Category Archives: Interviews

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The Borderlands: Interview with Jennifer Handorf

The Borderlands
The Borderlands

Format: Cinema

Release date: 28 March 2014

Distributor: Metrodome

Director: Elliot Goldner

Writer: Elliot Goldner

Cast: Gordon Kennedy, Robin Hill, Aidan McArdle, Luke Neal

UK 2013

89 mins

Rural Britain is a place of dread and mystery in Elliot Goldner’s debut feature The Borderlands. Following two priests and a technology expert (the inimitable Ben Wheatley-favourite Robin Hill, star of Down Terrace), who are sent by the Vatican to an isolated country church to investigate reports of ‘miraculous’ activity, the film begins in starkly realistic mode before weaving an increasingly disquieting, creepy atmosphere around its characters. The unhinged local priest, the sinister villagers, a sickening incident outside the investigators’ house, an eerie walk through the fields at night, supernatural manifestations, and the descent into the ancient church’s subterranean vaults, all unnervingly rack up the tension, sustained in no small part by terrific sound design, before culminating in a startling, inventive, horrific ending.

Producer Jennifer Handorf talked to Virginie Sélavy about the merits of filming in a bat-infested church and refraining from having a full-on Lovecraftian ending.

Virginie Sélavy: The film has a great sense of the moody, ominous British countryside in the tradition of The Wicker Man. There has been a resurgence of the British rural-horror genre in recent years, with Ben Wheatley’s films, and most recently In Fear. Did you consciously try to make the film fit this sub-genre?

Jennifer Handorf: No, we didn’t. And weirdly it was one of the only things that wasn’t prescriptive about the film. It was made with distribution in mind, in partnership with Metrodome. So they had things that they wanted us to include, like the found footage, the church, the Vatican – that was the brief. The rural element seemed to work for the story, but it wasn’t preconceived. And as we were developing the film, the local youths became more important. But we had lots of meetings where we said, ‘We don’t want them to be the creepy Wicker Man villagers’. So we were not even really aware that we were falling within that genre until after the fact, although we were conscious about many other things. Obviously we’ve got Rob Hill, who’s in Down Terrace, which is one of Ben Wheatley’s films, and he edited Kill List, so we were wary of coming off as copying anyone, but I think the film just naturally fell into that sub-genre.

How did you decide on the location?

Initially the director had thought about shooting at Brent Tor, which is down in Devon, on Dartmoor. But it’s tiny, it’s about the size of a shoebox, so it’s completely impractical to film in. So I was set with the task of looking at 15 to 20 churches that had the elements we needed, with a bell tower, that were on a hill, and were quite remote. When Elliot walked into West Ogwell Church in the south west, he said it was the only one that felt creepy – the other ones felt quite joyous. And I think there’s a very practical reason for that: there’s a native bat population living in the church. You not only get these strange noises of the bats fleeting around, but they also go to the bathroom wherever they are, so you get this sort of green mould all over the walls – it’s a bit gross, but I think that the strangeness and the colouration and the mouldiness and the sounds in the rafters – the life that was inherently in the building – is what made it that much scarier.

The Borderlands is released on DVD by Metrodome on 7 April 2014.

It feels like the church is a presence in itself in the film.

It really is. A lot of that is the sound design. Martin Pavey, who is Ben Wheatley’s sound designer, did it all, he’s an incredible artist. He added a lot of life to the church, with creaking rafters, and wind, adding things to make it a proper character in the film.

Were there any real creepy stories or legends about the church? What’s its history?

It was built in the 13th century, but the interesting thing we discovered is that it was likely built on a former druid site of worship, which is relevant in the film. The fact that it’s on a hill and that there are oak trees to the south is in keeping with their sites. And the church was built during the era when the druid sites were being taken over and their gods being done away with by Christianity. There were also some amazing folktales about nearby graveyards, like the possible origin story of The Hound of the Baskervilles. When this horrible local magistrate died they buried him in an above-ground mausoleum and they put iron bars around it so that he couldn’t get out. Supposedly if you go and say the right incantations on a full moon or something, his dogs will rise and chase you out of the graveyard. It actually burned down because some immature Satanists lit lots of candles and set fire to it in the 80s.

Found footage is a very popular sub-genre in horror at the moment. Were you wary of not re-treading ground? How did you approach it?

Absolutely. Strangely enough, it was one of the few things that was part of the brief initially, and when the film was finished, the sub-genre had become so passé that the distributor was begging us to distance ourselves from it in any way possible. So even at script stage, we were dead set on there being a firm justification for why the characters were filming, and how they were doing it. And that’s where the head-cams came from: they weren’t holding them, they were actually mounted to their heads. So they don’t drop them when they get scared. They’re not even aware of where they’re pointing the camera at sometimes, because it’s just their head movements. We even surveyed our friends and other film fanatics about what they hated the most in found footage, and a lot of the time we just got back: ‘Everything, why would you bother? It’s a dead genre.’ So it was exciting that people responded really well to our treatment. And, of course, in the edit it created a world of problems, because you don’t have a master shot, and cutting just on-head cameras can become quite difficult. While we were filming we were very aware of that, so we would make a character look somewhere so we could catch something on the camera. It was all very stringently planned, and very carefully considered throughout the process. If you put the work in and you’re really conscientious with the way you do things, it doesn’t have to be lazy, it doesn’t have to be a throwaway choice.

What do you think the technique brings to the film? How different would the story be if it’d been filmed as a conventional narrative?

Thematically, the idea of whether or not you can believe what you see, and the truth of the image, was a big thing. We realised in the process that it really suited the story, because if we’d filmed it straight, then if we showed you a string or a trick, you would think that it was shonky filmmaking, or you would think that it was obvious that we were showing you a trick. But if you do that with found footage the audience thinks, ‘Did I see a string, was that the movie or was that this guy faking it?’ All that stuff fits the genre better – the questioning of the image, the questioning of whether you can believe your eyes, really suited it thematically.

Watch the trailer:

There are a couple of particularly creepy, unsettling scenes, like the one where Father Deacon walks through the fields in the dark, and the scene in which some local youths gruesomely tease the priests.

I think the reason why those scenes work is because of what you can’t see. I’m a big believer in ‘Don’t show, imagine!’ You never properly see the youths until they get their comeuppance. And that really works because, in the light of day, they are these harmless kids, but at night, when you wonder who they are, what they are – and we keep them faceless until that point – your mind wanders to a very dark place if you allow it. And with Father Deacon walking around at night, again, he’s the character whose eyes are playing tricks on him, or he thinks his eyes are playing tricks on him. And I think we’re all used to that sensation of being somewhere dark, and suddenly the hairs on your neck stand up and you start to wonder, ‘What was that, what’s that sound, what’s that shape?’ and despite the fact that you know you’re alone, and you know there’s nothing sinister, your mind creates all these narratives. It’s also a lot about the sound design, because you’re informed by what you’re hearing, as you can’t see anything. So you can hear something but you can’t match it with what you’re seeing, and that’s very unsettling.

The relationship between Robin Hill’s jolly techie character Gray and Gordon Kennedy’s tormented priest Father Deacon is one of the great pleasures of the film.

It really is. The film wouldn’t be what it is without the chemistry that exists between those two. There are a lot of scenes that are straight improv from the two of them. When they’re looking at the map and picking out the different places, Gordon, who is a comedian, and has written comedy, is actually being forced to play the straight man by Rob, who won’t let him be serious for a minute. They’re a real treat.

One of the interesting things about the story is that it’s about priests who have a remarkable lack of faith in the miraculous, when you think that their whole belief system is based on just that.

Exactly. I come from a very religious part of America and I grew up surrounded by people who had tremendous faith, and for me it never made sense. But hearing those people talk about it as fact, they clearly get great comfort from it, it’s a big part of their lives. And then you look at the Catholic Church as an institution and you realise that not everybody within that institution has to have that absolute faith, as long as they act as faithful men – that’s all that really matters, a lot of it is politics. So it was really interesting to explore that. The character of Father Mark is meant to be by the book, he follows the rules, and then it’s revealed that he’s the one with the least amount of faith. And he makes this point: ‘Am I not a good man? Do I not follow the teachings of Jesus? Why do I have to believe in magic to be a good Christian?’ I found myself asking that a lot when I was a kid, and it was interesting to see it treated in the script. Then you have Father Deacon, who is someone who started off with a really strong faith, but through experiences in his life has learned that man’s inhumanity to man surpasses miracles. So he’s had it beaten out of him, where Father Mark never believed in it. It was a vital part of the film. Funnily enough, we’ve had a really bad reception from Italy because they think we’ve portrayed the Church as too nice, we haven’t made the priests sinister enough. So I’d quite like to see the Italian remake of this!

[SPOILER ALERT Stop reading if you don’t want to know anything at all about the ending.]

The ending is fantastic. Without revealing too much, what was the idea behind it?

Initially the ending was a lot more explicit, a lot more Lovecraftian. And it became one of those wonderful evolutions: because of the way you’re making a film there are restrictions put on you, and you can’t do what you initially intended, so you’ve got to come up with another solution. Keeping things a bit more subtle, having the guys just walk into it, showing that all they had to do was turn around and walk out, but they don’t, because they wanted that proof, because they needed to see it, and eventually they do, but the price they pay for that is obviously quite large.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

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The Robber: Interview with Benjamin Heisenberg

The Robber
The Robber

Format: Cinema

Release date: 21 March 2014

Distributor: Filmhouse

Director: Benjamin Heisenberg

Writer: Benjamin Heisenberg, Martin Prinz

Cast: Andreas Lust, Franziska Weisz, Florian Wotruba

Germany, Austria 2010

101 mins

Based on the real-life case of the Austrian serial bank robber who became known as ‘Pumpgun Ronnie’ in the late 1980s, Benjamin Heisenberg’s The Robber (Der Rä;uber) tells the story of Johann Rettenberger (Andreas Lust), a successful marathon runner and confirmed criminal, who is driven by a constant, uncontrollable need for speed and adrenalin rushes. Shortly after being yet again released from jail, Rettenberger inevitably falls back into his old habits, raiding and running, soberly measuring his heart rate after any physical strain. He even breaks records as an athlete at local competitions, but neither the sport nor the unconditional love he receives from his girlfriend Erika (Franziska Weisz) can bring his troubled mind to rest. Following a man permanently on the move, Heisenberg succeeds in capturing the inner turmoil of Rettenberger’s animal-like spirit with the same meticulous precision and steely determination that his character puts into his strict training scheme, which gives the film an unsettling intensity and unfaltering energy.

The Robber premiered at the 2010 Berlin International Film Festival, where Pamela Jahn caught up with Benjamin Heisenberg and talked about the challenges of filming a character who is constantly running, communicating his self-destructive energy and approaching the story like a wildlife documentary.

Pamela Jahn: Do you run?

Benjamin Heisenberg: No, but I thought that I should maybe start now. I have tried jogging a couple of times but I didn’t last very long.

In The Robber you are reworking the criminal case of Pumpgun Ronnie, aka Johann Kastenberger. Your film is based on the actual events but the script is largely drawn from Martin Prinz’s source novel. How much of the film comes from your own and Martin Prinz’s imagination and how much from actual fact?

We started off with the book because Martin, who was also my co-author, wrote the novel but he let me go off with it and extract the action parts around which I wrote a treatment. And then, parallel to writing the first draft of the script, we started researching the real character in detail. We met up with people who knew Kastenberger as a runner and also with people who knew him as a criminal, and with family members. We collected all this material and weaved all these elements into the script. Most of it is close to the real story, although the real man was probably more psychopathic than our main character. But I have to admit that working on the script was pretty tough and we changed it twice, completely. We used to have a lot more back and side stories in the second version but, in the end, we decided to limit it and we came back to an earlier version, which you now see on screen.

How did people react when you tried to talk to them about the case?

There were people who didn’t want to talk to us because they had enough of it. In Austria in the 1980s it was a big thing, and quite a few people who were closely involved with the man were simply fed up with the press and people interrogating them, and asking them where the money went. And we respected that. By the end of the day, he was a character who was fairly easy to understand. That energy that was inside him, you get that immediately when people talk about him, and that’s what fascinated me most with the character and kept his story alive for us during the writing process.

His energy and inner determination are almost infectious.

I have to admit there was a point where I thought I couldn’t do it. It was 2007, so about a year after I had started working on the project, I had some sort of crisis. I was really in bad shape, because I realised that I couldn’t go on writing this character – he was getting too close. [SPOILER ALERT] I had the feeling that I had to write another ending because I couldn’t let him commit suicide, it had to be different, and I panicked. [END OF SPOILER] But then there are elements in his character that I could relate to from the very first moment and that I find incredibly intriguing, which are the strength he has inside him and that kind of animal-like instinct that drives him.

Watch the trailer:

Where does this drive come from?

He’s looking for situations that take him to his absolute limits, it’s an urge that burns inside him, that he can’t resist. At the same time, he radiates an remarkable ease and rigour when he is in these situations. It’s that combination that is so powerful and intriguing, but on the other hand it is extremely self-destructive.

Andreas Lust, in the lead role, captures Rettenberger’s troubled mind and nature quite effortlessly. How did you develop the character together?

Andreas is someone who has this same sort of energy inside him and he sometimes can be off-camera like the character he’s playing. And that’s why we cast him in the first place. The funny thing was that, in the beginning, he wanted me to give him more back story and psychological explanations and for some scenes we did that. But most of the time I tried to tell him that a huge part of this character is an animal, he is like a wolf. That’s why I planned to make parts of The Robber like a kind of wildlife documentary, even though it was staged and dramatised. I said to Andreas, if you are a wolf, you have to be that wolf, you can’t play it, you can’t fake it, because then it becomes implausible. And then Andreas really identified with the character and he dived into it. There was a moment when we were filming him running, and I said, ‘Could you run a bit slower?’ And he said, ‘No, why? This is how he does it, and I do it the same way’. And we had an argument about it. It was really tricky to find that balance. But for me, Andreas really combines those two sides of Rettenberger: he can be pretty determined but he also has a very fragile, vulnerable side.

I can imagine it being quite difficult to film someone who is constantly running, constantly on the move?

Yes, absolutely, because the camera can react to this in many ways: it can swivel, or stay static or move with him. So you have to decide what works best for the scene, so that you get a feeling for the movement, the speed, but also the space he is running in, his surroundings. And every time he runs, or is on the run, it’s a new challenge.

You mentioned Rettenberger’s vulnerability, and what really seems to make him human is the relationship he has with his girlfriend Erika.

I always thought of this whole story as a sort of Greek tragedy with a character who has a fate that is laid out for him. And the moving thing about their love is maybe that this woman, who is very independent and who knows what she wants in life in a very modest way, falls in love with him and deliberately allows it to happen. Erika knows how to deal with Rettenberger, who lives a very alienated life and doesn’t care about social niceties or anything. However, at the same time she has a kind of vulnerability, an inner secret and a pride that she protects. And that’s something that bonds the two individuals on many different levels. It’s interesting when, at one point, she says to him: ‘You have to make decisions, and if you don’t, it mean’s something.’ That describes her really well. And she decides to go for this guy who is very dangerous, but she also knows that she can’t hold him, that eventually he will run away – literally.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

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‘It’s all Quentin Tarantino’s fault!’: Fifteen Minutes with Don Coscarelli

JDATE
John Dies at the End

Format: Blu-ray + DVD

Release date: 17 February 2014

Distributor: Eureka

Director: Don Coscarelli

Writer: Don Coscarelli

Based on the novel by: David Wong

Cast: Anton Yelchin, Addison Timlin, Leonor Varela, Willem Dafoe

USA 2012

99 mins

Best described somewhere on the Blu-ray extras as ’Bill and Ted’s Naked Lunch’, John Dies at the End is the latest Don Coscarelli film in a nigh-on 40-year body of work. He doesn’t make perfect films, the early ones tend to oscillate between ramshackle goofiness and arresting surrealism, but he does make winningly inventive ones, crafted against the odds on tight budgets. Phantasm and Beastmaster are genuine cult classics, and hell, if you don’t love Bubba Ho-Tep there’s just something wrong with you.

In a phone interview conducted at 9am Los Angeles time, Mark Stafford talked to Don Coscarelli about filming a spider crowd massacre, the Presley estate’s reaction to Bubba Ho-Tep, and how Tarantino has changed indie filmmaking.

Mark Stafford: I first saw John Dies at the End at the London Film Festival a couple of years back. That was fantastic, but it’s been a long, long road to this DVD/Blu-ray. Was the cut you first screened at Sundance different to the LFF version?

Don Coscarelli: It was an interesting process because we filmed in digital format, so consequentially after every festival screening I was able to make adjustments to the movie. I showed it at Sundance and I made some changes, and we showed it at South By South West and made some more changes, and probably by the time we showed it in London that was the final version… I don’t think they’d let me make changes that late into the process.

Read our review of John Dies at the End.

It becomes clear watching the extras that you do a lot of takes. Was that always part of your process, or has the technology encouraged that?

As I’ve made more films I think I’ve made less takes. Early on I took a lot because I didn’t have confidence in myself. It was always: ‘that was pretty good, can we get a better one?’ But it all depends. Some actors, by the way, seem to get better the more takes they do, others get worse. It’s the actor. But I do like to shoot lots of takes because movies are like a puzzle that’s built in the editing room, and the more material you have to work with the better. Sometimes you’ll get an odd look from an actor during a take, which doesn’t have any meaning at the time, but that you can use in the edit to make a point. But I don’t think I’ve ever taken as many as Stanley Kubrick did…

John Dies at the End relies a lot on the casting, which is great. How long was the process? Did you get everybody you wanted?

Generally yes. I’d worked with a couple of the actors before, like Angus Scrimm. And I knew Paul Giamatti, and he came on board very early, to help also as a producer. There was a built-in challenge making this movie: we had limited resources, so I had to find some unknown guys for the two leads, and as a horror director the most terrifying part of making the movie was whether I could find those two actors. The first few days of casting I’d only seen actors who were wrong for the part, who’d just butcher the dialogue, and I began to question whether I could make the film. Luckily Chase Williamson wandered in, this guy who had just come out of college and had never been in anything at all. And then, to compound the challenge, first day of shooting he has to come in and shoot eight pages of dialogue with Paul Giamatti as his first scene ever. It all worked out.

How much of the film was locked down on the page before shooting began? Some of the stuff on disc gives the impression of a film being made on the wing, on the fly…

I pretty much follow the script but sometimes the most interesting elements in a movie happen by accident, when one of your collaborators does something extraordinary. An actor, a set designer, a cameraman will do something with lighting, and you have to try to stay open. The challenge of making movies is that you have this finite amount of time. Every day you have your 12 hours to get the shots done, and you don’t always do it, and being an editor I know how crippled I’ll be if I don’t get those shots… So you want to have it pre-planned, you want to have it organised, and you also want to be spontaneous, but usually spontaneity takes time, to investigate where the spontaneity takes you. It’s a juggling act at all times, and just talking about it gets me exhausted.

I haven’t read John Dies at the End, the novel, but watching the film again I noticed how much it shares some bits of business with your other work, the interdimensional travel, insects, the way that Phantasm has a severed finger and John Dies at the End has a couple of pills that turn into flying bugs…

Reading the book was exciting for me. What was nice about it was this brilliant young author exploring themes and topics that I’ve been interested in for decades, but with this fresh voice, especially the way he writes dialogue. I thought the book handled those themes in a way that would connect with a modern audience. So I jumped at the chance to get the rights and make a film out of it. Then it became a challenge because he had so many wonderful ideas, and unless you’re Coppola or Cameron or Scorsese, who can make three-hour movies, you’re limited to a very tight time frame of maybe 90-100 minutes. Trying to find a way to shoehorn that book into a tight screenplay was difficult. I had to leave a lot of good stuff behind, unfortunately.

You said onstage at the LFF that your method was to go through the book and cut out anything that cost a million dollars.

That’s true, there were things that, with a huge effort, we could still never really approach. Still, I did look for ways to do that. There was this massive sequence in the book that I just loved (the spider trench massacre), and there was just no way we could create that in the movie. But I was able to get a friend of mine (David Hartman) to come in and do a little animated version of that sequence. Though I was worried for a while that that wouldn’t be accepted by fans of the book…

John Dies at the End is based on David Wong’s novel, Bubba Ho-Tep was based on a Joe R. Lansdale short story. Is there a pile of books by your bed waiting to be adapted?

There aren’t that many. It’s hard to find a book that suits my taste and where I can see a viable path to getting it funded and made. What was great about the Joe Lansdale story was that, other than the mummy, it was a pretty simple story that you could make on a budget. Some of the best moments of that film are just the two actors talking in the bedroom, and that’s pretty simple to shoot. I’m always looking for something like that. John Dies at the End is a lot more ambitious but I’m always reading, looking for projects.

Did you ever get any reaction from the Presley estate to Bubba?

We did get a reaction, I don’t know how legitimate this story is. We were always a little concerned that we’d gone too far with the movie and that we’d get an adverse reaction from the estate. I don’t think it’s any secret that they guard their intellectual property, trademarks and images very carefully. Luckily, I’m assuming, they approached it like everyone else did, that Bubba Ho-Tep was a piece of fiction, a parody. But I did hear that one of the folks who worked on our crew called over there just before the movie came out to see if they could get co-sponsorship on some kind of promotion. It was a completely ill-advised move and I was really angry when I found out about it. But apparently, when they called the response that they got was just, ‘oh, we’ve heard about that movie, we really want to see it!’ The thing is that the movie and the book had a really good spirit, and despite the state, the terrible predicament Elvis is in Bubba, we really did treat him and his legacy respectfully. I think we all looked to the better side of Elvis. That was the very nature of it, we couldn’t accept the fact that Elvis died the way he reportedly did. We had to say, ’he was the man, he wouldn’t go out, wouldn’t die that way! He had to die on his feet kicking mummy arse!’

You’ve been an independent filmmaker for 40 years, what do you think’s changed the most over that time?

There have been all kinds of changes. I think the worst is that it’s just much more difficult to get films funded these days. There used to be a lot less films being made. It’s all Quentin Tarantino’s fault, for making being an independent filmmaker cool. Millions of young people across the world decided ‘I’m gonna be a director!’ They’re all making movies and the competition is fierce. It seems to me that back in the day there was a lot more experimentation, a lot more willingness to take risks. There were always young filmmakers out there trying to figure out some new way of making a movie, it was exciting. There were a lot of movies that were popular back then, but wouldn’t be considered viable now, like The Last Picture Show or, say the Truffaut movies that were very simple but not exploitative, and they seem to have gone away.

I once interviewed Franco Nero, talking about the 60s, and all his stories seemed to be like ‘my hairdresser mentioned to me that her boyfriend had written a script,’ and four weeks later they’re shooting a movie. These days everything seems to take years. I asked him what the difference was between then and now, and he said ‘We used to have producers.’

There’s something to that. It’s gotten strange in that the divide has grown. There used to be a lot of pictures in the middle range, or lower middle range. These days you have the micro-budget on one side and the mega-budget on the other, so you either have to make your movie for two bucks or for two hundred million. That limits the kind of movies that can be made.

Interview by Mark Stafford

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Crazies, Creeps and Living Dead: Interview with George A. Romero

Night of the Living Dead
Night of the Living Dead

In autumn 2013, acclaimed horror film director George A. Romero visited London to conduct an on-stage interview and special screening of Night of the Living Dead as part of the BFI’s Gothic season. Alex Fitch caught up with the director to talk about his career so far, concentrating on his genre-defining zombie hexalogy, which began in 1968.

Alex Fitch: This year is the 45th anniversary of Night of the Living Dead.

George A. Romero: Don’t remind me! (laughs)

It’s astonishing how influential and continuingly popular the film is from generation to generation. I wonder if part of that is the political resonance that the film has, whether that was something you intended in the first place or not. If you look at the Civil Rights movement in the late 1960s, the students’ strike and other political unrest, these are themes in society that keep coming back, even in the present day.

Yeah. Certainly the racial aspect was not intentional, it was purely accident, because of the actor. He was the best actor from among our friends who we could get on the phone, and when he agreed to do it we consciously didn’t change the script. When we wrote the script, we never described his colour, and exactly the same things would have happened to him if he was white. So there’s that aspect of it…

Right when we finished the film, we were actually driving the first answer print of the film to New York, and that night we heard on the car radio that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. So, obviously, it then resonated that much more. When we were working on the film with Duane Jones, he was sensitive to it. We were all saying: ‘Come on, it’s 1968, we don’t have to worry about that’, but he was conscious of the fact that putting a black man in a role that wasn’t written for a black man was unusual. He thought it was bold, and we never recognised any of those issues, except only in conversation with him.

After Dr King was shot, did you think at all about changing the ending, or actually whether that happenstance made the film more powerful?

We had conversations in the car that night. We never talked about changing the ending, but in fact Columbia – who were the first ones who were interested in the film when we screened it on that trip, and wanted to distribute it – insisted that we change the ending, and we boldly said: ‘No! Of course not!’ We left New York without any distribution and then it took us a while to find some. We had to hire a producer’s representative to represent the film and he only found Walter Reade after Dr King was no longer in the headlines. I guess they weren’t as sensitive to it.

Most of the atrocities that were taking place in Vietnam at the time wouldn’t come to light until 1969 and beyond, but I assume you still felt that you were tapping into the zeitgeist.

It did, it felt that way. The documentary The American Nightmare (2000), puts the relevance right in there. There are some interesting parallels. There were some things we recognised, were conscious of. When I was shooting hand-held stuff, everyone was talking to us about the film as if it were like a newsreel. I was actually completely encumbered by the fact that we were using a ‘Blimp’ 35mm camera that you couldn’t move at all. We had no Dolly, so I think it’s a very static film, but that same camera would come out of the Blimp and you could hand-hold it with a pistol grip in one hand. In the posse scenes at the end of the film, that was where I was running around like a newsman, and consciously trying to make it look like news footage – the stuff with the dogs coming out of the wagons, the posse coming across the fields and all of that. I was conscious that I wanted those scenes to look like news footage, but that’s the only part of the film that looks that way.

You finally got to realise the idea of doing a movie in the style of cinema vérité when you made Diary of the Dead in 2007 – shooting it as if it was found footage that might have been distributed on the internet. Was it that new technology finally got around to bringing you the kind of equipment that would allow you to make a film that way?

No, it wasn’t that. The idea came from doing a piece on ‘citizen journalism’, which is something I find dangerous! So, that’s really where that came from. The second thought was, ‘let’s actually shoot it that way,’ and I developed the concept that these kids are out shooting a film and that’s how the plot develops, through their use of portable equipment.

Watch the original trailer for Diary of the Dead :

But since you have been cast as a political filmmaker, whether by intent or design, it seems that some of the found footage that you also included in that film – such as bombs being dropped on people in the Middle East and so on – is commenting on how on the internet you can quickly go from channel to channel and have someone’s self-aggrandizing YouTube video be followed by horrendous atrocities from across the globe.

Yes, and we were conscious of that. We were cherry-picking from archives all over the place – Getty and all the standard images that we could afford on our budget. Unfortunately there are too many of them out there, but we were very conscious of trying to do that. I’d say that I get too much credit for being a political filmmaker, but I do care about that. I also want to have something to say, even if it’s just simplistically said.

Not with the first film: with Night we were only concerned with the disintegration of the family unit – things like that. That’s what we were rapping about. We were living in that farmhouse. It was never about race, and largely I think that was the big thing that made Night noticeable.

Based on the success of that though, you cast another charismatic black lead in Dawn of the Dead (1978).

Oh, I did. That was conscious! Dawn of the Dead I had resisted doing – people were already writing about Night as if it was ‘important’, so I thought, ‘I’ve got to have some kind of an idea before I think about trying to make a second one’. The idea came from the shopping mall. I knew socially the people who developed that mall, and it literally was the first one, the first indoor temple to consumerism that we’d ever seen, the first one in Pennsylvania.

When people talk about malls in Britain in the present day, they’re regarded as a bit of a scourge – they open these things on the outside of towns and then the town centres start to disintegrate.

Like Milton Keynes! (laughs) That is a mall, a city that became a mall!

That sort of potentially malign influence, was that something already present at that time?

Not at all. Like I said, this was the very first one. Once it was up and operating, that was the very beginning of young people hanging out there instead of on street corners. Soda shops disappeared then and everyone started to hang out at the mall. Even within the film, the characters don’t know what it is. When they’re looking down on it from the helicopter, one of them says: ‘It’s one of them new shopping malls, or something’. None of us had any idea that the mall culture was going to develop the way it did. I was responding to just the idea of this. Instead of a small farmhouse, it was all about having people holed up in a supermall – at that time it was a supermall, nowadays some of them are way more elaborate than that one – where you can buy anything you ever wanted.

It’s interesting that people mainly credit Night and Dawn in creating the modern zombie movie, but I think The Crazies (1973) also, in its own way, is responsible for some of the more recent films that use the idea of a pathogen spreading, of the enemy being a fast, mutated people. Do you think that film is appreciated for its legacy as much as your Dead movies?

Not that much. It’s amazing that my films have such a shelf life! When I go to these conventions – horror conventions and so forth – there are fans of all of the films, and that’s really great. I love talking about them with people, people who are discovering films that no one went to see in the first place. I don’t know about The Crazies… It has its fans – people who really like it a lot – but I don’t know about its legacy. Certainly the remake, that was a zombie movie, but I never thought of it that way. Thematically, I was sort of doing the same thing with The Crazies as Night – people responding to a situation, except there I made them mad!

Watch the original trailer for The Crazies :

It’s not easy from our modern standpoint to think of the cultural resonances that might have influenced The Crazies at the time. Were there concerns in the media about bioweapons, chemicals and the spread of diseases?

No more than at any other time. I would say that it was heightened, there was Vietnam and all that going on, so it was about Agent Orange, napalm, that kind of stuff. There wasn’t any particular concern at that point, as there is today, about dirty bombs, sarin and whatever else.

But, in terms of the military and scientists being responsible, or at least exacerbating a bad situation, Day of the Dead (1985) seemed to pick up on some of the themes of The Crazies and develop them still further: this is all that’s left and we’re stuck with the people who were responsible for it in the first place.

Yeah. Well, that’s exactly what the idea for that film was. Originally I had written it bigger in terms of the script, but the finance company wouldn’t do it unrated. They said, ‘we’ll pay to shoot this, but it’s going to cost a little bit too much to risk releasing it without a rating’, so they asked if we could do it for $3 million. They’d go for $3 million without a rating and there were negotiations based on the ratings, so I said, ‘sure’. I chose then to go for the unrated version and cut the script back. It’s essentially exactly what it was and that’s the theme of it: that the military that caused the infestation are preventing the people who were trying to cure it from solving the problem.

I think the claustrophobia really works in the film’s favour. If the apocalypse happens, it is just going to be handful of people in a hole in the ground…

…somewhere! Unfortunately, it’ll probably just be the President and his cabinet!

In the 80s, you got into adaptation as well, particularly stories by Stephen King, films like Creepshow (1982), Creepshow 2 (1987), and The Dark Half (1993). What was it about his books that attracted you?

I think it was being comfortable with Stephen himself, and we became friends. We were introduced by Warner Bros., years before, because they had seen Martin (1976), and in typical studio fashion they reasoned that Martin was about a vampire in a small town, Steve had just written Salem’s Lot, which was vampires in a small town, so they thought we should meet! They sent me up to Maine and we hung out. My doing an adaptation of that book never happened, but on that visit Steve gave me a copy of The Stand and said: ‘Let’s make this!’ and I said, ‘sure…

…but how many movies is this going to be?’

Quite. So, I never did make The Stand, but at that time, Steve didn’t want to do it for television because they’d water it down too much, and he never made a film deal to produce it. In the end he did do a television version, with my ex-producing partner – Richard P. Rubinstein – who we’d worked with on the Creepshow films. So, it was just really being comfortable with Steve and having access to him. When he wrote Pet Sematary, right away he called Richard and me, and said: ‘What do you think about this?’ That’s how that relationship went.

Watch the original trailer for Creepshow :

The Creepshow movies are the first obvious example of your interest in comics in your career. Had you been interested in EC Comics’ horror comics in the preceding years?

Under the covers, with a flashlight! They were the forbidden fruit! Of course that’s before the 1950s Comics Code Authority came in. The censorship code busted EC Comics and turned Mad into a magazine instead of a comic book. At least that lived on, but Tales from the Crypt and other comics like that were thought to be amoral! Stephen, in fact, wrote a tagline for Creepshow: ‘A Laurel Comic is a Moral Comic’!

In them, I always thought the bad guys got their comeuppance, good basically triumphed over evil, even though the Crypt Keeper always was there to chuckle, and there’s that dark humour… It’s funny, the humour was an important part of those comics. Even though it’s so hard to convince people today that humour is the flipside of the same coin as horror – they don’t like to mix it.

You’ve had elements of that mix of horror and slapstick comedy in your more recent zombie films. A particularly memorable scene in Diary shows an Amish character stabbing himself in the head with a scythe! It seems that when you can put in a gag, there’s no reason not to…

There is no reason not to, and I can’t resist doing it! Also, there’s that fire extinguisher gag in Survival of the Dead (2009), with the eyes popping out; that’s completely like a comic book. I love comics, and actually as a defence against all of these zombie things that are out there now, I’m writing a 15-issue Dead story for Marvel Comics right now. Hopefully when the zombie furore dies, if it ever does, I can come back and turn the comic into another film.

I certainly can’t do what I used to do. I used to be able to hide in the corner somewhere and bring the zombies out once in a while, when I had something I want to talk about. But for now, it doesn’t work. In order to sell a zombie film these days, you have to promise that you’ll spend $250 million at least!

…and with a comic book you can show what a $250 million zombie film looks like…

That’s right!

Interview by Alex Fitch

Check it out, Cinema releases, Interviews

Oh Boy: Interview with Jan Ole Gerster

Oh Boy
Oh Boy

Format: Cinema

Release date: 17 January 2014

Distributor: ICA Cinema

Director: Jan Ole Gerster

Writer: Jan Ole Gerster

Cast: Tom Schilling, Katharina Schüttler, Justus von Dohnáyi

Germany 2012

83 mins

Best Film Director. Best Actor. Best First Film. Best Screenplay. Best European Film of 2013. After a gruelling 18 months on the festival circuit, German director Jan Ole Gerster’s first feature film Oh Boy is about to have a limited theatrical release in the UK, and as can be discerned it arrives with a bucketful of accolades including both critics and audience awards – rarely one and the same!

Oh Boy takes a wry look at a young man, Niko Fischer (impressively played by Tom Schilling) as he traverses Berlin – a Berlin of alienated people and locations not usually seen in the tourist brochures. He is an unemployed law student hailing from a wealthy family although, as the audience learn, his father is about to cut off his allowance, having discovered that his son has not actually attended classes in two years. He says he has been ‘thinking’. Now with no means of support, this Candide-like figure drinks and drifts across Berlin in the company of an actor friend. The pair find themselves in a variety of slightly surreal and absurd situations, resulting in a beautifully paced – and performed – cinematic text containing a reflective and moving series of vignettes that add up to an impressive and very confident first film.

It took a bold and assured directorial hand by novice filmmaker Gerster (who wrote the excellent screenplay as well) to decide on the visual style – it was remarkably shot in black and white – and to rein in the plot progression in order to allow generous amounts of shooting time for the story to unfold. His choice of lead actor, Tom Schilling, is an inspired one and Schilling turns in a remarkable performance as he makes the character sympathetic and charming while subtly hinting at his existential dilemmas. Even the opening scene is excellently judged as our (anti-)hero starts his day by rising from a bed shared with his girlfriend, from whom he is about to separate. A scene ensues between the two and as the camera focuses on this guilt-ridden and uncertain lone figure sitting at the end of the bed, the title, Oh Boy slyly appears on the screen, over-writing the shot. Then the credits roll as we begin our long day’s journey into the night.

James Evans talked to Jan Ole Gerster about the director’s interest in distanced characters, making a road movie inside Berlin, and looking for that timeless feeling.

James Evans: How did your screenplay come about – what impelled you to want to make a youth culture film about contemporary Berlin?

Jan Ole Gerster: I wasn’t thinking about making a ‘youth culture’ film, or a portrait of our generation or a portrait of our time or young people in Berlin because I think that this is the wrong intention to start out with. I had this character in mind that was somehow inspired by all the characters I always identified with in literature and films. I found it appealing to have a character who does nothing, who is very passive and still, but is wide awake and noticing things, and I thought it would be interesting to send him on a road trip without really leaving Berlin.

Your choice of visual style and the interesting and fitting use of black and white – was a gamble and, unlike some recent examples, did not seem to be gratuitous, modish or a ‘knowing’ visual gimmick. How did that decision come about?

I was afraid that it was going to be, as you said, received as a youth culture film or some sort of generational portrait that claimed to speak for how 20-somethings feel these days, but I was trying to do the opposite. I was trying to find a timeless atmosphere for the film and so every decision that I made, whether we were looking for locations or the visual style or even the music, was about finding that timeless feeling. I didn’t want electronic music, I didn’t want colour, I didn’t want super-modern architecture. It was important to me because there’s something old-fashioned about this character as well because he doesn’t seem to connect to the world he’s living in. He is distanced and alienated, and black and white provided this sense of distance that I was looking for. Of course, I am depressed that black and white has disappeared from the screen these days, but as you mention there seems to be a bit of a revival of it.

Watch the trailer:

The cast is very strong and Tom Schilling in particular is an inspired choice. He turns in a nuanced, balanced and finely honed performance and you give him and the other characters generous amounts of screen time to inhabit these characters. How did you cast him?

He was a friend…Well, he is still a really good friend of at least 13 years. We lived in the same neighbourhood and we hung out. We had the same interests and the same sense of humour, and we would go out and see films, and drink together and talk about life and work and the films that he is working on. So when I wrote the first draft of Oh Boy I sent it to him and he called me and said ‘Yeah, I like it, I’m gonna play that part – it would be an honour’. And I was pleased about this, but I said, you know it’s not really an offer, I just wanted to hear what you thought of it (laughs). But then he kept calling me and saying that he would be perfect for the part…And to be honest, the only reason I didn’t think of him was because I envisioned the character to be in his late 20s, and he looks about 20 but in the ensuing year he was smoking a lot, drinking a lot and then he became a father and something happened – he aged a lot in that time! I really think that it just took a lot of time to get used to the idea of working with a friend and of course I don’t regret it, it was the best decision of the whole process.

There are some discernable cinematic and literary chromosomes in the DNA of your film. I feel the spirits of Truffaut, Wenders, Salinger, Ashby, Cassavetes inhabit it. But I especially sensed Rafelson, and in particular his masterpiece Five Easy Pieces.

This is very interesting, you’re the only one who has mentioned Five Easy Pieces, and it was a film that I had in mind. People ask me if I had Manhattan in mind, but of course I wasn’t thinking about Woody Allen at all. I had Truffaut in mind and I watched Five Easy Pieces with Tom [Schilling] many times and we talked about this film a lot in preparing for our journey. I have just been re-watching all the films that I admire like The 400 Blows and Who’s That Knocking at My Door, which is a super personal film about growing up in a Catholic family among American Italians and in a gangster environment, and it is incredible because the whole Scorcese universe is in that first film. And it’s the same with the Jarmusch and Cassavetes films. So I thought there’s the key to finding your own handwriting – you have to talk about something that you really know and that you want to express – no matter what it is. And you’re right, it was more the spirit of these guys that inspired me than trying to be like them.

One question remains: what next? With all the road showing of the film, have you had any time to write?

Yes, I had a scholarship last year to spend three month in Los Angeles at a residence called Villa Aurora, which is funded by the German consulate and the Goethe Institute, and I’m going to Rome on a similar thing for two months, so I’m writing something new and enjoying it. After almost 5 years living with Oh Boy, I’m really ready to move on and do something else. It’s fun and it’s tough at the same time because, not being a full-time writer – I have only written one script – I don’t really have a routine, and it takes time to figure things out. I am not a fast writer and not a very patient person so it is torturing me a bit.

I guess there are now new pressures because presumably you can more easily attract higher amounts of money this time and there are high expectations for the dreaded second film after such fanfare for the first.

Maybe I should just do a high-budget flop next time!

Interview by James B. Evans

Check it out, Festivals, Interviews

Interview with Vivienne Dick: Punk, Art, Politics and Feminism

She Had Her Gun All Ready
She Had Her Gun All Ready

London Short Film Festival

10 – 19 January 2014

London, UK

LSFF website

Irish filmmaker Vivienne Dick looks far younger than her 63 years with her short thick hair and forceful stare. When we met in a pub in London before Christmas, I was reminded of film critic Jim Hoberman’s 1980 article on her No Wave films, where he wrote about her ‘obsession with female macho’. Cut to 2010: at the time of Vivienne’s major retrospectives, perhaps echoing Hoberman, there were articles written entitled ‘Dick Flicks’ and ‘Dicking Around’. This ruffles, because, if anything, her work, then as now, is rigorously gendered and firmly rooted in French feminism. Since the heady days of 1970s radical art and feminist thought, the bright lights have certainly gone out in New York’s Lower East Side, and Ireland’s Celtic Tiger has bottomed. Despite this, Vivienne’s films remain consistently uncompromising and consciously connect the personal with the political, reminding today’s audience just how vital oppositional filmmaking is.

Born in Donegal in 1950, after a bout of global travelling Vivienne settled in New York’s Lower East Side in the mid-70s and became friends with a group of artists whose connection to music and a radical punk aesthetic suited her own emerging politics. Conjuring up the spirit of Maya Deren and 60s underground filmmakers such as Jack Smith and Marie Menken, her trangressive Super 8 shorts became known as No Wave films as she turned a fresh Warholian camera on intimate performances and (at the time, underground) New Wave music from her friends such as Lydia Lunch and Pat Place. Some of her key films from this time are Guérillière Talks (1978) and She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978), both of which had an influence on 80s feminist filmmakers Lizzie Borden and Bette Gordon. In the early 80s, she marked her return to Ireland with a biting satire on her birth country’s shameless tourism called Visibility Moderate (1981). She relocated to London in the mid-80s and became involved in the London Filmmakers Coop. In 1990, she made a film about her friends and London’s cultural diversity called London Suite (Getting Sucked In) . Then in the mid-90s she moved back to Galway to teach, make films and raise a family. Finally, last year she settled in Dublin and turned back to making films full time.

In anticipation of the UK premiere of Vivienne Dick’s new film The Irreducible Difference of the Other presented by Club Des Femmes and Open City Docs at the London Short Film Festival on 11 January 2014, which the filmmaker will attend, Selina Robertson of Club Des Femmes talked to her about art, politics, feminism and No Wave film.

For information on screening times and tickets for the premiere of The Irreducible Difference of the Other, visit the ICA website.

Selina Robertson: You always pick strong titles for your films. Can you tell us how you came to find the title for your new film The Irreducible Difference of the Other?

Vivienne Dick: The title comes from the writings of Luce Irigaray, whose work I am very interested in. Woman is the primordial Other, but otherness can be displaced in colonialism, and war, and through caste and class. We have to find a new way of relating to the Other which is not based on dominance and brute force.

In The Irreducible Difference of the Other, we are taken on a personal journey through many portals: literature, song, poetry, performance, pop music, landscape, gardening, welding, the Arab Spring, war, politics in Ireland and feminism. On first viewing, the film unfolds like a collage – where or what was your starting point?

The starting point was war, vulnerability and otherness. I set out to make a film that would be very open to different pathways or directions. It can be a risky way to work because it is only when you are editing that it begins to coalesce. Fortunately the Arts Council in Ireland is still willing to fund work like this.

Three artists, Olwen Fouéré, Antonin Artaud and Anna Akhmatova are woven into the narrative. How do they relate to each other in the context of the film?

Olwen performs Antonin Artaud and channels, rather than plays, Anna Akhmatova. I see Artaud as a seer for this century. With all the technology we have in our hands we seem to be killing each other with ever more ferocity. It seems to me there is a connection between our treatment of the Other and our treatment of the planet. We all belong equally to nature and culture.

For the London Short Film Festival programme, we asked you to pick another one of your films and you chose one of your early No Wave films She Had Her Gun All Ready from 1978. In what way do you see the films as companion pieces?

She Had Her Gun All Ready is about relationship. The two main characters are performed by Lydia Lunch and Pat Place. I have been interested in the politics of relationship from when I first began to make films.

Your No Wave Super 8 films were so incredibly cool. They captured an underground punk art scene in downtown NYC as well as critiquing patriarchy, power, capitalism and gender relations. Can you expand on how your feminism and politics today connect with your filmmaking practice?

I have many of the same concerns I had when I began making films almost 40 years ago. I am going back to researching prehistory and images of women. It is about using images as a creative impetus for change. The starting point for new work is often people I meet, or a place, or music. I was in Cairo recently and would like to get to know the city and culture better.

Interview by Selina Robertson

Check it out, Interviews

Interview with Roger Corman – Part 2

Cormans World
Roger Corman © American International Pictures, 1970 All Rights Reserved

As part of the BFI’s ‘Gothic’ season, veteran film director and producer Roger Corman visited London in October 2013 to introduce a screening of his film The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). Alex Fitch interviewed the filmmaker about his career from the 1950s to the present day, and continuing on from the first part of the interview, which looked at his work on Edgar Allan Poe adaptations and remixing Russian sci-fi films, here they discuss Corman’s work as a producer and pioneer of new technology.

Read the first part of Alex Fitch’s interview with Roger Corman here.

Alex Fitch: As a producer you’ve garnered a great reputation for finding young talent – directors like Peter Bogdanovich, Jack Hill, Francis Ford Coppola and Joe Dante. Where do you think that instinct came from?

Roger Corman: It came from a specific reason. When I was making low-budget films, I could go for directors, cameramen, art directors, actors, and so forth, who would be all right for the task. Veterans of the industry had a certain level of expertise, but as a young man around Hollywood, I knew some of the brighter young people, and I thought it was better to gamble on somebody I knew and thought had potential, on the basis that even if he or she had less experience – or sometimes no experience – there was a talent there which would get me a better moving picture.

But it does almost seem like you had a bit of a preternatural instinct at finding good talent you could nurture. Were there dozens of people you turned down for every director that you did choose for a project?

More than dozens!

You’ve worked in various genres – science fiction, horror, Westerns. Do you think that in each decade you’ve worked in the business, different genres have reflected different themes of the times?

To a certain extent. I think they reflected my concerns as I’ve moved through time and through my life, and also what was happening at each particular time. For instance, in the 1960s, I moved from the classical Gothic horror films of the Edgar Allan Poe series to things like The Wild Angels (1966) and other Hell’s Angels and biker movies, then on to The Trip (1967) and LSD-inspired movies. They were subjects I was interested in, but they were about what was happening in culture at that time.

Watch the original trailer for The Trip:

Working with people like Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, you encouraged them not only to be actors, but also to work behind the camera. Did that go back to your days of having worked on set, and to the idea that to have a proper understanding of film, you need to try out more than one role?

Yes, I like to have everyone working in multiple capacities wherever possible.

Have they given you feedback on how that’s helped their careers?

Jack told me a very interesting story when he was doing The Shining (1980). When he was working with me, people said that I always printed the first take – I didn’t, generally I would use the second, third or maybe fourth take – and he said he did one scene with Stanley Kubrick, where it was over a hundred takes! He’s a good guy: he stood there until his 120th take or something like that, and finally Kubrick said: ’Print’ and that was it. Jack told me that he went up to Stanley and said: ‘I’m with you all the way, but I have to tell you, I generally peak around the 70th or 80th take!’

As the 1970s progressed, you became more of a producer than a director, and helped start the careers of the directors I mentioned. Did you feel like a proud parent as they went off to do other projects for other studios?

I was very pleased, particularly with Joe Dante and Peter Bogdanovich, and with Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, James Cameron… I always forget to mention somebody, and very often get a call from some Academy Award winner who says: ‘Hey, you forgot me!’

It’s interesting that a lot of those directors have gone on to make movies that cost $100 million and more. I wonder if there’s advice that you might give to directors starting out in the industry, that, actually, if you start off with low budgets – because you know how to efficiently spend money at that level – it prepares you better for the mega-budget films later on?

For more information on Roger Corman’s life and career, the documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel is released in the UK on Blu-ray + DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment.

Yes, and I talked to James Cameron about that after Titanic (1997)… I thought the special effects were great and I said to Jim: ‘How did you do it?’ He said: ‘I just did what I always did for you, I just had more money!’

By the end of the 1970s, you’d become – to use an uncomfortable word – a ‘brand’, with your name above the film title. Did you feel that as people got to know the kind of work you were making, you were under more pressure to deliver films that were beyond their expectations?

I’ve always felt that. I’ve always felt that I should give the audience more than they expect when they come to see a film. Generally that’s happened. Occasionally, it’s not happened.

One aspect of your career that perhaps you’re not that well known for is that you also became a distributor of foreign language films in America, presenting films that perhaps local audiences would have never seen if you hadn’t shown an interest in them. Did you get much in the way of thanks from the industry for doing that?

I don’t know if I got thanks, but I got recognition. What I felt was that I’d built my company New World Pictures into what was really the strongest independent distribution company in the 1970s, and I simply wanted to distribute the films of these auteurs. They were being distributed in two ways: very often by small companies that were little more than aficionados, and didn’t really have distribution strength to book the films the way they should be; or they were distributed by major studios who were great distributors, but for a certain type of film, they didn’t quite understand how these films should be distributed. I felt we were in between. We were small enough to give these films individual attention, but strong enough to book them into the right theatres in the right terms, and I simply wanted to distribute these filmmakers’ work. I wasn’t a charity, I wasn’t going to have nothing out of them, but I wasn’t expecting a big profit. I tried to break even or make a couple of dollars, so we ended up with Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Kurosawa, and the list goes on!

I guess to a certain extent, as you were saying, that meant presenting their films in a certain way because the American audience of the time didn’t know what to expect from international filmmaking.

Well, our general pattern was this: we would open the film in New York and Los Angeles, and get reviews from critics in those two cities. Based on the grosses from there, we would book the films around the country. We had a very interesting way of doing that: we went to a lot of college towns and if we opened, say, Bergman’s Cries and Whispers (1972) in somewhere like Detroit, we would then open in Ann Arbor, the home of the University of Michigan, because we found that way we made very big grosses. It became a little more complicated if we opened a film in San Francisco, we’d simultaneously open in Berkeley – home of the University of California – and Palo Alto, where you find Stanford.

Your final film as director was Frankenstein Unbound (1990) and I think it’s a really underrated gem. It’s a film that partially adapts Mary Shelley’s original novel and adds time travel to it. Suitably, one of the themes of the original book is the juxtaposition of old technology and new technology, and Frankenstein Unbound takes that to a different science-fictional level. Was that something you were considering when you made the film?

Those themes were definitely in my mind. What had happened was that Universal Pictures had done some market research and came up with the decision, result or whatever, that the idea of ‘Roger Corman’s Frankenstein’ would be successful, and they asked me if I wanted to make it! I said: ‘No, it’s going to be just another Frankenstein film, and there have been 50 or more of them. It’ll just be the 52nd…’ but they kept coming back to me every six months and kept offering me more and more money!

Finally I thought: if I can just find a new way to do Frankenstein, then I’ll make it. Brian Aldiss – a very good British science fiction author – had written a novel called Frankenstein Unbound, in which a statesman from the 21st century travels back in time and meets Doctor Frankenstein. I thought it was a great idea, but I changed the lead character to a scientist, because I wanted to do exactly what you said, I wanted a scientist of the future with knowledge of all future technology, to go back 200 years or so and meet a scientist at the beginning of modern science. I thought the juxtaposition would be interesting.

Watch the original trailer for Frankenstein Unbound:

But you didn’t film Aldiss’s sequel novel Dracula Unbound. Was it too difficult a book to adapt or did you want go in a different direction?

I just wasn’t quite that delighted with the film I’d made – some of the circumstances were beyond my control – I think I did a fairly decent job, but I felt the years piling up. It was easier, going back to being a producer.

Were you never tempted to direct again as the years progressed?

I’ve thought about it occasionally, but what would I do? There are two things I’d do: I would find a subject that was special to me that I definitely wanted to make, or I might just take the next script that comes off our assembly line and just shoot it as one of those types of films. Somehow I just didn’t get round to doing it.

In recent years you’ve been dealing with new technology. It may be smaller and faster, but there are all the little things like digitizing, adapting to different file formats and so on, to keep the machines happy. It’s not quite as simple as just turning a 35mm camera on…

I’d assumed it was. I felt I’d learned just about as much as you could with 35mm film without becoming a cameraman; digital came in and I only understand a part of it because every 90 days a new camera comes out or there’s a new technique, and it turns out that it’s far more difficult than I thought it was to shoot with. We have a technician on the set at all times doing I have no idea what, but he’s sitting with the cameraman. Then he goes through various stages of the work before you can cut with this stuff. So, I’d assumed this was immediately going to be faster and cheaper… It’s a little faster to shoot, but you lose time and money in the transferring back and forth.

You’ve also been encouraging directors to make what are called ‘micro-budget films’, an example of which was Alex Cox’s Searchers 2.0 (2007). Was that because new technology opened doors to even lower-budget movies than shooting on film, even with the problems you mentioned?

Yes. The idea actually originated with Jon Davison, who started his career with me, first as the head of our advertising department, then as a producer. He went on to produce Robocop (1987) and some giant-sized science fiction films. He’s younger than I am, but semi-retired and he came up with the idea of doing the film and doing it with Alex. The idea seemed to me a very good and interesting one and it wasn’t going to cost that much money, so we did it simply as an experiment. I thought the picture turned out well, I thought Alex and Jon did a very good job.

Watch the original trailer for Searchers 2.0:

You have a cameo in the film as a sort of parody of yourself. Whose idea was that?

It was Jon’s (laughs). You’re the first person to ask me about Searchers 2.0! The film did all right, but we expected more. It was such an unusual film, and it was such a hip idea. At the end we went up to Monument Valley, where John Ford shot many of his Westerns, and had the classic gun fight between the two guys, which I thought was great fun.

Frankenstein Unbound and Searchers 2.0 are available to import to the UK on Region 1 DVD.

I suppose that’s almost an inevitability when you’re working with a director like Alex Cox, who often has references to other movies in his films. It must have been so tempting for him.

It was his idea, originally, and again I thought: ‘This is a really unusual and good idea.’ Like I said, the film did all right, but you never know how things will turn out financially…

We’ve spoken about how you nurtured young talent on the set, and a few years ago, you brought out your autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. I was wondering if any young filmmakers come up to you and say that the book inspired them to work in the industry?

A surprising number have, and they’re not all Americans! I go fairly often to foreign film festivals and people come up to me out of the blue. A director in Odessa, at the Ukrainian film festival last year, said he’d read the book.

Do they say what skills it’s helped give them?

They’re never specific, just in general that it’s helped!

Another example of your use of new technology was Joe Dante’s mini-series Splatter (2009), which you produced. Having watched an episode, the audience could vote on how the story should progress, so for a three-part series, you had to shoot about twelve different variants. Was making cinema interactive something you’d been thinking of previously?

I’d been thinking about it, but the idea came from Netflix. They called me and said ‘Here’s what we’d like to do: three 10-to-15-minute segments of a horror story in which somebody is killed in the first segment and the audience votes on who they want to kill in the second. The second segment must be written, made, edited, and on the air one week later. Then the audience will vote again!’ I took the idea just because I thought it would be fun, that this is something new and an incredible challenge to do everything not in seven days but six, as we had to wait a day for the votes to come in on who was going to be killed. I called Joe and said: ‘This is going to be back to where we all started! Are you interested?’ And he said ‘Yes’ on the same basis that I did. He said: ‘It’ll be a challenge and it’ll be fun.’

It was actually my wife who came up with the solution. She said: ‘What we could really do is shoot the death of everybody in advance and then shoot connecting scenes’, so we’re still doing what the audience says. If they want character A killed in the second episode, we’ll give them that, but everything, including the multiple lines that lead to it, are already shot, and all we have to do is cut it all together to create the death of whoever everyone votes for. That was what enabled us to do the thing on a reasonable budget.

Watch the teaser trailer for the final episode of Splatter:

Do you think working at that speed helps to keep the filmmaking process fresh, because you’re not planning shots endlessly, and you’re working on instinct to a certain extent?

You’re doing both, because generally I do a lot of preproduction, but then during the filming I’m working partially on instinct as you never shoot the picture exactly the way you planned it. If something doesn’t work out or you get a better idea, at least you’re starting from that framework, but improvising as you go along. Maybe that keeps you fresh and it suits my personality – it’s attractive to be somewhere between a sprinter and a long distance runner…

Interview by Alex Fitch

Check it out, Cinema releases, Interviews

Big Bad Wolves: Interview with Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado

Big Bad Wolves
Big Bad Wolves

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 December 2013

DVD release date: 28 April 2014

Distributor: Metrodome

Directors: Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado

Writers: Aharon Keshales, Navot Papushado

Cast: Guy Adler, Lior Ashkenazy, Dvir Benedek

Original title: Mi mefahed mezeev hara

Israel 2013

110 mins

An intelligent, thoughtful film that lingers long in the mind, Big Bad Wolves is writer-directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado’s follow-up to the excellent Rabies, which had the distinction of being the very first Israeli horror film. With their second feature, Keshales and Papushado continue their subtle exploration of their country’s mood through the story of a suspected paedophile and murderer, and the men who hunt him. Avoiding any heavy-handed allegories, the film examines a macho culture in which men think they can solve everything through violence; the complex intricacies of guilt and responsibility; and the troublingly easy role reversals between victim and persecutor. Opening with a beautiful, haunting credit sequence set to a gorgeous score, the film mixes fairy tale and political subtext, black humour and disturbing subject matter with skill and assurance.

Virginie Sélavy talked to Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado at Film4 FrightFest in August 2013, and discussed victims and victimisers, corrupt politicians, and taking revenge on your parents.

Virginie Sélavy: Big Bad Wolves seems much more ambitious than Rabies. Is it because you developed your filmmaking skills, or had more money or better production?

Navot Papushado: All of the above! Rabies was a shoe-string-budget, guerrilla kind of film. It was shot over 17 days using only available light in a forest, in one location, and a bunch of the crew were Aharon’s students. Aharon was a film a critic and a university lecturer. Still, we are very pleased with the result. For Big Bad Wolves we worked with the top people in the industry – we got the best cinematographer and the best production designer. We were much more prepared, and we had more shooting days. The budget was bigger, although still not big in terms of Israeli film. Rabies was in the middle of what we could achieve and what we wanted to achieve. Big Bad Wolves is the kind of film that we are aiming to do.

Rabies was described everywhere as the first Israeli horror film. Did that feel exciting or was it a lot of pressure?

Aharon Keshales: Both! The good thing is that you have the opportunity to become a pioneer, you’re building the path for future generations. The bad thing is that if you do a crappy job that’s the end for you and for the entire genre. If you don’t collect prizes and you don’t do well at the box office, that’s it, because Israel is a small industry and it doesn’t like to take big chances on new stuff. So it was a lot of pressure. But when we did Rabies we were these young people who didn’t think about this kind of stuff. We just wanted to make the first Israeli horror film and to have fun. When you ask us now, we’re a bit older so we know what that meant.

Horror films have always worked very well as allegories for social or political issues, which potentially makes it a rich genre for Israeli films. This is something you do in Big Bad Wolves, but very lightly and suggestively. It feels more like you tried to evoke the mindset and atmosphere of the country, rather than specific issues. Is that fair to say?

NP: Yes. We both feel that most Israeli cinema is very heavy-handed and deals with political subject matter in a way that feels like they’re trying to educate you about the wars of Israel, the conflict with the Palestinians, or the memory of the Holocaust, and it’s always so serious. And sometimes you think, I didn’t come here to be educated. We have no fun at the movies, we cry all the time – and we cry in reality too. And we thought, wouldn’t it be nice to give Israel the gift of entertaining cinema? So people would go to the cinema and forget real life and tragedy, even though we are talking about it. We tried to do this a little with Rabies because it’s a movie where Israelis kill other Israelis and the real killer goes to sleep, so you see the allegory in that film. But with Big Bad Wolves, we tried to look at the macho, male-dominated Israeli society, but not upfront. First of all, it’s a revenge comedy thriller, and once the tone of the movie has been set, you start to think about what you’re seeing. What you’re seeing is three guys who were in the army and all their instincts from that time just come to life when the girl’s life is in peril. So it’s not in your face, but it’s there. And I think you’re willing to get this kind of subtext more easily because it’s not in your face.

Watch the trailer for Rabies:

There is also the idea that despite their violence and belligerence those men are unable to protect their loved ones.

NP: I think that growing up as Jews in Israel we carry this weight, first of all for being Jewish – and we don’t need to go back far into the past, we can just go back to the Second World War and the Holocaust. The instinct for survival is very strong in our people and we brought this with us to Israel. We are a small country surrounded by Arab countries, some of which we were at war with, some of which we’re at peace with, and we have the Palestinians within us. So you grow up in an environment where there is war in the air, you absorb it, you develop this survival instinct which is so strong, and sometimes can lead you to do horrific stuff in the name of survival, in the name of our children. Sometimes these moral questions need to be raised. In the name of our kids, in the name of surviving, are we allowed to do certain things? We’ve never been in a war or a combat situation, but as teenagers in the 80s-90s we were walking the streets of Tel Aviv and buses were exploding. It’s a very strange environment to live in – life goes on, it’s a very complex situation. And a lot of the film is about us growing up in Israel, but it’s filtered through an entertaining film.

AK: There’s a strong debate about torture these days, and the film by Kathryn Bigelow put it out there. I think that when you’re talking about torture you have to ask yourself, is this violence justified? Even if it’s justified by the fact that they will tell you where Bin Laden is, did you just create another enemy inside the guy that you’ve just tortured, maybe for his entire life and that of his family? It’s like a big circle of blood. That’s how we see things. It started with Rabies and it’s evolved to be this idea of a circle of death, a big dance that you can never stop.

You also seem to lay some of the responsibility for what happens to the girl at her father’s feet – and he’s not the only character in that position. Do you think that ideas of guilt and responsibility are more complicated than just pointing the finger at one man?

NP: When we wrote the script the idea was that we were writing a revenge thriller that was upside down. You have the avengers and the suspected victimiser, but the suspected victimiser is also a victim, and we wanted to have that kind of flip in the film. You see a lot of revenge films that end with the triumph of the vindictive hero. But those films support this kind of behaviour – people who take the law into their own hands, who do horrific stuff. We didn’t want to make that kind of nihilistic movie. We wanted to do a Dirty Harry movie where Dirty Harry gets punished for his deeds – personally, not because someone he knows dies. Stick it to him. That’s what we tried to do with Big Bad Wolves.

AK: We had a few arguments with our producers about the moral questions we tried to raise at the end. They wanted a lighter ending, a slightly funny, uplifting final scene, even though everything that happens is terribly wrong. But we wanted to have a heavy, serious ending, because you can never foresee the consequences of violence, you never know when or why it ends. That was very important to us. With this subject matter it was important for us to infuse some more moral layers into the film.

Watch the trailer for Big Bad Wolves:

Both Big Bad Wolves and Rabies show the Israeli police in a very negative light, they are consistently brutal and abusive of their power. Are they really that bad?

AK: I think it has to do with authority, because when you want to do a movie that questions the patriarchal society – and Israel is still patriarchal – you have to deal with authority figures, so the best thing to do is to make fun of the military or the police. We decided to do this one with the police, but that doesn’t mean that in the next film we won’t make jokes about the army.

NP: There have been a few rumbles with the police in Israel lately. The police have not had a very good reputation in the last two years. At the time when Rabies came out there were huge protests on the streets of Israel, and the police reacted very violently.

AK: And it was a very peaceful protest, they were students, they weren’t doing anything, but the police turned violent in order to smash their spirits. But I don’t think it has to do directly with the police, I think the authorities in Israel are corrupt these days. You have prime ministers under suspicion, a president who is a rapist and is doing time in jail now. So when we wrote the script for Rabies we had this scene with the cop who’s molesting the girl, and the producer came over and said, ‘This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Israel,’ and I said, ‘What are you talking about? We have a president who’s just been tried for molesting women inside his chambers’. So I think we have a problem with authority figures, a lot of people are under investigation in the government.

NK: I think we can call ourselves a bit patriotic because we love Israel, but we don’t love the way that things are run over there. It’s a complex thing to say, because a lot of movies that come out of Israel only criticise the country in the way they treat Palestinians, and we’re saying that first of all we have to question ourselves. And the movie is also about that, because you have a corrupt policeman, a man who is a politician or a lawyer, very high up, and a teacher who is suspected of being a paedophile. So they’re all the authorities that we grow up with in life, and something really needs to change. But they should do more popcorn films in Israel, that’s the first thing we’d like to change.

There is also a strong fairy tale element in the story. Do you see the film as a dark fairy tale?

AK: Yes. We decided to take revenge on our parents, because they told us horrific stories before we went to sleep, and they were all about wolves, which are really paedophiles. That’s what we were told as children – stay away from the wolf, they will lure you in with candy. And we wanted to take revenge on our parents with a nice story before they go to sleep, and now my mother can’t sleep. That was the idea, to make a grown-up fairy tale, and that’s what’s happened, because every spectator who’s a father or a mother takes it much harder than young kids, who just like it because they see it as a violent genre movie.

Interview by Virginie Sélavy

Check it out, Interviews

Interview with Roger Corman – Part 1

The Pit and the Pendulum
Roger Corman and Vincent Price on the set of The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

Format: Cinema

Screening as part of the BFI’s ‘Gothic’ season. For more information visit the BFI website

Dates: 26 November 2013 (The Pit and the Pendulum), 27 November 2013 (The Masque of the Red Death)

Venue: BFI Southbank

As part of the BFI’s ‘Gothic’ season, veteran film director and producer Roger Corman visited London in October 2013 to introduce a screening of his film The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). The season also includes Corman’s lurid and unforgettable film The Masque of the Red Death (1964), the penultimate movie in his sequence of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations.

In the first part of his interview with Roger Corman, Alex Fitch talks to the legendary director and producer about his early career, the differences between shooting in monochrome and colour, and his art of remixing other people’s movies.

Alex Fitch: You produced your first film at the age of 28 and directed your first film a year later. In terms of the start of your career, you trained as an industrial engineer before having a moment of clarity and realising that you’d made a terrible mistake. You worked as a mail boy at Twentieth Century Fox, then a script reader. Working at the fringes of the film industry at that point, was it a challenge to work your way up the ladder?

Roger Corman: It was very hard. At that time there were very few independents – there were some but not very many – almost everything was done within studios. The studios were 100% unionised, and you couldn’t get in to the union without all kinds of things happening. The only position in the studio that was not unionised was the messengers.

I suppose it’s quite similar today, that you get loads of people breaking into the British film industry by working as runners to get their foot in the door.

Yes.

The genres that you mainly worked in during the 1950s were Westerns, Horror, Gangster movies. Were they genres you were already interested in as a cinemagoer, or did you see a gap in the market?

A combination of both. Then, and to this day, the films I make are partially things I’m interested in, and partially things I believe will work in the market place. It’s the old statement: motion pictures are part art and part business.

You’ve gone back and forth between being a producer and being a director. Are they both roles you love equally?

I liked it best when I was producer and director, because as a producer/director, you truly are this overused word ‘auteur’; you are responsible specifically for what is going on. When I was a director only, I chafed a little bit at some of things suggested or sometimes ordered by the producer. When I’m a producer only, I’m sometimes amazed at some of the choices the directors make.

How hands on are you as a producer? Do you generally – when you’ve chosen someone – trust in their vision, or occasionally do you have to give them a prod?

As a producer I’m probably less hands on than just about any other producer I know; that is, I’m less hands on during the shooting. I’m very much there during preproduction and postproduction. The pictures are almost always ideas I’ve come up with: I’ll write a three-to-five page treatment, then hire a writer to do the screenplay, then bring in the director. Generally, I’ll bring in the director before the final draft of the screenplay, so that he gets his input into the screenplay, so it’s something he understands and can work with. Then I’ll collaborate or work with the director a great deal before shooting, particularly on the themes, how he plans to shoot, what his emphases are, what his interpretations of the characters are. So, I’m really there, all through preproduction, but once production starts, I just totally step away. I know some producers who are sitting there all day long, every day during shooting. To me there’s nothing duller than sitting on the set watching somebody else direct the picture. I’ll be there the first morning, and – if it’s all going well – by noon, I’ve left the set and probably will never come back.

Also, I suppose it’s unnerving for the director if the producer is always looking over their shoulder…

…and particularly, the first pictures on which I was a producer only, I found that the crews were coming to me, asking me questions that they should have been asking the director, and that was one of my reasons for stepping away. I know that having been a director, the director wants to be in charge, and should be, on the set.

Conversely, with the very first films you worked on in the 1950s, you were sitting in on the sets, to learn the craft by watching other people?

Yes. The first two films I produced, I was on the set every day. On the first film I was partially a grip, and I was the only producer/truck driver! I drove the truck as well… We shot the picture in a week. I would drive to the location, unload as much of the equipment as I could by myself, before the crew arrived, in order to save the amount of time they had to spend, and I’d be there all day. At the end of the day, the grips would load the heavy equipment onto the truck, everybody would leave, I would load the rest of the equipment and drive home, and repeat it the next day.

…and I suppose when you’re making low-budget movies, it garners you respect if you’re one of the gang…

They knew that I was working as hard, or harder than they were!

A series of films that you worked on, possibly your most renowned period of work, were the Technicolor Edgar Allan Poe films of the 1960s. Having worked on low budget black and white films in the 1950s, moving to colour must have created all sorts of new challenges – not as prevalent in monochrome – set dressing, lighting, costume design and so on. How did you find that experience? Was it at all terrifying or did you find it a natural progression?

It was a natural progression. There was very little change in the way I worked. I used the camera a little bit differently, and after talking to the cameraman, I was lighting a little bit differently. Danny Haller – a great friend of mine – was our art director, and he and I would discuss the sets. We worked with different colour schemes and patterns on the sets.

Watch the trailer for The Pit and the Pendulum:

You probably brought Poe to an entirely new audience. Did you feel at that time that he was a writer being under represented in the cinema?

Yes, I felt that Poe was under represented and was really not getting the attention he deserved in the American canon. He was thought of as an interesting writer, but not really one of the great writers, and I always felt he was one of the greats.

Presumably he still had a good reputation, so did that make it easier to choose him as the subject of your first colour movies?

Actually my first colour movie was a Western, but after that, with my next colour films, I chose Poe because I wanted to do an Edgar Allan Poe picture. I’d been making these ten-day, black-and-white films, two of them would go together as a double bill, and I convinced American International Pictures that they should let me go shoot for three weeks and make a picture in colour, and that was The Fall of the House of Usher (1960).

Towards the end of your Poe cycle, you had a young Nicholas Roeg as your cinematographer, shooting The Masque of the Red Death (1964). What was he like?

He was one of the best cinematographers I ever worked with. He was very inventive and his use of colour… We had discussed it before shooting started, and he went beyond what I anticipated. I thought the film was beautifully shot.

Watch the trailer for The Masque of the Red Death:

At the same time you were making those Poe films, you helped young directors remix various Russian sci-fi films that you’d bought the rights to. The art of remixing foreign films already existed, started with films like Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), Invasion of the Animal People (1959), and later in the 60s, Woody Allen would do What’s up, Tiger Lily? (1966), but it felt that you were almost nurturing a new art form.

Well, it was a new form, I’m not certain it was a new art form! What I was doing with the Russian science fiction films… I’d seen one of them and American science fiction films were very popular – I made a number of them myself – but we were making them on very low budgets and I’d seen this Russian film, which was clearly made on a big budget, a giant budget. It had wonderful sets and wonderful special effects, far superior to what we were doing. They only problem was the anti-American propaganda, so I wasn’t so much recutting the films as such, I was removing the anti-American sentiment. That was Francis Ford Coppola’s first job – cutting the propaganda out of Russian science fiction films.

Read Alex Fitch’s feature article on Roger Corman: The Producer as Jackdaw Filmmaker.

It was pretty wild. I remember I went to Moscow to buy those films and they had incredible anti-American propaganda in them. We of course had anti-Russian propaganda, but our propaganda was one tenth of theirs. Theirs was really outrageous, and I said to this guy in Moscow: ‘You know I’m going to have to cut this anti-American feeling, I’m going have to cut it all out.’ He laughed and said: ’I know that!’

By the time you got to Queen of Blood (1966), Curtis Harrington used about three different Russian films, so it really does feel like a remix of found footage.

At that time, it was our found footage! The only time I really did that was on these science fiction films.

Although, a film you produced in the late 1970s – Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) – you did reuse that later on in your career, with bits of special effects here and there, and I believe the score reappeared in a number of your films. Was it a project you were so proud of, you thought: ‘Let’s keep getting it out there?’

I was proud of it and also there was an economic factor. It was one of James Horner’s first scores, a brilliant score and really better than what I was getting from other composers. So, it just seemed illogical not to use his score again. We always used it in science fiction films. With the special effects, I was reusing primarily space ships that were designed by James Cameron. His first time in Hollywood was designing those model spaceships.

Watch the trailer for Battle Beyond the Stars:

Interview by Alex Fitch

Check it out, Cinema releases, Interviews

The Great Beauty: Interview with Paolo Sorrentino

La grande bellezza1
The Great Beauty

Format: Cinema

Release date: 6 September 2013

Distributor: Artificial Eye

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Writers: Paolo Sorrentino, Umberto Contarello

Cast: Toni Servillo, Carlo Verdone, Sabrina Ferilli

Original title: La grande bellezza

Italy, France 2013

142 mins

Certain parallels aside (set in Rome, the passive journalist protagonist, the lavish life-style), The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza) is no simple remake of Fellini’s La dolce vita, although it might ask the same big existential question about the meaning of life in a city that, as it appears in Paolo Sorrentino’s film more than 50 years later, is as dazzling and captivating as ever.

An ageing art journalist, one-off bestselling author and tireless gigolo, Jep Gambardella (played by Sorrentino’s favourite and long-term collaborator Toni Servillo) knows many a secret and the entire high society in Rome, but can’t seem to make sense of his own extravagant life. At his 65th birthday party, his façade of irony and ignorance slowly begins to crumble as he bemoans the lack of ‘true’ beauty in his world of excess, luxury, endless spiel and easy women, and blatantly shares his disgust with his so-called friends and enemies, as much as with himself.

In keeping with the often excessive, ironic visual style Sorrentino introduced in his earlier films, such as Il Divo and The Consequences of Love, The Great Beauty makes for somewhat exhausting viewing, and might seem to some superfluous from the start and preposterous in the execution. But it’s also a beautiful film about loss, death and sacrifice, and about those special, unforgettable moments you share with others that make life worth living.

Pamela Jahn talked to Paolo Sorrentino at the 67th Cannes Film Festival in May 2013, where The Great Beauty premiered in competition.

Pamela Jahn: The Great Beauty has a very dreamy feel to it, but was is meant to be more a nightmare or a day dream?

Paolo Sorrentino: Luckily, or maybe unluckily, it’s reality. It’s a world which is reinvented and revisited through the tools that we have at our disposal but, still, it’s reality.

Much like your main protagonist Jep, you seem to be going through a journey yourself, trying to find out what beauty is.

Undoubtedly, this is true for my work. And I share quite a few things with Jep, especially a sort of disenchanted way of looking at life and searching for emotions. I think that the search for beauty and emotions triggers my desire to make movies, and to express myself in an artistic way.

You talked about reality. Sometimes it feels like these parties Jep strolls in and out of are full of human zombies. To what extent did you want to make a statement about a certain social class and the freedom money gives you to change the way you look?

I don’t seem to be able find any beauty in the transformation of bodies through surgery or Botox, but I didn’t want to make a statement or anything like that. It’s so easy to do nowadays because there is such an abuse of techniques in cosmetic surgery. Nonetheless, I’d like to understand this phenomenon, because behind it there is a lot of pain and sadness, the inability to accept your body and the flowing of time.

You have a long and interesting working relationship with Toni Servillo. Are you worried that one day you will call him to say that the next script is ready and he says ‘no, thanks’?

It’s actually happened once already. I offered him a script and he said no, and that script never turned into a film. I pay great attention to the reaction of actors and producers, and if they say no to something, that might be a warning sign that there is something fundamentally wrong with the script.

What do you see in Servillo that you don’t get from other actors?

He is, of course, a very good and talented actor, and able to give a surprising performance, but this is true also for many other actors. We are tied by a bond of friendship, so there is always the feeling of working with your family when we make a movie together. This is very important for me in terms of feeling supported when embarking on a project.

Another question that arises from your film is whether too much beauty can be paralysing?

Yes, definitely. I think when you are surrounded by too much beauty, as it can happen to you in Rome, all of a sudden you can find yourself feeling lost and unable to find words to express what you see and what you feel.

How do you overcome this fear?

Probably one option is the way Jep deals with it. He thinks that beauty can also be found in the worst things, beneath the surface, in anything that appears ugly from the outside. And because you are not immediately blinded by it, you might be able to describe it.

The city is a character in itself in your film. What kind of Rome did you want to portray and how much did you want to do distance yourself, or create an homage to, Fellini’s films, like La dolce vita and Roma?

In Fellini’s films there was a feeling of easiness and it was a sort of ‘golden age’. There was a void in those films too, but it was then based on excitement and enthusiasm, and the positive energy of looking to the future. Today, you have a void as a lack of that positive energy and a lack of meaning.

Do you think about art in a similar way?

No, I think artistic expression can always find a way in. The difference today lies in our ability to trace these artistic expressions and to find access to them, which is not always easy. Personally, I think that, despite any conceptual or intellectual artistic expression that I might be unable to appreciate, there are still art forms to be found that are connected to feelings and emotions, which are the art forms that I like. In my films, sometimes I use irony when I don’t agree with something, because irony is a great tool to criticise. And Jep does the same, but when he goes to the photo exhibition of the man who takes pictures of his own life every day, he is no longer ironic, because he is touched by what he sees and the feelings that these photographs evoke in him.

Your films are characterised by a very specific style of cinematography. Is it difficult for you to create this kind of look?

It would probably be much easier and more profitable to pay less attention to the visual aspect of the films, and I am often told that I am too excessive in what I do, but that’s the way I like it.

The film is called The Great Beauty but it’s also about death. Are these two things connected for you?

I wish I could find the connection, but so far, I’ve been unable to do so. I would like to find it, because it would be a solution and a great relief for some of the anxieties that we all feel towards death.

Most people also suffer from a feeling of anxiety about getting older, including Jep. How about yourself?

Absolutely. I’ve been afraid of getting old since I was 20, or even before then. When I was little – I must have been 6 or 7 years old – I asked my mother, ‘When do you die?’ She said, ‘When you are 100 years old’, and I started to cry because I thought there was so little time in between.

Is that anxiety something that pushes you to produce more films the older you get? Do you feel that pressure now more than perhaps ten years ago?

No, I don’t so much feel it with regards to my work. I remember something that a filmmaker, Antonio Capuano, once told me, and I thought it was very true. He said, ‘In cinema, or filmmaking, there are only four or five things that can be told’, and I deeply believe in this, so I am only making films about the things that I think I want to tell.

What are these five things for you?

I probably only have a couple to be honest. Five things might apply more to Fellini and Kurosawa and what they have been able to say with their films, not me, really.

Interview by Pamela Jahn

Watch the trailer for The Great Beauty: