Archive for January, 2010
It’s a crazy, mixed up world and we are thankful for movies, excluding The Spy Next Door and The Tooth Fairy, that offer proof. /Film’s Weekend Weirdness examines such flicks, whether in the form of a new trailer for a provocative indie, a mini review, or an interview. In this installment, new trailers and a review of the Red Riding Trilogy, a noirish triptych of serial killer dramas imported from British television and being released stateside in February by IFC Films.
During a screening of the entire Red Riding Trilogy, with one intermission allotted for lunch, I found myself pondering the irony in three directors, one screenwriter, one author, tens of actors and three separate crews realizing a project that depicts humanity and bureaucracy at its most foul and irreversibly corrupt. A recent poster for the trilogy forebodingly reads, “Evil Lives Here,” a tagline that would serve most of the work that exits Stephen King’s skull; instead the “here” in Red Riding is Northern England in the ’70s and early ’80s, when a serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper carved a trail of female victims and set a mood and mythos ripe for social reflection.
If that sounds reminiscent of David Fincher’s Zodiac, it is. Both that serial killer epic and Se7en are influential here by way of nightmarish imagery and the former’s tediously realistic period detail and pre-computerized investigation routines. But it’s much harder to seek comparison for the way the trilogy’s storylines and characters—spread across three films, 1974, 1980, and 1983—communally bleed into each other, yet vary in quality, tone, and execution. The first film is a sexy, hardboiled mystery; the second a pitch-black procedural; the middling third a tale of redemption that borders on Hollywood melodrama. These differences make the trilogy appealing and slightly frustrating. Taken as a whole, it’s a collaborative achievement that fans of crime cinema can feast upon.
In the Year of Our Lord 1974: Enough Cigarettes, Sex, and Murder to Make Andrew Garfield a Star
Rather surprisingly, the first installment of Red Riding has no less than four sex scenes, all of which feature 20something Brit actor Andrew Garfield. When he’s not preoccupied in a bout of shagging, Garfield’s mutton-chopped character, an ambitious newspaper journalist named Eddie Dunford, tends to have a cig and drink in hand. At first, it’s difficult to gauge where the film is coming from, but Dunford’s lifestyle choices are a youthful juggling act that blurs his well-meaning but naive obsession with a missing girl. He hopes to link the possible murder to two similar cases gathering dust and catch his big break.
In the proceeding two films, Dunford is a minor, peripheral character, but 1974 offers a star-making performance for Garfield, who will appear later this year in The Social Network. He portrays a young journalist drunk on romanticized, idealistic notions of the profession and still taps plenty of Raymond Chandler-like cool doing so. When the latest girl’s body randomly surfaces, swan wings inexplicably sewn to her back, director Julian Jarrold (Brideshead Revisited) makes Dunford’s hazy confusion our own, quickly plummeting us into a conspiratorial web of group-think involving the police, a powerful developer, elite society, and the media. Recurring themes of paternal betrayal and vacancy are planted beforehand, with Sean Bean as a delightfully sleazy yet dapper father figure-from-hell to Dunford.
Several readers have wondered if the Red Riding films work as stand-alone features—especially since they were originally made, and aired last year, for British television. Jarrold’s 1974 works best in this regard. His use of 16mm in rendering a patina-heavy Yorkshire as a murderous landscape of pubs and misleading, at times ashen, hillside lends his film to memorable images. Dunford’s tale is also the most singular and isolated—his noirish nighttime drives pay homage to David Lynch’s Lost Highway—and the six-year gap between ‘74 and In the Year of Our Lord 1980 allows Jarrold to introduce several, complicit characters that are central later without worry for prior comparison. /Film Rating: 8/10
In the Year of Our Lord 1980: The Trilogy’s Darkest Entry and the Critical Favorite
Set amidst a fictionalized investigation of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, 1980 is directed by James Marsh, who directed 2008’s well-received doc Man on Wire. Compared to 1974, the protagonist in ‘80 is older and smarter, an experienced officer named Peter Hunter recruited to crack the stockpiling Ripper case (and who previously led an unsolved investigation of the bloody aftermath capping ‘74).
Whereas the look and tone of ‘74 mirrored the heady overindulgence turned paranoia of Garfield’s Dumford, the style and pace of ‘80s plays on the sober career anxieties of Officer Hunter (played by In America’s Patty Considine). Peter Hunter’s rabbit hole is directly in front of him; he’s the good man out amongst this new unit, but can’t admit just how far. Of the three directors, Marsh has the most difficult task in bridging the films. He uses 35mm, lots of wide shots, and is font of framing Hunter in scenes to illustrate the Kafka-like labyrinth of bullshit—mundane and later sociopathic—he’s up against.
Personally, I found Considine’s officer to share a certain optimistic weariness reminiscent of Tony Blair walking into Bush’s authoritative den of wolves; I’ll also admit that certain scenes packed such hopelessness that I questioned the film’s value of realism—and yet considered in mild horror whether the film’s palpable anger was directed at actual records of police misconduct.
In watching Hunter re-examine the murder of a young girl wrongly (purposely?) attributed to the Ripper, I began to feel that 1980 too briefly touched on the serial killer’s past crimes and terror. These films are not directly about the Ripper, but more exposition about him, and scenes with him, here would have been nice. Later I learned that the trilogy’s source material was a quartet of books by British author David Peace (The Damned United); the second book, 1977, did indeed focus on the Ripper’s spree. (It was left unfilmed due to budgetary restraints.) Knowing this, 1980 compensates for several gaps by featuring the trilogy’s best ensemble performance and the bleakest if not wholly unpredictable twists and turns. /Film Rating: 7.5/10
In the Year of Our Lord 1983: Does the Director of Leap Year Stick the Landing?
I’ve chosen to highlight the stylistic differences and a few of the recurring themes for the prior two films since diving into countless supporting characters and their litany of motives would lead to spoiler-addled overlap. Thus far in critical circles, 1983 is being correctly cited as the trilogy’s runt. What I found most puzzling was its rushed conclusion, which conjured so many soaring, slow-motion climaxes featured in the murder-thrillers that satiate Ashley Judd’s Wal-Mart fanbase. If and when the Red Riding Trilogy—which I should add is subtitle free—is pointlessly remade by Columbia Pictures as planned, I doubt its ending will be this cliche.
Unlike 1974 and 1980, 1983 utilizes a lot of flashbacks (ones made for this installment), and also differs by spliting its focus between three men: a compromised police officer named Maurice Jobson (actor David Morrissey, who appears in all three and whose character changes the most between films—another point of debate amongst critics); a portly, unremarkable solicitor/attorney named John Piggott (Mark Addy); and a transvestite drifter named BJ (Robert Sheehan). All of these characters eventually cross paths after another young girl is abducted in Yorkshire. In a coiciding wave of panic, several police, including Jobson, consult a talented psychic. Quite a stretch. Suddenly the evil yet human foundation of the first films seems on the verge of being thrown out altogether.
Director Anand Tucker (the recently panned Leap Year) takes the most creative license, and for all of his entry’s flaws and heavy-handed symbolism, his is still an interesting film. The material was certainly there for another director to stay within bounds and hit a deserved homerun, but the spirit of Red Riding encourages freedom for interpretation. And perhaps some of the blame for ‘83’s ill-fit should be shared with screenwriter Tony Grisoni, who adapted all of them. Part of what makes Red Riding so captivating is the creative risk in loose and ambitious collaboration, and it’s the resulting three uniquely haunting versions of a Yorkshire-in-decline that loom over arguments for more traditional consistency. /Film Rating: 5.5
/Film Rating: Entire Trilogy: 7
Hunter Stephenson can be reached on Twitter. If you’d like to send him a screener, or a screening invitation, email him at h.attila/gmail. For previous installments of Weekend Weirdness, here.
A few years ago I went to see a rather unusual play called TAMARA. The theater is actually a mansion and the audience follows around the various cast members as they perform their scenes simultaneously in different rooms. The idea is to attend with a few people and each person follows someone else. Then at intermission you get together and catch everybody up. I know. It’s a lot of work. And the story is a complicated mess. But it’s an experience and they serve chocolate covered strawberries at intermission.So I’m following the cute little chambermaid (me and about nineteen other guys). In one scene she goes up to her room to get ready for a date. We follow her and stand against the walls.
She turns to me and starts talking to herself, excited about this upcoming rendezvous. Bad writing but that’s not the point. She’s imagining being in his strong embrace and how she’ll melt in his arms. And all the while she’s looking directly into my eyes.
The vibe is clear. This chick likes me. The suggestive dialogue, her bedroom eyes locked onto mine. There’s no doubt. For whatever reason I turn her on. I had just had a pilot not picked up and was feeling somewhat inadequate so to have this smoking hot girl pick me out of a room full of men really boosted my bruised ego. The hell with CBS! I was a stud!
So I start making eyes back at her, letting her know the Fonz has received the message.
And then I realized…
I’m standing in front of a mirror. She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking through me. She was just playing the scene as if I weren’t even there. Talk about major shrinkage.
For the rest of the night I followed the Fascist Colonel.
Back in October, it was reported that DreamWorks acquired a screenplay by Memoirs of a Geisha scribe Doug Wright about the life of iconic composer George Gershwin. At the time we assumed that Steven Spielberg would merely be executive producing the project, but now that the announced Harvey remake is off the calendar, speculation has begun that he might helm the Gershwin biopic as his next project, which could begin shooting as early as April 2010.
According to Nikki Finke, Zachary Quinto (Heroes, Star Trek) has been hired to play the famous composer, and has even been supplied with “accent and dialogue coaches” to help him prepare for the role. While Spielberg in the director’s chair seems more like a connection of the dots, Quinto appears to be more of a sure thing.Quinto also seems like a good fit for the role. This shouldn’t effect Paramount’s hopes to release the yet-to-be-titled Star Trek sequel on the tentatively announced release date of June 29th 2012, as they would need to begin production by May of 2011 (which is a long ways off).
George, who wrote most of his works, including more than a dozen Broadway shows, in collaboration with his elder brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin, died at the age of 38, diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor known as glioblastoma multiforme. The Guardian declared that he was the wealthiest composer of all time. You can find a compete listing of compositions by George Gershwin on wikipedia.
Director Vincenzo Natali won plaudits for his low-budget 1997 film, Cube, in which he demonstrated an ability to create a moody, atmospheric thriller. This year, his sci-fi film Splice screened at Sundance. Having won some acclaim already at Sitges 2009, Splice was one of my most anticipated movies of the fest. Hit the jump to hear some of my thoughts on the film and watch a video discussion of the film with the guys at the blogger condo.
Elsa (Sarah Polley) and Clive (Adrien Brody) are a brilliant couple, biochemists who have figured out how to successfully combine different forms of animal DNA into a single creature. Their breakthroughs have many implications for the fields of science and health, but they have yet to crack the final frontier: an animal-human hybrid. When their superiors threaten to shut down their engineering project and put a stop to any further innovations, Elsa and Ed decide to take matters into their own hands.
For those interested, here’s a clip from the beginning of the film:
I hadn’t heard anything about the movie prior to my screening, so I was expecting a standard-issue monster horror film. What I can state confidently is that Splice is definitely not that. I don’t really want to say much more about the plot details of the film, since for me, half the pleasure of watching it was derived from the fact that I had no idea where the story was going. But Splice is less a horror film and more a quasi-serious exploration into the implications of playing God.
In Jurassic Park, chaos theorist Ian Malcolm insists to entrepreneur John Hammond, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” This sentiment is perfectly embodied in Polley’s character Elsa, whose drive for scientific discovery is only matched by her reckless disregard of its consequences. In fact, both Elsa and Ed struck me as incredibly foolish and naive, the type of characters you scream at while you’re watching them in horror films, as they make stupid decision after stupid decision despite the fact that they’re supposedly geniuses.
But you shouldn’t watch Splice for any of its subtle character work. Instead, embrace Natali’s moody atmosphere and his fearlesness in bringing the story to places that are so messed up, the unpleasant images will sear their way into your long-term memory. I should note here that the special effects are spellbinding, recalling the resourcefulness seen in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9. Natali used a nice balance of CGI and practical effects to make the creatures a convincing part of the film’s world, and I think he definitely succeeds.
Splice takes all of its plot elements to their logical extreme, with twisted results. Several scenes in particular towards the end of the film are mildly troubling, so wild and outrageous that my audience actually burst out laughing. Still, I can’t help but feel that anyone who tries to take this film seriously will have a great time in the way that Natali intended. This movie is great sci-fi, delving into the dangers of obsession, the excitement of scientific breakthrough, and the nature of life itself. For lovers of genre films and B-movies, it’s a must-see.
In the following video, me and the guys at the blogger condo offer a few more thoughts on Splice.
In December, we made a post about a guy named Mike from Milwaukee, WI, who created a 70-minute video review of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. The 7-part dissection tore apart George Lucas’ first installment of the prequel trilogy, and was linked by almost every website known to man. In fact, the video now has over 1.25 million views on YouTube alone. Even geek celebs like Damon Lindelof commented on the review. If you are one of the few who hasn’t seen it - click here now!
Well, Mike is back, this time with a less elaborate 18-minute video review of James Cameron’s Avatar. Watch the two-part video review now, after the jump.
Part 1 focuses on the story, the forced cultural message, comparisons to Cameron’s Titanic, the problem with the two-dimension villains, the unexplored problems of savage races without technology, how Cameron tricked audiences into falling in love with an alien race.
Part 2 focuses on the secret meanings behind the words of the world of Avatar, the Titanic/Aliens mach-up, the argument of the film being more about the experience than about the plot, how Fox/Cameron took advantage of a strategic release date, and Mike’s conclusion about the film.
Thanks to MikeyK for the tip.
This rumour comes from a UK gossip magazine, so it’s almost certainly just been made-up. All the same, there’s an interesting kink or two in the details…
According to OK, Efron has been hand-picked for the role of Peter Parker by Tobey Maguire. We’d previously heard that Sam Raimi had personally selected Nimrod Antal for the director’s chair, and that didn’t turn out at all - the job went to Marc Webb. Perhaps (just perhaps) Raimi and Maguire did nominate their favoured replacements, and these favoured replacements were Antal and Efron. That’s not impossible.
Efron is currently making a concerted effort to get on board some good projects, and is currently tied-up with Brian Michael Bendis, creator of Ultimate Spider-Man, the comics that have inspired this new reboot of the movies. In a universe where Bendis has come over to Sony to redraft the new Spidey films, maybe Efron could have come with him. The questions is… do we really live in that universe? I doubt it, but it certainly doesn’t seem like too horrible a place.
Note how I didn’t even dignify the Hudgens element of the OK story with any discussion. That certainly has a bad smell about it. And that $9 million pay out? Not on an $80 million budget, I’d say.
So, have OK gotten a hold of a legitimate piece of news here, a little tidbit from inside Efron’s circle, and then padded it with made up bumph? It’s more likely they just made it all up, of course. That’s the line I’m taking.
Bendis is very good at revealing little hints at his career moves via his Twitter account (recently: “one of my all time fave artists handed in an issue of a book i wrote today and it’s perfect. an artist i’ve never worked with before”) while never actually giving away all of the facts. Are there any hints he’s working on a Spider-Man script? If you’ve spotted any, please do share - because I can’t sniff out a thing.
Editor’s Note: Filmmaker Jake Scott has been blogging his Sundance experience on /Film. You might not know 42-year-old director Jake Scott yet, but you will. You definitely know his father Ridley, the filmmaker behind such films as Alien, Gladiator, and Blade Runner (Jake worked in the editing room during the school holidays). Chances are, you’ve probably never seen Jake’s directorial debut was a 1999 British historical action comedy titled Plunkett & Macleane. He’s directed iconic music videos for REM’s Everybody Hurts, Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees, The Cranberries’ When You’re Gone, as well as videos for Soundgarden, The Smashing Pumpkins, Live, Blind Melon, Tori Amos, Lily Allen, The Strokes, The Verve, and U2. Jake’s second feature film, Welcome to the Rileys premiered in Sundance’s US Dramatic competition. The story follows a damaged man on a business trip to New Orleans who is seeking salvation by caring for a wayward young woman. The movie stars James Gandolfini, Kristen Stewart, and Melissa Leo.
You can read Jake’s first blog post here, his second blog here, and his third blog post, after the jump.
More news from the frontier
Things have chilled down a bit after a MASSIVE Wednesday night. We had the filmmakers dinner where you could meet all the other producers and directors.
Let me introduce you to some of my fellow filmmakers….
Jonathan Schwartz, producer of ‘Douchebag’. It’s a comedy about two brothers re-uniting. There’s lots to make you feel uncomfortable & cross. Great performances and skillful directing by Drake Doremus. Really cool film.
Mark Ruffalo & Chris Thornton, director and screenwriter/actor of ‘Sympathy for Delicious’ respectively. I first met Mark about 20 years ago when he was a barman and I was working in the art department. We’d talk about all our favorite movies and performances, hoping someday that we’d both make our own films. Of course Mark became an incredible actor, making interesting and daring choices. This is his debut directorial film about a paralyzed DJ who turns to faith healing and struggles with his demons while trying to find himself amidst the temptations of fame & fortune. Chris wrote and starred in the film, giving a powerful & dangerous performance.
Ryan Piers Williams & Ryan O’Nan, director/screenwriter & actor of ‘Dryland’. Spoke to these cats for a while. Their film is about a soldier returning from Iraq to a small town in Texas. He has post-traumatic-stress-disorder and struggles to come to terms with his experiences in Iraq but it’s so much more than that with an astounding performance by O’Nan. Melissa Leo, who is my film too, plays his Mother and America Ferrera, his wife. Deep, moving stuff & an important subject.
Tamra Davis & David Koh, director & cinematographer of The Radiant Child. Tamra is one of my heroines. She comes from the NY underground art/film scene and while working as a painter there in the 80s shot all this footage of her friend Jean-Michel Basquiat as he rose to art world super stardom. It’s a moving homage by a loving and loyal friend.
Saw this band ‘Bramble’ on Main St and fell in love with their whole vibe. So made a lickle music vid for your pleasure….
My agent David Flynn & his lads
Uber barmaids Nicole & Daria. Say no more.
Now for a little history lesson: Park City was a mining town and by all accounts quite dangerous on payday.
The miners were notoriously wild and used to frequent the local brothels most famously presided over by Shirley, Madame extrodinaire.
The fierce Apache warrior Geronimo. What a glare!
And finally an image from a very beautiful film instillation ‘The End’ by Ragnar Kjartansson. It’s a folk concert given in the Canadian Rocky Mountains by Kjartansson & David Por Jonsson. Really soulful and spatially invigorating. I loved this.
I’ll be back.
Irie
Now playing in NY and LA is St. John of Las Vegas, the debut feature of writer-director Hue Rhodes. The picture gives Steve Buscemi a too-rare leading role as John Alighieri, a man with a gambling problem who is sent to investigate an insurance claim on the outskirts of the Nevada casino capital. Also amongst the cast are Romany Malco, Sarah Silverman and Peter Dinklage.
The film is pricked with references to Dante’s Inferno, though certainly has it’s own narrative which requires no knowledge of the Divine Comedy to understand - think how the Coen Bros. and Homer blended into O Brother Where Art Thou. And whereas the Coens’ film stood on the shoulders of Preston Sturgess, the equivalent influence on St. John would appear likely to be Ozu or Milos Forman.
After the break you can read my edited transcript of some of what Hue has said to me in our conversations over the last few weeks, sharing some of his thoughts on both this movie specifically and films and filmmaking in general.
I shouldn’t probably admit this but I grew up in the Cineplex, like most people in America, but I had no idea what any of the people at the end of the credits did. I couldn’t have told you what a director did, or any of the other credits. And I had no cinema education. Which is very surprising because I went to great schools, so I certainly know about classical music, I certainly knew about literature, but amazingly, though, I have never heard the name Fellini, I had never heard of Buster Keaton, I had never heard of any of the people you would consider in the canon. I just loved movies.
I had this very naïve thought – maybe I could make a movie. I was a film lover, but not in a way that would command any respect film snobs because I just went to the movies.
I knew pretty early on that I didn’t know what I was watching. When I watched a movie, it wasn’t revealing itself to me how to make it. I think you can eat your whole life but not know how to cook. I decided I wanted to make these things but I didn’t know how. I was older, I was 30 and I hadn’t put in any of the time. The people that you know in the film business, from the beginning they’ve served an apprenticeship.
So I decided to go to Film School because I needed anchoring in something. I got this great opportunity at the ripe old age of 31 to spend 5 years soaking in film history. I’m very glad that I did, I don’t think that’s a step to be skipped.
Love of film didn’t shape my identity. I have a whole other rich life and set of skills that are completely independent form film and it’s allowed me to have the discipline to approach film as a vocation.
The film is very much about work and this surreal experience of office life. It’s a tall tale, certainly, and I think I’ve taken fanciful liberties but I don’t think you could make this movie if you had not spent a lot of time in “cubicle hell”. The experience and ideas all predate the film school but the execution, I think I owe all to film school. It armed me with a library of references that was efficient and elegant, I think. First of all, when I first met Buscemi, he read it and he liked it and we spent a lot of time talking about Buster Keaton. Immediately we got off on the right foot. And the cinematographer Giles Nuttgens and I had a very fruitful and rich collaboration through talking about movies I only had access to after going to film school.
We used Final Cut Pro all the way down to the digital intermediate. That was the system we were in the whole time. The production company Indievest bought a system using Final Cut and they can use the same system and computer going forward for different movies. I like both Final Cut and Avid. I think that Final Cut is best used when imposing a certain amount of self organising discipline. It doesn’t have the same sort of bumpers on it Avid will, just in terms of media asset management. Certainly, Beginning Editing students, you’ll often see them stressed about organising and finding, sometimes, their media because they’re not careful.
There are definitely scenes that were a lot longer in the movie than they are in the page, I don’t think that they feel long. We adopted a style of shooting that just also helped us be efficient and consistent on set. The camera is always square to the frame. There are no dirty over the shoulder shots, there are no dirty two shots. We do a lot of 90 degree rotation. What this allowed us to do is to start shooting without shooting master shots. It’s an odd thing. You get a sense of the place in some ways quicker than if you see a whole high angle master shot that informationally shared this space. What you end up doing is establishing the space without having to actually show the space. There are several scenes in the movie where we have no master shot, but you don’t notice. And that is a fortunate by product for a restrained time schedule and limited budget of this style of shooting. We were inspired by Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde. There are several scenes in there that have no master and you don’t notice until you go looking for it.
This almost became like good editing in writing. We were trimming away the things that don’t mean anything. We don’t have wild walls - indie films are shoot to space. There’s a particular shot that I see sometimes in independent films that I just don’t like. It’s shot in which you put the camera high up and in the corner and the only reason you put it there is because it’s the only place to put the camera where the lens will be wide enough to capture the scene.
The great thing I feel about this movie is that it is cleanly done in it’s own way, there’s no compromise visually for any sort of information. You never have that shot that is just like “Now we have to show what is happening”. You get to have a movie that is much more uniform in its style and its grammar. That turned out to be a wonderful thing.
Having shot my first feature, and this is feature in how it is different than a short, I think I will have much more ability to think on set about how the things I am doing will effect pacing, which is very much an editing decision. The counter to this unity with these clean singles was our photographically inspiration. If from a movie perspective we were inspired by Ozu and Loves of a Blonde, photographically I personally discovered the photographer William Eggleston. His pictures capture the spirit of this great desperateness of mundane life which is what I mean by “cubicle hell”.
Giles noticed, from looking at his pictures, that Eggleston, by using medium format and by rotating the camera and shooting vertically, he was always putting people in places. They weren’t portraits of people, they were portraits of places where people were elements. In imitating this style we shot a lot of wide shots, a lot of medium shots but there are very, very few close ups. So there’s plenty of space and breath in the movie. I will confess for all the space in the movie, you can’t get out of the movie. It maybe feels like a very, very big casino in that, because the shooting style and colour palette is so uniform, because there was so much discipline, you can’t get out of the movie.
That’s perhaps one of the things that high angle shot gets you, a chance to check out of the movie altogether, to look at your watch and eat some popcorn. I don’t think that’s easily done because there’s no shot in the movie that doesn’t look like every other shot in the movie.
I think emphasis is sometimes relative. If most of the shots are medium shots, then a close up shot says something but if you’re all close up, then you have to go down to the eyeball to say something. And I may not have any cinema background when I started, but I loved it when I saw it and the people that are celebrated as heroes use a lot of wide shots, a lot of medium shots, do a lot of work to create scene rather than provoke emotions from actors.
It’s a very simple story, we have a lot of great locations, but in the end it’s a very simple story about John interacting with people. John talks to these freaky people and they stop being freaky when he talks to them and they help him solve this insurance case. It’s mostly one on one interaction, even if the characters are in varied and surreal locations.
When you have clean singles when people are looking almost at the frame, the next shot is the thing that person is looking to. Even if it’s a full body shot, there’s one person in the shot. When I say a close up, a close up in our movie would be at the shoulders and the head, a medium shot would be at the waist. So that’s still pretty specific. And even if it’s a full body shot and there’s one person in one frame looking straight at the lens talking and it cuts to another person who’s full-body, straight at the lens talking, there’s no ambiguity.
Normally when you jump, even if you do a 180 degree cut it can okay but in one scene in the strip club the backgrounds are so similar it’s almost as though you didn’t jump, it’s almost like we swapped the people. I think the tricky thing in that particular scene is not necessarily the camerawork but the production design. If one wall had been red and one wall had been green with the exact same camerawork you might not have had the same effect. I saw a wonderful Movie that Scott Cann wrote and produced, called Mercy. They did something at one point equally stylised in a way, and I think it’s funny, this could be the problem with making movies is that you appreciate things, you might even like things, that might take other people out. In Mercy I didn’t actually mind, and in fact I appreciated, the fact they were doing something aggressive. An extreme example would be in Copolla’s Youth Without Youth. At one point he turned the camera upside down and the car was driving at the top of the frame. I was sitting next to person who I think sort of hated that but I thought it was wonderful. That was very clearly by design, though in my case, I’m not sure the homogeneity of the backgrounds and the shots was purely by design, though overall I don’t think I mind that sort of thing. I don’t think I noticed it when we were cutting the scene, but I didn’t mind.
We didn’t have a lot of insert work and when I do have inserts, we were very careful. You can see in the trailer when Sarah Silverman’s hand wraps around the edge, we addressed that shot the way we would a close up of a person. The thing we are showing is the fingers, so the fingers became the thing we took our style of portrait of.
What we restrained from doing was using the camera as a kind of prodding device. We did not do that. We did not poke with the camera. Every set up that we tried to do had elements that were balanced in the frame. This was Giles’ takeaway from Eggleston was that you look at an Eggleston photo and people and objects are in balance and the thing that is photographed is the collection of these elements.
I don’t think this style is alienating. I had a feeling that I hoped for as a movie experience. One of the things you get from not growing up in cinema, I think, is a kind of real heresy. You don’t even have ideas for what a movie should be. Or maybe I should say, you grow up watching one kind of movie then you see there is all these different kinds of movies. The spirit I was hoping for was… I do like being in Las Vegas, I do like being in casinos, and what I find is that when I’ve been in one of them all night, is that when I come out and I look at the real world, the real world looks fake to me. In the casinos, the larger brighter casinos, they hijack your orientation cues and make a new reality for you.
There’s a specific example that I can cite. There’s a casino, The Bellagio, and when you walk into the lobby there’s this beautiful chandelier, it’s probably 50 feet long, and it looks like it’s bathing this room in this wonderful soft light. Of course, the light is not coming from that chandelier. A chandelier would do top-down lighting that would be harsh and dark, the lighting is coming from somewhere in the base boards but the casino has given you this object to fix on, the chandelier, and then has provided lighting from elsewhere. So, in a way, you oriented yourself with the chandelier but the casino has hijacked the means of orientation by changing the lighting. In a similar way, by doing this colour palette restriction but still having it feel real and by having this geometric framing that frame by frame looks real but over the course of 90 minutes is not what you would naturally see, I think we hoped to create this alternate reality. Perhaps, at the end of the movie you would blink a little bit and say “Where was I and how long was that?” I did hope that if that was the experience you had watching the movie, then that would be a success. Now, I’m not sure that experience is exactly what every moviegoer sits down to watch but what I hope is that enough people enjoy that experience.
