Interview: Mark Linfield of DisneyNature’s “Chimpanzee”

Posted on April 20, 2012 at 3:58 pm

Mark Linfield is the co-producer and co-director of DisneyNature’s Earth Day release, “Chimpanzee.” I talked to him about some of the challenges of filming in the rainforest and how scientists who had been following the chimps for years saw things in the movie they had never seen before. NOTE: Disney will make a contribution to Jane Goodall’s institute to care for the rapidly declining chimpanzee population for every ticket sold this weekend.

In the midst of a leafy, wet, rainforest how do you find enough light to get those perfectly focused shots of the chimpanzees?

It’s all down to the cameras. We would not have been able to make this film 10 years ago. You’d have needed 35 mm film cameras, which are big and bulky and you’d still have had quite a grainy image. Even the early digital cameras could not do it. The latest digital cameras are really good in the dark and really good at capturing very bright things and very things in the same composition. So it is only recently that the technology has finally caught up with the subject matter. So it’s all natural light. And you don’t see the shots that didn’t make the movie. It’s incredibly difficult to hit critical focus in the near dark. But the shots that did work were so good that the scientists who had been studying the chimps for years told us we showed them thing they never saw with the naked eye. With this film, audiences can see what the scientists have been thrashing through the bush to see and see it better.

All the animals in the film appear to be completely natural. How did you keep the chimpanzees from interacting with the people making the film?

We worked with a group that had been followed for 30 years by scientists. You need an animal that is totally oblivious to people. The last thing you want is an animal looking nervously over his shoulder. They had a level of comfort so they just get on with their everyday life. It sounds counter-intuitive but if you want to get really natural behavior from an animal, you need to an animal that is totally oblivious to people and doesn’t react or respond to the people in any way. To get that level of comfort so you don’t get a response to being filmed but they get on with their everyday life, you need them to be used to people. But they’re individuals just like us with different personalities. Some are just camera shy. We had one who was perfectly comfortable with people but whenever we pulled out the camera she turned her back. That’s when we moved on to Oscar and Isha.

We wanted the process of filmmaking to vanish. We really wanted to make a film that felt like a film crew wasn’t there. It would be much easier to film with a camera on the shoulder. The chimpanzees travel great distances, often travel 10 miles in a day and we would like to chase after them. But then the camera is always moving around and wobbling a bit and you’re always reminded of the cameraman attached to the camera and by inference thinking about the process and not the story. We decided early on even though it was sheer hell to carry tripods through the rainforest we needed to do that so that the audience isn’t conscious of the camera. We wanted beautiful, static, unobtrusive shots with the chimpanzees doing whatever they were doing in the frame and just kind of unfolding within it.

There must have been moments when you wanted to interfere with what was going on.

We had to have a golden rule of not intervening. Its not uncommon for something to happen that makes you want to step in and help it. But if we had, we would have ruined Oscar’s chance of being adopted by Freddy. On the face of it, it looked hopeless. But as it turns out it would have been much worse for him if we had. It’s quite a good lesson on the dangers of stepping in and doing what you think would be a good thing and it wouldn’t be.

What was the biggest challenge in filming?

Any time in the wet season is a hard day. Rainforests have a rainy season and it’s like standing under a shower for half a day. It wears thin being drenched all day and having your clothes eaten by a fungus, especially when it seems that nothing is happening. Then they will do something really magical out of the blue – make a tool or always surprising you. With chimpanzees, you can always be sure it’s going to be something exciting.

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Meryl Streep Narrates “To the Arctic”

Posted on April 20, 2012 at 8:00 am

Meryl Streep narrates “To the Arctic,” which takes audiences on a never-before-experienced journey into the lives of a mother polar bear and her twin seven-month-old cubs as they navigate the changing Arctic wilderness they call home.

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Behind the Scenes

The Lucky One

Posted on April 19, 2012 at 6:31 pm

Director Scott Hicks pours enough syrup over this film to supply an IHOP. Every shot of the golden sunlight on the Louisiana bayou or the perfectly tousled angelic curls of the perfectly precocious angelic boy or the perfect smile of the beautiful kennel owner and substitute teacher played by Taylor Schilling or the perfect muscles of the beautiful former Marine who seems to be channeling “as you wish” Westley from “The Princess Bride” all but drips with syrupy sweetness. Then there is the aural candy of the many pop songs on the soundtrack. This is outdone by the storyline, which matches the sugar content of the visuals with a synthetic and coincidence-heavy plot. But that doesn’t mean it it not a pleasant movie-watching experience in a greeting card commercial sort of way.

It helps that Zac Efron and Schilling are talented and attractive performers with good chemistry. Efron plays Logan, a Marine on his third tour who finds a picture of a beautiful girl half-buried in the sand. It becomes his lucky talisman. When he finds himself back at home, not sure who he is or where he belongs without his team and traumatized by loss, he decides to find the girl in the picture and thank her. He walks from Colorado to Louisiana with his dog, Zeus. Instead of telling her why he is there, he ends up working for her, helping to care for the dogs and also looking very handsome as he lifts things and fixes things. Schilling is Beth, who lives with her grandmother (Blythe Danner) and her 7-year-old son Ben (Riley Thomas Stewart), a violinist and chess whiz. Beth’s ex-husband Keith (Jay R. Ferguson) is a bully of a cop who is volatile, possessive, and jealous. As Logan and Beth are more drawn to one another, Keith threatens to sue for custody of Ben to keep him away from them.

“The questions are complicated but the answers are simple,” Logan says when Beth challenges him to quote his favorite philosopher. “Voltaire?” she asks. “Dr. Seuss,” he answers. Logan, who has accepted a job cleaning up after dogs because it is “peaceful” may understand that simple does not mean superficial better than Nicholas Sparks, author of the book and director Hicks, who seem determined to keep things safely formulaic.

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Based on a book Drama Romance

Think Like a Man

Posted on April 19, 2012 at 6:17 pm

A gimmicky best-selling book about love, sex, and marriage has been made into a high-concept romantic comedy with an all-star cast. “He’s Just Not That Into You”? No, that was so 2009. This time the inspiration is the book by stand-up comic and talk show star Steve Harvey, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment. The advice is the same — the stunningly obvious and yet too often ignored principle that people will treat you the way you insist on being treated. If you expect a man to open the car door for you, he will — and he will recognize that you are a woman who deserves respect and courtesy. If you give it up within an hour of meeting him or continue to live with him without any prospect of building a real home and family together, he will think you do not honor yourself and he will not honor you. And some women need to learn to choose their men by their hearts, not their resumés. Both men and women need to learn that lesson in this ensemble story about a group of friends and what happens when the ladies take Harvey’s advice — and then when the men find out what is going on and try to turn the tables.

At the most superficial level, the movie is suitably entertaining, with beautiful and talented performers coping with a range of romantic challenges. There’s a player named Zeke (Romany Malco) and Mya (Meagan Good) who wants commitment. There’s Lauren (Taraji P. Henson), a very successful female executive who wants a “suitable” consort. An aspiring chef (Michael Ealy as Dominic) does not fit her PowerPoint-worthy strategic plan.

A “mama’s boy” who brings his mother along on a Valentine’s Day dinner (Terrence J) has to decide if he can allow another woman (Regina Hall as single mom Candace) to come first in his life. And Kristen (Gabrielle Union), who feels as though the place she shares with her boyfriend (Kevin Ferrara as Jeremy) is a frat house, wants a home that looks like grown-ups live there — starting with getting rid of the disgusting old sofa. The group is rounded out with a happily married guy and pepper pot Cedric (Kevin Hart) who is in the midst of a miserable divorce and self-medicating his hurt feelings with visits to strip clubs.

The cast gives the usual rom-com banter as much sizzle as they can, and there is a whole second level of pleasure just in seeing these stars get a chance to play romantic leads. Malco, terrific as a doorman in “Baby Mama” and a sidekick in “The 40 Year Old Virgin” makes an assured transition to leading man and Ealy has an enormously appealing screen presence. King, Union, and Hall should all be doing the roles that get sent to Katherine Heigel. It is good to see an almost all-black cast get a chance to make a glossy romantic comedy but it would be great to see them do something more than the usual multiplex formula. A few Tyler Perry jokes (however welcome) are not enough to make this feel anything other than disappointingly generic.

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Based on a book Comedy Romance

Blue Like Jazz

Posted on April 19, 2012 at 6:05 pm

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material, sexuality, drug and alcohol content, and some language
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	References to tragic world situations, family stress
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	April 20, 2012
Date Released to DVD:	August 6, 2012
Amazon.com ASIN:	0785263705

Donald Miller’s best-selling collection of essays, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality has become a crowd-financed and lightly fictionalized film about a Texas teenager from a sheltered Baptist community who goes to the famously free-thinking Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Marshall Allman of “True Blood” plays Miller, whose Alice in Wonderland-style immersion in a world where everything is questioned and debated is disturbing the way jazz music is disturbing — it never resolves. In Texas, the answers were always laid out in nice straight lines. Everything resolves. Miller’s estranged father, an intellectual who listens to jazz and lives in a trailer, tells him it is time to improvise, to challenge his ideas. His father has arranged for him to be admitted to Reed. When Miller begins to suspect for the first time that not everyone practices what they preach, even at church, he decides to give it a try.

“Forget everything you think you know,” he is told when he arrives. “Sexual identity is social construct,” explains a girl who is using the urinal next to him in the men’s room. One student is handing out free bottles of water and another is handing out literature explaining why bottled water is a scourge and a fraud. Students get credit for civil disobedience. Even his most mundane beliefs are challenged: no one in Oregon carries an umbrella when it rains. Why separate yourself from the elements?

The script by Miller, director Steve Taylor, and co-producer Ben Pearson, smooths out the story (the real Miller did not arrive at Reed until he was 30 and he audited some classes but did not enroll). They wisely avoid the easy and obvious “fish out of water” confrontations. Refreshingly, Miller and his classmate heretics are from the beginning almost always very tolerant of each other’s ways of approaching the world. Indeed, while Miller is warned that the other students may not accept his faith, the most intolerant behavior comes from Miller when he feels betrayed in a very personal way by his church (the film’s only disappointing departure from the real story for the sake of narrative tidiness).

This is a very strong movie in its own terms, a thoughtful, smart, sensitive coming-of-age story. Reedies will enjoy familiar sights from Powell’s bookstore (the site of a debate about the existence of God) to the scroungers’ table in the cafeteria. Most important is that just as Miller’s book explores an expansive, golden-rule-based version of Christianity, the film itself takes sincere, faith-based story-telling out of the narrow confines of what is currently classified as “Christian entertainment.” The real divide is not between believers and non-believers but between those who believe that questioning and tolerance bring them closer to God and those who prefer constant reinforcement of what they think they already know. The vocabulary of faith should not be the exclusive property of one small subset of believers, and it is heartening to watch a movie that makes that point with such grace.

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