. “Mychael took the time to help us focus
on maintaining creative continuity through-
out the entire picture and offered suggestions
on which composer should take the lead.
After the Lab we took his insights into our
process and moved forward with finishing the
composition.”
Philadelphia-based Tom Quinn directed
The New Year Parade, a drama about the ef-
fect of divorce on adult children set against the
backdrop of the city’s annual Mummer’s Pa-
rade. Again, Hoffman’s and Williams’s help in
clarifying storytelling goals was the director’s
big gain. “Essentially, The New Year Parade is
built on five elements: son, daughter, father,
mother and Mummery, one of America’s old-
est folk traditions rooted in Philadelphia,”
Quinn explains. “Kate and Sabine correctly
defined the parents as ‘triggers’ for the son
and daughter’s conflicts. While this may seem
obvious, and was of course designed in the
writing process, I learned the importance of
boiling complex story elements to a carefully
chosen word. In his book Kazan: The Master
Director Discusses His Films, Jeff Young sug-
gests Terry Malloy’s objective in the first scene
of On the Waterfront is to get Joey Doyle on
the roof. Kazan corrects him, stating his objec-
tive is to follow orders. That seemingly minor
shift reframes the whole scene for an actor.
Here too, by defining the parents as ‘triggers’ I
could better decide which moments were most
important and how to weave them around the
son and daughter.”
Oklahoma-based Beau Leland and Kevin
Ely directed Rainbow Around the Sun, a full-
on musical centered around a hard-drinking,
talented songwriter dealing with the impend-
ing death of his father. Leland says the Lab
helped the two of them to figure out how to
unite the musical and dramatic sections of
their film. “We were advised by Danna to lay
a continual bed of underscoring in between
musical numbers so that the presence of mu-
sic was constant,” he reports. “We took this
advice and hired the original arranger of the
film’s source music to create original scor-
ing appropriate for each dialogue sequence.”
Adds Ely, the criticism the two received at
the Lab ‘was tough to hear,’ but the feedback
resulted in two newly written and shot scenes
and a “more cohesive film.”
Jason Cuadrado’s Tales from the Dead is a
Japanese-language horror anthology made,
ambitiously, as an L.A. independent film.
Cuadrado says that the Lab helped him “in-
spire a post strategy.” He relates, “We prob-
ably made more mistakes that anyone else
when deciding how to complete the film
with no money. We had tried to partner with
a production company/distributor to pay
for post in exchange for a percentage of the
film’s ownership. That didn’t work. Then we
attempted to partner with a post house of-
fering the same deal. No dice. It was only
after the Lab that we went across the street
to eat tapas and sketch out a plan to do it
ourselves. Within two months, we had raised
just enough money to hire some very talented,
very generous artisans to give it the kind of
polish the rough cut needed to look, sound
and feel like a solid film.”
Finally, Georgina Lightning’s Older Than
America, a tale of the supernatural set in a Na-
tive American boarding house, used the Lab
to strategize festival strategy as well as the
DIY outreach possible for a film with strong
Native American subject matter.t
INDUSTRY BEAT
from page 24
she says, will admit that 14 theaters in 10 cit-
ies is a lot to commit to.
There’s also the ongoing question as to
which venues are eligible for the rollout. Acad-
emy rules state that theaters must “show new
releases,” “charge admission” and “generally run
films for three to seven consecutive days, with
multiple showings daily,” but such regulations
are still vague enough to cause confusion.
“They’ve set up an impossible system in
which it is up to filmmakers and venues to
determine whether or not a particular ven-
ues meets these criteria,” says documaker AJ
Schnack, who is qualifying his doc Kurt Co-
bain: About a Son. “A far better system would be
for the Academy to officially recognize certain
venues and to post these locations publicly.”
Another challenge is that docs who make
it as far as the Academy shortlist must also
supply two 35mm prints just two weeks after
the announcement is made. “It’s a big rush,”
says Stern. “At a minimum that is going to
cost you $35,000 to $40,000.”
“This is clearly meant to eliminate films
that are primarily broadcast in their origin
and their expected destiny,” says Urman. But
the irony, he points out, is that “broadcasters
are so rich that they are among the few that,
without regard to box office, can underwrite
this.” Therefore, he argues, the new regulations
actually make it especially difficult for small
theatrical distributors — the very folks that
put docs in theaters. “I can play the majority of
the markets and a greater number of second-
ary and tertiary markets without ever going to
35mm. To be forced to do so, at a point where
you don’t know anything, is onerous.”
Another oft-cited catch-22 is the fact that
broadcasters, who require broadcasts that
would disqualify a film, are the backers of
most documentary films. This year, one much-
loved documentary, Pernille Rose Gronkjaer’s
The Monastery: Mr. Vig and the Nun, for ex-
ample, winner of Grand Jury Prizes at both
IDFA and Full Frame, has been disqualified
after a broadcast on Belgian television. 
Despite all these Byzantine rules and limi-
tations, however, documentary makers say
they’re still going “to go through whatever
hoops to qualify,” says Leifer. “We feel that
the Academy is a real useful tool. It’s a long
FILMMAKER FALL 2007 109
shot, it’s high-risk and it’s expensive, but it’s
worth it for the cause and the kids.”
As IDA’s Ruchs says, “Filmmakers who
decide to do nonfiction are unstoppable.”t
FEST CIRCUIT
from page 29
Paranoid Park, a combo of a skateboard movie
110 FILMMAKER FALL 2007
and coming-of-age film with a soupçon of
thriller, is a wondrous, dynamic collaboration
between the director and Hong Kong-based
d.p. Christopher Doyle. I have never seen a
film like Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’s
sublime Silent Light, a modern-day version of
The Scarlet Letter set among the antimodern
Mennonites, Europeans who inhabit a sizable
portion of Chihuahua, Mexico.
Guy Maddin’s fanciful My Winnipeg, in
which he projects all his feelings about his
Canadian hometown and family onto hilari-
ous mythic, scatological, and historic imagery,
is anything but a conventional documentary
(Canada’s Documentary Channel funded it).
And the hypnotic I’m Not There, Todd Haynes’s
impressionistic survey of Bob Dylan’s life, is
like no other film I’ve ever seen. Six actors suc-
cessfully play the musician’s various personas.
Damn, I did not accomplish my task of
imposing an order on the films I’m writing
about. Guess that rules out a burger — and
a freshly grilled one at that. On the plus side,
however, part of the fun and the challenge of
a festival as large and diverse as Toronto lies
in discovering movies that you can not totally
wrap your head around. That’s what makes
the journey especially worthwhile.
Venice Film Festival
Belle N. Burke
One of the best things about the 64thVenice
Film Festival (August 29 - September 8) was
its selection of films examining humankind at
its worst, a subject that’s usually anathema at
the box office. Among U.S. entries in compe-
tition, Redacted won both audience applause
and the Silver Lion for best director to Brian
De Palma, and a collateral award went to Paul
Haggis for In the Valley of Elah. Both films
open a window onto the horrors of the war
in Iraq.  Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World..., about
the exploitation of illegal immigrants in Eng-
land, won for best screenplay. La Graine et Le
Mulet, by Abdellatif Kechiche that was con-
sidered a front-runner for the Golden Lion,
deals with the difficulties faced by a Magreb
family in the south of France and features an
appealing newcomer, Hafsia Herzi, who won
the Marcelleo Mastroianni award for best
young actor.   One of my regrets is that there was too little
But giving Ang Lee his second Golden
Lion in three years for Lust, Caution, an ex-
tremely unpopular choice, was difficult to un-
derstand given the quality of films seen here.
12, the latest film by the great Russian director
Nikita Mikhalkov, based on the same theme
as Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men, was so impres-
sive that many thought it deserved the Golden
Lion. Instead a Special Lion “for his entire
body of work” was created for the director.
Even Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream
(shown out of competition, standard practice
for him) is dark, as were many others, from
Kenneth Branagh’s new version of Sleuth to
Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, a grim story in
which George Clooney plays his first bad guy.
Rodrigo Plá, making his directorial debut with
La Zona, about what ensues when some poor
kids get into a locked and guarded enclave for
the rich in Mexico City, delivers a powerful
message about the price of privilege.
The much-touted The Assassination of Jesse
James by the Coward Robert Ford fell flat for its
static quality, length, portentous voice-overs
and overreliance on scenery. Brad Pitt was
not a popular choice winning Best Actor at
the fest, while Casey Affleck as Robert Ford
was hailed enthusiastically as a new discovery.
Cate Blanchett won Best Actress for por-
traying a Dylan-inspired character in Todd
Haynes’s film I’m Not There. 
Speaking of choices, the festival jury was
composed entirely of directors, which raises an
interesting point: Would they have been apt
to sympathize with the directors of films they
were judging, or was there more of an “I would
have done that differently” attitude?  It was a
high-level serious jury in any case, deliberating
the award selections for nine hours.
Amid the many interesting sidebars,
retrospectives and tributes: Bernardo Berto-
lucci, somewhat infirm but with wonderful
memories of past Venice festivals, was pres-
ent to receive a special Golden Lion for his
career, to see several of his films screened
and to present awards to directors Abbas
Kiarostami and Jonathan Demme (here with
Man from Plains, shown in the Orizzonti
section). Tim Burton, one of the heroes of
the festival, was the recipient of a career
Golden Lion presented by Johnny Depp. 
Quentin Tarantino, who appeared in Ta-
kashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django, was
the subject of constant rumors about his
much-awaited arrival in Venice, where he is
greatly admired — he’s coming, he’s not com-
ing — until he sent his regrets due to illness.
time to catch up on the retrospective of the
Spaghetti Westerns, narrowed down to 32
titles chosen by various directors, as well as
the opportunity to see the final cut of Ridley
Scott’s Blade Runner.
There may have been no uncontested mas-
terpieces in Venice, but the choices made this
year of new films from Eric Rohmer (Les
Amours d’Astree et de Celadon), Claude Chab-
rol (La Fille Coupee en Deux), Peter Greenaway
(Nightwatching), Wes Anderson (The Darjeel-
ing Limited and companion short Hotel Cheva-
lier), Julian Schnabel (Lou Reed’s Berlin), Amos
Gitai (Disengagement), and old films ( John
Ford’s The Iron Horse, for example) produced
a serious festival which did not make conces-
sions to the flavor of the month or ephemeral
glamour, as indicated by the preponderance
of male actors and the lack of standard love
stories. Though the three Italian films entered
in competition failed to impress even the Ital-
ian critics, there were no recriminations. Ven-
ice appears to be on a good track, with noth-
ing to fear from the new Rome Film Festival
(the second one will take place in October) or
Cannes, and is poised to continue growing,
indicated by a symbolic wrecking ball on the
front of the Palazzo del Cinema as a sign of the
larger, improved facilities to come.
Edinburgh International
Film Festival
Nick Dawson
Though Venice and Cannes are older, the
Edinburgh International Film Festival (Au-
gust 15-26) has the distinction of being the
world’s longest continually running film fes-
tival. It has always been a vibrant event taking
place each August, a time when Scotland’s
capital is already buzzing with the presence
of the International, Fringe, Jazz and Book
festivals. Greatly loved by both filmmakers
and ticket buyers, the question in recent years
has been why EIFF’s profile as a film festival
has not been greater. Some years ago, the an-
swer was that stars were unwilling or unable
to make the trek to Scotland. More recently,
the revival of the Cambridge Film Festival,
with its July slot, and the London Film Fes-
tival’s move from November to October fur-
ther limited the ability of Edinburgh (already
right before Telluride, Venice and Toronto) to
get the films it wanted.
It was therefore totally understandable that,
just before this year’s 61st edition of the festi-
val, new artistic director Hannah McGill an-
nounced that the festival had decided to move
to a slot in June. McGill explained this change
would “give us the breathing space to expand
and create our own distinct identity, allowing
us to further develop our reputation as one of
the world’s most innovative, cutting-edge and
challenging annual film events. Logistically,
a June event is also better placed in the ever-
crowded international film festival calendar.”
Edinburgh has always prided itself on
championing new British talent and premier-
ing a slew of both commercial and more left
field movies by U.K. filmmakers, but this year’s
selection was the weakest in memory. Anton
Corbijn’s superlative film about Joy Division
singer Ian Curtis, Control, stood head and
shoulders above every other homegrown en-
try and rightfully took home the awards for
both Best British Film and Best Performance,
which went to exceptional debutant Sam Ri-
ley for his turn as Curtis. Scot David Mack-
enzie’s spirited Hallam Foe opened the festival
with aplomb, but the only other British film
(of the 12 there) that really stood out was the
unsentimental but highly affecting doc, We
Are Together, about a home for AIDS orphans
in South Africa. Directed by first timer Paul
Taylor, it played late in the festival and stole
the Audience Award out from under the nose
of Brad Bird’s Ratatouille.
The heartening thing is that next year, Mc-
Gill and EIFF will have two months more
of British films to choose from in order to
strengthen what was the only weak strand of
this year’s festival. Edinburgh has always catered
to all tastes, putting starry gala lineups along-
side a large selection of films by first- and sec-
ond-time directors, new films by old masters, a
strong documentary selection, experimental and
music-themed strands, a retrospective (this time
of Anita Loos movies) and special events (the
screening of all 14 hours of Fassbinder’s Berlin
Alexanderplatz was the highlight of 2007).
Edinburgh has also always traditionally
been a place for stumbling across great un-
discovered or underappreciated treasures. For
example, In Search of a Midnight Kiss (directed
by one of our “25 New Faces,” Alex Hold-
ridge) was a surprise hit, and even sold out
its Best of the Fest extra screening ahead of
heavyweight encore movies like Death Proof.
Equally, Canadian Catherine Martin’s brave,
beautiful take on urban malaise, In the Cities,
was a revelation, as was the playful and pro-
found literary confection Lovely by Surprise, a
brilliantly original debut by Kirt Gunn, one
of the most exciting prospects working in
American indie cinema. Other debuts that
had already won high-profile festival awards,
Jennifer Venditti’s SXSW-winning doc Billy
the Kid (another 25 New Face) and Lucia
Puenzo’s XXY (which won the Grand Prize
at Cannes’ Critics Week), also took home
prizes here at an awards ceremony marked
by enthusiasm and optimism for the future.
Next year, Edinburgh’s new time slot should
provide a stronger lineup than ever.t
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Hollywood Film Festival .................................... 93
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IFP Gotham Awards ............................................ 99
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LA 411 Publishing .................... Back Inside Cover
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Los Angeles Film School .................................... 33
Lowel-Lite Manufacturing, Inc. .................. 27
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Nashville Film Festival ....................................... 89
NBC Universal Media Works ............................ 85
New School University ....................................... 45
NewYork Film Academy ..................................... 31
NewYork University ............................................ 23
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Panasonic Broadcast .......... Front Inside Cover
PayReel / Crew Connection ............................ 85
Reiff & Associates ............................................... 88
San Antonio Film Commission ......................... 51
San Luis Obispo Film Festival ........................... 58
Saul Zaentz Center / Wareham ....................... 84
Screen Actors Guild - SAG Indie ........................ 21
Sony Media Software .......................................... 9
SUNY / Purchase ............................................... 49
SXSW - South by Southwest Festival .............. 65
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The Writers’Store ................................................ 43
Tucson Film Office .............................................. 77
Visual Products, Inc. .......................................... 105
Business Card Ads are on pages 108, 109, 110
For more information on advertising,
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FILMMAKER FALL 2007 111
 parting
shot

PHOTO BY: HENNY GARFUNKEL/RETNA LTD.

JAVIER BARDEM
We always knew Javier Bardem could immerse himself in a character. In his Oscar-nominated
performance as the gay Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls he seduced
us with a sense of revolutionary abandon before devastating us with his forceful yet futile battle with
death. As the quadriplegic Roman Sampedro in The Sea Inside, he gave one of the most moving and
heralded performances of 2004. But playing Anton Chigurth — a sadistic killer who literally plays
heads or tails with his potential victims to decide their fate in the Coen brothers’ latest No Country
For Old Men — Bardem puts aside his good looks, glowing smile and normally friendly persona. As
a dead-pan psychopath out for blood money, Bardem’s tour de force performance arguably creates
the most deranged character in any Coens film to date. And Oscar just may be eyeing him again
because of it. — Jason Guerrasio

112 FILMMAKER FALL 2007

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