Interview: Paul Dalio, Writer/Director of “Touched With Fire”

Posted on February 10, 2016 at 3:56 pm

Paul Dalio is a rap artist, writer, and director whose own bipolar disorder inspired his new film, “Touched With Fire.” In an interview, he talked about how he portrayed the subjective experience of mania for the bipolar poets played by Katie Holmes (Carla) and Luke Kirby (Marco) and how bipolar disorder affected the way he wrote. The imaginative vocabulary and rhythm of his conversation echoed the speeches he wrote for his characters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5xTorJad3w

It is very interesting because when I was in the hospital, I just started kind of rhyming compulsively, unconsciously and not trying but it came out that way rhythmically. There were so many rapid associations, with a kind of vivid sensuality that came from hearing each sound and hearing how the sounds move together. There is this rapid burst of emotional rise that almost can’t be satisfied just by normal sentences but almost needs that rapidly repeating sound of the same word that escalates in beat, the same way that music has a burst. And it comes out in these words that have rapid associations. People in the hospital would communicate in ways that might not make sense to us. They would use these word plays to have double meanings or triple meanings. If they’re talking about an egg it could mean the origin of the cosmos or the birth and they might say the egg head as legs and just find some kind of association between them and almost test to see if the other one understood it and then they would play back and forth like that.

I never was into poetry or rap at all until I was manic and then when I left the hospital I couldn’t write screenplays because I couldn’t write things for sane people anymore. I just wasn’t able to tap into the sane mind. But I still had the artistic urges and so it took the form of these raps because rap was almost a way of purging the poison in my veins that I kind of needed an outlet to release. So it was very toxic, what I was experiencing and it was always like puss coming out in words through these vicious, sharp, violent rhymes. I almost took on the identity of the lunatic and every stereotype assigned to me I would wear that face to exaggeration, almost to mock the people who were creating the stereotype and laugh at it and own it to like the tenth degree and be in their face about it, flaunt it. I was certainly going manic again in the rap world, doing rap battles. You are basically competing to see who can be more rhythmically intense with rapid rhyme schemes and more assaulting the person, or more creatively painting out a picture how you are going to cause their demise. And so I would be like the alter ego of Jack the Ripper or the Lunatic Under the Moonlight or breaking out of the Luna Band. It kind of became a way of finding company, too, because you can’t really be around happy people, but the people who I was hanging out with wore suffering as a badge and they embraced my insanity because I was coming up with this crazy stuff. And so that definitely was an outlet, especially when you’re battling a lot of this freestyle improvisation. So you are just kind of writing outbursts of euphoria. And when you write that burst first of euphoria comes out in words there is kind of a thrill to kill in terms of the playfulness of what happens when the two battle rappers bond over assaulting each other.

The film is deeply humane and very sympathetic to both the people with bipolar disorder and other forms of mental illness and the families and health care professionals who try to help them. Dalio said it was important to him to show parents who were caring and supportive.

I did want well-intentioned parents out in the audience to be able to see themselves in these parents. It’s very easy to make the parents the villain, but that’s not at all helpful. I wanted the ones who do want to do right for their children to be able to not only see themselves in the parent but see themselves through the children’s eyes so they can at least know what their children are going through, to at least open up a dialogue to have a talk with their children. There’s just no guide book for something like that. It’s just throws you so off of your orientation as a parent. One of our colleagues put it like this: you’re trying to be reasonable in a very unreasonable situation. That’s what it’s always like for my parents and I wanted to capture the different dynamics that would cause conflict between parents and children. In Carla’s case the intense love and fear is manifest through her very strong mother, which is both life-saving and crippling for Carla as she is trying to break free and be her own person but also needing her mother to survive. And with Marco and his father, it was a different situation. A father is trying to reason with a very erratic person who is rationalizing his own psychosis as very reasonable in itself. And it’s hard to deny that it’s not reason, the books on the floor you can look at titles, you have your patterns and so it is so hard to reason with that.

Dalio literally moved the walls of the rooms in the film to convey the distorted and often exhilarating thinking of Marco and Carla.

Obviously the room colur was reflecting Van Gogh’s starry night but in the initial state there was a lot more clearly man-made stuff, the markers and the construction paper and it was bright light and very even lighting and it was day time. As they started to slowly go manic we had these sliding panels so that we could make them more and more mazelike as they got more and more manic and project more and more spotlights on them and darken the other lights and strip away all of the production and the design that wasn’t celestial looking. And we had it slowly transform progressively as the mania does, it creeps up on you slowly and it’s not like stuff that isn’t real, it’s almost like enhanced reality that can lead to distortion, beautiful or ugly distortion. So yes there was definitely that and the actors had a blast with it.

And in that case while there were lines of dialogue that were written, I gave them a lot of freedom to improvise. I flooded their minds with a whole bunch of loosely associated things that manic people would connect to each other like 13th hour or Christ was the 13th, the 12 minutes of the clock, the pyramids of the corners 3×12, and we did that right before the scene so they just got flooded with it. Then I said, “Take that stuff and go figure out how to go out to space together.” So they were able to just free flow and improvise and use that stuff to passionately connect on going to their planet where they belonged and as the steady cam sort of become more disconnected from the symmetry of the ground and kind of just circled around and floated with them. I would ask the camera operator to be like a plane going that way and just kind of be with them and circulate with them. It was magical how they did it. How they did it was extraordinary actually. They have amazing imaginations and free chemistry. We wanted to show how letting go of the sense can feel very freeing.

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Interview: Kent Jones on the Documentary “Hitchcock/Truffaut”

Posted on December 15, 2015 at 3:36 pm

If you are very lucky, some day a book will change your life. And no book changed my life more profoundly than Hitchcock/Truffaut, a book-length interview of one of the world’s greatest movie directors by another who happened to be a former film critic and scholar. I was a movie-mad teenager when someone suggested this book to me, and it completely transformed the way I watched and thought about movies. So I was thrilled to see the wonderful new documentary “Hitchcock/Truffaut” by film critic/historian Kent Jones, with some of today’s greatest directors talking about how the book and Hitchcock’s work influenced and inspired them.

In an interview, Jones talked about his choice for the movie’s narrator, actor/director/screenwriter Bob Balaban. “I wanted only filmmakers in the movie. I didn’t want any experts or historians or actors or anything like that. I just wanted filmmakers because it was a dialogue between filmmakers. And so I wanted ideally somebody who was a filmmaker as well to be the narrator and Bob of course you know in addition to being an actor and director of movies and beyond that Bob also was Truffaut’s friend. They became good friends when they made ‘Close Encounter of the Third Kind,’ so for all those reasons and also I like Bob and I like his voice.”

The documentary includes some scenes with the translator who worked with the two men because their only real common language was the language of cinema. “It’s interesting, there’s a good rapport between the two of them and you could say between the three of them because she is very much a part of the conversation, in and of itself. There are moments when she and Hitchcock are talking. She was really attached to Truffaut as a friend, as a filmmaker, someone who was really smitten with him as a human being. But I don’t think that it really impeded the flow, I mean they had a good rapport. They were both filmmakers and the trends of the conversation were very clear. On the other hand there’s a lot of stuff that she gets wrong, like the names of certain film producers for instance when they were trying to talk about what movies he’s seen and what he hadn’t seen when he was young. There are different titles in different countries so try to figure out what movie it they were talking about was a little bit of a challenge. I think also Hitchcock understood French, he actually spoke it. But nonetheless throughout the tape, even in the movie when he’s talking about vertigo he doesn’t say ‘necrophilia’ he says ‘necrophilie’. You know he inserts a little French pronunciation. Truffaut on the other and really didn’t understand English but having said all that I think the flow of their conversation is pretty seamless.”

While Hitchcock was still dismissed as a genre director in the US of the 1960’s, the French “new wave” filmmakers and critics were the first to take him seriously as a master of cinematic storytelling. “What we call ‘auteurism’ now is very tied into the distance of time and the distance of space. It is very important that it was a group of people from across the Atlantic looking at America through different lens, looking at American filmmaking through their own lens. Obviously Hitchcock wasn’t alone, Nick Ray, Howard Hawks and all these people. Even people who say ‘I hate auteurism; it’s ridiculous’ when they write their reviews nonetheless they’ll refer to Michael Bay’s ‘Transformers 4.’ I mean they don’t know it but they have been transformed by the idea. And so I think that’s always a great thing when somebody gets people to accept something in a new light and gives people a new way of seeing the work that they thought that they knew. I think that that’s a great thing and it’s just really fruitful in this case, it just kind of opened the door to a really exalted idea in cinema.”

We agreed that the Montgomery Clift film, “I Confess” is one of Hitchcock’s underrated gems. Clift plays a priest who learns of a murder in confession and then himself becomes a suspect but cannot reveal what he has heard. “I love ‘I Confess.’ I think it’s great. Maybe you could say that in some of those 50’s movie things get a little telescoped at the very, very end. I really love the atmosphere of it, I love Clift, I love the presence of Québec City in the movie. I thought that those flashbacks were incredibly beautiful. It’s the film that my mother loved.” Jones objects to some of the conventional wisdom that Hitchcock did not work well with actors. He spoke about the special relationship Hitchcock had with Grace Kelly, James Stewart, and Cary Grant, who gave some of their best performances in his films. “Doris Day gives her most interesting and vulnerable performance in ‘The Man Who Knew Too Much,’ better than in ‘Love Me or Leave Me’ just riveting.”

Jones was reluctant to pick a favorite Hitchcock film because he likes to look at it as a body of work. “Within the history of Hollywood studio system of filmmaking, that’s the best body of work there is bar none. I mean the only body of work that I can think of that is kind of like it in terms of somebody working into the studio system where every film is as good is Yasujirō Ozu. There is no movie that he ever made that was at second gear, ever. And having said that I don’t know, I could narrow it down to about 10 or 12 or something maybe ‘Notorious’ or ‘Vertigo’ or ‘Rear Window.’ I don’t know it’s impossible for me.”

Interview: Jared Hess on the Biblical Archeology Comedy “Don Verdean”

Posted on December 14, 2015 at 3:35 pm

Jared and Jerusha Hess are best known as the co-screenwriters of the offbeat comedy Napoleon Dynamite, which Hess also directed. Their latest film is “Don Verdean,” with Sam Rockwell as a hapless Biblical archeologist who commits fraud to satisfy backers eager for artifacts from the Biblical era, including Goliath’s skull and the Holy Grail.

Tell me about the very funny dance number that appears out of nowhere in the middle of the film, when Boaz (Jermaine Clement) takes Carol (Amy Ryan) out to a club.

Jermaine is quite a dancer. It was just supposed to be a small little moment but it’s tough to pull that guy off the dance floor. So we rolled a couple of different takes and it was just him doing his interpretation of what he thought was some kind of traditional Israeli dance would be like if it was mixed with techno. It’s his seduction dance anyway but the subtleties of his moves are very funny.

And the dress Amy Ryan wears is in that scene is a hoot, sort of Disco Barbie Ice Skater.

Yes we wanted something that was over-the-top or what Boaz would think was sexy and beautiful and made somebody feel like a princess even though it was pretty hideous with how it’s bedazzled. It was like a competition gown from the 90s.

If you yourself could find some holy artifact and assuming that there were no laws preventing you from taking it home what memento from the Bible would you want to get?

Oh man! You know I think The Holy Grail would have to be the one if all the legends are true about eternal life and all that good stuff. That would be a fun one to find.

What is it that is so endlessly interesting about people trying to cheat each other?

I always find it funny and probably it’s more tragic when people are lying to each other because they think it is for a good cause or for the greater good. In reality it’s just hurting themselves and everyone around them. To me that kind of tragedy lends itself to comedy.

What locations did you use for the Holy land scenes?

We actually did shoot a little bit in Israel believe it or not. It was mostly second unit stuff. Our cinematographer went over there and shot a bunch of locations. But then we shot the bulk of it in southern Utah. St. George Utah is where we shot stuff that doubled for Israel.

I really enjoyed the little short about Don Verdean at the beginning of the film that looked so authentically amateurish. How did you develop the cheesy, low-budget look?

It was funny because my grandma would buy all these different archaeological Biblical videos and a lot of them looked super homemade, shot on a VHS camera. I feel most comfortable behind the lens of a VHS camera myself because it’s where I got my start as much a kid making films and so it was such fun to shoot in that very low resolution format and then go in with an old title maker and do those transitions and wipes. There are so many videos like that that with people who discuss their discoveries and often times make up excuses for why they no longer have the evidence of their amazing find.

Is that where the idea came from?

Jason Hatfield, one of our producers, turned me on to the world of Biblical archaeology or at least pseudo-archaeology, with people who don’t have any credentials going out with the Bible and trying to find really sensational objects like the ark of the covenant or Noah’s Ark or any other big object in the Bible. They pop-up in the news occasionally and I read a story a couple years back about a group of Christian Chinese college students that were going out and thought that they had found Noah’s Ark and it turned out unfortunately just to be like a Ranger cabin and they were sorely disappointed. There was just something so funny about the idea of being an amateur archaeologist that isn’t formally trained in the discipline but with imagination and the Bible they can go all there and find it with the help of God.

Are you especially cautious about making fun of religious people?

Not really because to me, it wasn’t so much about making fun of religion as it was about getting caught up in a world of lies. It’s something that Don Verdean believes in. He is a believing Christian guy but he’s willing to commit fraud, to do what he thinks is going to help people find God. To me, that dynamic was funny that people do make really bad decisions when they’re trying to promote the religious cause. Christians are always looking to convert the world on some level and to what extent people will go to accomplish that I think is interesting. And so are their fears. In the 80’s and 90’s there was this big fear of the occult creeping into pop culture, cartoons, video games and that kind of thing and there was so many funny examples. My mom was like:“You know, a group of scientists at school were watching He-Man one time and they saw Satan’s symbols in Skeletor’s lair.” Even as a kid I am like, “What group of scientists watch He-Man for things like occult symbols?” There are people that were former Satanists turned Christian that go around and give these talks to different churches and groups about how they became saved and that to me is such a funny, silly world. It’s sensational and anything that will give your story some juice.

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Interview: Bill Riead of the Mother Teresa Film, “The Letters”

Posted on December 8, 2015 at 3:58 pm

William Riead is the writer/director of the lovely film about Mother Teresa called The Letters. It was a great pleasure to talk to him about his dedication to sharing her story. “I wanted the story to be accurate when I started researching Mother Teresa’s life. What I wanted to do was let the chips fall where they may, if she’s a good person let’s find it out, if she is not who we thought she was let’s find it out, and so I just sort of let the story tell itself and let the script sort of take its own direction as I was doing my research. And when I came upon the letters that she had written, I couldn’t think of a better actor to cast than Max Von Sydow and let him tell her story through reflecting back on the letters that he received over a 40 year period. There were three of four trunk loads of these letters which told her story and I took it as a responsibility to let it be told truthfully by her own words.”

He begins the film with an investigation to consider Mother Teresa for sainthood. “In real life the Vatican does assign a postulator for someone that they designate a candidate for sainthood. And in this particular case I created this character to go out and investigate whether she was worthy of canonization or not. And so little by little he concluded that she was beyond saint-worthy for sure. That was my conclusion when I finished writing the script and ultimately made the movie, I knew that there wouldn’t be one man, woman or child who left the theater who wouldn’t draw the same conclusion that I drew: that she is a saint.”

Mother Teresa’s letters created some controversy because she was candid about her doubts and frustrations. “People who know that I made this film would approach me and say, ‘You know Mother Theresa lost faith in God right? You know that?’ And I have to straighten them out and say, ‘No, Mother Teresa never ever lost faith in God. She felt like God had abandoned her, and lots of saints do, it’s called the dark night of the soul. And she experienced that like all the saints.’ She was very human. We can all aspire to be as selfless as she was but she was very much a human being. All sainthood really means is someone who the Vatican has declared for sure has made it to heaven and is experiencing God and so that could be any of us. And my feeling is if Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu who would become Mother Theresa of Calcutta didn’t make it to heaven, none of the rest of us have a shot at it.”

The movie shows her experiencing what she called “the calling within a calling,” when she was already a cloistered nun but felt that God told her to work with “the poorest of the poor.” Riead said, “Her first calling was she wanted to be a missionary when she was a little girl and that didn’t become practical. Where she got the thing with the poor is she would be sitting at the family dinner table in Albania and her mom would go to answer the door and there would be a poor family who would be at the door because mom was out somewhere that day, found the poor family and invited them to her home to have dinner with them at the dinner table. She didn’t just give them money and give them food out on the street. She would say, ‘Come eat with us.'”

“So Anjezë experienced this sharing and decency from incredibly wonderful parents and then when she went off to become a nun and then ultimately settled into the life of a teacher at the Loreto Convent School. Her mother sent her a letter saying, ‘Anjezë do not forget why you became a nun.’ That was to help the poor. But she was a cloistered nun, she had taken the vows of a cloistered nun, which mean you cannot go outside of the convent walls. She realized that her mother was right and that her true calling was to help the poor and to be a selfless person and so she gave her life to God and said, ‘I’m going to do everything I can to honor what I think you put me on this earth for.’ And so she then absolutely dedicated her life to helping the poorest of the poor and that ultimately led to her having to start her own order because Mother General didn’t want her to leave. She was simply protecting her turf and when students started abandoning the Loreto Convent School and going off to join Mother Teresa, she had not started her own order yet but they just wanted to help, Mother General became extremely upset and said she was pilfering their students and so forth. I did not put that in the film because I felt that that would upset the Catholic community even though it’s the truth. There’s nothing about my film that is not the truth. I spent twelve years as a journalist so I wanted to get this right but Mother General eventually came around. Mother Teresa’s kindness, goodness and selflessness eventually so impressed Mother General that she became a fan as well.”

Riead was impressed to learn in his research that Mother Teresa was both driven and egoless, a very rare combination. “How can you be that driven without an ego? Because she felt she was a pen from God’s hand. When I was putting this project together I experienced the same thing. When I set out to make this film I became obsessed and the more obsessed I became the less ego I had. The more exposure I had to Mother Teresa the more I became like Mother Teresa. When we were filming in India there wasn’t one of us on the cast or crew who didn’t feel Mother Teresa’s presence. All of us left India and went to our respective homes Juliet Stevenson to England, and me to Los Angeles and so forth and all of us left not the same people we were when we arrived there, none of us. We all felt Mother Teresa’s presence.”

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Interview: Teyonah Parris and Spike Lee on “Chi-Raq”

Posted on December 3, 2015 at 1:01 pm

“Chi-Raq” is one of the best films of the year and one of the most important films of many years. It is a searing wail of love, grief, and fury inspired by “Lysistrata,” a play written in 411 BC. A small group of reporters spoke to star Teyonah Parris and co-writer/director Spike Lee.

Parris told us that she actually performed in the original Lysistrata when she attended Juilliard. “I did not get to play Lysistrata but I have always studied Shakespeare and Greek plays and Chekhov and I love working on that sort of text. There is so much to mine from it. And so when I got this script for ‘Chi-Raq’ and I realized this was a modern retelling of that story I was all in. And then to hear Spike talk about what he was doing with the movie — the first thing he said is, ‘I’m trying to save lives. We have to save lives,’ and I was all in, there was no question about it. Spike certainly has an out of the box approach to his work but I think that’s why people gravitate towards him. He gives us another way to look at things. It is a bit more unconventional but I certainly think that it will resonate with our current generation because it’s Spike. It’s hard to put your finger on what it is he does that makes it hit right here but I think that people will watch this movie and certainly understand what we’re seeing and what the message is.” She acknowledged that the film is bound to be controversial. “The title has gotten a lot of flak but the no one has actually seen it and heard the message and seen what we’re trying to say but I know that Spike’s intentions and mine and everyone that is a part of this film, our intentions are pure and were trying to make a difference and get this conversation started so that people can actively make some changes. The issue that we’re dealing with in the film with our young brothers killing each other — to talk about that I don’t think eliminates the conversation which has been on everyone’s minds and hearts with the police brutality against particularly young black men and women. I think that those conversations can be had simultaneously. There is a lot more at play and we talk about it in the movie, the fact that there are no jobs in these places. People are trying to feed their families who are given no other way out.”

The character she plays in the film is confident, forthright, and very capable of weaponizing her sexuality. She is a long way from the more realistic characters she played in “Mad Men” and “Dear White People,” and the distinction is clear in her physicality as well as her dialog and responses to other characters. She spoke about the costume designer and movement coach who helped her create the character. “I call the costume designer Master Ruth Carter. I remember being in those fittings saying ‘Ruth, don’t you want to add a little bit more fabric, a little more here and there?” but I loved it. I thought it certainly was a physical representation of who this woman was and the confidence that she has and how she moves about the world and finding her physicality. It felt very theatrical which is no surprise because it’s from a play. So finding who this woman was and how she walks into a room or walks down the street, I certainly had lots of assistance from a wonderful woman name Maija Garcia who was our movement director, and we worked on just finding her strength and, how does she stand and how does she command a room simply by being there without walking around or whatever. It took some work. I didn’t just show up to set; I had to explore it before getting there and I definitely had the assistance of Maija Garcia. We just did little exercises, exploring what does it feel like to walk in 6 inch heels and how that changes you.”

Parris was excited to work with Lee and to play the central role. “She’s the hero. She comes in and she sees the issue. There has to be a strength and a determination not only for her to carry on her mission but for me also the actress to figure out what she’s trying to do and how she has to do it and in such a very short time. We shot this in five weeks, the entire thing. And I had to use every bit of my artistic being in this film from the dancing to just finding my center and my strength and how do I affect people and how to effectively lead people. Yes, I think those are some of the things that made it a challenge for me but they are a welcome challenge.”

Lee emphasized that this movie is not for any particular demographic. “The film talks strongly about guns and that affects everybody, all Americans.” But it was not easy for him to get it into production, in part because it is so unusual to have an entire screenplay in verse. “I’ve never done this before so it was a challenge to get this made. I think that one of the reasons why everybody said no in the process is because of the verse, because it’s hard to read, and that’s why before Amazon said yes we had two readings. They wanted to hear it, they want their ears to hear it, and I don’t blame them because even when I write my own scripts reading it and hearing the actors say the lines is two different universes. And that doesn’t even happen till you hear bits and parts during casting. I do a lot of rewriting during that period because I hear it for the first time.”

The training Parris got at Juilliard helped prepare her for speaking in verse as though it was natural conversation. “Essentially the idea is that the structure is different but your intentions are still the same. You are trying to affect something. You are trying to get something out of someone. So what are you doing? And you have to continuously remember and remind yourself that you don’t get lost in the sing-song or the verse of it. Nick Cannon] and I frequently had conversations about that, just reminding ourselves and each other what is the scene about, like what are we trying to do so that we don’t get lost in the sound of it, so to speak.”

Like Lee’s earlier film, “School Daze,” this film ends with someone calling on us in the audience to “wake up.” Lee said, “We’ve been using those two words, that’s the last two words of ‘School Daze:’ wake up, from Laurence Fishburne. ‘Do The Right Thing’ begins with Samuel Jackson saying ‘wake up’ and closes with him saying ‘wake up’ as Mister Senor Love Daddy because consciousness is not something that is at use all the time.”

Parris added, “I agree with what Spike said. I think our role as artists is to show, to be a reflection of our community and the world in a way that even though it may not be comfortable to watch or to receive its truthful and makes you think about the state of our community.”