Interview: Director Rodrigo Garcia on “Last Days in the Desert”

Posted on May 11, 2016 at 3:14 pm

“Last Days in the Desert” is the story of Jesus in the final moment of his time of reflection before accepting his destiny as the Messiah. I spoke to director Rodrigo Garcia about creating the story of a critical moment that is not described in the New Testament and working with his international cast, the storyline about Jesus’ interactions with a family, and with three-time Oscar winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (“Gravity,” “The Revenant”).

How do you cast the role of Jesus, especially when you are going to have the same actor play the devil who tempts Him? In my opinion, the first requirement is kind eyes.

Well I think you know what I’m looking for because you’ve already said it. Ewan McGregor is a very good actor. I already knew that about him. I didn’t initially think of him because Ewan is in his early 40s and I was looking at men who are around 30, 31, 32. So I didn’t initially think of him but then I meet him socially and spent time with him and the kind eyes are there. Literally what Ewan has is a great human thing about him. He’s very likeable and he is very empathetic. You know he’s interested in other people. Her feels for other people. He is interested in human things. He doesn’t have a prejudiced bone in his body. He is just that person. That was very important to me. What I wanted was someone who has the kind eyes but also projected a real humanity, not a starry-eyed Jesus that seems of another world. Jesus is at least half human so I wanted him to feel like a person. I wasn’t going to deal with the divine side because how do you deal with that? How do you cast that? How do you play that? So we concentrated on the human side and his empathy and his kindness. It’s not without complication. Sometimes he says the wrong thing or might not make a good choice to intervene in the problems of the family. You could even argue that he helped but in helping he also hurt. He makes mistakes like humans make mistakes but he does have kind eyes and not just literally but as a metaphor. He sees the world and other with kindness.

You had a small cast, and each was from a different country, none of them from your home country. What does that international range bring to the production?

I think whether you’re working with actors from the same country or from different countries no two brains are the same. That’s the beauty about movies. When you work with other artists and things come together in a movie then they come together beautifully because it’s not just personality but also psyche comes together. Things people don’t know about themselves come out in the movie. Some people were religious and some people were less religious. A couple of people were Jews. It doesn’t matter. Everyone understood the theme of the movie. Everyone understood the movie was about fathers and sons and about the mysteries and about the incredible journey of Jesus. So when movie works it makes this infallible chemistry between those people of different origins come together, everyone’s conscious and unconscious is coming together around one idea.

What draws us to the desert, or the woods, or our own places of refuge and contemplation?

I think people of all faith and all religion and all spiritual philosophy go to the desert. You go to the desert, you go to the ocean. You go to where the noise stops and you can spend time with yourself and with the Universe, with the oneness. That’s what the desert is like. It’s both dangerous and ruthless but it’s also beautiful and you really get a sense of time. There are landscapes that probably haven’t changed that much in hundreds of years maybe thousands. So much of the movie was about men living in time. How we live and we move on. So, this movie was set at the end of something and at the beginning of something, it’s the last days in the desert for the mother and the father who stay and it’s the last days in the desert for the boy and for Jesus who go on to two very different destinies. The movie happens sort of at the first page of a book and at the last page of a book.

One of the things that I really like about your films is that you focus on those in-between moments not on the big climax or revelation but on the moments we may not understand until later.

A part of me is a minimalist. A lot of directors as they get more success they want to make that bigger movie on a bigger canvas with a bigger budget. I’m very Japanese that way. I’m always trying to see how can I do it simpler. I’m always fascinated by these Japanese artists that do calligraphy. They’ll work on a character forever, sometimes for life looking for that perfect stroke. I do like that. I like that minimalist thing and sometimes I have a lot of dialogue in films and I get a lot of praise for my dialogue but in the end all the important scenes in the movie have to be non-dialogue scenes. They have to be moments when people have to say good bye. Moments when people fall from cliffs or on crosses or just the silence, you know. I think sometimes in the movie the crucial moments cannot be dialogue moments. They have to be visual and silent moments.

In this film the characters talk about the most ordinary things in a very relatable way.

I wanted the conflicts to be simple but potent and they couldn’t be anything simpler than “I want my son to stay but my son wants to leave.” That’s a big conflict between a father and son wanting different things in life. That’s a conflict that is so relatable to any culture and any time and this looks small from the outside but for the people living in it, it’s brutal. It’s a really collision course and the mother is trying to intervene while facing death. Everything was as simple as could be. No matter when in human history, there will always be the issue: My father wants me to do this but I want to do something else. It’s certainly loaded because we know who Jesus is and what his destiny is. So anything that character does or says or doesn’t do or doesn’t say, we give it meaning because we know what awaits him.

Jesus and the boy are both struggling in that way.

My point of departure was Jesus was half human but that half is human. When you’re writing about a character you must think how is he like me, how am I like him. So the human half of Jesus must have confidence and insecurity, boldness and fear, fear of the unknown, a love for his father and of course some mystery about his father since his father was not someone you can just sit around with and talk things over. He probably had a sense of whatever the destiny was. He was probably going to make a grand gesture and maybe a big sacrifice. So the human man must have been, however committed he was, he just have been scared of what was ahead because who faces torture and death and crucifixion without fear. In fact if he had no fear the sacrifice would not have been the sacrifice that it was. I just dealt with the human side and the human side. I must assume is like me. Flaubert famously said, “Madam Bovary is me.” Well, that’s true of any character and I can only approach it if I am like him and he is like me and I think that’s what this one did.

What’s the best advice you ever got about being a director?

I was one doing a very emotionally loaded scene with Calista Flockhart. She walks into a room and find that her lover is dead. And right from the beginning she said we were going to do one take and I was already saying something to her and she said to me, “No, no I don’t want you in my head yet.” The lesson was don’t direct too soon. Let the actors, let your creative people, let the people you are working with come to the piece, bring themselves to the piece and along the way you are directing subtly but also hearing them out. You invite people and their subconscious to the piece. So I would say don’t direct too much too soon.

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Interview: Writer/Director Rebecca Miller of “Maggie’s Plan”

Posted on May 10, 2016 at 3:32 pm

Rebecca Miller is the writer/director of the delightful new film, “Maggie’s Plan,” a witty romantic comedy with an unusual twist. Maggie (Greta Gerwig) falls in love with a married professor named John (Ethan Hawke), who leaves his wife, Georgette (Julianne Moore) to be with her. But this is not the happily ever after ending you might expect. Four years later, Maggie comes up with a plan to get John and Georgette back together.

Let’s talk about the hair in the movie, there’s a lot of very interesting hair.

Yes! It’s true, it’s true. I remember fluffing up Bill Hader’s hair myself. I was like, “It’s not fluffy enough; it has to be like this.” It needed to be fluffy, because it’s a little bit based on a friend of mine who had fluffy hair before he lost all of it.

And Julianne Moore’s character had that very severe pulled up hair.

Yeah well that was Julianne’s idea; she said, “I really think it as to be wound up on the top of my head.” I thought it worked great, I mean it looks like there was some other little person In that bun. Actually I remember having a discussion like, “Do you think maybe we should have a moment where the hair comes down like after when she wakes up in the morning and she’s living it with Maggie.” And she said, “I think it should kind of slide off to the side.”

And her costumes are wonderfully tactile.

Malgosia Turzanska is a Polish designer. She’s a wonderful costume designer and she started talking a lot about fur, cracked ice, textures. Julianne wanted a uniform. Like something that was the same silhouette basically like all the time. She liked these boots, I forget what they are called but there is a certain brand of boots which are clogs and people wear them a lot in New York right now. She had them specially made into long boots so that there was sort of some heaviness to the shoe and kind of toughness to it but also elegance to these long things that go over jeans and then the tunic and then the fur vest because I wanted her to be like a Viking queen.

One thing I that I always love in movies and plays is when some of the characters speak a language that another character doesn’t speak, as Maggie’s stepchildren do in this film.

I just like the idea that they have their secret language that Maggie can’t penetrate. It’s just one more thing that isolates her in away in this family that she’s trying to be a part of or create, but also connects them to their mother.

You were an actress before you did what you’re doing now. Was that what made you want to direct?

I actually knew I wanted to be director before I started acting. In a weird way I fell into acting for various reasons but before I started acting I was making films that were really what we would now call video installations. I mean I was shooting on film and they were more connected to visual art and to painting. I started to act in films partly because I thought I had an opportunity to make money to make these sculptures I wanted to make. It began as a sort of lark and I then ended up working with all these wonderful directors. I started being able to imagine myself on a bigger set to understand how sets work, to understand how movies are really made because I was a painter, I didn’t know. So that really expanded my imagination and also I started to think I would love to make art that wasn’t so glorified, that was for everybody, more populist. So that how I started thinking about it.

The directors that I worked with were so wonderful. Mike Nichols was one of the great directors who I actually got to talk to a lot about this film before he died and was a kind of mentor on this film. I’ve studied and loved his work for years. His first film, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” is just one of the greatest films of the 20th century and then “The Graduate” and “Carnal Knowledge” and so on. So I got to work with him as an actress but I would have lunch with him and talk to him. I would talk to him a lot about pace and I would just listen to him. Pacing is very important to him and he was very open with actors. He didn’t try to cordon himself off from actors. He wasn’t afraid of actors. A lot of directors don’t really like actors that much and would prefer not to get down and not to kind of intermingle too much whereas I think Mike really loved actors. He treasured them and I’m more on that side of the fence. I really like working with actors. I really like that collaboration. I could just write books if I only want to control everything. Which I do. I do write books. But I could only write books. If I didn’t like the chaos of not knowing and being surprised then I wouldn’t make films because actors bring in the surprise element. All acting is improvisation and word wise very little of my work is in improvisation but to me every moment of interpretation is a kind of improvisation because it’s coming out directly out of the actor as a surprise.

You work with three of my favourite actors as your leads and all of them are writers too.

I certainly didn’t go out looking for a bunch of writers who were actors but at the same time I don’t think it was an accident that out of all this group of people, Greta, Ethan, but also Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph were all writers and Julianne writes also. So they’re all writers and serious writers and I think there’s just something about the way they transmit their minds, especially the leads who I had worked with really for a long time, like a year before we shot. They had really good ideas and questions that let me tailor the script to them. For example Julianne said, “I really think we need to see her working. We need to see her in an academic environment.” I answered that with that auditorium scene which is really a fun scene and that wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t said that. I wasn’t going to get to know Georgette until later and then seeing her teach was such a great idea.

Another thing that I like about the movie is that you’ve made a movie that was so fearless about smart people who are engaged deeply with ideas.

I’ve never dumbed down one single moment in the movie because I feel like people like to think and have fun at the same time.

You had a great control over the tone of the film, with a slightly heightened slightly bubbly feeling. What creates that?

It’s a strange mystery. I don’t know how you describe how you do that. It is a combination of all those things and it’s the main job of the director. It starts with the script with the tone of the jokes, the slightly absurd quality to the whole thing. I mean in a way there is a whole absurdity to the whole set-up that already lifts it up off the ground then this is where using very talented actors comes in. It’s almost like a tuning fork, they hear each other and they feel each other. They know what movie they are in according to the signs and the scripts. Partly through direction pushing them one way or another but really they have to come in knowing.

That’s why you want to rehearse a little bit but not too much before. I love to work with actors a long time before on just character, building character, not necessarily saying the words because you want freshness there when you shoot. And then there’s the design. What color are the walls? What color is the jacket next to the wall? How do you create a world that’s just that little bit heightened, as you say? What color choice might be just a little bit more than what you might see in everyday life but yet still real, real enough? And the emotion I insist is completely real. So everybody is really emotional. These are very real problems that real people have. Everyone goes just a little bit further than most people would. You know it’s like a path we know to be our own. The actors go just that much further along that path.

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New on DVD: LEGO Scooby-Doo — Haunted Hollywood

Posted on May 10, 2016 at 3:13 pm

New this week on DVD: LEGO Scooby-Doo — Haunted Hollywood!

Set in a LEGO world, the Scooby gang try to rescue an old movie studio, which is not only threatened by developers who want to tear it down, but by a series of movie monsters, which are suddenly haunting the place.

I have one to give away!

Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with Scooby in the subject line and tell me your favorite cartoon dog. Don’t forget your address! (U.S. addresses only). I’ll pick a winner at random on May 20, 2016. Good luck!

Audiobook: Lily Collins Reads Peter Pan

Posted on May 10, 2016 at 10:51 am

Screen Shot 2016-05-10 at 10.41.24 AM — Copyright 2016 Audible

For more than a century James M. Barrie’s story of the boy who would not grow up has been enchanting families as a play, several theatrical musicals, and in many different television and movie versions. Now the Peter Pan novel by Barrie is available from Audible as an audiobook, beautifully read by one of my favorite young actresses, Lily Collins (“Mirror Mirror,” “The Blind Side”). Peter Pan is the title character, and Collins does a wonderful job with everyone in the story, including Captain Hook. But having her tell the story subtly reminds us that Wendy (a name Barrie invented, by the way) is the one who really sees and understands what is happening and learning what she needs to know to do what Peter won’t do — grow up. The novel has much more detail than the familiar play and movie versions and lets us hear the story as Barrie imagined it and as he told it to the young boys he befriended and who inspired it. Play this one in the car and you’ll find yourself coming home the long way so you can keep listening.

FCC: It’s Time to Look at the TV Rating System!

Posted on May 9, 2016 at 11:19 pm

The television ratings system has failed badly. It is secret, inconsistent, and completely out of touch with current technology. There is no accountability or oversight and no way to challenge the decisions made by insiders. I am proud to join with 28 organizations devoted to protecting children and media literacy in calling for a review by the FCC.

The content ratings system as currently constituted is deeply flawed because the power to assign program content ratings was assigned to the same networks where the content originates. This has created an inherent and tremendous conflict of interest: It is to a network’s advantage to mis-rate its programming for a younger audience so as to gain a larger viewing audience; and a majority of corporate advertisers choose not to advertise on television programming that is rated for Mature Audiences Only. Unlike motion pictures and video games, there is no independent evaluation of the age-based rating system for television.
An incorrect content rating renders the V-chip worthless. If a parent programs their television’s V-chip to block programs rated as appropriate for “Mature Audiences Only,” their child will still be exposed to graphic and explicit material. Whether accidental or intentional, an informal practice has developed whereby broadcast networks never rate any of their programming “mature only,” no matter how graphic, explicit or inappropriate its content may be for children. As a result, extreme, graphic content is rated appropriate for 14-year-old children; and other programs with adult content are even rated PG.

The TV Parental Guidelines Oversight Monitoring Board (TVOMB) has enabled and sheltered this flawed content ratings system, rather than following its Congressional and FCC mandate to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the system:

TVOMB is not accountable to anyone outside its own membership, nor is it transparent to the parents it supposedly serves. Most Americans don’t even know TVOMB exists. They don’t know that TVOMB is in charge of the ratings system, or how to contact its members.

Parents have never been told the names of those who sit on TVOMB; why they are qualified to sit on TVOMB; how they are appointed; when or where TVOMB meets; how they determine what content ratings TV programs ought to have; or how they respond to complaints from parents and other citizens.

The public is not allowed to attend TVOMB meetings. Representatives from the FCC are not allowed to attend meetings. Members of the press are not allowed to attend meetings. There is no transparency beyond the TVOMB members.

TVOMB is composed of a chairman and 23 members, including six members each from the broadcast television industry, the cable industry, and the program production community. There are only five non-industry seats on a board of 23, despite the board’s express purpose being to serve the needs of parents; and as of this writing, not all five of the non-industry seats are filled. Of those five non-industry seats on TVOMB, all are appointed by the TVOMB chairman (an industry member).

In other words, the body charged with oversight of the television content ratings system is comprised of those whom it is supposed to be monitoring. Under the current system, the same people who create TV content then rate the content they’ve created, and also run the board that oversees the rating process. They also produce an occasional public opinion survey that validates the current system.

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