Interview with FutureDude Jeffrey Morris

Posted on August 8, 2015 at 3:02 pm

Jeffrey Morris is known as FutureDude. He took that name because he was “frustrated as the guy who was into science and into arts and culture interconnected to science and technology and humanity and that sort of thing. I couldn’t find a single source that had all of that kind of content. They were lumping lots of other things together so I thought I would create my own that was a little bit more pure and a little bit more clear along the path. I have been interested in science and the future since I was a small child and a lot of it stems from the space program and the interest around that. It was early in 1970s and the Apollo program was still going on. And so they were sending astronauts to the moon and I thought it was so cool and I wanted to grow up to be an astronaut. And so like a lot of my friends we used to talk about what life would be like in the year 2000 and we would have all of these big questions about the future and so the work I wanted to do going forward was really always about the future so that’s kind of where the nickname came from. And the blog was really about answering those sorts of questions.”

Now he creates stories via film and comics that “venture to spectacular realms of future possibility — inspired by the leading edge of science and the furthest reaches of human imagination.” For him, movies are “the biggest canvas you can use in a lot of ways. And you can tell stories there that can really grab a lot of attention. I mean the people see these films, they like them, they think about them. So I figured making movies about the future and making movies about humanity in the future was a really good way to sort of get the culture to ask questions and sort of influence positive change so that’s really why I wanted to create movies about the future. It’s not about technology and science so much, this is about human beings learning to be better people and treat each other better and all of those things. So I think that stories, action-adventure stories, good stories with good characters can help motivate that kind of internal growth. And also provide the right role models.”

He was inspired by Gene Roddenberry, who originally wanted to create a television series about the issues of his time, the 1960’s. But the studio was not interested, so he created “Star Trek” to explore the issues of the 1960’s through the context of the future. “If you think about how he dealt with issues of diversity, the Cold War, all kinds of stuff in the show, it’s fantastic. So I think that when I look at the work I am doing it’s kind of between the original Star Trek and now you have things like Terminator which is a very horrible dark view of the future. You’ve got Mad Max, Blade Runner, there is so much when you think about much more negative views of the future. You can count on one hand how many positive views of visions they are of the future. So for me what I am trying to do is create stories that have a positive view. In Oceanus we do have an apocalyptic moment that occurs in the story but out of that situation we are going to create a very hopeful view of how humanity could rebuild itself from that. And the reason why I added the apocalyptic elements is because I think that it is something that could give hope to audiences nowadays. It’s not enough to say, ‘In the future they are going to live underwater and it will be great.’ I think it is better to say that today’s audience – I would watch that movie, I would love that movie. But I think with today’s audience, you have to say there is a reason they have to live underwater and they are going to find the best because they are forced to do it. They are going to become the best. So that’s really the kind of storytelling that we are going to do along the front. But we are extremely positive in that we show people solving problems, working together, learning about their environment, learning about each other and finding the best of what makes us human in those circumstances, that’s a very important thing in our story.”

The special effects in “Oceanus” are very impressive for a non-studio film. “The beauty is that today’s visual effect technology and a great team can make it believable. And so it is a real challenge, we are working on soundstages, we are using a lot of blue screens, we are using a lot of lighting effects, we are using computer graphics but it is kind of a combination of all of these different elements that make it seem believable. And then you have the good actors who play like they are really in the environment so it works. So I think we actually worked out the bugs of how to make it look like you are in the water, we did it.” He said that he knows he got it right because people who see it often ask if it was shot in a pool.

One of the stars of the film is Oscar nominee (for “Longtime Companion”) Bruce Davison. “He is one of the greatest actors of all times and to get to work with him on my first major project as a director was a real honor. He liked the script and then he was really impressed with how I had organized and designed the production so he was willing to come out and do it. It was intense — I was working with a astronomic actor on my first time on this big set. You know what was really cool? After he saw the movie he called me up to congratulate me. He called me a Maestro. That was a real honor.”

Miller wants the audience to “feel like they watched something that give them a sense of awe, that they were amazed by and they may be blown away by, so they were like, ‘Wow.’ There were moments in the film where I heard the audience gasp, that was really cool. That was like – I did it! This really works! I wanted that sense of awe that I don’t feel exists anymore. The sense of beauty and wonder.”

And he said it is important to challenge stereotypes. “I intentionally cast a woman who was in her early 40s because I feel like there are so many unrealistic depictions of women in movies these days and I felt like it was really cool to have a woman who is very strong and very intelligent and maybe a little against stereotype. Again it was fun working and going that direction.”

His other project is a graphic novel called “Parallel Man.” “There is this concept of multiple universes in quantum physics that anything that could happen within reason does happen along different possibilities in another universe right?
So there is some universe where you are President of the United States, another universe where you live in Hawaii. And so we thought: What if in one of those universes instead of developing the atomic bomb, instead some experiment ended up yielding like a doorway into this multi-verse and so what if like that technology was harnessed and it was first used to win World War II and then it led to a bigger conflict? And then eventually leading the United States to a place where it actually had that version of the United States actually started using, skipping between universes and actually aligning with other versions of America in the different universes and eventually becoming corrupt and becoming kind of a power-hungry country. And then we said what if that country, that evil version of America was now going to invade us? And so then we created a number of characters. The guy who was an agent of that other America, the evil America, he sees that there is the freedom in the past and the way things could have been and he decides to turn against that group and actually try to save us and take them down, try to stop them. And so he is kind of a James Bond style guy, cool gadgets, cool car. He’s got a psychic that’s an artificial intelligence hologram and but then he comes over in our universe and he ends up meeting the version of himself in our universe who is a video gamer who lays around all of the time eating pizza and living off his grandmother. So you’ve got this kind of nerdy gamer and James Bond who are the same guy and they are partnering together.”

He says, “I try to make movies that are more than just going to fill time or just something to do. I want it to actually mean something. I want it to have been meaning to it.”

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Interview: Nancy Porter and Harriet Reisen on Louisa May Alcott

Posted on August 6, 2015 at 3:34 pm

No writer has influenced me more than Louisa May Alcott, and it runs in the family. My mother’s name is Josephine, like Alcott’s most famous (and most autobiographical) character, and she was inspired by Little Women to insist on being called “Jo” — and to become a writer. And her grandchildren call her “Marmie,” inspired by “Marmee,” the mother of the little women. I loved the PBS show American Masters: Louisa May Alcott – The Woman Behind Little Women and am delighted that is is now available on DVD through PBS.

I enjoyed talking to the women who made the documentary about Alcott, Nancy Porter and Harriet Reisen, who also wrote a book, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women.

Porter lives in Lexington, not far from Concord, where the Alcott family lived along with their contemporaries and friends, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. She said, “We decided to try to make a film about her because there hadn’t been a film about her at all, number one and number two there had not been a biography about her in 30 years. So we felt that this was a good time to do it and so we started a very long process of applying for grants and fund-raising which began with the National Endowment of the Humanities, which gave us a large grant and then the American Masters series and a few others gave us the rest of our money.” It took five years to raise the money. But they were determined to tell her story, which will come as a surprise to those who think of Little Women as non-fiction. “She was no little woman and her life was no children’s book. In fact she was almost 6 feet tall it seems. She was very, very tall and so were all the others which is not how I think of them but they are.”

In Little Women, Jo, the headstrong, independent second daughter who grows up to be a writer, at first tries very dramatic, adventurous, even gothic stories to make money but then, guided by the man she will later marry (unlike Alcott, who never married), Jo writes from her heart, and it is her autobiographical novel about her family, written for children, that brings her true satisfaction as well as success. But the documentary makes it clear that it was the other way around. Reisen acknowledged that Alcott herself created the myth that she was Jo. But in reality she got more pleasure from her more bloodthirsty tales, many of which are collected in Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Porter said, “I think she thought she was writing “moral pap for the young” and she was bound to support her family because she certainly had came from rags to riches. She had many, many jobs and lived in 30 houses and she had this idealist father and her siblings and needed to keep this whole machine going.”

Reisen described her contribution to “a series called the No-Name Series, after the success of Little Women. It was a series of anonymous books by famous authors, anonymously. She wrote one called A Modern Mephistopheles and it’s quite heavy duty. The devil character gives the heroine opium in it and she had a wonderful trip on this drug. So I think she loved writing all the thrillers just to take her to those places.” That story won a prize, and no one believed she had written it.

Reisen and Porter knew that they would have to create re-enactments of some of the elements of Alcott’s story. “First of all, there was almost no images,” said Porter. “So to spin a story about her using archival material was virtually impossible. The other way to do it was to do a more stylized approach, skirts on stairs and shots of the woods, but we really felt like what we needed to do was introduce Louisa to our audience and to make her a living breathing person.” “And modern,” added Reisen. “Somebody who if she had dinner with you, you might not realize she was from the 19th century. Her voice was contemporary. But we were concerned about re-enactments. So every word that the actors speak comes from primary sources. And then we had the scholars and interviewees and for that we had no narration. We wanted them to tell the story feeling that they were primary sources, too.”

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

Geraldine Brooks, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her novel based on the character of the father from Little Women and the real-life Bronson Alcott who inspired him, appears in the documentary as well. Reisen said, “I think the thing that really struck me about her was a comment she made that everybody says Louisa couldn’t deal with her father, which is why he is gone for much of the book, but she understood as a novelist why that was the only choice.”

Porter and Reisen talked about what made Alcott’s work so successful when it was first published and why it endured. “She is funny and I think girls identify with one of the characters, usually Jo but sometimes Amy or Beth. And all these girls have faults, serious faults and flaws and they work with them and they seem really imperfect but beautifully drawn female characters and they do silly things sometimes but none of them are silly,” Reisen said. “It’s told very well with a great female character and there aren’t that many written at that time,” added Porter. “It’s a classic coming of age story, too.”

Interview: Joshua Oppenheimer of “The Look of Silence”

Posted on July 30, 2015 at 11:40 am

Joshua Oppenheimer has made “a companion piece” to his stunning documentary about government-sanctioned gangster killings of more than a million Indonesians in the mid-1960’s, “The Act of Killing.” In “The Look of Silence,” we see Adi, the brother of one of the men who was killed sit with the people who participated in the genocide and ask them about what they did. It was a pleasure to speak with him again, and I look forward to our Q&A tomorrow at the E Street Theater in Washington, D.C.

Your images are so gorgeous and so striking; they could be in a very different kind of film, like a lyrical romance. Why is it so important that your visuals be so beautiful?

There are two things that those kind of images do in the film. I think first of all I am trying to create the sense of the hauntedness of the space in which Adi’s family, his mother, his father have to live, the presence of ghosts. And I don’t think the images are beautiful in a postcard way. I think they are haunting, and I think that’s achieved through a certain kind of enchantment, there’s a sense of something beyond just a picture but a swarming, a presence of ghosts that have never been properly buried, the dead that have never been properly buried, that has never even been properly mourned.

I hope the tender way in which I tried to film the family and the precision with which I tried to look for the traces of fear and decades and decades of living with fear on their faces, in their bodies and also created a space for the grace and the love that they have managed to find and to live despite having to leave in fear, surrounded by the perpetrators who killed their loved ones. In general I felt that my task with this film was to create a kind of backward-looking poem in memoriam for all that’s been destroyed, not just the dead who obviously can never be wakened, those who were killed but also the lives that have been broken by a half a century of fear that can never be made whole again because in some way whatever justice, truth and reconciliation, whatever form of justice might in the future occur in part perhaps as a result of these two films, it will never make whole what’s been broken.

The film tries to honor and do justice for all that’s been destroyed, and for all that’s been destroyed not just during the genocide but in the years after. It doesn’t end with the killings if the perpetrators remain in power because people’s life continue to damaged, wrecked by fear and trauma that they can’t work through.

I thought it was very meaningful that in this case your lead character wasn’t even born when his brother was killed and that shows how the trauma goes on to the next and the next and the next generation.

That’s right and it also is a source of hope in the sense that first of all he has the courage to confront the perpetrators. That is in part because unlike the rest of his family he’s not traumatized by the actual events of the killing itself, yet he is trying to understand what happened to his parents, to his family, to his village, to his country to make them the way they are and in a sense make him who he is. He is born into a situation that didn’t know and understand and that is what gives him the courage to do what he does. He finds this one person who was able to give him what he is hoping for, which is an acknowledgment that what happened was wrong and an apology. It’s also someone born too young to remember the killings or born after the killings, the daughter of one of the perpetrators who hears for the first time the details of what her father did. And we see her realize that he is not the hero she hoped he was and we see her face collapse in that moment and realize that she’ll have to spend the rest of his life caring for a man who is in some terrible way a stranger now. And yet instead of doing what any guy would do in that moment which is panicking and kicking the film crew out of the house and needing to collect herself she becomes very quiet and listens to herself and her conscience and takes the extraordinary step of apologizing on her father’s behalf and saying to Adi, “Let’s be family,” trying to reach across this abyss of fear and guilt that divides everybody in Indonesia.

Sadly, throughout the world we have seen many genocides there have been many many different ways of responding and moving forward from it. We’ve seen the Truth and Reconciliation Commission model and the Nuremberg and Rwanda models. I guess you could even include the Indians and the United States. What do you think is the best way for a community to respond and to find some kind of meaning and healing from an experience like that?

You need an acknowledgment of what happened in the past. You need a thorough recognition that this is a wrong. I think although we the efforts in postwar Germany were incomplete I think the effort by the next generation, the generation born by the end of the war in the late 60’s to actually demand a kind of honesty from their parents, the reconciliation of the past in the late 60’s and 70’s going forward is the best human beings have come, the closest human beings have come to acknowledging their past. All the examples you gave with the exception of the Native American genocide ended with the perpetrators being removed from power and whether it’s the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process in South Africa or Nuremberg trials or a tribunal in Rwanda, these steps happen after perpetrators were removed from power. The Americans genocide of the Native Americans is surely the closest and we can see how the effects of that linger today.

People sometimes saw “The Act of Killing” and would say, “Isn’t it tasteless that someone wants to produce West cowboy scenes essentially in a desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to glorify what he’s done?” And my feeling when I would hear that question is “No, I feels it’s absolutely appropriate because after all the whole genre of the cowboy movies, the Western from its outset was to glorify genocide, the native American genocide.” Native Americans families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades for hundreds of years except in Indian schools they weren’t allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll. It lasts frpm generation from generation to generation until a society has the courage to acknowledge the past. You see, we can never run away from our past, the past will catch up to us because it is us, it is a part of us, it’s what makes us we are, it’s what delineates the borders of our societies. It’s what gives us here in United State a common language, English. It’s who we are. And so all we can do is find the courage to stand still and to look backwards. Despite our politicians endlessly saying we need to look to the future, actually we need to look backwards and we need to accept our past not in the sense of making excuses for it but truly accepting it and taking responsibility for it, so that we can then turn around again and move forward into the future but knowing ourselves honestly really for the first time.

Are you writing history or are you changing history with these films?

I was asked from the very beginning to do this work by survivors. It was Adi who first encouraged me. When I was first filming the survivors back in 2003, he then encouraged me to film the perpetrators. When the survivors were not allowed to make the film with me, he then watched as much as he could of what I was shooting with the perpetrators. It was Adi who then insisted that he could meet the perpetrators in 2012 when I returned to make “The Look of Silence.” It was the survivors, Adi’s family, the survivors community more broadly, the Indonesian human rights community as a whole, who encouraged me to do this work. I always felt in a funny way that I was not a foreign filmmaker coming in to expose a terrible political situation for the outside world. I felt that I was being entrusted to do a work that they couldn’t in order to intervene in the mechanisms of fear inside Indonesia. I’m humbled by the impact that the two films have made.

“The Act of Killing” has fundamentally transformed the way of Indonesia talking about its past with the mainstream media now talking about the genocide as a genocide and talking honestly about the regime of fear and corruption that the perpetrators have built into that space. There is a sense that the film has come to Indonesia, the second film as well, Like the child in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” saying look how torn our society is, look at the prison of fear in which we are being asked to raise our children and we can no longer ignore this.

We have to support truth and reconciliation and some form of justice. And with justice, with truth comes a revision of the nation’s history curriculum, so a part of that movement is demanding a change of the national history curriculum which is still being taught in the way that we see in the film. So the teachers around the country until the government changes the curriculum can say, “This is what we’re supposed to teach you and now this movie is the truth.”

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Bugs Bunny Turns 75

Posted on July 28, 2015 at 3:21 pm

A fascinating look at what made Warner Brothers cartoons work. Surprisingly, within these anarchic worlds, there were a lot of rules. This video has some very thoughtful commentary, including Leonard Maltin and Steven Spielberg.

Interview: Dana Nachman of “Batkid Begins”

Posted on July 6, 2015 at 3:37 pm

Dana Nachman is the director of the heartwarming documentary “Batkid Begins.” She talked to me about how one five-year-old cancer survivor’s Make a Wish story captivated the entire world.

At the screening I attended there was audible weeping.

I also hear there is a lot of laughter also and cheering sometimes when people see the film. So I hope that was all there too.

It definitely was, especially when the family is asked if this is what they expected and the parents are stunned and the kid casually says yes.

I love that.

Me, too. So tell me how you got involved.

I had heard about it actually after the fact and I was lucky enough to get a meeting with the Make A Wish Foundation and we actually meet for two and a half hours. We totally hit it off. But my main question I had for them was what they intended to happen.
They said they wanted about 200 people to show up. I thought that that was such an amazing thing that like something could balloon really out of nowhere. They wanted 200 people to come support a child and then 25,000 people showed up and 2 billion people followed it online. So I really wanted to tell that story of how that happened, basically a memento forever for San Francisco and everybody else.

Do you think that this story is very specific to San Francisco?

Certainly I consider San Francisco one of the main characters of the movie because I think there is something about the whimsicality of San Francisco that enables this to happen. But I think it’s a very human story that any community can relate to. I think there is something a little different about San Francisco, but I think it’s a universal story for sure.

San Francisco does seem to be the kind of city where if you need a superhero costume it would be easy to find.

The people I interviewed from the San Francisco Chronicles said Halloween is kind of a city-wide holiday. So if you ask people to dress up in costume, they’re there.

Those thousands of people — were they showing up for Miles or for themselves?

I’m speaking from my own personal perspective. Whether I work at a food bank and whatever else we do and you think you’re going into benefit others but really when you leave there usually you feel better about yourself you know. And so I think that this day was very emblematic of that concept of that volunteerism and community service really does end up helping you as much as if not more than the person you’re trying to help. There are many people that said it was the best day of their lives, like bar none the best day of their lives. I think just the concept of going out there for no other reason than just trying to cheer a little boy on was enough for people to just feel good.

What is the fascination with superheroes?

The concept of a superhero is something that everybody relates to. Most of us wanted to be some kind of superhero when we were little. At some point you lose track of those fantasies that you had as a young person. This enabled adults to come out and experience that childlike wonder and excitement for Miles but then also for themselves.

How is Miles doing?

He’s great. He’s in remission. He just got through with Little League and he’s a great kid. He’s home for the summer. He’s going to have a nice relaxing summer. His family just bought their first house. He’s awesome.

You had some amazing characters in this movie and I wanted to ask you about Eric, who plays Batman and organized the feats. He is really extraordinary.

You know I had a list of people to call to see if they wanted to participate in the film and I actually called him last because I was a little intimidated by him which is funny because he is actually the most amazing person and you never should be intimidated by him. But he does do everything. You know my son was talking to him about trying to invent a hovercraft or something and he was like you can invent anything you want, anytime you want you just have to say you want to do it. And that’s I think the way that he goes about the world. He’s this magnetic personality that just wants to do good, live life to the fullest. He an amazing person, really. I think you could relate to Nick, Miles’ dad as a father what he went through and Natalie as a mother and what she went through. And then you can relate to Eric, who is like an older brother to Miles now. And I think it’s probably his human connections we can make as the audience that draws us into the story more. And he’s so infatuated with his wife. It’s so cute.

How do you as a filmmaker tell the story in a way that is going to still surprise people and not repeat what they already know?

I definitely thought about that. But I also realized that what people had in terms of information on the day was really like 140 characters on Twitter or a Facebook post or a photo here and there. Or you know something on the news that was probably 90 seconds. As I came to it I realized that not one of the people that participated in the day of knew everything else that was happening at the same time they were so busy making this happen. For instance nobody had ever met the couple that flew from Akron Ohio or LA for the day. Nobody met them, nobody had, we unearthed the Uber driver that saved Lou Seal before he even got kidnapped by the Penguin. The circus center scene which I think is one of the funniest scenes of the film — there were no cameras there except for the family shot home video of it and that was when he trained to become a superhero. I think also the 25,000 people who were there was such a mob scene. Most people only went to one or maybe two of the capers. So nobody really saw the whole thing. So you have to realize and kind of put it together what exactly happened on that day. I realized that there wasn’t anybody except EJ and Miles who had been at everything. So I thought that it actually is good whenever the people in the film watch and say oh I didn’t know that person, I didn’t know that happened. I’m really like pleased about that.

How did the Make a Wish people feel when it got world attention?

Their goal is just to make the wish the best it could possibly be. So all the hoopla that was around that kid that day wasn’t what they were intending. They just wanted to make sure it was a good day for Miles. They kind of figured that 200 people really was the same in terms of Miles’ eyes and his perspective. So they just wanted it to be a great day for Miles. You know I’ve heard a lot of Interviewers ask Patricia at Make A Wish if this has changed what kids want. And she said not really because most of the kids, a vast majority of the wishers are private wishes. They don’t ask for things that are public at all. They do more than 370 wishes a year. So I think when there is one that kind of lends itself to creativity they kind of jump on it because they are just those kind of people who make it cooler. They have these amazing volunteers just like EJ and all the rest of them who go in there just wanting you know literally to be the wish of a lifetime for every kid.

Why did it go viral?

My opinion on it is there was kind of this perfect storm and the main element of it was that it was so authentic. They weren’t trying to make it go viral. I think so many people try to make things go viral and that doesn’t really work. It has to hit a nerve and that’s what really happened with this. They weren’t asking for donations. They weren’t really asking for anything other than come cheer on this little boy either virtually or in person, and just experience the wonder of his wish.

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