British supernatural-tinged gambling neo-noirFlutter screens at the Raindance Film Festival on October 5. It is director Giles Borg’s second film, following last year’s bittersweet indie comedy 1234. Below he shares his tips for surviving the life of an indie filmmaker.
I had been working making TV, commercials and shorts for 15 years before I made my first feature but still nothing prepared me for what that first week was like. I felt like I’d been hit by a train, every day was just a barrage of questions and decisions to be made and it never seemed to stop. At night I’d dream I was on set so I’d wake up tired, feeling that I’d already done my day’s work. Even though I knew it was coming it was pretty much the same on my second film, Flutter, although the bigger budget did mean I got a lift to set every day rather than taking the bus as I did on 1234. Having said that, I’d do it all again in an instant, it really is the best fun I’ve ever had, but here are a few things I discovered during what seemed like the longest weeks of my life.
Look calm. Even if inside you’re screaming, outwardly look relaxed. If you look calm, everyone else relaxes. If you start screaming, so will they (probably).
Prepare. The more preparation you do before going on set the better. When you’ve nailed all the mundane stuff beforehand you’ll be in a much better situation, mentally, to react when it all goes tits up. Because at some point it will.
The director and the DoP are quality control on set. Let the 1st AD worry about keeping to the schedule, let the producer worry about the budget, you and the DoP are there to make sure everything that goes on film is the very best it can be, the shots and the acting. Just think about making those amazing and let other people worry about their jobs.
Without actors you’re nothing. If there’s a close-up on your actor and the audience looks in his eyes and doesn’t believe what they see then you might as well have not bothered. Spend time with your actors, they’re your greatest resource. Work on ideas with them, take their input, they’re going to live these characters on screen for you, make sure you let them own them. Give them the space they need and they’ll reward you handsomely.
There are no such things as stupid questions. Those two leather jackets may look pretty similar to you, but costume have been thinking long and hard about it and they need you to make a choice, and that choice will affect how the rest of the wardrobe looks. Lots of other people have work to do that can only be done when you’ve made your choice, so give it some thought. And if you get it wrong it’ll only annoy you every time you see it on screen. And it’ll be your fault.
Be nice to everyone. You could shout at people and not bother learning anyone’s name and they’d still work really hard, but really, you’re only making a film, not bringing peace to the Middle East, so try not to act like a twat.
Flutter screens on Wednesday 5 October at the Apollo. More information on the Raindance website.
Tucker & Dale vs Evil was one of the films that impressed Alex Fitch at this year’s Film4 FrightFest.
Tucker & Dale vs Evil
I went into the screening of Tucker & Dale vs Evil (2010) expecting the film to be a guilty pleasure, as a fan of both horror-comedy and the leading man, Joss Whedon regular Alan Tudyk. But the film surpassed my expectations and proved to be one of the most enjoyable of the festival, an uproarious comedy that takes the ‘teens in peril’ slasher genre and subverts its clichés.
Tucker and Dale (Tudyk and Tyler Labine) are an amiable pair of misfits with a close homoerotic relationship that comes across as less affected than Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s reoccurring schtick. Travelling into the woods to fix up a shack previously owned by cannibalistic murderers of the Texas Chainsaw variety, Tucker and Dale amble from one misadventure to another and inadvertently present themselves to a group of teens on holiday as the slasher movie style killers the kids are already expecting to find in the woods. As the hapless duo go out of their way to be friendly, the kids variously impale, burn and shred themselves to death trying to escape the innocuous pair.
Hilarious, subversive and occasionally shocking, this is a very welcome example of a spoof slasher movie, a sub-genre that has almost always proved to be unwatchable when attempted in the past, with the gruelling Scary Movie franchise being the most interminable and depressingly successful (part 5 is due in 2012) example.
With its schlocky name, seemingly familiar plot and cast of TV actors, Tucker & Dale vs Evil might struggle to find an audience among the onslaught of bad horror movies that fill DVD rental shelves, but it is to be hoped that it will attract the cult following it deserves and mark the start of a successful career for fledgling director Eli Craig.
Tucker & Dale vs Evil is released in UK cinemas on September 23 by Vertigo Films.
The Glass Man
On the second day of FrightFest, the main screen’s line-up consisted entirely of movies about people killing other people, which is to say they contained no supernatural elements, only monsters of the human kind. As such, not all of the films shown were actually horror films. Preceding The Glass Man was an underwhelming thriller/drama called The Holding (along the lines of Dead Man’s Shoes). The Glass Man itself straddles these two genres, and its only horror credentials are an extended cameo by Neve Campbell, star of the Scream franchise, and the fact that director Cristian Solimeno had the misfortune of playing the male lead in Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears (2007).
The Glass Man, however, is an excellent film. A mid-recession British take on one of David Fincher’s finest movies (I won’t say which one or you’ll get the twist immediately), the film concentrates on the travails of Martin (Andy Nyman), a businessman who has been fired from his job for an unknown reason; the film implies some kind of whistle-blowing. With a mortgage to pay and a lifestyle he and his wife have become accustomed to, he has been lying to her about still going to work for some time and amassed crippling debts when a hitman (James Cosmo) comes to his front door and gives him a choice between becoming his accomplice for the night or waking up Martin’s wife and…
A belated addition to the ‘yuppie in peril’ sub-genre that flourished briefly in the mid-1980s (Into the Night, After Hours), The Glass Man‘s relentless atmosphere of impending doom and Nyman’s constant nervousness about unarticulated peril keep the audience transfixed even though not a lot happens on screen for much of the running time. A terrific directorial debut by Cristian Solimeno, who proves himself to be an actor’s director, in a film dominated by the interaction between Nyman and Cosmo, judged exquisitely well.
The Wicker Tree
Some belated sequels, which no one particularly expected or wanted to see, are actually well worth a look. These include films that see actors returning from the original, for example Paul Newman in The Color of Money (1986), or ones that revisit the title and the source material, for example Return to Oz (1985). Others, while they retain one of the original creators, for example Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 (1984), seem ill-conceived from the start, as few directors, if any, could top Kubrick at his best.
Unfortunately, and somewhat inevitably, The Wicker Tree (2011) is an example of the latter. The original film, The Wicker Man (1973), was in many respects an example of lightning caught in a bottle – a dependable British cast at the top of their game, an unusual story and a witty script that flirts with different genres but is hard to pin down. As the original film depended on many disparate elements fitting together in a production that was beset by problems, a sequel would have to be brilliant to match its reputation. A script of ‘The Wicker Man II’ by original writer Anthony Shaffer did the rounds for decades, but this was stymied both by his death in 2001 and Edward Woodward’s in 2009. The actor, almost unbelievably, was prepared to return to the role of Sergeant Howie, following in the footsteps of Donald Pleasance in Halloween 4 (1988) as another apparently fireproof hero. With Shaffer and Woodward gone, director Robin Hardy has come up with his own thematic sequel, which takes the audience to another Scottish pagan community who enjoy orgiastic celebrations and sacrificing Christians.
Christopher Lee returns in a brief cameo as a former patriarch of the community (possibly Lord Summerisle, depending on the vagaries of copyright law), but the cast of TV actors he’s surrounded with rarely lift the material above the standard of an episode of Midsomer Murders, which in tone, atmosphere and set dressing the film seems particular keen to recreate. As in the original, there are some great uses of music, some well-judged moments of tension and some good depictions of decadent Brits taking their desires to their logical conclusion. However, the comedy moments are often forced and occasionally embarrassing to watch while the horror is never extreme enough to be particularly shocking, with more disturbing and memorable cannibalistic orgies served up in recent years by Perfume (2006) and episodes of True Blood in 2009.
The Wicker Tree isn’t unwatchable, unlike parts of the misguided American remake of The Wicker Man (2006), but adds nothing to the original. A worthy sequel to the 1973 cult movie is perhaps one best left to our imaginations.
More FrightFest reviews online next week, including Lucky McKee’s controversial The Woman.
The line-up for this year’s Venice film festival looked excellent and it had to be. With Cannes snatching some of the most prestigious directors (Malick being a particular catch) and Toronto nibbling away at its calendar, Venice is beginning to look increasingly embattled, threatened as it also is by domestic rival Rome and increasingly important European festivals in London and Berlin.
The programme offered a good mix of established hands – David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, Ermanno Olmi and William Friedkin – and relative new-comers – Yorgos Lanthimos presented his follow-up to last year’s Oscar contender Dogtooth, Tomas Alfredson cashed his Let the Right One In cheque with a classy le Carré adaptation and Britain’s very own Steve McQueen and Andrea Arnold were both in the main competition, making it the strongest British presence that Venice had seen for years.
One of the first things that became apparent was the fact that many entries were drinking from a theatrical well. Polanski’s Carnage, based on the French play by Yasmina Reza, maintained its stage origins most closely, refusing to pretend that it was anything other than filmed theatre. This one-set, real-time play follows two couples attempting to come to a civilised agreement after a fracas between their children ended with one of the boys in hospital. Each character begins firmly in control of their respective roles: Christoph Waltz is a high-powered, Blackberrying lawyer, Kate Winslet is the beautiful wife who smoothes things over; John C. Reilly plays the kind of ‘hail fellow well met’ type familiar from his many character parts and Jodie Foster a furrowed-browed finicky liberal who won’t let matters rest. However, as the strictures of middle-class politeness struggle with a primal urge to have the last word, each character regresses to something much more savage. The result is often hilarious and the film is a master class in acting, with each character a lead, and in minimalistic direction as Polanski manages to make his limited resources play out to their best advantage. In this he achieves what Sidney Lumet managed in 12 Angry Men.
If Carnage doesn’t quite fulfil the hyperbole of its title, Killer Joe could just as easily snatch it for a one-word summary. William Friedkin’s adaptation of Tracey Lett’s play is a ferocious dissection of a Texas trailer park family; absurdist and blackly funny, the film goes somewhere to re-establishing Friedkin after years in the wilderness and shows, perhaps for the first time, that Matthew McConaughey can act. David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method was a solidly realised version of Christopher Hampton’s The Talking Method (Hampton had also done the English translation of Carnage but there have been wrangles about credit), and yet Cronenberg suffered from the expectations raised by his own career. Had this been directed by Stephen Frears, the plaudits would have flowed, but with the director of Crash handling sexual shenanigans, madness and Freud, many felt let down by the formal restraint on display.
Michael Fassbender’s spanking of Keira Knightley in A Dangerous Method paled in comparison with Mr Fassbender’s second festival performance in Steve McQueen’s Shame. This was one of the highlights of the festival and Fassbender fully deserved the best actor prize he subsequently won. He plays Brandon, a successful New Yorker whose fastidiously orderly life is threatened by his compulsive sexual needs. The arrival of an untidy and emotionally needy sister, Sissy, played by Carey Mulligan, sets to tip the balance towards the chaos that always threatened. As only McQueen’s second feature, the film is remarkably confident. Compositions are assured and scenes are held long past the time required, but to wonderful effect. Carey Mulligan’s performance of ‘New York, New York’ is given in its entirety and almost all of it in a close-up of the singer’s face, allowing us to become immersed in the experience. The film refuses a pat pathology of sexual addiction and sex is seen in its whole spectrum, from the genuinely sexy to the mechanical and boring, the sleazy to the pure and occasionally the comic. Its explicitness is well earned and applied.
Wuthering Heights is released in the UK on 11 November 2011 by Artificial Eye.
Unfortunately, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights came over less as a passionate love story than a convincing but cold post-colonial reading of the mid-19th-century Victorian novel. The academic validity of certain choices (a black Heathcliff and the use of non-professional actors) sadly did not translate into on-screen interest. The sense of place is marvellously rendered – never has the Wuthering of Wuthering Heights been so effectively reproduced – but a film that should have left the audience emotionally exhausted left many simply exhausted, with none of the affecting power of, say, Jane Campion’s better period pieces. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a much more appropriately cold adaptation, which oddly packed more of an emotional punch.
Alpis
Other fare in competition included Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow up to Dogtooth, Alpis. As decidedly oddball as his previous film, Alpis follows a small group (the Alps of the title) who hire out their services substituting for a recently dead family member or friend, reciting set speeches, wearing items of their clothing and re-enacting scenarios. The film lacks any real sense of reality to offset the barmy ideas of the Alps group; there is no outside world, the way there is in Dogtooth. In fact it is almost as if the madness contained in the family of the earlier film has infected the whole of society, and so no one questions the morality or even efficacy of what the group are trying to accomplish.
Perhaps the surprises of the festival were Johnnie To’s Life without Principle and Sion Sono’s Himizu, which won best newcomer awards for its teenage actors. Both filmmakers have been made famous by their often extreme genre pieces, but these films were more mature and weirdly quieter films. Life without Principle sees the financial crisis affecting a series of characters, cops and criminals alike, whose scurrying to fix things seems trivially small set to the background of the amoral, if not immoral, operations of the banks.
Himizu starts with a nightmare vision filmed in one of the worst hit areas of post-tsunami Japan. Two teenagers are left to fend for themselves as all the structures of society fail: family, school, the police. There is violence in the film but it is divided between the innocent violence of the rough and tumble of emerging adolescent sexuality and the more sinister grown-up version of the yakuza, and more disturbingly still, parental violence, which is located often in the brutal dialogue as much as in fists and feet.
Himizu and Alpis both picked up prizes and the Golden Lion went to Sokurov’s Faust, an unapologetic piece of high cinematic art that mixed inventiveness and wit with occasional stretches of tedium. It very much served to highlight, however, Venice’s resolve to serve both the glamour the Lido provides for visiting Hollywood royalty – George Clooney has been almost a fixture since Good Night, and Good Luck premiered here in 2005 – and showcase cinema from the most challenging directors.
Honey-voiced duo Peggy Sue have gone electric and come back as a trio with heavier, but still lushly melodic sounds for their second album Acrobats (Wichita Recordings), out on September 12. They play Winchester on Sept 14, Bristol on Sept 15, Manchester on Sept 17 and Leeds on Sept 18. For more information, visit their website. Below, singer Katy Young picks her favourite 10 films.
I decided to be greedy and do this all myself. All views expressed are mine alone and not representative of the other two thirds of Peggy Sue (who I know would have some strong dissenting ideas of their own).
1. Empire Records (1995)
I have seen this film more times than any other (except maybe The Wind in the Willows). I know pretty much every line. I cannot help but admit that it is my favourite film although sometimes I keep this to myself.
2. Paper Moon (1973)
I have stolen this one from Rosa [Peggy Sue’s other singing half]. It is her favourite film and I only watched it for the first time recently. It is funny and sad and pressed all my buttons.
3. Badlands (1973)
Probably the most beautiful film I have ever seen. Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen are so cool in this movie. Plus I am a sucker for meta-textual references so all the James Dean nods are really satisfying.
4. Guys and Dolls (1955)
Some films are perfect for a Saturday afternoon. Ones with Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando are ideal. The soundtrack has some really big tunes on it, like ‘Sit Down You’re Rocking the Boat’. There is a really annoying super long romantic scene in the middle but it’s the perfect time to make some tea.
5. Valentin (2002)
Beautifully sad Argentine film about a cross-eyed boy who wants to be an astronaut.
6. AristoCats (1970)
Rosa had a deprived childhood and hasn’t seen very many Disney films. I think she maybe had seen Mulan, or another rubbish one like that, and was scarred by that experience so I showed her the ‘Everybody wants to be a Cat’ scene from AristoCats and she was persuaded that there are some great ones.
7. Scorpio Rising (1964)
We performed the soundtrack of this film at an event in London this summer. It is comprised entirely of massive 1960s pop hits so it is basically one long music video and the songs were so fun to learn and play. The imagery is immediate and there are some brilliant ironic moments.
8. Delicatessen (1991)
I love the attention to detail and colour in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s films and how he creates those surreal worlds. Delicatessen is pretty dark but very funny.
9. Raising Arizona (1987)
This is my favourite film by the Coen brothers. Maybe because of Nicolas Cage’s hair and moustache, or maybe because of Holly Hunter’s accent. It’s pretty much a live-action cartoon.
10. In Search of a Midnight Kiss (2007)
Sometimes one just wants to watch a romantic comedy. At these moments a low-budge mumble-core film is ideal because you can pretend you are watching it because of its interesting aesthetic and semi-improvised performances while mindlessly devouring the really satisfying plot about a New Yorker looking for a date on New Year’s Eve. Alternatively you could just watch 10 Things I Hate about You, which is also pretty great.
Two FrightFest hits are released in early September – full FrightFest round-up coming soon!
Kill List
Ben Wheatley’s second feature was one of the most eagerly awaited offerings at Film4 FrightFest on the August bank holiday weekend. Wheatley’s debut, Down Terrace, was a festival hit two years ago, and deservedly so. Tightly written, finely observed and darkly humorous, it mixed dysfunctional family drama with criminal elements in a refreshing take on the tired British gangster genre.
Kill List similarly combines gritty realism and crime film, but adds a sinister cult to the mix, not entirely wisely. It begins like a kitchen sink drama about the life of a work-shy hitman, Jay, who has blazing rows with his worried wife Shel and a son to provide for. Over a dinner party, his friend and partner Gal manages to convince him to go back to work. But as they go through their client’s kill list, Jay is shaken by what they discover about their targets and becomes increasingly psychotic, his violent behaviour fuelled by self-righteous moral indignation.
Kill List is released in UK cinemas on September 2 by Studio Canal.
As in Down Terrace, the character study, the observation of family dynamics and male friendship, and the excellent dialogue are utterly compelling. But the introduction of the cult element seems unnecessary and unoriginal and does not quite blend with the rest of the story. It is never explained fully, and although mystery and ambiguity are entirely desirable in a film, it is not evocative enough to fire up the imagination. Despite this and an ending that feels tacked on, Kill List is thoroughly engaging for most of its running time and Ben Wheatley is clearly a talent to watch. Virginie Sélavy
A Lonely Place To Die
A Lonely Place To Die
FrightFest closed with another gripping British thriller, directed by Julian Gilbey. A party of would-be mountaineers on a climbing holiday in the Scottish Highlands make a shocking discovery in the woods, uncovering a Serbian girl buried in a box. They deduce that she is part of a kidnapping plot and resolve to get her back to civilisation. But the kidnappers are out there somewhere, and the girl may be part of something far more dangerous… Gilbey’s film works pretty well as a peril-in-the-wilderness thrill ride, with the small cast members being picked off one by one against spectacular scenery in a variety of unpleasant ways. But it’s more ambitious than it at first seems, throws in a surprise or three, and gets more paranoid and political in the final act. I’m not sure how well this all sits together, though; the dialogue is clunky at times, with characters telling each other things they’d already know. And the kidnappers’ avowed professionalism is undermined by bouts of incompetence and suicidal stupidity. But it rattles along nicely, Sean Harris adds another great turn to his portfolio of horrible bastards, it’s not dull, and the script has its moments – ‘He’s gonna go like Christian fucking Bale in there!’ Mark Stafford
A Lonely Place To Die is released in UK cinemas on September 7 by Kaleidoscope Entertainment.
A seeming paradox: some of the most experimental, some of the most daring and unusual film scores have been created for horror films – and yet, few genres offer a set of aural signatures so seemingly conventional that they are left wide open to parody. One can easily imagine a kind of shopping list of common tropes without the aid of which few horror film composers would know quite what to do with themselves. So closely identified has the visual manifestation of fear become entangled with its audio counterpart that a horror film might scarcely be recognised as one without certain key sonic signifiers. And so, the idea of a recipe for the Platonic ideal of horror movie soundtracks presents itself. What might the essential ingredients be?
Dissonance. Since the Middle Ages, the highly dissonant interval of the tritone – composed of two notes, six semi-tones apart – has been associated with the diabolus in musica. Wagner’s use of low, grinding tritones for the appearance of the dragon in his Ring cycle became the archetype for movie monsters from King Kong to The Thing from Another World. Extremes of unresolved dissonance became particularly noticeable in the 70s after William Friedkin drew on a whole raft of European modernists, from Penderecki to Anton Webern, on the hugely influential soundtrack to The Exorcist. From the late 80s, horror comedies like Beetlejuice and Gremlins 2: The New Batch would make use of the tritone in a self-reflexive parody of earlier conventions.
Organs. The pipe organ immediately situates us in the world of Gothic horror, and certain pieces of organ music – in particular Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor – have become scary movie clichés through overuse. From The Phantom of the Opera and Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to the creeping uncanniness of Carnival of Souls and the camp Technicolor of The Abominable Dr Phibes, filmmakers will put grand old church organs in the most improbable of places in order to provide an excuse for featuring that distinctive full-bodied sound in their film.
Children’s choirs. Our greatest fears are no doubt those that recall us to childhood, and creepy children are just as present on horror soundtracks as they are in the image tracks. Mia Farrow adopts a childlike voice to la la la creepily over Komeda’s soundtrack to Rosemary’s Baby, and a real chorus of children is made terrifying use of in Children of the Corn. Most recently the trope was used in White Noise 2: The Light. But the prize here really has to go to Ennio Morricone’s wonderfully atmospheric score for Italian giallo (starring none other than former James Bond George Lazenby) Who Saw Her Die?
Strings. There can be few more recognisable soundtrack moments than the screeching strings from Psycho‘s shower scene. So immediately does the effect conjure up not just the plunging of a raised knife, which the musical movement seems to suggest almost of its own accord, but equally, by association, the themes of incest and unresolved Oedipus complexes, which dominate Hitchcock’s film, that Harry Manfredini could sum up the plot of Friday the 13th in toto with the Herrmann homages in his theme tune. But above and beyond this particular sound, orchestral strings offer a whole panoply of unusual effects to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. Where would any self-respecting moment of tension be without the shudder of tremolando? Or an eerie moment of supernatural weirdness without the glassy harmonics of sul ponticello playing?
The Dies Irae. A 13th-century Latin hymn describing the mythical ‘day of wrath’ in which the souls of the dead are called before the gates of heaven and the damned cast to the flames of hell set to a distinctive melody in the Gregorian chant, the Dies Irae, and sundry variations thereof, appears in countless horror films. Most recognisably, perhaps, in Wendy Carlos’s synthesiser arrangement of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique for the opening sequence of The Shining, but also, slowed down, harmonised, somewhat disguised, you’ll find it in Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Poltergeist and in cult nunsploitation film Killer Nun. The Dies Irae was also a favourite of Hammer Horror composer James Bernard’s, who used it in Dracula Has Risen from the Grave, and again in his score for the (1997) reissue of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.
Help me complete this recipe for the perfect horror film score, along with Kim Newman, Stephen Thrower (from Coil) and Harry Manfredini, at Sound of Fear, the Southbank Centre, Saturday 3 September.
Cast: Arian Labed, Vangelis Mourikis, Evangelia Randou, Yorgos Lanthimos
Greece 2010
97 mins
Two women stand against a white wall, their tongues intertwined but their bodies stiff as they stand as far apart from each other as possible. It’s perhaps one of the least erotic kisses seen on screen. Twenty-three-year-old Marina (Arian Labed) has never kissed a man before; she lives in a modernist, failed workers’ utopia that still houses a factory but few inhabitants. Living alone with her father, a disillusioned architect who is terminally ill, she sees life through the prism of Sir David Attenborough’s documentaries, the human species as animal; her relationship with her only friend, the much more experienced Bella, is primitive, physical.
Athina Rachel Tsangari’s film is a beautifully observed, often playful, study of one woman’s alienation; Marina, awkward, naïve, contemptuous, slowly learns that she needs more than just her father and Bella. It’s a refreshing and unsentimental film about sex, relationships and death. Aesthetically, the film mixes elements of the nouvelle vague with touches of performance art, plus a terrific soundtrack (Suicide is Marina’s favourite band); there’s also a brilliant scene sung to Françoise Hardy’s ‘Tous les garçons et les filles’. There’s real beauty in the shots of the empty town and factory, and the clean, crisp modernist spaces inhabited by the actors.
Tsangari also produced last year’s Dogtooth (director Yorgos Lanthimos appears in Attenberg as The Engineer) and while Attenberg is a very different work, it’s exciting to see such original filmmaking emerge from their collaborations.
Sarah Cronin met the Austin-based director at the 2010 London Film Festival, where they discussed intimacy, making films in Greece, and science fiction.
SC: What was the inspiration for Marina’s character?
ART: That is always the most difficult question. What did you think?
It seemed very personal to me.
Did you identify with her at all?
I did, quite a lot. I think it was that feeling that you don’t necessarily belong anywhere.
Yes, that’s it. It’s the first movie that I’ve made in Greece. It took me years to figure out if I could make a movie in my own language and if I did, what it would be. It’s very difficult to see myself as a filmmaker in Greece because I was in America for so long, and it’s difficult to write in Greek. So it was about a girl who does not belong in her environment or in society. It’s something that came very naturally to me. And also, the relationship between father and daughter is primordial, especially in Third-World countries – or Second-World, somewhere between First and Third.
I was quite surprised by the discussion of cremation in the film. Is it true that it’s banned in Greece?
It’s not allowed yet because of the Church. I think they are passing a law to allow cremation, but that’s partly because of the lack of real estate. For someone like the father, who held ideals that were examined and failed, his last act of resistance is to be buried the way he wants to be. The film is structured as a series of negotiations between people, and I felt that it was a fair negotiation, the father asking Marina to help him die in a respectable way – and to ask her to become a bit more human, for her to belong in society.
I thought the love scenes with the engineer were incredibly well handled. They really captured all the fear and nervousness, and Marina’s own insecurities. The scenes didn’t seem gratuitous, but integral to her development.
I liked the idea that Marina would just keep talking while exploring this foreign thing. It was quite nice because there was so much camaraderie between us, we are all friends, and it wasn’t just a matter of directing actors. I think that intimacy shone through. We didn’t really rehearse those scenes very much because it would have been too awkward. It also astonishes me – I’ve been teaching for a while – that girls from the generation after me are so into sexuality and have no fear about their bodies – they’re not quite exhibitionists, but almost. Intimacy is something that’s lost on Facebook.
One of the aspects I liked was this great chemistry between Marina and Spiro and the rapid-fire way in which they speak. Was that all scripted?
In terms of the dialogue, very little was not in the script. It was strictly rehearsed in terms of the lines and also their body language. I have an obsession with screwball comedy, Howard Hawks and films like His Girl Friday. I really don’t like sentimentalism, or naturalist melodrama. In this plan that I had, that everyone had to negotiate something with someone, you also need a third person to work as a catalyst. That was very important to me. I’m slowly trying to develop my own language, this relationship between emotion and distance, and how you can negotiate the two without being far out or artistic and detached, and without being all like… chick film. I don’t like it when people say a movie is a great women’s film. Especially in Greece, it’s amazing: if you’re a woman, you don’t make cinema, you make women’s films. There is this idea that women largely make sentimental movies. It’s not that I totally resist that – I like films across the spectrum that are about women, even Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Do you think people will be shocked by the opening scene, as well as Marina’s relationship with her friend Bella? Did you want people to be disturbed by it?
No, I don’t – it’s just a kiss. I think mostly men are shocked by the opening scene. I think it’s even more controversial because it’s not a lesbian scene – it’s not about two women being together, loving each other, or discovering that they’re gay. It’s about one girl teaching another how to do something fundamental. It’s like the relationship between the father and daughter, who are trying to be on the same page and be kind of equal, which is very rare in Greece. She has a very close relationship with her dad, but a very antagonistic relationship with Bella.
You’ve started your own production company in Greece and were involved with producing Dogtooth. Are you trying to inject some life into the Greek film scene?
This is already happening. I’m a part of something that’s been going on for a couple of years. The first film that I produced in Greece was Yorgos’s first feature Kinetta. I love to produce my own stuff because it gives me a sense of freedom and independence, and I also take some kind of perverse pleasure in organising and making budgets. I love collaborating, and we do kind of have a collective. Greek cinema is working out right now, it’s very exciting. Some people say that Dogtooth and Attenberg have some things in common, although I don’t really think so, but there is a kinship between Yorgos and I, we’ve been discussing and working together for a long time.
Both Dogtooth and Attenberg have a very modernist feel to them, with the locations in particular.
I went back to the town where I grew up to shoot. It was a company town, built in the 60s. Lots of young engineers moved there in the 70s and moved their families into this kind of modernist utopia, which was half-French, half-Greek, because the company belonged to a huge French conglomerate. We left, and my sister and I kept going back in the summer, so we had an image of it as this place where sexual awakenings happened, like Marina’s – you know, boy-crazy summers at the disco.
I thought the town was very beautiful in a way. There’s the scene with her father when she says that she finds uniformity very soothing.
It is very beautiful, and I definitely find uniformity soothing. I remember the town as very vibrant, and very happy, full of sport and art. It was such a cultural environment. Going back there with the crew in the winter, it felt like a bit of a ghost town, which suited me very well. It fitted with Spiros’s acknowledgement of the failures of the 20th century. But for all of us it was very strange as a crew, shooting in this very empty, uniform town, with all these white blocks – it was like the lunar, extra-terrestrial version of the town, which I liked. It was devoid of anything traditional, of expected beauty.
There’s a very animalistic quality to Marina and Bella, and the scenes of them performing like animals are interwoven throughout the film. Was that an initial element of the film?
We watched lots of Attenborough clips because it was important to me to develop the characters like animals. Each of my actors had a favourite clip and a favourite animal. It was a memory that they had while they were acting. I’m an avid, passionate admirer of all things Attenborough, I’ve been watching him since I was a little girl. He’s near and detached at the same time, like melodrama, as I call it. It really suits me as an aesthetic. He’s so gracious and has so much tenderness towards nature and his subjects. It’s a big example to me, in how to approach characters in cinema.
Do you think you’ll make a film in Austin?
I would like to. My writing partner, Matt Johnson, who is also my editor, and I have just finished writing two science fiction scripts. It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.
What attracts you to science fiction?
I really like J.G. Ballard. I like stuff that’s like a projected present, or the future of the past, and it has elements of Western, like going to this frontier and discovering yourself. I also really want to make a science fiction movie in Europe. I was recently in Reykjavik – it felt like a combination of a Greek island, Iceland and the Isle of Man. There were all these colours, all this grass, and then this rocky landscape. I loved Duncan Jones’s Moon. I don’t know why it’s so difficult to make genre movies in Europe – it’s like it has to be either art-house or social realism.
Electric Sheep‘s first visit to the beautiful Czech spa resort of Karlovy Vary for the 46th edition of its multi-stranded festival was a five-day marathon that offered a wonderfully mixed bag of hidden gems and charming low-key works, with only a few disappointments. Sadly, part of the latter category was the official opening film, Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre. Similar to the 1944 version starring Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles, Fukunaga’s adaptation offers an atmospheric, moody and finely tuned Gothic take on Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel about the plight of an orphaned governess who disastrously falls in love with her enigmatic employer. But although everything in this tragedy is adroitly done, it falls short of the brilliance and verve of the director’s 2009 debut Sin Nombre and, ultimately, feels no more ambitious than a compelling and well-performed British television drama.
By contrast, Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito), which, like Jane Eyre, screened out of competition, sees the Spanish master on excellent form. Based loosely on French crime author Thierry Jonquet’s dark novel Tarantula, the film tells the story of celebrated plastic surgeon Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), who becomes dangerously obsessed with creating the perfect form of artificial skin after the death of his wife, who was burnt alive in a car crash. Serving as his guinea pig is the beautiful Vera (Elena Anaya), whom he keeps locked up like a prisoner in his isolated mansion run by a doting servant, his former nanny Marilia (Marisa Paredes), who has her own secrets to conceal. To reveal more of the story here would spoil the joy of discovering this heady brew of deep passion, family horrors and dizzyingly uninhibited revenge. Though it might not be as daring and unruly as Almodóvar’s earlier work, The Skin I Live In is an absorbing, savage and grotesque, yet beautifully shot tale that finds the filmmaker vividly reworking his favourite themes of obsession, desire and sexual identity, while artfully borrowing from and playing with the great tradition of horror-infused melodramas.
The Skin I Live In is released in UK cinemas on 26 August 2011.
Aside from the big headliners, where Karlovy Vary excelled was in its selection of distinctive, often small-scale art-house films. Veteran Polish director Lech Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross is a carefully crafted study of Pieter Bruegel’s 1564 Procession to Calvary, which takes the audience both inside and behind the scenes of the painting, in all its meticulous detail. In Kim Ki-duk’s distraught Arirang, one of three Korean entries in this year’s selection, the esteemed director points the camera at himself in a confessional and heart-rending, yet at times undeniably annoying, attempt to overcome his personal and professional crisis. The superbly deadpan and physically intense Enemy at the Dead End (Jugigo ci-peun), by writer-director duo Owen Cho and Kim Sang-hwa, was one of the true standouts of the festival. It is a taut, unsentimental, tightly plotted revenge thriller about two bed-ridden men whose mysterious pasts and ill-shaped memories are linked by an unsolved murder that sees them turning their small hospital room into a deadly battlefield, as they desperately try to torture and, eventually, kill each other. Remaining consistently unpredictable right up to its nail-biting last act, the film offers a dazzling mix of pitch-black humour and off-kilter suspense, and proves that there is still zest and energy in Korean independent cinema beyond its more established front-runners.
All three films screened in the Another View strand, which turned out to be the most reliable for discoveries. The most striking debut was Breathing (Atmen), directed by Austrian actor Karl Markovics (best known for his lead performance in The Counterfeiters). The film premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight section in Cannes this year, where it picked up the Europa Cinemas Label award, which includes promotion and programming support, raising hopes for a UK release. The story revolves around the rebellious and solitary Roman, who is trying to reintegrate society after serving time in a juvenile detention centre for murder. Soon after he picks up a job at the city mortuary, to avoid a life spent behind bars, he discovers the body of a nameless woman, whose outward appearance triggers a need to search for his mother. Though inadvertently similar in its minimalistic accuracy and disquieting sense of normality to Austrian filmmaker Markus Schleinzer’s Michael, which also premiered in Cannes and played at KVIFF, Breathing is a compelling and consistently impressive first feature in its own right, which deserves to be seen widely. Out of Variety’s selection of ‘Ten Euro Directors to Watch’ (presented as another sidebar of the main programme) the best films I saw were Lisa Aschan’s deft coming-of-age tale She Monkeys (Apflickorna) and Ben Wheatley’s eagerly awaited, impressive genre flick Kill List.
In addition to the main programme strands, this year Sam Fuller and Denis Villeneuve were given retrospectives, and although the contrast between the director of Shock Corridor and The Street Helmet and the maker of Oscar-nominated Incendies is striking, the range of Villeneuve’s work revealed a tough sensibility that isn’t so far from Fuller’s hard-edged themes and stories. Also worthy of note was a selection of ‘Out of the Past’ titles, including a rare screening of Barbara Loden’s wonderfully unwieldy directorial debut Wanda and a restored version of Czech classic Marketa Lazarová, a breathtaking, mesmerising epic directed by František Vláčil, either of which would have made the trip worthwhile.
Owing to such an intriguing range of classic films, I regrettably didn’t see as much contemporary Czech cinema as I had planned, and in particular missed Vladimir Blaževski’s Punk´s Not Dead (Pankot ne e mrtov), the winner of the East of the West section, a programme dedicated to films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The two competition films I did see – German director Christian Schochow’s Crack in the Shell (Die Unsichtbare) and the Danish Birgitte Stærmose’s Room 304 (Værelse 304) – were both disappointing.
Without doubt, the highlight of the trip was the masterclass given by legendary American director Monte Hellman. He was on magnificent, passionate form as he unpicked his latest film, Road to Nowhere, about a young filmmaker who gets involved in a crime while shooting his latest project, based on a true story. During the absorbing session Hellman also gave an insight into the vagaries of a career that has spanned 50 years and, according to the director, revolves around making A-movies on a Z-movie budget. Or, as Hellman put it: ‘The producer thinks I’m making an exploitation movie and in my mind I’m making Gone with the Wind.’
Created in 1993 by musicien, producer, journalist and cinephile Frédéric Temps to give audiences the possibility to discover neglected works and filmmakers, L’Etrange Festival returns with another selection of outlandish and unconventional gems.
Asian cinema is making a strong showing with Tetsuya Nakashima’s masterfully misanthropic Confessions, the affecting, brutal Chinese thriller Revenge: A Love Story, Sion Sono’s latest, the perverse Guilty of Romance, in which two women look for love in all the wrong places and pay the price, as well as his previous Cold Fish, a darkly funny, gory crime drama set in the world of tropical fish retailing, and Korean crime thriller The Unjust, scripted by Park Joon-hung, who wrote I saw the devil.
The programme also includes Tory Nixey’s Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, produced by Guillermo del Toro, Lucky McKee’s vitriolic and controversial The Woman, efficient vampire road movie Stake Land, Xavier Gens’s claustrophobic sci-fi thriller The Divide, as well as a selection of works by animation pioneer Winsor McCay with live piano score by Serge Bromberg, short films and numerous oddities from the past.
There are special focuses on Rutger Hauer and Belgian director Koen Mortier, who shocked critics and audiences alike with Ex-Drummer, while Jean-Pierre Mocky, Liliana Cavani and Julien Temple curate strands of films. They will be in attendance at the festival, as well as many other guests.
In music events, Marc Caro rescores his and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1981 short film Le bunker de la dernière rafale, Tuxedomoon soundtrack Pink Narcissus and Boyd Rice provides a new soundtrack for John Parker’s Dementia.
Close-Up’s recent Theatre Scorpio season, running before the BFI’s Shinjuku Diaries series on the Art Theatre Guild of Japan, focused on Japanese cinema’s 1960s underground – literally, as the Scorpio was situated beneath the Art Theatre Guild’s venue. The Tokyo basement venue also played host to performance, dance and music; and while most of the Scorpio’s live musical happenings are no doubt lost to history, Masao Adachi’s Galaxy (1967) is a fascinating addition to what we know of the work of experimental composer Yasunao Tone.
Galaxy is a sort of psychedelic existential quest film in which a young man, laden with the ‘straight world’ trappings of work, tradition and respectability, undergoes a possibly psychotic meltdown, in a series of increasingly surreal, hallucinatory tableaux interspersed with slow pans across gory, cartoon-like drawings. The ‘rejection of society’ shtick is common to the time, but Adachi’s brilliant visualisation of the film’s city setting as a paranoid dream/nightmare space and Tone’s uncompromisingly dissonant, often disquietingly harsh score resonate together with a surprisingly fresh urgency.
Yasunao Tone’s work for film is rarely mentioned now, most likely because it is only to be heard at these very rare screenings. It’s also just one part of Tone’s long and impressively varied career, which started with improvising ensemble Group Ongaku in the late 1950s. Prefiguring European groups like AMM by quite a few years, Ongaku channelled influences like musique concrète and the aleatory techniques of John Cage into spontaneous, visceral sounds far edgier than those of their more academic contemporaries. Tone soon became heavily involved with the Hi-Red Centre, a politicised, Fluxus-inspired performance art squad given to disruptive ‘happenings’ (Julian Cope’s Japrocksampler mentions one piece that celebrated ‘non-victory’ by staging a banquet in honour of Japan’s defeat in World War Two). His interest in emerging technologies saw him curating a computer art festival in the early 1970s; he also wrote extensively about Japanese experimental music, and subsequently left the country for New York, where he has lived and worked ever since, with video, dance and countless other media. Now in his 70s, his most recent release was a 2004 collaboration with extreme Austrian electronic artist Florian Hecker. His documenters, then, can be forgiven for seeing Galaxy as something of a footnote.
Additionally, I’m not sure if Tone composed music specifically for Galaxy, or if the director edited pre-existing recordings to the film – if so, it is extremely well put together, choreographed precisely with the characters’ movements. But in places, its heavy use of tape effects, frantic sax and jarring bursts of noise also sound a lot like the Group Ongaku recording ‘Automatism’, a live piece from 1960 compiled in 2000 on Music of Group Ongaku, and I wondered if it might be an edit from an Ongaku or other group recording of the early 1960s. Whatever its genesis, though, its use as a film score changes its meaning.
Galaxy‘s first half plays out amid the roads, roofs, stairs and car parks of the city, and the music reflects the density of this environment. The claustrophobia of the new concrete city is sounded out by a signal jam of collaged noise, radio fragments and repetitive, harsh percussion; the tiled, cold spaces of an office corridor and toilet echo with sharp sax blasts. Tone’s sense of the inherent music of the city is a natural fit with Adachi’s ‘landscape theory’, in which place becomes or replaces character.
As the film progresses to a long, surreal sequence where the protagonist battles with a violent Buddhist monk on a giant outdoor staircase, the music’s focus tightens, becoming less of a soundscape and more of a kind of abstract dance score, with a percussive, tense, stop-start motion similar to Adachi’s jump cuts and the characters’ stylised gestures. The sounds of Buddhist ritual – prayer rattles, gongs – are employed, perhaps as a none-too-subtle comment on religion. More ‘real’ instruments can be heard, but heavily processed. Tone’s fascination with manipulating recording/playback devices would continue: in 1997 he released Music for Wounded CD, the title of which is pretty self-explanatory. Here, the tape effects are another indicator of unreliability, things not being real: even if they’re recorded, Adachi and Tone suggest, they’re certainly not ‘true’. This offsets the visual uncertainty too, as we follow the ever more unreliable narrator through increasingly trippy scenarios.
Finally, the protagonist is spat back out into everyday life – or perhaps not, says the sound. As Galaxy ends somewhat ambiguously, the music states its claim more aggressively, hitting a peak of distorted noise that is a small precursor, perhaps, not just of Yasunao Tone’s own music, but of the Japanese extreme noise scene that would emerge in the 1980s and 1990s.
Frances Morgan
A Deviant View of Cinema – Features, Essays & Interviews
