New York Film Festival

Attention College-Age Film Critics: Indiewire, Locarno Film Festival and Film Society of Lincoln Center Could Send You to Switzerland

Eric Kohn — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:11:27 GMT

One of the central challenges for any film critic is finding opportunities to turn the practice into a profession. The gateways to launching a career in film criticism have dwindled to a few scattered university courses and internships. A budding critic looking for places to write will find more outlets than ever before, but after a few bylines even the most ambitious newcomer will be forced to ask: Now what?

For many critics, film festivals are the ideal arena to practice the craft. Bigger festivals contain a dense lineup of films for critics to cover in a deadline-driven environment. The challenge is getting there in the first place.

That's where we come in. Indiewire has stepped up its efforts to create a support system for film critics by developing the Criticwire Network and the accompanying blog run by Matt Singer. Now, we're taking the next step.

This summer, Indiewire is partnering with the Festival del Film Locarno -- aka the Locarno Film Festival -- along with the Swiss Association of Film Journalists and the Film Society of Lincoln Center to run a workshop for aspiring film critics.

Indiewire and Locarno will select six college-age participants to attend the two-week festival in early August, where they'll write about the program in a deadline-driven environment. With the support of Gohner Stiftung, the festival will provide housing from July 31 through August 11. Indiewire will contribute with a share of the travel expenses depending on the country of origin of the participant.

The Critics' Academy is a subset of Locarno's larger Summer Academy initiative (more information can be found here). While the festival has co-hosted a workshop for Swiss students in the past, this summer's Critics' Academy will mark the first time it represents an international selection of aspiring critics, some of whom may also attend a similar workshop this fall in New York during the 50th edition of the New York Film Festival.

During Locarno, participants will work with me and other critics and journalists to cover the festival on a daily basis. Their writing assignments will appear in Pardo Live, the festival's daily newspaper, the Film Society of Lincoln Center's website, filmlinc.com, and Indiewire's Criticwire blog. They will also be encouraged to pitch other outlets based on their experiences in Locarno.

One of the oldest festivals in the world, Locarno attracts thousands of press and industry members each year. Most famous for its Piazza Grande section, which hosts nightly outdoor screenings before crowds of 8,000, Locarno has grown into one of Europe's most significant film events. In addition to premiering many films that go on to play at other major festivals, Locarno also hosts an annual retrospective (this year's is dedicated to Otto Preminger) and tributes to accomplished filmmakers and producers. Participants in the Critics Academy will have the opportunity to write about all of these events.

As one of the few U.S. critics to attend Locarno over the last few years -- beginning when film critic Olivier Pere took over as artistic director -- I can attest to the quality and scope of its programming that has been tailored to meet the standards of committed cinephiles. It is one of the best festivals for critics to hone their skills.

In an insightful 2008 essay about the film festival circuit, Cinema Scope editor (and Locarno programmer) Mark Peranson divides festivals into two categories: "Business" festivals and "audience" festivals. Locarno, a festival programmed by critics and cinephiles, pleases the latter contingency; however, with its opening "Industry Days" and developing marketplace, it also connects the dots between cinematic discovery and the process through which films can find audiences beyond the festival circuit.

For critics, this is an invaluable connection. Participants in this year's Critics' Academy will be able to explore Locarno's program and help introduce it to readers around the world.

Applicants must have completed a minimum of three years of undergraduate study and have a demonstrated interest in film criticism as well as the ability to speak and write fluently in English.

Interested? Here's what applications must include:

CV: A basic one-page resume
Contact information for two recommendations (professors, employers, etc.)
Four writing samples about film. These can take the form of film reviews, scholarly papers, blog posts, college newspaper clips, or any other written work that you think demonstrates your writing skills.
A 500-word statement of intent. Tell us about your background and why you would make an ideal candidate for the Critics Academy. Also note any particular interests you have as a critic (genres, national cinemas, etc.). Passion, strong writing skills and a deep knowledge of film history matter more than overall experience, so this is your chance to really make a case for yourself.

Please send applications in the body of an email by June 22, 2012 to SUMMERACADEMY@PARDO.CH.

Questions? Please direct them to me at eric@indiewire.com.

Amos Vogel, Founder of the New York Film Festival and Cinema 16, Dies at 91

Sam Adams — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:11:46 GMT

The promotional materials for Cinema 16, the groundbreaking film society founded in 1947 by Amos Vogel, advertised Films You Cannot See Elsewhere. But for Vogel, who died peacefully Tuesday at the age of 91 in the apartment off Washington Square Park where he had lived since the fifties, assembling a film program was an art in itself.

Inspired by the dialectical clash of Einsenstein’s montage, Vogel set avant-garde shorts next to a documentary about South American ants; a program from January 1959, reproduced in Scott MacDonald’s “Cinema 16: Documents Towards a History of the Film Society,” featured Buster Keaton’s “The General” and Stan Brakhage’s “The Wonder Ring.” Asked on the occasion of a 2004 tribute what he intended to produce through such sometimes jarring juxtapositions, Vogel answered simply: “Film culture.”

Vogel’s influence continued after Cinema 16 shut its doors in 1963. That same year, he founded the New York Film Festival with Richard Roud (although the independent-minded Vogel lasted only five years in an organization less welcoming to his idiosyncratic tastes) and in 1973 founded the Annenberg Cinematheque at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught until the 1990s. His lavishly illustrated 1974 book “Film as a Subversive Art” — a tantalizing to-do list for any serious cinephile — commits his approach to paper, matching stills from “Pickpocket,” “Belle de Jour” and “She Done Him Wrong” under the heading “Pornographic and Erotic Cinema.” (The book was reprinted in 2005, and is now out of print again.) He also collaborated with Maurice Sendak on a children’s book, “How Little Lori Visited Times Square.”

Born Amos Vogelbaum in Vienna, 1921, Vogel fled Austria with his parents in 1938, studying animal husbandry at the University of Georgia and then moving to New York, whence he intended to emigrate to Israel. But the socialist Vogel became disillusioned with Zionism, and at the same time saw the emergence of a new wave of filmmakers attempting to grapple with the uncertainties of the postwar world, abandoning the straight lines of Hollywood plots and often eschewing narrative altogether. Seeing that Manhattan lacked an equivalent to the film societies of his youth, Vogel and his wife, Marcia, founded Cinema 16, convincing Robert Flaherty to serve as chairman and adorning their program notes with a list of supporters that ran from Kenneth Anger to Basil Wright.

Beginning in the 200-seat Provincetown Playhouse, Cinema 16 boasted a membership of 6,000 at its height, regularly selling out 1,200-seat screenings. According to MacDonald’s book, Vogel was “one of the first, if not the first” to expose American audiences to the work of Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner, Joseph Cornell, Brian DePalma, Georges Franju, Richard Lester, Nagisa Oshima, Yasujiro Ozu, Roman Polanski, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Carlos Saura, François Truffaut and Agnès Varda, among untold others. In 1959, he premiered the second version of John Cassavetes’ “Shadows” to audiences that included Pauline Kael, Paddy Chayefsky and Arthur Knight, paying Cassavetes, according to biographer Ray Carney, “four or five times his usual amount.”

In Cinema 16’s time, the idea that film was a serious art, let alone a means of personal expression, was still very much under debate. Writing up New York Film Festival’s second year for the New York Review of Books, theatre critic Robert Brustein remarked that films were “very rarely a high art,” prompting Vogel to respond with characteristic alacrity:

It has been the bane of cinema art with certain critics as well as the industry that film is predominantly considered an excrescence of literature and the theatre. On the contrary, film as an art exists truly only to the extent that it is able to do what other arts cannot do; to paint in time, to force us into largely subconscious associations predetermined along the line of montage by the director by means of carefully structured juxtapositions of images, sequences, objects and movements in space and time within a rectangular frame area.

Vogel’s style was combative — “You don’t like it? We’ll show it again,” he recalled in Paul Cronin’s 2004 documentary, “Film as a Subversive Art” — but his staunch refusal to narrowcast reflected a deeply held belief what he called the “vast potential audience” of film. As Cinema 16’s reign ended, the pendulum was swinging away from Vogel’s eclectic taxonomy.

In 1962, the same year Andrew Sarris published “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” Jonas Mekas, along with Clarke, Brakhage, and other experimental filmmakers, founded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, encouraging screenings focused on a single artist rather than the “potpourri programs” of Cinema 16. (It didn’t help that Mekas had been promised screenings of “Shadows’” first version, an arrangement Cassavetes vacated when he reshot the film. Mekas panned the remade version in his Village Voice column.) But as word of Vogel’s death spread, social media flooded with tributes from eminent programmers. Brooklyn’s Light Industry devoted their website’s front page to a photo of Vogel, and wrote on their Twitter account: “Rest in peace, Amos. We owe you everything.”

Wrote critic Michael Sicinski of The Academic Hack:

“The eventual split between Vogel and Jonas Mekas was regrettable, and the experimental film world pretty much uniformly rallying behind Mekas, while understandable, meant that the value of Vogel's programming and distribution model was lost and misunderstood for a generation. The divergence of these philosophies has been as significant as the Kael / Sarris divide, although it's seldom seen as such. Mekas believed, and still believes, in filmmakers and auteurship, whereas Vogel would both champion anonymous films and bypass works by major figures if he felt they weren't up to snuff. In the long run, history has been kinder to Vogel's approach than it ever was to Cinema 16. Just as there needs to be Mekas' inclusiveness, there's also a need for the ‘strong programmer’ vision, of blending experimental film with narrative, documentary and other forms, and also serving as an arbiter of taste. Programmers are authorized to do this when they establish trust with their audiences, and that very idea owes a great deal to Amos Vogel.”

Paradise Lost 3 Comes to HBO

Caryn James — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:06:10 GMT

When Paradise Lost 3 premieres on HBO on Thursday, it will be the same smart, cogent doc that was shown at the New York Film Festival last fall: the absorbing story of the West Memphis 3, who were wrongly accused of murder as teenagers and recently freed after nearly 20 years in prison. But now the film arrives shadowed by some unexpected competition: the documentary West of Memphis, produced by Peter Jackson and his wife and partner Fran Walsh. Even more interestingly, producer credits also go to Damien Echols, the West Memphis teenager had been sentenced to death, and his wife, Lorri Davis.

One line in Paradise Lost 3 – the third film in a trilogy that begin in 1996 - now lands as strangely off-kilter. Directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky visit Echols in prison in 2009 and he tells them, “I really do believe these people would have gotten away with murdering me if it had not been for what you guys did, for being there in the very beginning and getting the whole thing on tape so that the rest of the world sees what was happening.” Not at all incompatible with producing a film with another director, but it does sound slightly odd now. (That’s Berlinger with Echols in the photo above, after a screening of Paradise Lost 3.)

West of Memphis, directed by Amy Berg, will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. (Here's a thorough NY Times piece about the competition between the films.) Whatever that newer doc contains, there’s every reason to watch Berlinger and Sinofsky’s passionate film, which is as much about justice and the failures of the legal system as it is about the accused men. (Update: They've just been nominated in the DGA's best director of documentaries category.) The directors sleekly fill in the background so Paradise Lost 3 stands on its own, but HBO will also show the two earlier films, Paradise Lost (1996) and Paradise Lost 2 (2000) following the new film’s premiere on Thursday.

If you missed it, here’s my full review from the NY Film Festival, and a clip of Echols and Davis interviewed by Piers Morgan.

Fast and Furious: The Best of 2011 in Avant-Garde Film

Andréa Picard — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 15:00:02 GMT

A terrific year for avant-garde film and video--much more so than had been forecast for 2011- -was matched by mid-year woe and commemorative celebration as a string of successive losses reminded us that many of the great, pioneering voices of the sixties and seventies (largely considered the “second wave” of cinematic avant-gardists, some limning the “New American Cinema”) were dying off, or nearing the end of their lives.

2011 brought with it the passing of Lithuanian-born anarchic filmmaker Adolfas Mekas, legendary animator Robert Breer, enigmatic prankster Owen Land (a.k.a. George Landow), visual music animator Jordan Belson, the inimitable underground camp supernova, trash enthusiast and twin extraordinaire George Kuchar, as well as Chilean-French master Raoul Ruiz and British bad boy Ken Russell, both avant-garde in their own amazing, hallucinatory (and very different!) ways.
And yet, to proclaim a ceremonial changing of the guard would be recklessly premature and shortsighted. Three of the most consistently great and intensely prolific moving image artists have been working for over 40 years and are, without a doubt, at the peak of their game. Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs and James Benning--the latter two exploring the digital realm in revealing, resuscitative and, at their best, inscrutable ways--are rightly being hailed as some of today's most important artists, period.

While they are all arguably working like painters, each continues to evolve their respective, signature textures and thematic preoccupations in equally suspecting and unsuspecting ways. "The Return" saw Dorsky revisiting familiar, windswept, twilight, shimmery terrain, as if to collude with his threatened 16mm medium. But the stain glass beauty that has become so characteristic of his work was punctuated by startling moments of the uncanny (in the true Surrealist sense of the word), as when fluttering hands conduct an animated but mute orchestral conversation playing off visible and invisible worlds communicated through the chance encounter with arbitrary strips of masking tape, or a destabilizing tracking shot that reaches, grandiloquently, for the heavens, only to betray our inevitable inelegance during this experience (not tree) called life.

Darker (in tone and hue) than much of his recent work, "The Return" is also more trippy and infused with a sly humor that softens traditional definitions of grace. Having premiered in the Toronto International Film Festival's Wavelengths section, "The Return" was paired up at New York Film Fest's Views from the Avant-Garde section with stain-glass artist and filmmaker Jerome Hiler's reportedly gorgeous and grand "Words of Mercury" (which I sadly did not see).
Meanwhile, Ken Jacobs' explosive marriage of metallic beauty and fierce, political statement in "Seeking the Monkey King" shattered illusions--not just optical ones, but ones too often assuming dictatorial reign upon the history of image-making itself, and society writ large (well, 99% of us, anyway).

Jacobs is the least complacent of artists, as radical today as he's always been, here seducing us with gold foil (medieval reliquaries and icons come quickly to mind) and crystalline blues, frenetically shaking, giggling, taunting us with brilliance, as a 2D/3D cosmos pulses in and out of focus, stirring our perceptive senses as the fell of history casts its diabolical shadow.

Responding to the turbulent, tragic times in which we live, Jacobs delivers a trenchant, doozy of a text in embedded intertitles as an intense psycho-acoustical soundtrack from J.G. Thirlwell (of Foetus fame) enhances the seething "Monkey King." Indeed, “America is a fiction” and it's up to us to interpret the Rorschach images of its recycled past. "Monkey King" would make a fine double bill with fellow dissenter Jean-Luc Godard's "Film Socialisme," which traces looted gold to Hollywood and employs cryptic, gnomic subtitles as a dirge for humanity, a casualty of cyclical imperialism.

Since acquiring a high-end digital camera for the making of "Ruhr" (2009), James Benning has literally been unstoppable, making several films and installations per year. 2011 bore many fruits of his production, beginning with "Twenty Cigarettes," which premiered in February in the Forum at the Berlinale and wound its way through the festival circuit.

A deceptively simple, Warholian portraiture film, "Twenty Cigarettes" is ostensibly about duration, but is rich in meaning and profoundly moving as it nods to the "Screen Tests" as much as it does to Benning's life and career. A literal Benning bonanza took place at the Austrian Filmmuseum in November, where "Ruhr" and "Twenty Cigarettes" were shown alongside the premiere of the glorious 35mm restoration of "American Dreams (lost and found)" (1984), a newly struck 16mm print of "Landscape Suicide" (1986), in addition to the world premieres of four new works: "Two Cabins, Small Roads" (masterpiece alert!), "You tube Trilogy: 4 Songs, History, Asian Girls," and "Faces" (courtesy of Cassavetes) accompanied by the handsomely designed book "(FC) Two Cabins by JB," edited by Julie Ault and published by A.R.T. Press. Even though he's already made a couple more films since (if not more), I expect and hope that these will continue to be shown into next year.

Still, 2011 largely belonged to British artist-filmmaker Ben Rivers, who had three major films playing simultaneously on several continents, at festivals large, medium and small: The 45-minute four-part futuristic epic "Slow Action," which was shown as both a work for cinema and an installation, the Baloise Art prize-winning short "Sack Barrow" and Rivers' feature debut "Two Years at Sea," which garnered a FIPRESCI prize in Venice and the main prize at CPH:DOX.

Distinct works that together demonstrate an even more distinct auterist imprint as Rivers furthers his inquiry into vanishing worlds and hybrid forms, marshaling science fiction, fairytale and ethnography. Revisiting the forest-dwelling subject of his 2006 film "This is My Land," Rivers observes a nameless Pan-like figure (Jake Williams), who lives alone entirely off the grid fulfilling daily rituals that sustain him and his freedom.

Despite its austere and attenuated form, "Two Years at Sea" is buoyed by a generosity of vision, spirit and soft humor. Its sublime widescreen images hover and surge as one man lives his life and extended observation begets meditation (for him as for us). Every frame of the film crackles with life--and magnificent still lives--and a clock ticks profusely despite the stoppage of time. In some ways the opposite of Béla Tarr's "The Turin Horse," "Two Days at Sea" offers birdsong instead of howling winds, freedom instead of entrapment and wafting nostalgic melancholia instead of Nietzschean despair. It is an astonishing, quietly moving (and virtually wordless) debut from an important future auteur.

Rivers is already in production with his next feature film to be co-directed by friend and collaborator Ben Russell, whose "River Rites" returns to the Surinam river and to the sinewy long take, hand-held style of his first feature "Let Each One Go Where He May." The two Bens co-curated a program at CPH:DOX this year, titled after their forthcoming film, "A Spell to Ward off the Darkness." Sparks flew as Kenneth Anger's "Lucifer Rising" mysteriously caught fire and a strange session of live film-aerobics prompted spontaneous jumping jacks from the crowd.

But the two Bens are not alone in their interest in ethnography. Many of the year's main works adopted a pseudo-ethnographic approach, whether traditional as in the case of Robert Fenz's border study "The Sole of the Foot" and homage to Robert Gardner, "Correspondence," unassumingly lyrical in Sarah J. Christman's "Broad Channel," raw and personal in Natasha Mendonca's Tiger Award winner "Jan Villa," idiosyncratic and refreshing in Jonathan Schwartz's studies along the Bosphoros, "Between Gold" and "A Preface to Red," and improvisational in Christopher Harris' double 16mm gossamer Passion play-theme park portrait, "28.IV.81 (Descending Figures)."

While the imminent demise of celluloid remained a constant, and in most cases, a plaintive conversation as lab closures sent artists scrambling and scurrying across borders (to Amsterdam and Canada, mainly), 2011 proved to be the year of the feature length experimental film. Noteworthy contributions in addition to those aforementioned include Marie Losier's festival favorite "The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye," Betzy Bromberg's moist and meticulous "Voluptuous Sleep," Michael Palm's prescient "Low Definition Control," Rania Stephen's "The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni" (which was also shown as an installation at P.S.1), Luo Li's "The Rivers and My Father," and Sylvain George's Medvedkin-riffing "Les Éclats (ma gueule, ma révolte, mon nom). Perhaps most anticipated of all was Lewis Khlar's first feature length work, "The Pettifogger," a sumptuously textured collage noir which veers into sublimated, awesome abstraction.

The retrospective of the year, bar none, was Pacific Film Archive's grand touring extravaganza, Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945-2000, curated by Kathy Geritz, Steve Seid and Steve Anker to accompany their publication of the same name. Ten years in the making and creatively conceived, the monograph is a major contribution to the history and scholarship of experimental film.

Additional 2011 highlights (there were many!) include Kevin Jerome Everson's lovely and surprising feature length, black and white portrait of an Alabama dry cleaners, “Quality Control”, not to mention his major solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art; newcomer Blake Williams' Google Street View constructed “Coorow-Latham Road”; Deborah Stratman's scintillating “These Blazing Stars”; Norbert Pfaffenbichler's menacing 35mm “Conference” starring many Hitler look-a-likes; Mark Lewis's equally eerie “Black Mirror at the National Gallery” based on an object by French designer Martin Szekely; Neil Beloufa's sculptural set piece “Untitled”, Laura Krane's “Devil's Gate”; Ammad Ghossein's “My Father is still a Communist”; “Palacios de Peña” by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt (the former received a much deserved retro at this year's Experimenta as part of the London Film Festival, and the film will have its New York Premiere at MoMI's upcoming First Look festival); and various Super 8mm performances by San Francisco-based filmmaker (and SFMOMA projectionist) Paul Clipson.

An obligatory special mention goes to archivists and preservationists Andrew Lampert (Anthology Film Archives), Mark Toscano (Academy Film Archives) and Ross Lipman (UCLA Film and Television Archive) for ensuring that the history of experimental film can be enjoyed by new generations (at least for the time being), such as the essential work of Chick Strand, which circulated widely this year due to Toscano's efforts.

Finally, 2011 was a year of flourishing international micro-cinemas and cine-clubs, many of which are putting certain large institutions to shame. More versatile and autonomous, their programming can best respond to the changes in the world, and as 2011 attested, that flux can be fast and furious. Word to the nimble!

Wim Wenders' 3D Dance Tribute "Pina" Is Both Gorgeous and Slight

Eric Kohn — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 18:14:36 GMT

The selling point of Wim Wenders' documentary "Pina" is twofold. It's an intriguing opportunity to see another New German Cinema legend explore the possibilities of 3-D technology in nonfiction, close on the heels of Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams." And beyond any cinematic trickery, Wenders' subject speaks for itself. Setting his sights on the vibrant and marvelously expressionistic dance movements of the late Pina Bausch, Wenders combines reminiscences of the experimental choreographer (who died in late 2009) with vivid examples of her work. More than anything else, the movie is a better Pima primer than any Wikipedia page could provide.

"There are situations that leave you utterly speechless," Bausch says in an early voiceover, as dancers from her Tanztheater Wuppertal company twirl through dirt with tribal intensity. "All you can do is hint at things." In Bausch performances, however, hints aren't equatable with subtlety. Her extraordinary takes on the compositions of Jun Mikayke and others find dancers rendering their physicality as emotional abstraction--embracing, arguing and seducing without saying a word. You could place a static camera in front of these people and they would still radiate with singular brilliance.

But the 3-D, of course, makes the intensity all the more intense. Wenders eschews complex maneuvers and lets the effect beef up the atmosphere and dimensionality of the dancers' motions. Scenes featuring the entire company benefit from the effect's mesmerizing quality as much as a tense, intimate piece involving two dancers in a seemingly eternal cycle of caressing and breaking apart.

For reasons solely related to the nature of the art, the use of 3-D in "Pina" unquestionably features the best application of the effect this year, ahead of substantial attempts by both Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. However, Wenders' stylistic decisions aren't on par with his technical ones.

At both the Toronto and New York Film Festivals this year, "Pina" wasn't the only dance-centered documentary from a major auteur filmmaker; Frederick Wiseman's superior "Crazy Horse," a vérité look at the Paris cabaret, luxuriates in the club's celebration of sensuality while using backroom chatter to underscore the process behind the performance. It connects the dots but never dominates Wiseman's focus.

By contrast, whenever Wenders cuts away from a dance to include reminiscences of Pina ("She had the most extraordinary eyes!"), the movie suffers. The choreographer's untimely death during early production of the documentary infuses its narrative structure and suggests a celebratory wake. The dance community may appreciate that, but it distracts from the work.

As a result, "Pina" is inferior to another dance-centered production from two much younger filmmakers: Henry Joost and Jody Lee Lipes' "NY Export: Opus Jazz," a phenomenal treatment of Jerome Robbins' 1958 ballet shot throughout New York City. While the setting adds fresh context to the ballet, it also works in congress with the movements rather than functioning as padding to material that doesn't need it.

"Pina" is a beautiful, heartfelt ode and a delicious feast for the eyes, but not an essential work of art on its own terms. Wenders shows the strengths of the work but never arrives at a greater understanding of it. I've seen the title written as "Pina" and "PINA," the latter an apparent attempt to overstate the larger-than-life quality of the choreography. Despite the grandiose intentions, the movie deserves the lower-case treatment.

Criticwire grade: B+

HOW WILL IT PLAY? Sundance Selects picked up "Pina" after its strong reception in Berlin earlier this year and it continued to find a healthy response at other festivals. It may not make the cut for awards season (although it's on two shortlists, for documentary and foreign film), but it inhabits a niche that moves beyond the cinephile community and should help it perform well in limited release when it opens on Friday.

Cinema Guild Buys "Patience," Doc about German Writer W.G. Sebald

Bryce J. Renninger — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 17:21:02 GMT

The Cinema Guild has announced that it has acquired Grant Gee's "Patience (After Sebald)" for US distribution. The essay film, whose director made his marks making music docs about Radiohead and Joy Division, chronicles the work of German writer W.G. Sebald.

The film will open in New York at Film Forum in May 2012.

Full release follows below.

THE CINEMA GUILD ACQUIRES “PATIENCE (AFTER SEBALD),”
ACCLAIMED DOCUMENTARY EXPLORES THE WORK OF RENOWNED WRITER W.G. SEBALD

New York, NY —The Cinema Guild announced today the acquisition of U.S. distribution rights to Grant Gee’s “Patience (After Sebald),” an exploration of the work and influence of writer W.G. Sebald, which premiered at the 2011 New York Film Festival. The deal was negotiated by Ryan Krivoshey of The Cinema Guild with Edward Fletcher of Soda Pictures International. The film will open in New York at Film Forum on May 9, 2012.

An investigation into the work and influence of German writer W.G. Sebald (1944 – 2001), “Patience (After Sebald)” is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss by the acclaimed documentary filmmaker Grant Gee (director of the Grammy nominated film on Radiohead, “Meeting People is Easy” and “Joy Division,” winner of the prestigious Grierson Award for Best Cinema Documentary.) Structured around a long walk through coastal East Anglia, the same walk undertaken by the narrator in “The Rings of Saturn,” the film includes interviews with writers Rick Moody, Adam Philips, Robert Macfarlane and Tacita Dean.

“I have been a fervent admirer of W.G. Sebald ever since I picked up a copy of his extraordinary book, ‘The Rings of Saturn,’ many years ago. Grant’s film is a wonderful appreciation of this vital writer and a real treat for lovers of literature everywhere,” commented Ryan Krivoshey. “We look forward to working with Grant and Soda Pictures, and are very excited to be releasing this film in the U.S.”

Edward Fletcher, Soda Pictures MD said "We're thrilled to be working with Cinema Guild on the release of Grant Gee's extraordinary film ‘Patience.’”

Soda Pictures is a London-based independent film distribution company established in 2002 by Eve Gabereau and Edward Fletcher, with a library of over 150 features and documentaries including such films as Fatih Akin’s Golden Bear winner Head-On, Susanne Bier’s Oscar® nominated After the Wedding, Laurent Cantet’s Heading South, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, and Chanel biopic Coco & Igor. Some of their releases this year include Howl, Norwegian Wood and Meek’s Cutoff. Upcoming they have Sundance sensation Black Power Mixtape, Joaquim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st, Nanni Moretti’s Cannes Competition selection We Have a Pope and Pete Doherty’s screen debut alongside Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lily Cole in Confession of a Child of the Century.

The Cinema Guild is a leading distributor of independent, foreign and documentary films. Previous releases include Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz’s “The Interrupters,” Matt Porterfield’s “Putty Hill” and Manoel de Oliveira’s “The Strange Case of Angelica.” Upcoming releases include Robbie Pickering’s “Natural Selection,” Bela Tarr’s “The Turin Horse,” Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” and Hong Sangsoo’s “The Day He Arrives.”

NYFF Review: 'Goodbye First Love' Looks At Young Romance Without Affection

Christopher Bell — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:25:17 GMT

Television and movies love to indulge us in pre-adulthood nostalgia. Whether the bait is loose (young hooligans causing a ruckus) or more specific and event-oriented (prom, which we've seen less of lately because, well, prom sucks), the powers that be tug at our heartstrings and force us to look back at a time free of major responsibilities and full of fresh experiences. The glazed schmaltz can be off-putting for some, but occasionally sincerity shines through and we get something that captures the emotions extraordinarily well (for this writer's money, "The Virgin Suicides" and "The Girl" are uneven but nail certain feelings on the head). But if we look back without this fondness, what are these stories? Are they merely just happenings that somehow affected the person we become, or are they just the product of naive children that didn't know better? Mia Hansen-Løve's "Goodbye First Love" attempts a critical look at a teenager's first relationship without wooing us first with their blithe beginnings, but has very little to say about the topic.

Sporting a feel similar to partner Olivier Assayas's family drama "Summer Hours" (in fact, it almost seems like 'Goodbye' picks up right where the aforementioned ends), we drop in on the adolescent Parisian lovers Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) and Camille (Lola Créton) after copulation. It's not explicitly stated how long the two have actually been courting one another, but the attitude of their relationship (fights at the drop of a hat, comfortable-yet-unhappy) suggest a rather lengthy amount of time. To make things worse, Sullivan is planning an extensive trip to South America with a friend, which translates as "inevitable break-up" to Camille. Despite their adorable penchant for sneaking out of the house to be with one another and an impromptu mini-vacation to the country side, these problems loom over head and drain the tender affection out of their remaining time together.

Sullivan finally departs, and both Camille and Hansen-Løve move on without him. We follow the young girl as she dives head-first into architectural studies and brings out some major changes -- she's now sporting a new hair cut, a nicotine addiction, and a crush on her seemingly-malnourished professor Lorenz (Magne-Håvard Brekke, aping Jérémie Renier's sickly look from "Lorna's Silence") . The movie jumps through years and years smoothly as she makes great strides in school and her subsequent career, but emotionally she's still the same person -- she still drops the most astoundingly faux-deep lines ("Everything before this doesn't matter," which is followed by a gentle criticism by Lorenz) and even continuously diaries about her longing for her teenage cohort. A chance encounter on a bus with one of his relatives connects Camille and Sullivan back together, but is this really what she wants?

Because the filmmaker starts at the tail-end of their relationship, we automatically take a critical stance of their consociation. To some extent, it's nice to have this kind of different perspective on teeny-bopper love, but by discarding the charm of their initial attraction and cheery romance our only investment in the two whittles down to simple head-shakes and eye-rolls. Their bond together is portrayed in such a negative, matter-of-fact light that it almost feels helmed in a very condescending way. While there's definitely plenty of stories that do fine without emotional commitment from the audience, this kind of plot absolutely necessitates one. The absence of affection makes the characters' actions a tad irritating, and it as a whole lacks any sort of substantial impact thanks to the director's refusal to show the couple at happier times and reluctance to embrace any sort of guileless behavior. You don't have to go Spielberg on us, but there is something undeniably beautiful and rare when love is born out of innocence. When you eschew that you're overlooking a huge aspect of being a youth, the perspective is marred by bitterness.

One ingenious move by the director is using the same actors for the lead roles; as the flick's timeline spans at least a decade (give or take), their inability to properly move on is reflected in their immature look no matter how different their clothing or however many cigarettes they smoke. Unfortunately, she ends up abandoning this motif when the maturation point actually happens, instead following Camille's hat as it drifts down a river. It doesn't hold as much weight as Hansen-Løve wants it to, ultimately concluding the film with a whimper.

It's hard to say what this overly serious investigation of puerile passion is ultimately trying to say. By curbing Sullivan to focus on Camille solo, prying into her reluctance to ultimately move on from him, Hansen-Løve is either making a statement that this boy had a hand in who she eventually became, or in broader terms, is analyzing the way some people refuse to let go of feelings long gone. Maybe it's simply supposed to show the reality of how long it takes to get over a person that was once pined for. Either way you spin it, it's not much to chew on, and its inability to affect makes "Goodbye First Love" even more disappointing. The "Father of my Children" director's reflection on early amour and its long-lasting power is much too distant, taking out the enchantment without analyzing deep enough to make up for it. [C]

Wim Wenders Discusses Painful 'Hammett' Collaboration With Coppola, Friendship With Nicholas Ray

Edward Davis — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 15:16:41 GMT

Filmmaker Talks 5-Hour Version Of 'End Of The World,' Sam Shepard, Unfinished Version Of 'Hammet' & More At NYFF Q&A

Wim Wenders' route to filmmaking was a circuitous one. At the age of 21, he landed in Paris determined to become a painter, but cinema had been in his DNA from an early age. He made super 8 movies as a child and became a local neighborhood projectionist at the age of 6 when he inherited his father’s antique film equipment; so cinema seemed like a natural path. But for years, he turned his back on movies, and it wasn't until he saw an Anthony Mann retrospective -- sidetracked from his painting aspirations in a Paris cinematheque -- that he began to fully understand that cinema had its own authors and "had a language of its own.” He then began a 40-year affair with the medium that continues to this day.

This past weekend at the New York Film Festival Wenders stopped by the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center for a lengthy and fascinating conversation with NYFF selection committee member Scott Foundas. An engrossing talk for Wenders devotees or even newbs, the filmmaker charted most of his career, from the early, still-unreleased student film "Summer In the City," to his laborious collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola in the '70s, to his strong friendships with filmmaking greats Nicholas Ray and Samuel Fuller and his many documentaries (like his recent 3D dance documentary “Pina,” which we tracked here and his Academy-Award-nominated documentary, "The Buena Vista Social Club"). While chronicling his entire career was impossible, this 1 hour 25 minute talk did span almost every important touchstone.

Known for Criterion-minted works like "Paris, Texas" and "Wings of Desire," Wenders' oeuvre is still sorely underseen in the U.S. including the great "The American Friend" with Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz, the road trilogy that gained him international acclaim (“Alice In the Cities,” “Kings of the Road,” and “The Wrong Move”), the Ozu-loving documentary, “Tokyo Ga,” and the first-person doc about Nicholas Ray dying of cancer, "Lightning Over Water." Here's to hoping audiences give his work a second glance and that films like "Hammet" find some proper distribution. In the meantime, here's several highlights from the NYFF talk.

1. Unless you score a bootleg or catch a rare screening, you’re likely never going to see Wenders’ “first film” (a student film) called, “Summer In the City.”
Named after a Loving Spoonful song and dedicated to The Kinks, “Summer In the City” features a pop-saturated soundtrack that includes the two aforementioned bands, plus songs by Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and The Rolling Stones. Suffice to say, music clearances are the biggest problem.

“That's why the movie isn't available anymore, because I just put in whatever [music] I liked in the film," Wenders said. "So it's impossible to release. They never told us in film school that we had to acquire the rights to songs. The movie is illegal in itself." Years later they attempted to see if they could rework and then release the film, but it was to no avail. "I only had the finished mix, the [individual sound] tracks are gone, so it's impossible to take any of the music out," he said. "We started and then realized it was completely useless to try acquire the music in the film because it would have cost 100 times more than the film itself."

2. Unlike most scenes created by the press, Wenders called the “New German Cinema” (or German New Wave if you like) of the late ‘60s, an “amazing act of solidarity.”
In Germany in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there wasn’t much of a film industry. “Germany at the time in terms of movies was a waste land,” Wenders said. “There was no independent distribution whatsoever.” German cinematheques mostly showed American films and if German money was being put into German productions, according to Wenders, it was largely in soft-core porn or German Westerns shot in Yugoslavia. The New German Cinema included a new generation of directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Alexander Kluge, Volker Schlöndorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Wenders.

But unlike similar scenes like the French New Wave or the Italian Neo-Realist movement, Wenders says, “There was not much sharing of [artistic] sensibilities. We didn’t have that much in common, which differentiated us from [other film movements]. The term ‘New German Cinema’ was imposed on us by American critics, but we were happy because finally we had something we could call ourselves.”

The group eventually formed a production and distribution company in what Wenders called, “an amazing act of solidarity.” “We realized everyone had their own boat, but we were in one big boat together and it was out of an economic necessity for each of us to stick together in order for each of these little boats to float,” he said.” So we formed our own production and distribution company and everybody was in it and it worked for 10 years and we all became who we are because of this act of solidarity.”

3. Wenders' first American venture, a collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope studios to direct “Hammet,” was a trying effort, nowhere near as artist friendly as he had hoped.
Wenders came to America in 1978 at the age of 33 on the invitation of Francis Ford Coppola to direct “Hammet,” based on Joe Gore’s fictional novel about detective author Dashiell Hammett. “It was a long, amazing experience,” Wenders said, but the invite to make a film in America was perhaps “too good to be true.” He worked on the film for four years, went through four different writers, 40 versions of the script and shot the film twice.

Starring Frederic Forrest (perhaps best known as the chef in “Apocalypse Now”), Marilu Henner and Peter Boyle, the picture was shot on location in San Francisco in 1979 and then shot a second time in Zoetrope studios in 1981.

Wenders said he shot the first version “under the radar” because “Francis had his mind on ‘Apocalypse Now.’ ” But when it came time to shoot the final scene of the film, the producers realized the scene was rewritten and not like it had been in the “final” script. “Actually it had not much to do with the script and there were even characters they didn’t even know,” he said with a chuckle. “And they looked at it and said, ‘What are you shooting here?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, well, that’s the necessary ending for the film I’ve been making so far.' ” Suffice to say, production shut down immediately. Coppola then suggested Wenders stop the shoot and edit the film so he could understand the ending. “I didn’t have a choice anyhow,” Wenders said and then when he finished editing the film a year later, “Nobody liked it. At least the studio didn’t like it. Francis sort of liked it, but he said, ‘They think it’s way too lyrical and it’s about the writer and not the detective story we had given you’ …but they felt it was too slow and didn’t have enough action.”

4. Eventually a second version of “Hammet” was shot.
A new writer was then hired to rewrite Wenders’ unfinished ending, but Coppola liked this new ending so much and in order for it to work with the rest of the film, more scenes had to be rewritten . Eventually an entire new story was written which Coppola also liked and eventually they decided to reshoot the entire film from scratch.

Two years later only, the only cast member that was left was Frederic Forrest and the rest of the actors had to be recast (actors that appeared in the original included Woody Strode, Sylvia Sidney, and director Sam Fuller). Wenders says only 10% of his initial shoot made it into the second version of the film.

Wenders even shot another picture in between the two ‘Hammet’ films, 1982's “The State of Things,” because lead Frederic Forrest had gained weight during Coppola’s “One From the Heart,” and they had to wait months until he slimmed down again. While it's been rumored over the years that Coppola reshot most of the 2nd version of “Hammet” himself and Wenders made a short film called “Reverse Angle” documenting his disputes with Coppola surrounding the making of “Hammett,” neither topic was discussed as the conversation eventually moved on (at least until they arrived on the topic of “Paris, Texas”).

5. Sam Shepard, who wrote “Paris, Texas,” was originally Wenders’ dream lead for “Hammett.”
Wenders said the genesis of “Paris, Texas” was very much connected to “Hammett” because his ideal, dream actor to play the lead was Sam Shepard. “We shot for one day with Gene Hackman as the old detective and Sam as Hammett,” Wenders said about some early test shots that took place in San Francisco. “That was fantastic, I mean, it was mindblowing. We shot several scenes and I was convinced this was it. I couldn’t possibly find a better actor.”

But Shepard, still known as a playwright had not yet starred in a film – his debut was in Terrence Malick’s 1978 effort, “Days of Heaven” – and the studio didn’t want him in the role. The studio lived to regret their decision though, as Shepard became a much-in-demand actor and “Hammet” tanked upon release. “Sam was fantastic in it and his poster hung in every teenage girl’s room because he really stole the show from Richard Gere in ‘Days of Heaven,’ " he said. “And the studio really regretted their [refusal to cast Shepard] because he was really great, and Sam was really happening when ‘Hammet’ was released.”

Wenders wanted to score “Hammett” with the music of Ry Cooder. Of course the studio said no, but their winning collaboration took place on “Paris, Texas,” arguably up their as one of the most moody and haunting guitar-based scores ever.

6. Shepard Almost Starred In “Paris, Texas.”
Wenders said “Paris, Texas” was born out of a desire to work with Cooder and Sam Shepard, as both writer and actor. “But that’s another story. He didn’t act, the bastard.” Wenders said with a grin. “He was supposed to play the part and then he fell in love with Jessica Lange and then was gone. I had to find another actor. He and I wrote the film and I took it for granted that he would play this damn Travis character, and so I never asked him. When I finally did, it was too late.” (Shepard instead went on to write and direct “Far North” starring Lange.)

All of the key personnel rejected from “Hammet,” including cinematographer Robby Müller, were then utilized in “Paris, Texas.” “I finally made the film in America that I had come to do in the first place,” he said. “It allowed me to go home because I could not go back empty handed as a failure, because I looked at ‘Hammett’ as a failure.”

7. Two, now-heralded B-movie directors Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray were not only close friends of Wenders, they participated in his films often.
Thanks to tastemakers like the Criterion Collection and repertory theaters like Film Forum in New York, filmmakers like Sam Fuller (seven films in the collection including "Pickup On South Street" and "White Dog") and Nicholas Ray “("Bigger Than Life," "On Dangerous Ground") have experienced an American re-appreciation in recent years, but like the French New Wave auteurs who lauded their works, Wenders was also a big fan.

As mentioned, Fuller starred in the original version of “Hammett” and he also had a role in “The American Friend,” Wenders’ loose adaptation of one of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley stories (yes, the same character from “The Talented Mr. Ripley” film). Nicholas Ray also had a role in the picture.

After that shoot, Ray called Wenders to inform him that he was diagnosed with terminal cancer and the one last thing he wanted to do was make another movie. So the two devised what became “Lightning Over Water.” Two weeks later after the call, they were shooting. Initially the film was supposed to be a “fictional film [based] on a situation that was very real,” Wender says but because of Ray’s ailing health, it soon became “a film about Nic’s death. Which is what he wanted, because his main desire was to correct the image he had in the American public as the drunk director who got kicked out of Hollywood.”

“All our efforts to fictionalize disappeared more and more and then it became a film dictated by cancer,” Wenders said. “The film wasn’t widely seen by the American public, but I think it fulfilled what Nicholas had in mind.”

8. The version of “Until the End of the Word” that’s available in the U.S. is what Wenders calls “The Readers Digest” version.
Written initially in 1978 (“interrupted by ‘Hammet’ ”), shot in 1991 and set on the verge of the millennium in 1999, the ambitious “Until the End of the World,” was a sci-fi-ish picture that spanned the globe and Wenders called, “the ultimate road movie.”

Part mystery, part sci-fi film, the second half the picture shifts its focus on a device for recording and translating brain impulses— a camera for the blind. The idea was based on Wenders' favorite aunt who was blind. “Even as a kid I thought about, ‘what would it be like if she could see? Why doesn’t anybody come up with an idea that lets blind people see?’, ” he recalled.

After a year, the filmmaker had a six-hour cut and he showed it to his distributors who reminded him he had a contract that said, no longer than two and a half hours. Wenders then tried to coax the distributors to release the film in two or three parts to get more bang for their buck, but they refused. “So we had to cut down this epic story from six to two and half hours and that of course was murder,” Wenders said. “The film that came out all over the world in my book it was just the readers digest version.”

A year later, Wenders reconstituted a five-and-a-half hour version of the film that was never released outside of Germany and Italy where he owned the rights. “You can get [the German DVD version] on Amazon and take out the subtitles because it was all shot in English, and there you have it,” Wenders said. Asked how he survived over his various “failures,” Wenders said he basically stopped reading reviews a long time ago. “You have to avoid the trap that if people rave about your films, that you’re a genius,” he said. “If you believe the good [reviews], then you have to believe the bad ones and then every now and then you have to believe you are full of shit. So I decided to not believe any of them.”

NYFF: With Kids On The Set Of 'The Descendants' George Clooney Couldn't Resist His Prankster Ways

Jen Vineyard — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:34:57 GMT

Clooney Farts With His iPhone, Plants A Kiss & Matthew Lillard Nearly Didn't Make It To The Audition

Despite a fact-filled press conference earlier this week the filmmakers and cast behind the now-Gotham-nominated “The Descendants” still had more info to share when they hit the red carpet for the premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sunday. In case you missed it, here's what George Clooney had to say about some of the movies on his horizon. For the rest of the chat, and some stories from the rest of the cast, read on. Warning, there are some spoilers.

Force feeding kids ice cream and playing with a fart app on his iPhone is all in day's work for George Clooney
“How could you not on this set?” he asked. “These were kids! I had to mess with them!”

When he was supposed to be quiet, Clooney whipped out his iPhone to make strange noises. “We were shooting the plane scene,” said Nick Krause, who plays Sid, a friend the eldest daughter brings along on the family’s journey. “It was a very tight set, a lot of extras, and no one really knew each other. And out of nowhere, we hear this fart noise! So we look around, and it’s George, playing around with his phone, his apps. It was awesome.”

And when Clooney could have revealed pertinent information, he kept quiet, such as when he failed to inform his youngest co-star Amara Miller -- who had never been in a movie before -- that she would have to eat the same amount of food in each take. “We’d give her a bowl of ice cream,” he said, “and we wouldn’t explain that we were going to do five or six takes, and she’d end up eating the whole bowl!”

“I didn’t know when to stop!” Miller said. “It got me sick the next day.” When the director of photography was framing a shot, sometimes Clooney would dip his legs so he would appear to be shorter than usual. “He would just do that for a couple of seconds, just to mess with him on the other end of the camera,” Krause said.

“That’s one of his talents that gets unnoticed somehow,” Krause added. “He has this real ability to make everyone feel much closer and more comfortable together. He worked hard to make sure everyone on set was happy, especially during the heavier scenes. It’s part of why he’s a great actor.”

“I did it just to keep the whole thing moving,” Clooney admitted. “Part of your job is to keep it fun.” Taking his cue, however, some of his friends and cast mates have gotten him back recently. “You know, some of my friends changed my outgoing phone message, unbeknownst to me,” he said. “So yeah, I got some revenge coming! I owe Brad [Pitt] back bad for that one.”

Clooney’s surprise kiss with Judy Greer was not a prank – but it wasn’t in the original script, either.
Of course, in a film about forgiveness, you expect a few people to turn the other cheek – but not during a goodbye kiss! Clooney’s character Matt King visits a beach cottage rented by Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard) and his wife (Judy Greer), to confront Speer about sleeping with his wife and give him one last chance to redeem himself. That charged conversation happens unbeknownst to Brian’s wife, who tries to give Matt a pleasant goodbye by kissing him on the cheek. But then he executes a quick move and the kiss instead lands on the lips – much to her shock. “It wasn’t in my script, but Alexander [Payne] added it during the table read,” Greer said. “I was like, ‘Whoa!’ And then Alex said, ‘I did that for you, Judy.’”

You might remember the pair shared a sex scene in “Three Kings” – which Clooney reminded Greer of earlier in the week when he asked, “Do you remember what our first scene was ever?” as she blushed – the two actors had never kissed on screen. “I didn’t get to kiss him then!” she exclaimed.

“Doesn’t it seem improvised?” Clooney asked. “The look on her face [during the kiss], that was great, wasn’t it? That was such a funny thing. She’s such a good actress. She can do anything.”

The character of the youngest daughter Scottie played a larger role in the book.
The first draft of the script by Payne and screenwriters Nat Faxon and Jim Rash included more of Scottie (Miller). Stuck suddenly caring for his ten-year-old daughter alone, Matt is bewildered by many of her actions and spends a great deal of time trying to figure out what to do with her. (Sample line from the book: “She’s nuts. Who knows what’s going on in that head of hers.”) Scottie is acting out – harassing her peers on her Blackberry, wearing provocative slogans on her T-shirts, and trying to emphasize her not-quite-there-yet breasts. “Scottie was such a presence,” Rash said, “because he’s trying to understand her and that’s part of his journey.”

“Our first draft was really big,” Faxon said, “because there was so much of that we loved, and we wanted to keep all the things that fit thematically, and that made us laugh, or made us cry. But at some point, you have to remove some things from the book and put your own point of view on it. You can’t have a four-hour movie.”

In the book, Matt is aware Scottie is constantly taking pictures of her comatose mother to document her for a social studies class. In the film, her photography is reduced to a scene in which he’s called in for a parent-teacher conference to be told the project is not appropriate, and Clooney looks surprised at the book’s existence. The movie also condenses Scottie’s interest in being more physically developed by showing her getting ready to go swimming by putting on her older sister’s underwear, and in a scene at the beach, filling her bikini top with sand. “We had one more scene where Matt walks in on Scottie as she’s posing in the mirror, and she does this thing with her breasts,” Rash said, pantomiming cleavage. “And that moment happens right before he goes and talks to Sid on the couch, which is why he’s a little bewildered.”

Matt King's wife was supposed to be a model.
Of course, Clooney can date models – but his character Matt is a schlub. But he’s got a beauty of a wife who is seven years younger than him and used to model for catalogs and newspaper ads. His teenager daughter Alexandra also used to model, posing in a bikini for a postcard company. Neither of these occupations are mentioned in the movie, but they go to help explaining Scottie’s copycat poses. “It’s part of the theme of how her mom was beautiful,” Rash said. “So when she’s posing in the mirror, she’s mimicking her mom, as if she were a model, too.”

Since they were trimming Scottie’s fixation, they opted not to flesh out that aspect of the rest of the women in the family. But there still remained a question of how much to show of the mother’s life before she’s comatose, since in the book, Matt spends a lot of time thinking about his wife, arguments they’ve had, close moments shared, and his suspicion that she’s been cheating on him. “We wondered how much to show of her life,” Rash said. “When he rethinks those moments, they’re not exactly flashbacks. But that was a choice we had to make, whether we’d see her more than in the hospital bed. So it was a big deal for us to show her racing.”

Matthew Lillard barely made it to the audition – which is why he’s so grateful for the part.
The actor only found out about the audition the night before it was scheduled, and he didn’t have the time free in his schedule, because of an obligation to his kids. Lillard rejected the idea of going at first: “It was one of those things where I said to my agent, ‘I can’t do this. There’s no way I can even be this guy. This is a waste of time.’” His agent told him to try anyway. When he arrived, he had second thoughts: “I’m just going to turn around. I’ll just go back.” He asked his agent to reschedule. “But they said, ‘No, you can’t just reschedule it,’” Lillard said. “’Somebody dropped out, so we pushed you in that slot. They didn’t want to see you, and we pushed you in.”

And so, Lillard had to make a choice – chase an audition that might or might not lead to something, or “be a good dad.” “So I went in to see Alexander,” he recalled, “and I was like, ‘Look, I’m on my way to taking my kids to a thing, if I can just do this fast, that would be amazing.’ I thought I would just act, say, ‘Thank you very much,’ and walk away.” Then, when he walked into the room, there were five other hopefuls – “Adonises,” Lillard called them. “Which tells you, you’re not the kind of guy [Alexander] wanted to see,” he said. “To know that there are five gorgeous, Hollywood, leading-men types there, and to know I had to be somewhere way more important to be, in terms of my life, my kids, and my family, it took everything not to just walk away.”

Pushing all of that doubt out of his mind, he said, was “liberating.” “I was just going to do what I do, and it’s either going to work, or not,” he said. “And it worked!”

"The Descendants" opens on November 18th.

NYFF '11 Review: 'Play' Is A Confident, Complex Look At Social Issues In Sweden

Christopher Bell — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:58:46 GMT

Festivals can be a great place to discover new, brilliant cinema, but often times the unknown films get drowned out by the heavily buzzed or the latest by a longstanding director. How many of us at the New York Film Festival saw "Martha Marcy May Marlene" and "The Kid with a Bike" but, for whatever reason, happened to miss out on "The Loneliest Planet"? It's highly likely that this writer isn't alone. Still, one person generally can't see everything a festival has to offer, so flicks that don't have Palme d'Or helmers behind them or a truckload of auspicious praise for their "breakout performer" tend to get shafted. Still, it's a must to attend those we know nothing about. Besides the fact that they deserve it, they also have something those lauded ones don't: the ability to surprise; for the viewer to go in blind and be completely taken without having known a thing about its cast or the curriculum vitae of the filmmaker. With movie news at the click of a button and various media available all over the web, this is a rare occurrence. We've had a few very pleasant whammies this year, from the social/political critiquing "Policeman" to the sweet "Corpo Celeste," and we're happy to add Ruben Östlund's "Play" to that trust.

The Swedish filmmaker's earlier feature, "Involuntary," was an adequate effort involving people acting/not acting in highly questionable situations. Shot in mostly single, static takes either from a distance or close up (and always cutting heads and limbs out of the frame), the material was relatively substantial but not strong enough; as a whole it was admirable but mostly a practice round for something (hopefully) more powerful. Östlund delivers on this promise in the very first scene of “Play,” again working his magic in a lone shot to build the conflict that will drive the rest of the film.

We open on the hustle and bustle of winter shoppers at a mall. Eventually we listen in on our first batch of lead characters, a group of African immigrant teens who decide to swindle some native Swedish youngins. Using intimidation and an ingeniously well-acted plot (the film is based on a real incident), they muscle the children's mobile phones, claiming that one of their brothers had his swiped fairly recently. It had the same scratch marks, so how could it not be his?

This same game is played on three different children, a trio we stay with for the rest of the film. Since we already know what the villainous kids are capable of, their off-frame presence looming in every shot (we hear them giggling, throwing a ball against a store wall, etc.) induces serious anxiety as it anticipates an inevitable confrontation. The innocent are lured out of the mall, and after being refused help at a local coffee shop, the hectoring group forces them on a journey across town to meet one of their siblings (the "brother" in their stolen phone scam) to verify that the phone is indeed not his. Of course, this isn't the first time that these brats have pulled this con, and on the bus ride over, some meat-heads (lead by a sister of a previous victim) storm the transport and whale on them. All disperse but ultimately (and unfortunately) the two cliques end up back together and not a thing has changed -- when confronted directly about what will happen, the bullies explain that they're not going to rob the kids but are out to "solve a problem." Quite an unsettling thing to hear.

Even in "Involuntary," Östlund had a knack for assembling realistic verbal quarrels where no one appears to be the right one or wrong one. He successfully avoids a trap that lesser artists fall in, which only result in a finger-wagging answer that belittles both the movie and its patrons. No, he understands that the things he centers on in his work are complicated issues that cannot be so simple. He doesn't skirt the issue but confronts them -- including everyone's points, faults and nastiness to better illustrate the chaos of these social dilemmas. "Play" takes a look at a situation facing the native Swedes and the immigrant children, with the latter exploiting the others' guilt that they are more well-off in society. These African kids go so far as to say, "Anyone dumb enough to show his cell phone to five black guys deserves whatever he gets." This kind of topic could veer into very uncomfortable, self-victimizing territory (oh us poor privileged), but a scene towards the end (not to mention the director's sense of humor which seeps through fairly often) involving a parent berating one of the thieves shows just how complicated this matter has become. This also contrasts with the previously mentioned coffee house scene: when people do nothing it is frustrating, but when people do something it only seems to cause more grief despite the good intentions.

He really knows how to open a can of worms, that's for sure. There's also mysterious diversions from the narrative, such as a performance by Native American street musicians and an ongoing train sequence where a conductor struggles to find the owner of a cradle blocking a doorway. Taken on their own they’re amusing but they’re obviously metaphors to help further the director’s point – not impenetrable, but done with a sleight enough hand to make them captivating puzzle pieces as opposed to a ham-fisted emblem. Of course, this subtlety has much to do with his shooting style, as the director confidently lays out his film with one angle using minimal camera movement. Sometimes this is done with a wide lens that sucks in the environment, rendering the actors as big as toy figures, or in an angle where the scene is mostly obscured by a random object or person in the room. Though it admittedly feels a tad cold and detached, it also results in a very democratic viewing (rarely forcing us to look at something) and eschews bullshit sentimentality, which makes the accidental warm moments -- like the ruffians rooting for one kid to hit a hundred push ups, or enjoying another's flute playing – much more lasting. In a different world, these kids would be friends.

You tend to hear this a lot about festival movies (especially ones with any social or political critique), but this is one that’ll definitely have people talking afterwards. It’s a small film that unfortunately got buried this festival season thanks to the usual popularity contest, but we implore you: if “Play” comes near, seek it out. With its intelligent approach to the subject and artful structure, it’s a gem that’s not to be missed. [A]

Wim Wenders Says 3D Has "Amazing Consequences," Still Waiting For Film That Cracks The 3D Code

Edward Davis — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:10:14 GMT

Venerable Filmmaker Praises ‘Avatar,’ Talks 'Pina' & Speaks Candidly About Hollywood’s Current 3D Dilemma

While it might not seem apparent at first, given his films haven't made much of a commercial dent in recent years, Wim Wenders, is still ahead of the curve. In 1997, over a decade before its use became prevalent, he shot sequences of his "The End of Violence" film in HD, he cast Michelle Williams as his lead in the little seen "Land Of Plenty" before she became fully noticed in "Brokeback Mountain," and for his latest trick he's shot "Pina," a documentary about the medium of dance in 3D.

While 3D film about expressive dance might not be the typical way to use the stereoscopic medium, Wenders, the filmmaker behind the cherished Criterion-approved-classics “Paris, Texas” and “Wings Of Desire,” thinks the medium is perfectly suited for this new visual tool. To boot, it’s been critically acclaimed and is said to be the front-runner for this year’s European Film Awards Documentary honor, the Prix Arte.

"I think 3D works when the additional dimension is relevant, so in dance it was so obvious," he said during a New York Film Festival Q&A conversation this past weekend moderated by NYFF selection committee member Scott Foundas. "And I was very lucky that my first encounter with 3D was for dance, another medium that as a condition needs space. So I think the storytelling in the future of 3D movies, I think it's relevant that the spirit of the story does need space. It is more obvious in documentaries to take people into someone else's world. But it's not obvious to me at all how 3D can be used properly. I'm sure they're [trying to figure that] out and [trying] to find the film that cracks the code and shows how 3D can be used for the telling of a story, not just the effect. I haven't really seen it [work that way], 'Avatar' in a way, yes, but that's the big exception. I’m not seeing it used with a necessity."

When asked if Hollywood was resistant to his early HD move, he said yes, suggesting this is par for the course. "I think quite often, if they didn't invent it themselves in Hollywood they felt threatened," he said, explaining why this truth is different for 3D. "In a way they have invented 3D themselves so they didn't [feel scared by it], but it's only [because] they invented a 3D that made sense in a certain context -- in that blockbuster context. So for them 3D was strictly an attraction, a way to rake in the money.”

Wenders said, so far, Hollywood is looking at 3D through a financial lens and not an artistic one.

“They've probably felt threatened by the idea that 3D could be a new film language,” he explained. “They saw it as another tool to make the same kind of movies, only maybe a little bit more spectacular. You could raise the prices a little bit, because they have to pay for the glasses, but they continued to make the same kind of movies. They didn't realize the language might have consequences. And I think 3D has amazing consequences if you take it seriously. So far Hollywood hasn't. They're using it as a great attraction. They're using it with a lot of imagination and intelligence in animation films, but in live-action I think they would feel threatened that it is a new language and a revolution.”

Wenders believes it’s up to the auteurs, the Camerons and Scorseses of the world, to show Hollywood how it should be done. And he's on James Cameron 's side in case you were wondering.

“So I think it's up to independent filmmakers to show them that it's a fantastic tool for storytelling," he said. "I think James Cameron is sort of pissed off the way they're using it and he's afraid they are ruining the new language before it can show its potential and he's right. It has to be used with much more imagination then just a roller coaster ride. I'm sure there are hundreds of writers working on that and there's likely many films [planning on using the medium in new ways]. I'm very much looking forward to Martin Scorsese's ['Hugo'] and other directors and authors who will use it and show us what it's meant to be. But so far we're left with [the film that aims for] the buck -- with the exception of 'Avatar.' "

Now What? NYFF Chairman Richard Peña Looks Forward and Back as He Enters His Final Year

Eric Kohn — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 07:24:33 GMT

On Monday, less than 24 hours after the conclusion of the 49th edition of the New York Film Festival, Richard Peña sat in the conference room at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and considered his past and his future.

The fourth floor was vacant; after the whirlwind that had consumed the space since the festival began in late September, the office was technically closed and most of the staff took the day off. But Peña, the festival's chairman as well as the Film Society's program director since 1988, was gearing up for another deadline.

The previous evening, prior to the closing-night screening of Alexander Payne's "The Descendants," Peña made public a decision many had predicted for some time: In 2012, following the festival's 50th edition, he plans to step down. He will continue teaching film history at Columbia University and advising the Film Society on a new educational initiative, but after 25 years the man responsible for introducing American audiences to countless international auteurs will move on.

"At first, my kids were a little surprised by the idea of their father 'retiring,'" he said, putting that last word in air quotes. "It was strange to them. But when we spoke about the possibilities, they supported me."

Peña is considering opportunities to teach abroad and write; maybe even open a museum. Over the years, the dual pressures of running one of the world's most prestigious festivals and overseeing year-round programming at the Walter Reade Theater hasn't left room for much else. "Not to complain too much, but this really takes a lot of time," he said. "It will be nice to take more of that time for myself."

Peña is only the second person to oversee NYFF's content; he took the reins from Richard Roud, whose own tenure lasted 25 years. Unlike Roud, Peña also managed year-round film programming at Lincoln Center, a job that grew increasingly significant with the opening of Walter Reade in 1991. International cinema became Peña's chief mandate and over the years he's been credited with introducing New Yorkers to filmmakers like Mike Leigh in addition to a plethora of eastern directors, such as Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Peña's name has been synonymous with art house curation for so long that it's hard to imagine the Film Society without his influence, and easy to wonder why he would ever want to leave such a lofty position. "I'm not stepping down because I can't take it anymore," said Peña, who's 58. "My own confidence in the work hasn't really changed."

In fact, he's been dropping hints about his departure for years. In a 2007 interview with The Reeler's S.T. VanAirsdale, Peña explained that he "should probably leave in a few years" because "it's time for someone else to bring in new ideas, new directions." Rather than cite any specific moment when he made the decision to clear out, Peña said on Monday that he first began to seriously consider leaving the Film Society when he turned 50.

"Inevitably, you reflect on your life and wonder, 'Well, am I just going to do this forever or try something else?'" he said. He committed himself to ensuring the successful opening of the Film Society's new first-run theater, the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center, earlier this year. And while he'll stick around for another 12 months, he doesn't plan on directly participating in the search for a replacement, although associate programmer Scott Foundas has been rumored as a strong contender.

However, Peña does have some recommendations for the Film Society, including the possibility that his two jobs go to separate people. "I don't think it would be a bad thing to hire two people," he said, "not because no one can replace me but because the festival and the year-round programming has increased so much. The danger is that if you have two people, there could be some kind of conflict, but there are a lot of ways they could work together."

He also argued in favor of younger replacements (Peña was in his late 30s when he came on board from the Art Institute of Chicago). "I'm not an ageist, but I do hope they get somebody who can be here for awhile," he said. "I learned on the job. I hope the next person will have that luxury as well."

In the meantime, Peña will continue combining the Film Society's resources with his work as a college instructor. He already has a few ideas for the educational initiative he'll develop in the coming months, including a year-long history of cinema series that would take audiences on a chronological tour of the medium. He describes the plan as "somewhere between academia and a public program" and hopes to tap into Columbia's graduate school community for help.

"I've always thought that the business of the Film Society is to help write film history," he said. He's mulling over a few book ideas and already has an upcoming writing assignment about Clint Eastwood for an exhibition in Brazil.

Meanwhile, he anticipates that the Film Society will continue to evolve without him. Although he admits he's "not tech-savvy," Peña recognizes that changing modes of distribution will eventually come into play, especially video-on-demand features for spreading content to viewers around the country.

"I would be really surprised if, in five years, we didn't have a VOD presence," he said, noting that many of his students now express more familiarity with television than movies. "I don't blame them for it," he said. "My students are now quite a bit younger than I am. I always find it a little bit shocking how little common knowledge I have with them."

Whenever asked about digital innovations, Peña usually throws up his hands. "Things like transmedia, first of all, I'm not really sure what they mean," he said. "Second of all, it's not really my issue." Nevertheless, he concedes, "we've always thought that the internet could be yet another screen for us."

Beyond getting younger viewers into the theater, Peña sees a bigger challenge in getting them interested in the types of movies he considers essential. "People in my generation were very turned on by the new possibilities of international cinema," he said. "I find younger people are a little less interested in finding out about those new cinemas."

But getting audiences to accept cinema from remote parts of the world has always been Peña's battle. "There were certainly people who couldn't really see what was interesting about a lot of Chinese cinema," he said about his early days at the Film Society. "They didn't get it, but for me, filmmakers like Hou Hsiao-hsien became the new establishment, the Antonionis of our time."

Whatever happens after he leaves, Peña's legacy is secure. To take a recent example: When the renowned Hungarian director Béla Tarr briefly showed up at NYFF last week to screen his purported last feature, "The Turin Horse," he told an audience he only made the trip as a favor to Peña. "We're good friends," the programmer says. "I've been to his house, he's been to my house. The next person who comes along will have his or her own contacts with the next Béla Tarr."

Peña's replacement will also face enormous pressure from countless filmmakers, distributors and sales agents jockeying for spots in the exclusive NYFF lineup, a frenzy Peña helped create. In 1988, the selection committee considered 800 submissions; this past year, they had around 2,800. That meant a lot of rejection letters and the usual mix of anger and disappointment they cause.

"Inevitably, we set ourselves up as the bad guys," Peña said. "But that's why I think people respect us. They're very happy when they get in."

That's not to say he loves ticking people off: "It's inconvenient and at times emotionally upsetting," he confessed. "But I wouldn't have been in this job or even accepted it if I wasn't willing to take that. I knew it came with the turf. I didn't realize how much it came with the turf, and how brutal it could sometimes be, but that's not a reason for me to leave."

Nor, he insisted, was he fazed by internal Film Society strife. This included the revolving door of the executive director's office, which was filled in 2010 by former AFI Fest artistic director Rose Kuo after the disastrous one-year stint of Mara Manus, whose aggressive managerial style resulted in numerous firings and a lot of bad vibes.

"I don't want to get into that," Peña said, "but the issues with Mara Manus weren't programmatic. There were other problems." He added that some changes might be positive, no matter how he personally feels about them. "Someone could lead the Film Society in a different direction," he said. "Whether I approve or disapprove doesn't really matter."

Still, he maintained his convictions about the function of the institution. "As a nonprofit that receives tax money, it is the duty of the Film Society to really help expand the boundaries of our understanding of cinema," he said. "I would hope we never get to the point where decisions are only made for commercial reasons."

He returned to the need for strategic transformation. "It's not my place to say how they should do it, but I think it's time to rethink everything," he said. "I don't think anything should be considered sacred."

But then Peña contradicted himself with a sacred assertion that has guided him over the years. "When I started going to the 'serious' movies in my teens," he said -- again with the air quotes, this time over "serious" -- "I was going to see movies that I didn't understand: 'Last Year at Marienbad,' some Bergmans, things like that. For me, the great joy was not understanding them. That challenged me."

The frozen smile on Peña's face then betrayed him. He looked calm, distant, in the throes of sudden nostalgia as he breathed a heavy sigh. "I wanted to get to a point where I could understand them, challenge them, criticize them, think about them," he said at last. "Simply not understanding wasn't enough. Hopefully, some of my work has been about that."

NYFF: George Clooney & Alexander Payne Discuss The Notions Of Forgiveness In ‘The Descendants'

The Playlist — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:58:56 GMT

Judy Greer, Beau Bridges, Robert Forster & The Entire Cast Of Payne’s New Dramedy Talk Film At New York Film Festival

The New York Film Festival went out with a bang on its last day, Sunday, October 16. Not only did George Clooney make a surprise visit to the press conference of Alexander Payne’s new comedic drama, "The Descendants,” but the entire cast came out to support the film including two newcomer leads, Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller, but also Robert Forster, Beau Bridges, Judy Greer, Matthew Lillard and Nick Krause.

Mature, restrained, melancholy and funny, “The Descendants” has Payne’s carefully calibrated funny/sad tone all over it – it is through and through distinctly one of his pictures. Moderated by THR chief critic Todd McCarthy, the afternoon was mostly a light and chummy affair, but occasionally peppered with some insights into the picture, which largely centers on the notion of forgiveness and coming to terms with anger.

"The Descendants," which hits theaters on November 18th in limited release, is about a father who takes off with his two rebellious daughters to track down his wife's lover on the island of Kauai when his wife falls into a coma. Here’s a few highlights from the evening (warning, some spoilers below).

1. While “The Descendants” is Clooney and Payne’s first onscreen collaboration, they almost worked before on "Sideways"
While Payne said that George was his “first and only choice” to lead the film, the “Ocean’s Eleven” actor joked that, “Alexander failed to find me fascinating when I met with him for ‘Sideways,’ which I’ve not let yet go,” he said with a smile.

Clooney remembered the duo met two years ago at the Toronto International Film Festival and Payne had given him a head’s up about a role coming his way. “I have a script coming that I’d like you to look at,” he said. Clooney responded with, “I’m doing it whether I read the script or not.” He then added with characteristic lightheartedness, “Which didn’t work with ‘Batman and Robin’ by the way, but that happens.”

2. Even though their scenes are brief, this wasn’t Judy Greer’s first time working with George Clooney.
The two of them shared a rather furious and therefore awkward sex scene off the top of David O. Russell’s “Three Kings.” “I had worked with George before, so thankfully I wasn’t a nervous about him, but he keeps everything so fun and yet professional,” she said. “He’s always the first person on set and he’s ready to work so I was impressed.”

“Do you remember what our first scene was ever?” George asked wryly. “Uhh, yeah,” Greer said, blushing. “Our first scene is us having sex up against a desk.”

“Yeah, like crazy sex,” Greer said laughing. “Having sex I had never even know about. So this is how grown-ups do it”

3. Matthew Lillard appeared very grateful to have a comeback part in the film, even if his crucial role in the picture is small. *Note some spoilers begin here.*
“I have the greatest role in the history of films,” Lillard said, cracking a smile. “I steal George Clooney’s wife! There’s 'Rocky' and 'Lawrence of Arabia' and there’s my character! That’s never going to be duplicated again. I literally looked at him and thought, ‘I’m better than you.” The audience howled with laughter, but Lilard then got very serious.

“I’ve been gone for a long time [from acting],” he admitted. “And to do the greatest movie that I will maybe ever be involved in – to be a part of that something that’s an instant classic, and to be with one of the greatest filmmakers in America right now? It changes your life. And it changes your perspective on the work and your career and it gives you something to be proud of and that doesn’t happen very often in the business that we’re in right now. To be able to work with this crack cast and crew and director – it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

4. Alexander Payne admits he might have gone overboard with the voice-over.
“I’m a big fan of voice-over and I’ve had it before in ‘Election’ and ‘About Schmidt,’ a short in Paris, and a TV pilot. It’s also helps propel the narrative a bit,” he said. But the nature of the novel is such that Payne was forced to deliver a lot of background at the top of the film to get it started.

“I think the first reel of this film is slightly too voice-over heavy,” Payne admitted. “There was a lot of exposition that I had to get across to the audience and I was aware of it. But the audience had to know all that stuff and I didn’t want to waste time in a scene to have to get that information across. So I did have to rely on voice-over, but it also anchors us – even though the voice-over disappears and tapers off by the third reel – into Matt King, his voice and in his head. This is actually the first time I’ve ever used voice-over with someone’s thoughts.”

However, always the class-act, Payne was generous about his contributions to the film, describing “The Descendants” author Kaui Hart Hemmings his “co-collaborator” on the script even though he didn’t actively work with her.

5. The relaxed pace of Hawaii was a groove that George Clooney had to eventually find.
Clooney’s Matt King character is essentially a schlub, and his costuming was a floral-pattern-nightmare, both for him and the DP. But the filmmakers said this dress was authentic. More difficult was the pace of life on the islands.

“On the freeway the speed limit is like 45 mph and it takes you awhile to get into that rhythm,” Clooney explained. “So I’m driving behind am like, ‘Move it!’ and they’re like ‘Heeeeeeeeeey,’ [makes a “hang loose” sign with his hand]. That was totally alien to me, but that’s just my problem and eventually you get into their rhythm.”

6. Spoilers abound here, be careful. While the center of the film is the misguided attempt to find the guy who was cheating with his wife, Clooney and Payne noted that at the end of the day, the film is about forgiveness.

“A big part of the film is forgiving yourself. Because so much of [the tragedy that occurs] in this film is his responsibility,” Clooney explained. “And a big part of that release when he’s with his wife at the end, when he’s saying goodbye, is understanding his part in this as well. Yes, she cheated on him, but he wasn’t there and he wasn’t a good father as much as he thought he was. He was busy working and that happens, so part of that was coming to understand that and so forgiving yourself is a very big part of that.”

“It’s about love and forgiveness,” Payne echoed, alluding to two scenes in the movie that were the hooks that drew him in (which we won’t get into here). “Having to rise above the occasion, and forgive and deal with also the murderousness inside oneself, but overcome that. Forgiveness is difficult. Forgiving self for many people, at least for myself is extremely difficult.”

And then surprisingly, Payne got slightly political at the very end. “And then the in a larger context, I’m constantly astonished by those that pray daily, forgive me my sins as I forgive those who sin against me and then beat very loudly the war drum,” he said to much audience applause.

“The Descendants” hits theaters November 18 in limited release. Watch for it to be a sizable Oscar contender this fall.

Richard Peña to Step Down from Film Society of Lincoln Center Posts in 2012

Brian Brooks — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 15:24:46 GMT

Richard Peña, Program Director and Head of the NYFF Selection Committee The Film Society of Lincoln Center Program Director and Head of NYFF Selection Committee will step down from his posts at the conclusion of next year’s 50th New York Film Festival, and his 25th year with the Film Society, the organization said Sunday. At that time, Peña will continue his involvement and has agreed to stay on to help design and organize a new educational initiative at the Film Society.

Dan Stern, President of FSLC’s Board of Directors made the announcement prior to the Closing Night Gala screening of “The Descendants” by Alexander Payne Sunday.

“For the past 24 years Richard Peña has served as the Chairman of the Selection Committee for the Festival as well as the Program Director of the Film Society. Richard has informed the Board that at the end of 2012—after the festival’s 50th anniversary, and his 25th at its helm—he will step down from both posts. Richard has been with the Film Society through the opening of the Walter Reade Theater as well as the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center and we are pleased that he has accepted our invitation to stay on to help create a new educational initiative at the Film Society.”

Regarding the timing of the move, Peña said, “Heading into the fiftieth anniversary of the festival, it seems a perfect time for a transition, both for me personally and for the organization. Working at the Film Society has been beyond a "dream come true," but in the years left me I would like to possibly explore other areas of interest, both within and beyond the cinema. I also feel that, like at any other cultural institution, change can be important, as it will bring in fresh ideas and approaches to lead the Film Society into its next fifty years.”

FSLC’s Executive Director, Rose Kuo added via an FSLC release, “Richard Pena has been a shining light for more than two decades at the Film Society, guiding us in the discovery of artists like Pedro Almodovar, Mike Leigh, Lars Von Trier, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Hong Sang Soo and many more. It has been an honor and a privilege to work with Richard and I am delighted that he will continue with us as he transitions to a new period in his career and life.”

Peña has been the Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Director of the New York Film Festival since 1988. At the Film Society, he has organized retrospectives of Michelangelo Antonioni, Sacha Guitry, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Aldrich, Roberto Gavaldon, Ritwik Ghatak, Kira Muratova, Youssef Chahine, Yasujiro Ozu, Carlos Saura and Amitabh Bachchan, as well as major film series devoted to African, Israeli, Cuban, Polish, Hungarian, Arab, Korean, Swedish, Taiwanese and Argentine cinema. In addition, he is a Professor of Film Studies at Columbia University, where he specializes in film theory and international cinema, and from 2006-2009 was a Visiting Professor in Spanish at Princeton University. He is also currently the co-host of WNET/Channel 13’s weekly Reel 13.

[indieWIRE will have an interview with Peña this week. An interview with Peña on the FSLC site. ]

NYFF '11: 'Kid With A Bike' Directors The Dardennes Say They Originally Planned A Different Ending

Christopher Bell — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 11:27:39 GMT

Reveal That Holly Hunter Is One Of The Hollywood Stars Who Has Expressed Interest In Working With Them

What can be said about the Dardenne brothers that five Cannes awards don't already say much more definitively? Even a mediocre splotch in their oeuvre is twelve notches above most other contemporary films that get paraded around on the blogosphere.

But our nose is getting a little brown so we'll just leave it at this: "The Kid with a Bike" is another ridiculously strong entry in an already highly consistent body of work. Using their signature no-bullshit aesthetic, the Gallic duo set their eyes upon a young boy with behavioral problems. After being sent to an orphanage by his father, Cyril (Thomas Doret) finds comfort in hairdresser Samantha (Cecile De France), who crosses paths with him after he runs away from the child services establishment. The woman's sympathy leads to her taking him in on the weekends, but as she spends more time with Cyril, she realizes that she may be in over her head. 'Kid,' heavily indebted to Maurice Pialat's fantastic debut "The Naked Childhood," is an uncomfortable journey with an unpredictable youth ready to explode at any minute. It's always engagingly nerve-wracking, and although Cyril can be rather bratty and frustrating, the Dardennes never give up on him. In turn, neither does the audience.

In addition to the Q&A they held after the screening (which was recapped here), the directing pair were nice enough to sit with The Playlist for a one-on-two interview where we spoke about the bike's importance, actors that are big fans, and their joyful sense of humor. Beware, there are mild spoilers ahead.

Cyril's Bike Was More Than Just A Mode Of Transportation -- It Was A Friend.
Yes, every kid rides a bike, but something about the familiar two-wheeler really spoke to the filmmakers more than anything else. "We knew he was going to be an abandoned child, and right away we saw him with a bike without fenders, without a luggage carrier/basket. The bike of someone who is alone and solitary -- also, he would be able to exercise his violence on it," Jean-Pierre explained. "It was also his friend -- much like, say, a dog. Eventually it evolved and we used it for the story between Cyril and his father, it was the link for Cyril and Samantha…in a way, it helped build the story."

Like Their Locations, A Character's Profession Is Very Important.
The two not only place a lot of importance in their locations (often visiting them in varying stages of pre-production), but in their characters' choice in employment. Originally, the main character in "The Son" was to be a cook -- but when they couldn't imagine that world, they set him up as a carpenter and everything fell into place. Similarly, de France's character had a number of false starts before finally settling as a hairdresser. "Samantha came out of another script, and for that she was a doctor. But we felt that a doctor is already someone in the caring profession, and that was too heavy-handed for this movie. We always saw her in some sort of retail position…We never saw her as an electrician, for instance, or a plumber," they laughed. "That might be a generational thing."

But what was it about that specific vocation? "We always saw her as a kind of person that had a relationship with the exterior of the neighborhood. Hairdresser worked for that. It was also good to have her as that because of that space. There's kind of intermediary space: it's not entirely a public place and not entirely a private place. Then you had Samantha's private space. So we always thought of somebody that had two spaces," they explained.

They Might Do A Comedy Starring Luc Dardenne, But Probably Not.
In stark contrast to their hard-hitting, dramatic work, the Belgian siblings often take on a light, playful demeanor when speaking with the press and their fans. Their personalities are so spirited that it's a wonder that they haven't tackled something in the same vein, which lead us to wondering if that would ever be of any interest to them. "Maybe, maybe…but it's difficult to construct a comedy with actors...often in a comedy, the director is a comedian/actor too," to which we pointed at Luc (who Jean-Pierre claimed was the funnier one) and suggested it be him.

"Funny story," he began, "I've been going to the same bakery since 1998, and every time I place my order with the employee, she laughs. If they have another girl that waits on me, she laughs! I don't know why! One time I asked 'Excuse me, why are you laughing? Is there something on my face, or something else?' And she replied simply, 'I don't know why I'm laughing!' So..." Luc threw his arms into the air. Well, sounds like a potential script to us! Someone give Happy Madison a ring.

The Directors Originally Planned An Additional Scene To Be Added At The End.
Those acquainted with their output should kind of expect a certain kind of ending -- one that at first feels abrupt (sometimes shockingly so) but, after some thought, seem like a carefully devised punctuation to everything that came before it. 'Bike' operates in the same fashion -- though the team had their reservations at one point.

"We did, at one point, wonder if we should shoot the barbecue scene," Jean-Pierre admitted. "But we honestly never felt the need for it. What we ultimately shot seemed to be enough, even though we can't say for sure since we never ended up shooting that. Once he got back on his bike and was carrying his sack of coal, that was efficient. Also, because of the importance of the bike in the story, it felt right to end with it."

A Number Of Actors -- Including Holly Hunter -- Want To Work With Them.
Lugging around a sack of Cannes awards has to catch the attention of Hollywood in some shape or form. Big time studios haven't exactly been courting the brothers for an Oscar-bait or tent-pole franchise, but they did mention that some rather famous American thespians were interested in a potential future collaboration. "We can't say who in particular, because we may work with them, we don't know. It's up to them to say," Luc respectfully stated. "Though one we can say because she had mentioned it before in a long interview…Holly Hunter." Huh, how about that. Truthfully we can't imagine a known face in one of their roles (maybe because of their penchant for framing the back of someone's head), but if it ever actually comes to fruition we'll be first in line.

"The Kid with a Bike" will be released in March 2012.

NYFF '11: 'The Artist' Director Michel Hazanavicius Credits Orson Welles As One Of Many Influences

Christopher Bell — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:49:34 GMT

Director Wanted To Revive Silent Movie Style For A Contemporary Movie Audience

Despite stealing audiences' hearts and walking away from the prestigious Cannes Film Festival with the Best Actor Award, Michel Hazanavicius's nostalgia-fueled silent feature "The Artist" may have its work cut out for it. Will regular movie-goers go and see something like this in an era when the mere thought of a flick not being in color is appalling? It's a tough call, but with the right push, it might get sales solely based on the fact it's unlike anything in at the cineplex today. After that, all the movie needs is five minutes: it's an instant charmer, an escapist picture done with flair and an enormous amount of heart.

French actor Jean Dujardin stars as movie star George Valentin, a dashing leading man and industry veteran. He bumps into aspiring actress/current extra Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo) during a photo-op, a chance meeting that ignites the emotional core of the movie. As she slowly rises up the ranks, George is faced with the advent of the talkie. Refusing to give in to the "fad" of sync sound, he quits and goes off on his own. Meanwhile, Peppy Miller is thriving and on her way to becoming a top-billed star. When George's ambitious directorial endeavor fails to find an audience, his world begins to fall apart.

Screening at the New York Film Festival, the director and some of his cast (Dujardin, Bejo, James Cromwell, Penelope Ann Miller and Beth Grant) along with producer Thomas Langmann did a short question-and-answer following the movie. We've recapped the discussion below, where Bejo divulges us with her lengthy preparations, Hazanavicius speaks candidly about influences, and Dujardin reveals an odd choice of a film that he used to research his role.

Michel Hazanavicius Wanted To Share The Black & White Movie Experience With A New Generation.
"I wanted to do something larger than an homage to the silent era, I wanted to evocate all the old, classical Hollywood movies. That's why there's so many references to 'Citizen Kane,' 'Sunset Boulevard,' a lot movies from the '20s to the '50s. I wasn't married to staying in the period, like in the scene where he first hears sound, there's a light that was used not in the '20s but in the '50s," Hazanavicius explained. "What I really wanted to do was tell my own story, if something helps me to tell it, I'll use it. I really wanted to do a mainstream movie in black and white. You see a lot of experimental ones like that, it's no problem, but I didn't want to do that. My daughter asked me once if the world was black and white when I was born. So they really don't know…But I wanted to show that experience. It's very special and very specific to those movies that are now gone, nobody watches silent movies anymore."

Bérénice Bejo Did Extensive Research; Jean Dujardin Watched "Lassie."
In preparation for their roles, the actors did their fair share of studies. Bejo dug deep and analyzed some of the first female stars. "It was important for me to find a way to be an American actress -- which I'm not, I'm an Argentine and live in France -- so I watched a lot of Janet Gaynor and early Joanne Crawford," she explained. "She had this adorable thing that man and woman could both relate to, and you wanted her to become a star. There's also Marlene Dietrich, she has something very special. Every time the actress came into frame she had something very animal and intense without even doing anything. The way she moves, winks… I would just google her and watch her wink and wink and wink...[laughs]"

As for leading man Dujardin, he pried into his childhood. "I watched 'Lassie,' he stated conclusively, to which the audience erupted in laughter. "It's me too, though. It's instinctive. I like to keep my pleasure on set, always. Like a child."

Michel Hazanavicius Readily Admits To Stealing Scenes From The Classics.
The look and handling of "The Artist" owes a lot to that particular early period in Hollywood filmmaking, so it's no surprise that certain scenes in the film are heavily inspired by moments in famous movies. However, Hazanavicius doesn't hide his sources. Miller describes a moment between George Valentin and her character/his wife Doris, which bares a striking similarity to the breakfast table montage in "Citizen Kane." Right as she calls it brilliant, the filmmaker cuts her off, "It is, yes. You should really thank Orson Welles for that."

His sincerity garnered quite a few laughs, and he continued, explaining why it was okay to do. "I acted like a crook, I stole things that nobody uses anymore and put them in this modern silent movie…and I think that's good! I'm not sure if there will be a lot of silent movies after this and if that will be okay or not. But for one movie, it's okay."

Like Most Bigger Budget Black And White Films, It Was Shot In Color.
Similar to Joel and Ethan Coen's "The Man Who Wasn't There" and Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon," "The Artist" was shot in a color stock and later changed to black and white after the fact. "We used color stock because it was easier, we did a lot of tests and the best images were with the color stock put to black and white in post." So there must be a color cut of the film somewhere, but don't think it will ever see the light of day.

"I kept in mind that the movie would be in black and white, but we shot in color. So you'd see on set, purple dresses with yellow hats… that was not so nice… so we have a color print but I won't use it. I hope we never will!" Hazanavicius exclaimed.

Berenice Bejo Wanted To Give Audiences A Gift With The Dancing Sequences.
A successful love letter to a type of movie long gone, "The Artist" is consistently tugging at the heart and making you feel all warm and gooey inside. But nothing really tops its dancing sequences, an exuberant display of joy that sweetens the journey these characters take. Of course, it came with a price. "We were not tap dancers, so we worked for six months almost every day. It was a lot of fun at the beginning and then it started to get boring, and then fun again...," Bejo said, displaying the back-and-forth emotions with a finger. "I love being in the audience and watching an actor doing something they didn't already know, I feel like they gave me a gift. You never see the work of an actor, but when you see them doing something they've learnt, it's always a lot of fun for an audience. So we really wanted to give you something special like that."

And that make that treat even more special, Hazanavicius had a demanding approach to filming. "Michel wanted to film it as one shot as opposed to showing legs dancing, then cutting to see our faces…so it was a big challenge. The only thing he said is that we needed to smile, because if you smile, people are going to watch your face and not your feet," Dujardin said. "I was thrilled to dance, I love dancing. I'd love to do it again, Tonight. With my wife," he added to laughter.

"The Artist" opens on November 23rd.

NYFF: Wes Anderson & Cast Of 'Royal Tenenbaums' Talk The Challenges Of Working With Gene Hackman

Cory Everett — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:42:44 GMT

Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow, Anjelica Houston & Noah Baumbach Discuss Film At NYFF 10th Anniversary Screening

The 49th New York Film Festival is wrapping up this weekend and there have already been many highlights but there are still a few more films left to screen. Arguably one of the most anticipated events of this year’s NYFF wasn't a premiere at all but rather a film that had its world premiere at the festival a decade ago, Wes Anderson's "The Royal Tenenbaums." The now-classic film features probably the director’s starriest cast to date, and he brought along a few of those cast members for a special 10th Anniversary Screening on Thursday night. Just prior to the screening Anderson gathered before a few hundred fans at The Apple Store a few blocks from Lincoln Center for a Q&A in their Meet The Filmmaker series (moderated by our own editor-in-chief Rodrigo Perez) before heading down to Alice Tully Hall to introduce the screening, this time joined by Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow and Anjelica Huston along with his brother Eric Chase Anderson, who provided all of Ritchie’s artwork in the film.

The Q&A, moderated by Anderson collaborators Noah Baumbach and Antonio Monda (who had a bit part in “The Life Aquatic”), was loose, lively and rather candid, with Murray keeping his fellow cast and the audience in frequent hysterics. Although there wasn’t anything terribly groundbreaking revealed, it was a very entertaining evening for anyone who ever wanted to be a Tenenbaum. Here's five highlights from the Q&A.

1. Though his sometimes prickly on-set behavior has been documented before, with a decade of distance from the experience, the filmmaker and cast felt a little more comfortable opening up about the sometimes “scary” experience of working with Gene Hackman.
Though a few tales have circulated over the years about Hackman’s moody behavior on the set, maybe it was the decade that had passed since filming or the fact that none of the cast had seen or spoken to him since, but everyone seemed a little more comfortable speaking candidly about their experiences with the legendary actor. Anderson and Paltrow both admitted they were “scared” of working with Hackman, with Huston saying, “I was a lot scared but I was more concerned with protecting Wes,” and said that no one involved with the film had “heard or seen of Gene since this movie." She then added that the tempestuous Hackman had told the director to “pull up your pants and act like a man.”

Anderson said that all of the cast members helped to protect him from the difficult actor. “You did defend me, all three of you did at various times but that’s making it sound bad,” he said before adding, “[well], he did call me a worse name” with Baumbach filling in the blank by saying, “He called you a cunt, didn't he?” Poor Anderson turned red and shrank his in his chair, clearing not wanting the audience to perceive that the cast and crew didn't enjoy Hackman. In fact, near the end of the evening, Anderson steered the conversation back to the topic Hackman, trying to salvage things, saying, "Can I say something? I kind of feel, through my own fault, we kind of made Gene look bad. Do you think we gave enough balance to him?"

Despite the challenging behavior, the director still fondly remembers the experience. “He was one of the things that pulled everybody into this movie. Anytime we are together and talk about the movie we always talk about him. He’s a huge force and I really enjoyed working with him. Even though he was very challenging with me, it was very exciting seeing him launch into these scenes,” Anderson said. Hackman told Anderson during filming that he thought ‘Tenenbaums’ would be his last film though he did go on to make several others before retiring unofficially in 2004.

2. Though Wes had written the part for Hackman, he had at one point considered another legendary actor for the part once Hackman passed.
It’s well known that Anderson had written the part for Hackman and he’d previously said that he had considered dropping the movie when Gene passed. But moderator Monda suggested something that few in the audience had probably been aware of, that Anderson had briefly considered Michael Caine for the part. “Gene passed for a year and a half or something like that. I also think he was sort of forced to do the movie and that was not fair really. I think I just kept asking him, kept bothering him, I just wore him down. I didn’t really have much access to him, I don’t know how I really went about that but eventually he just caved.”

“Well he’s weak. Gene is weak,” Murray winked much to the uproarious laughter from the crowd. “That’s what we found when you challenge someone like Gene, you find his weakness. But he’s a great actor and he was great in the movie and as much as all of us here tonight hate Gene Hackman, he is a really great American actor. I wish I hadn’t said that ‘American’ thing.”

3. Many will know that the film was originally intended to include several Beatles songs, and even had them in place at its NYFF premiere back in 2001, but the filmmakers were unable to attain the rights. What many don’t know is exactly how far they went in trying to woo one of The Beatles into getting them.
When the film debuted at the NYFF in October of 2001, the film both opened and closed with Beatles numbers. While the version that most people know opens with Mark Mothersbaugh’s instrumental rendition of “Hey Jude” and closes with Van Morrison’s “Everyone,” Anderson’s intention had been for it to open with original Beatles recording of “Hey Jude” and close with The Beatles' demo version of “I’m Looking Through You.” Anderson went to great lengths to try to attain the rights to the original recordings, even sending Paltrow on a personal mission to get them from Paul McCartney.

“I tried to bribe Paul McCartney,” Paltrow said. “I ended up taking him bowling weirdly enough with Heather Mills, his ex-wife, and we were trying to... I don’t know what [we were trying to do], [Wes] put me on a mission.” Wes continued that she had screened it for him on Long Island, with Paltrow adding, “And he loved the movie and then we went bowling and everything before he said he had nothing to do with the rights.” Murray then joked, “Paul McCartney, too, is weak.”

4. The part of Mordecai was originally written for Jason Schwartzman.
Though it was nearly 10 years before Anderson reunited with his “Rushmore” star in “The Darjeeling Limited,” his intention was to include him much earlier. The part of Mordecai, eventually portrayed by a hawk in the film, was originally conceived for Jason Schwartzman. Anderson explained, “We had a character that was called Mordecai, which in the movie was the name of a bird, but Jason Schwartzman was supposed to be a boy who lived across the street from the Tenenbaums in some embassy or something in an attic.”

5. In an effort to make sure they hadn’t mischaracterized Hackman, Anderson asked the cast to share what it was like working with him but quickly remembered that he had asked Murray to come to set even on his days off to act as his protector.
"We make jokes about him being challenging, well he was, but it was also exciting to [work with him] for me," Anderson said. Paltrow reminisced fondly, “I loved being in the same scenes with him. He was a bear of a guy but I also found something very sweet and sad in there and I liked him a lot. I think he’s one of the greatest actors who ever lived. Working in his presence and watching him do his thing, you know, if you’re Gene Hackman you can be in a fucking bad mood if you want to, you’re Gene Hackman.”

Anderson had tried to stay positive but recalled that Murray had actually come to set, even when the actor was not involved in filming, just to protect the director. “You were not scared of Gene,” Anderson said to Murray. “I noticed early on so I started asking you to come be there. I remember, there was a scene where Gene goes for a walk in the park and I looked up on the top of this rock and you were standing with a cowboy hat watching the set. And you were just there to show solidarity and I was very touched by that.”

Murray added with his usual deadpan approach. "I'll stick up for Gene too," Murray said, "You know, the word 'cocksucker' does get thrown around a lot. But I'll just take that word and throw it out of this room; it doesn't belong here. I'd hear all these stories [like], 'Gene threatened to kill me today.' Kill you? You're in the union, he can't kill you. 'Gene threatened to set fire to all of us.' [I'd say], it's a union shoot! He can't set anyone on fire!"
Watch the full Q&A below:
Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Part Four:

Part Five:

Part Six:

Part Seven:

NYFF '11 Review: George Clooney Grapples With Life, Death & Fatherhood In ‘The Descendants’

The Playlist — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:36:29 GMT

Marked by a strong, soulful performance by George Clooney, simple and economic direction, and a slow and patient gait, “The Descendants” finds filmmaker Alexander Payne working in the familiar, but not derivative, milieu of the adult drama. The film doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and while firmly within Payne’s wheelhouse, we can see the filmmaker inching towards pure drama without dramedy or resorting to the James L. Brooks method of punctuating pain with disarming laughter. That’s not to say “The Descendants” isn’t a dramedy or isn’t funny, as it certainly has its moments of comedic flair that do defuse some painful moments, but overall, one can argue that it’s Payne’s most somber and serious work outside of maybe “About Schmidt.” And it’s not without its problems either.

Based on the novel of the same name by Kaui Hart Hemmings, the film starts out with an unfortunate voice-over that feels as if it exists because the screenwriters (Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash) could not devise of a finer way to dispense with the thorny backstory that sets the film’s story into motion. George Clooney stars as Matt King, a lawyer, husband and father of two girls who we meet right in the middle of a major crisis. His adventurous, thrill-chasing wife is in a coma after a speed-boating accident off the coast of Waikiki. The descendants of Hawaiian royalty, and as the sole trustee of his large family's fortune, Matt’s also been grappling over the past months with the impactful decision of what to do with the remaining parcels of highly-sought after and lucrative tropical beach land they own.

The accident occurs on the precipice of the family’s vote of who to sell the land to, with the decision looming of either making a killing with a sale to wealthy Chicagoan investors, or sell more modestly to a Hawaiian real-estate company. As Matt tries to keep his head above water, he also struggles with fatherhood – a duty he’s never been particularly good at, but is now forced to bear the burden of. His precocious 10-year-old daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) is a handful, acting out at school post-accident and the angry and contentious teenager Alexandra (a terrifically good Shailene Woodley) is fetched from her expensive boarding-school in Oahu to help out.

And as Matt wrestles with belatedly trying to be a father and managing his own pain and daughters' grief, he’s hit with a bombshell: his wife was having an affair and was possibly in love with another man at the time of the accident. Pummeled emotionally by this discovery, Matt then has to struggle with his anger, anguish, his impending decisions, and the consequences of being a mediocre father. (Fyi, no spoiler warning needed, this is all in the trailer.) This revelation is what truly kicks the plot into active motion as Matt and his daughters decide if they should go after the guy who made him a cuckold. Sound a bit clichéd in spots and familiar? A man in crisis who is forced to discover who he is, what he’s made and capable of because of tragedy? Well, that’s because some of it is and at the end of the day, all stories are essentially about character overcoming adversities either otherworldly or in this case, deeply personal.

And this is where the not-especially-unique material of “The Descendants” gets elevated by its cast. While there are few stars in the picture (Beau Bridges, Robert Forster, Judy Greer and Matthew Lillard all appear in small supporting roles), the principal cast – Clooney, Woodley, Miller and Nick Krause as Sid, Alexandra’s dopey boyfriend – make for a strong quartet to carry the material. In their brief scenes, Robert Forster is also especially good as Clooney’s ill-tempered step-father as is Beau Bridges as one of the many cousins hoping to profit from the family's priceless land. While “The Descendants” isn’t Clooney’s best role -- some of the hallmarks of his dramatic performances feel a bit habitual at times -- ultimately the picture lives and dies with him and he makes its unhurried breaths rise and fall. He makes the movie better than it is, or as good as it can be, especially in every clutch emotional moment of bereavement – notes he’s not particularly known for, but tenors he sells successfully nonetheless. Perhaps the strongest emotional moments in the film however, is the notion of negotiating anger with love and forgiveness, a theme that circles back often to almost every character struggling with their variously loaded issues.

Featuring a plaintive and reflective soundtrack of traditional Hawaiian music, tone is everything to “The Descendants,” and while the almost two-hour movie takes a few moments before it settles into its mature little groove, it’s wise enough to never milk things or abuse the audience’s trust. This writer’s heard some call the tenor treacly, while others describe it muted, but truthfully it mostly lives in that sweet-spot in between. A largely subtle affair in retrospect, “The Descendants” is likely not going to win or lose any Alexander Payne fans, though perhaps younger fans of more biting and satirical work like “Citizen Ruth” and “Election” might be tiring of these grave moods. Does Payne have anything new to say? The film's not necessarily a fresh approach to Payne’s examination of the human condition but on its own terms, it is a largely effective and moving one that matters when it counts the most. [Somewhere between B and B+ if it exists]

Meet Pedro Almodóvar Live at NYFF and on indieWIRE...Streaming Now!

Brian Brooks — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:58:56 GMT

Almodóvar in Conversation with Richard Pena now!

More about the film...

A significant genre shift from his recent work, "Skin" uses thriller elements to tell a disturbing story about power, science and scruples.

"Skin" stars Banderas as Dr. Robert Ledgard, a plastic surgeon haunted by the death of his wife who was burned in a car crash. Obsessed with creating a new skin that could save her, he cultivates his own home laboratory; his goal is to create a man-made skin that both feels natural and is virtually impenetrable from attack.

Watch live streaming video from filmlinc at livestream.com

Audiences across the country will have a chance to see Almodóvar's latest beginning today (Friday) via Sony Pictures Classics which is opening the film Stateside (it only recently opened in Spain).

The film has a series of twists and flashbacks that lead to a crescendo that does not sit well with all audiences. It divided audiences in Cannes, where it had its world premiere, as well as more recently in Toronto and NYFF, with some saying that the director’s latest left them less emotionally attached to the characters compared to his previous work.

Almodóvar suggests that might be intentional. "I wanted [these characters] to have a different set of morals," he said recently in New York. "They're cold and lack feeling." He added, "Throughout my career as a director, I've worked in different genres—comedy, drama and now I'm in a thriller period."

Almodóvar said that he sees the world as a bleak place right now and compared his film with other dark stories that have come to screen lately including Lars von Trier's "Melancholia." But he noted that he "can still make comedy" and teased that his next film may in fact return to the genre. He also teased that he's working on his first English-language film.

Learn more about the director and have a chance to ask him questions tonight at 5pm live from Lincoln Center and online here at indieWIRE.

iW wishes to thank our friends and colleagues at the Film Society of Lincoln Center for working with us during the NYFF indieWIRE Meets... series.

The remaining indieWIRE Meets... series at the New York Film Festival this weekend:

Friday, October 14
5PM indieWIRE Meets: Director Pedro Almodovar, "The Skin I Live In" (moderator Richard Peña)

Saturday, October 15
6PM indieWIRE Meets: Director Jeffrey Schwarz, "Vito" (moderator Basil Tsiokos)

NYFF '11 Review: 'Policeman' A Strong, Haneke-Inspired Rumination On Israeli Society

Christopher Bell — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 07:03:05 GMT

While it's absolutely an important issue that deserves coverage, we've already heard nearly every angle of the Israel-Palestine conflict seventy times over -- so much so that we barely have a clue about their other dilemmas. One of these issues starting to come to light is the large economic disparity that exists among the Israelis themselves, resulting in many protests against the abnormally high cost of living. In his assured debut "Policeman," journalist/novelist Nadav Lapid tackles this very problem with a reserved strength rarely seen in a filmmaker so green.

Similar to its NYFF acquaintance "Sleeping Sickness," Lapid's feature starts with one storyline before abruptly switching gears and following new characters. Our first narrative follows officer Yaron (Yiftach Klein), an expecting father and walking representation of masculinity. As he comforts his wife with a soothing leg massage, he warns her not to tell anybody that their baby may come at any time, but in an amusing follow-up, the next few scenes have him casually spilling the beans every chance he gets. But it's not just for a laugh: this string of moments says a lot about the man, one who knows the right thing to do but despite trying to be a "leader" is constantly swayed by his pack's mentality. Pretty soon we learn that he and his team -- a group of anti-terrorist agents -- botched an operation and ended up killing innocent people. Without batting an eyelud, they decide to place sole blame on their co-worker who has cancer, as his medical treatment will likely lead to a swift acquittal. Yaron volunteers to be the one to confront him about this and the two hammer it out like it’s nothing. He doesn’t really give his buddy a choice, but seeing as everyone will be off the hook in the end, it makes the most sense. With the agreement in place, the lens lingers on our hero, seemingly preoccupied for the rest of the scene as they sit in silence. Klein uses the quieter moments well, externalizing his inner conflicts in a subtle way. He plays it off well so his friends can’t see it, but when he is alone and lets his guard down, we can.

Broadening the scope a bit, the filmmaker turns toward Shira (Yaara Pelzig), a well-off mid-20s thinker who just happens to witness her car being vandalized (read: destroyed) by a group of native Israeli punks. She doesn't seem to know how to immediately react to this incredible scene, though something about this event causes her to become a revolutionary anarchist. Together with three others (including the handsome faction shepherd Natanel, suavely played by Michael Aloni), they practice their shooting skills in anticipation of their grand plot to take billionaires hostage at an upcoming wedding. It's this eventuality that pits both lead characters against each other, leading to a shaking and extremely penetrating finale. Pelzig plays her character as if she's in a trance, boldly reciting damning stanzas and hurling cold-hearted threats at the wealthy prisoners. Unlike Yaron, Shira's eyes don't show a speck of doubt, though it's debatable who is more frightening: the one who does bad and knows it or the ignorant one who has no clue that her behavior is vile.

Though Lapid directly confronts the strife between citizens, the structure of his narrative works similarly by slapping together two separate stories leading up to their brutal confrontation. A strong, topical script can work on its own without any pizazz, but the filmmaker's insistence on using the form to strengthen his ideas (something that most in the medium, especially novices, don't do) makes for a much more sophisticated and uniquely moving picture. Every stroke the director makes is well thought out, from the general anatomy of the movie right down to its blocking and framing: in one scene, a revolutionary and his father have a droll conversation separated by a wall, with one in the kitchen and the other in the bathroom. The filmmaker constructs this in a static shot with a room on each side and the dividing wall in center frame. It obviously stresses the distance between the two, but it's kept from being overreaching due to such a dissonant and uncomfortable placing of the camera. It suggests something deeper than just a father and son with little to say to one another; it forebodes and enacts a feeling of anxiety.

There’s a faint whiff of early Michael Haneke (mostly “71 Fragments Of A Chronology Of Chance”) permeating the entirety of “Policeman,” especially with its explosive bursts of violence and general coldness. But unlike other disciples of the Austrian professor, it never feels like it’s aping him but instead working with the same mindset; driving along on a parallel road. The director’s detachment from the characters also enables him to portray them as complex individuals (he’s less interested in making them likable, more so in making them interesting) instead of hero and villain caricatures.

It's certainly not a Wellesian debut, but a first-time filmmaker having such a kinship with the medium right out of the gate is something very remarkable. There's room for some polishing, but mark our words: if Nadav Lapid continues working, he'll be raking in some top awards in the near future. Avoiding easy answers and engaging on various levels, "Policeman" is exactly the kind of film that makes one excited about the art again. [B+]

NYFF '11: Pedro Almodóvar Talks The Identity And Gender Themes Of ‘The Skin I Live In’

Mark Zhuravsky — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 09:16:36 GMT

Director Discusses Finding Humor In Tragedy, Differences Between Men And Women, And More

When we first laid our eyes upon Pedro Almodóvar's "The Skin I Live In" at Cannes, we called it a film that "snaps between bright glittering glamour and dark, doomed horror," and emerges largely triumphant, "uniquely beautiful and distinctively imperfect." The reception for Almodóvar's latest in the Big Apple has been similarly apprehensive and appreciative; the audience's reaction at last Tuesday's press screening was a testament to the polarizing nature of the film. Almodóvar and stars Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya were present with a translator in tow, and the conversation was by turns amusing and laid-back, touching on themes and concepts native to the story. While our own Jen Vineyard turned in an excellent piece digging deep into the specifics of the production, this time most of the questions were addressed to Almodóvar, who fielded them with ease, occasionally utilizing the translator for particularly verbose answers.

The conference got off to a lively start with one question that's been increasingly leveled at the film since its conception -- Almodóvar's adaptation of the Thierry Jonquet novel “Mygale,” also known as “Tarantula,” has been deemed a major departure for the director. Addressing this concern while also speaking about his tendency not to analyze his films, Almodóvar said, "For me, I got the impression that [the film was] completely, not completely, but quite, new. In this movie, I approach one genre that I didn’t before: the horror movie. I don’t mean this is a horror movie, but there is a part inside, in the middle of the movie, 20 minutes, that really belongs to that genre. That was completely new for me. I mixed genres like always, but I think I took it here in a completely different way than before. In my former movies, I was supporting these people that they had to struggle to become what they really are. The identity theme here is treated like a punishment. I hope I will surprise myself and I will surprise you with the next movie. Even the themes were familiar to me, but on the whole I was much more scared than ever.”

Certainly those who've seen "The Skin I Live In" can attest to the fact that it toys with concepts, familiar to Almodóvar's work, of gender, sex and the permanently blurred line between men and women. Addressing the difference between the genders, the director admitted that it exists, "but I can’t explain it to you. This movie talks about that, talks about the identity, one of the ideas that I was trying to say is that identity is not something that can really be just so simply manipulated. It really exists beyond plastic surgery and beyond gender identity, but with that there is a difference between the masculine and the feminine. The identity, the soul, the spirit, whatever you want to call, is something inaccessible, is something incorporeal." He also related an anecdote about "a friend of a friend" whose wife is a linguist and whose daughter prefers to be referred to as "it" and "they" in attempt at gender freedom -- a contradiction to her mother, whose career involves the study of words.

Another oddity that figures significantly in the film is the humor Almodóvar mines from the frequently tragic absurdity on screen. “In this movie, I try to fight against my sense of humor, because I ask myself to do it, to be the most austere I can be, I think it’s always good to have humor in any genre," he said, adding, "Almost every sequence, not just in my movie, but every sequence in life, humor can be present. It depends how you feel, it depends on how distant you can be, and it depends on how much pain you suffer, but the humor is present in the most awful situations in real life." Tipping his hat to detractors who'd deem 'Skin' far removed from real life, Almodóvar said, "This example is very extreme, I know, I realize that, I wanted not to underline anything that could be gory, and not too much funny. In those areas in which one strives hardest to survive, it’s easiest in those moments to find aspects of humor.”

Wrapping up, an audience member invoked "Frankenstein" and "Pygmalion," asking whether these classic tales were conscious inspirations. “I can’t say really that was taken consciously, but in fact was part of a deep cultural pool of resonances that I have," said Almodóvar. "Yes, they’re there of course, but it’s really a whole sort of history of the idea of the scientist that’s trying to create a new being. So, yes, 'Frankenstein,' yes, 'Pygmalion,' 'Vertigo,' 'Prometheus.' I didn’t think about them consciously, but I think the spirits of culture would arrive on the set every day to say hello. But also, it was the theme of creation – in this case, he was trying to recreate the same human that he loved.”

"The Skin I Live In" opens this weekend in New York and Los Angeles and will make its way across the country in the following weeks.
[Top photo by courtesy of UPI /Laura Cavanaugh]

NYFF '11: Eddie Redmayne Says 'My Week With Marilyn' A Celebration Of Old School Filmmaking

Gabe Toro — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 08:40:28 GMT

Rising British actor Eddie Redmayne has packed a career’s worth of activity into a short time. He's already won a Tony Award, is well regarded for his stage efforts and is quickly making headway on both the small and big screen. He features in the mini-series "The Pillars Of Earth," has appeared in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" and "The Other Boleyn Girl," however, “My Week With Marilyn” is where he’s got his biggest, showiest role to date. As third assistant director Colin Clark, he’s not only got to manage the egos on the set of “The Princess And The Showgirl,” he’s also tasked with being Marilyn Monroe’s unofficial “handler.” And like anyone else who orbited the star, he winds up falling for her.

We sat down and talked with Eddie Redmayne at the New York Film Festival, and discovered that the story of Colin Clark isn’t as cut and dried to him as it would seem. “I think there’s a wondrous aspect to it,” he said. “The fact that the diaries were written, and then he came back and wrote [the book] ‘My Week With Marilyn’ was interesting and suspect.”

To Redmayne, it was all part of a much larger look at a certain moment in movie history balanced by a personal story. “I’m pretty sure that something happened here, something special, intimate,” he says. “I think parts of this film are a celebration for what filmmaking was in this era. But there’s a point when you’re playing a true story where you stick to the script, because there’s no point in bringing this sense of history that isn’t supposed to be in the film."

“But I asked people who worked on the set, a script supervisor and a someone in the publicity department, and they had said that he was an incredibly kind and charming man, and he had a facility to engage with them,” he continued. “So they believed it was possible.” Redmayne, who admits he had not seen the movie around which "My Week With Marilyn" centers, nonetheless relished the chance to delve into this bit of history.

“What was endlessly fascinating was actually seeing ‘The Prince And The Showgirl’ and this incredibly charismatic performance by her, where she blows everyone off the screen, and how you reconcile with what you read about her behavior,” he says, referring to the mood swings, emotional delicacy, and troublesome flirtiness depicted by Michelle Williams in the film.

Redmayne is keeping busy, with an appearance in the Sundance hit “Hick,” and a starring role in “Birdsong.” Abi Morgan, writer of “The Iron Lady” and co-writer of “Shame,” adapted the Sebastian Faulks novel for the BBC, a World War I romance starring Redmayne and Clemence Poesy. Redmayne describes his role as, “A young man in France, 1910. He lives with this family, and he falls in deeply love with the young wife. They have this passionate affair and run off together. She then disappears one day. Cut to the first World War, now this man is a stoic, cold-hearted man. And the war takes him back to France, and he goes in search of this woman. It’s a piece about loneliness, about passion.” Philip Martin will be directing for the BBC, with Matthew Goode and Marie-Josee Croze co-starring.

He still hasn’t forgotten his roots, however, forever thankful for being cast as the son of Matt Damon and Angelina Jolie in “The Good Shepherd.” Director Robert DeNiro has spoken about the desire to revisit that story, possibly in a trilogy, and Redmayne even confirmed that the two of them recently met up backstage during one of his plays. But if you’re looking for a return trip to that world, there’s nothing in the works as of now. “That’s a period of history he’s absolutely fascinated in,” Redmayne confirms. “But he didn’t say it was a work in progress. But I know it retains his interest.” Whatever the case, there is an Eric Roth-penned follow-up just waiting to be shot regarding the Bay of Pigs, but the always-busy DeNiro may no longer consider it a priority.
[Top photo courtesy of Olga Bas via Facebook]

Almodóvar's New Muse? Elena Anaya Talks "Skin," Body Suits and Joining Pedro's Family

Brian Brooks — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:25:57 GMT

Spanish actress Elena Anaya is in an enviable position. After first working with Pedro Almodóvar 10 years ago in a small role in "Talk to Her," the Spanish filmmaker responsible for creating some of cinema's juiciest female roles asked if she'd like to take the lead in his latest, "The Skin I Live In" (La Piel que Habito), which will have its U.S. debut at the New York Film Festival tonight.

Not without some resemblance to Almodóvar's most famous muse, Penélope Cruz, Anaya seduces the screen in her Frankenstein-like complexity. In the film, heroine Vera Cruz is molded by Dr. Robert Ledgard, played by another Almodóvar discovery, Antonio Banderas, in his first role with the director since 1991's "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" (1990).

Ledgard, a prominent plastic surgeon who lost his wife in a fiery car accident, becomes obsessed with creating a new human skin that will look and feel like the normal epidermis, but would at the same time be an impenetrable shield. Ledgard has long abandoned scruples; now all he needs is a guinea pig and an accomplice.

On October 14, Sony Pictures Classics will open "The Skin I Live In" and the Film Society of Lincoln Center and iW will co-host Almodóvar at the Elinor Bunin Film Center in a discussion as part of the NYFF indieWIRE Meets series. The event is free and open to the public on a first come, first serve basis and will also be streamed live on indieWIRE.

In NYC for the U.S. premiere of "Skin" at the NYFF, Anaya met with indieWIRE to discuss her role, working with Almodóvar on 9/11, Banderas' on-set hilarity and becoming a part of the Almodóvar family.

indieWIRE: What went through your mind when Pedro first called you about being the female lead in "Skin?"

Elena Anaya: It's like a beautiful gift that life gives you and it was Pedro who gave it to me. It was little by little though, because first he called me and said he was thinking of me, but said he wanted to see me first in rehearsals. They were really auditions, though (laughs).

He said come on, let's do it. One afternoon he gave me the script and he explained the film to me -- and I loved it! I was wondering how far he would go with this film. I did the rehearsal after preparing three scenes and then we started rehearsing properly after that.

In the role, you play someone who receives a new appearance -- new skin -- a complete overhaul from your previous existence. The character must have seemed crazy when you read it on paper.

I just loved this role. This character is so complex with so many layers and so much to play with. There are so many things going on that there are no words to describe it. You just have to be there to see the transmission of her emotions. It was a trippy thing to play with.

I read that you had to go through Pedro's mind to understand the character. Can you explain what you meant?

You know, when I read the script and started working with Pedro, I thought at the time that he'd been involved and living with these characters in his house for years. At a certain part, all the characters were like him. I can see him like Dr. Ledgard and like Vera Cruz. I could see him as like all these characters. You read the script, but it's not just all written there. You go through the script and then ask questions and then you're going through his mind.

He's a very good storyteller. I took thousands of notes and all the details [I needed] to understand his Vera Cruz.

Did he give you cinematic references to help you formulate her?

Yes, we went through Hitchcock films and also I had actually seen [Georges Franju's] "Eyes Without a Face" by coincidence before going through the script. It was like I had to see the film before seeing the script. He also had me watch [Billy Wilder's] "Double Indemnity" to show this energy that those beautiful actresses had back then. They were femme fatales who had strength that radiated without moving their faces - or any muscles in their face.

In a way, that's what a character does in those films. Who is in control of who? Who is actually the boss?

Vera Cruz has ulterior motives of her own, and is sort of an actress in her own right, is that a fair description?

I think the character at the beginning has a plan, and that plan is only to escape. And she learns how to escape for six years, while suffering all this crazy transformation. And once the moment is done, when the transformation happens and she realizes he's done working on her, she then realizes, "This is the moment I need to act the way he wants. I'm not going to seem dangerous so he won't kill me. I must act like a woman and make him believe that I'm his wife, doll, monster, toy or whatever he wants to get."

And that's when people think she has a crush on him, but I don't think any of that is true. Pedro said that you need to cheat the audience in a way. You need to make the audience and Dr. Ledgard believe that you're in love with him. You need to make them believe. Then suddenly [a surprise happens] and people will say, 'She's a liar.' And that's the biggest revenge, I think.

At a press conference in Cannes, Antonio shared that Pedro told him not to smile or laugh on set and I was wondering what kind of instructions he gave you during the shoot.

He didn't tell me not to smile. You know, Antonio's energy sometimes goes so high. He can be hyperactive sometimes. Antonio is so funny. He can do 10 things at the same time and he makes people laugh and can entertain all day. He's like a boy playing with everybody and having fun with everybody. One day, Pedro said, "Don't play, just do [Dr. Ledgard]."

There's a certain atmosphere that always happens on any set. It's the director's atmosphere. If a director is nervous or wants to leave to go to a football match for instance, then the crew feels the same way. If a director is very into it, then the crew follows even if they don't know it. And this is very true with Pedro. People respect him so much. When he arrives on set, people whisper, "Oh, Pedro has arrived..."

Was the atmosphere very different on "Talk to Her" compared to "The Skin I Live In" for you? Obviously you had a much larger role in this film.

The atmosphere during "Talk to Her" was very weird. It happened during September 11, 10 years ago when the terrorist attacks happened. All around the world, of course, people were in shock and sad about these crazy attacks. But we had to keep going. We only had this one day to shoot this scene in which I was getting married in this church.

He said, "The show must go on, let's keep moving and shooting." And the passion was there again. He said, "This is really disgusting what has happened, and we can go and watch the news and be in contact with the world later, but we must finish today what we need to film here." And the energy was there again.

How was it working with Antonio Banderas and how did you both develop your characters' rapport?

You know, we made a good team. I felt very comfortable working with him. He's very clever, intelligent, very generous and those are very important qualities for an actor because if you don't get feedback, you're acting alone. And two actors working alone doesn't make any sense. It was good, his energy and his way of making things easier and fun.

How was it witnessing Pedro and Antonio coming back on the set together after two decades?

I was expecting some magic after 20 years. Then it happened and we were all first in Pedro's house and I was there when they met. It was simply like seeing two old friends reunite that have a past together and now both have different careers -- but they've both made it and have big careers. They adore their jobs and take them seriously. Like Antonio says, "When I go to work, it's not like a picnic; it's work." But they're very good friends and it was excellent to see them work together again. I think Antonio's excellent in the film.

There's a song [I know] that says, "Twenty years means nothing." And it was like yesterday when they finished "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" Time had passed by, but they still have been together.

Pedro said that he doesn't consider this film to be a thriller (in fact, he's told journalists to not say that because they'll be disappointed), but that he's living in a "thriller period." Would you agree with that description, or how would you describe the film?

It's chilling. And it's a film that remains with you. It's not like a "fast-food film" where you go and then forget about it. It asks the audience to think about it. It gives something "extra." It's a mix of genres, like life. Life every day offers different kinds of genres and Pedro's films are like that. One can be a comedy and others are different or a mix. He helped pave the way for this kind [of storytelling].

How was it wearing that body suit?

[Smiles broadly] I admire Jean-Paul Gaultier so much and we went to Paris to try it out. I loved it so much, but it was also weird being in this body suit with the nude color. I felt a bit like an undressed mannequin in a boutique, you know? But it helped me to relate which skin I was living in and which space I was in with Vera.

You've worked across a cultural spectrum with of course Pedro and others in Spain as well as Ruba Nadda in "Cairo Time" and Stephen Sommers in "Van Helsing" and others. Do you like working across borders and languages?

It's good. All were very rich experiences working with different nationalities, but I don't choose my individual roles based on where they're going to be done, or which language they're going to be in. I choose my roles based on the story.

After each film, you wonder what windows they will open. I'm not simply trying to work with the biggest, most famous directors in this country or my country, but just to see what happens next. I'm crazy to act again. I like it more than interviews [laughs].. No, I enjoy doing these too, it's part of my job -- but I really like acting.

How has the reaction in Spain been?

People got into the film there -- it just opened recently, actually. It's weird -- recently when walking down the street, I had someone stop me and say, "Excuse me, can I help you?" [Laughs] And I hugged the person, that was absolutely a compliment that they could believe this happened. I get messages from people telling me the most beautiful things. It's also beautiful being here in this country seeing people's reactions.

I read that Pedro said that you're part of "the family."

I have a beautiful family, but it's so wonderful to also be a part of his family. I'm excited.

Veteran members of his family have gone on to do other things in this country and worldwide and have become very famous, including Antonio and, of course, Penélope Cruz. I'd imagine that must enter your mind. Does the loss of anonymity concern you?

Pedro explained to me that by taking on this role, there will be a kind of no return. My character lives that journey of not being able to return and a in a way I do, too. This character has changed my life. I'm so grateful and proud to be here and I wish luck to myself too as far as how I can maintain my private life.

NYFF: Pedro Almodóvar Told Antonio Banderas To Watch Cary Grant Movies To Prep For 'Skin I Live In'

Jen Vineyard — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 07:26:00 GMT

The Director Reveals He's Not Doing A Biopic On Mina; Tension, Twists & More From The Team Behind The Film

Pedro Almodóvar crafts a creepy Frankenstein-esque tale of rape, revenge, and survival in "The Skin I Live In" – a polarizing film which is one of his most ambitious yet. Because the movie features an unexpected twist halfway through the film, discussing it becomes difficult – how do you debate the themes, the issues and the meaning without giving it all away? We leave that task to the esteemed director and his cast that includes Antonio Banderas and Elena Anaya, who hit NYFF this week to present this latest concoction, a tale unlike anything Almodóvar has put on the big screen before. Covering everything from the twist in the movie (don't worry, we won't reveal it here), the reason why Antonio Banderas had to watch Cary Grant movies to prepare for the film, and the themes of identity that run through the story, the trio were happy to discuss in detail the quirky, provocative and unforgettable film.

1. Almodóvar first read the story on a plane – and took flight with it.
While looking for a bit of light reading for a one-hour plane trip, Almodóvar came across a trashy hardboiled noir novella by Thierry Jonquet called "Mygale," also known as "Tarantula," also known as "The Skin I Live In," depending on which language you read it in. After reading the story of a plastic surgeon’s revenge against a man who raped his daughter, Almodóvar decided to transform the story into a little something extra. “I got the idea that this man was trying to create a new skin, and when the skin became the big idea, I was abandoning the original idea of the book,” he said. “I was just creating something different. We have the rights, so it’s good to mention the book, I was inspired by the book, but I created my own way.”

Consequently, Almodóvar asked his cast not to read the original story, which was darker in some areas. (A woman isn’t just kept prisoner, she’s pimped out as a prostitute; a man doesn’t just commit rape, he unknowingly rapes his own friend, whom he doesn’t recognize). “Pedro first told me about the story in 2002,” Banderas said. “And he said, ‘Don’t read the book. It’s not going to help you. It’s going to take you in a different direction, and I don’t want that. I just want you to use the material we have, and I don’t want you to get confused by information that you can’t use.'” Of course, now that the film is completed, Banderas is “very curious” and plans to read it right away.

2. Pedro Almodóvar says the twist gets more satisfying on subsequent viewings
While elements of the surgeon’s revenge have changed and take on broader meaning, one detail of the revenge is the same in the book and the film – and one we won’t give away just yet. Suffice to say, like "The Crying Game," "The Skin I Live In" bears repeat viewing just to get one of the characters straight. “There are two movies here,” Almodóvar said. “There’s the first time you see it, and the second time you see it, when you are familiar with the plot, with the twist of the plot, and you can enjoy it more. I invite you to see it a second time.”

Banderas explained, “The whole entire first hour of the movie is a question without an answer. You don’t know anything about why this woman is there as a prisoner. What did she do? You’re mostly learning about the doctor. You see how he's lost his wife. You learn that his daughter is in a mental institution. You start feeling for him. But then Pedro takes the rug out from under your feet, and says, ‘OK, but look at it from here.’” When the point of view shifts, Banderas says, “then the movie takes off.”

3. In casting the movie Almodóvar wanted a reunion with an old friend – and possibly also found a new muse.
When the director thought about who should play his central characters – which include the surgeon Dr. Robert and his prisoner Vera – he immediately knew who he wanted, since he had worked with them before, and in a sense, had discovered them both. Banderas got his start as a young actor in a series of five Almodóvar films in the 1980s -- "Labyrinth of Passion," "Law of Desire," "Matador," "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" – before Hollywood beckoned. But the two hadn’t collaborated in 22 years.

“At the beginning of the process, I thought about Antonio,” Almodóvar said. “I talked to him at Cannes. I went to L.A. and talked to him. And let’s say when I decided I was ready to make this movie, I knew I wanted him. I wanted someone who was 50, who was attractive, and who doesn’t give the feeling of looking at him that he’s a psycho.”

As for the part of the psycho’s prisoner, Almodóvar remembered an actress he had given a small part to in 2002’s "Talk to Her" – Elena Anaya. Back then, he called her asked her to do the part as a favor.

“I said, ‘Of course,’ because I’d play even a microphone for him, I’d be so happy,” Anaya recalled. “It was like biting the forbidden apple to act for him, so delicious.” Ten years later, he called her again. “He was offering me this amazing character, so complex, so many layers, for such an amazing story,” she said. “He wanted to tell a story that is much farther than he’s ever gone, so we follow him, of course.”

“I really love her,” Almodóvar said. “I’m sure that I’m going to work with her again.” Could she be his next muse, given his penchant to collaborate with actresses over a long period of time? “I hope so!” he said. “I’ll sign up tomorrow!” she said.

Banderas is game to team up with Almodóvar again as well. “I know for a fact that we will work together again,” he said. “I don’t know when or in what context, [but] we will. I personally would love to make a comedy with him again. I was telling him in the middle of this movie, ‘Pedro, we need to laugh like in the old days! Let’s do something light and fun.’”

4. Almodóvar told Banderas to watch the iconic noir "Le Cercle Rouge" to help prepare for the film.
Despite their long history, Almodóvar wanted something out of Banderas he hadn’t seen before – something cold and calculating, but not obvious. “For this character, I wanted him to hide everything,” Almodóvar said. “No emotion in the face. For me, the movies I have with Antonio couldn’t be better, but I wanted to explore something we didn’t do in the ’80s. I wanted him with a surgeon’s precision, a kind of tone we didn’t do before. Something that was the opposite of Antonio himself.”

This was no easy task. Banderas said he struggled to throw away his usual style and techniques and to make his face a mask. “This can make you very insecure,” he said, “because you’re starting from zero, from scratch.”

Even things that Banderas didn’t pay as much attention to before were thrown into focus – such as the position of his eyebrows. “It’s the quantum physics of acting,” he said. “Pedro would say, ‘Don’t do that with your eyebrow.’ ‘Don’t do what?’ ‘When you pronounce that word, your eyebrow moves. You did it three times.’ I wouldn’t have even known about that, those little details.”

To help Banderas get into character, Almodóvar pointed him to chilly classic French crime flick "Le Cercle Rouge" with Alain Delon, noir films starring Robert Mitchum, and anything with Cary Grant. (For Anaya, he asked her to watch Hitchcock, "Double Indemnity" and pre-code classic "Baby Face").

“He wanted me to reflect back to a type of acting from the ‘40s and ‘50s, so we played the game like that,” Banderas said. “The idea was how after you discover someone’s a serial killer, everyone always says on the news, ‘Oh no, he was so nice and charming, so polite and well-mannered,’ and yet he had five people mutilated in the fridge for five years. These characters have to melt into society and be undetectable.”

5. After finally seeing the movie at TIFF, Melanie Griffith understood why her husband was tense for three months when making the movie.
Getting into character was difficult. So was getting out. After finally seeing "The Skin I Live In" at the Toronto International Film Festival, Banderas’ wife Melanie Griffith was pensive the whole night, even after attending a few parties. Then he said, they had the following conversation:

Melanie: Now I understand.
Antonio: What do you understand?
Melanie: Now I understand certain behaviors you’ve had for the last three months.
Antonio: You can’t be serious?
Melanie: I’m not saying you’re a bad person or you want to cut somebody’s parts off, but there was something you were carrying these past three months and I didn’t know where it was coming from. Now I do.

“That really scared the shit out of me!” Banderas said. “I wasn’t conscious of how the film affected me, but it stays with you. Even when you think you’re fine. I was kind of creepy, and I didn’t know it.”

“This movie remains in your gut,” Anaya agreed. “How bad people can be. How crazy people can be.”

Still, Banderas said, he knows where his character ends and he begins. “I have daughters. If someone did this to one of my daughters, yes, I might take revenge and take an axe and cut his head off,” the actor said. “But to do this for every day for six years? This is something deeper than revenge. There’s something suicidal in the action he’s taken. Pedro might disagree.”

6. The movie has a message: "Beauty is only skin deep, identity goes even deeper."
Issues of identity are key to "The Skin I Live In." Almodóvar wants us first to think about how our skin – our largest organ – is not fixed but malleable. “Up until recently, our skin has been a way of identifying us,” he said. “It says what race we are. It can betray whether we slept badly. It’s supposed to be a mirror of the soul, but I don’t think we can say that anymore.”

Plastic surgery is the primary reason why, and both Banderas and Anaya are concerned with how prevalent it’s getting, especially in Hollywood. “Unfortunately, plastic surgery is nothing but a symptom. It’s not the real problem,” Banderas said. “The problem is in society, which is heavily pushing everyone to be better than they are on the exterior. And there is something sick about it, because they don’t only want you to look more beautiful, but also look younger, and that is against nature. And so we are always trying to bend nature.”

“Most plastic surgery is going a little far,” Anaya said. “We live in a society that doesn’t accept growing up, getting older. And that’s anti-natural. All the time we are being pushed by commercials to be young, to be beautiful, so people start changing their faces, their skin, and that should be forbidden. Sometimes with the photographs , they change your face, and it’s like, ‘Thank you, but don’t do it.’ I hope to have a face full of wrinkles when I get old.”

Anaya’s character’s flawless on-screen skin wouldn’t be possible in the real world, surgery aside. “You cannot create that kind of beauty in the real world,” Banderas said. “Maybe in thirty years, it will be possible.” (It took a lot of lighting tricks and post-production magic, Anaya said, so her skin looked baby new.)

Almodóvar is also concerned with the rapid progress made in the fields of transgenesis and genetic modification, and not just because he always gains weight when he eats GMO food on trips to the U.S.! “Most of the food here is transgenic,” he said. “And while transgenesis has its pluses, the diseases that disappear, we’re moving beyond curing disease and into determining the characteristics a human being can be born with. There are limits placed on transgenesis by the scientific community, but if they’re not already, they will be skipped over, because science is not something that is going to limit itself.”

The director predicts that eventually, science will create an artificial, synthetic human being, at which point “our relationship to creation, to God as creator, will change drastically. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but it is scary.”

7. Long a champion of transexuality, in "The Skin I Live," Almodóvar uses it as a gruesome punishment.
Almodóvar has featured transgendered persons and defended issues of transexuality in many of his films, but this is the first instance in which sex reassignment is forced. “Of course, surgery can save lives, and make people feel comfortable in a body that didn’t feel like their own,” Anaya said.

“But this is the opposite of what’s going on in this film,” Almodóvar said. “Transexuality is used as a punishment here, and it’s hard to imagine anything worse.”

Almodóvar said attitudes about transsexuals have changed drastically since he first addressed the issue on film, because they’re no longer thought of as “freakish figures,” at least in Spain. In his brother’s apartment building, a family invited him to a party to meet their “new daughter” – because their 18-year-old son had a sex change operation and was now female. “This girl was a boy my brother used to see go up and down the stairs,” the director said. “And now the boy is being presented as a girl, by the family, and not as a strange thing.”

As a side note – the dilators given to a character in the film, in increasing sizes so to gradually enlarge a new vaginal opening post-op, are the real deal. “That was one of the more horrific sequences to shoot,” Almodóvar said. “I told Antonio, ‘You have to tell her how to insert them like a doctor, very cold, very mechanical.’ And those things are completely and absolutely real. You cannot and should not invent that.”

8. Banderas has two more sci-fi films on the way that he's making back-to-back
Next up for Banderas is a sci-fi film called "Automata," about robots in a future world which start to develop a consciousness, leading to a possible war. “It’s not a Hollywood movie,” he cautioned. “It’s about singularity. The robots don’t jump from building to building. They’re just supposed to be performing tasks, but they break the second law famous in [Isaac] Asimov’s world, and they’re better than us, so they take over.”

Anaya is not joining Banderas in Automata, however. “You know, this is something we need to erase from IMDB!” Anaya said. “This is a mistake on there. A friend of mine gave the script to Antonio, he loved the script so much he’s also going to produce it, but I’m not in the film. I would love to, though.”

Besides "Automata," Banderas is prepping his next directorial effort, called "Solo." “I’m doing these two movies back to back,” he said. “Solo is a reflection on solitude and war environments. It’s the story of a lieutenant colonel from the Spanish army who comes home from Pakistan and he’s messed up about events that happened to him in the war, during an experiment. Ultimately, something’s happening in his head.”

9. Almodóvar is planning an English language movie, but not a Mina biopic.
Like Anaya, Almodóvar wants IMDB to make a correction. Despite previous reports, he has no plans to direct a biopic about the Italian singer Mina. “That is something that someone invented, and it wasn’t me,” he said. “My office called IMDB and said it was not true, and Mina’s son was in contact to say it wasn’t true, either. I like her very much, but I don’t have this project at all. I’ve never even talked about it, but do you know how many people ask me about it?”

However, Almodóvar is planning to proceed with another previously reported project – an English language film. It won’t be his next film – he’s choosing one of four others in development first – but perhaps his second one.

“My English is very poor, but I wrote the script in Spanish, and after the promotion of 'The Skin I Live In,' I’ll try and look for an English writer,” he said. “It happens here, in America, with American characters. They are not Latin people living here. So I need a good writer to finish the script in English. I don’t want to give away any details, because it’s in the process right now, but I really like the subject, so it’s a real possibility. Just don’t tell anyone!”

West Memphis 3 Arrive in New York as Free Men; Echols Says AR Officials "Know Exactly Who Did It"

Eric Kohn — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 07:55:17 GMT

For audiences familiar with the 1996 HBO documentary "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" and its 2000 sequel, the saga of the three young men known as the West Memphis 3 has exclusively taken place during their time behind bars. Only in "Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory," which premiered in its completed version at the New York Film Festival on Monday night, do the prisoners finally make their way to freedom, the result of entering the little-known Alford Plea in August that allowed the accused to plead guilty in the 1993 murders of three young men while maintaining their innocence.

However, although the new film ends with the West Memphis 3 on the outside, it doesn't detail what comes next. Speaking to a roomful of journalists at HBO headquarters in midtown Manhattan prior to the New York Film Festival screening Monday, newly released prisoners Jason Baldwin, Jessie Misskelley Jr. (both of whom had been sentenced to life) and Damien Echols (who was on death row) discussed how the difficult process of adjustment was coming along. Joined onstage by "Paradise Lost" directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky as well as longtime president of HBO Documentary Films Sheila Nevins, the former prisoners detailed many of the challenges they had faced. The audience included many of the subjects of the film, including lawyers and activists whose efforts helped spread word of the prisoners' situation.

Misskelley, whom the films identity as "mildly retarded" and with a low IQ (part of the reason he may have been coaxed into providing officials with a false confession in 1993), said that using the internet and cell phones continued to provide a unique learning experience. However, he appeared exceedingly nervous in front of the press and eventually excused himself from the room while the other men stayed put.

Wearing a pair of sharp blue sunglasses to shield his still-sensitive eyes and characteristically dressed in black, Echols said that he was still getting used to walking around without having his feet chained together, and often fell down in the days following his release. He also said that he had been keeping track of various first-time experiences. "The first movie I saw was that horrendous 'Fright Night' remake," he joked. "The first thing I ate was a Black Angus burger." He also mentioned that he recently attended Disneyland, and "I've even been saving hotel room keys."

Baldwin showed off his drivers permit and said that he planned on starting driver's ed next week. He also took a job at a construction company and recently received his first paycheck. On the cultural front, Baldwin added that he attended a rock concert featuring the Seattle band Carissa's Wierd.

The conversation took on a graver tone when journalists asked the men about the unsolved murders. Echols, an ardent critic of the death penalty who expressed frustration over the controversial execution of Troy Davis last month, condemned the state of Arkansas for neglecting their own case over the years. "I think they know exactly who did it and just don't care," he said, noting that he had received letters from junior high school students who appeared to have a better handle on the case than any Arkansas officials. "Their first and only priority was getting elected," he said. When a reporter asked Echols about the possibility that Terry Hobbs, a stepfather of one of the children, committed the crimes - an allegation explored in "Paradise Lost 3"- Echols offered a concise response. "You could go crazy thinking about that," he said.

When the issue of whether a fourth film could be made came up, Nevins jumped in. "I think Jason's loyalty to Damien is Shakespearean," she said, a reference to Baldwin's willingness to accept the Alford Plea in order to rescue Echols from death row. "If the story has to be told, we'll tell it." At that point, Berlinger turned to the remaining two members of the West Memphis 3 left onstage. "Is that OK with you?" he asked them. Echols replied, "I don't see why not."

Expanding on her literary reading of the story, Nevins cited the ending of Anne Frank's diary, where the ill-fated teenager asserts that "in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." Nevins asked the men if they agreed with that statement. "They're definitely still good," Baldwin said. Echols gave a more complex answer. "That's far too big of a conclusion for me to reach now," he said. "Give me 50 years."