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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, April 15th, 2006 - Comments Off on Making good movies is as good as it gets: Denis Tanovic
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Making good movies is as good as it gets: Denis Tanovic

Oscar-winning Danis Tanovic talks to the Telegraph’s SF Said about adapting Kieslowski‘s adaptation of Dante’s “Inferno”: “Tanovic emerged from the war as a fully formed filmmaker… “My documentaries won prizes, but nobody watched them, because they were documentaries,” the 37-year-old director tells Said. “I felt an urge to make movies that people would see, because I was angry about Bosnia. So I sat down and wrote. Ten days later, the script for No Man’s Land was written… lenferttanovic15623454.jpg“I think the basic difference between East and West… is that the West concentrates on form. Having too much money, you concentrate on how to do things. Not having money, you concentrate on content. For people in the East, it’s the story that counts more than anything.” Given this lineage, it’s fitting that Tanovic’s latest film, Hell, is based on Kieslowski’s final, unfinished project… [W]hen he died in 1996, he was developing another trilogy for young filmmakers to direct, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell and Purgatory. “I think we live in terrible times. We lost the spiritual dimension of our lives; the world is messed up. We live in such an egoistic society. Nobody gives anything any more. The Spanish Civil War would be finished in two weeks today, because nobody would go to defend Spain—that’s what our world has become. It’s almost impossible to love and be loved in this world.” … Although Tanovic respects Kieslowski, if he has a role model, it would more likely be Milos Forman…. “When you watch Forman’s first works… compared with the movies he made when he came to America, or the films he is making today – they are all completely different. You never know what is coming next, but they are all great movies. That is what I wish for myself: to make good movies. That is as good as it gets.”

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon