Interview: Jean-Michel Cousteau of “Secret Ocean 3D”

Posted on April 2, 2015 at 3:51 pm

Jean-Michel Cousteau has carried on the legacy of his famous father, Jacques Cousteau, who first allowed the world to see the creatures that live in the water, through deep-sea diving and his pioneering underwater photography. Now his son has used the latest technology to show us another world previously unseen, with tiny animals and colors as bright as any garden in full flower.

I spoke to Cousteau about his latest film, Secret Ocean 3D.

He wanted to work with IMAX 3D, in order “see the behavior of things that I’m flying or swimming over all the time since I started diving when I was seven years old, fifty nine years ago. And I would be very frustrated not to be able to see the behavior of tiny little things. So they put together the prototype cameras which are allowing us now to focus in slow motion on the behavior of small creatures and see what they are doing to feed themselves, protect themselves and be of course in relationship with other creatures. So for me I am now for the first time in my life able to see things on the big screen which I cannot see when I’m under water.”

I was especially fascinated with the tiny animals who look like flowers and the squid who could instantly change color to match the environment. “The flower-like creatures are found mostly in the tropical environment. The beautiful one that you see in the show are in the tropics in the Caribbean and in Fiji. Then there were these beautiful worms which are called Christmas tree worms. The squids were in Southern California. Squids and octopus can change their color, their texture. They have no bones so they are very bendable. They can hide. They are really amazing creatures. The bad news as you probably have heard on the show is that they die every year. After they reproduce they are gone. I am totally convinced that if they didn’t die they probably would run the planet today because they have real brains and are very clever creatures.”

There is a creature that looks like a pile of sticks. In the film, we learn that it has no head or brain but can regenerate its limbs. “We have seen those creatures but usually we don’t see the same one during the day and then come back and see the same one at night. Thanks to science and scientists we are able to learn about these creatures because they capture them and they analyze them. So the instinct that they have to capture food and bring into their mouth when you realize they have no brain is just for me it’s fascinating. I’m just like a kid every time I see them. So we were very patient, we saw it. As a matter of fact we saw two of them during the daytime and we decided, okay we have to wait and come back at night and we did and they were still there. And we were able to film them.”

What surprised me most in the film was the information about the tiniest creatures, plankton, and the part they play in keeping the rest of the world breathing. “Plankton are really the foundation of life in the ocean. And you have two kinds of planktons, the big which you see which are very spectacular, many different types of species and then the tiny little ones which drift. And the big ones are animals. They are called zooplankton. And then the tiny little ones which are plants, they are phytoplankton. Now the zooplankton is feeding on the phytoplankton. They need that to feed themselves and to grow and they are what you call the foundation of all life in the ocean. Without them there would be no life. So being absorbed within the food chain, they migrate towards the surface every day. And they are very very active at night and of course there are a lot of creatures that are coming by and feeding on them, both the plants and animals. And it goes all the way up the food chain all the way to the big creatures whether they are fish or mammals, whales or sea lions or tuna. Totally every creature is dependent on these unbelievable plants and animals which are the foundation of all life in the ocean. As a result of all that about half of the oxygen that is being produced comes from the ocean. And every other breath of air that you take you are getting it thanks to the ocean. So we are totally connected and dependent on the quality of life in the ocean. Unfortunately we didn’t know that before. Now we are learning and we are learning very fast thanks to what I call communication evolution. There are people all over the planet now who are asking questions now about these creatures. We need to learn very quickly and pass on the information to the decision-makers and the future decisions makers which are the children, the young people. They need to understand that we need to stop using the ocean as a garbage can. Because all of that decomposes and it affects the food chain, it affects the plankton, it affects the creatures which are concentrating those chemicals in their system and accumulates them, and concentrates as the creatures are getting bigger and bigger up the food chain. So we are hurting that environment which means we are hurting ourselves. At the end of the day it is not just the fact that we fishing or we catching more than nature can produce. We have learned that a long time ago, we are not hunters and gatherers we are farmers. So we need to do something with the ocean but we cannot farm creatures that are disappearing and you cannot farm in the ocean where you have the storms, hurricanes and so on.”

Jean-Michel told me that his father pushed him into the water with a tank on his back when he was seven and the water is home to him. “He kept telling me, ‘People protect what they love,’ and I kept telling him, ‘How can you protect what you don’t understand?’ So thanks to my dad I have this thirst for discoveries and wanting to protect what we don’t understand.”

Interview: Writer/Director Noah Baumbach of “While We’re Young”

Posted on April 2, 2015 at 3:18 pm

Writer/director Noah Baumbach talked to me about his new film, “While We’re Young,” starring Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts as a middle-aged couple. They befriend a young couple played by Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried, and the movie has a wise and humorous take on the dreams and delusions of all four of them.

What do you miss about being younger?

I miss going to the doctor and being able to raise somewhat extreme worries about health or something. The doctor used to laugh and say, “You are fine, don’t worry.” Now when I go to the doctor I brought up something and he was like, “Maybe we should get a MRI.” I thought our thing was when I would bring up something and he would say it was nothing. I miss that.

Is there anything you don’t miss about being young, that you are glad you don’t have to do anymore?

I think I feel more myself than I did then. I wouldn’t say I’m relaxed but I feel less urgency in a funny way than I used to. I think in my 20’s I felt like: this is happening so I’ve got to get something done, there is no time, everybody’s doing something, what am I doing? I feel more at ease, maybe that’s not the word, but I feel better in that way.

Why are we so fascinated with the effortless coolness of young people?

It’s like the basis of body switching movies. We think we all could be better 25 year olds now or better 18 year olds now than we could then. It does work that way, so that’s totally understandable.

When do you feel a generational disconnect?

A lot of my friends who are in their 20s or 30s tend to have a kind of old-soul quality, they sort of feel older than their years. It comes up more in those conversations like “Where were you when…?” Like when Clinton was first elected, that’s always striking if they were kids then. My first election that I voted in was Dukakis. And then the reverse which is the movie obviously engages in which is them introducing me to stuff, in some cases stuff that I lived through and they didn’t but they are somehow in the way that they listen to music or whatever I’m able to appreciate it in a different way because it is sort of removed from its context.

Why do you think this film is being described as your most “accessible?”

Well, my last film was black and white. And this time I was trying to make my version of a kind of comedy of marriage and there’s more of tradition of those kinds of movies. And so even though it might be my kind of perverse version of that I still felt like I wanted to follow some sort of template, not that there is a template but at least that I had a responsibility to tell a story with a married couple that goes on various detours and comes back together. They have learned and there is hope.

This is the second time you’ve worked with Ben Stiller. What does he bring to your projects?

When Ben saw “The Squid and the Whale” he got in touch with me and we both sort of quickly connected. I think our sensibilities or backgrounds may be different in some ways but we were both born and grew up with creative parents in New York and we like a lot of the same movies and comedies and things. So we recognized something in each other. “Greenberg” was a great experience and for me. I wrote this thinking of Ben, and thinking of Ben’s voice, and I felt like Ben’s calming voice was an important element in this movie too. Since Greenberg was kind of a different role for him and very different from him this would be a way to kind of use his iconography because more comic iconography in something that was more my territory.

How do you see the young couple that your main characters find so fascinating?

I was having fun with this idea that these young people seem too good to be true in some way. I mean they are ultimately projections for Ben and Naomi. They could be younger versions of themselves or romantic versions of themselves but they are also like surrogate children and I felt like in another movie they would have conjured up ghosts, something that kind of comes at the right time. Because Ben and Naomi don’t know that they need this but they do. So that is how I initially came to them and then as I wrote them it got more real. The thing with Darby is that you kind of discover that she is in some ways as much a victim of the sort of experiences Ben has and they have their scene where they kind of bond in a way. People have reacted differently to Jamie and Darby. Some say, “Do you hate hipsters?” And some say, “That’s such a sympathetic portrait.” I felt like whether you like Jamie or not no human being should bear that kind of responsibility that Ben basically gives him. And Ben really hands him the keys and then gets angry when he doesn’t do what he kind of imagined he is going to do.

Do you think couples fall in love with other couples?

Yes, I think they do and that was one of the things that I had in my head because I thought about that for an earlier movie, a script I started years ago after “Squid.” It is very interesting and understandable and I think the way couples project on one another. In this movie you see it even in a more casual way with the two couples at the beginning of the movie, the couple who had a kid and the couple who hasn’t, and I find that very interesting and funny, moving and understandable. And potentially tragic.

You worked with the legendary Ann Roth, who did the costumes for this film. How do you design clothes for characters who are supposed to be very much of the moment when you have no idea what will be cool by the time the movie comes out?

The thing that Ann and I knew early on was that there we would never would be able to actually document Brooklyn youth culture in terms of wardrobe. I mean we would be chasing it forever. The thing about working with Ann is that she sees the whole movie and she talks about characters. She will have back story for characters that I have not even thought about. I worked with her first on “Margo at the Wedding” and she would start talking about one of the characters and her ideas and I was kind of scared because I didn’t have any answer because I haven’t thought about this stuff. And actors love her for that reason. After a fitting with Ann, an actor will come out having all these ideas and all this understanding of themselves as a character that’s a kind of unique experience. With this Ann and I kind of just made up our own ideas. There is this hair groomer movie I love called La Collectionneuse from the late 60s. The actor Patrick Bauchau kind of looks like Adam, or Adam looks like him in that movie a lot. We actually kind of parted Adam’s hair like his and we dressed him in some cases like him too, the long leather jacket that he has that feels like John Lurie in Stranger Than Paradise. There are just things that feels right to her and she’s a great collaborator too. That’s the thing you want in all collaborators — they see the whole movie, not just their department.

I know she sometimes brings in pieces from other movies. Did she do that here?

Naomi is wearing Jane Fonda’s bag from Klute.

What are some of the great “marriage movies?”

The Awful Truth with Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. I love Holiday, too. Twentieth Century was a great marriage movie because it’s crazier, I guess. To Be or Not to Be also. I miss the kind of movies studios used to make that were mainstream but they were character driven. They would have broad humor but then they would be very moving like Broadcast News or Working Girl or Tootsie. . They are all different kinds of movies but they were all about adults. You know, as a viewer I miss those movies because they are not made really much anymore and I wanted to try to do one.

Related Tags:

Directors Interview Writers

Interview: The Woman in Gold’s Simon Curtis and E. Randol Schoenberg

Posted on March 31, 2015 at 3:37 pm

Director Simon Curtis told me, “My last film was My Week with Marilyn, and this one is my century with Maria.” He is referring to “The Woman in Gold,” with Helen Mirren as Maria Altmann, who brought a lawsuit to get back the portrait of her aunt Adele, painted by Gustav Klimt, which had been stolen by the Nazis. The story covers much of the 20th century, from Maria’s childhood in a wealthy Viennese Jewish family, in a luxurious apartment, where the portrait was on the wall. I met with Curtis and Randy Schoenberg, the real-life lawyer who represented Ms. Altmann, who is played by Ryan Reynolds in the film.

It is an extremely complicated story, so I asked Curtis how he decided what he needed to focus on. “It could have been so many different movies. Adele could have been a movie in her own right. We wanted to tell the story of Maria and Randy’s relationship and their campaigns. Once we were telling that story we realized we needed to just go back into the past and get a sense of that incredible time in Vienna before the second World War and in particular that sense of community, that extraordinary community that produced so much that the world benefited from and that was kind of shattered overnight in 1938. I was influenced by the Bergman film Fanny and Alexander and I felt the sense of that apartment where all these people, all the different generations who bumped into each other and thrived on each other.”

Schoenberg, whose grandfather, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, was one of the luminaries who visited Altmann’s family in Vienna, knew Ms. Altmann because their families stayed in touch when they emigrated to the United States. As shown in the film, he was young and inexperienced when she asked him to help her get the painting back. I asked if their relationship was as spirited as the one portrayed in the film. “Sometimes it was,” he said. “Every part of the film where you think, ‘Oh, that must have been made up’ has this core of truth to it. So I told Alexi Kaye Campbell that I had at one time an argument with Maria. It was actually after we won the case but Austria had required us to do a whole procedure where they could have an option to buy the paintings. This was after they decided, and Maria was feeling so magnanimous that they flew out to meet with us. They said, ‘We need more time.’ She was 89 years old. And she said, ‘Oh of course, there is no problem,’ and I pulled her aside and I said, ‘Maria, you cannot do this to me after eight years of working on this. You can’t let them do this. They are going to stall; they are going to find out some way not to give back the pictures and it’s all going to be lost.’ And I had to really sort of fight with her. So that shows up in the film in other ways. We had a very friendly relationship obviously because she was very close with my family, very close with my grandmother and she would tell stories about my grandmother and great grandmother. So normally we had a very friendly relationship like being with my own grandmother.”

As shown in the film, Ronald Lauder (who ultimately bought the portrait) did offer to pay for a more experienced team of lawyers. In real life, Schoenberg urged her to get advice from some independent law firms about whether he was up to the job. After she consulted them, she decided to keep him. And, as shown in the film, he was so nonplussed by the first question he was asked at the Supreme Court that all he could do was say, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand the question.”

This was not the first time Curtis worked with Dame Helen Mirren. He was a production assistant on one of her films, where he said his job was bringing her coffee. “That’s pretty much all I did with her on this film as well,” he laughed.

Related Tags:

Directors Interview The Real Story

Interview: Amy S. Weber of the Bullying Movie “A Girl Like Her”

Posted on March 29, 2015 at 4:55 pm

Writer/director Amy S. Weber first became interested in the problem of bullying when she was producing educational films for young people in 1996, over about a 10 year period. “I was working with mostly teenagers on real life stories documenting what those experiences were for them. We covered social issues, everything from violence in school to eating disorders, teen suicide, child abuse, family life, and unhealthy relationships, the list goes on and on. And it was through the hundreds of kids that I worked with through today actually, any of the young people that I work with and mentor, there is always this common theme to every one of the issues that plague them. And it came down to low self-esteem. It came down to identifying a lot of the issues that they were having, feeling like they couldn’t be themselves, they didn’t fit, they were afraid to be a target. And as we dove in a little bit deeper it was a common theme that being picked on and bullied, being really a target of someone or possibly just that fear overall, kind of stopped them from being who they were and living as their true selves. So this is definitely been a project in the making for many, many years to bring this, what’s going on in today’s world into the spotlight through this perspective. I really wanted “A Girl Like Her” to stem from their beliefs. They were the inspiration and hopefully it will offer some help.”

In the time she has been working with teenagers, Weber has seen enormous changes in the way that technology and social media add to the pressure. “The days of the schoolyard bully and escaping their wrath once you walk in your front door at home and now you are safe, those days are over. The Internet offers quite the tool for an abuser to also collect an army of people who can anonymously pursue a person’s spirit and that’s kind of how I see it.” She quoted the father of real-life bullying victim Phoebe Prince. “He said that bullying is a word that used to exist when you would run away through the fields or down the street from the guy that was going to beat you up. Now it’s a completely different story. And he described what happened to his daughter. It was basically a relentless pursuit of her spirit, the destruction of a human spirit. Social media and the social applications that young people can use have changed this game in epidemic proportions.”

She sees another problem in the increasingly hostile exchanges teenagers see in the media, celebrities, even politicians making harsh accusations. “If were to really just put denial aside and put our busy lives aside to see all the stress that goes on in our lives as adults in this world in which we have created, we would take a very honest look at what’s happening to our youth today. They are simply holding up a mirror reflecting back to us what we have created in terms of a world. What we show them each and every day, everything they see in the media from so-called leaders, from politicians to church leaders, the people who are in the spotlight, the messages that they share, the violent types of programs that teenagers are exposed to, video games, an overall sense of negativity.”

She said, “If you’re lucky enough that you live among people who are very positive and joyful people, you get to feel that and take that in every day. I have a group of people like that and it is wonderful being around them. But how many people can you can say are truly happy? People who find joy every day and see the silver lining in every situation. But how many people are what you would consider lost, miserable, unhappy? Perhaps we believe that children are supposed to rise above what they are learning on a daily basis, and expect them to be better than us; we expect them to know more than us. That is the thing I think has shocked me the most in all of the work that I’ve done with kids.

Weber worked very closely with the teenagers in the movie to develop the story. And it was very important to her that the bully, a “mean girl” named Avery, would not be demonized. “I wouldn’t call her monster. I would say her behavior is very much like a monster who is so unconscious of what she’s doing to Jessica’s spirit, she doesn’t seem to care. She is so unconscious of it that a daily pursuit of Jessica has become quite entertaining to her and her friends. And there’s this desensitizing that has happened, almost this numbing effect that takes place in Avery where she is, even when confronted, unable to see what she was doing, denial at its finest. She’s a good student, she believes she’s a good daughter, and a good friend. Jessica just bugs her and she’s unapologetic about it. This is just the way she feels and she would like to express herself. Then you start to peel back the layers. We get to know Avery and we created a safe space for Avery to explore herself, take a look at life through a different lens and literally gave her a camera that allows her to look at life through a different lens, and it’s not as it appears. The outer shell of perfection, the popularity, the beautiful girl, the friendships, the status in her school, it’s meaningless because of what she is away from that, the true Avery comes out, the unhappy Avery, the insecure Avery, the scared Avery, the one who isn’t proud of what’s going on in her family life, the broken Avery that we begin to see. So we humanize a monster and when you do that we can’t as an audience be in denial of the fact that she’s in pain. Something is going on inside of her that is creating this projection, a coping mechanism, a mental health component, all of these play a role in this character. It is shocking to the audience that when the transformation begins the audience transforms along with it. That’s what’s so powerful about Avery Keller and the dynamic of her character.”

All of the dialog was improvised by the young performers. She gave them the overview of the scene and then let them create their lines based on “the emotion of what was happening in this moment in their lives. And then we would draw from real life to bring that out into their characters. I wanted them to bring their own experiences and their own emotions and their own words because I wanted it as genuine and as authentic, as real and raw as possible and whatever happens in that scene we would just keep going. I think we captured some of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced as a film viewer all my life. But to be on the other side of that camera and to be involved in the scene with these actors as it unfolded was incredible. It was just incredible the raw emotion especially because of the topic and how it has affects so many people.”

Interview: Robert Kenner of “Merchants of Doubt”

Posted on March 22, 2015 at 7:03 am

Robert Kenner’s Merchants of Doubt is a deeply unsettling documentary about the way corporations divert money they should be spending on making better products more effectively to spend it instead on undermining science and scientists. By creating fake “public interest” groups with generic names to argue that scientific findings are not sufficient to take action they use the tactics perfected by the tobacco companies to delay government action for decades while people suffer the consequences. These days, that primarily means “selling” the idea that there is not a scientific consensus on the reality and the causes of climate change, but it applies to many other scientific findings as well. The scientific method is rigorous, checked and counter-checked, and ruthlessly truthful, with no other agenda but the facts. This is the method that produces all advances in technology and medicine. These efforts to devalue and undermine science by selling doubt the way corporations sell products obstruct efforts at the most fundamental level to establish policies based on the latest and most documented understandings of how the world works.

Writer/director Robert Kenner (“Food, Inc.”) said that while much of the film focuses on the fossil fuel companies’ efforts to discredit the science of climate change, “It is not about any specific industry. It’s about a group of very talented individuals who honed their craft in tobacco and were able to take the most difficult subject, a product that they knew was cancer causing, and for 50 years maintain doubt about it. They couldn’t say it doesn’t cause cancer because it’s a lie. They could say, ‘We don’t have enough science. We need to do more study.’ It’s the ‘doubt and delay’ tactic. So, they would switch the subject and say, “You’re taking our freedom away. We should be allowed to smoke on airplanes.” We had people picketing at Washington’s National Airport saying, ‘We demand the right to smoke on airplanes. You’re taking our freedom.’ So what’s interesting is on one hand we think of tobacco slightly as an old hat subject but what’s interesting is that playbook that was created lives on exactly the same way today. What’s so interesting is not only is it a lot of the same people but it’s the same very specific tactics.” He says it is a kind of “anti-Enlightenment.”

The industry-sponsored consultants who fabricate “interest groups” with uncredentialed “experts” are the primary culprits in the film, but one of its most significant and disturbing revelations is the complicit nature of the media, whose reflexive commitment to “showing all sides” means that they will bring on any contrarian without checking the legitimacy of the source, training, expertise, or conflicts of interest. “The real battle here is I don’t think newspapers should be putting people who play scientists on television, quoting them as equals. I think the media is playing a role in encouraging false debate. There’s always going to be one guy out there arguing that the earth is flat but that does not mean the question is not settled.”

So it is especially gratifying to see an exception in the film’s portrayal of two Chicago Tribune investigative reporters who spent two years on a brilliant expose of fraud, misrepresentation, and fake science funded by the tobacco and chemical industries that led to fire retardant regulations that (1) didn’t work and (2) exposed infants to toxic chemicals.

But Kenner points out that there are “fewer and fewer and fewer” news organizations able to devote those kinds of resources to exposing these corporate scams. “There are now 4.5 PR representatives for every journalist. When I started out there were far more journalists than PR Reps. So as people get fired from their newspapers they get hired by the very companies that they might have investigated.”

This should not be a political issue, he says. “I talked to George Schultz and he said the greatest thing he and Ronald Reagan did was the international ozone treaty. He said, ‘We didn’t know 100% but we were in the high 90’s and it was the right thing to do. We had to take action. It was a great insurance policy.’ And Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, and George Bush with acid rain — so there is a tradition of conservative environmental protection. We might all hate the EPA for being such nags, but the air and water are cleaner and so we are lucky they are there.”

He also insists that it is not an anti-corporate film. “It’s really important to say that corporations are in the best position to be the solution.”

Related Tags:

Directors Interview