Susan Wloszczyna Interviews Pete Docter about “Inside Out”
Posted on June 16, 2015 at 8:00 am
My friend Susan Wloszczyna interviewed “Inside Out’s” co-writer/director Pete Docter for IndieWire. The film takes place primarily inside the mind and emotions of an 11-year-old girl who has just moved to a new home and a new city with her parents. Docter acknowledged that Pixar has been slow to give girls and women lead roles in their films, in part because they reflected the perspective and experience of the men who worked there. But this film was inspired by Docter’s own daughter (who previously provided the voice for young Ellie in “Up”). He added,
We contemplated why a girl? The reason is that research has found that no one is more socially attuned and keyed in on expressions and little interactions than a girl aged 11 to 17. I see this in my daughter. She will come home from school and say, “Oh, my best friend doesn’t like me anymore.” How did she know that? Maybe from a certain look. On the other hand, no one is less socially attuned than an 11-to- 17-year-old boy. Walk around girls that age, and they are dressing like women, while boys are 3 feet of awkwardness.
“Freedom” interweaves two stories of slavery. In one, an enslaved family led by Samuel (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) escapes via the Underground Railroad. In the other, set a century earlier, John Newton, the captain of a slave trader sails from Africa with a cargo of slaves, bound for America. On board is Samuel’s great grandfather whose survival is tied to the fate of Captain Newton. This portion of the story is based on the real-life captain who wrote the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Director Peter Cousens talked to me about the film, and I began by asking him about the significant role played by music.
The music is certainly an important part kind of the kind of content for the film. It took a little bit of a while to massage the script and the story to make sense of these songs so that they came organically either out of the character’s kind of world or it just by chance within the storytelling. Obviously, some of the choices were scripted and sometimes we found other choices. Some of the music is a little bit anachronistic and not necessarily of the period but seemed to make sense with the story. And then the music for me that is probably the emotional heart of the film. “Amazing Grace,” which eventually get into full flight at the very end, obviously.
The other songs for me sort of become the emotional road to freedom. Being a singer myself, I understand that music is enormously releasing emotionally and psychologically releasing. The music sort of plays a kind of megaphone. As the songs become more and more kind of uplifting, when Samuel finally discovers his voice and is able to sing “Amazing Grace,” it’s really about him finally finding true freedom and it is expressed through the opportunity to sing. That for me is kind of metaphorically just happening throughout the film as he discovers his voice, he discovers his heart.
How did you approach telling two stories from two different time periods and in two different locations, keeping it all as one organic whole?
Initially in the script there was no real connection between these stories so I had to try and work out how we could do that. The central notion of that Bible and the boy became a connector to the two stories. But dealing with the two periods, especially for a small independent film, it was challenging, discovering how to create part of England, the Atlantic Ocean, a journey to Richmond, Virginia, all in Connecticut. I was lucky I had a really great designer and costume designer and director of photography and locations manager to kind of discover how we could actually create those two worlds. And she has challenges as you could imagine with the costume in those periods and just creating and finding ways. For instance at Mystic Harbor in Connecticut we shot in one direction just to create a particular harbor in West Africa. And then we just turned the camera around the next day and faced it the other way and created Charleston in Carolina. Those sorts of great cinematographer choices, that sort of trickery is kind of a way of solving some of these problems which were many. But I find with working with Americans in particular nothing is really impossible. If you ever were to be marooned on a desert island, get marooned with an independent film crew and you will survive.
My favorite scene in the film was the stop on the Underground Railroad with the theatrical troupe. It reminded me of the Crummles in Nicholas Nickleby.
When I was a younger actor I actually had the good fortune of performing in the eight-hour theatrical version of “Nicholas Nickleby.” I played Lord Verisopht and my wife played Fanny Squeers and Miss Petowker. It’s a favourite of mine and when I was doing this film the Crummles and that notion of Nicholas Nickleby was very present in mind as well. That sort of heightened actory campery that goes on in a troop like that. To me that as quite fun just directing those scenes obviously. So I’m glad you made that reference that was certainly in my head as well.
Interview: Brett Haley, Writer/Director of “I’ll See You in My Dreams”
Posted on May 21, 2015 at 3:12 pm
Copyright 2015 Bleeker Street
Brett Haley wrote and directed “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” a bittersweet romance starring the luminous Blythe Danner as Carol, a widow taking some tentative steps toward love with Bill, a handsome new neighbor played by Sam Elliott. Haley talked to me about why he chose to make his story about people in their 70’s and why music plays such an important role in the film.
Blythe Danner is magnificent in the film. In the scene where her beloved dog is put to sleep, she is mesmerizing.
Yes, that was a very challenging scene to film because we’re obviously dealing with an animal and animals are unpredictable. We have really amazing trainers and they really got the dog to a level of calmness that I’ve never seen. He’s trained to just get very, very calm and then I just let Blythe take her time and do what she wanted in there and she knew the script, she knew what we were doing and I just let kind of roll with it and we just set multiple takes back to back to back so that the dog would just stay calm. I didn’t want to come in and say cut and reset and all that. So we just rolled the camera and Blythe would just do the scene and then stop. And then she’d take a breath and then she’d do it again. It was a really tough scene to shoot obviously. It was a very sad scene and I thought, “Oh boy am I being manipulative? Am I being exploitative in any way?” But no, I really stand by it. I think the way it’s done was honest and truthful and that is my ultimate goal with everything that I do.
What interested you in writing about people of that age?
I’m very sort of intrigued and curious and fascinated by older people because I think they have a lot of life experience and they’ve gone through so much more than what I’ve gone through. I’m starting to ask questions about life and loss and why are we here and why do people die and how do you deal with loss and things like that. I think older people have experience quite a bit more of that. So to me it was a no brainer if I wanted to make a movie about those themes I should make it about older people. And then I think on the same hand when you think about it and you go yes, it’s like older characters especially in films are marginalized. They always put on the sidelines, supporting characters or plot movers, wacky characters. They’re never the leads, they’re never fully dimensional, three dimensional leads or rarely I should say. And especially rare being romantic in any way and that was something that I was really intrigued by.
What are the biggest differences between romance early in your adult life and romance near the end?
People who are towards the end don’t have as much time to mess around. They cut to the chase more and I found that actually really refreshing to write. Bill certainly knows what he want and he goes for it. And I think there’s less time to sort of beat around the bush so to speak. I think when you’re young you think the world is ahead of you. You just don’t think about the realities as much when you’re young. You’re sort of caught up in a moment which is a great beautiful thing but I think when you’re older you can feel the weight of that ticking clock a little bit more. I think you’re a little bit more decisive. You just go after what you want more. I thought that was really fun. That was really fun to write.
Music is very important to the film.
Music does play a huge role in the film. There’s karaoke and Carol was a singer in her younger years and Martin’s character, Lloyd was in a band and a poet. I don’t want to spoil it for people but there’s a huge emotional moment in the film that is centered around the song of the title and I think it’s really crucial. I love music and I felt that it a really fun way to explore some of the emotions in the film.
Malin Akerman plays Carol’s daughter. What do we learn from the relationship between the two of them?
I think it’s unfortunately a bit of a common one. I think we get pretty self-obsessed in this world. I think we kind of we forget about the other people around us, who we love and who we think about. I think that they both had sort of been drifting naturally. No hard feelings but living in their own lives. They live on different coast and that sort of adds to the drift. I was trying to get at something to show a different side of Carol, that she is not perfect and neither is her daughter. I think they both should probably put more effort in their relationship. I wanted it to just be real. I didn’t want her daughter to show up in the movie and just be this perfect daughter and have this perfect relationship because that’s just not the way people are. There’s always something more there; there’s always something more layered. To me it rang true to pick them as slightly distant but then it’s really about them realizing how much they need other, how much they truly love each other and that they shouldn’t take each other for granted. The film is all about relationships really, and connection.
One of the highlights of the film is Carol’s relationship with her friends, played by three fabulous actresses, June Squibb, Rhea Perlman, and Mary Kay Place.
Everyone was my first choice and everybody just came on board this small budget movie without too much hoopla. They just responded to the material, I think they appreciated a three dimensional role that was on the page for all of them and I think that they just wanted to be a part of it. I was just super blessed to have them want to join the party. Blythe described it as a repertory company, in this together and not in it for the money but in it for the passion of the piece. And we just had a wonderful time, it was just a wonderful experience and so lucky to have these amazing actors believe in me and put their fate in me to go and make this film and gosh, I’m a lucky guy.
Did they have a lot of fun filming the pot smoking scene?
Yeah the girls were having a great time shooting that scene and it just shows how funny they are. They’re all comic geniuses. Obviously they were not really smoking pot, but everybody has been asking me if they were really high! Of course not. I think it’s very interesting that these ladies, they didn’t go for the cheap laugh. They went for the really honest stuff that comes out of that scene and I think that’s why it works. They don’t yuck it up too much. They keep it really grounded and honest.
What’s the best advice you ever get about directing?
The best advice I ever got was to be kind and gracious to everyone who works on your movie. Understand that no one is better or worse than you on a film set. A lot of directors take their power into their head and feel like they can treat people without respect. I’m a big believer and especially on the set but in life you should treat everyone with kindness. And then you should be grateful to everyone for their hard work especially when they’re working on your film. It’s very important to me that everybody gets treated with equal amounts of respect and no one is better than everybody else on a movie set or in the world. If you’re kind to people they’re going to be good to you and I think that’s the big life lesson. I think we forgot that. The energy that we had on that set did come through on the screen as well, from Sam Eliot down to the PA. Everybody wanted to be there and felt a part of this film and there was a really nice energy and I think it translated to the film.
Seeds of Time is a documentary that seems like a terrifying science fiction story. It is about the efforts of Cary Fowler, funded by Bill Gates, to find, preserve, and store seeds from plants necessary for all life forms on the planet, as over 90 percent of the plant species we use for food have become extinct in the last century. For the best and worst reasons, most of our food now comes from modified plants (and the animals who eat them), created to be more efficient to grow and ship — and to be able to be patented and thus a better investment for agribusiness.
Seeds of Time is in some theaters now, and anyone can bring a screening to any community via Theatrical On Demand film distribution service Gathr®, which is free if it “tips,” meaning enough tickets are reserved.
I spoke to director Sandy McLeod about the film.
How did you come to this project?
I had been sent an article that was in the New Yorker by two friends and I was reading it one morning at breakfast. My husband was on the speaker phone and I’m reading about Cary Fowler and I hear my husband talking to a guy named Cary on the phone and I don’t really think much it. But I read a line in the article that says Cary Fowler was given $30 million to collect the seeds through the Gates Foundation and I hear my husband ask this person on the phone. How much were you given by the Gates Foundation? And I hear the person on the other end say “$30 million.” And when my husband hang up the phone I said, “Was that Cary Fowler by any chance?” and he said, “Yeah, how did you know?” So I ask my husband if he could introduce me to Cary and that summer I read Cary’s book which is called Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity/. I realized that there are so many things in that book that I had no clue about even though at I’m a foodie and I know quite a lot about food, and it is of fundamental to having an intelligent conversation about the status of the food system today. And so I went to Memphis and I interviewed Cary and he really blew my mind. I realized that if this was something that people really need to know about in order to have an intelligent conversation about food and that I was going to learn along with my audience. So I felt like I was a good guinea pig for them.
The extinction statistics are staggering. How do you respond to people who say, “Well, that’s Darwinism. It’s just natural selection, right?”
It’s not in this case because we actually domesticated those plants and we ate those plants and we had tremendous diversity and a lot of different kinds of fruit and vegetables that we no longer have. In fact 93% of all the fruit and vegetables that were in the United States in the last 80 years has gone extinct. So that is huge, that’s a tremendous number and with agriculture now facing so many difficulties including limited lands, limited water, low availability of fertilizers, population expansion, and now climate change, having lost that diversity means that there are less tricks in the tool bag to let genetics be able to give to the farmers to work with to have a radish that’s going to survive, to have heat tolerance or drought resistance or all the things that farmers are starting to feel in terms of what’s happening with the climate. So that loss would have continued if Cary hadn’t done what he did. It’s an ongoing battle. Seed banks are still becoming extinct and if they’re not backed up, those seeds will go with them.
The scenes in the seed storage facility between Norway and the North Pole were like something out of a James Bond movie. What was it like to film there?
Well, it was very cold there. It was 50 below and 30 below in the vault. and I didn’t fully appreciate what that would mean. I have a lot of cold weather gear because I’ve shot in a lot of strange places, very cold places but I’ve never really been in any place like that. It’s very other wordly. It’s ironic that we store all those seeds up there because nothing could ever really grow up there. There’s a very short season where it’s day all the time and then the rest of the year starts again and it is very, very cold. And in my exuberance as soon as I go there I wanted to go to the seed vault and I jumped out of the car and ran up the hill and found a shot that I wanted to get and I very quickly realized that my nose hurt. I didn’t have anything on my face. You have to cover everything up. You can’t really run around in those kinds of temperatures. And it was funny because when we went into the seed vault which is 30 below it actually felt really warm to me. If you decide you’re going to shoot outdoors you have to stay outdoors all day because once you bring the cameras in they have to go through a thawing process and the lenses fog up. But we were lucky in a way that we’re in a modern enough time where we weren’t shooting film, because the film can break under those conditions. Also, it’s a really expensive of place to be. All the food that’s there has to be brought in and hotels are really expensive there so we couldn’t really stay there very long but we ran around as much as we could, while we could.
Your opening shot is so beautiful. It really invites you into the film even though it’s going to be a scary and disturbing stories. So tell me a little bit about the cinematography.
I come from a feature film background. I used to do continuity on feature films and I’ve worked with a lot of great cinematographers. And so I’ve learned what good lighting looks like and how to frame the shot. One of the biggest problems I had on this film was that I couldn’t have the same cinematographer with me all the time. I worked with lots of different people, so I had to keep trying to keep the look unified. It was really challenging but so far most people don’t seem to notice that. And because it’s about seeds, first of all I wanted people to see how beautiful seeds can really be because they’re so tiny we don’t really look at them. These two guys in London did a beautiful book of photography on seeds and I had seen it and they let me use some of those images in the film. They’re amazing when you look at them and, they are beautifully engineered, they have incredible subtlety and nuance and diversity. So finding things like that to shoot was really, really fun and we went to a lot of great locations. Peru is a beautiful country and the Peruvian farmers are incredibly beautiful people. They dress up in their indigenous gear and they look phenomenal in the film. And we were shooting in the Sacred Valley, which is a very lush mountainous part of Peru and which is incredibly photogenic. We were lucky and the film lends itself to lots of lush imagery.
How has working on the film changed the way that you shop?
I eat a lot more fruits and vegetables now than I ever had and I really look for things that were unusual. I’m interested in tasting new things. I’ve always been pretty healthy eater, except probably when I was in my teens. But I appreciate diversity in the supermarket now more than I ever have and I also appreciate what the farmer does more than I ever have. I really do appreciate actually having a relationship with someone that I know who’s growing my food.
It’s something really…that feels really connected to me and I like knowing what can grow seasonally where I lived and when it becomes available. Even though I live in the city, I live in a loft so I do grow some herbs on my fire escape. At least I can participate in that way and know what’s sort of growing around me. I think it’s healthier to do that.
How do you think of the people who were in their 20s today see these issue different than the last generation?
I have godsons in their 20s, and they are really much more interested in the land and their food, than I was when I was their age. Even though I was interested in it I was, I mean, I would go to the health food store and that sort of thing. One of them is taking a permaculture in class now. One of them has to come a really good chef and is interested in this new ideas of more nutrition per acre and how acre and how do you that instead of being so concerned about yield per acre. So I think that they are more aware because they see the issues that they’re about to confront. There are economic issues, though, too. I mean the whole farmers market phenomenon and I know that’s a certain…it has a certain…I know that Walmart is sourcing a lot more food locally and trying to make organic food more readily available. We need to have more democracy in our food. Consumers can help drive that. I know a lot of the big companies are trying to make healthier products now they see that they sell and that people are making a lot of money on this stuff. So I don’t think most people realize how powerful their dollars are and they can cast a vote on the food that they want by not buying what they don’t want to eat. And I know that their people who don’t know we have that choice because they’re in a hurry and they don’t have time to think about it. I think we should be responsible about what we do because it definitely influences the powers that be. They’re in the business of selling things and if they can’t sell them they’re not going to make them. So we can help drive that.
Happy 100th birthday to the writer/director/star of one of the greatest films of all time, Citizen Kane. Everyone should see that movie, and then everyone should see it again, listening to Roger Ebert’s shot-by-shot commentary, a master illuminating a master and together both of them illuminating the best and worst of the human spirit.
/. I realized that there are so many things in that book that I had no clue about even though at I’m a foodie and I know quite a lot about food, and it is of fundamental to having an intelligent conversation about the status of the food system today. And so I went to Memphis and I interviewed Cary and he really blew my mind. I realized that if this was something that people really need to know about in order to have an intelligent conversation about food and that I was going to learn along with my audience. So I felt like I was a good guinea pig for them.
. Everyone should see that movie, and then everyone should see it again, listening to Roger Ebert’s shot-by-shot commentary, a master illuminating a master and together both of them illuminating the best and worst of the human spirit.
