Yearly Archives: 2010

Features

Kitanos and Takeshis’

Takeshis

Format: Cinema

Date: 12 February 2010

Venue: Curzon Renoir, London

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Takeshi Kitano

Writer: Takeshi Kitano

Alternative title: Fractal

Cast: Takeshi Kitano, Kotomi Kyôno, Kayoko Kishimoto, Tetsu Watanabe

Japan 2005

108 mins

Ever since his feature debut with Violent Cop (1989) 20 years ago, the cinema of Takeshi Kitano has been dominated by the director’s alter ego, ‘Beat’ Takeshi. This is the nickname under which Kitano became famous as a comedian in Japan in the 1970s (as part of a stand-up double act called the Two Beats, so called because of the future filmmaker’s love of jazz music) and thereafter as an infamous radio and television host. It was a convenient means of demarcating a lowbrow celebrity persona from an ambitious and multi-talented creative artist, and Kitano has retained the name for his acting credit in every film in which he has appeared, so that ‘Beat’ Takeshi has become in effect the face of Kitano’s cinema, acting as the director’s surrogate or substitute. As the US critic Kent Jones has noted: ‘the special kick of Kitano’s films… is the man himself. In the distinguished history of actor-directors, he stands alone’.

Such is the singular nature of Kitano’s stardom – his (national) popularity as an irreverent television personality against his (international) status as a serious filmmaker – that it should come as little surprise that he has himself recently turned his attention to the specificity of his multifaceted artistry. His last three films, each of which is variously concerned with the theme of substitution, have all been defined by their exploration of aspects of Kitano’s own stardom, or at least critical and popular perceptions thereof. Most recently, Achilles and the Tortoise (2008) examined the artistic face of Kitano and his lack of popular acceptance in Japan through the serio-comic life story of a painter forever out of step with modern trends and practices (Kitano has been an avid painter for over 10 years). Before this, Glory to the Filmmaker! (2007) offered a playful, Fellini-esque satirical vision of Kitano as a director whose career has stalled and who cannot settle on his next project. In the guise of a faux documentary, Glory to the Filmmaker! becomes pointedly concerned with ‘Beat’ Takeshi. Indeed, seemingly unbeknownst to the characters around him, he is sporadically substituted in the narrative by a life-size Kitano doll (replete with puppeteers when necessary), a comedic device that underlines the extent to which ‘Beat’ Takeshi is taken for granted as part of the furniture of a Kitano film.

It is, however, the first in this series of what Kitano has self-deprecatingly called his ‘auto-destruct’ cinema that is most thoroughly concerned with the vagaries of Kitano and ‘Beat’ Takeshi, and the particular nature of substitution at their heart. Takeshis’, Kitano’s twelfth film, is given a belated theatrical release in the UK (over four years after its notoriously unsuccessful premiere as the surprise film at the 2005 Venice Festival) and will shock viewers expecting anything like the popular fare of Zatoichi (2003). Indeed, it has been suggested that Kitano acquiesced to remaking Zatoichi in order to gain the leverage necessary for what he knew would be a personal, commercially unpalatable project, having already proposed it (under the title Fractal) as a follow-up to Sonatine (1993), at which time he was strongly discouraged from making it.

Takeshis’ concerns a TV star named ‘Beat’ Takeshi who encounters his double in the figure of a struggling actor called Mr Kitano. Over the course of an increasingly surreal narrative, built largely around Edgar Allan Poe’s proverbial conception of life as a ‘dream within a dream’, Mr Kitano begins to usurp the position and status of his more famous counterpart, seemingly becoming ‘Beat’ Takeshi to the point where the line between reality and fantasy becomes ever more blurred and difficult to determine.

This most self-reflexive narrative is a culmination of Kitano’s representation of himself, of ‘Beat’ Takeshi, within his cinema, and of its consistent subtext of substitution. This theme is given its fullest expression in Takeshis’, but can be traced back as far as Violent Cop, concerned as Kitano’s first work is with the unmooring of identity in modern, post-economic miracle Japan. The titular detective in this film, as in Kitano’s later international breakthrough film Hana-Bi (1997), moves fluidly from police officer to criminal, one substituting for the other just as the central character in Japan’s other key film from 1989, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, develops from man into machine. These pictures were made on the cusp of seismic social change in Japan. They appeared just as the death of Emperor Hirohito and the beginning of a recession were transforming the country, substituting an enormously different nation whose points of reference, both spiritual and capitalist, were being increasingly eroded.

This sense of identity-in-flux can be seen as a particular facet of ‘Beat’ Takeshi within Kitano’s cinema. In the three films he directed in which he does not appear as an actor – A Scene at the Sea (1991), Kids Return (1996) and Dolls (2002) – the personal trajectories embodied by the youthful protagonists differ markedly. They display ideals of self-betterment through a single-minded commitment (generally to sports; surfing in A Scene at the Sea and boxing in Kids Return) that comes even at the expense of personal relationships. In contrast, the characters played by the director evince no such sense of secure identity developed through action. Rather, like Godard’s outlaw couple in Breathless (1959), their sense of self fluctuates according to each event, with the protagonists’ identity remaining in flux throughout.

In Takeshis’, one ‘Beat’ Takeshi literally substitutes for another in a film about internal and external realities, and about the limits of the very notion of existential identity associated with other ‘Beat’ Takeshi protagonists. The point of the substitution in this narrative is specifically to undermine the defining features of ‘Beat’ Takeshi on film, the important detail being that it is the exterior trappings, the accoutrements, of this character that exclusively determine Mr Kitano’s transformation into him. Initially, his rise in status is characterised exclusively by the guns he takes into his possession in order to practise for a film role. He is then further distinguished by his actions with those guns, such as robbing a bank (something that echoes the protagonist of Hana-Bi); and, like almost all Kitano’s characters, by his retreat to the beach. Finally, Mr Kitano’s transformation is crystallised when his body becomes encoded as the cinematic ‘Beat’ Takeshi: that is, when he engages in a prolonged and comically stylised and exaggerated shoot-out against a multitude of opponents amid a veritable hail of bullets, from which he emerges unscathed.

In this moment of extreme comedy, Mr Kitano takes on the bodily impenetrability of the typical ‘Beat’ Takeshi yakuza character, and with it his metamorphosis is apparently complete. However, the spectre of (often self-inflicted) death always haunts ‘Beat’ Takeshi’s cops and criminals, and here the notion of encoding the body, of make-up and performance, is explored thematically as the essence of substitution. One possible starting point for the dream structure of the film is ‘Beat’ Takeshi falling asleep as he has a yakuza tattoo applied in preparation for a television role. It is returned to later as Mr Kitano, now fully ensconced as a ‘Beat’ Takeshi clone, stabs the TV star, and the knife in the attack becomes the stabbing needles of the tattooist as ‘Beat’ Takeshi wakes from a dream.

In other words, the violent attack by Mr Kitano segues into ‘Beat’ Takeshi being made up (constructed, created, encoded) as the genre figure that he is popularly or primarily known as, with Kitano juxtaposing actual and figurative violence in order to illustrate the harm this figure represents for his career. It is thus redolent of the brutality inflicted on Kitano by commentators who can’t see past violence as a defining feature of his work, who have over-valued and fetishised it out of proportion (the specific parodies of Hana-Bi and Sonatine underline this notion). The theories of the French philosopher Michel Foucault argue that the human body can be regarded as a surface for writing, as a site on which social systems of regulation and control can be marked out and openly displayed. In Takeshis’, ‘Beat’ Takeshi becomes just such a vessel. The yakuza tattoo literally inscribes and codifies his body, just as the views of critics and commentators have figuratively performed the same act of violence against his work, his textual body. From what is, in actuality, a sign of imagined completion and belonging to a bigger body, that of the strictly ordered brotherhood of the yakuza, this image becomes, for ‘Beat’ Takeshi, a stain on his identity, an exterior mark of interior decay.

Doppelgänger fiction has been reasonably prevalent in Japanese cinema. Akira Kurosawa’s overt substitute narrative Kagemusha (1980), Shinya Tsukamoto’s Gemini (1999) and Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s Doppelgänger (2003) are only the most evident examples predating Takeshis’. Kitano follows Akira Kurosawa and foregrounds the subtext of substitution as it is inherent in a majority of doppelgänger narratives (not only cinematic: Dostoevsky’s The Double, Nabokov’s Despair and José Saramago’s The Double are all about the terror of an individual replaced in the world or the potential liberation of replacing someone else). By relating the idea to his own work and screen image, Kitano introduces the idea of performance and the commodification of the artist – the promulgation of copies or clones that take on their own life in discourse on art and the artist. Like Orson Welles’s art forgery essay and magician’s fable F for Fake (1974), in which the director derides the status of art in the marketplace as an entity given a seal of originality and commercial value by bearing the approved stamp of its artist creator, Takeshis’ sees Kitano lamenting the brand he has become. It imagines, in the aforementioned knife attack, the violence inherent in the substitution of an artist with his/her creation, but also the ease with which this can happen: ‘Beat’ Takeshi over Takeshi Kitano.

Adam Bingham

This article was first published in the summer 09 issue of Electric Sheep Magazine, which explored the idea of substitute in cinema.
Reel Sounds

Reel Sounds: Unsynched Rhythms – George Antheil’s Le Ballet mécanique

Le Ballet mécanique

George Antheil, the pistol-wielding, self-styled ‘bad boy’ of the European branch of the Roaring Twenties avant-garde composed Le Ballet mécanique in 1924. Scored for eight pianos, eight xylophones, pianola, two electric doorbells and an aeroplane propeller, it was scratched out in the context of post-WWI technological and sensorial momentum. When art either looked askance or fluttered its eyelashes coquettishly at the pyschotropic dimensions of the world. A world perceived from a multiplicity of angles, far away and at high speed. Mechanised warfare, aviation, railways, automobiles, skyscrapers, telephones, super mass production, jazz, radio, cinema, futurism, cubism, dada, surrealism, Duchamp and all manner of post-traumatic stress disorder freak-outs. Antheil would have adored the Heathrow Express.

Antheil’s score was originally commissioned to accompany Fernand Léger’s film of the same title, shot by Man Ray, but it was twice as long and could never be synchronised with it. The only commonality the two works have is, seemingly, their title. Léger’s film flickers like an ashen moth in a lethargic strobe light. Antheil’s score has the quality of a combustion engine with brass fittings and a modicum of grease.

In 2000, technological advances allowed Paul Lehrman to combine an edited version of the original score with the film. This version appears on the DVD box-set Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941 released by Image Entertainment in October 2005.

A bombastic, belligerent, percussive work, vulgar in its way, formed from a lattice of insistency. Xylophone and the hi-frequency linear vibrations of doorbells evoke a mirage of movement that lances through the dense mahogany clusters and churnings of mass piano vamps. Vamps that chase linear rhythms like Keystone Kops in pursuit of a villain.

As a quaint anthropomorphic fantasy of mechanic frenzy, an homage to the resilience and persistence and oppression of advanced capitalist production, it is indeed quite witty. It certainly wouldn’t be out of place accompanying a Keaton catastrophe or, as mentioned, a Keystone caper. In terms of composition and arrangement, if you’re looking for comparisons, Antheil’s piece is closer to Sabre Dance by Aram Khachaturian than Varèse, Russolo, Cowell, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg or any other important modernist composer. It’s rather weak tea to Léger’s biscuit too, best not to dunk.

Richard Thomas

Short Cuts

Short Cuts: 7th London Short Film Festival

Con Moto

7th London Short Film Festival

8-17 January 2010

Various venues, London

LSFF website

‘It’s only fucking rock and roll’. After considered soul-searching and philosophical ponderings, Noel Gallagher’s Mancunian drawl brought proceedings down to earth with a sharp bump, stifled laughter rippling around the Roxy Bar and Screen. One of the London Short Film Festival’s many events combining music and film, the 65-minute documentary, Introspective (2006), was a captivating exploration of definitions: musicians struggling to define themselves, as individuals, among their contemporary peers, and within a complex sprawl of musical genres and history. While this type of quandary might not keep Noel Gallagher awake at night, fortunately there were plenty more thoughtful voices to discuss what the term ‘post-rock’ really means. A simple, low-fi mix of interviews and performances by bands associated with the movement, Adam Garriga’s documentary presented the audience with important dilemmas facing all artists in an age of information overload: how to come up with something original when it feels as if everything has been done before; and how to escape pigeon-holing while being indentified. The interviewees were an analytical, critical and engaging bunch, as they tried to find the words to define their art and their own place within the world. One of the more eloquent speakers, Jan St Werner from Mouse on Mars complained about the media trying to categorise and file bands: ‘our work is our definition,’ he explained. Ending with an eerily beautiful live performance of Low’s ‘(That’s How We Sing) Amazing Grace’, the film proved that words and definitions are not always necessary or able to do artworks justice.

The London Short Film Festival happily followed this dictum throughout its own programming. And this was nowhere better displayed than at the Leftfield and Luscious screening. The shorts compiled into this enigmatically titled programme defied categorisation, lying somewhere between video art and art-house cinema. Such assorted misshapes are usually left out in the cold or side-lined so it was nice to see them taking centre stage for a packed-out screening at the ICA.

As two ghostly figures appeared on screen, shrouded by mist and ethereal strings and saws, it was clear that this was going to be an interesting afternoon. While at times the programme felt a little long and films occasionally missed the mark, most offered memorable moments and arresting images and some were really very special. Generally, it was those that tried to marry conventional linear narratives with more intangible, obscure forms that worked least well. The dialogue rested heavily and awkwardly in these films, making you wish the filmmaker had dispensed with the everyday altogether and just let the visuals speak for themselves.

Toby Tatum’s painterly short, The Sealed World, which started the screening, presented two women cut off in an over-grown, secluded garden. Here, everyday activities become hyper-ritualised with girls deliberating, obsessing over books, pouring tea and, most bizarre of all, fondant fancies. This otherworldly, haunting quality was apparent across many of the selected films: from Conversation, a series of slowed-down, theatrical facial expressions that spiralled into increasingly abstract forms; to We Only Talk at Night, with its compositions of hypnotic pulsating city lights. Layered images, split screens and disjointed soundtracks were popular as filmmakers experimented and pushed at their media. For me, the most successful films were the ones that seemed to enjoy the possibilities of film – shorts that were happy being shorts and filmmakers who were happy working with film.

The programme was at its best with joyful celebrations of rhythm. Most straightforward, Sam Firth’s I.D. created a mischievous montage of photo booth pictures cataloguing teenage posturing and chameleon hairstyles while Max Hattler’s Aanaatt presented an endlessly mobile sequence of animated Bauhaus-style shapes and compositions. Magnus Irvin’s Spiral In Spiral Out also centred on geometric forms as drawn spirals expanded and increased, recalling early scientific films demonstrating the multiplication of microscopic organisms. The stand-out works of the programme were two shorts – Con Moto and Without You – by Tal Rosner, who won the festival award within this category. His kaleidoscopic visions of architectural views and receding countryside shot from racing train windows demonstrate the excitement that arises when music and film combine successfully. With a dynamism similar to Léger’s Le Ballet mécanique, Con Moto‘s interpretation of Stravinsky’s 1935 Concerto for Two Pianos provided a fantastic seven minutes of cinematic vitality. An exceedingly happy marriage between music and film, which spoke for itself.

Eleanor McKeown

Watch Tal Rosner’s Con Moto:

Alter Ego

Alter Ego: Ken Hollings is Astro Boy

Astro Boy

Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work appears in a wide range of publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor Journal, Frieze and Nude, and in the anthologies The Last Sex, Digital Delirium, Undercurrents and London Noir. His novel Destroy All Monsters was hailed by The Scotsman as ‘a mighty slab of trippy, cult, out-there fiction’. His latest book, Welcome to Mars: Fantasies of Science and the American Century, has been praised by celebrated documentary maker Adam Curtis: ‘Ken Hollings shows brilliantly how the extraordinary web of technologies that drove the Cold War has shaped not just our culture but the very way we think of ourselves as human beings.’ It is available from Strange Attractor Press. For more information please visit Ken Hollings’s blog. Below, he tells us why he would be Astro Boy if he was a film character.

‘I’ve defeated the saucers. The robots won’t come anymore.’

Astro Boy takes on men, monsters and machines – and wins. He has this special smile on his face whenever he comes in to land: so self-contained and filled with happy anticipation. I want to be a machine and live in the future – just like him.

‘A robot has the same right to fight for justice. Captain, stand up and fight.’

Innocent, honest, trusting and brave, Astro Boy is a true marvel of tomorrow. He can speak over 60 different languages and sense whether people have good or evil intentions, smash solid steel with his bare fists and has the most unbelievably cute eyes. ‘He flies in the sky and goes round the universe,’ proclaimed the original Astro Boy march. ‘He is mighty, gentle and the fruit of scientific technology.’ He is a robot and proud of it. To have the same pride in being human seems a real challenge by comparison.

‘I hear that humans were created by God.’

Astro Boy first appeared in the sci-fi comic strip Ambassador Atom created by ‘god of manga’ Osamu Tezuka. Astro proved so popular that he was given his own series. Begun in 1952, Tetsuwan Atom – his original Japanese name, meaning ‘Mighty Atom’ – would run for 17 years, establishing its robot hero as a benign cultural emissary from the future both in Japan and abroad. Somehow atomic fission didn’t seem so menacing when you knew it was controlled by the heart-shaped nuclear reactor concealed within his chest.

Read our interview with Osamu Tezuka.

‘There is no difference between humans and robots.’

With an electronic brain, atomic engines in his feet, powerful searchlights concealed behind his big wide eyes and a 100,000 horsepower punch, Astro Boy lives in a 21st-century city of skyscrapers and rockets, jet cars and factories. He is also the mechanical reincarnation of a dead child, the neglected son of a scientist reborn as a robot on April 7, 2003. He will always be the future we never had.

Ken Hollings

Ken Hollings

audio Listen to the podcast: Alex Fitch talks to animé expert Helen McCarthy about the work of manga and animé pioneer Osamu Tezuka.

Film Jukebox

Film Jukebox: Lightspeed Champion

Lightspeed Champion - photo by David Swanson

‘Life Is Sweet! Nice to Meet You’ is Dev Hynes’s second outing as Lightspeed Champion since the demise of the lauded indie punk outfit Test Icicles. He manages to eschew the Americana leanings of his previous album ‘Falling Off the Lavender Bridge’ in favour of a richer sound drawing inspiration from classical music, 70s rock and French standards. Now residing in New York City, Dev’s interests extend way beyond just music. A fanatical blogger and writer of short stories, he has co-written a comic book with his girlfriend, graphic designer Nicole Michalek. He also is an avid film fan and below he tells Electric Sheep about his 10 favourite movies. You can find out more about the movies he doesn’t like in his blog ‘the world’s worst movies’ (as voted by IMDB). The album ‘Life Is Sweet! Nice to Meet You’ is out on 15 February 2010. The EP ‘Marlene’ (2×7”) is out now and features a cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s ’69 Année érotique’. More information on Lightspeed Champion’s website and on Domino Records. LUCY HURST

1. After Hours (1985)
In this film directed by Scorsese, Griffin Dunne plays a bank worker who decides to go for a night out in Soho, NY. It all goes wrong, and all he wants to do is go home, but he can’t! This movie is a beautiful exaggeration of a night we’ve all had!

2. The Crush (1993)
Cary Elwes looks incredible in this film, it’s like ‘MTV does drama’, which of course makes it amazing. Alicia Silverstone is so evil in her seduction of Cary Elwes’s character and the ending is surprisingly dark: ‘he thought it was just a crush… he was dead wrong!’

3. The Room (2003)
I don’t even know what I can say about this movie. Vanity project gone wrong, which in turn, goes right? Tommy Wissau is a mystery man, he supposedly spent $7 million on this forewarning about a woman cheating on her lover (his best friend). I’ve probably seen this film 40 times within the last year and every time it just gets better and a lot more bizarre.

4. Three 0’Clock High (1987)
This is the story of Jerry Mitchell, a young boy who accidentally makes enemies with Buddy Revell, the new bully in town. Buddy promises the demise of the young protagonist as soon as the school bell rings at 3 o’clock. To me, this is one of the best films the 80s had to offer for teenagers!

5. Legal Eagles (1986)
This Ivan Reitman comedy courtroom drama stars Robert Redford, Debra Winger and Daryl Hannah in a complicated love triangle. Interestingly enough, the film has different endings depending on where you viewed it. For example, in the cinema version Daryl Hannah is found innocent, yet on TV she is found guilty – but of a different murder!

6. Planet of the Apes (1968)
Man, I wish I spoke like Charlton Heston does in this film. Every line he delivers is truly ludicrous and magnificent at the same time. You can’t really beat this film.

7. La Planète sauvage (1973)
This French animation by René Laloux is the greatest cartoon ever made. The soundtrack by Alain Goraguer is the greatest soundtrack of all time and quite possibly the reason I play music!!

Read our article on René Laloux.

8. Zabriskie Point (1970)
Supposedly Antonioni’s critique of America, this film is full of amazingly outdated hippy dialogue, but as soon as the action moves to Death Valley, it becomes truly beautiful.

9. Todd Rundgren: The Ever Popular Tortured Artist Effect (1983)
Fake documentary, music interview and life story written and directed by Todd Rundgren. Before its time and completely bat shit crazy. If you’re a screen grabber such as myself, this is like pure gold!

10. The 5000 Fingers of Dr T (1953)
The scariest kids’ film of all time? Most definitely. A kid drifts off into a fantasy world where his piano tutor is an evil mastermind controlling a huge prison facility forcing kids to learn the piano. Dr Seuss actually designed the set himself, wrote the songs and wrote the script, making it the only movie based on his work that he was involved in. Try to track down ‘The Elevator Song’, it still gives me chills!

Watch Lightspeed Champion talk about comic books..
Interviews

Thirst: Interview with Park Chan-wook

Thirst

Format: DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 25 January 2010

Distributor: Palisades Tartan

Director: Park Chan-wook

Writers: Jeong Seo-kyung, Park Chan-wook

Original title: Bakjwi

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Kim Ok-vin, Shin Ha-kyun

South Korea 2009

133 minutes

Best known for his disturbing revenge drama Oldboy (2003), Park Chan-wook‘s latest film Thirst, now released on DVD, is a subversive and original take on the vampire genre. Sophie Moran sat down with the director during the Korean Film Festival in November 09 to talk about priests, vampires, desire and revenge.

Sophie Moran: In classic horror films, priests and vampires are enemies by nature. What gave you the idea to turn one into the other?

Park Chan-wook: It goes back to my childhood memories. In the Catholic Church, a priest drinks red wine as a symbol for the blood of Christ, and in a way this always reminded me of vampirism. I actually wonder why nobody had thought of this before [laughs].

SM: Thirst is not only a twisted vampire love story, but also a thriller, a horror film and a black comedy with a touch of film noir. How difficult was it for you to write the script?

PCW: I’d been planning Thirst for about 10 years, but I didn’t work on it consistently. For a long time I had only two scenes written. One is the scene in the beginning when the priest is being transfused with vampire blood, thereby becoming a vampire himself. The other was the scene in which the woman he falls in love with becomes a vampire too. That was it until I came across Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin. I loved the style of the book, the fact that it’s not romantic or sentimental, which was similar to the approach I had in mind for this film. So, the book inspired me to start working properly on the script and to eventually make the film.

SM: Thirst offers a unique take on the vampire genre, and I wonder if there is a vampire myth in Korea that has influenced you?

PCW: I’m not an expert on Korean folklore, but as far as I’m aware, there is no vampire myth in Korea. The Korean title of the film is ‘bat’, which symbolises vampires in the Western world, and it’s the stories about characters like Count Dracula that constitute some sort of modern vampire myth in Korean culture today. I wanted to tell the story of a character who doesn’t belong to one world but who is torn between these two different worlds, and about the dilemmas that creates. Sang-hyun, the main character, is not just a vampire but also a priest, who wants to do something good but gets caught up in a twist of fate. He loses his ability to control his desires, but he is still trying to hold on to his identity as a priest, as well as grappling with his new identity as a vampire. And I wanted to create a story that deals with this dilemma of identity.

SM: On top of his own personal dilemma, Sang-hyun falls in love with Tae-ju, the wife of an old friend. In fact, barring the horror elements that come into play, the film feels primarily like a love story.

PCW: Yes, from the very beginning it was always going to be a love story. I never conceived the film as a horror movie, and therefore I put in the most effort trying to develop the story between the two main characters. I spent a lot of time ‘shaping’ Tae-ju’s character and trying to find the right actress who would fit in perfectly with the two male leads, and who would have the right chemistry with Sang-hyun. Of course, I can’t deny the fact that there are scenes and elements in the film that you would associate more directly with the horror genre. But these sequences are built into the story to serve as a hurdle or an obstacle to the romantic relationship between Tae-ju and Sang-hyun. So the horror elements exist to function in that way. But in the end, the last shot shows two burnt feet in that old pair of shoes from an earlier scene, which is probably the most romantic scene in the film. The film comes back to the pair of shoes as a symbol of their love finally coming together, and their two bodies becoming one.

SM: Your previous film, I’m a Cyborg, also dealt with love, but in a very gentle way. In Thirst, the love scenes seem rather harsh and cold.

PCW: I decided to remove all the romance and clichés that classic love stories are based on because in Thirst I wanted to explore the real side of love. I mean the fact that love can give one not only the strength to survive, but that one can also achieve something through love, and that, to some extent, love is always selfish.

SM: Although the film has a more realistic approach to the notion of love, it seems that there has been a shift from your revenge trilogy to more fantastical stories.

PCW: I have to agree that in the course of my films the fantastical or surreal elements have become more prominent. Since Thirst is by nature a vampire film, it cannot but have such fantasy elements in it. But at the same time, for a vampire film this is probably the most realistic vampire film that you can find. And this duality is what I like most about this film. In Thirst, fantasies and realism are fundamentally in conflict with one another.

SM: You said earlier that Tae-ju’s character was very important to you from the beginning in regard to her relation with the male leads. Did you also think about how Tae-ju’s dubious character, and her own emotional journey, would be perceived by Korean female audiences while you were developing the story?

PCW: Her character may be seen as some sort of comment on contemporary society to female audiences in Korea, but I didn’t intend anything like this while I was writing the script. The idea of imprisonment within a family or a household is already found in Thérèse Raquin. It’s a story about a person who is trapped within these boundaries and who feels very much suffocated by the way the household is ruled by the mother and the husband. I wanted to explore that idea further on an existential level. But if you look at the terrible actions that Tae-ju takes as a vampire, for example, you have to consider the whole personality of this character who is as innocent as a child in a way. Children can be very cruel, for instance, when they play with small animals or insects. They tear them apart and rip off their wings and so forth. But they don’t realise that what they are doing is cruel. They don’t understand what they are doing but still, to us their actions are violent. It’s in that sort of context that you have to see her actions as a vampire. At the same time, this might come across to the audience as emancipation or liberation for the female character, but it was never intended as such.

SM: What relates Sang-hyun to the main characters in your revenge trilogy?

PCW: All these characters are haunted souls in a way. In Thirst, the desire for blood and the desire for sex are connected, but ultimately it’s a matter of life and death, and the drive for survival. And revenge is just a different desire in this context. We all dream of vengeance sometimes, and it is something that stimulates our fantasies, something we need for our own personal well-being. At the same time, in real life revenge is not honourable. But if we don’t give vent to our feelings, our desire for it increases proportionally towards those who offended us. It’s that kind of inner conflict that interests me. These characters attempt to take responsibility for the decisions they make. Things may not always turn out well for them, but because they are at least trying to account for the consequences of their actions, they are able to achieve some sort of integrity after all.

SM: Do you consider yourself a moral filmmaker?

PCW: I don’t see myself as a moral filmmaker, and I don’t like categorising myself. I am just very interested in characters who try to take responsibility for the results of their actions. I think this is what I’m trying to deal with in my films.

Interview by Sophie Moran

Read film reviews of Thirst and I’m a Cyborg, short discussions of Oldboy and Lady Vengeance and our earlier interview with Park Chan-wook for I’m a Cyborg.

Short Cuts

Tateshots: Childish rules

Billy Childish

Photo: Billy Childish
©Tate Media

TateShots

Release date: 21 January 2010

Watch on TateShots Website or download from iTunes.

TateShots is an ongoing podcast series produced by Tate Modern, and the latest six films in the series investigate the links between music and visual art through interviews with musicians who are also artists. Even though they’ve been well-researched and curated, watching five-minute podcast films on a cinema screen is disconcerting. Because the podcasts are meant to be watched in short online bursts, teased out over a few weeks, the artists are asked many of the same questions. This probably helps give the segments cohesion when watched in chunks over time, but it grates when all are watched in one sitting. The Flip Cam wobbles of some interviews sit uneasily with archive footage, concert images, and extracts from other interviews shot from many angles, with tricksier shots. (The series is funded by big media corporation Bloomberg so it’s hard to tell if the low-budget feel of some of the filming came from financial limitations or was a deliberate choice to replicate a YouTube DIY aesthetic.)

The artists interviewed – Lydia Lunch, David Byrne, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Billy Childish, Jeffrey Lewis, and Mark E Smith – are all safe choices. Most of these artists came of age during punk and post-punk (with the exception of Lewis, whose work owes such a stylistic debt to Daniel Johnston that he might as well have done). All are established as having been cool. But what about some interviews with musician-artists whose work in one or both fields is a bit naff, or awkward, or embarrassing? It might have been more interesting to hear someone like Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes, say, talking about his collection of sexy Polaroids.

What we get is a lot of talk about art school experimentation and subversion in the 1970s, which is fine – but it’s nothing new or unexpected, and not terribly illuminating. Shock has an increasingly short half-life. For Lydia Lunch to explain how she loves Goya’s devils or Duchamp’s Etant Donnés (an installation that lets viewers look through peepholes in a barn door to see a faceless naked woman) will surprise no one. Though she gives an intelligent and impassioned explanation of her choices, her segment makes those works, and the dark, violent sexuality of her songs, all seem oddly quaint.

Mark E Smith, on the other hand, sinks into self-parody in his segment. He talks about painters who work while listening to his music, and about hitting Damien Hirst in the face at a long-ago Fall gig. Mostly he’s just swinging a bottle of beer around, picking his nose and gurning like the old drunk priest in Father Ted. His segment will probably go viral because it’s so obnoxious – and good for the Tate if it can trawl some hits in with this for bait.

Billy Childish’s film is the standout of the bunch. Childish dresses in his onstage clothes and in an exaggerated painter’s smock and neck scarf so that the ‘artist’ and ‘musician’ can interview each other, and both characters play with the questions, pulling faces while joking about the Beatles, punk and Edvard Munch. He’s funny and charming, and his interview shows what the format can do. If the series continues, the curators would do well to try more such experiments.

Emily Bick

This TateShots series of films can be watched on the TateShots Website or downloaded from iTunes from 21 January 2010.

Interviews

Extreme Private Eros: Interview with Kazuo Hara

Extreme Private Eros

Sheffield DocFest

4-8 November 2009

Sheffield

Extreme Private Eros showed on 6 November 2009

Sheffield DocFest website

Although the Japanese director Kazuo Hara has insisted that he is anything but a political filmmaker, his 1974 documentary Extreme Private Eros (Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974) remains a fascinating snapshot of Japanese society at a time of transition. An account of the life of Hara’s ex-lover, Miyuki Takeda – a feminist who relocated to Okinawa and entered into a lesbian relationship with a bar hostess before becoming pregnant following a fling with an African-American soldier – Hara’s film directly addresses such issues as sexual liberation and racial discrimination. Extreme Private Eros was potentially inflammatory when first shown in Hara’s homeland and strict censorship laws regarding on-screen genitalia forced the director to recoup his production budget over an extended period by charging admission for private screenings. He would not complete another film until 1987: The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On won awards at major festivals such as Berlin and Rotterdam, and earned the admiration of Errol Morris, the American director of The Thin Blue Line. Hara is now firmly ensconced in academia, teaching documentary filmmaking at the University of Osaka, but he recently attended the Sheffield DocFest to introduce a screening of Extreme Private Eros. John Berra met with him to discuss his landmark work and the fascinating female personality at its centre.

John Berra: You witnessed the explosion of the Japanese New Wave in the 1960s; were you influenced or inspired by the films of Shohei Imamura and Nagisa Ôshima?

Kazuo Hara: At that time in Japan, after the war, lots of young people tried to achieve power by rebelling against the government. I grew up in that era and I went to see those films to support that ideology and contribute to changing the government. Nagisa Ôshima and Shohei Imamura had made documentary films before me, but all their films showed how normal Japanese people did not have power, that they were struggling and controlled by the government. I thought that there must be a way to change that view, the idea that normal people are weak; I didn’t want to show the weakness, I wanted to show the strength of the people.

JB: Miyuki exhibits a powerful personality but also a very vulnerable side. She is contradictory in that she does not need anybody but also needs to be with someone in order to feel special. Did you see her as being particularly representative of a certain generation of Japanese women?

KH: She was very representative of Japanese women at that time, especially those who were involved in student activities. But she had more charisma than other women, she was stranger, you could not say she was ‘normal’, although she does represent a time of change for Japanese women.

JB: There is a disturbing moment after the birth of Miyuki’s child when she gives the news to her mother over the telephone, and her mother asks how ‘dark’ the baby is, and if she is going to ‘keep it’. Was her relationship with the African-American solider a political act?

KH: Miyuki was always interested in the power of lower-class people, which is why she went to Okinawa and lived in the prostitution area. There were army camps there, and black soldiers would come into that area, but she did not intend to have a black boyfriend at that point. One day, she became ill, and one soldier was really kind to her, so she spent the night with him. Their relationship only lasted three weeks, and she did not think she would have a baby with him, she just wanted an experience. Miyuki was very nervous when she spoke to her mother after giving birth. Her family were not very supportive but Miyuki was very much against racial discrimination in Japan and wanted to fight that aspect of society.

JB: When was the film first shown in Japan and did you experience any censorship problems?

KH: It was first shown in 1974. It was a big film in Japan that year because it was a shocking, self-portrait film, so a lot of people came to see it. At that time, the Japanese censorship law was that if you filmed someone’s private area, you would be arrested if you tried to show that film in the theatre. But because I had made the film myself, I could hire a venue and show it privately, which was not illegal. That’s how I was able to get past the censors. Some of the money for the film came from university research departments and friends, but we did get into debt making it. We were able to gradually pay back the money we had spent making the film by charging admission for these private showings, but it took three to five years to pay back the debt.

JB: When the child is born, there are a few minutes when it seems that he could be stillborn. How were you able to continue filming during what must have been a very distressing experience?

KH: The way the birth is presented in the film makes it seem very quick, but it actually took 12 hours. My mind became very cold, I was just a director, I was thinking about the film and nothing else.

JB: Before Miyuki leaves Okinawa, she makes a pamphlet and hands it out. What kind of statement was she trying to make with this material?

KH: In the film, it seems that she does not like Okinawa, but actually she loves Okinawa; like me, she is from the mainland and Okinawa is very different, with a lot of discrimination. When mainland people go to Okinawa, we can’t get into that society, even if we try, and it’s the same for people from Okinawa who go to the mainland, even more so in that era. Even though Miyuki loved Okinawa, she could not be in perfect harmony there, so the pamphlet was her love song to Okinawa, she wanted to leave something.

JB: What has happened to Miyuki and her son in the past 30 years?

KH: For about five years after I finished filming, Miyuki stayed in a commune, living with other women and their children; but Japan was still very conservative and mixed race kids, especially half-black, half-Japanese kids, were not accepted. The boy wasn’t happy at all so they decided to put him up for adoption and now he is very happy in America.

JB: Extreme Private Eros captures a very particular period of your life. How did you respond to the film when watching it at today’s screening?

KH: I did not watch the film today. I can’t watch it anymore; it’s too embarrassing, I was too young.

Interview by John Berra

Interviews

Exam: Interview with Stuart Hazeldine

Exam

Format: Cinema

Release date: 8 January 2010

Venue: key cities

Distributor: Hazeldine Films/Miracle

Director: Stuart Hazeldine

Writers: Simon Garrity, Stuart Hazeldine

Cast: Luke Mabby, Adar Beck, Nathalie Cox, John Lloyd Fillingham, Jimi Mistry

UK 2009

85 mins

Known until now for his work as a Hollywood scriptwriter, Stuart Hazeldine is making his directorial debut with Exam, a tight, suspenseful low-budget thriller. In what seems like the near-future, eight short-listed applicants looking to secure a job in a big pharmaceutical company are locked in a high-tech room to take their final test of the interview process. An intimidating invigilator reads out a set of instructions that they must follow or be disqualified. They have 80 minutes in which to find one answer to one question. But when they turn over the papers, they are blank: they have to find the question first. Unfolding in quasi-real time, the film observes the group dynamics and the different reactions of the characters in a pressured environment. Virginie Sélavy interviewed writer/director Stuart Hazeldine on the occasion of Exam‘s screening at the Raindance Film Festival in October 09.

Virginie Sélavy: You’ve been working as a scriptwriter until now, is that right?

Stuart Hazeldine: I’ve been selling scripts since 1995. I started very young as an action writer, then I became mainly known as a sci-fi guy. I’ve just been working on Milton’s Paradise Lost with Scott Derrickson, so now I’m moving into different areas like religious fantasy/sci-fi (laughs). It’s the old predictable story: some things turn out like you imagine, other things turn out differently, and you just want the opportunity to put your vision on film and have the whole of your ideas out there instead of people cherry-picking them.

VS: Is that why you decided to direct your first film?

SH: I’d been planning to direct since I was 19. I never liked the idea of a writer going on to direct out of frustration. But directing takes a lot longer to get into, so writing was my route into making films. I felt that the story is the foundation of every movie, so I wanted to get very good at building foundations before directing. I don’t regret doing that, but you can very easily get sucked into just scriptwriting when you’re being paid well. Thankfully, I have good relationships with a couple of genre directors. I’ve worked with Alex Proyas four times now. I’ve just done an adaptation of a BBC sci-fi trilogy from the 60s called The Tripods with him. It’s something that both Alex and I grew up with and were fans of. I like having repeat business with directors who I think have got talent. You may not make a great movie every time, but you are more likely to, and I’ve been able to learn from them. It took longer than I expected to direct something of my own. But I financed the film myself, so I was saving up money and looking for an idea that could be done very cheaply.

VS: Was it your choice to self-finance or was it because it is difficult to find funding?

SH: I always planned to self-finance it. Everybody always tells you that you should never put your own money into a film, so I quite liked the idea of ignoring that rule. I thought, well, if you shouldn’t put money into your film, who should? I think the idea is that studios make money by spread-betting on 10 or 20 films. But if you can control the risk, and if you are in a rare position where you can actually make the film you want, then I think it’s not a bad thing to do. I figured the idea for Exam had a commercial hook: you have young, ambitious, good-looking ABC1 personalities stuck in a room to take an Apprentice-style test in a near-future environment where there are huge stakes. The one thing they’re not prepared for is nothing – they’re not prepared for no guidance, no question. It’s a commercial hook but it’s also philosophically interesting. You think they’ll be good at team work, at taking the initiative, at writing an essay on why they should be hired, but what happens when very structured, driven people are given no guidance and suddenly they have to think in a very lateral way? What would that do to their different psyches? And on a macro level, life itself is a blank piece of paper, so what do you project onto that blank piece of paper?

VS: How did you create the different characters? Were you influenced by reality TV?

SH: I have to confess I don’t watch reality TV. I think if I did, I’d watch The Apprentice because I could watch it without feeling too dirty afterwards. I think that show and Dragon’s Den are interesting because they’re about business and the contestants have some talent. In Exam, I started with the most obvious character confrontation, which is the one between the characters of White and Black. White is essentially a social Darwinist, this sort of wide boy trader who simply believes in the survival of the fittest and sees the test in that way; Black is someone who believes that everyone should work together as a team, and he draws that from his religious principles. That was like the midnight position and the six on the clock, and then I started trying to fill in the other characters. It started out as a short film script, which originally had six out of the eight characters in it. It had Brunette, who was competing for leadership of the team with White. Deaf became a bigger character in the final feature draft. He started out as someone who was a little bit more of a mad philosopher, someone who seemed to have been pushed over the edge, but maybe had some extra insight. In the feature draft, I added Brown and Dark, the gambler and the psychologist. Dark thinks that the answer is all about human behaviour and relationships and can read the other characters in the room, whereas Brown is the poker player who won’t show you his cards until he’s ready to strike. So in a way, he’s as much of a social Darwinist as White is, but White isn’t self-aware whereas Brown is. I like the fact that Brown likes the chaos. When White says, ‘they’re playing with us’, Brown says, ‘great, isn’t it?’ He’s still determined to win but he’s not scared of what’s going on.

VS: Exam is a modern take on the locked room mystery. Is that something you wanted to explore?

SH: I wanted it to have a bit of the locked room, a bit of the morality play, a bit of Jean-Paul Sartre, a little bit of everything (laughs). I was trying to mix it all up but I wasn’t trying to go after too many influences too consciously, otherwise it becomes an homage and nothing else. I like works that have a lot of levels, like in Shakespeare: there’s something in it for the smarter people who care to look for it, and there’s also the grave digger’s scene in Hamlet with lots of humour for the masses. That’s what I tried to do – I don’t know if I’ve succeeded! (laughs)

VS: There have been a few films that have been trying to reinvent that locked room set-up, like Cube or Fermat’s Room…

SH: Yes, and The Killing Room this year as well. I think it’s an interesting genre. I missed Fermat’s Room, but from what I could tell, it seemed more coldly intelligent than Exam because it is about mathematicians. I wanted to have a universal scenario that people would relate to so I thought a job interview would work. Somebody who saw the film early on called it ‘the Wachowski Brothers meet Harold Pinter’, which I thought was great and wanted to steal for the poster! (laughs). I like examining human nature and what happens when different philosophies of life, or extremes of altruism and selfishness, come up against one another. So for me, the one-room-ness of it was largely just about being able to finance it. I like the idea of creating a microcosm of the world, which is what the exam room is. It’s about why we are here.

VS: There is no indication of the time in which the film is set, but the harsh-looking, high-tech room makes it feel like it is set in the near-future. It seems like a world very close to ours, but not quite ours, which gives the film a certain strangeness. Was that the sort of effect you wanted to achieve?

SH: I like the idea of leaving it up to people, to make the film accessible. Science fiction often has a problem. People who love science fiction really love it, but people who don’t will avoid even if it’s got something to say to them. So I didn’t want Exam to be too exclusive. There was an earlier version of the script that was more sci-fi and some of the concepts that were being discussed were about nanotechnology and other things that I’m interested in, but I realised that some people wouldn’t be, so I stripped them out. It was the same with the names. I tried not to focus people on real names. It wasn’t so much an homage to Reservoir Dogs, although some people might think it is. It allows people to focus more on the characters’ views of the test than on them as unique individuals. I wanted them to represent world views.

VS: They come across as types.

SH: Yes, they’re types, absolutely, and I’m completely unapologetic about that fact. I wanted them to be very international and multi-ethnic to allow the different people in the audience to say, I’m that person.. But after watching the film for 30-40 minutes, they might say, OK, I might be blond and Caucasian but Brown represents my world view, so I’m actually him. I don’t know if I succeeded, but I liked the idea of people identifying with one character and then slowly focusing in on the idea that it’s actually about general philosophies.

VS: The other interesting thing is the time device. Ticking time is always an effective tool to build up tension but you also make the events unfold almost in real time. What was your aim?

SH: I like limitations and the walls of the room are one limitation, one dimension, and time is another. Again, it’s a metaphor: we have a limited time to decide what we think life is about. It’s also my Hollywood training, I like things to be on a clock. When I’m sent novels to adapt I’m always compressing. Film has that effect. There are a lot of things in the film that I did for multiple reasons. The clock was one of the most stressful things in the film, trying to physically work out how we were going to shoot with the clock and stick to that. When we did our first cut of the film, the actual real-time cut from when the clock starts to when the clock ends was exactly 80 minutes. My editor and I were really surprised. The problem was, we wanted to cut stuff, so actually it ends up closer to 74 minutes. There are little jumps in there.

VS: In a way, it seems to be a Hitchcockian sort of film in the sense that the plot appears to be a pretext to build tension and suspense for the pleasure of the audience.

SH: The plot is like the wrapping for the ideas, and the ideas are a mixture of philosophical, religious and psychological observations. It’s about human behaviour and life, that’s the core of what I’m interested in. Stylistically, I keep hearing Kubrick from many people who have seen the film, and I’ll fess up to doing a few conscious references there. I used to tell people that the white sheet of paper and the black screen were our version of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The long tracking shot towards the screen at the beginning of the movie is all quite precise and controlled. The film starts off with these very controlled tracking moves and a lot of composition and cuts, until the middle of the film, when we brought in the hand-held camera. That’s the point where the characters have turned on one another and they’re trying to uncover some truth from each other. I’m definitely quite a stylistic person, but I just don’t want to be only a stylistic person.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Read Alex Fitch’s review of Exam in the winter 09 issue of Electric Sheep, which looks at what makes a cinematic outlaw: read about the misdeeds of low-life gangsters, gentlemen thieves, deadly females, modern terrorists, cop killers and vigilantes, bikers and banned filmmakers. Also in this issue: interview with John Hillcoat about his adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the art of Polish posters according to Andrzej Klimowski, Andrew Cartmel discusses The Prisoner and noir comic strips!

Interviews

I’m Dangerous with Love: Interview with Michel Negroponte

I'm Dangerous with Love

Sheffield DocFest

4-8 November 2009

Sheffield

Sheffield DocFest website

Michel Negroponte’s website

The documentary filmmaker Michel Negroponte was already familiar with the world of drug addiction before he embarked on I’m Dangerous with Love; his 2005 documentary Methadonia focused on the patients who frequented a methadone clinic on the Lower East Side of New York City, recovering heroin addicts living in chemical limbo as they swapped Schedule 1 substances for prescription medication. His latest project examines an alternative approach to breaking the cycle of addiction, one that is not officially endorsed or prescribed by registered health care practitioners. Ibogaine is a hallucinogen that comes from the root of a West African plant and has been used by shamans for centuries, but in the United States it is classed as a controlled substance and is therefore illegal. At the centre of Negroponte’s film is Dimitri Mugianis; a reformed addict who underwent an ibogaine treatment at an Amsterdam clinic following 20 years of substance abuse, Dimitri is now an ‘ibogaine provider’, trading chemically-induced highs for adrenaline-fuelled escapades as he works with an underground network to help other addicts kick the habit. Negroponte followed Dimitri over an extended period, becoming so involved with his subject that he tried ibogaine himself in order to fully communicate the experience and, after a treatment at a snowed-in Canadian home went wrong, travelled to Gabon with Dimitri to learn more about the hallucinogenic properties of the plant root. Laced with decidedly dark humour, I’m Dangerous with Love is both a compelling character study and an exciting excursion into an underground subculture. John Berra met with Michel Negroponte at the 2009 Sheffield DocFest, where I’m Dangerous with Love received its world premiere.

John Berra: In your opening voice-over for I’m Dangerous with Love, you state that you did not intend to undertake another drugs-related project. How did you become immersed in the ibogaine underground?

Michel Negroponte: My film Methadonia was shown at the New York Film Festival in September 2005 and then aired on HBO a month later. HBO is a fascinating channel for documentary filmmakers because it has a huge number of viewers; people who don’t normally watch documentaries will watch a non-fiction film on HBO simply because it’s there. The number of people who saw Methadonia stunned me and we received many emails, phone calls and letters. One email was from Nick, a young man from outside Chicago who had a heroin habit. He was about to try this experimental cure using an African hallucinogen, and he wanted me to film him going through the treatment. My first reaction to Nick’s email was to say that I had spent three or four years in the world of addiction, that I was still recovering emotionally and psychologically, and that I really wasn’t interested in doing a film about ibogaine, even though it sounded fascinating. But Nick wouldn’t let go. I started to do some research and quickly met many of the main characters in the ibogaine underground movement of New York City. Everyone I spoke to said, ‘You have to meet Dimitri’. When I finally did, there was something about his persona, his presence, and his intensity that made me think he could be the subject of a film. When you make these kinds of ‘present tense’ documentaries, it’s a tremendous act of faith because I knew very little about ibogaine, very little about Dimitri, and absolutely nothing about what might happen in the next several years if I committed to making a film. My underground adventure lasted four years.

JB: I’m Dangerous with Love has a tremendous narrative drive for a documentary; were you concerned when editing the film that it was too exciting and not sufficiently fact-heavy?

MN: First of all, I’m not a journalist, I’m a filmmaker. I’m much more interested in the idea of photographing what’s happening in front of the camera than merely documenting it. Everything from the framing of a shot to the editing of a scene is important to me. I want the finished film to look intentional and precise. I want it to capture the essence of being there. Like most of my other films, I’m Dangerous with Love is character-driven. It’s portraiture. I may not include interviews with medical experts about ibogaine in the film, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think the information is important. While being too fact-heavy can weigh down the storytelling, I try to carefully weave information into my voice-over. It’s a stylistic choice. One of things I have found as I have made more and more films is that I shoot very little. I’m much more interested in the idea of photographing scenes. I never turn the camera on until I’ve composed a shot through the viewfinder, and I think a great deal about the photographic elements.

JB: I particularly liked your detached, darkly humorous voice-over, which recalls the writing of Philip K Dick and Douglas Coupland. Was it important for you to find the humour in this painful world of drug addiction?

MN: The subject matter of the film is so intense and dark that some lighter or comedic moments seemed necessary. In the first 10 minutes of the film there’s a tough scene of Nick vomiting in a hotel room from heroin withdrawal, and I could imagine a number of people getting up and leaving the theatre or switching the channel. So I hope the occasional humour of my voice-over helps people stay with the story.

JB: In the first half of the film, Dimitri seems to be living for the thrill of being an ibogaine provider. Were you concerned that he had substituted one addiction for another?

MN: At one point, Dimitri looks at the camera and says something like, ‘I’m addicted to chaos. Things in my life are going very smoothly. I’m not using anymore, but I need to get my hands dirty’. He’s not nine-to-five and he likes risk. I was intrigued by his bravado, but I think the film captures a change in his personality. After the terrifying event in Canada, when a young man almost dies during a treatment, Dimitri is forced to reassess what he’s doing. By the time he’s been introduced to African shamans and we’ve returned from Africa, he’s a different person.

JB: I was very impressed by Dimitri’s belief system; the bad experience in Canada did not stop him from wanting to be a part of the ibogaine network, but he realised that he needed to learn more about the process and adopt a new approach towards his work.

MN: He’s obviously an incredibly resilient guy; he’s been close to death himself on a number of occasions because of drug use. It would have surprised me if Dimitri had decided after Canada that he never wanted to do another ibogaine treatment. The trip to Gabon reinforced his belief in himself and his mission. It changed his life and took the film in a direction I couldn’t have anticipated.

JB: What was your motivation to take ibogaine yourself?

MN: Before I took ibogaine, I had seen several treatments, and yet I didn’t understand how a hallucinogen could help a drug user detox. Also, most people who take ibogaine find it difficult to describe the psychedelic journey. I wanted to see what it was like, so I asked Dimitri to give me a dose. The trip is like a dream. If you don’t have a pad and pen at your bedside and scribble notes, you may not remember anything the next morning. You have to make a real effort to put the visual and aural experience into words. I guess you could say I became a believer after I took it, and that changed the course of the film.

JB: What are the characteristics of the ibogaine underground and what distinguishes it from more conventional methods of health care?

MN: One of the things I find so intriguing is that former drug users like Dimitri created the ibogaine movement. In the film, you see several addicts go through ibogaine treatments and they return later to help Dimitri take other addicts through treatments. Drug users understand detox and they know how to be empathetic. I’m not sure you can say the same thing about conventional health providers.

JB: What is the significance of the title, I’m Dangerous with Love?

MN: It’s a line from one of Dimitri’s poems. Interestingly enough, he wrote the poem in 2002 just after undergoing the ibogaine treatment in Holland that made him stop using. He inscribed the poem in the ‘guest book’ of the woman who took him through the treatment. The poem ends with the lines, ‘I’m dangerous with love, I’m dangerous with love’. After the crisis in Canada, I thought it was an appropriate title for the film because Dimitri can be dangerous with his love. The title also has a double meaning; my subjects are people who live on the fringes, and I’ve often tested ethical and moral boundaries by filming them. Sometimes I think my passion for making documentaries makes me dangerous as well.

Interview by John Berra