Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 July 2008

Venues: BFI Southbank, Renoir, The Gate (London) and key cities; Scotland July 18

Distributor: Soda Pictures

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Darcy Fehr, Ann Savage, Amy Stewart, Louis Negin

Canada 2006

90 mins

Guy Maddin season at the BFI Southbank

July 4-23

Programme

In the week before the British theatrical release of his new documentary My Winnipeg and the BFI retrospective of his films, Guy Maddin came to London to introduce some preview screenings of his work. Alex Fitch caught up with the director and they chatted about My Winnipeg, Guy’s interests and influences as a filmmaker and his career on screen so far.

Alex Fitch: My Winnipeg seems to be a mixture of the various styles you’ve developed in other movies. Parts of it – for example the ballet section – remind the viewer of Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary and other parts are autobiographical. Do you see it as a sort of culmination of your career so far?

Guy Maddin: Yeah, I just decided to kind of throw the kitchen sink at the viewers! I was commissioned to make this film and I’ve never made a long documentary before. I’d made a short one with Isabella Rossellini which I’d always called a docu-fantasia, because Isabella was talking about her father on his centennial, but I don’t think she was really worried about getting the facts right. What really mattered was that this was a documentary about her feelings about her father, so she conducted all the research she needed in her heart. So when I was commissioned to make a film about Winnipeg I realised I could do the same thing! But I was still worried about ‘the documentary’ and all the ridiculous disciplines it tends to require, all the apparent objectivity and higher shooting ratios and longer editing periods and discovering your true subject in the editing… All these are clichés about the process of making a documentary, and I was pretty terrified! So I thought, I’m just going to load up the arsenal with as many tricks as I have… But something prevented me from allowing them to be tricks; since I was talking about my Winnipeg, they had to ring true in my heart. So I ended up making – I think very intuitively – a movie about Winnipeg that really kept grabbing at the oddest, almost forgotten corners of my memory and finding things that mattered to me. Finally, I found myself not making a movie about Winnipeg after all but about home – everyone’s home – about home towns, family, nostalgia, memory or something! I think that’s why the movie’s been travelling way better than I ever thought it would. People in Sydney or London or Berlin are seeing the same things in it that Winnipeggers see in it. It’s strange…

AF:Someone famous once said it’s not so much that ‘History is written by the winners’ but rather ‘History is written by the writers’ and so you can take any kind of fact and weave it into your own personal narrative.

GM: That was a bit of a challenge. There are so many disparate and seemingly unrelated items of interest to me that I had to find a way of weaving them together. The editing process did take a long time, but sometimes I would just fluke upon a connection between two things during my improvised narrations. I would go to the recording studio for five or ten minutes each day and just talk for a while. Sometimes in the spirit of just keeping the talk going I would have to repeat things before thinking of the next thing to say and so things started taking on poetic symptoms. Every now and then when I was trying to force out an idea, I’d come up (to the studio) – and in desperation, to keep the ball rolling – I would make a throw that accidentally perfectly connected two scenes. Ultimately, after months of doing these improvised narrations, almost every scene in the movie spoons against the previous and the next or rhymes somehow with a scene elsewhere in the movie and they all kind of fit together. I’d like to feel that if there were such a thing as poetry or psychology accountants, they’d come in and do an audit and everything would add up horizontally, vertically, diagonally and we’d be congratulated for keeping such good books!

AF: A lot of themes in the movie seem to be about movement and rhythms. The confluence of the rivers, the way they flow into the town and the immigrants, the way they flow into the town and the way the railroad flows into the town… Nature and man’s imposition on nature is something that might dictate a more poetic narrative rather than straight storytelling.

GM: Yeah, and Winnipeg especially, being at the geographical centre of North America and the site of so many strange intersections including all sorts of mystical beliefs whether European or Aboriginal… I’m not much of a mystic when I’m not holding a camera but you’re always looking for something to haunt your screen when you’re a filmmaker and I found it in abundance in Winnipeg. The stories really had me half-believing in all the great mystics and the legends. I mention them because they actually create a really strong and eerie milieu for the stuff that happens within my family. I could never successfully disentangle a study of my home town from a study of my own home and family. I was pleased that the staining mystical powers bled right into my family and that all the occult ectoplasms prescribed to the city by Aboriginals and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also seemed to be in operation whenever my siblings and my mum sat down to eat dinner!

AF: How autobiographical are the recreations?

GM: They’re spot on!

AF: You show a younger version of yourself making films of your mother and family. So that actually happened?

GM: Yeah.

AF: So you might have, for example, those actual home movies as an extra on the DVD if you felt like exposing yourself that much to the world!

GM: I have hours of 8mm footage – it’s not even Super 8 yet – from when I was very young. I shot some of it; my older brother, Ross – who’s still alive – shot a bunch as well. He’s twelve years older than I am. My dead brother was an audiophile and created tonnes of sound sculptures which we were able to incorporate into the movie, so he has a posthumous credit of sound design or some sort of sound department credit anyway. I didn’t want to give him too good a credit – you don’t want to cheat the living out of their proper credits! The recreated family and conversations were spot on, as well as I could remember anyway – memory’s pretty unreliable.

AF: The new scenes, were they shot on film or digital? The reason I ask is because you mentioned alchemical processes earlier and film itself is obviously a very alchemical process – you open a shutter, expose some plastic to light and bathe it in chemicals in order to reveal the hidden image…

GM: …and you’d think I’d know that more than anyone! But I really thought that making a documentary was an opportunity for me to break free of my enslavement to film emulsion and work in HD. So I did buy an HD camera and I shot most of the movie with it and then I realised that these stories would sit a lot better in emulsions rather than pixels. They’re just made for emulsions… So I projected the finished edited film onto my fridge and shot it with a film camera and there the stories sit properly!

AF: The history of filmmaking is something that’s very important in your work. There’re all sorts of references to silent movie techniques… Were European silents something you were fond of when you were growing up?

GM: Not when I was growing up, but when I was a 20-something hipster I loved the look of those things. When I was daydreaming of becoming a filmmaker and for the life of me couldn’t light the basic three-light set-up. I had three shadows every time I’d light them, so I started unplugging them until I got down to one shadow. And it was an expressionist shadow and I realised the shadows were not only very evocative and loaded with atmosphere and dread but also the most inexpensive form of set decoration. Absence of light seemed to suggest far more than building a set could ever do! It was kind of a chicken / egg thing… I think my penchant for expressionist stuff came about from sheer inability to do classic filmmaking, and then of course that forced me to watch more silent film and I found more affinities with it. The approach of silent film is a little closer to fairy tale than naturalism. I like treating everything as more or less fairy tale anyway. That’s my way of finding myself inside of a book, I always pretend it is a fairy tale at first – whether it is or not – and then make adjustments later.

AF: In your first three films, you seemed to be touring Europe both in terms of style and narrative – Tales from the Gimli Hospital is about an Icelandic community, Careful is about a Swiss town, Archangel is about a group of Russians. Also, Archangel and Careful have very strong expressionist and constructivist influences, which culminate in my favourite of your shorts, The Heart of the World, which feels like a lost Russian silent movie!

GM: Yeah and that’s the only movie I’ve made that turned out exactly the way I planned it! It’s pretty lucky – that won’t happen again! I feel it’s because film, more than any other art form – it can be argued that Renaissance painting was like this too – is an industry as well as an art form. In its industrial haste, so many beautiful unexploited potentials were just left behind and it seems like such a shame not to go back and exploit them a bit more, even as ineptly as I do!

AF: I wouldn’t say that at all! Certainly the fact that your films use the language of the silents gives them a great visual aesthetic that stands out amongst all the CGI and the slickness that are crowding the movie theatres. It seems a shame that so few directors have a visual style any more, as if they have to fit in with everything else that’s out there.

GM: I’m so lucky… Like I said, whatever visual style I have – and I do have one – came about just from dumb tenacity to shoot in spite of the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing and I’ll credit myself with recognising that that was producing something – something worth clinging onto with a lot of desperation! It’s evolving slowly but I’m not in any hurry; there’re still a million and one great stories to be told by this enchanting method, so why toss it out, the way the industry did the first time around?

AF: In the films you made from the late 90s onwards like The Saddest Music in the World and Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and now the hidden history of Winnipeg you seem to be inventing a Canadian mythology.

GM: Yeah, definitely.

AF: Modern Canadian cinema seems to be somewhat ‘new’; it seems to be inventing its own history as if the hundred years that preceded it haven’t been documented enough so they need to cram it all in.

GM:They haven’t! I guess because we’re smack dab up against the greatest self-mythologising culture ever, America – we’re loathe to self-mythologise. When Canadians are asked to define their identity, they say, ‘Well, we’re not American!’ And pressed to define what that means, they say, ‘Well, we don’t exaggerate, we don’t boast…’. But there’s no more sure-fire way to consign a historical figure or event to complete amnesiac oblivion than to present them in life-sized terms. So it’s nice to see other filmmakers’ work, but it was something I was prepared to do if no one else was going to do it – start self-mythologising… That doesn’t mean lying! If you asked the average American which one of the following really existed, Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, Daniel Boone, Abe Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Joe Montana, they couldn’t tell you half the time! So apocryphal people are just as important as ones that really lived. They get boiled down to an essence that gets tasted in one’s lifetime and goes into the recipe of a national identity. I just want to do my bit for Canadians so they don’t have to say, ‘Well, we’re not American’.

AF:Also, because you’re nestling against a ‘sleeping elephant’, as someone once called America, Canadian cinema seems to be able to explore themes that American cinema seems to be terrified of, such as sexuality, for example. Your films, the films of Robert LePage, the films of David Cronenberg, seem to explore male sexuality in a way that American cinema won’t touch with a barge pole!

GM:Us Canadian mice can go right up the rear end of that elephant without them even noticing! It’s an advantage.

AF:In My Winnipeg for example, the scenes in the changing rooms… Is it something you feel just isn’t explored in cinema?

GM:Children are sexual beings, just think of your own childhood. In my case, I was far more sexual as a child than I am now; far more preoccupied from a very early age… I haven’t conducted an elaborate survey, but I just like movies that acknowledge that. There’s a great Canadian film called Léolo that gets right into that. I’m just trying to be honest. Nothing bothers me more than a movie about the innocence of children! What are they innocent of? They might be innocent of murder, but that’s about it! Children haven’t learned to repress yet or anything like that. They’re just teeming with wonderful luridity, from very early on! I was six, maybe, when for some reason I locked the bathroom door and urinated into a badminton birdie! It was very important that I do this! I’m not going to say how many times I did this, but…

AF:You marked that territory well!

GM:…it seemed to make sense to me somehow. While it was a rough draft or an incorrect model of the world, there was something telling me to do that…

AF:Another theme in your work is matriarchal figures. Obviously there’s Ann Savage playing a semi-fictionalised version of your mother in My Winnipeg, in Twilight of the Ice Nymphs there’s Shelley Duvall, in The Saddest Music there’s Isabella Rossellini… These strong female presences, is that something you’re trying to work out – some sort of childhood trauma – or just something you feel isn’t explored enough in cinema?

GM:Yeah, especially in indie film, which is still very male-dominated. I’m not going to start making feminist statements on behalf of women filmmakers, but it just feels good to see everybody represented fairly in movies. Bergman’s trick was to write autobiography and then ascribe his own autobiographical traits to one or two female characters; but I’ve been lucky enough, I’ve had one or two very strong female characters in my life and they seem to be bottomless sources of narrative material! My first few movies were very male-centred with very simple objects of desire wearing the skirts but in these recent pictures I’ve decided to zero in on what women really meant to me. They feel more fleshed out, it’s very satisfying.

AF:I suppose that in films like Cowards Bend the Knee and Sissy Boy Slap Party it’s the absence of a female presence that causes the guys to go crazy?

GM:Well, yeah! If you’re just lounging around the dock with your shirt off and a gob hat aslant over a sun-sleepy face, you’ll get yourself into some trouble! I found myself reading Euripides of all things… I never wanted to read Greek tragedy, I thought that would be like unrolling parchments and be a very arid activity, but gobbling up Euripides is like flipping through the pages of Mexican romance comics – really fun, fast-paced, crazy, violent stuff! Everything Quentin Tarantino should be is in Euripides! Not only that, it’s written 2,500 years ago but it’s about the relationship you just got out of – it’s incredible! There’re some great women characters in there and I’m in there! The male characters always seem to be me! In Medea, I’m Jason. I’ve gone out with Medea, I’ve gone out with Electra… It’s amazing how easily you can find yourself in these things.

AF:It’s interesting you should mention Medea, as Lars von Trier made a film version of the story for TV and I was wondering if you were a particular fan of his work, because the central leit-motif in My Winnipeg, having the train with back-projected images behind it, reminded me very much of Europa.

GM:Yeah, I had that in mind and then I realised that when I was trying to hypnotize people at the beginning of my movie some people might be reminded of Max von Sydow’s very hypnotic narration in Europa, but I’d already decided to do it anyway. It ended up being different. Von Trier really took the rear-screen projection a lot further, by incorporating characters in real world and ‘flat world’ and having them trade places and things like that. I do like rear-screen projection. It’s a simple way of opening up space – of acquiring cheap cinematic space.

Interview by Alex Fitch

For more on this see Guy Maddin and the mythologising of Winnipeg and the interview with Cecilia Araneda, director of the Winnipeg Film Group.

Guy Maddin learned his craft as part of a local filmmaking initiative, the Winnipeg Film Group, which exists both as an art-house cinema and as a resource for local filmmakers. Alex Fitch talked to Cecilia Araneda, executive director of the WFG, about the work of the organisation and Guy Maddin’s involvement with it.

Cecilia Araneda: There are proportionally a lot of independent filmmakers working in Winnipeg, and I do mean independent in the sense of artist-driven work. Winnipeg is a bit of a rarity in Canada in terms of its filmmaking context. Indeed, in English-language Canada, we believe that Winnipeg has the most distinct filmmaking community. Because Winnipeg does not have a film school, and for some other reasons likely related to the size of our city (big, but not too big) and its isolation from any other major metropolitan centre in Canada, the Winnipeg Film Group developed as different from other independent film co-ops in Canada and became a full centre supporting the entire cycle of film.

Alex Fitch: Why do you think Winnipeggian film has a distinct voice within Canadian cinema?

CA: Without access to a film school, filmmakers in Winnipeg just did what they thought was best and perhaps didn’t realise – or maybe they did and didn’t care – that they were breaking all standard conventions. Locally, film critics were brutal when they reviewed the works of our members produced in the 80s (we opened our Cinematheque in 1982, and of course prominently featured our members’ films) and the early 90s, because they weren’t following the standard conventions that are normally taught to filmmakers in film school. Before the ‘film industry’ reached Winnipeg, with corps of experienced film crafts people and technicians training students in making films ‘the right way’, the Film Group evolved an aesthetic approach that essentially affirmed that there is no one right way to make a film, and certainly no wrong way. The skill of filmmaking in Winnipeg was something that was handed down personally from filmmaker to filmmaker (John Paizs to Guy Maddin, Guy Maddin to Deco Dawson, for example). It often stuns people across the country to see just how influential and significant Winnipeg filmmakers remain, and how proportionally deep the talent pool is in relation to artistic cinema over the years, in spite of how small Winnipeg is and in spite of the absence of the many financial resources that are available in other centres.

AF:Is Guy’s output indicative of a local style?

CA: He is certainly among one of the most recognised independent filmmakers from Winnipeg, and his output could be said to be parallel in a way to that of Norma Bailey (Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 1980). But Norma works in a completely different aesthetic school, focusing on narrative and documentary, and her movies are a staple of television programming. Guy and Norma are the only filmmakers that I can think of that have consistently worked for decades here in Manitoba at a high level. In the early days, if you wanted to make a film and if you wanted it screened at our film theatre (likely the only screening local filmmakers would have had here in the city), you would have hung out here at the Winnipeg Film Group. In an interview I did with Guy Maddin last year, he noted that he learned filmmaking by hanging out at the Film Group – as non-specific as that might sound (Guy studied Economics in University). Guy’s insistence on doing things his way – even a documentary commissioned by the Documentary Channel (My Winnipeg) – often in spite of compelling financial reasons, is, of course, what clearly stands out in my mind about him as a filmmaker. That, plus you always feel you know him a little more as a person with every film you watch, which is not necessarily true of other filmmakers in his category.

Interview by Alex Fitch

Related articles: Guy Maddin and the mythologising of Winnipeg, interview with Guy Maddin.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 18 July 2008

Distributor Optimum Releasing

Director: Olly Blackburn

Writers: Olly Blackburn, David Bloom

Cast: Robert Boulter, Sian Breckin, Tom Burke, Nichola Burley, Julian Morris, Jay Taylor, Jaime Winstone

UK 2008

95 minutes

Olly Blackburn’s debut feature, Donkey Punch, recently had its UK premiere at the 2008 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Shown alongside other British films such as the trite, sentimental and miscast period drama The Edge of Love, Shane Meadows’s gritty black & white Somers Town, and Steven Sheil’s schlocky Mum and Dad, Donkey Punch stood well above the rest for its slick production values, witty intelligence and its finely-tuned ensemble cast of young, virtually unknown talent.

In the film co-written by Blackburn and David Bloom, a budget holiday in Mallorca goes horribly wrong when a drug, sex and ego-fuelled party on board a luxury yacht ends in the violent death of one of the girls. Still tripping, and grappling with the brutal reality of the shocking accident, the young, male crew must decide how far they’ll go to protect their precarious futures.

Olly Blackburn talked to Electric Sheep‘s Sarah Cronin at the Edinburgh Festival about genre cinema and the making of a British thriller. Sarah also caught up with actors Jay Taylor and Rob Boulter to ask them about the characters they play in the film and the moral dilemmas they face.

Sarah Cronin: Talk about your motivation and the inspiration behind this film.

Olly Blackburn: Well, I really like genre film, and that’s what I wanted to make. It’s very hard to make a first movie, and I thought it would be good to try and figure out a genre film with a small group of characters that was set in a confined space, because you can shoot that for very little money. My co-writer and friend David Bloom was on holiday in the south of France, and he had seen that all of the luxury yachts in the marina there were crewed by very young guys from England, so he called me up because he thought this could make a really great story. We met up and we sort of mind-melded and came up with this idea for the film. It flowed very rapidly, and the more we did research on crews on these boats, the more it fitted in with what we wanted to do. So that was the inspiration for the film. I also just really like films like Alien or Knife in the Water, where you have people in isolated spaces and they have to get out of a terrible situation, but there isn’t any help available. That’s what this story offered up.

SC: There’s a sub-genre of disaster-at-sea movies and the confined space of the ship really works to your advantage.

OB: You’re right. We wanted this boat to be as isolated as possible and just be lost out at sea. We researched communications on those yachts, how easy or hard it would be to get help, how easy or hard it would be to actually pilot the boat. It was all geared to the idea that these people are just stuck, that they might as well be out in space.

SC: What was it like working with Warp X and their low-budget initiative?

OB: Brilliant. I think what Warp X is doing is really exciting for British cinema, because they’re allowing people like me and Chris Waitt (A Complete History of My Sexual Failures) to make quite edgy, challenging films and they’re doing it in two ways. The first is because they’re low-budget, it means that they can raise the funding very fast and just motor these projects through. Also, because they are really skilled, tasteful producers, and they really do everything they can to make the project work, both in terms of what the filmmaker is trying to do, and in terms of reaching an audience. We all agreed that the film should be able to show next to American films, but with the budget the question was, how could we make something that would stand up and punch above its weight and not embarrass us all. They were very keen that we achieved those production values.

SC: I think that your experience in music and commercial directing really influences the film. It does look very slick and quite commercial, very American – it doesn’t look low-budget.

OB: The biggest thing about making commercials and music videos is that they’re focused on image, on making things look good, and you learn very quickly that you don’t need that much money to do that. Technology is really great these days, things like grading; so if you’ve got a very good camerawoman, in my case, it’s actually quite easy to achieve something on a very low budget. It’s about having the experience. I would recommend that all young filmmakers learn about that kind of stuff.

SC: There’s a very luminous feel to the beginning of the film when they’re in Mallorca, and you seem to have used that to help build up the tension as things become darker and darker.

OB: Well, that was a very big thing for me. I really wanted the story to start off very naturally, and suck the audience in, the same way that the characters get sucked into this ever darker situation. And obviously that is reflected in the fact that the film starts in daylight, goes through to sunset and ends at night. When we were writing the script there were lots of sparks happening between me and David, and a lot of stuff was very instinctive and that was just one of those things. It just seemed natural.

SC: Talk about the nature of power on board the ship between the characters, and the power that the male characters try to exert.

OB: We love Neil LaBute, and his films In the Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbours, because he’s very good at tapping into a particular side of the male psyche, a dark side, which people don’t like, maybe because it’s very accurate. And I think when we were writing a group of young guys who are kind of on the prowl, and then get into a situation with these girls, it just made us think of Neil LaBute. And the other thing was all this stuff in the press, this kind of culture where footballers were picking up these girls and going to hotel rooms. What was interesting to us was this very LaBute-ian scenario, where you have five naked men in a room and they’re all commenting on each other’s performances, and it’s more about them than the girl. That’s kind of the movie in a nutshell.

SC: Josh, who’s responsible for the girl’s death, really retains an aura of innocence, even as he gets nasty and violent. I think that’s very effective, so how integral was that to the film?

OB: The whole thing about the film is that these are normal people, so how far do you need to push things for them to do really abnormal, crazy things? Now that’s going to divide the audience, I’m sure a lot of people will watch the film and say ‘oh, that’s nonsense’. But that’s the purpose of making a film, you want to push people and see how they respond. A big part of the film is that the characters get pushed, they do something that has really bad repercussions and then things get even worse, and they have to make an even more difficult set of decisions with even worse outcomes and it just keeps escalating. That is something that I really wanted to explore in the film. It starts off psychological and then becomes physical and then even more physical.

SC: The film straddles different genres, from horror to thriller and slasher films, but it’s also quite funny. The humour provides some relief.

OB: The humour is definitely intentional. I have enough respect for the genre to be able to screw around with it and do a few different things. First of all there are no rules. For example, the biggest laugh line comes towards the end, at about the most disturbing point of the film. I felt that we should keep the line in there because it’s almost like a release. Likewise, just speaking as a punter, I like to go see films where I’m surprised, where you can’t see what’s happening, or you are kind of shocked, and I just wanted to do that, because there’s no better gauge than to try and do something that you would want to see yourself. There’s this theory about horror films that they’re actually a great way for releasing our worst nightmares, because you’ve got them in a safe space, up on a screen, with a group of people, and you can share in them and then walk away from them. That’s kind of, I hope, what that second part of Donkey Punch does, just throws things at people, and, like you said, at the end there’s this kind of relief, ‘I got through that one’.

Jay Taylor and Rob Boulter play two of the young crew members on board the yacht. Rob, who plays Sean, is the sensible, level-headed guy, who also has the misfortune of being Josh’s brother. Marcus, played by Jay, is the ship’s skipper, in charge of the yacht and the ultimate decision-maker. Embroiled in the sexual act that causes Lisa’s death (played by Sian Breckin), Marcus has too much to lose to allow her death to get in the way of his future.

SC: Your characters in the film provide quite different functions, they play off each other. Talk about your roles.

Jay Taylor: Our characters have quite an important relationship because if the situation was different, they could have made quite good allies. It becomes the downfall of the whole lot. Marcus is the leader of the pack, has this authoritarian quality and Sean has a real sense of diplomacy and what’s right and what’s wrong. That could have really worked but it doesn’t because Marcus is involved in what happens. And Bluey (the on-board DJ and drug dealer, and instigator of the violence) is a good mate of his.

Rob Boulter: That’s the thing really, Bluey is the little devil on his shoulder.

JT: It’s almost a case of good versus evil, and Marcus doesn’t really have this huge decision to make. The big moral dilemma is Sean’s, what to do, the right thing by his brother or do the right thing essentially. Those are the stakes.

RB: Sean’s whole life, his dreams, everything he’s worked for – he wants to crew boats and he wants to own his own boat and live honestly. That’s the life for him.

JT: All the characters have their own idea of the way they see their future, certainly the boys anyway. Josh is off to law school, Bluey maybe less so, but he’s just intent on living the life, being a DJ.

SC: He seems like the one unredeemable character.

JT: There doesn’t seem to be a moral conscience on his part, he’s obviously come from this fairly twisted place, a fairly disturbed upbringing.

RB: He’s just a bit of an asshole, and Marcus is supposed to be mates with him. He brings him along.

JT: Yeah, that’s the thing, Marcus has brought him along for the ride, it’s all his fault almost. Yes, Josh is the one who commits the title act, but it’s more about the way that Bluey takes the situation and develops it all and coerces and manipulates people. He’s obviously the most destructive element on the boat.

RB: He’s a provoker as well, isn’t he. The whole thing happens off of questionable human decisions, and faced with huge life-changing consequences, the chance to brush it all aside and get on with your life is so tempting. They don’t have the perspective to think it through and see that they’ll have to deal with this for the rest of their life. At that time they might find it the lesser of two evils, but obviously they make very wayward decisions. But I totally buy those decisions, they’re very human. It’s what makes the film exciting.

SC: I think there’s a sense that the men have more valuable lives than the women. The girls are down there partying, whereas Marcus is about to join the military, for example. Does that impact their decision-making?

JT: I think the boys certainly regard the girls in that way, or sorry, disregard them in that way. They don’t hold them in very high esteem. It’s a typical kind of macho bullshit male attitude. When they were trying to get lucky with them, they were treating them like princesses, showing them the boat, telling them what they wanted to hear, and then suddenly when their presence becomes a problem they’re cast aside, and they’re suddenly nothing. It’s all about the boys and you see the interesting side of Rob’s character, Sean, because he doesn’t do that, he still sees the girls as people. I also think Nicola is the only one to come through, she’s definitely the strongest character in it in terms of her perseverance. The guys outnumber the girls as well, four to two in the end, and that’s a hell of a thing for anyone to deal with.

SC: Psychologically how difficult was it for you to be a part of the violence?

JT: Well, there is some pretty extreme stuff, sex and violence. Even though Rob’s character is not involved in the sex, he has his fair deal of the violence and the emotional trauma. But to talk about the actual sex scene, it’s a very strange thing to be asked to do, and it’s quite a challenging thing for actors, and I guess relatively inexperienced actors. I don’t think any of us had ever done anything quite like that. It was treated with absolute respect and Olly made it quite clear that we wouldn’t have to do anything we weren’t comfortable with, and I think the proof is in the pudding. I think it’s a really great scene, and I think it looks pretty sexy, to be honest with you.

SC: It is very explicit, I think more so than in other mainstream, commercial films. It had to contribute to the realism of the film.

JT: And it is a realistic film. When you see a lot of sex scenes they’re in this beautiful setting, on a Greek island, with the curtains blowing in the wind, and that’s not what it’s about, especially for characters our age who go on holiday. This is what happens, and maybe it’s a heightened realism, they’re on this amazing boat and there’re more of them involved than just a couple in a room, it’s a group scene, but it’s quite realistic, I think.

SC: How did you find filming in such a confined space and out to sea?

RB: That just contributed to the film and the psychology of it. It’s very much an ensemble piece, and we all got on really well. It got very intense because it was a very short shoot. But we did it in sequence, which helped a lot.

JT: It was quite a small area to work in, you could go a little stir-crazy at times. But being on that boat and being a part of that was quite conducive to creating a really fantastic atmosphere in the film. We all got in the zone, as they say.

Interview by Sarah Cronin

For more Edinburgh Festival coverage see: See also EIFF 08: Best of the Fest, EIFF 08: Under the Radar and Standard Operating Procedure.

Photo: Charles Burnett (right) and Danny Glover (BFI)

The Charles Burnett retrospective runs from 1-19 July at the BFI Southbank, London.

More details on the BFI website.

For over thirty years Charles Burnett has been at the forefront of American independent cinema, yet most of his films remain hidden cinematic gems, all too rarely screened. It may be that Burnett’s subtle chronicles of African-American everyday lives lack the sensationalism of many of his contemporaries. Or that America was just slow to acknowledge the achievements of black independent cinema. Whatever the reason, the tide has now turned: the re-release of Burnett’s acclaimed Killer of Sheep at last year’s London Film Festival and this year’s Berlinale, and the BFI retrospective throughout July mean that the director is finally, if belatedly, getting the recognition he deserves.

Joel Karamath: The Library of Congress has finally declared Killer of Sheep one of the most important contemporary American films. What’s it like to receive such an accolade after thirty years?

Charles Burnett: Well, it’s strange, looking back on it after all these years, as the film was never meant to be shown theatrically, because it was my student thesis film.

JK: Just as you started studying at UCLA there was a marked shift in the screen portrayal of African-Americans in mainstream productions, moving away from the optimistic Civil Rights-era movies to the more nihilistic vision of many Black Exploitation movies. How did that affect you?

CB: The reason we got into filmmaking was to try and affect the negative images Hollywood had been producing about people of colour. And then the Black Exploitation films came along while we were in school, and that became just another element that we were fighting against.

JK: I once read that one of the reasons you went to film school was to dodge the draft and not go to Vietnam. Is that true?

CB: Yes, I had irritated one of the people at the draft board because I was late in registering and they read the riot act at me, so I knew I was going at that point. But then I realised that if I took a full programme of courses I could get a student deferment, so I started taking a lot of classes and that’s how I valued education.

[…]

Interview by Joel Karamath

Read the rest of the interview in our summer print issue, which is a jazz and cinema special to coincide with the re-release of Burnett’s Killer of Sheep. To celebrate the belated recognition of one of American independent cinema’s greats, we look at the influence of jazz on film in the US with articles on Shirley Clarke, John Cassavetes, Jim Jarmusch and Beat cinema among others. For more information on where to buy the magazine and how to subscribe, please contact amanda [at] wallflowerpress.co.uk.

Still from 5 Centimeters per Second

Screening as part of Anime Now

Date: 20-22 June 2008

Venue: BFI Southbank, London

With only one feature film, three shorts and one medium-length work to his name, Makoto Shinkai is a thirty-something animé director who has generated far more praise than his relative youth and short career would seem to deserve. Dubbed the new Hayao Miyazaki by the animé press, this is something of a misnomer as the two directors have very little in common other than creating films with greater emotional depth and a more singular vision than those of their peers. However, while Miyazaki works primarily in the nostalgic fantasy genre for a child / family audience, Shinkai makes thoughtful, austere films that tap into contemporary concerns about humanity’s relationship with technology and how it both connects and separates us from the people around us. While the director’s latest movie, 5 Centimeters per Second, is slightly underwhelming compared to his previous two films The Place Promised in Our Early Days and Voices of a Distant Star, his films at their best show a director who has a genuinely affecting visual aesthetic that recalls the live action films of Andrei Tarkovsky. It is this sensitivity to form and place that have earned the director his reputation, cemented by the fact that his first two shorts were made by the director almost entirely by himself on a home computer.

Alex Fitch: What motivated the choice of doing She and Her Cat in black and white? Was it to convey the less complicated nature of the love between a pet and their owner or was it because cats have limited colour perception? Or was it simply because you wanted to work without colour?

Makoto Shinkai: I made She and Her Cat in black and white more out of necessity than design. I made the film in 1998 and at that time it was very difficult to make colour animation due to the lack of available technology. Colour used three times as much space in the computer and it would also make the process three times slower and as I was still working at the time, I needed to minimise what is a long and complex procedure. If you make a movie now, it doesn’t matter if it’s black and white or colour because the technology is able to deal with it.

You’ve made short films and a feature-length film and now your latest film 5 Centimeters per Second is a medium-length work at 63 minutes. Do you prefer working on films of shorter lengths or features? Or does it depend on the story you want to tell?

It does depend on what kind of story I want to tell. As it takes about a month or so to make a short film and at least a year to make a feature, it all depends on how much time I have to put into it and how long I am prepared to dedicate myself to the process. If it’s a light-hearted subject matter, I may want to spend less time on it so it really depends on my level of dedication to the subject. As for 5 Centimetres per Second, because it contains three short films which make up a medium-length film, it wasn’t a heavy decision. When the film was completed, I didn’t feel as satisfied at the end of the process and this has led me to work on a feature-length film for my next project.

In both Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days, it’s technology that both enables and prohibits normal communication and it seems to be a metaphor for unspoken words in relationships. Do you think technology – from letter writing to video phones – is something that gives people a chance to express their true feelings by liberating them from direct confrontation? Or does it make communication more difficult due to the lack of body language?

I believe that it depends more on the circumstance if this kind of technology expresses your feelings. For Voices of a Distant Star, one of the reasons that I used mobile phone technology is that when I made it, texting on phones and sending e-mail by phone was starting to be popular in Japan. I was in a relationship at the time and used to send texts to my girlfriend. Although my texts arrived quickly, sometimes it took a long time for the replies to get back to me. In these instances, I wondered why it took such a long time to hear back and though we both lived relatively close by in Tokyo, I felt that her feelings might be far from mine. This experience drove me to include the use of mobile phone technology within the film.

Does the sense of isolation and the missed emotional opportunities in your films come from personal experience or particular genres you enjoyed reading / watching when you were younger?

I can’t pinpoint any particular experience to share with you and to be honest, this theme hasn’t come from watching any particular film. It is just something that has come out of myself.

In 5 Centimeters per Second, it’s difficulties with travelling and arranging meetings that makes the romance problematic; however, the method of travel – by train – seems inherently romantic. Is this something that particularly interests you, or speaking as someone who comes from a country that’s slightly obsessed with trains, am I reading too much into it?

This is a question that I get asked quite a lot by Japanese audiences too. I am not particularly interested in trains themselves and I don’t particularly enjoy drawing trains. People do point out that trains feature in my films quite prominently and what I tell them is that first of all, trains are part of everyday Japanese life and as the main characters in these films are in their teens they don’t have access to cars. Though I’m not interested in trains themselves, I am interested in scenes of trains travelling through cities or countryside. The box-shaped carriages moving through these scenes are beautiful to me and I am attracted by the idea of total strangers being taken to their destination in these boxes. I haven’t seen a level crossing in London yet but in Japan they are everywhere and I have always liked the idea of this divide between two sides that the crossings create. For much of my life, from high school to university to my working life, I used trains myself and have many memories from those days.

Long-distance relationships have their problems but seem increasingly common in the modern world, due to the ability of people meeting over the internet etc. Also, over the last half-century, more and more people have had to travel to do their jobs, making their relationships also long-distance. Are these themes that interest you or was it just the emotional content of the situations?

It’s the situations that these distant relationships create that interest me more than the distance itself.

Non-diagetic music seems very important in your films, culminating in the final section of 5 Centimeters per Second. Do you think music is something that is underused in animation in terms of either accentuating the narrative or working as the equivalent of narration from an unseen source?

I believe that the amount of music used in animation is similar to that used in live action films. In many movies, music can sometimes communicate something that the picture cannot and therefore can play a very important part. I appreciate that the use of music at the end of 5 Centimetres per Second is probably quite rare in that you won’t see it in many films and I had to question myself as to whether I should finish off with music at the climax. I am happy with the ending now but it was a tough decision to make. One of the reasons that I chose the song is because it was popular in Japan about ten years ago and I’m sure that many of us have had the experience of listening to music from the past and being reminded of times and places travelled previously. As it is such a famous song in Japan, I felt that the audience who heard it would be reminded of their own memories from ten years ago. Because I wanted this music to bring out the audience’s memories, I removed all dialogue and sound effects. Although the movie is only 60 minutes long, I included the song in the hope that their memories would help to create the experience of a feature film. As I didn’t think about other countries, I never really thought about how people around the world might react to the music and I am looking forward to hearing what other audiences think as it will be playing in London this summer.

Thinking of the conclusion of 5 Centimeters per Second, the powerful use of music recalls the heightened emotions in scenes accompanied by songs that are either performed by the characters or mimic the characters’ experiences in the films of PT Anderson (in particular Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love). Are you a fan of his work? Do you think too few filmmakers use music as a powerful enough tool in soundtracks?

Although I have heard of PT Anderson and his work, I have never seen his films.

In addition to filmmaking, you’ve also worked on interactive romance video games. Was the fact that other people could choose the outcome – be it happy or sad – something that appealed to you, so that you personally didn’t have to choose what happened to the characters?

As I don’t actually make the games, I can’t really answer this but if the question is do I like to make interactive films where the audience can choose the ending or not then I like to, as the director, decide how the outcome will be. I see that in Japan the effect of these games where you can choose the outcome has started to influence manga, novels and animé. The reason that I say this is that many of these novels for younger people take on the themes of parallel worlds and universes and The Place Promised in the Early Days also has a similar influence. Though the writer decides the ending, he pictures how the world might have been if the character had taken a different path and I am interested to see what the future holds in this area.

Introduction and interview by Alex Fitch, translation and English text by Hanako Miyata, Tim Williams and Justin Johnson.

Format: Cinema

Release date: 4 April 2008

Venues: ICA, London and key cities

Distributor: Tartan

Director: Park Chan-wook

Writers: Jeong Seo-Gyeong, Park Chan-wook

Original title: Saibogujiman kwenchana

Cast: Lim Su-jeong, Rain

South Korea 2006

105 minutes

Park Chan-wook has followed up his brooding revenge trilogy with a whimsical, pastel-hued romantic fantasy set in a psychiatric hospital. But fear not, although graceful and tender, I’m a Cyborg is sharply stylised and odd enough to avoid sentimentality. Young-goon is a young girl who thinks she’s a cyborg and is institutionalised after she electrocutes herself in an attempt to ‘recharge her batteries’. At the hospital, she is befriended by Il-sun, a young man who suffers from a rather special kind of kleptomania – believing he can steal things like memories, politeness and ping pong skills. I’m a Cyborg may feel like a gentle interlude between Park Chan-wook’s weightier offerings, but it is as wildly imaginative as the director’s previous work, mixing futurism, manga influences and a love story in a fresh way. I’m a Cyborg premiered in the UK at the Korean Film Festival in November and on that occasion Park Chan-wook told us more about the ideas behind the film and gave us a tantalising insight into his next project.

Virginie Sélavy: After Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, Oldboy and Lady Vengeance, I’m a Cyborg is much lighter and almost violence-free. Did you feel you needed a break from the serious tone of those movies ?

Park Chan-wook: It’s been a very long journey, I spent five years making the trilogy and I also directed a short film for Three, Monster [a collection of three Asian horror shorts, the other two directed by Fruit Chan and Takashi Miike]. All of them have been very dark and serious and I did feel like I needed to get away from that. With the trilogy the vengeance was the end of the journey, and that ended with I’m a Cyborg. It felt right to finish with I’m a Cyborg; it was the end of an era for me.

VS: It’s interesting that you should see I’m a Cyborg as the end of the trilogy because although it’s very different in tone from the other films, it deals with the same themes. In all three films revenge was always linked to love. Here it’s just a different balance between the two – I’m a Cyborg is more about love than vengeance.

PCW: I conceived the revenge series as three films plus I’m a Cyborg, and it may look like they were made by completely different directors, but I do believe that there is a common theme throughout. Fantasy has become more and more important to me in later works. My films are becoming more feminine, there’s more hope. The themes of love and hope have definitely become more prominent towards the end of these four works. I started with Mr Vengeance, which was very dark and serious and as you go towards the end of the cycle it becomes lighter and more fantastical, and love becomes more important.

VS: I’m a Cyborg is a very sweet film, and it might come as a surprise to some fans of your previous work, but I think that that sweetness was already present in the character of Ryu in Mr Vengeance and in the Geum-ja character in Lady Vengeance.

PCW: I have a daughter so the theme of bringing up a child, bringing up a daughter in particular, has really influenced me in Mr Vengeance and Lady Vengeance, and also in I’m a Cyborg. The image of a dad bringing up a child is becoming more important in my work. But there isn’t much of a sweet element in the current project that I’m working on. After I’m a Cyborg I wanted to get back to a more serious tone. But I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

VS: There is a nod to your previous films when Young-goon has violent revenge fantasies in which she becomes a killing machine and guns down all the doctors and nurses. Why did you include these scenes in what is otherwise a very gentle film?

PCW: I believe that this particular scene is not as violent as it seems. The audience already knows that it’s not reality, that it’s a fantastical scene. No matter how many people die it’s not as frightening as it would be if it were set in reality. I believe the scene was needed because Yung-goon is very angry at the adults in general and however sweet she seems she is still really furious. The movie doesn’t have a happy ending because her anger is not concluded. It’s like when young children are angry at their parents and they say, ‘mum, I want you to die’. It’s a very childish anger but it’s terrifying all the same. It’s that kind of anger that I wanted to put in that fantastical violent scene.

VS: In Oldboy you explore the idea of revenge as a positive emotion in the sense that it gives the two central characters this incredible will to live. There is a similar idea here, although of course in a lighter way, as Young-goon’s murderous fantasies are what keeps her going – in fact, right to the very end, when she thinks her purpose is to bring about the end of the world.

PCW: It comes from the idea of the ‘purpose of existence’. That phrase is repeated throughout the film. It’s not a phrase that you hear in normal conversation, it’s more philosophical. Teenagers are always asking that question and I believe that it’s completely natural that people should wonder that. Then comes the question, ‘why should I live?’, this longing to know your purpose in life. The reason why Yung-goon becomes the way she is is because she wants an answer to that question so badly. Then she realises that machines have very strict operating instructions and a very obvious purpose, which is something that she envies, completely misjudging the situation. And she realises that food also comes into it: she has to eat to exist so in the end the only reason for existence is to exist, there’s nothing more and nothing less. Her murderous fantasy of revenge fits into that rather than it being the reason for her existence. At the end of the film she believes that she’s found her purpose and it is to become a nuclear weapon and to blow up the world. That is a very fantastical idea, not only because it’s not realistic, but also because the probability of her getting enough power from lightning to become a bomb is very low. The way in which she looks at the purpose of her existence is very different from the way her friend Il-sun sees it.

VS: You said earlier that you were interested in moving more and more towards a fantastical kind of world. But at the same time the girl is a real girl, she’s not a cyborg, that’s all in her head. While you were writing the script did you think at any point that maybe she should be a real cyborg?

PCW: At the very beginning I thought of using a cyborg in the shape of a young girl, but first I realised that it would cost too much (laughs) and then there are already lots of similar films in Japan, so it wouldn’t have been anything new or fresh. At the beginning my idea was to make a movie about a psychiatric hospital so I decided to combine the two, psychiatric hospital plus cyborg. That’s when I came to the idea of a girl who thinks she’s a cyborg, but the reason why I made it a girl has nothing to do with sexuality. The most important thing for me was that the character should have a child-like quality, that she should be almost like a little girl.

VS: Did you find it easier or more difficult to deal with love compared to the violent emotions you’ve depicted in your revenge trilogy?

PCW: Telling a love story is definitely a lot more difficult than dealing with dark, serious material because when I film a dark story I know exactly what kind of thing I’m looking for, what expressions, scenes, imagery. With love, it’s very difficult to make it look real and not like a soap opera or one of those cheesy movies that there are too many of. You see it so often and it seems so fake and so false that when you see a young couple kissing in a film you don’t feel anything, you just think, ‘oh it looks pretty’ or ‘it looks fun’. Those kinds of images are too common. In Korea there’s an expression that says that it’s really embarrassing to watch a couple kissing on screen, so that was the most difficult scene for me to film. I filmed it but I had to scrap it all and start again. Now I’m very happy with the result, I’m sure that it’s the weirdest kiss there’s ever been in any romantic comedy and I’m very happy with that.

VS: You said your next project, which I believe is called Evil Live, will be a return to darker material. Can you tell me more?

PCW: It’s not called Evil Live actually, I’ve decided to change the title, and the English title hasn’t been chosen yet. The reason why I decided not to call it Evil Live is because it sounded a bit too much like a horror film, and although it is about vampires, it’s very difficult to specify what kind of genre it’s going to fall into because it’s more about a love triangle and being unfaithful. It will star Song Kang-ho, who was the dad in Mr Vengeance. He’s a vampire who falls in love with a married woman and murders the woman’s husband…

VS: Vampires and a love triangle, it sounds great! (laughs)

Format: Cinema

Release date: 25 April 2008

Distributor Optimum

Director: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

Writers: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud

France 2007

95 mins

Marjane Satrapi’s adaptation of her own Persepolis graphic novels deservedly won the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes festival. Although the film is a necessarily stripped-down version of the two volumes, which respectively describe her childhood in Teheran and her exile as a teenager in Austria, the film version retains all the elements that made them so successful: the mix of Satrapi’s personal story with her country’s history, the wryly humorous look at the absurdity of political power games, the penetrating observation of both Iranian and European societies and the powerful contrast between simple animation and the complex, difficult events it depicts. Full of life and irreverent spirit, this is a film that is simply impossible to dislike. The same can be said of Satrapi herself, who proved to be a wonderfully entertaining interviewee when we caught up with her during last year’s London Film Festival.

Virginie Sélavy: The film is an adaptation of the two Persepolis books, and this works very well as they are really two sides of the same story: they are complementary both in terms of your personal history and in the contrast between Western and Muslim cultures.

Marjane Satrapi: I didn’t want to make a movie with a sequel, Persepolis I, like there’s Rocky I, Rocky II… Actually, I liked Rocky I, not so much Rocky II, sequels are always bad… It was also very important to do both together because it’s the story of one person’s life. The linchpin of the story is the exile. The book starts in 1978 and it stops in 1994. It’s a nostalgic point of view, it’s the point of view of someone who goes into the airport and who cannot go back, and she re-evaluates her whole life.

VS: Why did you choose this nostalgic viewpoint for the film instead of following the same linear structure as in the books?

MS: Because at the time I was writing the script I was extremely nostalgic. At that point in my life the fact that I didn’t go back to Iran really started to weigh on me. Of course, if I made the movie today it would be a different movie because now I’m not nostalgic anymore. And also, the flashback structure shows that I’ve distanced myself even more from the story than in the book, in which I’d already taken some distance, in order to be able to laugh at myself.

VS: Your life has been shaped by momentous political events, and it seems to be inseparable from the history of your country, which makes your autobiography much more interesting than most people’s!

MS: But I don’t like the word ‘autobiography’ for my own work because it’s not really an ‘autobiography’. It’s a book that you write because you have problems with your family and friends and you don’t know how to tell them, so you write a book and you take your revenge. I didn’t want to make some kind of political or historical or sociological statement because I’m not a politician, a historian or a sociologist. I am one person who was born in a certain place and in a certain time. It’s a very personal point of view and I think that is also why it has become universal; because the only point of view that can eventually become universal is of course one person’s point of view. This is my French side, this is my very individualistic side. (laughs)

VS: It’s a very interesting perspective, especially in these times, when the Western world and the Muslim world have become completely polarised, partly due to the politicians’ simplifications. Your viewpoint is very interesting because it’s that of the outsider, both in the Western world and in the Muslim world.

MS: When I was a child I always had doubts about people who believed in astrology. You know, is it possible to believe that there are twelve groups of human beings? Now it’s not even twelve groups, it’s two groups, the Muslims and the Christians, West and East. If you’re French does it mean that you love all French people and you understand all of them? What common points do I share with a fanatic of my country? None. What common points does an American liberal share with George Bush? None. What common points does a fanatic of my country share with George Bush? A lot. So it’s not a question of where you come from. It simplifies everything and it just shows that the basis for the war is bullshit. There is only one division in the world, that between the fanatics and the rest of the people. Fanatics are absolutely everywhere. And the way they think is the same everywhere. The reason why they’re more powerful than the rest of us is that they push emotional buttons. They use people’s emotions to lead them into the streets. What you or I try to do is ask questions, so you’re asking people to think, to use their logic; and of course the process is much longer and it doesn’t have the immediate effect that emotions have. That’s why you see them much more than you see us but there are many more of us. We, the people who are not fanatics, have to be united because whether they wear a bow tie or a beard, these people are very dangerous for the whole of humanity.

VS: In the second part of the book you said you felt you didn’t belong anywhere when you went back to Iran. You’ve lived in France for many years now, so do you still have that feeling of not belonging anywhere?

MS: I belong to nowhere and I belong to everywhere at the same time. It’s a very convenient situation because if you give me a hotel room anywhere in the world, and I have a comfortable room with a bath tub – a shower is not enough – I feel at home completely. But at the same time, no matter what happens, you have a relationship with the place where you were born that you don’t have with any other place. It’s kind of a genetic memory, something like that, it’s there and it can never change. I always say that if I was a man, I would say that Iran is my mother and France is my wife. My mother can be hysterical, she can blackmail me emotionally, whatever, she’s my mother and I cannot pretend otherwise. My wife, on the other hand, I enjoy living with her very much but I can cheat on her, I can leave her, I can have a baby with another woman… (laughs) At the same time, I am very French. For the Iranians, I am very French and for the French I am very Iranian. (laughs)

VS: What did you hope to achieve when you started writing Persepolis?

MS: The only thing I wanted was for people to ask themselves questions. Whenever they talk about it on the radio they just talk about fanatics. But these people that they’re scared of, these people that are reduced to abstract notions, these people that we know nothing about, aren’t they really like us? And if they are, then we have to rethink our whole position. That’s all. As an artist, you have to remain humble as to what changes you can make in the world. Marilyn Manson said something very interesting about turning kids into Satanists, he said that if music could change anything, the whole of the world should be love because 99% of songs are about love. So it can’t change much. But we try.

VS: The medium of the comic book may seem a strange choice for a story that is about very complex political issues, as traditionally it’s not associated with being able to explore those issues in depth. Why did you choose that medium?

MS: I read Maus by Art Spiegelman and I understood that it was a medium like any other. Traditionally, it’s not used in that way because most kids stop drawing at the age of 7 so for 99% of people drawing belongs to childhood. Plus at school you learn very early on to interpret what poets and authors say but you never study what painters and illustrators mean. We don’t know how to judge, we don’t have the tools for it so we are scared of talking about the drawing. For that reason I do understand that people may think that comics are odd but it’s a medium like any other and it has lots and lots of possibilities. Especially since people think that it’s a limited medium, you can just go for it, you can do a lot of different things. And the use of the image, the frame and the sequencing gives you a freedom that I don’t have when I write. When I want to describe a feeling I need a drawing. I don’t need pages and pages and pages.

VS: Visually it’s very cute but at the same time you talk about very dark subject matter and the contrast is very powerful.

MS: It should be. If it all went in the same direction it would become redundant. I used to be a complete psycho and that’s why I decided I had to dress like a bourgeois because if I dressed in a way that reflected how much of a psycho I was I wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere! (laughs)

VS: Was it a conscious decision to draw it in that particular style?

MS: Absolutely. Especially because in a comic the drawings are part of the narration, it’s not just an illustration of the text. I had a lot of text, the story was very complicated so I couldn’t have a very complicated drawing because it would have been too much. I had to purify the style of the drawing as much as possible.

VS: Were you influenced by the work of other graphic novelists when you started drawing?

MS: Not so much because I don’t come from a culture of comics. I started reading comics only after I wrote mine. At the same time, saying that I don’t have any influences would be too pretentious and not true, but they don’t particularly come from comics, they come from Matisse’s paintings, they come from Flaubert, from music, from cinema, from a lot of different things. So of course I’m the result of whatever I have experienced, whatever I have lost, whatever I have seen, but not particularly of comics.

VS: Why did you decide to turn the comic books into a film?

MS: It’s the worst idea in the world. (laughs) I didn’t decide to do it but I was in a situation where I could make a movie. Suddenly we had the right to play with this big toy, a movie, even though we didn’t know how to play with it. And we just said yes without knowing what we’d do. It was like diving into the water with Vincent [Paronnaud, co-director of Persepolis] and once we were in the water, we were like, now we have to learn how to swim. Now I really like the result so I could invent 1200 good reasons for doing it but even though I’m happy I did it, it was not a good idea.

VS: Were there any particular difficulties involved in adapting the comic books to film?

MS: Yes, the most difficult thing was the family scenes. They are absolutely useless but without them you don’t have a movie because it’d just become a patchwork of very hectic moments. You actually need these useless moments to cement the whole story. When the whole family is in the living room and they’re doing nothing, we had to think about how to make it attractive, how to make sure that it wouldn’t become boring, change the angle of the camera to make it more dynamic, things like that.

VS: Visually there is a difference between the comic books and the film and it seems that you were able to use some effects, like charcoal backgrounds and lighting, to give a more sinister atmosphere to the darker scenes.

MS: We kept the characters in black and white, the way they were in the comics. But you cannot make a whole movie simply in black and white because either you make people blind or you provoke an epileptic crisis, it’s unbearable. (laughs) So we had to find a way, we had to change a lot, it was necessary.

VS: It introduces an element of nuance in the black and white.

MS: Absolutely. It’s not possible otherwise, it would be like the Danish dogmatism, and we’re not here to make people pay – not only people have paid for their tickets, but if they have to throw up when the movie is finished this is not the point.

VS: And obviously because it’s two books condensed into one film, and you couldn’t make a five-hour film, you had to…

MS: …but if it was another time and my name was Erich von Stroheim I would have made an 8-hour movie. But nowadays nobody wants to pay for that. And nobody wants to watch it. I’m a very obsessive type of person, I love to watch 8-hour movies.

VS: It must have been very difficult for you to limit what could go into the film and to decide which scenes to get rid of.

MS: You have to go straight to the essential things, you can’t just joke around and take time to say things. You have to be efficient. It’s also extremely exciting to work this way because you have to think about ways of doing this.

VS: One of my favourite scenes in the book is the one where your character goes to visit her childhood friend Kia after the war and he’s in a wheelchair, he’s been horribly injured and he tells her a really tasteless joke; and Marjane doesn’t know whether to laugh or not, but then she realises that you just have to laugh when things are this bad. I thought it was a brilliant scene but in the film it’s truncated.

MS: Yeah, we tried to put it in but it was impossible. The problem in cinema is that you have to stick to one storyline. For example, Gangs of New York is a very bad movie because there’s a love story and there’s a reward story and all the different gangs; it goes in many directions and in the end it doesn’t work because you’re like, what is the story? On the other hand, you have Jean-Jacques Annaud, who made The Name of the Rose. Of course, the book by Umberto Ecco is much more about the philosophy and the whole history of the Church in the Middle-Ages. Annaud was extremely intelligent in that he put that in the background and he made the film as a detective story and the movie works perfectly because it doesn’t go in all directions. So we made the whole movie around the idea of exile, and we didn’t have the possibility to tell all the stories. This way, people will also have to buy the book if they want to read the jokes! (laughs)

VS: Why did you decide to write it in French rather than Persian?

MS: I had to write it in French, because I was writing it for the French. This book was my answer to the world, you know, things are really not the way you think. And you see it in the structure of the book, I give too many explanations, what is this, and what is the New Year, etc. If I had written the book for the Iranians, I wouldn’t need to explain all that because they know it. We talk the way we think. So in order to be able to think about how others would consider my story I had to think in their language, not in mine. So that’s the philosophical side of it. And I have always studied in French school. Writing in French is easier for me, especially as the spoken and written Persian are very different. There are a few Persian writers who know how to deal with that perfectly but I don’t, because I’ve always written in French. And I love the French language too, I’ve always loved it.

VS: Finally, there’s one part of your story that seems completely at odds with what we see of your personality in the rest of the book – it’s the bit where you become an aerobics instructor. What happened?

MS: I was stupid, I don’t know what happened! That is called a historical mistake. (laughs) I don’t understand it either. I have photos, you know. I’m dressed in pink and purple, with a hair band. I’m like, what was I thinking? (laughs) I don’t have any explanation either. I’m very surprised by myself too. (laughs)

The Last Mistress

Format: Cinema

Release date: 11 April 2008

Venue: Curzon Mayfair, Renoir (London) and key cities

Distributor: Artifical Eye

Director: Catherine Breillat

Based on: the novel by Jules-Amédée Barbey d’Aurevilly

Original title: Une vieille maîtresse

Cast: Asia Argento, Fu’ad Ait Aattou, Roxane Mesquida, Claude Sarraute

France/Italy 2007

104 mins

A confrontational filmmaker, Catherine Breillat has often been unfairly and violently reviled simply for taking a brutally honest look at sexuality. Her past work, including Romance (1999), Fat Girl (A ma soeur!, 2001) and Anatomy of Hell (Anatomie de l’enfer, 2004) always offers a provocative, radical questioning of traditional views of female sexuality. Her latest, The Last Mistress (Une vieille maîtresse), is somewhat of a departure. Adapted from a novel by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, it is Breillat’s first costume drama and has an unashamedly romantic tone. It centres on the impossibly handsome Ryno de Marigny, a dissolute dandy striving to disentangle himself from a passionate ten-year relationship with his earthly Spanish mistress Vellini, in order to be allowed to marry the rich and pretty Hermangarde. We were able to talk to Catherine Breillat at last year’s London Film Festival, where she told us about dandies and femmes fatales, her fraught relationship with the French press and how her new film differs from her previous work. Fully recovered from the stroke she suffered before she started shooting the film, she was as sharp and lively an interviewee as ever.

Virginie Sélavy: The Last Mistress is your first costume drama – how did you approach it?

Catherine Breillat: First of all, I fell in love with the novel. I think that if I’d lived in his century I would obviously have been Barbey d’Aurevilly.

VS: Why obviously?

CB: Because he was a dandy, and because his work was censored.

VS: Is that something you identify with?

CB: Yes, and it’s clear that in the film I identified with the role of Ryno.

VS: Ryno rather than any of the female characters?

CB: Absolutely.

VS: Why?

CB: It’s an autobiographical book, Barbey d’Aurevilly is Ryno de Marigny. I’ve always dressed as a dandy, I’ve always liked androgyny, and I wanted to film a boy who would have the beauty of a girl.

VS: This is something that recurs throughout your work. In Anatomy of Hell, Rocco Siffredi has a position that is almost feminine.

CB: He was very criticised for that in France! They asked him, ‘why did you let Catherine Breillat boss you around?’ In France, he’s a star, but as a stud who reinforces men’s idea of pure masculinity. So the fact that he let me feminise him… He replied, ‘because I like to be dominated by Catherine Breillat’. Rocco likes porn films and Pasolini. He loves cinema and he’s much more intelligent than people think.

VS: You offer a very blunt, honest, adult reflection on sexuality, so it’s strange that it seems to disturb so many critics.

CB: French critics are not so bad now. Although with Anatomy of Hell, one of them wrote a piece in a French paper that was presented as the announcement of my death. It was over two pages and the title said, ‘To Be Done With Catherine Breillat’. It was very violent.

VS: I don’t think that the critics would have been so shocked and would have reacted so virulently if it’d been the work of a male filmmaker. Do you think that it is the fact that you are a woman that disturbs people so much?

CB: Yes, definitely. In painting terms, I’m not Marie Laurencin, I’m Soutine or Bacon. And that’s what’s unbearable to them. Marie Laurencin is an esteemed painter but she paints pretty things. I find beauty in violence and brutality, and that doesn’t fit with the image of a woman. Claire Denis is another filmmaker who doesn’t mince her words, who is more brutal than a man. But she came after me, so she was lucky! At the same time too much aggressiveness prompts other people to defend you passionately. That’s why I don’t want to say that all critics badmouth me. Some of them do, like the one who wrote the death announcement piece. I met him after I’d had the stroke. He was coming out of my producer’s office where he’d done an interview for another film. I said, ‘ah, it’s you? All I do is make films! Why do you need to express so much hate, like a criminal, like a murderer?’ And as I was still half-paralysed, I said, ‘you see, I’m still alive! And I’ll still be around to piss you off! I’ll survive you!’ He was livid!

(pause)

But in reality, I’m also very arrogant. In the film, the Vicomte de Prony says, ‘what I like in Monsieur de Marigny is that if he ever becomes Minister, he will make a point of being unpopular’. And I think I’ve always been like this. I’ve always provoked what I’m complaining about now, so in reality I’m not complaining about it. I need opposition to construct myself against.

VS: The tone of The Last Mistress is very different from that of your previous films, it’s a lot less belligerent. It seems that you’re not trying to break taboos so much in this film.

CB: But I’ve never wanted to break taboos, I simply want to go through them. Taboos are like initiatory doors. So it’s quite the opposite, I like to create taboos, to know where they are. I do like to go beyond the limits. That’s what I see as my work.

VS: In one of the reviews of The Last Mistress, a journalist said that it’s a feminist revision of the myth of the femme fatale. Is that how you see it?

CB: Everything was in the book, including the conversations between the Contesse d’Artelles et the Marquise de Flers, when they analyse how you have to manipulate a man, which are indeed very feminist. I knew that people would say I’d written this but it’s in the book, it was written by Barbey d’Aurevilly. However, I have explored the myth of the femme fatale. Vellini is the femme fatale, she’s a ‘flamenco’ character, she comes from Seville, but I approached her through the vamps of the 30s and 40s, Marlene Dietrich, Rita Hayworth; and also Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu créa la femme, she has that singular sexual freedom, the freedom to provoke desire knowingly, which caused a scandal when the book came out, and later when Bardot made the film.

VS: Was it difficult to deal with that type of character? Were you worried that it might fall into a Carmen type of cliché?

CB: But what is fiction, if not a series of clichés in which people see themselves? We all live the same lives and if we can still read very old books it’s because they have fixed fictional types in which we can recognise ourselves. It’s not a convention, it’s a type of reference to oneself. The commonplace is precisely the place in which everyone recognises themselves. I’ve worked a lot on the commonplace. People have said that Virgin [36 fillette, 1988] was full of clichés, of things that people already knew. But that’s not true, it was about what people never show.

VS: Why did you choose Asia Argento for the role of Vellini?

CB: I thought that the flamenco character had to be a rock’n’roll character in our times. She had to have a very sexual, provocative side, but also be very androgynous. Rock’n’roll women are both feminine and masculine. They are aggressively sexual, like Bardot in Et Dieu créa la femme, and at the same time, unlike Bardot, who was really a woman, they are masculine, like Marlene Dietrich, smoking cigarettes dressed in a suit. In Barbey d’Aurevilly’s novel, Vellini smokes the cigar.

VS: For this film you’ve also worked again with Roxanne Mesquida for the third time. Do you like working with actors that you already know?

CB: No, with actors I have invented! It’s not just that I know them, I made them! It is true that I’ve made three films with Roxanne. As soon as she entered the casting room for Fat Girl, I said to my assistant, ‘you see her, she’s mine, you can stop the casting’. With Fu’ad [Ait Aattou] it was the same thing. He wasn’t an actor. He was sitting at the terrace of a café and when he got up I pointed at him and said to my assistant, ‘this is Ryno de Marigny, that’s exactly it’. I wanted my assistant to run after him and ask for his phone number because I thought we would never be able to find him again! But Fu’ad came straight towards me, maybe because I had so obviously pointed at him, and said he’s seen Romance and really liked it and he gave me his phone number. But he didn’t do it in a subservient way, he did it with this magnificent pride that he has.

VS: You have described Anatomy of Hell as ‘the end of a necessary cycle’.

CB: Yes, I had to take it to the end, I couldn’t have made The Last Mistress, which is essentially a crowd-pleaser, if I hadn’t done Anatomy, which was the worst film I could make.

VS: Why that idea of a necessary cycle?

CB: Because films are necessary to my life. If I didn’t make films I wouldn’t live. I’m only alive when I make films, when I write or when I talk about cinema. When I stop doing that, I feel like an invalid. My daily life is terrible. Daily life is not real life; real life is cinema, literature, and running around the world talking about my films.

VS: What did Anatomy of Hell represent for you personally?

CB: Daring to do what I hadn’t dared to do in Romance, which is to show the reality of the sexual organ. In Romance, the character talks about her face and about her vulva while looking at herself in the mirror, and the mirror should have been between her legs, instead of reflecting the pubic triangle, which is now completely accepted and politically correct. It was the sexual organ that repulses and horrifies that I wanted to film. And I didn’t do it because I was a coward and it was that cowardice that I had to transgress. So I made Anatomy of Hell for that reason. I filmed a hairy horrifying/horrified vulva, like the face of the Medusa. It was not about a real sexual organ, but about this world-wide fantasy of the vulva as a horrifying thing.

VS: Did your stroke have any influence on The Last Mistress?

CB: None at all. What changed in relation to my previous films was that I finally understood that the power of a filmmaker is very abstract. Now I know how to control a film without giving orders. I don’t think I could have kept control of the set designers, the costume designers, etc, before, but with this I made the film exactly the way I wanted. I often had half of the set removed because it was just too busy and you couldn’t see the essential anymore. Apart from that, the only thing that my stroke changed is that the insurers don’t want to insure me anymore!

VS: Do you think that The Last Mistress opens a new cycle?

CB: No, I only referred to a cycle that ended with Anatomy so that people who are scared of my films would understand that this one is less esoteric and more watchable. Usually, my films do well until the 6pm screening, then at 8pm attendance dives and while all the other films generally do better at the weekend, mine crash. So I wanted to say that this film was different from the others, where people were scared to go with their family or their wives, that this film could be seen in a respectable fashion… it’s for all audiences! (laughs)

VS: The tone in The Last Mistress is definitely much softer than in your previous films.

CB: Of course, since it’s a very romantic novel. So it seems softer, but it’s still a film made by me, so it’s not that soft. To get out of the enclosed drama that is my specialty I needed the help of a novelist who can build a work as an orchestral piece. What I do is chamber music – pardon the pun – and The Last Mistress is an orchestral piece.

For much of the 1990s, writer-director Harmony Korine was readily identifiable as the enfant terrible of the American indie scene, a twisted prodigy with a penchant for drugs, drama and artful rebellion. Now, after a lengthy hiatus, he returns with his most surprising work yet: the tender, warm-hearted Mister Lonely, a comic parable of love, loss and the importance of faith.

Tom Huddleston: The writing of Mister Lonely coincided with you pulling yourself out of a long dark period. Can you talk about how you ended up there?

Harmony Korine: Well, I guess about ten years ago, during my last movie, something happened to me. I was living in New York and I wasn’t very happy. I started to feel disconnected, it’s no secret I was very much into narcotics at the time, and it started to fall apart. I started to feel like most of the people around me were phonies, crooks and idiots. And then I began to question myself, like, if these are the people that are around me, I must be putting off that as well. So then I wanted to do nothing but disappear, just get out of that world. Basically I just kind of more or less disintegrated.

TH: Did you honestly consider quitting the movie business?

HK: Definitely. Absolutely. And it wasn’t just quitting. I mean, I’ve had fantasies about quitting almost since I began. It was a weird thing, because all I ever wanted to do was make movies, and then when I started making movies all I wanted to do was quit making movies. It wasn’t the films, I loved making the films. It was everything that came before and after.

TH: Mister Lonely is about a character rediscovering companionship and happiness. In that sense is it a very personal story?

HK: Definitely. There are all these ideas about faith and hope, wanting to be someone other than who you are. Being in beautiful places and feeling awful. A lot of searching, inventing your own reality.

TH: There seems to be more of a sense of joy here than in any of your other movies.

HK: Well, the truth is… It’s no secret I’m not a big fan of plots in films. I mean, I love stories and I love characters, but with anything I’ve done I’ve wanted to create a mood, a tone, and a feeling. I felt this movie would succeed or fail based on me getting across this sense of hope and happiness. Or at least the idea that in amongst all the horror there’s still some beauty, there’s still a kind of poetry to it all. The film before, Julien (Donkey-Boy), in some ways was very bleak, like a dark hole, and it reflected my mental state at the time. But I was feeling differently with this, and I wanted to make people laugh, and do something different.

TH: You seem to have a poet’s ability to encapsulate very distinct feelings in single shots or brief scenes.

HK: Sometimes I don’t really know where they come from. I try not to question it too much, it’s good when it becomes an intuitive thing. Certain images speak. I can say more in images and music than I can in actual conversation.

TH: What made you want to tell a story about celebrity impersonators?

HK: Visually, it was interesting to me. I like the way they look. And I like obsessive characters. It seems such an odd way to make your way in the world, this bizarre existence. Living as someone else, living as an icon. But at the same time I thought it would be interesting to see, you know, Sammy Davis Jr. mow the yard, or Abe (Lincoln) tending sheep, or James Dean washing clothes. Those were just things I wanted to see.

TH: Were you concerned that it could become kitsch, or seem to be making fun?

HK: Definitely, that was something I was always aware of. Obviously, I didn’t want it seem like a joke. I didn’t want people to be doing impersonations the whole time, you’d get tired of them. I was more interested in the human underneath.

TH: Your father was a tap dancer, and there’s always this vaudeville influence in your films. What do you think it is about that era that fascinates you?

HK: More than anything, I’ve always admired show-people. I always had a great affinity for people who can walk on stage and do a little performance, give their blood, sweat and tears for the people out there, make ’em laugh, change the mood. People that live by their wits and their creativity. So I think I’ve always just loved those elements of performance and show-people, that carnival nature.

TH: It seems in your films that dancing, or any unconscious movement, signifies happiness and release.

HK: Man, it’s fun watching people dance. Sometimes I just sit on YouTube… you get a lot of these almost novelty dancers, with hip-hop and stuff, you get a lot of these strange dances that I really love.

TH: Conversely, do you think you mistrust intellectualism?

HK: It’s like what Herzog says, it’s false currency. I would rather you feel something than for me to have to explain it to you, intellectualise it. It’s not the way I work. It’s why I love Cassavetes’ films, because they just are, you just feel it. You sit through a movie like Husbands and it’s more than a movie, it’s like a life experience that you’ve just shared with these characters. And that’s not to say that all films should be like that, because I also really enjoy movies like Knocked Up, really debased comedies I enjoy as well, those just aren’t the kinds of movies that I make.

TH: You seem closer, more sympathetic to your characters here than in either Kids or Gummo, do you think that’s fair? There doesn’t seem to be any artistic distance between the camera and the subjects. You’re with them all the way.

HK: Yeah, I think so. But I think, in Gummo, at the time I didn’t feel that far away from some of those people either, I just think maybe they were more extreme, so it was more of a provocation. With this, I guess that some of the characters are maybe less sadistic.

TH: Do you think that’s a sign of growing confidence as an artist?

HK: (laughs) I hope not. I don’t know, as soon as people start saying things like that I start to get nervous. I don’t ever want to get that confident, or too mellow. But with this movie, after going through so much shit in my life, I really wanted to push myself. I wanted to do things I never thought I would do, and express ideas and feelings that I hadn’t before. I think it was important for me to try that.

TH:Do you feel like it’s perhaps more traditional as well, in terms of its character development and narrative?

HK:Yes, without question. Those movies were more deconstructed, they were more about breaking down image and language. Julien and especially Gummo were more about how I wanted to see films, in a kind of fragmented, random, chaotic order. With this story, I didn’t feel like it needed that. It needed something simpler.

TH:Obviously the key eccentricity in Mister Lonely is the parallel story. What do you think the importance was of telling these two stories simultaneously?

HK:Even though they never intersect, I thought that they both spoke to the same ideas, the same philosophy. This idea of wanting to be someone other than who you are, change and faith and obsession and identity. And in some ways I thought that the nuns’ story served as a kind of poetic punctuation, or an allegory of sorts.

TH:Did you at any point consider cutting the secondary narrative, issuing it as a short, or as a prelude to the main narrative?

HK:Definitely. Because they started out as two separate ideas, but I thought they’re very similar, they’re both saying something very close.

TH:Inasmuch as this is a film about faith, you seem in the end to be saying that such faith is essentially misguided, that it all turns bad. Do you think that’s fair?

HK:I think there’s a few ways to look at it. I don’t really have an intention, so maybe that is what it says, I don’t really know. Sometimes, to me, it seems like the people who are the biggest dreamers, and the most pure in heart, in the end get hurt the worst. Society and the real world, I’ve noticed, have a way of kicking your ass at the end. But I also think that, for me, there’s nothing more important than the dream. The dream sustains us. It’s not about a person’s individual successes or failures it’s about the dream. At least for me, it’s the dream that always helps me make it through the day.

TH:Do you yourself have faith in anything?

HK:Of course. I think it’d be awful to walk these streets without it. But, you know, faith in anything. I have faith in the trees. I have faith in the belly-dancers.

TH:Did you ever consider giving the movie a happy ending?

HK:I think it does have one.

TH:Not for the nuns.

HK:Right, right, right. Yeah, maybe not, but who knows? Maybe they’re in some other world right now.

TH:How has the film been received so far?

HK:So far, so good. With my movies, in some ways, I’m delusional. In the back of my mind I always think it’s going to be, you know, a sequel to The Shawshank Redemption, or that I’m going to have these massive commercial successes. Then when the film is shown people tell me how insane that is, and how misguided I am.

The conversation then turned to Harmony’s earlier career, where the success and notoriety he earned writing Larry Clark’s infamous Kids quickly translated into mainstream fame, late night talk-show appearances and his own debut directing gig, Gummo.

TH:How was it being thrown into the spotlight so young? I saw you on Letterman (look on YouTube for these ridiculous interviews). You seemed to be playing with him a little.

HK:I was a kid, I was having fun. Making it up as I was going. I didn’t get in it for a lot of the reasons that most people get in it, so I figured if I was going to do it, I was going to make it my own. It was fun. I did a lot of stuff that caused me problems later in life, but I was enjoying it.

TH:Is it fair to say you were something of a nihilist as a young man? Life seems pretty bleak for most of your characters, even if they do have a little fun along the way.

HK:Sure. I’m sure there’s a lot of that in there.

TH:How much of Gummo came from personal experience?

HK:A lot of that movie was filmed with people and friends that I knew growing up, in locations that I was very familiar with. But it was kind of both, it was things that I was making up and manipulating, mixed in with straight documentary. That movie was really just trying to get images from all directions, wanting to create a tapestry.

TH:Do you think it’s fair to say you had a tendency at that stage to pick the most grotesque aspects of the world you were exploring?

HK:I don’t know. Those are things I’m interested in, those were the types of pictures that I wanted to take, and those were the types of people and characters. It’s what I loved, those were people that I loved, and found interesting. Some of them, yes, you could say that they were bizarre, you could refer to some of that as grotesque, but for me that’s what I loved, that’s what was exciting to me. Those were the types of images that I hadn’t seen on screen. And I still love it. It’s still what it is.

TH:We know what happened to the principal cast of Kids, but what happened to the cast of Gummo? Are you still in touch with any of them?

HK:A lot of them didn’t fare so well. A lot of my friends are in prison, a few of them died from, you know, sniffing paint. It was a rougher road for those guys.

TH:How was it directing Werner Herzog the first time on Julien Donkey-Boy?

HK:It was great. When you see him, that’s how he is. He’s always exciting to work with. When you explain the character, when he gets in and understands it, you kind of just let him go. Yeah, Werner is a real performer.

TH:How much improvisation did you do?

HK:Improv is based on ideas. Improvising, for me, comes with the script, and letting the characters, actors leave their lines and take it in some other direction. With someone like Werner you can do a lot, but there are some people who are horrible at it.

TH:You talked a lot at the time of Julien Donkey-Boy about finding a new cinema, about finding new narrative directions in film. Do you still harbour those kinds of ambitions?

HK:I guess it depends. With this movie, it wasn’t about that. It was because the story seemed, to me, like it needed to be told in a simple way. And so I think it changes with each film. I have no interest in doing straight movies, I just don’t care about it, it’s not my thing. I don’t think like that, so I think my movies will always have something to offer in the form of non-narrative or, you know, something different. But I’m not staying up at night trying to discover new forms of cinema. It’s not like a science project. It’s not a math equation.

Interview by Tom Huddleston

Photo: Noel Lawrence

Other Cinema

Listen to the podcast of the full interview on Sci-Fi London

Having started as an underground film venue 25 years ago, the Other Cinema also became a DVD label in 2003, releasing the works of experimental filmmakers such as Craig Baldwin, JX Williams and Bill Morrison. Alex Fitch talks to co-founder Noel Lawrence and finds out more about their ‘mad, bad and rad’ aesthetic. This interview was originally podcast on Sci-Fi London.

Alex Fitch: Experimental cinema isn’t that widely available in the UK; your DVDs are sold in the ICA bookshop and are region 0, so they fill a gap in the market.

Noel Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. England was a particularly hard nut to crack for us as you’ve got that dated rating system.

AF:What sort of films do you show when you tour your programme to countries like the UK?

NL: I do a combination of things – I showed Experimental Eros in a variety of places, in Switzerland and the Netherlands this year. We show full programmes from the Other Cinema catalogue, some titles that have been released, forthcoming ones to test the market / the audience, to see what they like, that sort of thing. I’ve been in England before, we showed at The Cube cinema in Bristol and at The Horse Hospital in London. I went up to Newcastle: they have a fairly vibrant underground film scene there.

AF: Are you the main curator for titles? Do you decide which releases go ahead?

NL: I’m not exactly the main curator… Let me give you a little history of how The Other Cinema went ahead. We started as an underground film venue in San Francisco about 25 years ago and that was founded by an avant-garde filmmaker called Craig Baldwin who has done several well-known pictures composed of found footage, most significantly Tribulation 99. He started with what’s known today as the micro-cinema movement, which was the idea that we don’t have to show films in movie theatres – anyone with a screen and a couple of folding chairs could set up a cinema and show what they want, something outside of mainstream, outside of what big studios are distributing to the public. Other Cinema is based in the Mission District in San Francisco. It’s a storefront theatre with folding chairs and not the best high-end projection equipment but, how should I put it, a lot of spirit and enthusiastic audiences. The idea of Other Cinema – the DVD label too – is to show ‘outlaw’, marginal cinema that can be broken down into three ingredients; this is how Craig has always explained it: The Other Cinema programming aesthetic is ‘The Mad’, ‘The Bad’ and ‘The Rad’!

AF: Okay!

NL: Let me explain that. ‘The Mad’ being alternative subjectivity, bizarre uncommon ways of looking at things that are ‘mad’ or ‘schizophrenic’. You can make a million associations with that. ‘The Bad’ being kitsch, low culture. We’re all about high culture or low culture – there’s no middle ground! And then ‘The Rad’ is radical politics, progressive politics – the idea that film can be used as a way of changing the world by changing people’s ways of looking at things. Does that make sense?

AF: Absolutely. Those are the sort of things that are part of underground culture in San Francisco and California in general…

NL: I’d say we’re tuned into that… you know, that underground sensibility that characterised California – certainly counter-culture California – for many, many years. Some people talk of West Coat and East Coast rap; there’s certainly a West Coast / East Coast flavour to experimental filmmaking. We’re on the West Coast side of that. Of course, it’s more complex than that – we represent a great number of New York filmmakers on our label, they’re certainly not ghettoised or anything like that. But I feel that we tend to be a little more fun in what we do than some of the things that come out of the New York Film Festival in their avant-garde programme – not to say anything bad about them ’cause they do a great job – but we’re a little more playful.

AF: In a way your label is like a film festival, spread over a number of discs.

NL: That’s an interesting way of looking at it! One of the reasons I became a film curator is that there was certainly a point where I thought, ‘Maybe I should found a film festival’, then I realised, ‘Why bother? There’s a million of them!’ There’s about 150 festivals in San Francisco alone! DVDs have an enduring material legacy that is not possible when you do a festival. Things go to a festival, there’s a big crowd and then they disappear and there’s nothing left. To a lot of undistributed films, that’s what happens: they do their festival run and they get shown in a lot of places but in a few years no one remembers what they are. Even the big stuff that’s going through Sundance or wherever. But because DVDs have this material component, they’re going to be floating out there forever. There are hundreds of video stores that have our catalogue and from today until whenever the DVDs break, people are going to be watching them and that works! So even though a DVD label can be really difficult – ’cause it’s really stressful to put out these discs – it has advantages over showing these things in a film festival… Or showing them in Other Cinema itself, which is a great venue where I’ve seen hundreds of films over the years, but the problem is that you’re limited to whatever audience happens to show up on a Saturday night to see it! Whereas the idea with the label is that we can export the magic that happens at the cinema and put it onto a disc and then everyone around the world can see it at any time.

AF: Another thing about your label is that the packaging is very well designed. You’ve made it collectable, which is important if you’re making something that you want people to keep for a while.

NL: Yeah, I think that’s very important actually. You’re right, we spent an enormous amount of time studying over the packing – there’s not the tiniest detail that is not going to be approved by Craig or myself. That materiality, that aesthetic component of the discs, is really important to what we do and I have a fear that it’s going to be lost because we’re moving into a digital age, where everything can be downloadable from the internet. Ever since I was a young lad I collected old records. When I was fifteen years old I would go to ‘the big bad city’ and go to the underground record shop and get punk rock albums and it was really a rush to go into a store and pick up something rare. I think that’s sort of getting lost today, with the internet now anything can be accessed by a few keystrokes. In a way that’s great, but at the same time, I kind of miss the idea that you have to search these things out.

AF: Definitely. I’d be the first person to argue that the loss of the corner video shop is a terrible thing, because if you’ve got shelves of esoteric titles, it’s much easier to browse them in the flesh and if you’ve got someone vaguely knowledgeable behind the counter, they’re going to point you in the right direction.

NL: Exactly! There’s a really great record shop in San Francisco called Aquarius Records and it’s not a particularly large shop at all, it’s probably the size of my apartment, which is not very big, it’s a studio! They sell a fraction of what you might get in a big HMV, but everything is so lovingly presented; they write these tiny reviews of every disc in this incredibly small hand-writing and it looks like someone has spent two hours writing this little index card review with a magnifying glass! You walk in there and you ask the person behind the counter, ‘I’m looking for this kind of music…’ and they can point you exactly to the CD you’re looking for. You can’t do that at an HMV and you definitely can’t do that on the internet.

AF: Is it important for you to balance the number of short films with the number of features that you’re releasing?

NL: We tend to put out more collections of short films than we do feature films, but it’s not like any kind of hard and fast rule. What we do, running a DVD label and competing in a market place where we’re against the likes of Harry Potter and we’re trying to peak the public interest in our work, is to curate thematically with our DVDs. So a lot of our compilations have been on a subject that everyone knows about, like a lot of people don’t know who Craig Baldwin and Mike Kuchar are but they know about horror films or they understand the concept of the seventies. I put out this disc dealing with themes of sexuality and called it Experimental Eros and everyone’s heard of sex! They might not know the particular short films on the disc, but people get interested because of the theme that gets addressed on the disc and they pick it up for that reason. I’m hoping that from there, people familiarise themselves with the artists that are behind some of this stuff and seek out more of their work.

AF: With the Eros collection, you seem to be tapping into the zeitgeist a bit. I don’t know if it’s the same in America but in Britain, there’s an exhibition of art about sex on at the Barbican at the moment, they had a collection of 70s Swedish erotica on at the ICA recently and before that there was a collection of Edwardian pornography called The Good Old Naughty Days shown in London. To get around the ratings system, you had to join a ‘sex club’ in order to see this film of sex acts that were recorded 80 years ago… So with the ‘mainstream’ becoming increasingly mainstream and people having less challenging films to watch, I guess sex is still a subject that’s somewhat taboo.

NL: It’s interesting you should mention that. Even today, as ubiquitous as porn has become because of the internet, there are still a lot of difficulties in distributing sexually explicit material on DVD and I don’t just mean porn – with Experimental Eros there were a lot of stores that would not pick it up and I couldn’t get it replicated at certain factories that wouldn’t handle that kind of material. There’re a lot of problems that are still present when you’re showing that kind of material and in America they still occasionally do arrest porn directors on obscenity charges and that sort of thing. I don’t know if that happens in England or not… It’s strange because the legal status of porn is still very ‘grey market’ in the United States, particularly under the Bush administration, which is a lot more puritanical than some of the more recent democratic administrations like Clinton’s.

AF: The demarcation between porn and erotica in this country seems to be very much delineated by the artistic intent of the filmmakers. You can show full penetrations and erections in films if you can show that they have some kind of artistic meaning.

NL: There was a famous court case in the United States where the Supreme Court talked about obscenity being offensive to community standards and having no socially redeeming value. So as a result, back in the 60s and 70s when this court case was first decided, you would always see these naughty books that were just wall-to-wall sex, but the first page would always have an introduction by some kind of professor with a PhD who would say something like, ‘This is talking about the social conditions these people are living under’, which is absolutely ridiculous because it was just a pornographic book. But, in any case, our work is erotica and supposedly it has a socially redeeming value! There’re a lot of arguments to what constitutes socially redeeming value, in the sense that all porn – even the most gutter porn – still has relevance in terms of its documenting of social behaviour. There still could be arguably an anthropological argument for that! I heard about a university, I don’t remember if it was Berkeley or not, they were keeping an archive of all of this 70s porn, basically to study the furniture that was used on the sets because most Hollywood films are not filmed in real places – they’re filmed on sound stages, they’re completely make-believe – but 70s porn films were shot in someone’s living room. So people can get an idea of what actual 70s furniture looked like by looking at porn!

AF: It’s funny you should say that because there was a documentary on the very subject on BBC Four a couple of months ago. It was very much looking at these 70s interiors in California in particular, and how the look of these 70s porn films have a certain cultural cachet that has outlasted the films themselves.

NL:Oh yeah. It’s very interesting to watch that stuff – the sex is boring – but they have these really bizarrely tacky soundtracks and I’m particularly enamoured with the bad acting between the sex scenes because it seems like something straight out of some Warhol movie! So, it’s downright bizarre at times which I really enjoy a lot! It’s kind of experimental film, unintentionally.

AF:All of your stuff – the Eros collection particularly – does demonstrate the fusion between high art and low art because it shows an aesthetic quality and at the same time it’s being appreciated for its trashiness.

NL:Exactly! You’re right – that’s the Other Cinema aesthetic right there: the work in Experimental Eros tends to be footage that’s been appropriated from porn, which is pretty much the lowest rung in the totem pole of genres, and it’s been taken by avant-garde filmmakers and made into something completely different. It’s strange; it’s made very beautiful in a lot of cases – I’m think about, for example, the film The Color of Love by Peggy Ahwesh. Do you remember that one?

AF:Yes, it looked really good.

NL:Exactly. Basically what happened was: she found a decayed reel of super-8 porn, took it into her workshop, dyed it, massaged it, changed the look of stuff and made it into something incredibly beautiful. In terms of the low-brow and high-brow ends of the spectrum, she’s definitely in the high-brow end. She’s a published academic, she teaches over at Bard College, she’s a serious artist from New York. That is definitely a good example of our programming style.

AF:I’m glad you mentioned that title because it leads on to Decasia, which is possibly one of the most famous films, at least over here.

NL:Well, that’s Bill Morrison, he’s a good friend of mine and a very nice guy. We released it – the DVD – in something of a limited edition. The idea of it was that he had a print of Decasia that he didn’t need, so we cut it up into pieces and with this edition they would not only get the DVD but also an actual piece of the film. We’re going into that materiality which is very important to the work we show on DVD. What else can I say? It’s a masterpiece, it’s a very important film – one of the most important experimental films that came out in the last decade or so – and I’m a big fan of it! It’s kind of hard for me to find the words to describe it, to be honest with you. I was also really pleased because we just released a new DVD called Experiments in Terror 2, which obviously follows Experiments in Terror 1, and Bill gave us a new film that he made called The Mesmerist for that. Bill took this silent film called The Bells with Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff and worked his magic on it; I don’t know exactly what it is that he does in his studio but he creates… When you see a Bill Morrison film there is a certain look to the film that is magical and that film definitely has it.

AF:There seems to be a new interest in silent movies. People have looked into this phenomenon and it seems to be that when a couple of generations have died off and there’re no longer family members left with memories of, say, the 1920s, that’s when young people get into it. It’s the opposite of what you might expect.

NL:Yeah, I don’t know! I guess! I really like old stuff – even my parents seem kind of archaic! It is fascinating the way film can be used that way, to give people the ability to go back in time. What fascinates me is that watching an old movie is an experience that can literally be unchanged from 50 years ago. You see a film like Casablanca in 1942 when it came out or whenever and when you see it 50 years later, it’s still essentially the same experience in a dark room watching this movie and in that sense it’s really the ability to go back in time. Does that make any sense?

AF:Definitely. Particularly when they restore old movies for the film print and not just the DVD; about ten years ago they did a new print of Vertigo where they went to the trouble of finding the cars that were in the movie and matching the colour of the celluloid cars to the paint colour of surviving models so that they looked exactly the same.

NL:Of course, and this being a San Francisco film, I know it well! In fact, speaking of Vertigo, there’s a film on Experiments in Terror 2 called Between 2 deaths and the filmmaker, Wago Kreider, went to the church known as Mission Dolores with a video camera and he retraced Jimmy Stewart’s steps through the church in that scene that was filmed 50 years ago. The film very carefully fades in and out from Hitchcock’s Vertigo to the filmmaker’s version of that scene. It’s really amazing, ’cause he synchs up all of the architecture perfectly, so you see it constantly going from the past to the present, from the present to the past…

AF:…and that exemplifies exactly what Vertigo is about in the first place, by trying to recreate the past using…

NL:I hadn’t even thought of that! That’s a brilliant point that you’re making there. I don’t know if that was the thought that Wago had when he was making it or if he was just being clever… I just took it on a literal level – I just enjoy watching it. I hadn’t thought about that part.

AF:Thinking of the ‘Rad’ aspect of your catalogue, another title that’s well-known over here is Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y…

NL:We’ve enjoyed a lot of success selling that title. It’s especially popular in Europe and it continues to sell very well to this day.

AF:How did you pick it up for your label?

NL:Johan came to us with that actually. I think he had probably tried to sell it to somebody else and it hadn’t worked out. We take weird stuff that other mainstream distributors are not going to be interested in. At the same time, I think it’s a fairly accessible work. It’s an experimental documentary without any kind of cohesive narrative but it’s surprisingly watchable.

AF:It’s weird that the kind of documentary films that are popular in the cinema these days – the sort of Michael Moore titles – are very polemic and try to make you adhere to a storyline, in comparison to documentary footage that lets you draw your own conclusions.

NL:You’re right. I like Michael Moore’s work, but there’s a certain authoritarianism with that A to B, ‘this is the point’ kind of filmmaking; you’ve got to follow all these steps to what the conclusion is. It’s much more fun to have this ambiguous kind of work like Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y that lets you draw your own conclusions. We had another documentary too called The Net, which is basically the same thing but is more of a ‘talking heads’ documentary. But it wasn’t there to say, ‘this is the point we’re trying to make’, it just offered a sort of polyphonic view of a certain subject, which was the links between the internet, the Unibomber and LSD…

Interview by Alex Fitch

Read the review of Experiments in Terror 2.