Werner Herzog is not only one of the most brilliant directors in the history of world cinema; he is also unique in the span of his films, equally impressive in narrative features and documentaries. After a decade of pleading from the AFI Docs festival for the chance to recognize his work at their Charles Guggenheim Symposium, the busy director finally agreed to attend and permit a tribute to his work that included an interview on stage and a screening of his new film about the internet, “Lo And Behold: Reveries of the Connected World.”
Herzog was interviewed by another outstanding director, Ramin Bahrani (“Goodbye Solo,” “99 Homes”). Both were championed by Roger Ebert, who brought them together for a collaboration — the wonderful short film “Future States,” with Herzog providing the voice for the existentially troubled central character, a plastic bag.
Herzog’s documentary may cover some of the most advanced technology in the world, but he does not have a cell phone, he says, “for cultural reasons. Our examination of the world should not only be through applications.” When Bahrani complimented his “location-based” images, Herzog said, “I’m good with locations. I can direct landscapes.” Whether he is shooting burning oil fields in Kuwait (“Lessons of Darkness”), the face of a deaf/blind woman on her first airplane flight (“Land of Silence and Darkness”), or the soft-drink-machine size computer that sent the very first two-letter message over the internet (“Lo and Behold”), his camera movements and images are vital and engaging. He spoke of the importance of being on top of the mechanics of filming (“I am a very pragmatic filmmaker”) and of the poetry, a sort of choreography of the camera, as he conveys “the dance between the actors and the location.”
He distinguished his documentary films from the prevalent approach to non-fiction filmmaking, which he considers more like journalism, “belonging more to television than in a theater.” He is frank about his departure from the conventions of cinema verite; he has no hesitation in asking a subject to move or answer again, to “go beyond the mere facts” in search of “narrative power.” “Illumination is more important than facts….I’m looking for deeper poetry.” But that does not necessarily mean pretty pictures. He will avoid shooting a sunset, calling it “romanticized beauty.”
He says there are things you cannot learn in film school, like “know(ing) the heart of men.” What filmmakers should learn in film school are the tools it takes to get the film made: “lock picking and forging shooting permits.”
Herzog makes films when “there is a story so big I cannot resist.” And he does not stop. “I plow on.”
Morgan Neville is the man behind some of my favorite documentaries including “20 Feet from Stardom” and “Best of Enemies.” His latest film, “The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble,” is about cellist Yo-Yo Man bringing together international musicians to share their sounds and traditions in a group called The Silk Road Ensemble. As we learn more about the challenges faced by performers from Spain, Syria, China, and other countries, the music they create together becomes even more moving.
That does not mean it was not a challenge for Neville to work with people from so many different cultures, whose only common language was music. “It was difficult but incredibly rewarding. I mean this was such an ambitious film that I think if I had known how ambitious it was at the beginning I would have been a lot more scared. I think when you make films it’s like being like a mother who’s had a baby. Your body forgets the pain; you have this conscious amnesia where you convince yourself that it won’t be that hard. And this was hard. We shot in seven countries in six languages and so from a production point of view it was hard, but creatively it was fascinating. Trying to take the ideas and the music and the scale of what is happening in the Silk Road Ensemble and trying to put that into a movie was daunting, but it was amazing experience at the same time.”
The film goes back to the first gathering in 2000, and some of the film was archival, coming from a local PBS station. “I didn’t know when I started making the film that any of that stuff existed but we just found little bit and pieces in archives that helped us tell the story and helped shape the story. But I basically filmed everything from 2011 on.” There were so many musicians he had to select a few to focus on. “Not only did I want to represent the diversity of the geography and background and experience but at the same time they had to be on the same type of journey. There were other great musicians and great stories in the ensemble but their stories are less related. I think the thing that united everybody that we focused on was that they all made a decision to leave, to not do the obvious thing or take the road less traveled and to go out into the world and then all returned back to home with some new found perspective on what made their home special or made that tradition special.”
The musicians all cherish their traditions and cultures, but they clearly relish the musical adventure of combining sounds and trying something new. Neville agreed that those two impulses could create some tension. “In all these cultures there are traditionalists, people who basically don’t want things to change, and I get that, but I think what Yo-Yo says in the film is that all traditions are born of real innovation. In a way what they’ve all tried to do with their tradition is the best way of preserving it. They are trying to keep it growing. What you are doing with a bagpipe or a peepa; a Galician gaita or a pipa, it’s taking it and expanding the vocabulary of that language. That’s a way of celebrating its uniqueness and making sure it stays relevant, it doesn’t die out like you see with the Xang Family banned in China . To me they are just tremendous, they are amazing, but there is no future for it. And there is a whole other counter-argument you could make, which is why the metaphor the Silk Road is so appropriate. Things that seem like pure embodiments of specific cultures usually aren’t, whether we are talking about pipas or pasta. I will give you one example, the Persian instrument which is a Kamancheh, a very traditional, personal instrument. It has four strings on it; it used to have two strings on it until they saw violins and said, ‘Well, if they’ve got four strings we should have four strings.’ And now people want to protect it but it already has a vocabulary, it’s already in dialogue with the rest of the world even going back before this tradition. People like Wu Man and Kayhan , even though actually they left their homes, they’ve done more to preserve their tradition than the people that stayed. If you look at how China regards its own traditional music now or how Iran regarded its traditional music after the Gulf War, they not only stopped all Western influence, they stopped all traditional music in the cultural Revolution and that’s part of why Kayhan had to leave, everybody had forgotten how to play the Kamancheh.”
While Neville has made documentaries on other subjects, his favorite topics begin with music. “To me, the best music films are not about music. Music is a way of telling the story. It’s a language but it’s got to say something with that language. I think Yo-Yo is very much about that. I feel like it’s an amazing tool to have as filmmaker and I love investigating those stories. But every music film I’ve done is about something beyond the music. This one is about all these ideas. I mean it’s really about these big questions in its most elemental form, the importance of culture. Does culture matter, how does it define us and connect us in ways we don’t see? How can culture help us humanize the other in a world where we are so caught up in building walls and demonizing the other, how does culture work as antidote to that? I mean all of these kinds of questions I think we’re the ones we were investigating.” He gave as an example one moment in the film he said was one of his favorites: when Yo-Yo Ma is playing a Bach piece and another musician is singing a very traditional Taiwanese song as a mashup between the two seamlessly.” At first, the film had more expert explanations, but “at the end of the day it just felt like we were talking more than showing and that the music expressed so much that we just kept pulling back on it and trying to find the emotional story.”
Interview: Whit Stillman on Adapting Jane Austen in “Love & Friendship”
Posted on May 18, 2016 at 3:37 pm
Whit Stillman is known for his elegant, shrewd, and witty drawing-room comedies about the upper classes, which makes him a natural for adapting Jane Austen. His new film is called “Love & Friendship,” the title of an early Jane Austen novel, but it is based on a different book, the epistolary (told in letters) story of a widow described as “the most accomplished coquette in England.” Lady Susan is played by Kate Beckinsale and her close friend, an American, is played by Stillman favorite Chloe Sevigny. In an interview, Stillman talked about using costumes and music to tell the story and why it took him a few years to appreciate Austen.
How was it adapting a novel told through letters instead of a traditional narrative?Copyright Amazon Studios 2016
I try to keep the letters to a minimum in it, because it could have been dominated by the letter format, so I had to stay away from that and try to make it pay off when it was used. It’s a long process and it takes a long time. It’s one thing to adapt a novel when you have the scenes and the dialogue from the scenes and you can the novel as written. In this case you had to kind of recast everything, shuffle the deck, and take at least two letters back and forth to make a dialogue scene between two people or various people. It could be more than five letters going into one scene with parts used in another scene. It requires some invention of additional characters and then those characters have their lives and preconceptions and their stories. Although people probably talk about the funny lines in their film and dialogue, everything in film has to be about the story and so it’s all leading to developments and story and characters and where they want to end up and where they’re going to end up.
The costumes are gorgeous.
Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh, who did the costumes, was one of the first crew names mentioned to me and was the first person of the crew we hired. She was also helpful with many of the other people who were very good in each department. We were talking about the period that it was earlier than what people think of as Jane Austen, the 1790s. It’s a little bit of a broad reach because we think she started writing in 1793 but she didn’t make a clean copy till 1805. So we thought that well if there are things we like in the earlier period we would use them and also the older people could be wearing things from the past and I don’t really like the lines of the later styles. Ladies’ fashion of this period gave us the opportunity to make Lady Susan and her friend, played by Kate and Chloe look sexy and interesting. Lady Susan was a widow and this whole thing of her widowhood was reflected in her clothes. She’s all in black with a veil the first time she is seen and that comes off and she seems sexier and sexier and the colours change over time. So that was Lady Susan’s progression and then the idea for Chloe was more cheerful, bright and colorful. We were down in costume departments in London for a lot of the male actors to make sure we were choosing the right costumes and right livery for the footman and everything.
Why did you switch the title?
I really believe like when you are making film just do everything the best you can. So if you don’t like the title, change it and I didn’t like the title at all. I really hated it and very early like right away when I started working on the adaptation I said I’m not going to work on a film called “Lady Susan” and I had seen Love and Freindship(sic) as one of her other titles and so I immediately titled it “Love and Friendship.” I’m surprised when people asked me, why did you re-title it? For me that’s twelve years old. She had this very Austenian title on a juvenilia story that’s not fascinating. She misspelt friendship and all that. So I thought it was good to have it in the Austenian later tradition. It’s the direction she generally went in. At first I didn’t think that the title bore any relationship to the story. After I finished the film actually I think the title is in the story.
In your first film, Metropolitan, the characters discuss Mansfield Park. So have you been an Austen fan for a long time?
Copyright Amazon Studios 2016Yes, I have been. I have first, I wrong-footed it, because at 18 when I was in a bad funk and about to take time off from college to go to Mexico, I picked up Northanger Abbey and read it but which was a big mistake because I was an 18 year old guy and I had never read a gothic novel. I had no idea what they were. I had no idea what she was trying to do. I thought it was the most stupid thing and I would tell everyone like for the next five years, “You know I hate Jane Austen. She is so overrated. You know I don’t understand it” blah blah. But my sister is very good at reading. A lot of the good reading habits that I had came from my sister and brother-in-law so one way or another I read Pride and Prejudice and liked it. Then read everything and loved it and became a big Austen fan. Then back when I moved to Paris in 98, I think I was travelling around to promote The Last Days of Disco, I said, “Oh look there is Northanger Abbey. I will buy that and see if I like it now.” And of course I liked it because I’d been in publishing. I had edited Victoria Holt. I knew gothic novels and so I liked it.
I think your Lady Susan is more sympathetic than the one in the book, maybe because Kate Beckinsale plays her so charmingly. She is still manipulative and deceptive, but we can see the reason for it.
She’s not virtuous and but she wants to achieve things that are understandable. She sure wants to achieve them fairly dishonestly. But what she actually does ends up being positive for everyone and with a catalyst it doesn’t really matter what they want to do; it matters how they affect the rest of the world. She’s kind of like that bird on the rhinoceros. She eats the bugs and helps him while she’s riding on his back.
Interview: Director Rodrigo Garcia on “Last Days in the Desert”
Posted on May 11, 2016 at 3:14 pm
Copyright Broad Green 2016
“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.
Interview: Writer/Director Rebecca Miller of “Maggie’s Plan”
Posted on May 10, 2016 at 3:32 pm
Copyright Sony Pictures Classics 2016Rebecca 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.Copyright Sony Pictures Classics 2016
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.
