Profiles | UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television

Filming the Extremes of Nature

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

"We don't always know what the story of an episode will be until we land on it. We can't predict when a driver is going to run into a whiteout or narrowly avoid hitting a moose." -- Adam Martin, "Ice Road Truckers"

"The thrill of it for me is just the awe-inspiring power of nature. Some of these things, you can't even fathom how beautiful they are until you see them with your own eyes." -- Ronan P. Nagle, "Storm Chasers"

Ronan P. Nagle MFA '98, executive producer and on-screen co-star of The Discovery Channel's "Storm Chasers," and Adam Martin MFA '05, the Supervising Producer of The History Channel's "Ice Road Truckers," are working at the cutting edge of daredevil edu-tainment. The TFT filmmaking alums are risking life and limb almost on a daily basis, to get the shot, and the story, on two of reality television's biggest current hits.

Working on projects like these, the filmmakers inevitably become part of the story, because in the reality arena you can't photograph the activities of people who put themselves in mortal danger to make a living without subjecting yourself to the same hazards.

The three main crew members of "Storm Chasers" also appear on camera as the programs continuing protagonists. In addition to executive producer and "intercept vehicle" driver Nagle, the line up includes two of his former UCSB classmates, "champion storm chaser" Sean Casey and "navigator" Byron Turk (with legendary chasers Reed Timmer and Chris Chittick helping out). The charismatic team projects a swashbuckling panache as they climb into radar and computer-equipped, armor-plated, behemoth SUVs to stalk monster twisters across Tornado Alley -- roughly a thick stripe down the center of the U.S., from Texas to North Dakota.

"There are times when visibility drops to zero," Nagle says, "and you have to wonder about the sanity of becoming a sort of human probe, injecting yourself into the center of this frenzy." At the same time, he insists, "The thrill for me is just the awe-inspiring power of nature. Some of these things, you can't even fathom how beautiful they are until you see them with your own eyes."

"Ice Road Truckers" has made outlaw folk heroes out of the practitioners of the men (and a few women) who pilot 18-wheelers across the frozen lakes and rivers, and even portions of the Arctic Ocean, of Canada's Northwest Territories. There is a practical reason for doing this, it turns out: these "ice roads" are the only way to deliver supplies to remote diamond mines and natural gas and oil fields during a brief window of opportunity afforded by the coldest months of midwinter.

Both programs have been smashingly successful. This year's third season premiere of "Ice Road Truckers" in May was the most-watched single episode in the history of the cable channel. The ratings of the third season of "Storm Chasers," which returned on October 10, are up 30% over last year's network highs.

Danger is an obvious draw for both participants and viewers. "There is definite blood lust on the part of the audience, "Martin admits. "The same impulse as rubbernecking at accidents." And in his official bio on the "Storm Chasers" web site Nagle says, "I love adventure and doing things only a few people will dare to do. When I tell people what we are attempting to do with the TIV [the show's hulking "Tornado Intercept Vehicle"] they assume we're crazy, but I feel it's a calculated risk worth taking."

"Storm Chasers" can argue convincingly that the technologies developed for filming rampaging cyclones safely have contributed substantially to the research efforts the show documents. The resources that a TV crew can commit to the chase have already made a major contribution to the research task of improving early warning times for people in the Alley.

The TIV is steel re-enforced and bristling with recording equipment. It is now so heavy that it is essentially immovable, even in the strongest funnel. "The TIV becomes a 16,000 pound tripod," Nagle explains, "with a turret camera that can swivel 360°. During a recent chase in Eastern Wyoming we just hit right where they wanted. As a result that storm became the most studied of all time, with 110 minutes of recorded data."

A more realistic hazard is that probes and radio-controlled drones that get sucked up by the winds to take readings can be transformed into lethal projectiles. "Nothing has happened, yet, thank God," Nagle says. "But I have seen the swath cut by one of these things through a field of wheat, like a shark fin cutting through the ocean."

The sleek filmmaking skill with which both programs are crafted doubtless has a lot to do with the fact that viewers keep on returning to these programs week after week and season after season. According to a "New York Times" TV critic, "Truckers's" rapt viewers come to share "that existential recognition behind the wheel late at night that the pull of sleep and the pull of death are one and the same."

As the driver of the TIV, Nagle is one of the on-camera "stars" of "Storm Chasers," an interesting concept in the context of reality TV. Adam Martin, who supervises a production team of 30+ crew members on "Ice Road Truckers," talks openly about "casting" the drivers featured in the show with demographics in mind, and about keeping his eyes open for "characters" - "people with large personalities who don't think about the camera and don't censor themselves."

A clear case in point is the show's breakout star, Lisa Kelly, a driver Martin recruited when he began proactively looking for a different way to appeal to the show's core young male audience.

"I had some female truckers," Martin said, "but what you usually get are the Large Marge types," referring to the iconic butch trucker in the 1985 movie "Pee Wee's Big Adventure." "I kept hearing stories about Lisa and how cool she was," he says. "And when I met her, I thought, 'Well, she's pretty cute.' But she also has a fresh, vibrant attitude and an unpredictable way of saying things. Saying that a storm 'vomited all over the road,' for example. She is very genuine."

"Truckers" has four road teams, each comprising a producer and a "shooter," filming at all times, along with two roving utility units and a helicopter unit that can rush to the scene of spectacular developments - like the crash last year in which a driver walked away after rolling his vehicle and being ejected through the windshield.

In all, about 16 crew members work as shooters, their work augmented with "diary cam" footage, shot by the drivers, and often mud-spattered images from cameras mounted on the bodies of various trucks. The ratio of film shot to film used averages 350 to 1, Martin says. That's 350 hours of raw footage for every hour-long program.

Martin is frank about the need to shape all that footage into something more closely resembling a narrative. The two organizing devices they use most often, he says, are the "cliffhanger" and the "red herring." "We don't always know what the story of an episode will be until we land on it," he says. For example when a truck turns a corner and drives unexpectedly into a whiteout blizzard. Then the material leading up to that event will be culled to create either a false sense of security or of foreboding. "We're always playing actual events that have occurred right before us. We simply want to concentrate the material to bring out the narrative."

What reality filmmakers seem to discover over time is that even when their raw material is derived from actual events, the qualities that keep viewers riveted are the ones that have been working that magic for centuries in fictional narratives: humor, strong and unconventional characters and a compelling sense of how human beings get from point A to point B - the most basic form of storytelling.

"Ice Road Truckers" began its third season on The History Channel on May 31, 2009. "Storm Chasers" launched its second season on The Discovery Channel on October 16.

Nagle photo by Gino de Grandis.

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/innovation/extreme-filmmaking_storm-truckers/

Michael Stuhlbarg Gets "Serious"

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Watch our exclusive video interview with Michael Stuhlbarg

The stellar New York stage career of TFT undergraduate theater alumnus Michael Stuhlbarg reached an early peak in 2005, when he received a Tony nomination for his supporting performance in the Broadway hit "The Pillowman."

Stuhlbarg's many first-rate performances, both in new works and the classics, had already made him famous with Gotham theater fans. His Shakespeare Festival "Hamlet" in Central Park was legendary. But as the actor recently told TFT's Sheila Roberts, the Tony nomination "opened some doors for me in terms of film, and I started getting some opportunities that I had never had before."

Stuhlbarg vividly remembers his sojurn at UCLA, where he was able to work in every aspect of the art form, before zeroing in on a passion for performing. And the gratitude he expresses toward professor Michael McLain, who "kicked my ass" during the audition process for Julliard, is heartfelt.

After several years of strong supporting turns in a variety of film and TV projects (Stuhlbarg played Leonardo DiCaprio's attorney, for example, in Ridley Scott's recent "Body of Lies"), it was still a theater connection that led to his first leading role in a major film, working at the famed 52nd Street Project children's theater with actress Francis McDormand, who recommended his work to her husband, Joel Coen, one half of the Oscar-winning writer/producer/director duo The Coen Brothers.

The Coen's latest painstakingly crafted and bitterly funny film, "A Serious Man," which opens in selected markets of Friday, October 2, is also a deprature for the pair: an obliquely autobigraphical account of the time and place where they grew up, a mostly Jewish section of Minneapolis in the mid-1960s.

The central character, Larry Gopnik, who loves his work as a physics professor at a small college, and is at least content with most other aspects of his life, finds himself woefully beset by one grotesque misfortune after another, from a straying wife to a college tenure crisis. (The Coens admitted in an interview that the most fun they had working on the script was "thinking up new ways to torture Larry.")

While sympathetic, Larry Gopnik is scarcely a hero. He never takes action against his sea of troubles. In fact, the most vigorous response he ever comes up with is the plaintive double-edged lament, "But I didn't do anything!"

SHEILA ROBERTS: What was it about the character of Larry Gopnik that resonated with you?

MICHAEL STUHLBARG: In some ways I imagine he resonates with everybody, in the sense of going along thinking that his life is one thing, and then getting some curve balls thrown at him. He has to go along and do the best he can. I asked Joel and Ethan a lot of questions and found my way into him, and tried to put myself into whatever situations Larry found himself in and to react and respond as truthfully as possible.

What are Joel and Ethan like on set?

They are very hands off and very respectful of everybody. They are very discerning in terms of trying to find the right actor for a role, but once they do that they really love to get questions from the actors. So I'd ask them a ton of questions and then they just let me do my thing. They might say, "Oh, that was great. Now here's another idea. Let's try this." It was all very collaborative and easy.

How would you say your grounding in theater informs your work in film?

I find that my work is pretty much the same in both mediums. It's my job to bring a character to life. It's how that character is received that's a little different. In a Broadway house, the person in the back of the second balcony needs to be able to receive what I'm doing. If I'm making a film or a television show I have to do much less.

But they really feed off each other in a beautiful way. I know that my film and television work tend to make my theater work more simple. And, my theater work tends to ground me in a way that informs my film and television work. So I want to continue to do all of it.

What did you take from this film? Is it that life is difficult and you have to get through it? That when it gets bad, it can only get worse? Or, is it that life is hard and you have to live it the best that you can?

The quote at the very beginning of the movie, I think, has a lot of resonance: "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you." I mean, it's a Talmudic scholar, Rashi, whose quote it is, and I think it's a good place to start in terms of understanding what the film is exploring, and also a way to live one's life in many ways.

This movie is set in 1967. What was your experience of going into that time period midway between "Mad Men" and "Taking Woodstock"?

Mary Zophres, the Costume Designer, had created for everybody these amazing clothing boards, covered with pictures from the period in Minneapolis, exclusive to the community in which we were working. So when we showed up on the first day to meet her, all our work was done for us. When you put the clothes on it just made you feel like you were there. We didn't have to do anything, really.

We talked a little bit about what was going on at that time, the New Freedoms that [Larry's femme fatale neighbor] Mrs. Samsky mentions. It's a fascinating time to find yourself in, in terms of what our country was like - the conformity or perhaps the beginning of the lack of conformity. A work-a-day professor's life veers off and changes, and what does that mean within the context of the political situation at that time? His journey kind of mirrors it a little bit.

How beneficial was it to you in character as Larry and to the film as a whole that you were actually filming in a local synagogue, in the Hebrew schools, and then having a Cantor and the actual Torah there during the Bar Mitzvah scene?

A really funny thing happened. When we were rehearsing the Bar Mitzvah scene and as [Larry's son] Danny comes down from the pulpit after his Bar Mitzvah and he's got his Kiddush cup in his hand and the whole congregation breaks in with Adon Olam, that hymn we're all singing. Everybody knew it. They were actually members of the congregation. It was like all of a sudden they said, "So you guys all sing Adon Olam. Do you know it?" And the whole congregation jumped in and it was like you're back in synagogue. It was crazy. I had flashbacks to my own Bar Mitzvah.

Did you have any concern while you were making the film that you might be propagating some negative stereotypes?

If we're talking about the succession of Rabbis Larry consults, I take the point of view that we're presenting these particular individuals who aren't helping Larry very much. It's Joel and Ethan who are creating them, and they had a particular experience growing up in their community. And there are truths within archetypes, too, you know. That's why they're archetypes.

I have to ask, did you get to climb up on the roof yourself [in the iconic TV antenna scene pictured on the film's poster]?

I sure did.

And how much fun was that?

It was fantastic! And I was also actually in the car when it was hit in the traffic accident scene. That was more scary than being on the roof. I was Stuntman for a Day, which was kind of fun.

Did you have any training for that, before they threw you in the car?

God, no. They said, "Just get in the car. We're going to do something, but you'll be fine. Keep your seatbelt on, though."

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/industry/michael-stuhlbarg_serious/

Payne's Passionate Programming

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Oscar-winning co-writer and director of "Sideways," Alexander Payne MFA '90, has always been forthright in expressing his gratitude to the educational institution that shaped his career. His most recent opportunity to do so came during a party in his honor as Guest Director at the 36th Telluride Film Festival, sponsored by TFT and hosted by the School's new dean, Teri Schwartz

""Alexander is the consummate filmmaker, whose works delight, entertain, engage and transform all at once," commented.Dean Schwartz. "In that regard, he represents the highest ideals of humanistic storytelling that dovetails brilliantly with the School's vision and mission."

Telluride chooses a Guest Director each year "as a key collaborator in the Festival's programming decisions, bringing new ideas and overlooked films" to its patrons. The roster of past Guest Directors includes Salman Rushdie, Buck Henry, Laurie Anderson and Stephen Sondheim.

Eliciting strong performances has been a hallmark of Payne's work from the beginning. Payne gave an early boost to the careers of rising young actors Laura Dern ("Citizen Ruth") and Reese Witherspoon ("Election"), and has directed established stars such as Jack Nicholson ("About Schmidt") and Paul Giamatti ("Sideways") to career-topping achievements.

Payne has spoken movingly about the debt he feels toward the School's legendary teacher Delia Salvi, who taught him to direct actors.

A lifelong film buff, Payne has famously declared, too, that he "learned how to make movies by watching old movies at the UCLA Film & Television Archive." And the spirit of the Archive's eclectic and lively programming seemed to animate his work at Telluride.

According to the IndieWire blog "Thompson in Hollywood," Payne's programming furnished several Festival most memorable moments:

[Payne's] program included one of the festival favorites, Leo McCarey's 1937 tearjerker "Make Way for Tomorrow," and the 12-minute Caroll Ballard 1969 short "The Perils of Priscilla," which Payne had seen as a UCLA student and wanted to see again. It's about a cat left behind. Payne contacted Ballard, who no longer had a print. So Payne posted a query on eBay and, some months ago, it turned up. Nobody else wanted it and he purchased a 16 mm print for six dollars. Audiences at Telluride adored it.

Payne's fervent program notes for the films he selected (reproduced at right in their entirety from the Festival's program guide) suggest a truly "film literate" person whose favorite movies are woven into the fabric of his life. He responds in direct and personal ways to films made decades ago on the other side of the globe - works that still seem "relevant" to the concerns that motivate him today.

"You have to admire this director for making entertainment with substance -- but also for his passionate involvement with the history of film," says Shannon Kelly,Head of Public Programs at the Archive. "The film artists of today are very much like those of yesteryear. They've got a tiger by the tail with this relatively young medium, and its seemingly endless possibilities of irony, surprise, insight and transformation.

"Talent is key," Kelly continues, "but so is taking one's place inside a still-unfolding tradition. In his penetrating human portraits, Alexander Payne clearly demonstrates the importance and the rewards of immersing oneself in the treasure-trove of film culture."

For Dean Schwartz, "Alexander's' Telluride programming exemplifies TFT's strongly held belief that works of art should be potent active forces in our world: shaping values, sparking imagination, changing lives."

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/scholarship/payne-programming/

Museum Simulates Terrorist Attack - VIDEO UPDATE

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO UPDATES.

A veteran video director and title sequence creator, alumnus Todd Brunelle '86, won an Emmy in 1993 for his graphic designs for the FOX TV series "Front Page." His most recent project, an innovative, video-driven museum installation on global terrorism, applies the skills he acquired at UCLA in unusual and socially enlightening ways.

This new phase of his career began when Brunelle created the animation and graphics for five award-winning feature films produced by The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. On the strength of those efforts he was hired, in February 2008, to create a video for the Museum's sister institution in Denver, The CELL, an acronym for the Center for Empowered Living and Learning.

"Ultimately," Brunelle says, "the museum directors liked my video enough to hire me to create the look and feel of all media throughout the museum. Shortly thereafter I was given the task of designing the display spaces -- ten separate areas including a surround movie arena and seven exterior window displays. I had to pull out all my skills to accomplish this, filmmaking, editing, animation, set design, lighting and sound design."

This "Museum of Terrorism" is centered around exhibition spaces which identify the roots, history, causes, and prevention of terrorist attacks. Brunelle's design includes high definition videos projected throughout the Museum. The CELL's most innovative feature is a simulated terrorist attack, projected on 30 surround screens designed specifically for this purpose by Brunelle.

Brunelle has had the good fortune to work with many UCLA classmates in recent years, including Kurt Kaya MFA '92, Michele Wagner MFA '92, Cameron Spencer '86, Diane Frederick MFA '93, Judi Jensen '85, Liz Cane MFA '92 and Robert Manganelli. On The CELL, Kimo Oades '87 added his expertise in graphic design.

Currently Brunelle is advising Diane Heller MFA '90, on her documentary film, "Edward M. Bannister: An American Artist."

"And now that I have somehow become an expert on terrorism," he adds, "I am directing a video for Homeland Security."

Watch Todd Brunelle's Homeland Security "training video".

Brunelle's video and exhibits featured on "NBC NIghtly News:"

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/social/todd-brunelle_the-cell/

Playwright Erica Jones is first Beverly Robinson Fellow

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Watch our exclusive video interview with Robinson Fellow Erica Jones

Currently in her first year, an MFA playwriting student at TFT has been named the first recipient of the Beverly J. Robinson Memorial Fellowship for Playwrights. World Arts and Culture graduate Erica Jones '09 will also see her play "Gross Sales" staged this fall as part of the Theater Department's annual New Play Festival.

The Robinson Fellowship was established to honor UCLA Professor Beverly J. Robinson, scholar, folklorist, author, producer, writer and director. From 1978 until her death in 2002, Robinson taught a legendary survey course in African-American theater which scores of graduate and undergraduate students attended each Friday afternoon. She also served as a consultant on such films as "The Color Purple," "Coming to America" and "Miss Evers' Boys."

As a playwright, Erica Jones is walking a very different path than the one that seemed to be marked out for her in her early years. At age 7, during a performance of the musical "42nd Street" she attended with her mother, she fell in love with the idea of dancing in front of an audience, "I knew immediately that I wanted to be up there, doing that," she says.

Jones was already appearing professionally with the famed Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater when she joined the World Arts and Cultures (WAC) program on a dance scholarship. "I soon decided that I wanted to be challenged more academically," Jones says, of her decision to pursue scholarship and folklore studies. "I wanted to be able to write and do research and focus less on dance performance, because I had been doing that for so long."

When Jones began working with words and ideas at WAC, an earlier ambition resurfaced. "When I was a kid," she recalls, "I always wanted to be a writer, but I never had time, because I was always taking dance classes and going back and forth to rehearsals. So I was in this world where I had to express myself without using words, and I was frustrated. I wanted to go to school for writing for my undergrad, but a dance program was what gave me the best financial aid package.

"And then in my second quarter at UCLA, I took Gary Gardner's playwriting class. I sat down to write, and I don't know how it occurred, but it just flew out of me, like years and years of pent up energy rushing out."

Jones says playwriting is her most natural form of expression, because her impulse to write is so strongly centered on dialog, on the way her characters talk to each other.

"I am definitely inspired by the people I know," she says. "My first play 'The Lesser of Two Weevils,' was based on a sisterly relationship with my best friend, the way we are with one another and how we talk to one another. And 'Gross Sales,' which will be in the New Play Festival, is a story about four women who work at a high end makeup counter in the Glendale Galleria. Basically it is a fight to the death to see which of these four will be the best salesperson in the company and win a prize, which is a trip to Monaco. Mainly it is a spree of back biting."

"I could say," Jones continues, "that the play is a comment on corporate America in retail. But really it was inspired by my own life. I worked in retail and I had friends there, and there was some friction. I had another friend who told me about working in a boutique in Beverly Hills. And I spent some time working as an assistant wardrobe stylist in Hollywood. I would have to go to Barneys and Neiman Marcus to pick up clothes, and I had to interact with a lot of ladies who were uptight and miserable and very, very fashionable. So 'Gross Sales' is my send off to the girls in retail."

The experience of participating in the first production of a play she has written has only confirmed Jones's belief that she is on the right track in her writing career: "Writing a book would not be the same as doing a show and forming a community of artists and actors. I love theater people. I was attracted to that from the beginning. There was a reading of 'Gross Sales' in which this fantastic actress, Nikki Macauley, played one of the major roles, and when I heard her voice it totally changed my thinking about the play. I started trying to turn the ship around mid-voyage to capture that. I just love that collaborative experience. That's what I want to be a part of."

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/social/erica-jones_robinson-fellow/

Shane Acker: Envisioning a World

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Meet Shane Acker at a free Melnitz Movies screening of "9" September 29

"I didn't learn all the technical stuff at UCLA. On a lot of that I was essentially self-taught. What I really learned was storytelling and filmmaking, which prepared me to be a director."--Shane Acker, writer/animator/director, "9"

"I saw Shane's short film and it just blew me away," says visionary director Tim Burton ("Sweeny Todd"), describing his first encounter with "9,"the Director's Spotlight-winning Animation Workshop thesis film by Shane Acker MA '98, MFA '04. Set in a blasted futuristic landscape, the film centers on a plucky rag doll with oddly metallic, camera-like eyes, who battles a mysterious mechanical antagonist, The Beast.

The short went on to play at dozens of film festivals. It was named "Best of Show" at SIGGRAPH 2005 and snagged the Gold Medal, the top prize, at the 2005 Student Academy Awards.

In 2006 it was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Animated Short Film category.

Acker traveled a winding road to his career as an animator. Born in Wheaton, Illinois, he began his academic career at the University of Florida, intending to become an architect. At UCLA he earned a masters degree in the subject from the School of Arts and Architecture before signing on at the world-famous Animation Workshop.

"When I started working in architecture," Acker explains. "I realized right away what a long arduous journey it would be to get the freedom to do what I wanted. But I was also trained in the computer graphics side of things, and I began to see that possibility to create something all by yourself, with just your own computer and software. The potential of that is really limitless."

It took Acker more than four years to make the short version of "9." That extreme solitary dedication is, for Tim Burton, is what truly separates the men from the boys in the field of animation.

"I got out of animation because I couldn't do that," Burton says. "I just don't' have the patience for it. I was a really unhappy animator. In fact, when I was working at Disney [on shorts such as the 1982 "Vincent"] I slept half the day. I learned how to sleep at my desk in case they ever walked in."

In contrast, Acker recalls,"That's when I discovered that I was an artist, because I could not walk away from '9' once I started. I had to see it through."

Acker's work on the short had to be postponed from time to time because the filmmaker was already getting lucrative day jobs, including a lengthy stint in New Zealand at Peter Jackson's special effects and animation studio WETA Workshop. Acker says he "killed a lot things, virtually," on Jackson's "Lord of the Rings," notably some giant elephants in the final battle sequence in "The Return of the King."

He also animated the iconic Eye of Sauron that dominates the fantasy epic's last two installments.

"I really got some animation legs from that experience," Acker says. "Being in such a prestigious place, with some of the top animation talent in the world -- I consider that my animation boot camp."

The feature version of "9"opens worldwide on September 9, 2009 - 9/9/09.

In our exclusive interview below, which includes material gathered by Sheila Roberts at San Diego Comic-Con 2009, Shane Acker comments on:

Animation and Architecture

Becoming a Director

His Influences

"9" - From Short to Feature

Mentors Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov

Realism in Animation

Did you have a good experience at the UCLA Animation Workshop?

I had a great experience. I was fortunate, I think, because I had already gone through one masters program, in architecture, so I knew what a masters program was all about. It's really about making the space for yourself to do your own work. You have to be self-motivated and you have to know what you want to get out of it. I knew how precious that time was and that it was really up to me to make the best of it.

And it was amazing working with [the Animation Workshop's founding director, now retired] Dan McLaughlin. He had so much knowledge, such a history. And he was really good at story. I didn't learn all the technical stuff at UCLA. On a lot of it I was essentially self-taught. What I really learned was storytelling and filmmaking, which prepared me to be a director.

ANIMATION AND ARCHITECTURE

UCLA alumna Catherine Hardwicke ("Twilight") is another director who started as an architect. It doesn't seem like the most obvious first step to becoming a filmmaker.

It makes more sense than you might think. In architecture school you're not so much making a building as telling a story about a building that you want to make someday. You're trying to sell that, and you wrap it up in a narrative. You talk about how people will live in this space, and then you present drawings and imagery that will sell this idea to people.

It's a world. When you study architecture you're studying anthropology. You're trying to understand how all these fragments come together to create a world. For me filmmaking, too, is about creating a world and saying, "Who are the people who live here, and why?"

I've always had a very broad artistic background. I loved sculpting, drawing, cartooning. I loved architecture, the pursuit of creating space, but I saw that in architecture I could only do some of that, not all of it. Animation opened up the possibility of all my interests coming into play. And on top of that is storytelling, the element of time. Here was the opportunity to create, from nothing, a whole world. I thought, "That's what I really want to try to do."

BECOMING A DIRECTOR

Going from the "one person, one film" approach of the UCLA Animation Workshop to being a leader at the head of a huge crew, that must have been a bit of an adjustment.

It was very strange. It was frightening! It took a long time to get past the desire to push the artists out of the way and just sit down and do it myself. It's a really frustrating thing at first. But then you start to collaborate with people who, frankly, are much more talented and have more experience than you do, and they bring something to it that you never could. That's where the joy begins.

HIS INFLUENCES

The film has such an unusual style and tone -were there any earlier films that served as touchstones for you?

I was inspired by a lot of stop-motion filmmaking - The Brothers Quay ("Street of Crocodiles"), Jan Svanmajer ("Alice"), and Tim Burton's productions. I just love the tactile quality, the texture and the type of movement that stop-motion creates, an organic kind of decayed nature. I initially started playing with stop-motion and then realized, at UCLA, that I wasn't going to be able to do the camera moves and the visual storytelling that I wanted, so I quickly went into the CG world. But I took with me those qualities of stop-motion. I even designed the characters in "9" as you would a stop-motion armature so that they'd behave the way metal and cloth behaves. I think that lent a kind of believability to the film.

"9" STORY - FROM SHORT TO FEATURE

Tell us something about the story of "9" and how the short differs from the feature. No spoilers, but whatever you feel comfortable saying.

In the short we pick up in the middle of a conflict between our lovable heroes, these rag dolls who each have a number, and this awful creature, The Beast. The beast has been hunting the dolls and taking their life force, and making trophies of their numbers. And then the doll who is number 9, who appears to be a newcomer, gets an idea about how to overcome this creature.

In the feature version we wake up with 9 in this world and it's really a process of self-discovery: who are we and why are we here and what has happened to us? And 9's journey of self discovery awakens something from the past, the force that led to the downfall of humanity. Now the dolls have to overcome this thing, and in so doing they find the answers.

It's really a struggle for what it is to be human. I guess, and at what point do we dehumanize ourselves? But it's also just a big action adventure movie!

Many, many details of the backstory and the landscape are left implicit in the short. Was there a push to make things more explicit in the feature version, to spell things out more?

Those are questions we grappled with constantly. My instinct would be that the filmmakers need to know, but the audience doesn't necessarily need to know all that stuff. That's what makes watching the short so engaging, because something you glimpse in the background or some small gesture from a character will suggest all that history. In animation there's always a huge leap of faith. You can't solve every problem. There won't be an answer for everything. It's about where you put the focus, or how hard do you sell it, how do you project it in a way that it's believable, so people will say, "We'll go along with it."

MENTORS TIM BURTON AND TIMUR BEKMAMBETOV

Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov were major collaborators in the process of developing this premise from short to feature. How did they help you?

Tim was instrumental in getting the whole thing up and running. He was the umbrella who made a creative space for me to work. But both Tim and Timur were super busy, so there were only periods off and on where we could get together. Most of the time it was me working with the writer, Pamela Cutler, and the producer, Jim Lemley, and all the artists and designers. And then there would be moments when we could get together and present this material to the producers.

The later part of the project, where I really got to work with Timur after he finished "Wanted," was a great experience, because he's just an incredibly creative artist and filmmaker. I would say that while Timur directs live action what he also does is make worlds, pretty much in the same way that "9" does.

REALISM IN ANIMATION

Were you actively trying to apply what we might call a live action sensibility to animation?

As far as the cinematography, I was trying to approach this from a realistic standpoint, even though it's as far-fetched as it can be, with these little burlap guys running around. One of the problems that I have with first time CG directors is that they do everything with the camera, way beyond what you can do with a real camera rig. And I really wanted to embed this film in the classic language of cinema and treat the virtual camera as if there was a cameraman there, following the action; that he's not on some kind of crazy spaceship flying around. I want to make it as real as possible

And that's also the way we approached the voice acting [with a cast that includes Elijah Wood, John C. Reilly and Jennifer Connolly] . A lot of and times in animated film it's so broad and so pushed and so loud. We wanted a real naturalism. We sought out actors who had characteristics similar to the characters they were playing, and the actors speak in their own voices and we're very earnest about everything we're doing. We believe so much that these characters exist and that they're real.

You used no motion capture on this film.

That's true, no motion capture. But we did shoot tons and tons of reference. We shot the voice actors and used that footage as reference. And we were constantly acting out scenes - as animators always do. It's interesting because in that sense the animators are the actors who create the characters, but we also have the voice actors. So the thing that you see on screen is several actors all coming together to create a performance.

It's a process of discovery. First the story board guys will sort of kick it off by investigating how these guys will behave in the scenes. And then you go and capture the voice performance and then you talk with the animators and finally through this whole process the character emerges. You almost have to be a couple of months into the work of animating before you really understand who these characters are.

That's the focus. I didn't set out to shake the foundation of animation. I just wanted to tell the story that I wanted to tell, and show this world and its characters, and the way I see things. It's exciting to see that something like this can come out and get the backing of a studio. I'm very happy.

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/innovation/2009-shane-acker-9/

Navigating San Diego Comic-Con

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

By Jonathan Kuntz

San Diego's Comic-Con, created in 1970 as an annual event for a few hundred fans to trade comic books, while discussing science fiction and fantasy, has grown into a pop culture Sundance that sells out months in advance to 125,000 attendees, with a guest list that challenges Cannes. Over the intervening years, the "Spider-Man"/"Lord of the Rings"/"Harry Potter" takeover of the Hollywood blockbuster, replaced now with the far more profitable tentpole franchise, multi-part media event, has caused San Diego to become the crucial launch pad for upcoming films, TV shows, games and many other forms of cult cultural media. The idea of viral marketing, exemplified by the preview of "Iron Man" at San Diego two years ago, which was credited with boosting that film to stratospheric grosses, has caused the global media companies to stage major events at Comic-Con, supplicating the fanatic attendees with previews, superstar appearances and "convention exclusive" merchandise, hoping to light the fuse of a billion dollar explosion.

There is always something special about being in an environment where others share your particular interests, especially if those interests were once despised in traditional culture and academia. In San Diego, the geeks and nerds have inherited the earth. No Moms throw away comic books, no kids get picked on for reading stories about dragons or alien worlds. To this is added the fact that many people attend in costume, expressing their special identity on the outside -- I must have seen 25 Wonder Women, from the short and fat to the stunning, and from five year olds to a few goddesses in their sixties. The best costume I saw this year was a Chef Darth Vadar, carrying a roasted Jar Jar Binks on a platter, complete with a spiced apple in Binks's mouth. Film criticism can be funny!

Comic-Con 2009 was advertised as featuring the highly anticipated first San Diego appearances of several geek Gods -- James Cameron, Tim Burton and Peter Jackson, along with a stop by legendary (and legendarily reclusive) Japanese animation giant Hayao Miyazaki. On Friday, I waited over two hours in the hot sun in a very well organized line to get into the famous "Hall H ," the 6,500 person venue where the big Hollywood events are scheduled. The hall has four huge, high-definition, 3-D-ready screens, so every seat is a good one.

Friday's Disney/Pixar presentation was the highlight of the con. John Lasseter hosted an elaborate show, supported by directors Lee Unkrich ("Finding Nemo"), Kirk Wise ("Beauty and the Beast") and John Musker ("Aladdin," "Hercules"), that began with previews of the 2010 release of "Toy Story 1 & 2" in 3-D,complete with film footage and an original trailer. "Toy Story 3" (2010) was also represented by a special 3-D short, "Groovin' With Ken," presenting Barbie's boyfriend (well, actually, Barbie's accessory) Ken (voiced by Michael Keaton) to the "Toy Story" universe.

Lasseter tipped his hat to his film school background at Cal Arts, showing a 1976 photo of his class, which also included Brad Bird, among others. Switching to his Disney hat, Lasseter then discussed traditional drawn animation. He screened a lengthy section of the 3-D conversion of "Beauty and the Beast," due for release in 2010. This was followed by a segment from Disney's next big animated feature, "The Princess and The Frog," due at the end of the year.

Then Miyazaki was introduced, along with his translator. A humble, white-bearded man, Miyazaki is the godfather of animé, co-founder of Japan's Studio Ghibli and the creator behind "Princess Mononoke" and "Spirited Away," among many other animated features. Miyazaki answered questions from Lasseter and the crowd, and then a segment of his next feature, "Ponyo," was screened. Miyazaki's films often deal with the relationship of young girls to nature, family and the world of the imagination, and "Ponyo" follows these themes. It includes a stunning reimagining of the sea, as giant swells of huge fish, brought to life through animation, 180 degrees different from Pixar's own "Finding Nemo," but equally fascinating.

Miyazaki was followed by UCLA's own Shane Acker, who joined producers Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov ("Wanted"), and actors Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly, to preview "9,"Acker's animated feature version of his Oscar-nominated UCLA thesis film of 2005. A stunning segment was screened. The film portrays a steampunk (or, as Acker prefers to call his style, "stitchpunk") alternate future, where rag dolls, relentlessly pursued by murderous machines, try to preserve a remnant of human culture. Acker made a point of praising the experience of film school and explaining that he brought several of his UCLA animation classmates into the production of the film. (See a list of additional Bruins on the "9" crew in the sidebar below.) The release date for the feature, 9-9-09, was prominently featured throughout the con as part of the full-on promotional effort.

The Bruin "9" Mafia

Shane Acker '98, MFA '04 made a point of bringing along several of his talented classmates from the UCLA Animation Workshop when he went off to work on the feature version of his 2005 thesis film "9." Their ranks include:

Regis Camargo MFA '08 (Story Artist)
Patricia Kavanaugh MFA '08 (Production Intern)
Daisy Lin (Production Intern)
Michelle Lopes '04 (Production Intern)
Carlos Mena MFA '06 (Production Assistant)
Joshua Morgan '06 (Technical Manager)
Mark Nelson (Look Development Artist)
Kristin Solid MFA '07(Supervising Animator)
Fred Tatasciore '91 (Voice Performer, "8")

Camargo was also one of three TFT filmmakers whose work appeared in a Comic-Con sidebar sponsored by the San Diego International Children's Film Festival. The films:

"Her Lion's Jump" Regis Camargo MFA '08
"2 Scoops of Justice" Zachary Lind
"Jellyfish Niche" Jenny Sherman

Peter Jackson, a true geek superhero, followed with a panel on his latest production, "District 9," accompanied by protégée writer-director Neill Blomkamp, a veteran of several short films, now happily promoting his first feature. Jackson began by discussing the status of the two "Hobbit" films he is preparing; script nearly finished, no casting yet done. "District 9" is a sci-fi feast about a huge group of refugee aliens who land on Earth, only to be penned up in a ghetto in South Africa and mistreated. The aliens' advanced weapons, activated by "alien DNA ," become the subject of an arms race among the humans. The segment shown was packed with the WETA digital effects we expect from Jackson, while Blomkamp has shot the film in a cinéma-verité, news caught on the fly style that is ultra modern.

The convention floor, a space so huge you cannot see from one end to the other, packed with hundreds of booths and displays, and filled with tens of thousands of people at all times, is an experience unto itself. It features everything from expensive film studio displays to a booth that just sells period corsets for costumes; giveaways abound, and you can get your picture taken on the bridge of the starship Enterprise or in an electric chair. The constant flow of costumed characters -- all willing to pose -- completes the picture of an environment of, by and for the geek/nerd subculture.

This was a special year for me personally, as I was joined for the first time by my 15 year old daughter, Rebecca. A passionate fan of Tim Burton, Peter Jackson, Miyazaki, Pixar, "Star Wars" and "Star Trek," she is already scheming on her costume for Comic-Con 2010 -- Bat-Mite, Batman's biggest fan from the Fifth dimension.

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/industry/2009-comic-con_kuntz/

Todd Holland Sets the Record Straight

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Watch Todd Holland's Emmy-nominated episode of "30 Rock" on Hulu

."Coming out was the single most important event in my life," writes alumnus Todd Holland '83, in a stirring essay published on the movie industry website, "The Wrap."

The essay, entitled "The Gatekeepers at Hollywood's Closet Door," is a personal reflection on the progress gay artists have made in Hollywood -- and the progress that remains to be made.

One of the defining directors of such landmark TV shows as "The Larry Sanders Show" and "Malcolm in the Middle," and a multiple Emmy, CableAce, DGA and WGA award winner, Holland has been nominated for an Emmy again this year for directing the fan favorite "Generalissimo" episode of "30 Rock."

In fact, the array of accolades Holland has accumulated is a testament to his range as a storyteller: Though his work is often typed as edgy and irreverent, his feature film "Firehouse Dog" won a family-friendly Kid's First award in 2007.

In his own words

The story that the self-described "out gay director and producer" tells in his Wrap essay is his own, although it has wider implications.

A week before that piece was posted, Holland had appeared as "the least political person" on a discussion panel at Outfest 2009, LA's gay and lesbian film festival, now in its 28th year. His comments on that occasion were, he felt, taken out of context by some bloggers, and he was determined to set the record straight.

The essay talks about coming out and "living authentically" in moving terms -- but it also acknowledges that doing so may pose some unique challenges for a very select few. In Hollywood today, Holland writes, "no one cares" whether any given writer, director, craftsperson or even performer is gay.

... unless you're in that fractional .002 percent of the young male actor population, and you really have the goods to become a true leading man. Then there may be obstacles to both living authentically and achieving that Holy Grail of dreams: real, tent-pole-sized Hollywood Stardom.

... Yes, it is neither activist nor idealistic -- but it is the real world I work in every day.

Read the complete essay in the sidebar at right.

UCLA Peer Power

How Holland got his start is the stuff that dreams are made of.

Early on, while studying film directing at UCLA, Holland determined his goal: "I'll leave with 10 minutes of film that I can put on anybody's desk and truly say: Take it or leave it. This is the best I can do."

"One of the most important things I learned was the power of your peer network," he says. The peer who deserves the credit in this case is classmate Danelle Black. She had worked with him on his spookily funny, multi-award winning student film, "Chicken Thing." When she landed a job at Steven Spielbeg's Amblin Entertainment, Holland recalls, "My film was barely finished. Danelle took the only print of 'Chicken Thing' that existed and put it on top of the Amblin 'to watch' pile. Well, Steven suddenly walked into the office with nothing to do and sat down in the screening room next to his director of development who was supposed to be prescreening for him. He stayed. He saw it, loved it, and wanted to meet me. When his office called to set it up, I didn't believe it."

Holland remembers the meeting with Spielberg as if it were yesterday: "I had to buy new clothes. New sweater, new shirt, just like a date. We had a lovely chat. Steven said, 'Do you write?' I said, 'Yes, I do,' and handed him a half-hour script I'd written, a Halloween episode for 'Amazing Stories.' Unfortunately, they already had their Halloween show, so he asked if I had anything else. I said yes - I lied. But I raced home and in two days I wrote another episode, 'Welcome to my Nightmare.' Steven read it and liked it, and that became my first episode of network TV - my first professional gig ever.

"Seeing the sets being built at Universal for that first script, having an army of crew people making the film and having Bruce Broughton ("Silverado") conducting the score for it with a full orchestra -- it was magical. I was 26. I was still in school. I didn't even have an agent. And suddenly everyone in town wanted to meet with me."

Holland has gone from strength to strength as a TV auteur. In fall of 2009 a new series he is directing and executive producing will debut on Fox: "Sons of Tucson" stars "Reaper's" Tyler Labine as a down-and-outer hired by three brothers to stand in for their dad, a banker who's gone to jail for fraud.

Giving Back to UCLA

As an alumnus, Holland is happy to give back to the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, with both his financial resources and his time. He co-founded a scholarship in memory of Gerald Hughes, a film school friend who died. "I give back because Steven Spielberg gave to me," he says. "I try to help young filmmakers who are talented. I'm not Spielberg, but I lend support where I can."

Holland actually came out to Steven years later. "It was 2001 and my life was just really good, you know? So I wrote him a letter to thank him for all the support he'd given me when I was launching my career. I just felt a need to express my gratitude. And I told him that I'd married this wonderful man and that I was truly happy. He wrote me back -- and he was just so kind. He said the most important thing is to find happiness outside a career. And that it had taken him 38 years to find that as well - but that it's never too late."

Holland advises film students to "listen to your inner voice. Screw everybody and all their pressures to be this or that. There are a lot of ways to derail yourself. Stop listening to outside voices. Trust the great creator within you. That's really all any of us have that makes us unique - that makes us artists."

But Holland is quick to point out that doesn't mean being a ranting diva. "Lots of Hollywood types seem to work at being the loudest person in the room. That's just not my style. I listen. And it really took me a while to see that as a strength in a business crowded with really strong personalities. But I know now, it's important to have the courage to listen to other opinions and ideas - and then still be able to find that inner voice of your own that tells you which way to go."

He also recommends that novices prepare well and, "come in the door as the thing you want to be - writer, director, producer. Decide. Do it. Make no excuses. Nobody wants to hear about your personal problems. Your work has to stand up without disclaimers or excuses. Also, don't direct a documentary in school and then tell Hollywood you want to direct drama - they don't have that kind of courage or vision. You have to do the heavy lifting for them - with your student film, show them how to sell you in the marketplace. That's how you'll get your first job."

Color My World

The biggest lesson Holland has learned as a director, he says, "is to ask actors, 'How can I help you?' Each actor has a very personal point of view, so you need to understand how to speak in his or her language."

He illustrated the point with a vivid example: "An actress told me she related showing emotion in terms of color. So, I learned to say, 'I need three more points of blue, and take away some red.' It was a mind-bender, but it worked! And it meant the world to her that I cared enough to make the effort. She'd had a very long feature career - and yet I was the first director to ever ask her how I might communicate more effectively with her."

One last word of advice? Be grateful. "I sent hand written notes to every member of the crew on that first 'Amazing Stories'. And I had this big burly construction foreman actually get all teary-eyed over it - no one had ever told him thank you. CUT TO: 22 years later. I sent thank you emails to my department heads after I wrapped my episode of '30 Rock'. Turns out not one director had ever said thank you. In three seasons! These are great jobs we have as directors. Be grateful. It lets the universe know that you're ready for more good things to happen."

Tell Me a Story

"It's also important to love and understand stories," Holland says. "To know how everything contributes to the story. It's all about story. My passion for story is the only way I win over the writers with whom I collaborate. Sooner or later, they figure out it's not about ego or being right - I'm all about the story."

There is a popular license plate holder seen around town: "I'd rather be directing." When we asked what Holland might like his to read, he said: "I'd rather be storytelling."

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/social/todd-holland-wrap/

Deborah Landis is Founding Director of Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Deborah Nadoolman Landis, an Academy Award-nominated costume designer and scholar, has been named to the newly endowed David C. Copley Chair for the Study of Costume Design at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.

An unprecedented gift of $6 million to the school from newspaper publisher and philanthropist David C. Copley last June supported the establishment of both the chair and the Center, which will further scholarship in the field through research, coursework and a program to bring in leading professionals as visiting faculty. Landis will serve as the founding director of the Copley Center, the only institution of its kind in the world.

In addition to her distinguished film career, Landis is an award-winning designer for the theater and opera and is a noted scholar and author in the field who has lectured and written extensively and published three books.

Landis received an M.F.A. in costume design from UCLA in 1975 and a Ph.D. in the history of design from London's Royal College of Art in 2003. She recently completed her second term as president of the Costume Designers Guild, Local 892. She has had a distinguished career designing for major motion pictures directed by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Louis Malle and Costa-Gavras.

"Deborah Landis has made the point on many occasions that costume designers are first and foremost storytellers," said Robert Rosen, dean of the school. "They are full creative partners in art forms that are intrinsically collaborative, and academic recognition of that fact is long overdue.

All of us at TFT are very proud indeed that Mr. Copley has chosen UCLA as his partner in this pathfinding enterprise. And we consider ourselves fortunate, as well, that Deborah Landis, an acclaimed professional who is also an accomplished scholar, has agreed to provide leadership."

"The Copley Center is dedicated to the deeper understanding of the role played by costume design in the collaborative process of the cinematic and performing arts," Landis said, "and this is the goal that I have always pursued in my scholarly work and in my writing. So to be appointed to this unique position is for me both a great honor and a priceless opportunity."

The David C. Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design will work toward three pioneering objectives:

Becoming the world leader in the academic study of costume design -- an institution that crosses media boundaries and enhances the already top-ranked theater costume program at UCLA with a bold new focus on film, television and digital media.
Preparing graduates for career and artistic success through a balanced curriculum of theory and practical experience, as well as mentorship from the most accomplished practitioners in the world.
Establishing an approach that will unify theory and practice in the area of costume design through the research and study of the cultural significance of costume, its relationship to aesthetic theory and, most importantly, the role of costume as a centerpiece of narrative and storytelling.

The establishment of the Copley Center for the Study of Costume Design will break new ground in academia and help secure the school's future preeminence in this artistic endeavor. Areas of study will include the history of costume design in Hollywood, genre research, costume illustration as an art form and explorations of the influence of costume design on fashion and culture.

"The artistry of costume designers has long been a vital part of storytelling in the moving image and performing arts and deserves significant scholarly attention from a great educational institution such as UCLA," David Copley said. "I'm delighted to help the field move forward with this gift. I'm confident it will pay dividends for scholars and practitioners for many years to come."

As a member of the international film community, Landis delivered the keynote address at the inaugural Costume Symposium in London in 2006 and served on the 2007 Cinefondation Jury at the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival. She teaches at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and the American Film Institute and is a professor at the University of the Arts London.

Landis is the author of "Screencraft/Costume Design" (2003), "50 Designers/50 Costumes: Concept to Character" (2004) and "Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume" (2007). She is currently preparing "Deconstructing Glamour," due out in 2010.

As a costume designer, her many collaborations with her husband, director John Landis, include "Animal House" (1978), "The Blues Brothers" (1980), "¡Three Amigos!" (1987) and "Coming to America" (1988), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award, as well as the groundbreaking music video "Michael Jackson's Thriller" (1983). She worked with Steven Spielberg on "1941" (1978) and designed the iconic Indiana Jones adventure "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981). Landis' distinguished theater work includes costumes for the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and "Turandot" for the Virginia Opera.

IMAGES: "Raiders of the Lost Arc:" Costume designer, Deborah Nadoolman; illustrator, Kelly Kimball. © Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™. All Rights Reserved.

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/scholarship/deborah-landis_copley-chair/

Francis Ford Coppola: Still Independent

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Watch exclusive video coverage of the Film & TV Archive's benefit screeing of "Tetro."

View a slideshow of photos from the premiere

Alumnus Francis Ford Coppola MFA '67 is "an examplary UCLA filmmaker,says Robert Rosen, the outgoing dean of the School of Theater, Film and Television. "Even when he achieved his greatest commercial success with 'The Godfather' [1972] he did it with a core of independence, the passion of a personal filmmaker."

Rosen made this large statement during a screening event in June, at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood, of "Tetro," Coppola's eagerly anticipated new film, his 29th since he made his debut in 1960."

The screening was a benefit for the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and among the distinguished alumni in attendance was Charles Burnett '69, MFA '77, whose thesis film "Killer of Sheep" was restored by the Archive and finally released, to great acclaim. in 2007, almost 40 years after it was completed.

Burnett recalled that for students of his generation, attending the School in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Coppola was already a legendary figure, proof positive that it was "still possible to achieve commerical success in America without losing your soul."

It's an open question whether Coppola, today, would agree with Burnett's assessment. He has said that his early career as an indpendent creator of American art movies such as "The Rain People" (1969) and "The Coversation" (1972) was derailed by the unexpected commercial success of "The Godfather;" and that only now, in his 60s, has he finally managed to steer it back on course as a personal filmmaker.

"Tetro" is very personal, indeed, a designedly operatic drama about as large and tumultuous family of artists not unlike his own, although its creator insists that very few of its specific incidents actually occurred.

The first original screenplay Coppola has written since the multi-Oscar-nominated "Conversation," "Tetro" centers upon the relationship between the youngest members of a large clan of tempermental artists: Bennie (newcomer Alden Ehrenreich), and his admired older brother Tetro (Vincent Gallo), who broke with the family after his father (Klaus Maria Brandauer), a famous symphony conductor, took up with Tetro's then girlfriend.

When he spoke a few days after the Film & Television Archive premiere with TFT's Sheila Roberts Coppola said flat out there is no longer any place for him in corporate Hollywood. He also revealed that among the touchstones of his stylistic appraoch in "Tetro" were the films of British filmmaker Michael Powell. It was a happy coincidence that Powell's masterwork "The Red Shoes" was recently restored by the Archive. The film's saturated Technicolor images received much acclaim after a screening this year at the Cannes Film Festival.

SHEILA ROBERTS: Do you have a younger brother or an older brother?

FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA: I have a brother who is five years older than me, and he was a wonderful older brother. He was very handsome and very good at school and very advanced, in that he was reading literature and seeing unusual films. I patterned myself on him as much as I could. He took me to the movies, and we went to see both things like "Abbott and Costello Meet Dracula" and Michael Powell's "Tales of Hoffman." As you can imagine, I'd never seen this type of thing. Whenever I think of my brother, some part of me thinks of "Tales of Hoffman."

So when I wrote this script, my idea was, what if there was a brother like that who took his kid brother to see those beautiful Michael Powell films. And what if, when the kid brother found a manuscript telling the story of what happened to drive their family apart, he imagined it as a Michael Powell film, almost seeing it as if it were "The Red Shoes?" I love the implication that film doesn't have to be people just sitting around talking, although there is a lot of it in this film, but that you can try to use, as "Red Shoes" did, ballet as part of the story. That was fun to get to do the dance sequences.

You've said you're not satisfied with the current state of Hollywood.

It's a tricky situation. There are guys older than me who are still working: Clint Eastwood, Ridley Scott. These are some of our best filmmakers. But what could I do? If I wanted to be in the industry, now, what kind of movies would I make? They don't want to make the kind of movies I want to make. Even if they offered me "Batman Part 6" I don't know that I would be a good choice for it. But since I'm not trying to have a career and not trying to make a fortune or be famous, what I have now is good: I'm independently wealthy and I use my money to make little personal films.

Am I now perhaps a Has-Been? For sure, and what I was was very exciting at the time. But I don't want that anymore. I'd like to make films that I'm in love with and I don't care if I don't get paid or if they don't make money. What I say now is that I've started a second career. Part of what that means is, for example, that I financed 'Tetro,' and since I put up the money and I don't get paid, I figure I'm allowed to do anything I want.

But when you're writing something like this, is there anxiety about making it too indulgent in terms of what you want to show an audience?

What does that mean? Is self-indulgent different from heartfelt? Maybe self-indulgent is when you're imposing on the audience? Like, if I'm cooking you dinner and I gave you lots of stuff I knew you don't like, because I like it? But maybe even that can be good, in a way. I know that if I invite 30 people to lunch, a lot of them would probably prefer that I just order in Kentucky Fried Chicken. Instead, I'm going to try to make some real interesting regional dishes that you've never tried before.

The real happiness in life is to learn something and, as I get older, that's what I really look for. Nothing makes you learn more than when you work on a film about something that you're interested in because, in order to make it, you have to do research, you have to study it, you have to spend a whole year just thinking about that.

What's next?

I really feel I have a clean sheet of paper in front of me and I can write something new that's the kind of movie I've always wanted to make. It's a great privilege to know that whatever it is, I can finance it and make it. When you make a lower budget film, not only do you have the benefit that the lower the budget the more ambitious or interesting the ideas can be, but you're free to do what you want. You can also cast someone like my leading man Alden Ehrenreich, who's not so well known but might be perfect for the part.

Most of the techniques we use in films were invented in the 1920's when movies could be pioneers in Germany and Berlin or Eisenstein or the great American silent artists. Then, all of a sudden when it becomes really a business, you're not allowed to do anything. You can't make it in black and white, it can't be subtitled, it can't be a drama anymore, it can't be intellectual, it can't be pretentious.

But there are probably other things that cinema can do that we can only know about if we can take a chance and not have some guy say, "You can't do that. We're not going to finance that kind of a movie."

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/industry/coppola-tetro-2009/

Alum Brad Silberling mixes dino-thrills and laughs in "Land of the Lost"

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Alumnus and Executive Baord Member Brad Silberling MFA '87 is a director of unusual versitility. His work ranges from the large-scale commerical special effects fantasy "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" (2004) to the intimate comedy "10 Items or Less" (2006). That unique mix of skills has enabled him to seamlessly combine time-travelling prehistoric thrills with low-down male bonding humor in "Land of the Lost," a big screen adaptation of the lovably tacky Sid and Marty Krofft TV series of the 1970s. Dueling motor-mouths Will Farrell and Danny McBride are joined by British comedienne Anna Friel and TFT alum and SNL comedy writer Jorma Taccone (as a lecherous caveman) in a movie that delivers dino-sized spectacle while remaining light on its feet -- no small accomplishment.

Sheila Roberts talked with Silberling during a recent press event in Los Angeles.

SHEILA ROBERTS: Is special effects technology getting easier to work with? You made "Casper" in 1995 and at the time it was pretty trailblazing for the amount of effects it had.

BRAD SILBERLING: I would say it's a little bit of a fallacy that the tools have gotten that much more nimble. "Casper" was late enough in the game that it was already a little more untethered. What has improved vastly is the number of talented CG animators. I did "Caspar" at ILM, as good as you can get, and there were not enough CG animators to fill the room. They were hiring kids right out of school. That, to me, is the leap from 1995. There's a vast new generation of kids now who have been trained to do just this job.

Obviously kids are going to want to see "Land of the Lost" because of the prehistoric creatures, but you also have a couple of other creatures, Will Farrell and Danny McBride, who are known for raunchy humor. What age are you aiming for in an audience?

Innuendo seems to fly over kids' heads. I worry more about kids getting traumatized, because one of the things we were excited about was really committing to the photo-realism of these dinosaurs and the action. We set out to make a PG 13 movie and it is decidedly PG 13. So one of the things we started talking about with the studio was just not going off and selling it on the Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon.

Because your reputation is not as a comedy guy, did you have to prove yourself to an extra degree to get this job?

Comedy is always built in somewhere in what I do, but it's not usually overt or broad comedy. I did a very small, intimate film that was a comedic drama, "10 Items or Less." I would say, for the most part, domestic broad comedies have just not been of interest to me. They're not cinematic enough. That's why this film is probably the closest you'll see me get to that.

You've mentioned that you were creeped out as a kid by the character of Chaka, the caveman in "Land of the Lost," who is played in the film by another UCLA alumnus, Jorma Taccone. Did you put the bit in with Will wanting to eat him?

That was a fantastic Will Farrell improv that happened in one of the video diaries his character was recording. That was a fantastic riff where he was like "When we're desperate enough, we will cook and eat Chaka."

When you're doing a film that's this big and costs this much money, with this many extras, how much ad libbing can you really allow?

What's interesting is if you plan properly, the best money is spent giving the actors room. That's my philosophy, and I have enough experience with effects at this point that I can give them greater freedom. It's also why we built sets on the scale that we did, because I didn't want those guys to be afraid to bounce off of something. I look at actors doing 100% blue screen or green screen work and they always look constipated, because they're afraid to embarrass themselves. They don't know where to look.

Tell us about your future project "The Lost Boys of the Sudan."

"The Lost Boys of the Sudan" is a film that we hope some day to get made. It's been with me about six or seven years, a narrative drama based on the actual story of a group of Sudanese refugees, orphaned between the ages of five and 11. These kids had to survive on their own for an extraordinary journey and many of whom have come to the United States to create lives as American citizens, which is sort of surreal. So it's a great story. But in this economy and in the world of cinema today, it's a very challenging thing to get done well and to get done right. So we'll see what happens.

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/industry/2009_silberling_land-of-the-lost/

Learning from the pros

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The program's official title is the UCLA Arts Camp/Workshops - and when you talk to the people who administer, teach and study at TFT during these annual summer sessions the emphasis is almost always on work and fun rather than recreation. These are not the kind of summer camps where kids toast marshmallows or paddle around in canoes.

Now in its eighth season the program runs from June 21 to August 7 and offers students ages 14 - 20, one to three weeks of hands- on intensive workshops in subjects ranging from Shakespeare performance to sitcom acting and writing and producing. And from musical theater performance and dance to computer animation and digital filmmaking. This is a rare summer program aimed at young people who are thinking seriously about careers in the performing or media arts. Their work here can even earn them a few extra college credits.

Attracting almost a thousand high school and college students each year, from the United States and around the world, the program was developed and has been supervised since its inception by producing director and adjunct professor Myrl Schreibman, who emphasizes the continuity between the Workshops and the curriculum of UCLA's top-ranked professional School of Theater, Film and Television. "That is the primary reason," he says, "why we recruit our faculty from the School and the industry. The professional emphasis is central to the approach of all the Workshops."

Robert Rosen, Dean of the School, reinforces that point: "This is the only summer youth program that is taught by the faculty of a world-class academic institution and by top professionals from the entertainment community, such as Conchata Ferrell, John Pasquin, Philip Charles Mackenzie. Armin Shimerman and Kay Cole."

SERIOUS STUDENTS

According to former Workshop veteran David Tucker, now an undergraduate studying acting at UCLA, it was their seriousness, the sense of what was at stake, that made the sessions exhilarating. "I was there five weeks," Tucker says, "and we were up in the morning, fast breakfast, get over to the Theater Department, get into the room and just dive into it. It was definitely a professional atmosphere, which I loved. I was looking for the next step up."

For Schreibman, the intensity of the Workshops is rooted in their sense of purpose: "Most summer programs of this type give a video camera to a kid and teach them the basics of shooting and editing, and say 'Go make a movie.' We don't. Our workshops are based on developing strong storytelling skills, which is the approach we take at the School.

"With the easy availability of digital camera and editing software," Schreibman continues, "many of these kids have already made movies when they arrive here. But there is a huge difference between doing a short kick-boxing sort of film, which is what they think of as a movie when they are kids, and something that really tells a story. They come away from this program with a whole new outlook on what making movies is really all about."

A STUDENT ACTOR BREAKS THROUGH

Acting students in the Workshops, too, get what may be their first glimpse of "what it's really all about."

Theater Professor April Shawhan, who is one of the teachers in the program's pivotal College Audition Workshop, suggests that "getting to students before they have had a chance to form bad habits," can give them a boost in their college and later professional careers which cannot be overestimated.

"A key element of the audition workshop is helping the students select the material that is best for them," Shawhan says, "that will show off their particular talents to the best possible advantage. And gaining this sense of who they are as performers will be of value to them throughout their careers."

David Tucker remembers Shawhan's Workshop as one of the high points of his summer, because it gave him his first experience of top-flight professional stage direction: "April gave just great, great direction," he says. "All of her suggestions felt very natural. I could tell I was getting better every time I did my monologue for her."

Professor Jean-Louis Rodrigue's classes in the Alexander Technique, one of several in the Theater Conservatory, has become a summer staple for similar reasons: because they help liberate the potential of performers at a crucial formative stage of their training.

"The Alexander Technique," Rodrigue explains, "helps to develop a high level of self awareness and the integration of mind and body, an ability to eliminate unwanted, restrictive tension. This stress and tension can negatively affect the use of the voice and the breath, as well as the expression of emotions.

"A perfect example of this kind of learning experience came about when I was working with David Tucker. He was performing a monologue from Moises Kaufman's "The Laramie Project," the speech of the father of Mathew Shepherd during the murder trial of his killers. David said he felt rushed and had poor concentration. Basic acting questions were asked: Who was the character, where was he, who was he talking to and why? This helped him become more aware of himself in a constructive way, so he could begin to live in the world of the play. By the time he started speaking again the character was alive and addressing the other characters with urgency and full emotional commitment."

Tucker recalls the experience as a personal breakthrough, a turning point that confirmed his decision to pursue acting as a career:

"I went up in front of the class, and I started the monologue, and Jean-Louis came over. There was a white wall in front of me, and he said, 'Look at the wall. See the courtroom in front of you. There are the defendants, the two men who killed your son.' And then he said, 'See your son Matthew. Look at him. Talk to him.' And he had this technique where he got behind you and he would touch your shoulders lightly to adjust your posture.

"And I started doing it again, and it was the best monologue I have ever done up to that point, because I saw, I actually saw my son Matthew's face. I saw him and I spoke to him. I didn't even see the other students in the class sitting there. And it was just. I started crying during the monologue, tears rolling down my face. At the end of it Jean-Louis came up to me and gave me a big hug."

It is not hard to understand why faculty members and top professional return again and again to teach at the Workshops - or why students like Tucker express a strong desire to someday "pay it forward" by teaching there themselves.

"The expression 'life changing' is one that I hear over and over again every summer," Schreibman says, "either from the kids or from the parents. The parents drop their kids off on a Sunday, and by the time they pick them up at the end of a week, or two weeks or three, they can see a big difference in their son or their daughter. They grow up a lot in the space of a few weeks, both as performers and as human beings."

UCLA Arts Camp/Workshops are produced by the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in association with US Performing Arts.

Photos: Jeff Goldblum, JoBeth Williams, Jon Cryer, Gregory Itzin and Armin Shimerman are a only a few of the gifted professionals who have led Arts Camp/Workshops. Photos by Tito Deveyra.

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/scholarship/arts-camp_workshops/

Caffeinated Commerce

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Documentary filmmaker Amy Ferraris MFA '02 discovered the classic barista-made cappuccino while living in Italy. She describes this eidetic beverage eloquently on the website CappuccinoMovie.com, devised as a self-promotion tool for her most recent film, a labor of love and good taste called "The Perfect Cappuccino." On the site she notes that every cup of true cappuccino "is unique in its particulars, based in large part on the hand of the person who made it."

This first-person documentary about a quest for the defining example of a hand-crafted artisan beverage seems an ideal candidate for the increasingly popular option of self-distribution via the Internet and DVD. Thoughtful "artisan" films like this one, in which "the hand of the person who made it" is visible in every frame, is exactly the sort of work that tends to fall through the cracks of the one-size-fits-all apparatus of mass market movie promotion.

"Early on in making the film," Ferraris says, "I recognized that this is not a mainstream idea, but I was so into it that I wanted to do it anyway. I wanted to do it for myself. It's really cool to me that I can do that and still have some possibility of connecting with an audience and making a little bit of return on my investment. I feel really fortunate in that way."

For Ferraris, the search for great coffee in North America inevitably leads to the specter of Starbucks, a chain so ubiquitous that in several cities there are dueling outlets facing each other across intersections. Now the chain is popularizing their homogenized version of the beverage around the world, raising the possibility that it could eventually supplant the original Italian version in global coffee consciousness.

Ferraris carved out a few minutes to discuss the process of self-destruction with us in May, working around the sleep schedule of her brand new week old baby daughter.

There seems to be a certain kind of personality that might be drawn to self-distribution. Some people just prefer to drive a stick shift. They want to have their own hands on the controls.

I am totally that way! I hate automatic transmissions. So, yeah, this is my preference, and I recognize that it is nor for everyone.

In order to self-distribute, you have to be comfortable being a business person as well as an artist, which I would guess some filmmakers are not.

Yes, and frankly one of the great attractions of D.I.Y distribution is that you get to keep a much larger percentage of the money. Your volume of sales may be lower but you're keeping so much more of the revenue that it's OK.

I would rather not be doing the work of sales. But I would rather be doing it myself than handing it over to someone who is inept or doesn't care. When I was researching this effort, talking to other filmmakers, participating in online filmmaking communities, I never met a small independent filmmaker who was happy with their distributor. Literally never.

What convinced you that this approach was a good match with for this film?

One of my friends said, "Your film is a little too intellectual." I don't agree that it's intellectual, in the sense of being difficult, but the argument I'm presenting is a little bit complex. It's an essay. It doesn't have a story arc built in, like some of the other recent documentaries that have done well. I've had warm responses from audiences, but it doesn't pack a rhetorical punch like "Bowling for Columbine."

So what do you use as a selling point? What becomes the focal point of the campaign?.

The subject matter. Why do people watch a documentary? Ninety-nine percent of the time it's because they're interested in the subject matter. So my major promotional niches in each city are on the one hand people who are interested in coffee, the foodies, and on the other hand people who are interested in Italian culture.

The coffee part of it was a no-brainer. I spent five years making the film. By the end I knew those folks and I knew how to reach them. I knew that I had to put a couple of ads on the coffee discussion web sites and reach out to the founder of CoffeeGeek.com and get him to write a review. People who are really serious about coffee feel so misunderstood. I've had them get so excited that somebody wants to make a movie about this little world that they care about. Those are the people who are e-mailing me though my website, the people I've slowly but surely built up into a mailing list.

The part I had to research was the manufacturing and order fulfillment end of things, the actual distribution of physical DVDs. I've had to research on my own the film and DVD review websites. Even just learning how to contact the mainstream press was a bit of a learning curve.

But there are a lot of filmmakers out there trying to do what I'm doing and many of them have put up resources on line that you can learn from. [Links to some of Ferraris's favorite online D.I.Y resources can be found in a sidebar on this page.]

What forms of distribution are you pursuing? I know you have a DVD coming in June. Are you also pursuing theatrical, online?

It would be an exaggeration to say I've been doing theatrical distribution. I have had some public screenings that I've arranged on my own, but I really only do them when somebody approaches me. Again, as I researched other people's experiences everyone said, "Theatrical is a lot of money for advertising and promotion and the revenue is just terrible.

Online is definitely a part of my strategy. There are so many new options right now for watching films on line, and most of the content carriers don't insist on exclusivity, so it's very easy to submit you work and make it available. A couple of them, Amazon Unbox and one called Caachi, are very filmmaker-friendly. "You set the price and we'll sell your film." There are others, such as Hulu and iTunes, that won't deal with you unless you come to them through an aggregator who will represent your work.

But even there, there are starting to be sites like IndieFlix that will make your film available for download and will also act as an aggregator to negotiate with iTunes and Netflix and other third party providers on your behalf.

How about broadcast or cable television? The tone of your film would seem to be very apt for PBS, for example. And of course there's the Food Network.

Broadcast is hard. Broadcasters are scared off by the heavy Starbucks presence in the film. They tend to be really touchy about things like corporate logos, even though I worked with an attorney and know that all of my uses of the Starbucks logo are completely legal.

Broadcasters worry about the likelihood of getting sued, which where Starbucks is concerned is highly likely. They will file a suit they know they can't win just to force compliance from people who can't afford to go to court. This is exactly what I document in my film, a case in which they went after a café owner in Tulsa whose place is called the DoubleShot Coffee Company. Starbucks is now claiming ownership of the term "DoubleShot."

PBS is still a remote possibility. I did submit the film to "Independent Lens" and I hope to submit it to "POV," although the deadline is right around now and with a new baby my life is little crazy.

The Food Network passed on it. I think they would rather do cooking shows.

Food seems to be a very strong niche subject for documentaries, though. Everybody loves food. There are a lot of other cool foodie sub-cultures out there.

I would love to keep on making movies about food, to be very honest. I continue to have ideas even for other films about coffee. A movie that was more about just coffee and less about the politics of corporate America would have more of a chance on the Food Network, I think. And I would love to make it.

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/industry/amy-ferraris_perfect-cappuccino/

Fast & Furious:

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Alumnus Justin Lin's breakthrough feature "Better Luck Tomorrow" (2002), filmed on a budget of just $250,000, a startling suburban noir about "model minority" Asian-American high school boys drifting into crime, established his reputation as a stereotype-buster.

Arguably it was an even bolder move for Lin when he ventured off the indie cinema reservation into the glossy realm of mainstream Hollywood commercialism. His second contribution to the internationally successful "Fast and Furious" fast cars 'n' violent crime franchise opened to recod-breaking box office April 3, and in his press appearances Lin was forthright about acknowledging that he grew up enjoying, and wanting to make, the same kinds of high octane popcorn movies as other filmmakers of his generation.

Although he has continued to alternate high octane entertainments such as "Annapolis" (2006) and "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" (2006) with edgy low-budget fare like "Spotlighting" (2005) and "Finishing the Game" (2007), Lin recently told TFT staffer Sheila Roberts that when he saw the first mega-hit installment, "The Fast and the Furious" (2005), while still an undergraduate at TFT, he was instantly intrigued by the sub-culture of underclass street racing it portrayed.

JUSTIN LIN: The thing that made the first film work for me was that it was an introduction to a scene that nobody had seen before. I was still in graduate school and working as a TA when I saw it in theaters. I didn't understand but it was very interesting. These kids were very proud. They know that the American-made muscle cars are faster because they're bigger, but they were determined to figure out how to beat these big cars. That sub-culture was fascinating.

In a way, the illegal street scene has really died down. They confiscate and crush the cars now that are caught racing, so they have actually kind of legalized it. People go out in the desert and do the races there and make it more real. The scene has changed and I think characters grow. If we try to put the characters back into the same environment, it would " kind of silly.

SHEILA ROBERTS: Why did you want to do the new film, the fourth? What appealed to you about revisiting the franchise again after making "Tokyo Drift"?

I am a movie fan. I grew up in the working class suburbs in the '80s so I do love Hollywood movies. But what I don't like is when they take something that's successful and just recycle it. The goal here was not to do that, in the first place to acknowledge that there's been a passage of time. When these characters go back to the car scene, they seem a little too old for that scene. There is growth and there is maturity and I think that's part of the mythology. The way it's presented, we want the audience to figure out the timeline for themselves. I think that's part of the fun.

I think a lot of times when people think of "Fast and Furious" they think of fast cars, hot chicks, stuff like that. But I think there are good reasons why people keep wanting to see more of this franchise. Part of it is the characters and part of it is the theme. Aside from all the superficial things, this is really a franchise that's exploring the idea of family in a non-traditional way. On this film, we were trying to take that and explore the idea of sacrifice. We talked a lot about how these stories are really Westerns, but with cars instead of horses.

Was it tough coming up with a different approach for the look in "Tokyo Drift" compared to this one?

My job is to try to serve the theme of the film. When I came on the third one, "Tokyo Drift," I was like "Well, okay, do you have to shoot it this way and does it have to look that way?" And it turned out there was a lot of flexibility. What's great about this franchise for me is that it's a bit post modern, in that stylistically it has evolved quite a bit and it's changed a lot. That's a plus for any director coming on. The challenge is not to take anything for granted.

Some directors say that while they enjoy watchhing action movies they don't enjoy shooting them, that they find it too mechanical and therefore boring.

I've heard that,because action takes a lot of time and patience. The key is having a point of view -- which is very much the UCLA approach to working on thse things, as opposed to (can I say this?) the USC approach. You could say UCLA filmmakers try to bring an indie attitude even to studio pictures. We always try to find some kind of subjectivity or point or view.

Designing the chases and the races is surprisingly easy, especially with the budget that we have on one of these. It's easy to say "Oh, let's do this just because it looks cool." Many times you have to pull back and say "What are we trying to say here? Where is Brian [Paul Walker] at this point? Where is Dom [Vin Diesel] at this point?" Because we don't have a lot of scenes to really explore character we have to use the chases for that. The way they handle the cars tells the audience much more than a dialog scene about who they are. It's a short cut to see where the characters are at that point in the story.

What was one of the hardest scenes you had to shoot, logistically or otherwise?

The chases in the tunnels were something that had never been done before. What happened was I actually went and scouted tunnels in Mexico, but I wanted angles you just can't do in a real tunnel. So we had to go and find this super long warehouse down in San Pedro and build our own tunnel, in four sections. We couldn't shoot anywhere else because we needed that much control. And actually I wanted even more space. It made it tougher because we had to reconfigure our tunnel every few days.

What's your dream project as a director?

I would say it's "442," about the Japanese American battalion. They're the most decorated battalion in history. In World War II, they were sent into all the craziest battles. I worked at the Japanese American National Museum for a while. I looked at a lot of archival interviews and stuff like that.

Unfortunately, a lot of the people that served are all passing away now and that's something that's part of their history that you hear about but you don't really know. That's a story I think should be told

Have you been pitching it to the studios? It sounds like it would be a large scale film...

It has to be a studio film. It's not a no-budget scenario. Hopefully I have enough relationships and have earned enough trust that I can do it the right way. That's the goal.

I do really feel like I'm learning and I'm growing. I'm a better filmmaker today than I was five years ago, and I'm just getting started. I feel like my best films are still ahead of me. Now it's about positioning myself to make those films.

What's next?

I don't have anything right now. I tend to like to go do no-budget movies and stuff in between. I'm always looking to do that. I like that challenge. You have to convince everybody from the actor to the PA to come on and do it for nothing. I do feel very fortunate to be able to have both worlds, to do those and also do something like this.

Somebody told me that you drive a SAAB. That seems so anti fast and furious, somehow.

It fits me, though. With American cars, I feel like a little kid. I can't see over the hood. Japanese cars like the Lexus are just a little too nice, like it's a little too easy to drive. The SAAB is just temperamental enough. On the SAAB, you can't bring in your own phone. They have their own phone system.You have to get a special phone number just for the car and they have this voice recognition thing that maybe its native language is Swedish and it never calls the right person. My coolant light is on right now and I don't even believe it anymore.

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/industry/justin-lin_fast-furious/

Berlinale Journal 2009

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 17:00:00 -0800

"I'm watching five films a day," reports Professor María Elena de las Carreras from Berlin. "It's heaven!"

Each year de las Carreras attends the Berlin International Film Festival, an event she covers for several international publications. Also in Berlin this year are Professor Jean-Louis Rodrigue, who is teaching his celebrated workshop "Embodying the Character" at the festival's invitational Talent Campus, and alumnus Mischa Livingstone '97, MFA '99, who screened his short film A Little Night Fright at the Festival in 2008 and was invited back this year to participate in the Talent Campus.

De las Carreras will be filing exclusive reports for our web site throughout the festival.

María Elena de las Carreras's Berlinale Journal

February 15, 2009

All too soon the festival comes to an end.

The statistics released by the Berlinale organizers are staggering: almost 400 films, 20,000 accredited guests and 270,000 admissions. The prizes awarded by the international jury fell along the traditional Berlinale parameters: small, edgy films and also pictures that engage the political Zeitgeist in a meaningful manner. The Gold Bear went to The Milk of Sorrow (its Spanish original title "La Teta Asustada" packs a punch), a moving Peruvian drama, backed by a Spanish producer and directed by Claudia Llosa. Tracing the interior journey of a young Indian woman from the Andes who moves to Lima, the film delicately traces the negotiations between a pre-Hispanic mindset and the modern world. The Uruguayan minimalist comedy Gigante, the debut of Argentine director Adrián Biniez, received both the prestigious Alfred Bauer Prize, in memory of the festival founder for a work of particular innovation, and the Best Feature award, endowed with €50,000. Both pictures come from countries which do not have a film industry properly speaking, and they are a tribute to the stamina of their creative teams as well as the faith placed in them by foreign producers.

The American independent production The Messenger, feature debut by screenwriter Oren Moverman, about an Afghanistan veteran who becomes a casualty notification officer, was awarded a Silver Bear for best screenplay. A straightforward (and fairly predictable) account of the physical and psychological toll of combat, the film was a favorite of the critics.

The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi received a Silver Bear for About Elly, an unflinching look at social dynamics among a group of middle class professional Iranians whose weekend at the Caspian Sea begins as a comedy of manners and ends in tragedy. The film has yet to open in its country of origin, and its depiction of the status of women - symbolized by the Elly of the title - will displease the cultural mullahs of Iran.

On a lighter note, the last day was enlivened by the screening of Der Rosarote Panther 2 - yes, Pink Panther 2 - directed by the Norwegian Harald Zwart, featuring Steve Martin, Andy García, Alfred Molina and Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai Bachchan - a cast that obviously had fun playing their outrageous roles. Even Pope Benedict serves as a foil to the bumbling Clouseau.

Steve Martin gamely came to the Berlinale and entertained the critics by playing the banjo. "How many more questions can you ask about the film?," he teased the press before pulling the musical instrument from behind his chair.

Attending the Berlinale can become a reality for our film students. Since 2003 the Festival has launched the Talent Campus, an initiative designed to bring budding filmmakers - including young critics - from all over the world, for a series of workshops, master classes and a hands-on approach to the craft of bringing images to the screen. The selection process is rigorous and 350 people are selected from a pool of roughly 4,000. The U.S. had one of the largest groups - 18 candidates. It's worth a shot, since the results of these first mentoring programs can already be seen in young directors who have succeeded in getting their films financed, based on contacts and connections formed here. A case in point are USC-graduate Lance Hammer and his Berlinale award-winner Ballast, and Lake Tahoe was a Berlinale winner last year. Why not give the Talent Campus a try?

I would especially encourage our MA and Ph.D. students in cinema and media studies to do so. The Talent Press branch of the program brought this year nine budding critics, and in conjunction with the Goethe Institute and the International Association of Film Critics (FIPRESCI), mentored them in the nuts and bolts of writing criticism for traditional (ever more scarce) and digital outlets.

The Talent Campus has a very useful website. And for those wishing to explore alternative training programs attached to international festivals, Rotterdam, Telluride, San Sebastian, Toronto and London are worth exploring.

February 11, 2009

Attending the Berlinale is perhaps the most satisfying professional experience of the year. It's a total immersion for ten days in overlapping worlds of fantasy, other geographies and histories, different politics and languages. Spellbound in the dark

The festival poses a never resolved Psycho dilemma: Will you follow Norman Bates' awakened longing for Marion Crane - and lose yourself in one of the great cities of Europe? Or will you be ensnared by a blind, unhealthy devotion to Mother - and consume celluloid, non-stop, sleepless in Berlin?

On the Marion Crane gentle side of things, I attended a fun exhibit organized by the Deutsche Kinemathek at the Museum für Film and Fernsehen on - speaking of coincidences - the Master of Suspense himself: "Casting a Shadow. Alfred Hitchcock und seine Werkstatt." In a large exhibition hall, the curators have assembled a variety of materials - many on loan by the Academy's Margaret Herrick Library - to examine how Hitchcock worked in this highly collaborative "métier". Slick TV monitors loop interviews with the usual suspects every few feet. The highlight is the director himself speaking German - he spent several months in Berlin and Munich in the mid-twenties, and then again in the 60s - and discussing his craft with chain-smoking German critics with dark, thick, horn-rimmed glasses around a table. Completely uncinematic but fascinating. These Teutonic Truffauts ask all the right questions. Other excerpts belong to a new documentary to be shown this summer on German TV.

The Competition has displayed some interesting wares, honoring the Berlinale's tradition of showcasing the political. The US made an appearance with The Messenger, first feature by screenwriter Oren Moverman, about two Army officials (Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster) assigned to notify families about the deaths of their relatives in Iraq. Adequately handled, and grounded in well-researched military procedure, the film has nothing much to commend itself. Except that its critique of the devastating impact of war resonated with the Berlinale critics, and appears as a favorite in several polls. The co-writer, Alessandro Camon, attended our film program - no IMDb available in the hotel room where I write these notes, but I remember him distinctly.

Two of the most satisfying works I've seen so far are excellent candidates for the course I teach on international cinema, FTV 106C: Chen Kaige's Forever Enthralled and About Elly, by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. The first one is a biopic on a famous Peking Opera singer spanning three decades, and examining first the nature of the artistic vocation, and then, during the Japanese occupation of the late thirties until 1945, the relationships between an artist and the state. Like Kaige's early films this lavish production plunges into the tumultuous history of twentieth century China, speaking obliquely of things that cannot be said openly. About Elly - like so many of the Iranian films that never see the light of day in its theocracy of origin - is an oblique conversation about being a woman in Iran today. Our Film & Television Archive's annual Iranian series should consider showing it, and I wouldn't be surprised if the film won one of the awards.

Mother is calling For a few more days, she will win. The Berlinale is no food, no rest, all celluloid

February, 7, 2009

I first came to the Berlin Film Festival as a film critic from Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1985. And except for a handful of times when I couldn't come - literally, for matters of life and death, the birth of my child and a cancer treatment - I've been coming ever since. It has been the best gift a film professor could receive to deepen her love affair with the movies, and make her a more solid professional.

For a film professor - the angle of these short notes today - it was a key time to begin a regular visit. Little did I know that I was coming at the tail end of the Cold War era. There was no sense, at the Berlinale or elsewhere, in February of 1989 that the Wall dividing the Communist world and the Western democracies would crumble so spectacularly in November of that year. The festival had built its reputation since its beginnings in 1950, as a "political" showcase for cinemas developing under constrictions. It was practically the only place to see a wide assortment of Soviet and Eastern European films, as well as productions from emerging nations in Asia and Africa. Latin American political cinema always found a hospitable home at the Berlinale.

The added bonus for a budding film professor at the time, was -and still is - the city itself, and its place in the history of the cinema. It was, literally, stepping into 1920s Weimar cinema, the UFA studios, the intellectual and artistic life of Berlin between the wars. The locations were still there, sometimes massively transformed, still pulsing with the rhythm of a metropolis. Walter Ruttmann's city symphony unfolded everyday, the large stage sounds of Metropolis and Faust and The Nibelungen could still be visited in Babelsberg, near Potsdam, south west of the city. And, the physical presence of the Wall, which West German or American films had recreated elsewhere - Wim Wender's Wings of Desire, Robert Siodmak's Escape from East Berlin and Billy Wilder's frantic One, Two, Three, broke the city in two. The work of Leni Riefenstahl gained a geographical dimension, as did the Mabuse films of Lang. I was awestruck the first years, and that feeling has never left me.

The festival today has lost none of its political bite, but it has switched its focus: now it is the Middle East, the global world and budding national cinemas. The curators for its key sections - Competition, Forum, Panorama and retrospective - pick up trends, discover directors and films, mixing the old and the new.

In the first two days of this 59th edition, Claude Chabrol, Bertrand Tavernier, Francois Ozon (what's with the French this year?!) have shown their latest work, alongside with younger yet to be discovered directors. More to come about this in the next days.

The only "traumatic" thing at the Berlinale is the number of films I invariably miss. With luck, I see four or five a day. Which over ten days, doesn't even begin to approach the 400 and something the festival offers each edition. In the late nineties, I saw every film connected to perestroika and glasnost, but I failed to catch Marina Goldovskaya's key documentary Solovki Power. Little did I know at the time, that our UCLA Film Department would be enriched by having her as a filmmaking professor.

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http://www.tft.ucla.edu/profiles/community/berlinale-09/