Author Archive

The Gronvall Report: Kim Novak on Being Kim Novak

Monday, September 14th, 2015

Hollywood in the 1950s was both the right and wrong place and time for being Kim Novak. It was the right spot and moment for ingénue model Marilyn Pauline Novak to be groomed, promoted, and zealously protected by Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn as his answer to 20th Century-Fox’s Marilyn Monroe. But by the time he died in 1958, the first tremors of America’s postwar youthquake rocked  Hollywood, and the high-gloss, sophisticated adult pictures that Novak made under his aegis were fading away. Although in real life she was more comfortable in California’s counterculture, her professional roots were in the studio system, and her transition in the 1960s to a changing industry landscape was not smooth.

Novak has retreated from the business a couple of times, but it does look as though at 82 she has finally given up acting. Still, she enjoys public appearances and the interviews entailed. The memories of drubbings some critics gave her continue to sting, but it’s a mystery (to me, at any rate) why she was so savaged. Go back and look at the body of her work at Columbia from 1954 to 1962: at least half-a-dozen of her pictures are standouts. Hers is a memorable presence, beginning with Pushover [1954], the first of four pictures she would do with director Richard Quine. In that tense and compact noir, she she’s a soft-on-the-outside, steely-on-the-inside femme fatale who double-crosses her gangster lover with an undercover Los Angeles detective (Fred MacMurray). Joshua Logan’s Picnic [1955], based on William Inge’s play, was her breakout film; it showcased her in a completely different role, as a sweet, genuine teen swept off her feet by a restless ladies’ man (William Holden) who passes through her small Kansas town.

Also for Columbia, she held her own opposite Frank Sinatra in Otto Preminger’s The Man With the Golden Arm [1955], based on Nelson Algren’s gritty novel about drug addiction, and co-starred with Frederic March in Delbert Mann’s prestigious Middle of the Night [1959], which was in competition for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. And in Quine’s Strangers When We Meet [1960}, cool reserve masks the unhappiness of her neglected suburban housewife and ambivalence over her affair with a neighboring architect (Kirk Douglas).

For my money, her most enduring picture at Columbia is Quine’s Bell, Book and Candle [1958], about witches passing as Greenwich Village beatniks and bohemians. James Stewart got top billing, but it’s Novak’s film; she’s at her most sultry and subtly comic, shining amid a terrific ensemble that includes Jack Lemmon, Elsa Lanchester, Hermione Gingold and Ernie Kovacs. But she will always be best known for the first film she made with Stewart, when Cohn loaned her to Paramount to play a murdered socialite and the woman who impersonates her in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo [1958]. Although it didn’t do great box office during its original release, the film steadily gained acclaim over subsequent decades, eventually in 2012 toppling (after 50 years) Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane to lead the annual “Sight & Sound” poll as the best film ever made.

Born in Chicago of Czech descent, Novak has, over the years, made trips back to the Midwest to visit family. On her most recent return she was the featured guest of Chicago Prague Days, where she met her fans at a screening of Vertigo. She graciously sat down with me to recall her time in Hollywood.

 

Andrea Gronvall: When you were making Vertigo, did you or anybody else involved have any hint that it would be one of the greatest movies of all time?

Kim Novak: No, not a clue. When Harry Cohn loaned me out from Columbia Pictures, he said, “You know, I think it’s a lousy script, but Alfred Hitchcock’s doing it, and I think he’s a good director. So, go ahead.” I liked it, because it was exciting to play a dual role. And I loved getting away from Columbia Pictures, because working for Harry Cohn was not easy. I loved the idea of working with Jimmy Stewart, who I hadn’t worked with before. He turned out to be the best, nicest person I’ve ever worked with. He was so kind and endearing. I always think of him like wearing a pair of morning slippers that you’d had all your life, with that comfortable feeling that made you feel like you wanted to come to work every day, wanted to be with him. The thing that was hard for me to get: he lived in Hollywood all that time. How could he have been such a gentle person, and have lived in Hollywood all his life?

AG: When you first arrived in Hollywood, what was the biggest shock to your system?

KN: The whole thing was just overwhelming to me. It was so foreign. What got to me was that they immediately wanted to change you. They sat me down in the makeup chair, and said, “Okay, here’s what we want to do. Let’s give you a Joan Crawford mouth.” Dark red lips were in fashion, not pale lips. Then they looked at the charts, and picked out the eyebrows of someone else, and so on, to make me over.

AG: Like a composite figure.

KN: Yes, a composite of everything popular then. By the time I was ready for the screen test, I’d lost any resemblance to me; I couldn’t identify with anything. And so, before the cameras started rolling, I ran into the ladies’ room, and smeared off all that I could, to soften as much as I could. Once the cameras rolled, they couldn’t change it, and I think that’s what saved me, what allowed me to keep my own identity. And I insisted on keeping my last name, even though they didn’t want a Middle European name. I think that fighting for those little things helped in the long run. [laughing] Bohemians are known to be stubborn.

AG: In the movie business, you often do have to fight to survive.

KN: But I’m not the fighting type, so I did it sneaky-like.

AG: Well, when you’re an actor, on the screen or on the stage, your job is to embody a character. However, for screen actors who want to be more than character actors, another level to master is molding a film persona. They have to protect those facets unique to them, things that will help distinguish their movie careers.

KN: That’s what we’re talking about, yes: a persona.

AG: And not just actors; for instance, whatever he was like in real life, Hitchcock cultivated an on-camera persona which made his brand instantly recognizable. Somewhere I read that Hitchcock gave you credit for ideas you brought to the film. Is that true?

 

KN: No. Alfred Hitchcock was a brilliant director who knew exactly what he wanted, and did exactly as he wanted. But Otto Preminger did [give me credit], and so did Billy Wilder, and Dick Quine.

AG: Richard Quine was underrated.

KN: He was totally underrated, exactly. And different people I worked with on Middle of the Night, like Paddy Chayefsky, were also open. He was a brilliant writer, but he worked closely with the directors, as a director, even though he was the writer. And he worked with the actors; you could talk with him, and contribute. Paddy Chayefsky was great. I think of his as a director, even though Delbert Mann was the director [on that picture].

AG: You keep up with new movies, right?

KN: Yes, I vote every year. They send me all those videos [Academy screeners].

AG: Surely it hasn’t escaped your attention that there are fewer roles for women now than there used to be, especially for women of a certain age?

KN: I don’t know that there were ever that many roles for women. It’s always easier for a younger woman to get a role. And it’s always easier for a man to get a role.

AG: But more and more A-list actresses are producing their own films in order to ensure a supply of good roles. If you’d committed to that route back in the day, how might your career have looked?

KN: Here’s the thing: Harry Cohn was a difficult man, but he knew the motion picture industry, and knew a good film from a bad film, and what script was good for whom. He was the only one who knew how to run that studio. When he died, there was nobody who knew how to take authority. The studio went to hell because nobody knew how to do anything, other than pick stupid beach party movies. Once he left, I had to leave, too, because they didn’t know what to do with me.

 

AG: So let’s talk about another film that you made [post-Columbia],

Kiss Me, Stupid [1964}. The restored version has been released on DVD by Olive Films, a young company that, coincidentally, is based right here in your hometown. It’s a great restoration, and you look great in it, so it’s hard to understand the controversy surrounding its theatrical release. Could you walk me through that?

 

KN: The Legion of Decency stopped that movie from being released in so many places. I mean it’s unbelievable how they could have considered it scandalous, and I think part of that was about who played the male lead. Ray Walston wound up taking over the role after Peter Sellers suffered heart attacks. And I think if Sellers had been able to complete the movie, they wouldn’t have considered it such a dirty joke. But they felt that Walston seemed too wholesome of a man to have played the part [of a scheming, adulterous song writer]. I really don’t understand why.

 

AG: That movie was ahead of its time, in a meta sort of way, because here was Dean Martin lampooning himself, by playing a version of his nightclub act persona. And Billy Wilder was very caustic in his view of show business.

 

KN: That film really hurt Billy Wilder’s feelings. He got really burned out after that.

 

AG: After what? The battle with the Legion of Decency?

 

KN: Oh, yes, because he had felt wonderful about the film. He was so excited, he already had the script ready for the sequel. He couldn’t believe they were so rejecting of that movie. It really cut him to the quick. But by that time I was burned out, too.

 

I already had left the industry by then, really. I came back to do the film because it was with Billy Wilder. I hadn’t yet read the script. But then I read the script and said, “Oh my God, I am so doomed,” because already critics thought I was a bad actress, and stupid. I said even if I play it right, as a dumb blonde, it’s still a no-win situation for me. And that’s exactly what it was: a no-win situation. No shock for me, but it was for Billy Wilder. For me, it was an “I told you so.”

 

AG: But shortly after that you were back with another film, The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders [U.K., 1965, directed by Terence Young]. Do you remember that movie with more fondness? Because it’s so much fun to watch.

 

KN: Well, [laughing] I had fun on it. I met Richard Johnson. What can I say? I was a Big Sur hippie at the time, and couldn’t keep living in London, so we stayed married for less than a year. But we remained good friends. You know, he passed away very recently. We spent half an hour on the phone together just a few days before he passed. We stayed close all the way to the end.

 

AG: Looking back now at your career, what was it like be Kim Novak?

 

KN: What was it like? Lonely. Lonely, because I felt isolated from everybody else, because I wasn’t like anyone else in Hollywood. So nobody else really hung out with me, because I was different. I was independent. I felt like a misfit, but at the same time I felt that I had to stand up for what I believed in.

 

AG: That may have been a sad experience, but it was part of what made you a singular actress.

 

KN: A singular actress, but I was not considered a good actress, because I didn’t play by the rules. But to me, being a good actress is being honest.

 

AG: But maybe that’s why a number of your films still stand up: because you were honest, because there was a naturalism there that feels contemporary when we watch these movies today. Take Vertigo: San Francisco doesn’t look like that anymore, and the clothes and cars are of the period, but in his day there wasn’t a more naturalistic actor than Jimmy Stewart.

 

KN: That’s it! That’s right! Jimmy Stewart was the same way. I always say, “I’m not an actor, I’m a reactor.” And Jimmy Stewart was the same. That’s why we were such a good pair, because we reacted off of each other. Kirk Douglas [while making Strangers When We Meet] used to say, “Kimela, let me help you, because your rhythm isn’t always good. I’ll set your pace for you. Look into my eyes and follow my rhythm.” [She mimics Douglas’s darting eyes.] And I didn’t want to look at him while he was standing off-camera, because I didn’t want him giving me rhythm lessons. I’d rather look at the wall offstage than at someone who was being theatrical.

 

THE GRONVALL REPORT: Aviva Kempner Talks ROSENWALD

Thursday, August 27th, 2015

Rosenwald

 

 

Before screening Rosenwald, the new documentary by Aviva Kempner (The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg), I had never heard of Julius Rosenwald. Sure, I was familiar with the retail giant he helped build—Chicago-based Sears, Roebuck & Company—mostly because it offered household appliances and auto tires at the best price, in the days before big-box discounters. But as for the front-office titan who died in 1932, how many today know that he was equally (if not more) important as an early trailblazer in the American civil rights movement? More folks below the Mason-Dixon line than above, I’m guessing.

Rosenwald’s life story is the embodiment of the American dream. The son of a German-Jewish immigrant peddler, Julius was born in 1862 in Springfield, Illinois, and grew up across the street from Abraham Lincoln’s residence. In New York he learned the clothing trade, then moved to Chicago to open his own business. Not long afterwards he joined Sears, rising rapidly as he grew its core mail-order business. By 1925 he had ushered the firm into the retail department store marketplace. Along the way he and the company, which he helped take public, became very wealthy.

But Rosenwald had a vision not only for business, but for the wider world as well. Inspired by his progressive Reform rabbi, the influential Emil G. Hirsch, Julius developed a passion for social justice, especially on behalf of blacks persecuted in the Jim Crow South and marginalized in the segregated Northern cities to which they fled. His first major philanthropic efforts raised money to build YMCAs and YWCAs across the country for job-seeking African-American migrants. After meeting Booker T. Washington, Rosenwald undertook a long campaign to build over 5,300 schools in the South for black children shut out of white schools. The Julius Rosenwald Fund also gave rise to a fellowship fund that financially supported many struggling black artists, including Marian Anderson, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence.

I caught up with Washington, D.C.-based director Kempner during her recent trip to Los Angeles, where Rosenwald was previewed both at the Museum of Tolerance and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in advance of its Los Angeles opening this weekend.

Andrea Gronvall: What is your working method? Do you do purely research first, or do you add to your researches as time goes on? How do you target your interview subjects, and how much travel does it take to recruit all these talking heads? There are over 60 in your film.

Aviva Kempner: I’m very lucky; in all my films there were several books already written, so that helps a lot. Here there were books by [Julius’ grandson and biographer] Peter Ascoli, Stephanie Deutsch, and Julian Bond, consultants who agreed to be in the film. [Washington Post columnist and Rosenwald school alumnus] Eugene Robinson is a friend from D.C. Through another friend I got to Maya Angelou, and on a hunch I contacted the office of Representative John Lewis. If I had all the production money up front, I would have done this continuously. But I’d get funding, then I’d film, then I’d run out of funding and would have to stop. Then I’d get more funding and resume. I’m also lucky that a lot of people who had stories vital to the film live in Washington. Research takes months and months.

When you work 12 years on a film, you want to do everything you can. I couldn’t envision that this film would come out during the summer of all these violent racist attacks across the country.

AG: How you’ve structured the film is interesting, stylistically. The first part, which is primarily about Julius’s early years and rise in business, feels like a time capsule. Since of course there could be no motion picture footage of him when he was younger, you rely on archival print sources, artwork, and some judiciously chosen clips from twentieth century movies and TV shows to paint a picture of his life from around the turn of that century. I recognized The Music Man, The Frisco Kid, Young Mr. Lincoln, and TV’s “Rawhide,” but what other clips did you use?

AK: The feature footage is what costs a lot, but HBO and CBS were wonderful, and didn’t charge me much for clips like “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.” With “Rawhide,” Clint Eastwood has been particularly supportive. One young person who saw the documentary looked at the scene where Gene Wilder’s character gets married in The Frisco Kid and congratulated me on getting my hands on such rare footage. So I guess the fictional feature clips did their job of standing in for actuality footage that never existed! I also found some footage from the National Archives and the Library of Congress; you don’t have to pay rights for footage that’s in the public domain, just [the cost of] transfers.

I’m also pleased with the original animation in the film. My editor, Marian Sears Hunter, has great ideas, and I enjoyed brainstorming with her and our animator, Carol Hilliard. For me, the real point in those early sequences is where we learn how Rabbi Hirsch stressed the importance of healing the world [the Jewish concept of tikkun olam]. We all can’t have the riches of Julius Rosenwald, but we can all do our part to make the world a better place.

AG: So, that first part of the film is akin to Rosenwald’s planting the seeds for what would be an achievement arguably even greater than the soaring fortunes of Sears: Julius’s charitable foundation. Once we get to the story of all those who benefited from the educational, career, and housing opportunities his foundation provided, it’s as though the film blooms, there is such a profusion of colorful life stories.

AK: Thank you. I see the movie in three parts: (1) his early years, business, and what made the man; (2) his partnership with Booker T. Washington and the schools; and (3) the Rosenwald Fund Fellowship Program. What the fellowship fund was really about was how it’s important to support artists of all kinds and stripes [Woody Guthrie was also a fund recipient]. Right now at the Museum of Modern Art there’s an exhibition of works by Jacob Lawrence. His is a great legacy, as is Marion Anderson’s. Yet I have young people here working on the film who didn’t even know who Marion Anderson was.

AG: The mission of your foundation, the Ciesla Foundation, is to produce films about Jewish figures whose fame has perhaps been eclipsed by time.

AK: In Polish “ciesla” means “roof carpenter,” so in a sense it’s symbolic of how I’m trying to build a structure of a film, a story, and to educate people on the topic. I’ve made movies about “under known” Jewish heroes, those who fought against fascism, anti-Semitism, sexism, McCarthyism, and racism.

AG: Your films have played well with Jewish audiences; how will you be getting the word about Rosenwald out to black viewers?

AK: It’s all our common history. I had the honor of presenting the film at a recent NAACP convention, where Julian Bond and Rabbi David Saperstein spoke. I have interns working outreach to churches, colleges, and community institutions. In every city we’re trying to get a coalition of speakers that are representative of the film to speak to audiences. I think of it like a political campaign.

[The great American statesman and civil rights leader Julian Bond passed away on August 15. A former student activist who would later serve in Georgia’s House of Representatives and the Georgia Senate, he was also the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and chairman emeritus of the NAACP. It was Bond who was Kempner’s inspiration for her film, after she heard him speak at Martha’s Vineyard 12 years ago about the impact Julius Rosenwald had on Bond’s own family. May his memory be a blessing.]

 

 

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The Gronvall Report: Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville on BEST OF ENEMIES

Tuesday, August 4th, 2015

5

In this country we have Poet Laureates, but not Pundit Laureates. (At least not yet.) Even if we did, the honor would have originated and ended with William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal, two of the most outspoken of American intellectuals, who rose to prominence in the mid-twentieth century, and were almost unique then in their mastery of both the print and television media. The new documentary Best of Enemies (Magnolia Pictures) charts their explosive intersection when they were contracted by ABC News to provide commentary on the live TV broadcasts of the 1968 Republican Convention in Miami and Democratic Convention in Chicago. Their appearances were a calculated gamble by the network, then dead third in the ratings. (As “New York Magazine” writer Frank Rich, one of the film’s many witty talking heads, quips, “Somebody famously said the way to end the Vietnam War was to put it on ABC, and it’d be cancelled in 13 weeks.”)

Buckley was a vigorously conservative Republican, Gore a visionary liberal Democrat; both had run, unsuccessfully, for public office earlier in their careers. With the live televised debates they ascended a huge national platform from which to air their opposing views, and their rapid-fire, barbed remarks were both hilarious and chilling in their personal malice. They proved ratings gold for ABC; as the film makes clear, none of the Big Three networks ever went back to mere gavel-to-gavel coverage again.

Best of Enemies marks the fifth collaboration between filmmakers Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville (the latter won an Oscar for Twenty Feet from Stardom). This latest project began when Gordon viewed a bootlegged DVD of the 1968 debate footage and passed it on to Neville. Their film not only sheds light on our political past and the history of television, but also makes challenging connections between the debates and how they contributed to the fragmented, often polarizing news landscape we’re in today. I talked with the directors via phone during the end of their recent publicity tour in New York.

Andrea Gronvall: One of the most impressive things about Buckley and Vidal was their conviction: there appeared to be no switching the message to pander to viewers, no walking it back. Agree? Disagree?

Robert Gordon: Agree, yes! There’s two and a half hours of raw debate footage and I’ve come to know it intimately. When I first watched that DVD I was amazed at how contemporary they were, how prescient they were. It was in a way like the Big Bang of the culture wars.

Morgan Neville: 100 % agree. What’s so interesting is that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to have people like this on TV, what it’s like to hear people who sound like this. They were completely unpredictable, and that unpredictability is compulsively watchable. They’re not debating the issues of the Republican and Democratic conventions so much as they’re debating the condition of the republic. They were each convinced that if the other side won, it would be the downfall of the nation. There was no play-acting. Whereas today you get the feeling most of the TV pundits can go out for a drink together after the show.

AG: Yes, today it does seem like a little club, where ratings trump all. But is there anyone on the horizon who might cut a swath in the new-ideas mold of Buckley and Vidal?

RG: I would be anxious to hear your suggestions because I have none. We’re in an anti-intellectual age. With the death of Christopher Hitchens, it’s hard to come up with someone. Maybe Andrew Sullivan.

MN: I think there isn’t. And I think they [Buckley, Vidal, and ABC] knew it at the time. This was a moment of the decorum breaking down.

AG: Don’t you think that being in Chicago, amidst all the chaos and demonstrations in the streets and Grant Park, added a whole set of stressors to their TV appearances?

MN: It’s not a coincidence that their blowup in the studio came the night of the events in Grant Park. They had witnessed the violence, watched the news tapes. They were the patrician white stand-ins for the two sides warring in Grant Park. And I honestly think that some of their new ideas were actually the old ideas, and the thing that really interested them is history. They were both students of American history, and what they saw happening in our country they viewed as an assault on the republic. They were also both well versed in ancient Roman and Greek history. I think that Buckley was bowing to the god of Rome, and Vidal was bowing to the god of Greece.

RG:  Neither would kowtow to his own political party. Bill would reshape his party; that was his goal. Vidal was running around the Democratic Convention trying to form a fourth party.

MN: Vidal and Buckley were concerned about sticking to talking points. They weren’t worried about the rolodex; they didn’t see the debates as essential to their careers, because each had other careers. The $70,000 each was paid, although it was certainly nice, wasn’t as attractive as the huge national audience they could reach.

AG: Buckley and Vidal reveled in their own sophistication and verbal virtuosity. They did not try to mask their intelligence in order to come across as just regular guys. Today they would have a tough time selling that stance on TV, but looking back, I think they were actually respecting the intelligence of their viewers, not condescending to them.

MN: You’re completely correct: they didn’t condescend. Nowadays the audience test is, do I want to go out to have a beer with the guy? Now even smart guys pretend to be dumb.

RG: There’s a difference between George W. Bush the man and his public persona. Bush went to Harvard and Yale, but played that down in public. Obama does something like that, too, when he gets into his folksy mode. I don’t want to have a drink with my elected officials, I want to be somewhat in awe of them, because they’re people who make decisions, and I want smart people to be the ones making decisions. Being put off by intelligence is nuts. I don’t know how Americans got that way.

MN: [As the film shows] TV is driven by ratings. And the synonym for higher ratings is the lowest common denominator. But a lot has to do with what we expect. Back in the 60s the networks regarded news as a service. Today they see it as a profit center. Part of what is so refreshing about the Vidal and Buckley debates is they’re truly [ideological] opposites, and speaking to an audience whose minds they were trying to change. Today we’re at a kind of “through the looking glass” moment. The people who are in news are trying to be entertainers, and the people who are in entertainment are trying to be newsmen. You know, the saying about Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart is that O’Reilly is insincere, but pretending to be sincere, while Stewart is sincere, while pretending to be insincere.

AG: The point to which the “action” in Best of Enemies builds is, of course, the jaw-dropping “crypto-Nazi”/”queer” exchange, when Vidal nearly goads Buckley into violence. After that, we witness the decades-long fallout. Why do you think Buckley could never get over that particular moment of heat and human fallibility?

RG: Well, I would have to answer that it’s about the tension between him and Vidal. It’s the self-recognition that each saw in each other and the fear that they would be mistaken for each other. [Journalist and Buckley biographer] Sam Tanenhaus hit on something in the film, about what they had in common: they both came from notable families and went to boarding schools, they each published their groundbreaking books around the same time. They had these parallel lives, but they diverged along the lines of God and sex. Bill spent 33 years on “Firing Line” taking on all comers across the political spectrum, and this was the only time that he blew up. For years he tried to explain himself, but every time he tried to make it better, he only cemented it harder.

MN: You just said: it was a moment of fallibility. And one of the things he never wanted to show was fallibility. This was one moment he lost his cool, and it happened in a very public way. And I don’t think he could forgive himself for that.

AG: You spent five years making the movie, right?

RG: The first four years were a labor of love. Then, once we got funded, everything came together in the final year. Then we could settle into it and work on it full-time, and we could do a deep archival sweep. We had to pay for a lot of old footage, and that’s why we had to wait for funding.

MN: This was not an easy film to make. We thought this would be the perfect film for the 2012 election. Little did we know how hard it was going to be to get financing.

AG: Understandably, you don’t want to name names, and single out anyone who wouldn’t give you money, but could you provide a “for instance” about the obstacles you faced?

MN: The “for instance” is everybody. I pitched this all over to everyone. We were selling a documentary about two old dead men talking in a room many years ago. You watch the finished movie, it’s thrilling, but we had to work hard to explain it to potential funders. We covered all our expenses out of our own pockets for a while, but that’s why we do this work. Robert and I started out as journalists; I still think of myself as a journalist. We looked at the news media and thought, let’s discuss how we argue. Let’s discuss the way our discourse could unfold before we begin talking the issues.

RG: It’s the double-edged sword of news and the media. We all share the same news. We didn’t think about it then [back in the 60s] that what we heard was determined by a group of white-haired guys who chose what Walter Cronkite would cover. Now you have social media impacting Tahrir Square, and on-the-ground footage shot on cell phones. Everyone’s entitled to opinion of his own, but there’s no fact-checking of news [when it’s reported by nonprofessionals]. And that’s very dangerous.

AG: What kind of stuff didn’t make the final version of the film?

MN: Some of the people we interviewed didn’t make the final cut: [linguist and activist] Noam Chomsky; [journalist] Bob Scheer; Bill’s brother, Senator James Buckley; and Vidal. We shot an interview with Vidal shortly before he died, but decided against using it.

AG: I read that you decided against including that because Buckley had died before you began filming, and you didn’t want to seem like you were giving Gore the last word. But was it also kindness on your part, because Vidal was so infirm?

MN: If he had added something new, I think we would have put it in the film. But he already had said almost everything he had to say on Buckley before. Yes, he was not well, but he was still very sharp. I think he disagreed not with our film’s thematic concept, but with our premise that he and Buckley were in any way comparable, that they were the reverse image of each other.

AG: Oh, but that archival still of them being made up in the ABC green room is such a yin-yang image.

MN: They were their own distinct personalities, and yet the debates helped define them for the rest of their lives.

AG: One last thing: what question have you not been asked about Best of Enemies, but wish that you had?

MN: “When did you realize it was a comedy?”

The Gronvall Report: Zazu Urushadze on the Oscar-nominated TANGERINES

Wednesday, May 6th, 2015

If you screened all the nominees for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, you couldn’t help but notice that three of the five titles—Ida, the winner from Poland, Timbuktu from Mauritania, and Tangerines, a co-production from Estonia and Georgia—center on war and its devastations.  Given how many regional armed conflicts currently plague our planet, many of them direct consequences of earlier prolonged violence, war remains one of the most relevant themes in movies today. Surprisingly, few predicted that American Sniper would be a breakout hit. Americans and other nations may be suffering war fatigue in the real world, but for a while, at least, they’ll still be flocking to theaters looking to make sense of it all, if sense can be made.

The setup of Tangerines, by Georgian filmmaker Zaza Urushadze, is deceptively simple: in 1992, following the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., war is escalating between Georgian nationals and Abkhazian separatists, the latter backed by Russia. In a corner of Georgia that a century ago was settled by Estonian immigrants, a small group of Georgian soldiers run up against some Chechen mercenaries working for the Russians. Only two barely survive the ensuing bloodbath: Niko, a Georgian Christian (Mikheil Meskhi), and Akhmed, a Chechen Muslim (Georgi Nakhashidze). A couple of ethnically Estonian farmers who are neutral rescue them, and the elder farmer, Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak, magnificent), decides to house both warriors secretly and nurse them back to health. His humanitarian gesture turns into a situation both perilous and surreal, as the two soldiers work at recovering just so they can finish the botched job of bumping off each other. But that turns out to be the least of their troubles.

Just as has been the case historically over millennia, in Tangerines language, ethnicity, land, and religion are significant factors that trigger and fuel combat. Writer-director Urushadze recently was kind to take time away from his elected job as head of the Georgian Filmmakers’ Union (which brings together important movie artists to network, help each other, and modernize and promote cinema in their country), in order to participate in the following interview by email.

Andrea Gronvall:  Your film Tangerines is more lyrical—in the sense of more poeticized, less dour—than Ida or Timbuktu, although it still builds to a powerful impact at the end. It shares with Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion an emphasis on honor and humanity, while in its focus on two enemy soldiers trapped in an almost absurdist situation, Tangerines also recalls Danis Tanovic’s No Man’s Land. Did you intend to frame your story as a parable?

Zaza Urushadze:  I wanted to direct a film based on basic human values—such as tolerance, forgiveness, and so on—as the lack of these values is one of the reasons of the ongoing wars. I didn’t intend to frame it as a parable, but I guess it turned out this way.

AG:  How did you strike a balance between pathos and dark humor?

ZU:  It was very difficult to find the right balance of tragedy and humor. Too much humor would have broken the drama and too little would have changed the message of humanity I was trying to convey. I thought a lot about the film’s tone and tried to use the humor effectively at key intervals, inserting it sparsely throughout the film.

AG:  The visuals in Tangerines are captivating, and at times almost painterly. The sun-dappled views of the tangerine orchard remind me of Van Gogh, and the way the light models the characters and table settings in the interiors brings to mind Cezanne. What were your visual influences in making this film?

ZU:  Even though I love art very much, I didn’t really have an influence, at least consciously. When I write scripts, I can already see the shots, like I’m already watching the film. It happens on its own.

AG:  The fluidity of the camera work also is impressive. How did you and Rein Kotov, your director of photography, arrive at a shooting strategy? Do you storyboard any sequences before you film? How pressured were you by your shooting schedule? What was the hardest shot, or scene, or sequence to realize?

ZU:  I shoot without a storyboard because it’s already in my head. I sit down with the cinematographer the day before the shoot and tell him about the angles and camera movement. We had a really busy schedule; we shot it in 32 days. The most difficult part was the gunfight scene, because if we couldn’t shoot this scene in one take, we would have had to repair the holes on the walls, the cars….

AG:  [SPOILER ALERT] That gunfight, the climax of the movie, is triggered by a short but pivotal conversation between Akhmed and an arrogant commanding officer, in a scene that is about ethnicity but hinges on language. Why does Akhmed hesitate to reply in Chechen when the officer commands him to?

ZU:   To answer your question I’ll need to delve into the interactions between the military officers and the subordinates who served under them before the Soviet Union broke up. Specifically [regarding language], the phrase “fuck your mother” is common in the colloquial speech of the Russian military. They use it as punctuation, without any intended insult implied—for instance, “Pass the salt. Fuck your mother.” However, for Caucasian peoples the term is highly insulting and often led to fights between officers and subordinates.

The scene in Tangerines that you are referring to takes place shortly after the breakup of the Soviet Union. Many in the Russian military, after the loss of the Caucasus, could not adapt to the new reality and behaved in a demeaning manner toward citizens of former Soviet states. Akhmed was in the process of re-evaluating his ideas about the war, Georgians, and his preconceptions about both. The Russian officer was unable to trust a Chechen regardless of whether he was a mercenary fighting on the side of Russia or not, due to his bigotry towards former members of the Soviet Union and his feeling that Russians were superior to them.

Akhmed showed defiance and a refusal to be intimidated [and] out of context used the phrase “fuck your mother” to the officer—which, in front of his men, challenged his authority and would have tarnished his reputation had he done nothing.

AG:  Lembit Ulfsak as Ivo has great presence and authority on screen. Despite his age, Ivo is vigorous and very alert. One seldom sees characters like this in American movies. Were you trying to make a case for the wisdom of age over the rashness of youth?

ZU:  Ivo is a wise character, with a lot of experience in life and a mission to share with the youth: that life is short and very valuable.

The Gronvall Report: Simon Curtis On WOMAN IN GOLD

Tuesday, March 31st, 2015

When he segued into film after notable work for the stage and in television, director Simon Curtis may not have set out to revive that staple of the Golden Age of movies, the “woman’s picture,” but so far he’s two for two.

Following up on his 2011 debut, My Week with Marilyn–the Michelle Williams-Eddie Redmayne-starrer that garnered Williams a Best Actress  nomination for her evocation of Marilyn Monroe–Curtis has partnered a second time with BBC Films and The Weinstein Company to bring another indomitable real-life femme to the screen. Woman in Gold is the dramatized account of the legal battles waged from 2000 to 2006 by Holocaust refugee Maria Altmann against the Austrian government to reclaim five Gustav Klimt paintings that the Nazis looted from her Jewish Viennese family after the Anschluss. Helen Mirren, nearly as regal and twice as feisty as she was in The Queen, plays the octogenarian Altmann; Ryan Reynolds costars as her idealistic Los Angeles attorney, E. Randol “Randy” Schoenberg. Casting is one of the movie’s strong suits: supporting actors include “Orphan Black” sensation Tatiana Maslany as the young Maria; Daniel Bruhl as crusading Austrian journalist Hubertus Czernin; Curtis’s wife Elizabeth McGovern (beloved by legions of “Downtown Abbey” fans) as Judge Florence Cooper; and the estimable Jonathan Pryce as Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

As I mentioned to Curtis when he came through Chicago recently, Woman in Gold is an unusual hybrid: a courtroom procedural, a Holocaust drama, and a love story–or two love stories, if in addition to the marriage of young Maria Bloch-Bauer to opera singer Fritz Altmann (Max Irons) you count the strong bond of mutual support, respect, affection, and gratitude that gradually develops between Randy and the elderly Maria. However did Curtis keep all those balls in the air at one time?

“It was like playing 3-D Sudoko,” he said. “We had to factor in the different genres; the flashbacks to the early 1900s [when Klimt painted his first portrait of Maria’s aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, the titular woman in gold] and to the 1930s; the various court proceedings [in the main temporal frame of the film]; plus, we were shooting in three countries: Austria, the UK, and the USA.” With that kind of pressure, did he surround himself with previous collaborators? “Actually,” he replied, “there were only a couple of holdovers from earlier works:  my first assistant director, Phil Booth, from the TV series ‘Cranford,’ and executive producer Christine Langan, head of BBC Films.” And how long did it take to edit all this material? “We finished the initial cut for our first New York test screening in eight weeks,” he said. At which point I began to wonder if this precise, professional, very reserved Englishman had a secret inner life as a raging adrenaline junkie.

So I had to ask him what kind of set he runs. “On the set, I am much calmer than I am actually feeling,” he admitted. “As a TV producer, I’ve seen some directors become destabilizing forces, a situation I aim to avoid.” I mentioned that I had read an interview he gave a few years ago in which he said that the job of a stage director is to serve the text; what’s the job of a film director? “To help everyone raise their own game,” he replied.

In Woman in Gold everyone’s game is raised, including Ryan Reynolds’s. Playing an underdog and borderline nebbish (a modified version of the real Randy Schoenberg), the actor once again demonstrates his considerable range, proving he’s more than the sum of his geniality and boy-next-door good looks. Reynolds’s critical reception over the years has often been puzzling; even his purported admirers, like John Patterson in a recent article in “The Guardian,” seem to damn him with faint praise. I just don’t get that, because the actor more than holds his own on screen with the always-compelling Mirren. “Absolutely,” agreed Curtis. “They got on tremendously. Ryan is a highly intelligent and intuitive actor. The scene late in the film where Randy breaks down at the Holocaust memorial is such a powerful moment. That scene, by the way, was based on a story the real Randy Shoenberg told us.”

The restraint with which the film treats what happened to Maria and the Bloch-Bauers in the 1930s is key to the movie’s appeal. In 1978 Elie Wiesel wrote in the New York Times that pop culture was in danger of trivializing the Holocaust; since then here have been so many representations of the Shoah in the media that outstanding movies like Claude Lanzmann’s ten-hours-and-fifteen-minute-long  epic, Shoah, wrongly get lumped in with kitsch like 2013’s The Book Thief. Given the acclaim My Week with Marilyn earned, Curtis could have chosen from any number of topics for his sophomore film; why Maria Altmann’s life? The end credits provide a clue, citing that Woman in Gold was inspired by the 2007 documentary Stealing Klimt, which was presented by Curtis’s friend Alan Yentob for the BBC’s “Imagine” series. But why retell this story now? What does Woman in Gold have to say to today’s moviegoers?

“A lot has to do with the importance of not forgetting,” Curtis acknowledged. [Indeed, in Alexi Kaye Campbell’s screenplay Maria has a line lamenting how short people’s memories are.] Curtis went on, “This century has begun in a very troubling way. We are now facing again the spectre of anti-Semitism resurging in Europe. We had to put in the film some kind of debate that underlined the human elements of this story.” In other words, it’s not just the ripped-from-the-headlines account of how Klimt’s “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” eventually was sold by Maria to Ronald S. Lauder for the (then record-breaking) sum of $135 million. “Yes,” Curtis affirmed, “it’s important to remember that this was a portrait of Maria’s aunt Adele, commissioned by Maria’s uncle.” The painting, along with others by Klimt, were treasured objects in the Bloch-Bauer home not just because of their exquisite artistry, but because they reflected the lives and passions of that remarkable, cultivated family. Maria’s long fight in the courts was not about the money, but about recovering her past, trying to hang on to the threads of all those she lost before and during the war, in order to keep their memory alive.

Knowing that Curtis is himself Jewish, I wondered if the wartime backdrop of Woman in Gold had any personal relevance for him. “I had a very secure upbringing,” he said. “My family’s arrival in the UK from Poland was at the beginning of the twentieth century, predating the Holocaust. But Maria’s story definitely resonates with my DNA.” His current project, as an executive producer, has distinctly English–and Asian–flavors: the Channel 4 co-production, with PBS’s “Masterpiece,” of “Indian Summers,” a TV mini-series about the end of the British Raj and the dawn of India’s struggle for independence. With a cast top-lined by Julie Walters, it sounds like another vehicle for a worthy actress who can carry a picture.

Reporter’s note: As an art lover who at a much younger age trained as a painter, I was enchanted early on by the works of Viennese Secessionist giant Gustav Klimt. Later, in 2006, after the five Klimt paintings Altmann and other relatives had rightfully inherited were restored to her by an Austrian arbitration court, I was lucky enough to view the artist’s two portraits of her aunt Adele, and his landscapes “Apple Tree I,” “Beech Woods (Birch Woods),” and “Houses in Unterach on Lake Atter,” in a revelatory exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For those who didn’t have that opportunity, consider a visit to the Neue Galerie in Manhattan, where the painter’s first portrait of Adele anchors an intimate new show, “Gustav Klimt and Adele Bloch-Bauer: The Woman in Gold,” on view through September 7. Afterwards, hop a bus or taxi south to the Museum of Modern Art, where “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II” is currently on display, on loan to MoMA from a private collector.

The Gronvall Report: Shlomi Elkabetz on GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANE AMSALEM

Thursday, February 26th, 2015

Divorce court in the movies has never been as suspenseful as the proceedings at the center of Israeli drama Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem. Winner of the Ophir (Israel’s parallel to the Oscar) for Best Film, and a Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, it follows its titular heroine over the course of five years as she attempts to convince her spouse of some two decades to grant her a gett, the formal release from their glacial marriage that, under strict religious Jewish law, only he can grant. If he doesn’t consent, Viviane will forever be regarded as an agunah, or chained woman, one who in observant (especially ultra-Orthodox) Jewish societies, is regarded as an outcast.

For her earthy, yet regal portrayal of Viviane, the magnetic Ronit Elkabetz (The Band’s Visit, Late Marriage) has earned comparisons to such screen icons as Maria Falconetti and Anna Magnani. Viviane is far more progressive than her introverted, intractable husband Elisha, played by the versatile French-Armenian actor Simon Abkarian (Zero Dark Thirty, Casino Royale, Yes). Of North African descent, the traditionally religious Elisha in late middle age still has not adjusted to life in Israel’s largely secular culture (for instance, he prefers not to speak Hebrew because he regards it as the language of prayer). The couple’s differences are insurmountable, but Elisha simply will not let go.

Making Viviane’s case even harder is that the three rabbinic judges hearing her petition have a mandate to preserve Jewish families. In Israel, the rabbinic courts have final say in almost all matters concerning Jewish marriage and divorce. This is a situation that dates back to the Middle Ages, when the Ottoman Empire ruled the region, and invested rabbis with authority in local Jewish communal affairs. Today, most Israelis, whether observant or not, still must navigate this system. (Although a relatively recent law permits civil court weddings and divorces, both partners must have officially registered as being non-religious, and so far relatively few Israelis have chosen this route.)

When it opened in Israel last fall, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem sparked a national conversation. Just this past week, the film was screened at the annual rabbinic judges convention, so they could see what the buzz is about. The movie is the third co-writing, co-directing cinematic venture between Ronit and her brother Shlomi Elkabetz; the siblings made two earlier movies about Viviane, To Take a Wife (2004) and The Seven Days (aka Shiva, 2008). Wiry, highly verbal, and quite the smoker (although polite about it), Shlomi was in town last fall for the Chicago International Film Festival. The very model of an Israeli hipster, he found some time in his packed schedule to talk about his craft.

Andrea Gronvall: When you named your film, did you tend to evoke any parallels to Franz Kafka’s novel, “The Trial?” I ask because as I watched Gett I often felt as though trapped in a bewildering, absurdist universe. The movie is alternately disturbing, maddening, and darkly funny.

Shlomi Elkabetz:  Our first attempt to write the screenplay we were terrified.  What could happen in this one room during a running time of two hours—in narrative time, over the course of five years—that would generate enough emotional energy to sustain the audience’s interest? Then something very exciting happened: we found we could write 200 pages because so many things could happen on screen. The name of the script originally was “The Trial,” but it was suggested that we should change it to something more independent of associations with Kafka. One day Ronit said we should call it “Gett.” And I replied, it’s Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, because (1) while Viviane is being judged by everyone at these sessions, (2) at the same time she is judging everyone else in the courtroom. But the general atmosphere of our story is completely Kafka-esque because of this [ancient] law. We knew that we were conducting a circus, in the sense that the situation on screen is ridiculous, but you’re still taking part. When we first started to show the film we were surprised at how audiences responded. There was laughter, but also stillness, because of all the tension. Last night [at the festival showing], people shouted back at the screen, “When are you going to grant her a divorce?” And I remember at the first screening in Cannes, the audience reacted like Israelis, like they understood the world we were evoking. As filmmakers when we set out to do something we can’t always anticipate the reactions of viewers. We are not computer programmers; there is no set way, no prescription for how to make a movie. Watching Gett with audiences has been a unique and happy experience.

AG:  Years ago I had an acting teacher, the great improvisational director Del Close, who banished the word “no” from our work because it would stop whatever scene we were trying to create dead in its tracks.  But you and Ronit have done something remarkable by investing the word lo—“no”—with so much potent mystery. We can’t figure out why Elisha won’t give Viviane a divorce, so each time he says no, another character witness is called to testify, and the story moves forward. And thus we get another view not just of the couple, but of Israeli society as well. How did you arrive at this structure?

SE:  Sometimes when I teach acting I do this exercise where we get a couple of people to stand up, and one says “yes,” and the other says “no.” The entire exercise grows from that. So, I could imagine five years of yes and no, where the whole story becomes yes and no. Why is Viviane saying yes? For her right to be free? To fall in love again? To experience life from a new perspective? And what does Elisha say no to? “No” to all of these, and also, “No, I can’t be someone else. I don’t know how to live my life when I am not the one in charge.”

AG:  This is the last film in a trilogy. I have not seen the first two, but can say unequivocally that this film stands on its own as a riveting drama. I am curious, though: have the characters changed over the course of the trilogy?

SE:  The characters changed over time because Ronit and I changed over the years. If you see the other films, you will see different aspects of these characters, but you don’t need to see the films in chronological order. In To Take a Wife, Viviane has to get to that point where she can believe that she can be free.  In The Seven Days, we see her dealing with the large family she was born into [Viviane is the only woman among nine siblings].  Thematically, the trilogy is about how women cope in a patriarchal society.

AG:  Is there anything autobiographical about the trilogy?

SE:  These films are fiction, but they are meant, in a way, as an appreciation of our mother—although she never sought a divorce, and, as far as we know, never discussed that possibility with anyone. My origins are Moroccan, and Arab Jews are the people I know the best. The French in the film is part of our culture; the main characters speak Arabic and French because we’re French. Among other things, these films are about the impact of immigration—on the immigrants, and on other Israelis. When Ronit and I began the trilogy, it was the first time Israelis from the Maghreb could see themselves on the screen. Before, they always looked exotic, or were portrayed as stereotypes. I certainly couldn’t recognize myself in any of the Israeli movies I saw when I was younger. It was as though Arab Jews had to erase their past. Before my mother saw Gett, the last time she had been to a movie theatre was 40 years ago.

The Gronvall Report: Gabe Polsky On RED ARMY

Thursday, February 5th, 2015

1Now that Super Bowl XLIX is history, can we talk about a sport that’s really gripping, like hockey? Sure, football is about strategy and physical prowess, and your heart might indeed pound if you’re actually in the stadium close enough to the action, but television, with its mandate to sell commercials, has stretched the average duration of games to back-numbing length. Whereas hockey is not only about strategy and athleticism, it is fast, fast, fast. The competing players zooming across the ice combine precision skating with a ferocious concentration on the puck–which, at only three inches in diameter, can move up to 100 miles per hour, making all that blather about Deflategate even more laughable.

But as the thrillingly kinetic new documentary Red Army shows, there’s another, deeper dimension to the sport that sets it apart from American football: not all that long ago, hockey was emblematic of the Cold War struggle between the USA and the USSR. The movie tells the little known behind-the-scenes story of the Soviet Union’s state-sponsored world-champion hockey team, a nearly unbeatable marvel of speed, agility, and unity. There’s a charismatic “leading man,” fabled defenseman Vyacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, recipient of dozens of awards and honors. There’s a legendary mentor and sage, coach Anatoly Tarasov, who revolutionized the game by introducing elements of ballet and chess into the training regimen and playbook. And there’s even a villain one can love to hate, the KGB bureaucrat Viktor Tikhonov, who, as Tarasov’s replacement, imposed ever more draconian regulations on his supremely dedicated team, for whom winning was synonymous with serving their country.

Director-writer-producer Gabe Polsky may have been destined to bring this narrative to the big screen. The American-born son of Soviet émigrés is fluent in Russian, got his first pair of skates when he was just out of kindergarten, and played hockey zealously throughout his school years, culminating at Yale University. At which point, he says, “I realized I wasn’t going to be a pro, and had to find a new passion. I had a college roommate who was shooting edgy videos, and I thought I could come up with a few subjects myself.” The filmmaker, who was in his native city during the 50th Chicago International Film Festival to support the Sony Picture Classics release, agreed with my assessment that you don’t have to be a sports maven to be captivated by Red Army. “Many people who have come out of these screenings,” he observed, “are people like you. My goal was to make a film that is not only for hockey fans, but is also about complex things like culture, history, and politics. But I also wanted to reach way beyond the academic [aspects of the documentary form]. It was an exciting challenge.”

The film two took years to make, start to finish. I asked him if he faced any hassles while on location in Russia. He replied, “I had a contact who knew one of the players. No one knew what I was doing there, exactly; because I had a tiny crew and speak Russian, we weren’t [perceived as] threatening. Slava didn’t know I wanted him to be the lead ‘character’ in the story, but I kept on bugging him.”

It’s certainly clear from the film that Polsky can be tenacious. Some of the funniest moments are when he and his subject seem to be on the edge of their own international conflict, with Polsky off-camera lobbing questions that at times seem surprisingly disingenuous, and which Slava swats back as if shooing some buzzing pest—that is, when he can even be bothered to get off his cell phone to respond. I commented on Polsky’s vivid audio presence, and asked him if he had been deliberately aiming to get a rise out of Fetisov.

“In a way, in the movie at least, I represent sort of the everyday person, leading with questions that will hopefully get to facts the audience wants to know. And part of it is just my personality, which can be confrontational enough. Part of it is also that you need to feel a guy out, to psych him into revealing something that’s meaningful, and that you can build on from there. Slava initially wanted to allow me only 15 minutes, and wound up that first time giving an interview that lasted five hours. But everything I did was by choice,” he insisted, quickly adding with a smile and the hint of a wink, “and if at times it seems, as you point out, like I’m bordering on naïve–well, sometimes you just have to sacrifice yourself for the film.”

That cheek and initiative and sly sense of fun pervades Red Army, from the way Polsky handles archival footage (there’s a black-and-white sequence featuring a Soviet children’s choir chirping a patriotic song, while an animated hammer-and-sickle bounces above the subtitles), to the colorful end credits, which are studded with detailed new takes on old propaganda posters. But there’s plenty to inspire serious discussion as well, beginning with the Soviet hockey team’s incarnation as an intended symbol of Communism’s superiority over capitalism. As the film at times painfully shows, these resilient players basically turned their entire lives over to Mother Russia. By design they were not “professionals.” Pros are barred from the Olympics, so the state built a consistently winning team from its compulsorily enlisted military forces in order to harvest that Olympic gold year after year. Far from what professional athletes earned in the West, the Russian amateurs lived off their soldiers’ pay, laboring ceaselessly and seldom seeing their families.

As forthcoming as Slava is, a few of his old comrades provide equally riveting testimony. The movie examines the tight bond between Fetisov and the four others who comprised that part of the team that the media dubbed “the Russian Five”—Alexei Kasatonov, Vladimir Krutov, Igor Larionov, and Sergei Makarov. These men moved as one, demonstrating the virtues of cooperation and vigilant support over any individual grab for glory. Some of them, increasingly chafing under coach Tikhonov’s oppressive edicts, would, like Fetisov, later defect to the US to turn pro and play in the NHL. But those life choices brought their own set of problems.

Polsky’s respect for the character of these men, their idealism, their sacrifices, and their remarkable achievements is manifest throughout Red Army. And although he doesn’t belabor it, he also sees a connection between how the Soviets turned sports into propaganda, and what goes on in Russia today. “Propaganda posters were a big part of that era,” he says. “They were created to emphasize the popularity of hockey, and to inspire the populace in dramatic ways. That’s part of what Vladimir Putin is doing now. Look at how much emphasis he places on sports–as spectacle in Sochi, and as personal lifestyle [in how he portrays himself in the media].” Recognizing that relations between the US and Russia sadly once again are very strained, Polsky is thankful to all the Russians who helped him create Red Army, particularly Fetisov: “I am grateful he is supportive of the film, doing press on its behalf. We both feel it has the potential to influence people.”

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The Gronvall Report

GABE POLSKY ON RED ARMY

By Andrea Gronvall

 

 

Now that Super Bowl XLIX is history, can we talk about a sport that’s really gripping, like hockey? Sure, football is about strategy and physical prowess, and your heart might indeed pound if you’re actually in the stadium close enough to the action, but television, with its mandate to sell commercials, has stretched the average duration of games to back-numbing length. Whereas hockey is not only about strategy and athleticism, it is fast, fast, fast. The competing players zooming across the ice combine precision skating with a ferocious concentration on the puck–which, at only three inches in diameter, can move up to 100 miles per hour, making all that blather about Deflategate even more laughable.

 

But as the thrillingly kinetic new documentary Red Army shows, there’s another, deeper dimension to the sport that sets it apart from American football: not all that long ago, hockey was emblematic of the Cold War struggle between the USA and the USSR. The movie tells the little known behind-the-scenes story of the Soviet Union’s state-sponsored world-champion hockey team, a nearly unbeatable marvel of speed, agility, and unity. There’s a charismatic “leading man,” fabled defenseman Vyacheslav “Slava” Fetisov, recipient of dozens of awards and honors. There’s a legendary mentor and sage, coach Anatoly Tarasov, who revolutionized the game by introducing elements of ballet and chess into the training regimen and playbook. And there’s even a villain one can love to hate, the KGB bureaucrat Viktor Tikhonov, who, as Tarasov’s replacement, imposed ever more draconian regulations on his supremely dedicated team, for whom winning was synonymous with serving their country.

Director-writer-producer Gabe Polsky may have been destined to bring this narrative to the big screen. The American-born son of Soviet émigrés is fluent in Russian, got his first pair of skates when he was just out of kindergarten, and played hockey zealously throughout his school years, culminating at Yale University. At which point, he says, “I realized I wasn’t going to be a pro, and had to find a new passion. I had a college roommate who was shooting edgy videos, and I thought I could come up with a few subjects myself.” The filmmaker, who was in his native city during the 50th Chicago International Film Festival to support the Sony Picture Classics release, agreed with my assessment that you don’t have to be a sports maven to be captivated by Red Army. “Many people who have come out of these screenings,” he observed, “are people like you. My goal was to make a film that is not only for hockey fans, but is also about complex things like culture, history, and politics. But I also wanted to reach way beyond the academic [aspects of the documentary form]. It was an exciting challenge.”

 

The film two took years to make, start to finish. I asked him if he faced any hassles while on location in Russia. He replied, “I had a contact who knew one of the players. No one knew what I was doing there, exactly; because I had a tiny crew and speak Russian, we weren’t [perceived as] threatening. Slava didn’t know I wanted him to be the lead ‘character’ in the story, but I kept on bugging him.”

 

It’s certainly clear from the film that Polsky can be tenacious. Some of the funniest moments are when he and his subject seem to be on the edge of their own international conflict, with Polsky off-camera lobbing questions that at times seem surprisingly disingenuous, and which Slava swats back as if shooing some buzzing pest—that is, when he can even be bothered to get off his cell phone to respond. I commented on Polsky’s vivid audio presence, and asked him if he had been deliberately aiming to get a rise out of Fetisov.

 

“In a way, in the movie at least, I represent sort of the everyday person, leading with questions that will hopefully get to facts the audience wants to know. And part of it is just my personality, which can be confrontational enough. Part of it is also that you need to feel a guy out, to psych him into revealing something that’s meaningful, and that you can build on from there. Slava initially wanted to allow me only 15 minutes, and wound up that first time giving an interview that lasted five hours. But everything I did was by choice,” he insisted, quickly adding with a smile and the hint of a wink, “and if at times it seems, as you point out, like I’m bordering on naïve–well, sometimes you just have to sacrifice yourself for the film.”

 

That cheek and initiative and sly sense of fun pervades Red Army, from the way Polsky handles archival footage (there’s a black-and-white sequence featuring a Soviet children’s choir chirping a patriotic song, while an animated hammer-and-sickle bounces above the subtitles), to the colorful end credits, which are studded with detailed new takes on old propaganda posters. But there’s plenty to inspire serious discussion as well, beginning with the Soviet hockey team’s incarnation as an intended symbol of Communism’s superiority over capitalism. As the film at times painfully shows, these resilient players basically turned their entire lives over to Mother Russia. By design they were not “professionals.” Pros are barred from the Olympics, so the state built a consistently winning team from its compulsorily enlisted military forces in order to harvest that Olympic gold year after year. Far from what professional athletes earned in the West, the Russian amateurs lived off their soldiers’ pay, laboring ceaselessly and seldom seeing their families.

 

As forthcoming as Slava is, a few of his old comrades provide equally riveting testimony. The movie examines the tight bond between Fetisov and the four others who comprised that part of the team that the media dubbed “the Russian Five”—Alexei Kasatonov, Vladimir Krutov, Igor Larionov, and Sergei Makarov. These men moved as one, demonstrating the virtues of cooperation and vigilant support over any individual grab for glory. Some of them, increasingly chafing under coach Tikhonov’s oppressive edicts, would, like Fetisov, later defect to the US to turn pro and play in the NHL. But those life choices brought their own set of problems.

 

Polsky’s respect for the character of these men, their idealism, their sacrifices, and their remarkable achievements is manifest throughout Red Army. And although he doesn’t belabor it, he also sees a connection between how the Soviets turned sports into propaganda, and what goes on in Russia today. “Propaganda posters were a big part of that era,” he says. “They were created to emphasize the popularity of hockey, and to inspire the populace in dramatic ways. That’s part of what Vladimir Putin is doing now. Look at how much emphasis he places on sports–as spectacle in Sochi, and as personal lifestyle [in how he portrays himself in the media].” Recognizing that relations between the US and Russia sadly once again are very strained, Polsky is thankful to all the Russians who helped him create Red Army, particularly Fetisov: “I am grateful he is supportive of the film, doing press on its behalf. We both feel it has the potential to influence people.”

 

 

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The Gronvall Report: Screenwriter Graham Moore on THE IMITATION GAME

Wednesday, December 10th, 2014

Graham Moore is no slouch. He was only 29 when his debut novel, “The Sherlockian,” hit The New York Times bestseller list in 2010. Now his first feature film, The Imitation Game, is pegged for awards group plaudits in this year’s very crowded Oscar race. Adapting Andrew Hodges’s nonfiction book “Alan Turing: The Enigma,” screenwriter Moore (also the film’s executive producer) has crafted a biopic that may have a few purely fictional elements, but nonetheless sheds light on a real-life war hero whose professional achievements were long clouded–in the popular imagination, at least–by personal scandal in his final years.

In one of his most effective performances in an already stellar career, Benedict Cumberbatch plays Turing, a genius who headed a World War II British team charged with cracking coded messages sent by Enigma, the Nazis’ infamously unbreakable encryption machine. In succeeding with his mission, Turing became one of the founders of modern computer science; the machine he developed could break the German military codes—which changed daily at a precise time—as they were being transmitted. His team, headquartered in a compound called Bletchley Park, has been credited with shortening the war’s duration by at least two years.

There have been other film and TV productions about the Bletchley Park cryptanalysts, but The Imitation Game covers new ground by framing the war exploits within another narrative, one about how Turing’s life was ruined years later, after he was prosecuted and convicted for being gay. It’s no small feat to give an inspiring story and a sad one equal footing, but Moore’s script propels the action with bracing, pointed wit, giving a supporting cast that includes Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Charles Dance, Mark Strong, and “Downton Abbey’s” Allen Leech many moments to shine. Actually, “shine” is exactly what Moore himself does. The screenwriter returned to his hometown this fall during the Chicago International Film Festival to publicize the Weinstein Company release, and I was impressed with how articulate, self-composed, funny, and outgoing he wasas well as by the fact he showed up for an online interviewer in immaculately pressed attire, and a tie, no less.

Andrea Gronvall:  Whoa, I thought this was dress-casual! You look so spiffy.

Graham Moore:  This is my casual dress mode. I used to live in New York, where my flat was so small there was barely any space between my bed and my desk. But every morning I would get out of bed and put on a coat and tie before sitting down to write, telling myself writing was my job and I was getting dressed for work—which was like telling myself, dress for the job you want. Now I live in Los Angeles, where you can’t always tell by his clothes whether someone is homeless, or a millionaire!

AG:  In The Imitation Game you move back and forth between Turing’s wartime work at top-secret Bletchley Park, where he struggles to unravel the Enigma, and postwar Manchester, where Detective Robert Nock [Rory Kinnear] seeks to uncover Turing’s hidden past. Then we have the academic outsider parallels between Turing and the lone woman mathematician he hires, Joan Clarke (Keira Knightley). You clearly are jazzed by mysteries, but you also like writing dual tracks of narrative, don’t you?

GM:  Yeah, in my first novel, “The Sherlockian,” I used dual, interlocking stories, too. But there has to be a reason for it. The reason for it in The Imitation Game is that I had to fit into two hours a narrative that crosses three decades: the 1950s, the 1940s, and the 1920s. He first falls in love [in the 1920s] with a Sherborne School classmate, Christopher, who introduces him to cryptography, and Alan then becomes fascinated by codes, ciphers, and puzzles. Decades later Turing used a newspaper crossword puzzle to recruit new members to his team of Enigma code-breakers. So I decided to tell the story in such a way that the audience winds up trying to solve a puzzle at the same time as Alan [and Detective Nock].

AG:  Your dialogue is smart and graceful, conveying a lot with economy. But I also like non-verbal moments you scripted, like the close-up of Nock late in the film, when in one shot we see so many emotions fleet across his face as he realizes what grave damage he’s done with his investigation.

GM:  [laughing] Well, I may have written the scene, but you have to credit Rory Kinnear for his skilled performance!

AG:  The Royal Navy and MI6 both threaten Turing and other team members with execution for treason, but in the end it is the nation—the British government—who is Alan’s betrayer. This is both ironic and deeply tragic. Was it your intention to suggest that Turing died for love? I ask because the screenplay personalizes Alan’s proto-computer by naming it Christopher.

GM:  I invented that the machine was called Christopher. There are about half a dozen other books about Turing that I consulted in addition to Hodges’ biography, including a more recent biography, “The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer,” by David Leavitt. And every major biographer agrees that Christopher Morcom was the first love of Turing’s life, and cites his affectionate letters to Christopher’s family [with whom Turing remained close after Christopher’s death]. Every major biographer agrees that Christopher inspired Alan to pursue his study of artificial intelligence: could people be brought back from the dead by using A.I. is one of the questions Turing hoped to answer.

AG:  What was your job description as executive producer?

GM:  The executive producer credit was a way of formalizing my involvement. I was on the set every day, and sat in on the edit. Earlier, I was involved in casting, came up with some names, and weighed in on casting choices. Everyone we asked to be in the film said yes.

AG:  Since childhood, you have been very keen on computers, and have steeped yourself in Turing lore. What new research did you do to bring his story to life on film?

GM:  We conducted as many firsthand interviews as possible with the surviving veterans of Bletchley Park. Benedict Cumberbatch met with members of Turing’s family, as well as a former secretary of Alan. We toured Bletchley Park, which is actually a museum now, to soak up its history and atmosphere. We shot scenes at Sherborne School just 20 feet from a memorial to Christopher. Whenever possible we shot on the real locations that figure in the movie. The Enigma machine you see is a genuine artifact. And the crossword puzzle shown is the same one the real Alan Turing had placed in the newspapers. One day on the set Allen Leech  [who plays John Cairncross] said wouldn’t it be fun if we all did the puzzle. But it turned out that not one of us could complete it!

Personally, it was great seeing my obsession with Turing spreading to others. The feeling on the set was so inclusive—everyone was encouraged to do their own research and bring in things that could amplify the story. Our director Morten Tyldum really got into digging stuff up. We were a team, and in some ways we felt like the wartime team at Bletchley Park. And we all believed that Alan’s story needed to be told.

The Gronvall Report: Talking With ROSEWATER’s Maziar Bahari

Tuesday, November 11th, 2014

Mine was his last interview at the end of a long day, one of many days in a grueling multi-city tour, but you couldn’t tell by looking at him whether Maziar Bahari was running on empty. The Iranian-born Canadian journalist and filmmaker, 47, was immaculately groomed, hospitable, calm, and focused, the intensity of his gaze never flagging. He was in Chicago with “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart to herald the opening of their new movie Rosewater, based on Bahari’s memoir, “Then They Came for Me: A Family’s Story of Love, Captivity, and Survival.” The book, a true page-turner, details the 118 days of torture and interrogation that the journalist endured in 2009 in Tehran’s Evin prison after he supplied footage to the BBC of public protests against the rigged presidential elections that kept incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power.

The Open Road release marks the screenwriting and directing debut of co-producer Stewart, who undertook the project partly to make amends for inadvertently contributing to Bahari’s distress. For it was a comic interview by “Daily Show” correspondent Jason Jones (playing himself in the film) that helped convince Bahari’s jailers that the journo was secretly a spy for the U.S. and Mossad. Gael Garcia Bernal (Babel, The Motorcycle Diaries) plays Bahari, whose interrogator, a Revolutionary Guard police officer code-named Rosewater (Denmark’s Kim Bodnia, of Pusher and Terribly Happy), is terrifying when he’s not ridiculous, so wildly off the mark are his ideas about the West. To his credit, Stewart walks that fine line between seriousness and satire, illuminating a nightmarish tale by concentrating on its humanity—much as the book does.

Andrea Gronvall: You survived torture and brutal interrogation during a lengthy imprisonment, and later revisited those months first by writing your memoir, and then by serving as production advisor on Rosewater. Now you’re traveling to promote the film, putting up with journalists like me who are conducting another form of interrogation. Does this ever seem a little surreal to you?

Maziar Bahari: It is a bit surreal, but not as surreal as my experiences in prison. It’s a new platform for me, and I’m grateful for the opportunity it gives me to talk about things that are more important. For instance, I was up most of the night because I’ve been keeping touch hourly with contacts in London, which has a six-hour time zone difference from here, and in Tehran, a nine-hour difference. Have you heard about the acid attacks on Iranian women?

AG: Yes. I read a very disturbing story in “The New York Times.” [Reporter’s note: in October several women in Isfahan were doused with acid by motorcyclists, an act that was construed as the men’s censure of the women for not dressing conservatively enough to meet religious fundamentalist standards.]

MB: In response to the attacks there have been demonstrations by protesters in Iran. A photographer, Arya Jafari, has been detained for covering the demonstrations. Instead of arresting the perpetrators, authorities have gone after this journalist. All day I’ve been trying to find help for him in London and Iran; I feel a sense of responsibility to talk about it. Journalism has become one of the world’s most dangerous professions. There were always risks involved in covering disasters and wars [such as getting caught in the crossfire]. But it was during the Balkan crisis in the 1990s that combatants started specifically targeting journalists. Now it’s becoming more common for warring factions to target correspondents in the field, not only to suppress the flow of information, but also to set an example by killing the messenger. We are going through a really turbulent time in journalism. There are the chaos and challenges within the industry itself. Then there are the waves of citizen journalists [operating online and digitally]. Meanwhile, because news now can travel instantly, leaving no time for deniability, governments become more and more afraid of media coverage.

AG: Like in the film, where Rosewater and his boss are laughably paranoid about “media espionage.”

MB: Yes, “media espionage”—that’s bullshit!

AG: Are you satisfied with Jon Stewart’s adaptation of your book?

MB: The film is a good adaptation of the book because Jon and I collaborated on the script early on, and I was on the set during filming.

AG: Was there anything in the book that was deleted in the adaptation that you would have liked to see in the final film?

MB: I could think of things I’d like to see included in a mini-series based on the book, but not in this film. Jon is a genius. I always admired his performance on “The Daily Show,” but when I saw him at work with other people I was really impressed by his trust. When he finds the potential in someone, he trusts that person. That goes for everyone—the crew, the actors.

AG: Can you give me a timeline of your involvement in this film?

MB: I came out of prison at the end of October 2009. I appeared on “The Daily Show” at the end of November 2009. Jon and I first met for breakfast in January 2010. Then we met at least once a month for a couple of years. Between January 2010 and 2012 we approached many writers and producers about working on the film, but they were not interested, for a number of reasons: either they didn’t think the money was big enough, or had doubts about the project, or had other commitments, or were going off to work on the next Bond film. Finally, Jon said, “Fuck it; let’s do it ourselves.” While we were in pre-production Jon was still working a full schedule on his cable series: we would meet for breakfast at 7 AM to get as much work done as possible before he had to appear on the show set by 9 or 9:30 AM.

AG: And then of course he took a hiatus from the show during the summer of 2013 to direct the film, and you were there.

MB: I’d like to add that we were very fortunate to be working with and supported by some terrific collaborators, including Jon’s co-producers Scott Rudin and Gigi Pritzker; the director of photography, Bobby Bukowski; and the production designer, Gerald Sullivan, to name a few.

AG: Let’s talk a bit about the films you yourself have made during your journalism career. After seeing Rosewater lots of viewers are likely to want to track down some of them, but there are no links to those documentaries on your web site, maziarbahari.com. How can we find them?

MB: Well, as you know, I’ve been pretty busy for a while now, so my web site needs to be updated. Also, I don’t own the copyrights to a number of them; those are controlled by various broadcast and cable companies, like BBC, Channel 4, HBO, Discovery.

AG: But you have a new documentary coming out next year, To Light a Candle.

MB: Yes. It’s an hour-long film about the persecution of the Baha’i faith in Iran. I’ve also been developing a number of web sites under the new “.me” domain. Journalismisnotacrime.me tracks Iran’s treatment of the press. Educationisnotacrime.me is another I’m working on, among other “notacrime” web sites. The Iranian government is criminalizing so many forms of behavior and cultural expression; did you hear about the students who were arrested for making a Tehran version of Pharrell Williams’s “Happy” music video? As long as Iran’s government continues to harm its people, we’ll keep covering these stories.

 

The Gronvall Report: Theodore Melfi On St. Vincent

Thursday, October 16th, 2014

df-16485(1)_popFrom the opening scene of the new movie St. Vincent, where he’s telling a joke in a bar, to the closing credits where he’s desultorily watering a barren backyard from the comfort of his recliner, Bill Murray creates yet another memorably flippant curmudgeon. He plays Vin – short for Vincent, which at two syllables requires too much extra effort – an unrepentant Brooklyn gambler, boozer and smoker, who, aside from the occasional canoodle with pregnant hooker Daka (Naomi Watts), spends most of his time at home alone with his cat. That changes when divorced mom Maggie (Melissa McCarthy) moves next door with her young son Oliver (newcomer Jaeden Lieberher), then hires Vin to look after the boy when she’s stuck working her hospital’s night shift. By day, in the classroom run by genial Father Garaghty (Chris O’Dowd), Oliver studies the lives of the saints; in his afternoons with Vin, the kid gets an altogether different education.

Writer-director Ted Melfi drew on his own family life for inspiration. After his brother died, leaving a young daughter orphaned, Melfi and his wife adopted the girl. One year while in school she had a homework assignment to pair a Catholic saint with a contemporary, ordinary person, and for the latter she chose Melfi. Those elements of loss, hope and love recur throughout St. Vincent, a beguiling comedy with some agreeably flinty edges.  The Weinstein Company release was recently a centerpiece of the 50th Chicago International Film Festival, and Melfi came to town for the screening.

Andrea Gronvall:  How long did it take to get St. Vincent from development to the screen?

Ted Melfi:  Three years. I wrote the screenplay very quickly, in five weeks. We shot the film in 37 days in Williamsburg, Brooklyn last summer.

AG:  All told, that’s not much time, really. Have you always been so decisive?

TM:  To a fault. My wife calls it my “happy delusion.” If I want to make something happen, about 60 to 65% of the time it happens. Look, if you reach even the 50% mark, you’re good.

AG:  Did you rehearse your actors?

TM:  Bill doesn’t like to rehearse; he likes to keep it fresh for the camera. With Melissa we didn’t have time, because she joined us one day after completing Tammy. Naomi spent four weeks working on her Russian accent prior to production, so she didn’t want to rehearse. Chris was working in Ireland on his TV series “Moone Boy,” so on Friday nights he would take the red-eye to New York, shoot with us all day on Saturday and Sunday, and then turn around and fly back.

AG:  That’s a work ethic for you. Actors in the U.K. and Ireland are like that. For them, it’s all about the work, whether it’s a bit part or a big movie. They love the work, more than they love the money.

TM:  That’s right. Over here it’s so fucked up. The amount of money that’s thrown around in Hollywood becomes an evil force. I made nothing on St. Vincent – which is to say I made scale. After you subtract the fees for agents, managers and lawyers over three years, there’s not much left. But I’d do it again. Your life should be about more than money.

AG:  Let’s talk a little about your discovery, Jaeden Lieberher. You got a terrific performance out of him.

TM:  I did rehearse Jaeden a lot; we’d go over each of his script pages 20 times until we got it right. Over my years of making commercials I’ve worked with a lot of kids. This is Jaeden’s first movie – he’d only made a couple of commercials before – but he’s like a 50-year-old pro in a child’s body.

AG:  And then there’s Bill, in one of his best roles. Nobody plays “world-weary” better than Bill Murray. How important is likeability for your characters? Because some of them walk a line. Your movie is sweet and funny, but it’s also quite tart.

TM:  Most people walk that line – move them 10% in one direction over the line, and they’re admirable, but move them 10% in the opposite direction, and they’re dangerous. Sometimes I’m an asshole, and sometimes I’m a nice guy. I like stories about real people. There aren’t any superheroes in real life, and very few Walter Whites [from “Breaking Bad”] – that is, at least before they go on to become so evil we can’t stand them. There are more Vins in the world than anyone else. That vast middle, the middle class, that’s who I’m making movies for.

AG:  Before I met you, I had planned on asking if you ever got intimidated directing a cast of such acclaimed actors, but I can see now that you’re probably not intimidated by very much.

TM:  Intimidated, no. But I can get nervous.

AG:  What makes you nervous?

TM:  The thinking of things. The doing of it doesn’t. Someone once told me that if you’re never nervous, you might as well quit this business, because it’s a tremendous venture you’re undertaking — and if you’re never nervous, you’re not being true to yourself. You’re masking your emotions, which means you’re dead, in a way.

AG:  Speaking of ventures, I read that for your next one you and Jon Favreau are developing a TV pilot called “The Mancinis”. But I’m a little confused about the wording in the press kit. Did it mean that the characters you’re creating are a father in the Mafia, and a mother who’s a nun, or did it say that those were actually your real parents?

TM:  My real parents.

AG:  Seriously?

TM:  Seriously. My dad was involved with some things in New York, where he was supervising a Mafia-run construction company called Stay-Put Concrete. You can’t make this stuff up. And my mom was a nun in Tarrytown, but she had a breakdown, so she quit and left to look for a job in the city. She applied for a secretarial job at my father’s company, but he told her he couldn’t hire a woman he was attracted to. So they went out to dinner instead, and four months later they married.

AG:  So, you’re still drawing on your own biography for your next work?

TM:  I have years of personal history that I can mine for the rest of my life.

The Gronvall Report: Damien Chazelle on WHIPLASH

Tuesday, October 14th, 2014

Artistry plus adrenaline proves the winning formula for Whiplash, the pulsating new musical drama and second feature from French-American writer-director Damien Chazelle. The Sony Pictures Classics release won both the Grand Jury Prize (Dramatic) and the Audience Award (Dramatic) when it premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, setting off a chain reaction of kudos that is reverberating months later, well into awards season. Miles Teller (The Spectacular Now, Divergent) stars as New York music student Andrew Neiman, an aspiring drummer who idolizes jazz great Buddy Rich. Neiman can’t believe his luck when his school’s legendary conductor Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons of Juno and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy) begins grooming him for a spot in the conservatory’s renowned jazz ensemble. But talk about being careful what you wish for: almost immediately the brutal, megalomaniacal Fletcher appears hell-bent on showing Neiman that being the best means suffering the worst. What results from their ensuing and escalating struggle is a dark, twisting, heart-thumping thriller about what the inhumanly high costs of success. When he recently stopped in Chicago to talk up his film, it was reassuring to find that Chazelle in person was Fletcher’s polar opposite: relaxed, genial, and not at all scary.

Andrea Gronvall:  Your debut feature film, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (2010), was also about jazz, and also ended with a solo, but the tone, mood, and look were very different. That film harked back to the French New Wave, and, in a way, to the musicals of Jacques Demy, and also to cinéma vérité.

Damien Chazelle:  Yes, those were my influences. I’m surprised you saw that movie; so few people did.

AG:  A lot of critics admired it, including me. But I can’t remember the last time I saw a second feature that was so much more ambitious and technically assured than the director’s first. Whiplash dazzles on every level, from the screenplay to the lighting, to the camera moves, to the cutting—not to mention the riveting performances of Miles Teller and J.K. Simmons. And on top of everything, it’s film noir. Did you tell this story because you wanted to do a noir, or did noir simply suit the contours of the story you wanted to tell?

DC:  The latter. My decisions were largely pragmatic. When I began trying to get script ideas off the ground, I needed to write something that could be done on a small budget, and which I could direct, that would be a personal film, but would also appeal to a wider audience. So as my starting point I looked back to my own high school experiences as a drummer.

AG:  And how did you wind up making a movie about music that feels like a classic thriller?

DC:  Actually, it’s not so much like the classic movies from the Forties and Fifties as it is like the noir films of the Seventies.

AG:  Ah! Neo-noir.

DC:  Like in the films of [cinematographer] Gordon Willis, I wanted lots of green, brown, and gray shades, dark streets, top-lit shots. As soon as you decide on the overall mood, certain things fall into place, like having characters move in and out of the shadows. I’d say that the two biggest visual influences were The Godfather and Taxi Driver.

AG:  Certainly the ways in which a lot of the shots of Fletcher are lit make him look so sinister, almost Mephistophelean, like someone out of a Jacobean drama.

DC:  Jacobean–that’s a term I haven’t heard for a while. I enjoy the fury and the venom of Jacobean plays, and the almost larger-than-life villains.

AG:  How did you decide on J.K. Simmons for the role of Neiman’s mentor-nemesis?

DC:  Actually, it was [executive producer] Jason Reitman who got J.K.—who’s been in several of Jason’s films —on board for this. After my screenplay wound up in Jason’s hands and he signed on to produce, the first thing Jason asked me was, “What do you think of J.K.?”

AG:  Well, you couldn’t have cast a better actor for Fletcher, just like you couldn’t have cast anyone better to play Neiman than Miles Teller. From his very first film role, in Rabbit Hole (2010), it was clear he was exceptionally talented.

DC:  I agree. When I first saw him in Rabbit Hole I thought, I have to work with this guy.

AG:  Do you use storyboards?

DC:  These days, yes. When I was in school [at Harvard University], I shot 16mm documentaries, which influenced my first attempts at fictional films. Whiplash is more personal, with its emphasis on imagery – which I’m returning to now, going back to my earlier years growing up, when Alfred Hitchcock was almost like a god to me. When I was in school, putting that much stress on the craft of images was seen as selling out. But even if you look at the visuals in the work of John Cassavetes, they’re more controlled than you might remember.

AG:  We can’t leave without talking about the music in your movie. I like jazz well enough, but I’m nowhere near steeped in it. However, one of my film critic colleagues is also a very serious jazz aficionado, and his objection—not mine—to Whiplash is that he feels the movie misrepresents jazz: that in reality jazz is all about improvisation, not about the written charts that preoccupy your characters.

DC:  There has been an ongoing debate between different camps of jazz lovers [as to what defines jazz]. The sort of jazz performed in my film is not unlike the jazz I played when I was younger, jazz that was very much influenced by the big band era. There are elements in big band jazz that are borrowed from classical music: a large orchestra with a conductor, playing pre-designed, rehearsed, dense, complex arrangements. Big band jazz is more structured than the jazz played by small combos. When you are a student first learning the form, you have so much to keep track of–things like shifting time signatures, for instance–that improvisation is a luxury you can’t afford just yet.

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The Gronvall Report: Ira Sachs On LOVE IS STRANGE

Saturday, August 23rd, 2014

Irony is a weapon that’s most effective when wielded lightly, rather than with sledgehammer force. In the engrossing, richly textured indie drama Love is Strange, a Sony Pictures Classics release directed, co-written, and co-produced by Ira Sachs, Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred Molina), New Yorkers who’ve been lovers for 39 years, tie the knot under their state’s recent Marriage Equality Act. But shortly after their nuptials George loses his teaching job at a Manhattan parochial school because of that institution’s opposition to gay unions. Instead of binding them closer, their wedding now drives Ben and George apart, as their sudden financial hardship forces them to sell their co-op and find separate, temporary lodgings with others.

That’s the setup for what in lesser hands could sink quickly into melodrama. Sachs, however, takes the higher ground, using Ben and George’s tribulations not to manufacture big, flashy scenes, but to observe how the men find grace under pressure. The quiet naturalism Sachs achieves here is part of the style he’s been cultivating since his debut feature, The Delta (1996), a teenage coming-out story that was notable for its low-key performances, grainy 16mm imagery, and slice-of-life documentary feel. It was shot in Sachs’s hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, as was his next film, Forty Shades of Blue (2005), an ambling drama about a philandering record producer (Rip Torn) and his much younger Russian émigré girlfriend (Dina Korzun). Sachs’ third feature, Married Life (2007), marked a departure in tone and pace; a tightly scripted, noir-ish thriller about passion, infidelity, and postwar middle-class malaise, it was an ensemble showcase for Chris Cooper, Patricia Clarkson, Pierce Brosnan, and Rachel McAdams. The director then returned to a more freely flowing, contemporary narrative with Keep the Lights On (2012), a frank, brooding tale of an ultimately destructive love affair between gay thirtysomethings.

The relationship between Ben and George in Love is Strange is anything but destructive; it’s clear that their deep commitment to each other is part of why they are so valued by the friends and family who rally to support them. Cheyenne Jackson and Manny Perez play Ted and Roberto, neighboring gay cops with a penchant for loud parties and Dungeons & Dragons. Darren Burrows is Ben’s filmmaker nephew Elliot, who’s married to Kate (Marisa Tomei), a writer who works from home, the better to look after their moody teenage son Joey (Charlie Tahan). In this view of New York, people try to do the right thing; it’s the high cost of living that’s brutal. On a recent swing through Chicago to promote his movie, which opens August 22 in New York and Los Angeles, and then expands elsewhere beginning August 29, Sachs shared his thoughts on the nature of love and the challenges facing independent filmmakers.

Andrea Gronvall:  Why the title Love is Strange, when your characters are anything but?

Ira Sachs:  The arc of a love is unique; each has its own shape. There’s the almost life-long love of the two central characters, but as this is a multi-generational story, we also see the bond between Kate and Elliot, and the beginnings, for their boy, of first love. In each of these accounts, love is “strange” because the details of the individual experiences are not true for everyone else. It’s also complicated because people change, and the definition of love expands with them. The film is about the experience of love, captured in the moment, like in real time.

AG:  Your movie reminds me of the neorealist classic The Bicycle Thieves, in the sense that early on in Vittorio De Sica’s film the loss of the hero’s bicycle is the catalyst for what turns out to be a character study, rather than a plot-driven work.

IS:  Thank you. Neorealism was certainly an influence. Love is Strange is like a neorealist film in that it attempts to make the ordinary extraordinary.

AG:  Also–and I hope you like this filmmaker and won’t mind the comparison—it reminds me of the movies of Olivier Assayas, particularly Summer Hours [where far-flung adult siblings reunite to dispose of the home of their deceased mother]. Your movie has a similar off-the-cuff, life-as-it-happens feel.

ISSummer Hours was a very influential film for me, and for my co-writer Mauricio Zacharias [who first collaborated with Sachs on Keep the Lights On], because it tells a family’s story, and explores the qualities of love and loss—plus, it’s also about real estate! I had a somewhat similar story happen in my own life, concerning the 1905 Memphis home that once belonged to my grandfather. When it got to the point where the granddaughter who inherited it couldn’t afford to maintain it any longer, to keep it in the family she asked me if I wanted to buy it. But that just wasn’t possible.

Mauricio and I started working on Love is Strange in 2012. I had gone through some big changes: I went from living alone to living with my husband [artist Boris Torres, who painted a canvas that is a key element in the movie], two kids, and the kids’ mother. So, like the movie’s characters, I knew something about being cramped.

AG:  Some of your film’s lighter moments arise from living at such close quarters, as when George is bewildered by Ted’s enthusiasm for Dungeons & Dragons.

IS:  I don’t do traditional rehearsals because they inhibit the kind of realism I want. But we did rehearse that scene; Cheyenne Jackson learned to play the game just for the film. I didn’t know much about it before, but I’ve come to have a great respect for Dungeons & Dragons. All kinds of interesting people have played it—writers like Nathan Englander and David Sedaris, for instance. It requires an investment in narrative, unlike video games, where everyone else does it for you. Cheyenne was great at it; I’m not that quick of a storyteller. Do you play?

AG:  Do I look like someone who plays Dungeons & Dragons? I’m old enough to be your momma!

IS:  [Laughing] Oh, don’t be too sure about that!

AG:  Well, getting back to narrative, it seems to me that many of the gay-themed movies I’ve seen are about both coming out, and coming of age. You know, where the young protagonist is at a crossroads: he’s newly aware, or coming to terms with, his homosexuality, which not only leads him to understanding himself, but also to see that the world is a very different place from what he’s been taught. It’s refreshing that your gay protagonists are at the opposite end of the age spectrum.

IS:  Although some of my movies are about coming out, they all are, in a way, about coming of age, in that they’re films about enlightenment, about self-discovery. I could make Love is Strange because I’m not the same person I was ten years ago.

AG:  You stated in a recent interview with Variety New York film editor Ramin Satoodeh, “The independent film business is dead.”  It’s true that many of the great indie companies from the 1980s were bought by the Hollywood majors, repurposed as the studios’ boutique divisions, and then shuttered. But could you expand a little more on your comment?

IS:  The profit margins just aren’t big enough. There are so many challenges, including marketing. When a movie like mine opens at Sundance, it gets labeled “GAY” in capital letters, but it’s not so easily defined.

There are also the tight budgets and short production windows. I’ll tell you a story about the final shot in the film [where Joey and a pretty girl skateboard on a street toward the setting sun]. I had cast a 14-year-old based on an audition video she sent, where she claimed to know how to skateboard. But on the day we shot that scene, it turned out she couldn’t skate. So here we are on a street that was closed down for us for that one day, and we’re running out of light, and just not getting what we needed, when out of the corner of his eye one of my producers, Jay Van Hoy, sees this pony tail go sailing by. He races to grab a transport van that Alfred Molina had just left, and follows the girl for three blocks before he catches up with her and asks, “Do you want to be in a movie?” And that’s how we got the shot.

AG:  Now that’s a producer.

IS:  He sure is.  I see us as going back to the John Cassavetes model. You make films because you have to. No one can let you. You just go ahead and do it.

The Gronvall Report: Joyce Maynard On LABOR DAY

Tuesday, January 28th, 2014

Love stories are Hollywood’s most endangered species. Forget about formula romcoms, or vampire-human couplings, or the ubiquitous tales of men lusting after their hot, shapely guns. I mean real love stories, where the exhilaration of two people falling headlong for each other is also laced with the dangers such plummets can bring. Real love, however sensual and joyful, is seldom without darkness, risk, and sorrow.

Writer-producer-director Jason Reitman has already made two memorable love stories, although Juno and Up in the Air are definitely on the quirky side. With his latest film, Labor Day, he reaches a new level of maturity, adapting Joyce Maynard’s poignant, bestselling novel about reclusive, divorced Adele Wheeler (Kate Winslet) and her 13-year-old son Henry (Gattlin Griffith). Their rural Massachusetts existence is disrupted in the summer of 1987 when wounded, escaped convict Frank Chambers (Josh Brolin) takes refuge in their home. The attraction between Frank and Adele quickly deepens into something profound, as he takes care of her by listening, making repairs around the house, and showing remarkable culinary skills–like how to bake the perfect peach pie. Meanwhile, Henry feels a rush of conflicting emotions, complicated by his own emerging sexuality.

Moviegoers saw author Maynard on the big screen last year in the documentary Salinger, where she recalled her youth as one of literary giant J.D. Salinger’s secret conquests (he reportedly favored liaisons with teenaged girls). She survived that experience, which could have proved crippling, going on instead to craft her own literary career as a prolific journalist, columnist, novelist and memoirist. (Her latest novel, “After Her,” comes out in paperback in April.) Slender, sleek, and chic at 60, she fills the room with her energy and exuberance. She also has a wicked, self-deprecating sense of humor, referring to her recent trip to Chicago as part of her “Kate Winslet Was Unavailable Tour.” As much as I like the consistently pleasing Winslet, I doubt I could have had more fun talking with the actress than I did chatting up the movie with the book’s creator.

Andrea Gronvall:  Generally, if I haven’t already read the book on which a movie is based, I won’t read it until after I’ve seen the screen adaptation, so that nothing interferes with my initial perception of the film. So, I didn’t read Labor Day until after I’d seen Jason Reitman’s version. I very much liked the movie, and then I loved your book, and after reading it I found I admired the movie even more.

Joyce Maynard:  [laughs] I think the book is always better!

AG:  Books often are! But seriously, he captures the tone of your novel so well. He really has a feeling for your original material.

left-awardsJM:  He does, and he is a man who loves his mother. Jason bought the movie rights before Paramount came on board. He had read the book in galleys, and contacted me in the fall of 2009 shortly after it came out. And he asked if he could come over to my house to learn how to make pie.

AG:  Although the movie is faithful to the book in all the important ways, what’s also interesting is what’s left out. An abortion is key in the book, but there’s no mention of abortion in the film. My guess is that he made that change because if he hadn’t, the culturally divisive topic of abortion would have pretty much dominated all media discussion of the movie.

JM:  We did talk about omitting the abortion reference. Kate Winslet pushed hard to keep it in the screenplay; she wanted the film to be faithful to the novel because she loved the book so much. But Jason’s decision was the right way to go.

AG:  Also, without wading into any potential spoilers here, the film is ambiguous about which character is guilty of an act of betrayal, while the book is not.

JM:  Yes, let’s avoid spoiling. I can say that that [betrayer’s identity] aspect was deliberated thoroughly, but an ambiguous ending seemed to be the only way to pull the film off. And it’s certainly not a conventional happy ending.

AG:  You’ve seen two of your novels adapted for the big screen. How did your experiences of movie-making differ between Gus Van Sant’s To Die For [1995] and Reitman’s Labor Day?

JM:  They were totally different—although, in both instances, a wonderful director, a wonderful screenwriter, and a wonderful movie. Buck Henry, who wrote the screenplay for To Die For, is brilliant; I love his writing. And Nicole Kidman was terrific in the lead.

AG:  Yes, it remains one of her best roles.

JM:  But that said, the two directors’ styles were completely different. I was very pleased with the way the way the movie of To Die For turned out, but I think I didn’t have more than one conversation with Gus Van Sant—not that I ever expected to be hanging out on set, or wanted to be peering over anyone’s shoulder. Jason is roughly the same age of the narrator of the Labor Day movie [Tobey Maguire, who plays the adult Henry], which gives him the right perspective for the character. And Jason has a wonderful team of collaborators who’ve worked with him previously [including cinematographer Eric Steelberg, production designer Steve Saklad, art director Mark Robert Taylor, and composer Rolfe Kent]. The set decoration, the whole look of the film, reminds me a little of the love story The Way We Were. It also reminds me of the cover of a James Taylor album I still have.

AG:  You’ve been writing professionally since you were 18. Which authors do you read?

JM:  I tend to read writers who inform me as a writer—Andre Dubus II, Alice Munro, Grace Paley. And I’ve just read Ann Patchett’s “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage,” a book that’s been getting a lot of favorable attention.

AG:  You’ve written eight novels, and several memoirs—

JM:  Actually, that’s not completely true. Of the four nonfiction volumes, only “At Home in the World” is, strictly speaking, a memoir. I went through a really tough time during all the uproar following its publication; it was unbelievable how vitriolic people were that I chose to write that memoir.

AG:  Who are they to judge you? They weren’t there when you were with Salinger, so they don’t know what it was like.

JM:  It is one of my books of which I’m most proud, despite everything I went through later.

AG:  But getting back to my question: you’re such a prolific writer—a storyteller, a journalist, a memoirist—haven’t you ever thought of turning some of your work into a one-woman stage show?

JM:  [laughs] All the time! Actually, I do perform with The Moth [the celebrated New York storytelling group]. I’m such a ham.

AG:   Well, there’s already one actor in your family. You must be so proud of your son Wilson Bethel, who is carving out a promising career for himself.

JM:  I am so proud of him. He has developed quite a female following for his current TV series. “Hart of Dixie.”

AG:  He’s a cutie-pie.

 

JM:  He is a cutie-pie!

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The Gronvall Report: Kevin Macdonald Gets to the Heart of How I Live Now

Saturday, November 9th, 2013

No doubt about it: young adult novels are proving fertile hunting ground for movie adaptations. Most studios would kill for the grosses from Summit Entertainment’s blockbuster franchises built on Stephanie Meyer’s “The Twilight Saga” and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy. But even when a big-budget adaptation like Ender’s Game has a softer-than-expected opening, judge the film on its own merits (and whatever you feel personally about novelist Orson Scott Card, just think back to the 2007 movie made from Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass and you might agree that Ender’s Game is a far more successful adaptation).

Kevin McDonald

Kevin McDonald.

So it was with a sense of anticipation last month that I attended the Chicago International Film Festival’s special presentation of How I Live Now, based on Meg Rosoff’s award-winning YA novel, and directed by Oscar winner Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, Touching the Void, The Last King of Scotland, State of Play, Marley). A speculative fiction set in England during an unspecified time—it could be the future, or it could be any day now—the Magnolia Pictures release is intimate, hypnotic, and chilling, a coming-of-age tale combined with a romance and a war adventure.

Saoirse Ronan (Atonement, Hanna, and Wes Anderson’s upcoming The Grand Budapest Hotel) stars as Daisy, a troubled, surly American teen sent by her father to spend the summer with cousins in the English country home where her late mother used to stay. At first indifferent to the charms of rural life, Daisy holds herself apart, but as World War III nears, she bonds with her younger cousins Isaac (Tom Holland) and Piper (Harley Bird), and even more closely with the eldest, Eddie (George MacKay), with whom she falls in love. When war breaks out, at first they’re all fine–the front seems so far away. But eventually the conflict spreads to their region, and Daisy finds herself fighting not just for her life and Piper’s, but also for the boys, who’ve been lost amid the chaos.

 The first act of the film is idyllic; the second, dystopian. And yet, the film has an evocative poetry even in its toughest scenes, thanks in no small part to the cinematography of Wim Wenders’ collaborator Franz Lustig (who also made the fascinating documentary 2, or 3, Things I Know about Him, about the adult children of a former Nazi). How I Live Now is a movie whose appeal will not be limited to younger viewers, and I was delighted to get the opportunity to talk to Macdonald about his vision.

 Andrea Gronvall:  I usually shy away from personal questions, but I have to ask you:  do you have children of your own? Because your movie really gets what kids are like–fragile and tough at the same time.

Kevin Macdonald:  Yes, I have three kids, aged 6, 9, and 11—so two of them are roughly the age of Harley Bird when she made the film. I suppose the central thing for me is that the world we live in now is a world full of anxiety. We don’t know who we can trust, or where the next attack is coming from. What we lose sight of is how anxious this makes our kids. I grew up during the Cold War, when the Soviets were identifiably the enemy. Today violence can come from anywhere, and we’re often helpless to stop it.

AG:  Much of the film’s power derives from the fact that most of the evil occurs offscreen.

KM:  The idea of the apocalypse has been debased because we’ve seen it so many times before in movies, often involving huge explosions. I wanted instead to focus on the relationship between Daisy and Eddie. I’m surprised how many people have found the film disturbing; their imaginations are engaged and working them up.

AG:  The screenplay is by three writers, Tony Grisoni (In This World, Red Riding Trilogy), Jeremy Brock (The Last King of Scotland, Brideshead Revisited), and emerging playwright Penelope Skinner. One of the movie’s most affecting sequences—the children’s experience of widespread fallout after an atomic bomb devastates London—is a perfect example of how less can be more. Was it always scripted that way?

KM:  Yes, it was. The idea was to show how their pastoral, wonderful idyll is suddenly so rudely interrupted, but they don’t really know what’s going on; at first they think the ash is snow. It shows how the world appears to children. They’re not following the news; they don’t necessarily know or understand the scale of the tragedy, but they come to an acceptance of it. That sequence is also the big turning point in the movie, where you may have thought the story was going in one direction, but now, maybe not quite halfway through, it’s headed in another.

HOW I LIVE NOWAG:  As original as the film is, it’s also within an established tradition of British cinema, those wartime dramas about ordinary women who join the labor force or work farms, or about London children who are sent to the countryside for safety. I’ve always admired that about the British, how they retain their humanity and carry on in the face of disaster.

KM:  The power of love helps you survive. Daisy at the beginning can’t feel love, but when she comes to love this family, she finds enormous strength. [As for British war movies,] John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987) is a lovely film based on his memories of growing up in London during World War II. For the child at the center of the movie, the Blitz is a wonderful time, a magical time. When a bomb drops on his school, he doesn’t see it as a disaster; he’s thrilled that he doesn’t have to go to school! It shows how differently a child can perceive the world than the adults around him.

AGHow I Live Now was your first experience working in digital, yes? How would you categorize it?

KM:  It was a pleasant one. Before production, I did go back and forth trying to decide whether to go with film or digital. Really, it was mostly for financial considerations that I chose digital, but it gave me a lot of freedom. We used the ALEXA M and the ALEXA Plus, as well as the Canon EOS C300. The flexibility that comes with being able to shoot 40 minutes without changing the magazine was especially useful in working with child actors. And the little handheld Canon allowed us tremendous freedoms in shooting; a lot of the first part of the movie was shot with it.

AG:  The color is so dreamy; these cameras are very good in low light levels, especially when the weather proves uncooperative. But I just want to get in one last comment, about the original score by Jon Hopkins, which is as lyrical as many of the visuals. Thank you for your time, and I wish you well; you and your team have made an extraordinary movie.

KM:  Thank you.

How I Live Now is in theaters, on demand and on iTunes.

The Gronvall Report: Coogler & Jordan On FRUITVALE STATION

Friday, July 19th, 2013

fv-sg-000_lgAs vast a country as the United States is, and as diverse as its regions are, all too often there’s one news report that resonates from coast to coast. The locations, victims’ names, and MOs change, but over and over the story recounts yet another young black male meeting a violent, and often avoidable, end. The new film Fruitvale Station takes one such true crime story and amplifies it into an emotionally complex and highly compelling drama. Writer-director Ryan Coogler, 27, makes the particular universal in his rendering of the last day in the life of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old San Francisco Bay Area resident who was shot and killed by a policeman on a BART elevated platform early on New Year’s Day, 2009. Michael B. Jordan, 26, stars as Oscar, an ex-con who’s trying hard to stay straight and prove himself to his mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer) and his partner Sophina (Melonie Diaz), and make up to his young daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal) for lost time. So skilled are the director, cast, and crew that even though we know the outcome of the story going in, its climax is nonetheless devastating.

   The film won both the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic feature and the Audience Award for U.S. dramatic film at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. The Weinstein Company, its distributor, is widening the movie’s release this weekend and next. Recently Coogler and Jordan flew to Chicago, where I caught up with them.      

Andrea Gronvall:  Welcome, but I’m sorry you had to arrive in this heat.

Ryan Coogler:  Oh, we caught 90-degree days in California when we shot this time last year.

Michael B. Jordan:  Yeah, we had a few obstacles. I was calling him “Firefighter Ryan” because he was putting out fires every day.

AG:  Like what?

MBJ:  You name it. Take Oscar’s wardrobe, which didn’t change that much. I had two white T-shirts, one with blood, one without. Since we weren’t shooting chronologically, continuity was a real problem.

RC:  We were running and gunning. It was great that we had phenomenally talented actors and crew. Our actors were real team players. Octavia Spencer and Michael could have easily been prickly, but they weren’t. They just rolled their sleeves up. And I put this guy through the ringer—stunts, getting beat up, getting shot, lying on a hospital slab, working with animals. And emotionally put him through a lot of hoops, as well. But he was always trying to figure out how to do it better.

AG:  I’m sure I’m not the first, and not going to be the last, to comment on how Fruitvale Station couldn’t have had a more timely release. I’ve been glued to MSNBC’s coverage of the trial of George Zimmerman for the slaying of Trayvon Martin, and keep asking myself why these senseless killings of young black men keep happening. Like Trayvon, Oscar Grant was guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How do you see your film fitting into this national debate?

RC:  People often don’t recognize certain people as human beings. So many people look at African-Americans as criminals, degenerates, and then turn to the media to confirm these attitudes. That kind of mentality leads them to view a lot of people dying as, “These people got what they deserved.” And some African-Americans internalize that, too, and start thinking that way. As a filmmaker, all you can do with your art is to trigger thought, inspire thought. Thoughts count. All I can do is to bring people to reflect, so that they can gain insight, so that they might understand something about these young men, and who they really are.

MJB:  To piggyback on what Ryan just said, I think that what we show in the movie is about as real as it can get. I hope we stir thoughts about how we are responsible for our own actions, ask questions about manhood–how can I be a better brother, father, husband? –and how to deal with people outside our comfort zone.

AG:  Michael, there are only a couple of flashbacks in Fruitvale Station during which you can show what Oscar was like in the past, and therefore how far he has come by that fateful New Year’s Eve. Which means that you essentially have to establish the layers of his character within just the last few hours of his life. What were your techniques with, say, body language—like, how did you choose your swagger in the prison scene where Wanda visits her son?

MBJ: That was something that Ryan and I worked on together, to show Oscar acting one way to survive in prison, and then shifting out of that, because when you’re going to see your mom, you don’t want her to see that side of you. So what happens in that scene is kind of a warming process. We always wanted to show how Oscar’s mind changed when he had to deal with different people. That’s why there were a lot of long takes.

AG:  Ryan, let’s talk a little about your visual strategies. You had a very fast shoot, on a tight budget. How did you get such a warm, vibrant look for your film? I’m thinking, for instance, about the softly illuminated, intimate scene of Wanda’s birthday party on New Year’s Eve. It perfectly conveys the centrality of family.

RC:  The budget was around a million dollars. Our director of photography, Rachel Morrison, was just recognized with the Kodak Vision Award for her contributions last year to the art and the industry. She’s very tough, and operates cameras herself. She’s done a lot of non-fiction work, so she’s used to getting right into the thick of the action. It was the first time I saw a cinematographer get so close to the actors. Yet somehow Rachel would know when to give them space. We shot in Super 16mm, and therefore had to forego screening dailies because the film had to be sent to L.A. for processing. We used film because I wanted an organic, visceral feeling, and a contrast to the digital video taken of the real-life Oscar Grant on the BART.

AG:  Did you intend symbolism in the scene where Oscar tosses the bag of weed he was planning to sell into the Bay? It strikes me as though he’s washing away his sins, a spiritual concept that’s part of both Christianity and Judaism. I’m just asking if that scene is your poetic touch, because you couldn’t have known if that really happened, since only Oscar was there at the time.

RC:  Actually, that did happen; Sophina told me that Oscar told her he threw the weed into the water. But you’re right about the spiritual aspect of water, and it’s not limited to just the Christian and Jewish religions—it’s part of a number of different religions. The scene with Tatiana toward the end of the movie, where she learns the truth about Oscar from Sophina in the shower, that really happened. I can say that working in the Bay Area, water is all around us. For us, it has a sort of meditative character—the sea can change in an instant. That goes for us as people, too: our day can start out one way, and then change in an instant.

An interview with WHAT MAISIE KNEW’s Scott McGehee and David Siegel

Monday, June 10th, 2013


What Maisie Knew, the latest film from the directing team of Scott McGehee and David Siegel (Suture, The Deep End, Bee Season), is about an endearing 6-year-old girl caught between her warring parents. Very loosely based on the novel by Henry James, the movie has a thoroughly contemporary look and feel, from its setting in downtown Manhattan, to its detailed portrait of a trendy, narcissistic “creative” couple’s breakup. Julianne Moore plays Maisie’s mother, Susanna, a fading rock diva who’s unwilling to relinquish either the limelight or her footloose lifestyle, even as her art dealer husband Beale (Steve Coogan) moves out, taking the child’s nanny Margo (Joanna Vanderham) with him. Alexander Skarsgard costars as Lincoln, a bartender who catches Susanna on the rebound. These four actors are so strong, and the plot twists so satisfying, they’d be reason enough to watch, but the film’s revelation is Onata Aprile as Maisie.

In her first feature role, Aprile gives a performance of such grace, confidence, and naturalism that she calls to mind other great child actors’ movie debuts, including those of Hayley Mills in J. Lee Thompson’s Tiger Bay (1959) and Tatum O’Neal in Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973). You’d have to have a heart of obsidian not to fall for this little girl in a big, big way. Maisie is the calm at the center of the storm, a playful innocent at the mercy of capricious adults, yet she seems at times more mature than they. The film shimmers and pulsates around her. When New Yorkers McGehee and Siegel flew in recently to bang the drum, they couldn’t stop talking about her. Millennium Entertainment is orchestrating the platform release of this arthouse gem, which is likely to wind up on numerous Top Ten lists at year’s end. But don’t wait until then; find What Maisie Knew at a theatre near you, and see it now.

ANDREA GRONVALL:  This is my first time setting eyes on you, because I’ve never seen you interviewed. So, forgive me, but who is who?

Siegel, Aprile, McGehee.

SCOTT McGEHEE:  I’m the smart one.

DAVID SIEGEL:  I’m the handsome one.

AG:  Okay, thanks—good to have that settled! Let’s start with the script, because you usually do your own writing. Was the tone of the film pretty much already on the page when you first read the screenplay by Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright? What, if any, significant changes did you make?

DS:  The screenwriters crafted a lovely script; we were attracted to its lightness of touch. We were most attracted to telling a story from a child’s point of view. But the original script was quite different from our movie. We admire it very much, but everything wasn’t all on the page. We were changing things as we went along, because once you start working with the camera, you find out what in the script works and what doesn’t.

SM:  And so much of that we owe to Onata Aprile, who plays Maisie. We fell in love with her on day one. Her spirit is just so lovely; every day she would show up, just happy to be there. We had as great an experience filming with her as we did shooting The Deep End in Lake Tahoe.

DS:  Onata is like Tilda Swinton and the lake rolled into one. I would wake up each morning knowing, “I get to go to work with Onata today!”

AG:  I’ve read your comments elsewhere about how from the very start Alexander Skarsgård bonded with Onata off-camera, resulting in their appealing on-screen chemistry.  What approach did your other actors take to working with her?

DS:  I think Julianne Moore’s approach to Onata was to make sure she was safe, because Julianne herself has kids, and as Maisie’s mom she had to scream a lot. So, she would sometimes say, “Here we’re going to play pretend. Let’s pretend that….” And Onata, who is very bright, picked up right away on the “pretending” aspect, and ran with it.

SM:  The casting of Steve Coogan as Maisie’s father was part of our strategy of preserving some comic moments. He was fantastic playing this really dark character, but he also brought a humorous edge to Beale.

SM:  None of our actors were into any “super Method” mode. Between takes the set was very relaxed, so it was easy to slip into acting, and then out. That seemed to come quite naturally to Onata. She has a great attention span, and is there to do what you need her to do, but when you call “Cut!,” she’s off exploring. Everything fascinated her.

DS:  Everything! From the dollies, to the lights, to the cameras. [When we were in development] at first we thought of hiring a 9-year-old actor to play Maisie. But then we began reading that after age six, kids become selfconscious. It was the right move to have a 6-year-old playing her own age.

AG:  Let’s talk a little about the look of your film. How early on did you begin consulting with your production designer, Kelly McGehee, and your cinematographer, Giles Nuttgens—for instance, on your color choices? The film’s warm color palette reminds me of those bold, saturated colors found in many children’s paintings. But it’s never harsh, even when Maisie’s parents are behaving harshly.

DS:  As you know, Kelly is Scott’s sister; we’ve been working together since we started making shorts, and so she was on board early. And this is our third time around with Giles [who also shot The Deep End and Bee Season]. Color palette is one of the first things—maybe the first thing—we always discuss when planning a movie.

The second thing we discuss is the quality of light. We knew Giles could get us the kind of luminosity we wanted. We were impressed by the effects cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki achieved in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men. Giles has a similar sensitivity, and got us that intense but spectral quality of light we were looking for.

AG:  It appeared to me that a number of the close-ups of the adult characters seemed to have been shot from below. Was this deliberate, to reflect the point of view of someone as small as Maisie?

SM:  You don’t always know in advance.  You spend a lot of time looking [through the camera], and then discussing what a close-up will mean.

DS:  To some extent, the angles of the close-ups did show Maisie’s POV, but often they were for technical reasons, like matching the characters’ eye lines in any given scene.

AG:  How much did it cost to make What Maisie Knew?  What’s on screen looks so rich, but I suspect you achieved that without a big budget.

DS:  I think you might have more money in you bag than we had to work with. Maybe I shouldn’t say, but it was $5,000,000. We enjoy working with constraints, but that’s a tight budget for shooting for 35 days, on location and with a union crew.

SM:  The challenge was to make that five million stretch across as many days as possible—which becomes a bigger challenge when you consider that our lead actor is a child who is in almost every scene, and there are child labor laws that limit the hours that kids can work. Not to mention that they sometimes get tired.

DS:  We had to go out to the beach twice to shoot the nighttime scene that’s toward the end of the picture, because on the first night Onata fell asleep, and that was that.

AG:  What cameras did you use?

SM:  An Arri film camera, shooting Super 35mm, using Cooke lenses and a 2:35:1 aspect ratio—as you noticed, we designed for the wide-screen format. You might think that was an expensive way to go, but after we had priced out various digital shooting options, the way we ultimately chose was comparable in cost. Our objective was always to conserve as much money as possible so that our actors had as much time as we could give them to deliver their best performances.

The Gronvall Report: THE EAST’s Batmanglij and Marling

Thursday, June 6th, 2013

THE EAST is that rarity among espionage thrillers: a film that offers intricate plotting without being plodding; privileges characters over action sequences; and introduces a credible, memorable female protagonist. Brit Marling, an actress with arresting presence, plays an intelligence agent newly poached from the FBI by the head of a private security firm (Patricia Clarkson) whose mandate is to clean up messes created by high-profile companies before the public catches on.

Going undercover as the vagabond Sarah—short on possessions but long on rebellious attitude—the rookie spy infiltrates The East, a radical collective whose members live off the grid and deal payback to corporate bigwigs guilty of crimes ranging from toxic pharmaceuticals to industrial pollution. Alexander Skarsgard (currently also on screen in WHAT MAISIE KNEW) plays the cell’s leader Benji, who sees potential in his new “recruit.”

THE EAST is Marling’s second feature with her co-writer and director Zal Batmanglij; the two made a splash at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival with SOUND OF MY VOICE, an unsettling drama about a cult and its mysterious head. That same festival also saw the premiere of ANOTHER EARTH, an eerie sci-fi indie starring Marling and directed by Mike Cahill—who, like Batmanglij, was her classmate at Georgetown University.

For THE EAST, Batmanglij found inspiration in Alan J. Pakula’s THE PARALLAX VIEW and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, political films from the paranoid 1970s, a decade the young filmmaker likens to the present. His subject—a band of disenchanted outsiders who turn to terrorism—couldn’t be more timely. Fox Searchlight is seizing the moment, releasing the film as welcome counter-programming to the bloated summer tent poles currently hogging screens. The distributor recently sent the director and his star on a cross-country promo tour; in person the fresh-faced, bright-eyed duo is as engaging and thought-provoking as the movie itself.

ANDREA GRONVALL:  Your first feature together, SOUND OF MY VOICE, follows two investigative documentary filmmakers who infiltrate a cult and run up against its charismatic leader, who is very persuasive and manipulative. Your new film THE EAST is about an intrepid private investigator/corporate spy who penetrates an underground radical cell and meets her match it its charismatic leader, also very manipulative. The films represent two different genres and certainly vary in tone, but what attracts you to this particular narrative dynamic?

BRIT MARLING:  I think we have always been interested in outsiders and insiders, and how, as you get into any group, your idea of “normal” changes. Espionage is deep cover; you become a specialist in a world outside your own and then penetrate it. But how long can you remain it and not become assimilated, or not be tripped up by the secrecy, lies, and layers of duplicity?

ZAL BATMANGLIJ:  Also, we were writing these films at the same time, and naturally some spillover happened. And it was at a point when we were trying to get started in an industry that, in a sense, we were looking to infiltrate.

AG:  Brit, in the three features so far that you have starred in as well as co-written ad co-produced, your characters have a distinct sense of gravity. The outcomes of their quests may be uncertain, but these women are determined, and ultimately, quite competent. In no way does physical beauty subtract from their strength. So why can’t Hollywood get the message and make more movies about women with looks plus smarts plus skills? We have Meryl Streep, Susan Sarandon, Tilda Swinton, and an emerging talent like you in such roles, but what about all the other gifted actresses looking for challenging parts?

BM:  One of the great pleasures of acting is to try to transcend, to leave yourself for a time. When I first wanted to become an actor, I found it difficult to navigate that terrain. But even when you get further down the road [in the movie industry], you’re often still a second-class citizen. You are not driving the train. In most American films, female characters aren’t on journeys that are elliptical; what you often see are roles that were written originally for men, but which have been converted into roles for women. So, writing is a way out of that dilemma.

ZB:  What’s exciting about these questions is that they remind us we are living and working in a land filled with talented actresses, and how exciting many have proven themselves when given the opportunity to stretch—just recently, think of Robin Wright Penn in HOUSE OF CARDS. Most filmmakers and screenwriters are men, and so they often view our culture from how they fit into it. But as time goes on and this changes, other things will change. For instance, if you watch [Lena Dunham’s] GIRLS, the men are often the more interesting characters.

AG:  I was struck in THE EAST by the constant give-and-take between your lead character Sarah and the numerous supporting characters; as a writer and performer, you show a remarkable generosity toward the ensemble.

BM:  That may be because I think of the story first. In the edit room Zal has told me that I go for choices that are good for the story, even if they might mean a disservice to my performance.

AG:  Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the mood of the country, particularly as regards the war against terror—the Boston Marathon bombers; Guantánamo; drone strikes. How do you see your film as adding to the national conversation about terrorism? What do you hope viewers take away from THE EAST?

ZB:  Understandably, people are scared and frustrated.

BM:  And they’re having a hard time trying to figure out the meaning of things. One thing THE EAST shows is that you have to very careful about who you choose as your authority.

ZB:  We [as a people] give authority its power. Brit and I want audience to enjoy the film and take what they want from it, but also to face the questions in THE EAST about alienation, mobilization, and authority. And to open a dialogue about what is and isn’t crazy. Today just the very act of questioning can make you look crazy.

AG:  Zal, you were born in France. When did you and your family move to the U.S.A.? Do you speak French? Have you been influenced by French culture and French films, and would you like to work abroad?

ZB:  My family moved here when I was seven years old; I’m an American citizen, and I do speak French. I love French film, and, yes, I would very much also like to work in France. I f ind it’s a place that really values and supports filmmakers. You can make kinds of movies in France that you can’t make here. That said, you can make other kinds of movies here that you can’t make in France, where they’re not set up to produce the sort of big-budget epics that Christopher Nolan and James Cameron make. I love both kinds, and above all, love having the freedom to make morally and emotionally complex films.

The Gronvall Report: Down Under On Their Way Up With THE SAPPHIRES’ Blair And Mauboy

Thursday, March 28th, 2013

There are more reasons than better weather to cheer the arrival of spring; gone are the dog days of January and February, when multiplexes were still showing either awards season titles or disposable new features studios were dumping for a quick theatrical run before video release. Finally some decent movies are on screen, and one of the most enjoyable right now is a musical drama-comedy from Australia, The Sapphires. A little movie with a big heart and a great vibe, it’s the story of three Aboriginal sisters—Gail (Deborah Mailman), Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell), and Julie (Jessica Mauboy)—who dream of becoming country and western singers in 1968 Victoria. Luckily for them they meet Dave, a down-at-heels music promoter (Chris O’Dowd) who sells them on soul instead. Tired of fighting racism at home, the sisters enlist their cousin Kay (Shari Sebbens) to make their trio a quartet, and with Dave as their manager head to Vietnam for a gig singing to American troops. Based on a stage musical by Tony Briggs (who was inspired by his own family’s history), the movie has a period look that’s spot-on, and a soundtrack full of Sixties hits that have stood the test of time. The Weinstein Company recently flew director Wayne Blair and star Mauboy to the States for a series of interviews; I caught up with them at (appropriately) The House of Blues.

Andrea Gronvall:  Not having seen the original stage production, I’m wondering how—beyond, obviously, your use of locations—did you open up the play for the big screen?

Wayne Blair:  We changed half the songs because we had more to play with. We also fleshed out the characters to a greater extent; in the movie we start with the four female protagonists as youngsters, which wasn’t the case in the play. And the character of Dave [Chris O’Dowd] is Irish in the film, but he was Australian on the stage.

AG:  You were under a lot of pressure with a tight budget and a rigorous shooting schedule. One of your producers, Kylie de Fresne, said Ho Chi Minh City was “a pretty crazy place to make a film.” How did you handle the stress?

WB:  During the shoot, I didn’t have time to think, I just had to keep moving. And then in the evenings I screened dailies. But apart from the night right before shooting began, when I didn’t sleep well, I was so tired at the end of every day that I slept like a baby. We covered nine locations in six weeks. For me, the challenges in shooting in Vietnam were not about culture clashes, or even language—a lot of the Vietnamese people speak at least a little English, but when language is a barrier, you can usually make your intentions clear through gestures. For me, the difficulty mostly was the distances we had to travel: two and a half hours from the city into the country to shoot the group performing for the troops at remote sites.

AG:  There’s a sequence in The Sapphires that is key to the appeal of the movie, and gets right to the heart of what soul is all about. It’s when Dave coaches the girls, “Country and western music is about loss. Soul music is also about loss. But the difference is, in country and western music they’ve lost, they’ve given up, and they’re just at home whining about it. In soul music they’re struggling to get it back, and they haven’t given up—”

WB:  “—so every note that passes through your lips should have the tone of a woman who’s gasping and fighting and desperate to retrieve what’s been taken from her.” I wrote that, together with Tony Briggs.

AG:  I love those lines. They set the tone, and they set up our expectations—which the characters meet. Jessica, I didn’t see your appearances on “Australian Idol,” so I don’t know what material you performed. I will say that I find the trend of the kind of “power ballads” that “American Idol” and “The Voice” and “Smash” promote is getting tedious. What’s refreshing about your numbers in The Sapphires is that you respect those great songs from the Sixties; you don’t try to upstage them. You serve the songs, and so the songs serve you, and in the process you become incandescent. You really get it.

Jessica Mauboy:  Thank you! When it came time to audition for “Aussie Idol” at first I didn’t want to do it. But I was really lucky that I had supportive parents and enough confidence to go ahead. I was 16 at the time. “Idol” has a process: you have to choose from the list of songs the show gives you to perform. I only made it to runner-up, but that opened doors to a record contract; I’m currently working on my third studio album.

I feel the same as you about the music in The Sapphires. On those songs I worked with Wayne and with Bryan Jones, who’s the top soul producer in Australia. I also got the chance to meet the real-life women who inspired the play and the movie–sophisticated and really strong women, who took the time to talk with us about their lives. By the time filming started, I had a sense of who my character was, and could tell her story through the songs.

AG:  One thing I noticed in the movie is that the competitiveness and the combativeness between the three sisters spill over into their dealings with the outside world. They don’t take any guff from anyone, including men. Were these women ahead of their time, or is their brash toughness a part of Aboriginal culture?

JM:  A certain amount of intensity and aggressiveness I’d say are part of Aboriginal culture.

WB:  You know where you stand right away, rather than pussyfoot around each other.

AG:  So what’s next for you two? When are we going to see you on the screen again, Jessica?

JM:  If the opportunity comes up, I’d like to do a film again. I’ll be traveling back and forth to New York and L.A. for the next couple of years, to work with music producers Harvey Mason, Jr. and Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins. I’ll be spending the whole of April in L.A.

WB:  I’ll be working on “Redfern Now,” a TV series for ITA/ABC.

AG:  Have you been getting any film offers?

WB:  I’m reviewing a number of movie projects, yes.

AG:  Anything exciting?

WB:  It’s all exciting now.

The Gronvall Report: Oscar-Nominated GATEKEEPERS Director Dror Moreh

Saturday, February 23rd, 2013

What’s in a name? Let’s take Dror Moreh.

Translated from the Hebrew, the name of the 51-year-old Israeli producer-director means “freedom teacher.” After witnessing his stunning, searing new film, The Gatekeepers, you might come away thinking that his parents couldn’t have named him any better; without being ponderously didactic, his incisive nonfiction feature makes clear what’s at stake at this critical juncture for democratic Israel. It’s not a lesson that all Israelis—or their American supporters—will necessarily relish. Kudos to distributor Sony Pictures Classics for not shying away from a tough subject, and for shepherding the film to a Best Documentary nomination at the 85th Academy Awards.

The Gatekeepers are six former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s intelligence agency charged with combating terrorism, espionage, and the release of state secrets. They had never been interviewed about their work before; it’s a coup for Moreh that after he persuaded Ami Ayalon (who headed the Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000) to participate, the others got on board as well. It’s not like they hang out together.

When Moreh recently visited Chicago, I mentioned that in our country there’s a Presidents Club, where the current POTUS can meet with former Chief Executives to swap ideas and advice. Before I could ask if the Shin Bet top guns had a similar fraternity, he interjected, “There’s no Shin Bet club. They don’t like each other much. Respect each other, yes, but they’re not pals. The last time they met as a group was at the [December, 2012] premiere at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. The premiere went amazingly well, but it was very, very intense, and after the lights went up, everyone looked shocked.”

And shock is what U.S. audiences also are likely to experience, as there haven’t been many war documentaries this hard-hitting since Errol Morris’ The Fog of War ten years ago. (Morris’ film directly inspired Moreh, who says, “I saw it 20 times. After Errol watched The Gatekeepers at the [September, 2012] Telluride Film Festival, he came up to me, hugged me, and said he loved it.”) The big difference between the two works is that Ayalon and his five Shin Bet colleagues—Avraham Shalom (head, 1980-1986), Yaakov Peri (head, 1988-1994), Carmi Gillon (head, 1994-1996), Avi Dichter (head, 2000-2005), and Yuval Diskin (head, 2005-2011)—are far more candid and introspective than the smug and slippery Robert S. McNamara, who as U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War would answer questions he wanted reporters to ask, rather than the questions they actually posed.

Moreh explains that the heads of Shin Bet are not politicians, but former members of Israel’s executive branch, and as such can disclose whatever they want, “as long as they don’t compromise ongoing security operations. And they can’t speak specifically about what surveillance techniques are being used.” What they open up about in his film are some of their successes during the various crises that arose after the Six Day War in 1967. More often they speak of their failures, and why they failed.

Early successes, according to Dichter and Peri, depended on gathering human intelligence (HUMINT) among the Palestinians in the newly occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. The Shin Bet’s efforts in this regard improved dramatically once all its agents learned to speak Arabic with a flawless accent. And for years as long as dialogues continued between Israeli and Palestinian security forces, tensions were kept relatively low.

Once terrorism became the main priority of the Shin Bet, Shalom admits they forgot about the Palestinians as a whole. SIGNINT (signals intelligence, or the interception of communications) became more important, because with an accurate trace of, say, a cell phone call by a terrorist, the greater the chance of a clean strike against that target. But those strikes were not always accurate, and cycles of violence kept escalating.

Dror Moreh.

“At the end of the day, SIGNINT is superior. But when you have someone you trust, HUMINT is the most valuable asset program an agency can have,” Moreh avers. “There is a whole army of reasons why people cooperate with the Shin Bet. Money is the most common element in developing HUMINT, but sometimes people become informants out of idealism.”  He cites the example of Mosab Hassan Yousef, nicknamed “The Green Prince.” Son of one of the founders of Hamas, he worked for over a decade with the Shin Bet to unmask terrorists. Yousef’s motivation was to save lives, and by helping thwart suicide attacks he indeed saved hundreds.

The agency’s goal may be to save innocent lives, but the lethal force often employed to do so clearly haunts some of Moreh’s subjects. In a pre-credit sequence, Diskin explains: “You say, ‘Okay, I made a decision, and X number of people were killed. They were definitely about to launch a big attack,’ No one near them was hurt. It was as sterile as possible. Yet you still say, ‘There’s something unnatural about it.’ What is unnatural is the power you have to take three people, terrorists, and take their lives in an instant.”

Shalom, on the other hand, at first seems to have fewer regrets. In a terse exchange with the off-camera Moreh early in the film, the eldest of The Gatekeepers bristles as he defends his controversial 1984 order to kill the two handcuffed surviving hijackers of the 300 bus from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon. “I didn’t want any more terrorists in court,” he says, adding that if a newspaper photographer hadn’t been there, “no one would have known.” Following a public outcry, Shalom resigned in 1986.

Increasingly the Shin Bet’s focus expanded beyond Arab terrorist threats.  During his tenure as agency head, Gillon repeatedly warned that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was in mortal danger from Jewish religious extremists.  Right-wing fundamentalists, many of whom built illegal settlements in the West Bank, reviled Rabin for his commitment to the Middle East peace process and the Oslo Accords. The Shin Bet had extensive files on those groups, but it was someone totally off the agency’s radar, law student Yigal Amir, who assassinated the P.M. at close range in 1995. Gillon fears that there will be another political assassination around the time of Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank.

The Gatekeepers is packed with information, yet flows quickly through its trim 97 minutes. Moreh brought the film in on a budget of $1.5 million, most of which went into post-production, CGI and editing. “I have 60 to 70 hours of recorded interviews with each of these guys,” he says. “I left a lot on the cutting room floor.”

Of all six men, the one Moreh seems to identify with most is Diskin, whom the filmmaker also interviewed at length in a 2012 print article titled “Absolutely Over and Out” for Israel’s Yediot Aharonot. It’s Diskin who opens the film, and his thoughtful comments set much of the tone, but Moreh gives the last word to Ayalon, who was a decorated military commando and Major General in the Israeli Navy before he headed the Shin Bet.

“I think of my son,” Ayalon reflects, “who served for three years in the Paratroopers, participated in the conquest of Nablus at least two or three times. Did it bring us victory? I don’t think so. Did it create a better political reality? The tragedy of Israel’s public security debate is that we don’t realize that we face a frustrating situation in which we win every battle but we lose the war.”

The Gronvall Files: To Canada (And Beyond?): PIXAR Canada Creative Director Dylan Brown

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012

Animation has remained one of my cherished film forms since childhood, and today movies from Pixar are among my all-time favorites. Toy Story, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and Wall-E rank up there alongside works from Walt Disney (classic Disney as well as titles from the Michael EisnerJeffrey Katzenberg era),  Hayao Miyazaki, Lotte ReinigerOskar Fischinger, and those great cartoons from Warner Bros. So when the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival brought in Dylan Brown, long-time Pixar animator who is now the creative director for the company’s Vancouver outpost, Pixar Canada, I made a beeline to talk to him.

Following a screening of crowd-pleasers from the new Blu-Ray/DVD & Digital release, Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 2, the California-born Brown was a bouncing human wind-up toy in a Q&A lasting a full hour. Tall, trim, and still boyish-looking at 42 (he has no wrinkles, a good indicator of job satisfaction), he demonstrated how animators act out the characters they’re creating in order to get the movements right; explained that sequels are made because there are still stories to be told about beloved characters, and that the shorts exist to keep the characters “alive” between features; and that would-be animators don’t require expensive equipment to start out—some Legos, or clay, and a cell phone to take photos are all one needs to make a stop-action film. Then he devoted another 45 minutes to meeting with fans one-on-one, the best way to get to know your audience.

Founded two years ago with a mission to provide support to the parent studio by creating shorts starring the existing characters from the various Toy Story and Cars films, Pixar Canada has produced four shorts to date, including Partysaurus Rex, which made its debut this fall in front of the theatrical release of Finding Nemo: 3D. The busy Vancouver satellite has a staff of 80, and fields employment applications from all over.

Andrea Gronvall:  There were a number of aspiring animators in the house today. What does Pixar Canada look for in its hires?

Dylan Brown:  Usually when someone applies for a job, they submit a reel and a resume. What I look for first is the work. I don’t care about the resume or their background. If the work shows growth and potential, if it’s good enough, that rates an interview maybe 49% of the time. For about 51% of the candidates, I’ll look at a resume to learn where they’ve been and what it is that sparks their interest, why they have the need to entertain. When we get to the interview stage, what I want to learn is how well they take feedback—that’s very important—and also, their curiosity and artistic impulse, and not just regarding the world of film. One of my favorite interview questions to pose is, “Is there anything you wanted to be asked that I didn’t ask?”

AG:  For decades through its National Film Board Canada has fostered an appreciation of animation among filmgoers, kids and adults alike. Do you find your Canadian applicants to be particularly attuned to the medium?

DB: I actually haven’t thought about it. Without a doubt, they definitely have a Canadian sense of humor, a little more off-the-wall; it may be related to the cold! They’re really funny people. In terms of animation, we have a house style that is not rigid: the playing field is very broad, but there’s still an out-of-bounds area. There’s a lot of room at Pixar to spread your wings, but it’s channeled in a certain way.

Animators are like actors. I felt our Vancouver animation team needed to be better actors, so I found them a great acting coach. Now for two hours every Monday they study acting!

AG:  Over the past few years there’s been a glut in animated features—a number of them made to cash in on the vogue for 3D—and more than a few were not successful. Yet every new theatrical release from Pixar somehow feels like an event. How does the company keep up that momentum?

DBSteve Jobs used to say, “Do one thing, and just make it great.”  And John Lasseter says that quality is the best business plan. When you go to see a Pixar movie in a theatre, you will get, first, the trailer for one of our upcoming movies, then a short, and then the feature attraction. [To make a comparison,] the way they package objects in stores in Japan is as careful, thoughtful, and artful as the gift itself. We are a well vertically-integrated company.

I always want us to strive to be the best animation studio—the best film studio—in the world. I want to punch up production values on new films, and have our studio be a beacon in Vancouver of amazing creativity. I feel the right thing to do is the thing we haven’t done yet.

AG:  Like maybe the TV specials that have been announced?

DB:  Our first works at Pixar Canada were six-minute pieces, and some one-and-a=half-minute films, which we call shorty-shorts. But we set up the Vancouver studio to produce the 22-minute specials. Pixar in California is currently working on the first one, called Toy Story of Terror.

AG:  On the new DVD, my favorite short is the very funny Small Fry, which your Pixar Canada team did. Jane Lynch voicing Neptuna, the leader of a support group for outmoded promotional giveaway toys—who comes up with these ideas?! But another short, Air Mater, is kind of sweet, as well as dynamic. It looks somewhat like the upcoming Planes—judging from the trailer, which also appears on the DVD. Was the short supposed to be a run-up to the longer film?

DB:  We had done nine Mater’s Tall Tales at Pixar [in Emeryville] before we did Air Mater at Pixar Canada. The Walt Disney Company knew they were going to do a spin-off of Cars. So, Air Mater was designed as a way to introduce some of the characters in Planes. I think that the last line in Air Mater [where Mater’s new flying pals, the Falcon Hawks, call him back into service] is a little too much like advertising in that it’s a little too on-the-nose. But the short is self-contained.

AG: You’ve been with your highly successful company for 17 years, 15 of which you’ve spent in leadership positions. In all the literature on corporate strategy that’s been published in recent years, are there any books, from the bestseller lists or otherwise, that you feel offer valuable insights into business success?

DB:  Not really, and I’ve looked at a lot of those books.  But there are other kinds of books that do. Right now I’m reading about Ernest Shackleton and the voyage of the Endurance to Antarctica. Over the course of several years, during all that hardship and danger, he promised his men that no one would die. He didn’t care about the rules; he led his men by pairing different personalities with each other in ways no one else would have thought could work. And he succeeded: nobody died.

I’ve spoken with plenty of psychologists and coaches over time, and have been fortunate to have been led by Steve and John. Glenn McQueen, the supervising animator before me, was also an important mentor. And there’s another book I can mention:  Tribes,” by Seth Godin. It’s about the differences between leaders and managers; it’s interesting, and, for myself, accurate.

AG:  So, what question haven’t I asked you, that you wanted to be asked?

DB:  About reaching the top. People talk about getting to the top of the mountain, or the top of the corporate ladder. I’ve actually come to believe that I don’t ever want to reach the top of the mountain. Sometimes you need to rest at a plateau, either to celebrate, or take in the view. Sometimes you’re just out of juice, and you’re not going upward anymore. And sometimes you simply need to go downward before you can find another way to head toward the top.