QT-Apple pie: distilled Tarantino

Drawn from “Quentin Tarantino Meets Fiona Apple,” almost 1,600 words from the gob of QT: “One of my favourite scenes of all time is the opening scene of Pedro Almodovar’s Matador: the guy getting off on slasher films. That is a touched-by-God, genius moment. I remember talking to some of the guys I worked with at the Video Archives store and saying, “Man, I’d love to do an opening to a movie like that.” And someone said: “Yeah, they wouldn’t let you.” People have said little things like that all my life. But who’s “they”? I’ve given nobody the authority over me to say I can’t do anything—I can do anything I want or can achieve. I don’t ask permission. I might ask forgiveness, but I won’t ask permission. There is no “they”… You have a loaded gun, and you know you’ve got what it takes to put it in their faces and blow their heads off. It’s about never taking the gun out. It’s about never touching the gun, never raising it, never pulling the trigger, never blowing their heads off. It’s about not going there—but knowing you can.” Violence is “cinematic,” QT says. “It’s almost as if Edison and the Lumiere brothers invented the camera for filming violence.” Pride of accomplishment? “I’ve never done a car chase before, and if I’m gonna do it, it has to be one of the best in the history of cinema… Directors don’t get better as they get older. They get worse—they get out of touch. There is this weird thing about movie-making where you kind of figure out how to do it. You’re just pulled along by the experience—there’s no way you can predict what’s going to happen. And on the second one, you know a hell of a lot more than you did on the first one, but you’re still being pulled along at least 25%. But when it came to the third one, now I kind of got it, and that was scary to me… I like holding on to my amateur status. I wanted to be a professional in all the right ways, but I didn’t want it ever to be a job… Whether it’s hardship or ruin, or hardship or good times, or happy or sad, or profitable or destitute—whatever the deal is, you go down the road today, and maybe your rewards are today, or maybe your rewards will be tomorrow, or maybe in another life, but you’re going your own way.”

LOOK: Planes, Trains and Effing Automobiles

Glass' house: this American label

This American Lifer Ira Glass gets time in the NYT Magazine, telling Deborah Solomon that the work on the new Showtime series isn’t documentary: “We don’t say “documentary” because “documentary” sounds boring. We try to avoid that word… We’re taking the tools of journalism and applying them to people whom you wouldn’t normally apply them to—people who aren’t famous, people who aren’t powerful, people just like you and me… For me to do a story, something has to happen to someone. It’s a story in the way you learn what a story is in third grade, where there is a person and things happen to them and then something big happens and they realize something new.”

They wear so many hats and it is only one head: today's African cinema

For the Beeb, Orla Ryan reports on the state of African cinema from movie-mad Burkina Faso during the biennial pan-African Fespaco film festival, or, “the Oscars of Ouagadougou.” “[D]espite the huge love of cinema and the popularity of these films, which tell stories from around the continent through the eyes of Africans, many budding and active film makers still find it hard to raise finance for their films.” Plus, “conventional film business models do not work on a continent where there are few cinemas. It is much harder to convince people to back to a film when… a shortage of cinemas make[s] it hard to earn back their initial investment.” Says Burkinabé director Gaston Kaboré [pictured], “Directors are forced to play many roles. They are scriptwriters, they are producers, they exhibit, they do promos, they are sellers. They wear so many hats and it is only one head.” Senior Senegalese master Ousmane Sembene is on hand: “If you write in a newspaper, people read it and it is finished. When it is on screen, everyone sees it. Lots of people cannot read, everyone has eyes to see.”

6 years in Harvey's closet: Tears of a Thai director

ONLY RECENTLY FREED of the notorious early 2000s Miramax Shelf of Invisibility, Wisit Sasanatieng’s Tears of the Black Tiger (Fah Talai Jone, 2000, ****) is a sui generis mashup, a “Raiders of the Lost Archive,” a strange, fevered, delirious, 1950s-styled Thai western-romance melodrama and a singularity of the highest order. Giddy beyond belief, it embodies an era of Thai genre movies, with florid colors and visual devices that out-spaghetti spaghetti westerns, faded to the turquoise-gold-pink-chartreuse shades of 1940s roto newspaper supplements. The film’s major influence even sounds made up: the films of Thai independent filmmaker Rattana Pestonji, who as the press notes describe, is “unknown outside of Thailand [and] largely forgotten at home, where there is no tradition of repertory or archival screenings of vintage films.” Apocryphal or not, there is much wry, wild and weird in Tears, and its invisibility to northern American audiences for half a decade only adds to its allure. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez have said their upcoming Grindhouse will play with making their work look like a battered relic; this gentle yet persistent hallucination was way ahead of their game. Designer cowboys with shoulder rocket launchers? Gunshot wounds that can only be called “meaty”? Blood as viscous and sweet looking as lychee? Textures were created with a pre-digital intermediate process, with a transfer to DigiBeta video, lurid tweaking and then back to 35mm. Look for how many reviews describe this blossoming bruise as “indescribable.” Over at LA Times, the indispensible Dennis Lim shines a light on Miramax’s past and Sasanatieng’s present. Lim calls it “a delirious pastiche that whizzes through as many incongruous genres as it does implausible plot twists. The movie’s real-life trajectory—from festival star to battle-scarred survivor—Is almost as dramatic and convoluted… [I]t’s one of the most notable victims of the old, overspending Miramax, which in the Weinstein era was notorious for acquiring armloads of festival titles and sometimes allowing them to molder in the vaults indefinitely… Eamonn Bowles, president of Magnolia Pictures [the film’s current US distributor] remembers seeing Tears at its first packed Cannes screening. “The saturated color scheme and the incredibly arch nature of the characters and plot were counterbalanced by a seeming earnestness that just had no precedent for me,” he said… The first rumblings of trouble came when Miramax decided to re-cut the film within months of the Cannes purchase. Sasanatieng said he and his producers had been warned of the Weinsteins’ penchant for meddling. But, he said, “We were too innocent. We believed that they would respect our work. They told us again and again that everybody at Miramax loved the film so much… They didn’t allow me to re-cut it at all,” Sasanatieng said. “They did it by themselves and then sent me the tape. And they changed the ending from tragic to happy. They said that in the time after 9/11, nobody would like to see something sad.” [Quicktime trailer here [graphic violence]; Now playing Cambridge, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Seattle; March 16 Tucson and San Diego; March 23, Hartford, Grand Rapids, and Columbia, South Carolina; March 30, Detroit and University City, Missouri; April 6, Denver, Atlanta and Nashville.]

Ishtar unfeathered: defending May

“The Departed is unlikely to make as lasting an imprint on the film community as another high-profile title, now celebrating its 20th anniversary: Ishtar, writes Dalton Ross at EW. “Starring A-listers Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as failed songwriters caught up in international espionage, Ishtar [1987] is considered [by some] one of the greatest Hollywood flops of all time… Time magazine even included the movie on its list of ‘The 100 Worst Ideas of the Century‘… Certainly one of the reasons Ishtar is so widely ridiculed has to do with the [then] huge cost ($40 million, with only a $14 million return [theatrically, not including an HBO sale or video revenue]) and even huger egos involved, but I’m here to tell you something that many may find funnier than anything in the actual film—it’s not that bad… I cackle watching Hoffman try in vain to teach Beatty the difference between ”smuck” and ”schmuck,” guffaw at the bit about a blind camel, and pause the screen every time that [Isabelle Adjani] flashes her left breast. (I never claimed to be a proud man.) … [O]ne could even call Ishtar a cutting-edge precursor to awkwardly uncomfortable gems such as “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Jonathan Rosenbaum takes Elaine May’s comedy more seriously. May converses at length with Mike Nichols after a 2006 Manhattan screening held by Film Comment in which her former performing partner suggests “you invented the perfect metaphor for the behavior of the Bush administration in Iraq” and May observes, “If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today… [O]ddly enough when I made this movie Ronald Reagan was president and there was Iran-Contra, we were supporting Iran and Iraq. We put in Saddam. We had taken out the Shah. Khomeini was there. I remember looking at Ronald Reagan and thinking—I’m qualifying this, this was just an idea, I didn’t really believe it—I thought, he’s from Hollywood, he’s a really nice man. It’s possible the only movie he’s ever seen about the Middle East are the road movies with Hope and Crosby, and I thought I would make that movie.” When Ishtar opened, “I left almost immediately for Bali,” May says. “The film was political and it was a satire but it was my secret. When these articles started coming out, I thought—only for five minutes—it’s the CIA. I didn’t dream that it would be the studio. For one moment it was sort of glorious to think that I was going to be taken down by the CIA, and then it turned out to be David Putnam. I think this man was unique in that way, in that he was going to redo Hollywood and make it a better place. He was going to work from the inside…” [It’s a fascinating Q&A in its entirety, plus, a dialogue transcript.]

[LISTEN] Eastwood's work ethic: keep your embouchure strong

“It’s just a bit of work ethic,” prolific septuagenerian Clint Eastwood tells fellow filmland vet Philip French in the Observer, “It becomes part of my life and, if I have any virtues, which are probably not many, I get fairly decisive about things. When I find something I like, I usually know it pretty soon and I don’t have to talk myself into much. I probably shoot from the hip a little more than Warren Beatty or other people. They probably ponder things more and I say: I like this, let’s go. I don’t sit and dwell on it too much. I dwell on it as I make it. I guess everybody’s a little different. Warren got up at the Golden Globes and he says: ‘How do you it – having to do two pictures in one year?’ But when I was growing up, Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh and all those directors made several pictures in one year. There’s no big deal. Nowadays, everybody makes a deal that you can’t do it, it’s an impossible feat. It wasn’t an impossible feat. Some of those B movie guys would get the script on Friday night and Monday morning you’re starting and here’s your cast. They just went with it. It’s like being a musician. If you play every day, your embouchure is strong. If you play once every two years, you have to build up all over again.” [The complete seventy-three-minute conversation is downloadable here.]

Sienna Miller: At least we got a fuckin' bunny out of it

Sienna Miller again proves herself a worthy throwback to the era of the say-anything actor or actress who always speaks their racing mind to Simon Hattenstone in the Guardian. “Mating with your rabbit!” I shout. “No! My rabbit with another rabbit. I had this gorgeous rabbit called Daisy and I picked out the one I wanted, got them out of their hutches—it was obviously very illegal to put them together—got them in a travel basket, ran behind the shed, let them do it, got caught… But it was this school in the country, and we had all been packed off at eight years old. At least we got a fuckin’ bunny out of it.” She though math was pointless. “I’d say, ‘When would I use long division?’ and the teacher would say, ‘When you’re in a supermarket and you want to calculate the price of your food before you get to the till,’ and I’d think, ‘Well, I’d take a fucking calculator, you nob.'” She is surprisingly laddish, with a wonderful knack of putting her foot in it. Take Pittsburgh. When she returned to the city where she had researched Factory Girl, she told Rolling Stone [that] she’d renamed it Shitsburgh. It just slipped out… “Having met me, you’ll realise these things just come out. I think it might be mild Tourette’s, not to insult people who have proper Tourette’s, but I will say the most inappropriate things at the most inappropriate time to the most inappropriate person. Always. Guaranteed.” Even now, mid-apology, she can’t help digging herself in deeper. She tells me how she and her friends then spent ages renaming other American places. “Massivetwoshits is Massachusetts. Connecticunt, or Connectibutt. We came up with loads…” Of the yellow press favoring her slips and alleging her affairs, she tells Hattenstone, “Yeah! Year of the Slut! Spread ’em! That’s my motto for 2007.” She stops again, stresses she’s joking. “Oh, please don’t write that.”

Zodiac tech: taking a shot

From Paramount’s “handbook of production information,” director of photography Harris Savides describes in simple tech-speak how the technology used to shoot the vivid, visceral Zodiac works: “The Viper is a high-definition (HD) video camera that captures data raw—meaning the camera outputs the image data off the sensor chips without modification. HD sensor chips generate tremendous amounts of data. Initially, HD cameras recorded to tape—a medium that cannot support HD’s high data rate. Camera manufacturers decided to address this drawback by compressing the data and reducing the data rate that the tape mechanism can handle. When the data is compressed, decisions about color balance, contrast, brightness, etc., must be made during the compression process. Once these decisions are made and the results compressed, any subsequent modifications degrades image quality. In effect, the filmmakers must live with what is recorded to tape. The Viper represents a drastic departure from this paradigm. Rather than making image processing decisions and then compressing the data, Viper only captures the data and outputs the unmodified, unprocessed data. Without an onboard recording device, the Viper depends on an external recording device. Filmmakers can opt to record to a tape recorder, like the Sony HDCAM tape system. In this instance, image decisions would be made and the data would be compressed. However, with the availability of S Two digital field recorders and Thomson’s Venom data recorders, filmmakers can modify the image as much as they wish without degrading the image.

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AnachrOzNistic: new Aussie silent speaks

Australian director Rolf de Heer has made a silent movie, reports Sydney Morning Herald’s Garry Maddox. The Dutch-born Adelaider was given a “the year of Rolf” nod at the Adelaide Film Festival last week and he touted his twelfth feature, Dr. Plonk. “Predictably unpredictable, de Heer has made a black-and-white silent comedy, Dr Plonk, shot with a hand-cranked camera [reviving] the slapstick tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and the Keystone Cops. When approached to star in it, actress Magda Szubanski thought the idea was so wacky it just might work. “At best it will be brilliant… At worst it will be a brilliant experiment.” … Dr Plonk is a return to innocence, he says. “In terms of subject and feel, there’s an innocence about it which I suspect a lot of people really enjoy. They’re just not used to seeing it any more. It has to work as a film and as entertainment but if there’s anything that’s going to get people to enjoy it on a level beyond that, it’s this innocence from back then. Cinema on the whole has lost that. And I think we’ve lost something by losing that.” … Very little about the enterprise was conventional in contemporary filmmaking terms. “It isn’t a 1912 silent film,” de Heer says. “It’s a 2006-2007 contemporary film but there’s no real precedent. And it’s comedy, and comedy is harder to pick than most drama as you’re doing it. Those two things together mean you’re going on a wing and a prayer more than normal.” [A fair bit more at the link.]

[TRAILER] Satoshi Kon's Paprika

Sony Pictures Classics releases the eyeball-kick rich trailer for Satoshi Kon’s latest anime, Paprika: “Twenty-nine-year-old Dr. Atsuko Chiba is an attractive but modest Japanese research psychotherapist whose work is on the cutting edge of her field,” the distrib describes. “Her alter-ego is a stunning and fearless 18-year-old “dream detective,” code named PAPRIKA, who can enter into people’s dreams and synchronize with their unconscious to help uncover the source of their anxiety or neurosis.”

About nothing: calling unfunny Seinfeld's guff on docs being depressing

Producer John Sinno, Academy Award Nominee for Iraq In Fragments calls the loathsome Jerry Seinfeld on his unfunny, self-regarding introduction to the Oscar doc category in an open letter to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “I had the great fortune of attending the 79th Academy Awards following my nomination as producer for a film in the Best Documentary Feature category. At the Awards ceremony, most categories featured an introduction that glorified the filmmakers’ craft and the role it plays for the film audience and industry. But when comedian Jerry Seinfeld introduced the award for Best Documentary Feature, he began by referring to a documentary that features himself as a subject, then proceeded to poke fun at it by saying it won no awards and made no money. He then revealed his love of documentaries, as they have a very “real” quality, while making a comically sour face. This less-than-flattering beginning was followed by a lengthy digression that had nothing whatsoever to do with documentary films. The clincher, however, came when he wrapped up his introduction by calling all five nominated films “incredibly depressing!” While I appreciate the role of humor in our lives, Jerry Seinfeld’s remarks were made at the expense of thousands of documentary filmmakers and the entire documentary genre. Obviously we make films not for awards or money, although we are glad if we are fortunate enough to receive them. The important thing is to tell stories, whether of people who have been damaged by war, of humankind’s reckless attitude toward nature and the environment, or even of the lives and habits of penguins. With his lengthy, dismissive and digressive introduction, Jerry Seinfeld had no time left for any individual description of the five nominated films. And by labeling the documentaries “incredibly depressing,” he indirectly told millions of viewers not to bother seeing them because they’re nothing but downers. He wasted a wonderful opportunity to excite viewers about the nominated films and about the documentary genre in general. To have a presenter introduce a category with such disrespect for the nominees and their work is counter to the principles the Academy was founded upon. To be nominated for an Academy Award is one of the highest honors our peers can give us, and to have the films dismissed in such an offhand fashion was deeply insulting. The Academy owes all documentary filmmakers an apology.

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Bong Joon-Ho's Leica

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[LOOK] Blue screen