Interview: Jordan Vogt-Roberts of The Kings of Summer

Posted on June 4, 2013 at 7:17 am

Jordan Vogt-Roberts’s first feature film is “The Kings of Summer,” the story of three teenage boys who run away and build a house in the woods. It’s one of my favorite movies of the year, so I was very glad to get a chance to talk to him about it.

How did you get involved with this project?

I made a short a few years ago called “Successful Alcoholics.” It balanced tone in a similarly tricky way, starting out funny and then getting more serious. And the company that did “Little Miss Sunshine” had this script. They were looking for a director and I was looking for a movie. I got into this business because I want to make movies. I’d been doing TV and commercials and that’s great to work your way up. But then I read this script and I fell in love with it. I knew it was exactly the movie that I needed to make. Not that I could or wanted to — I needed to tell this story. So I just pitched my ass off, and spent the next couple of months trying to get the job. I didn’t want to say that someone else beat me on merit. It had a jumping off point I wanted for my first feature, a lot of different things at once, magic and beautiful and hilarious — there was so much fun that I could have with it.

You were working with young kids, which is a challenge.

The movie lives and dies with the kids. I have an incredible adult cast — stand-ups and improvisers and brilliant comics like Alison Brie, Nick Offerman, and Megan Mullally. But the movie rests completely on the kids. All of them had to be good. When you watch “Stand By Me” or “The Goonies,” all of those kids are great. I couldn’t cast 25-year-olds. I had to cast kids who as much as they could go through what the characters were going through, who could be as real and awkward as the characters they played. And Gabe and Nick and Moises really took over the roles at a certain point. I forgot what the characters were as scripted and it started becoming them. We did improv training, not so they’d be super-quick and witty and punchy but just so they’d be comfortable enough in their own skin so that if I didn’t yell cut or changed something on the fly, they could adapt to it. My favorite stuff in the movie, a really important part of the movie, is those moments, just glances or mannerisms, that’s what it was to be that age. A movie like this is made up of small, little moments, where watch it and you say, “I love that.” I just wanted to give those kids the trust and faith so they could elevate it themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYQvwJ0G7qQ

The moments that I love are the three jump kids of him exiting the house in different ways, that’s how a kid would pass time. That came from him and me just playing around about the best way to do it. There are so many weird little moments that stem from them cracking me up. I made a weird decision on set where I didn’t want them to think of me as the boss or watch themselves around me. So they would punch me in the arm and treat me as though I was a kid. We created a fun environment. The stuff where they were banging on the pipe, finding out that Gabe played the violin and adding that to the movie. That adds authenticity because it is so particular. The unscripted things are what make me laugh.

In another movie, some of the things Joe’s father said could be disturbing, but you made it feel safe.

A lot of it is that it is from the perspective of the kids, so we know that it is heightened. They can feel a little bit more overbearing or harsher because that is how the kids were perceiving it. And we ran the spectrum of emotions without turning them into caricatures. We did some ridiculously funny things but to ideally always have it be informing the character and the story and the moment.

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Interview: Rama Burshtein and Hadas Yaron of “Fill the Void”

Posted on June 3, 2013 at 2:23 pm

“Fill the Void” is an Israeli film with a rare, intimate, and very sympathetic portrayal of a very observant Orthodox Jewish community. It is the story of a young woman, still in her teens, who is under pressure to marry the husband of her sister, who died in childbirth. If this was an American movie, it would be about the girl’s rebellion. But this is a far more complex, layered, sensitive exploration of the girl and her world, and therefore a much more fascinating story. The lead role is played by Hadas Yaron and the writer-director is an Orthodox woman born in America and raised in Israel, named Rama Burshtein. We met at a hotel in Washington to talk about the movie.

What makes a good marriage?

RB: You’re good. What makes a good marriage? This is not a quite popular view I would say but I think it’s about defining men and women and knowing how they’re different. Okay, this is how it works for me. I need my husband to be a little bit more, for me to hold more, to hold that passion…to feel that sexiness. This is what I need. He needs to be a little more open and it’s me making that. I have to make him want me. Like especially if I’m like dominant and a strong person than I really have to work hard to make him more than me. In a deeper way. He’s got the stamina. I know it is so not popular and some want to crucify me for saying that because it’s very not feminist to say. For me, it’s only about being in love and being passionate so I don’t care about being equal. I really care about really liking him for the rest of my life you know and really being attracted to him and that he’s going to be the center of my life. It doesn’t mean I don’t do other things, I’m sitting here and yet when I ever, ever have to make a choice it will be him. It will always be him.

Okay, and what about you, Hadas? What do you think makes a good marriage?

HY:Well, I’m not married. It’s funny because I’ve been listening to Rama. I have a boyfriend and the words you said really stayed in my head, the words you said to me about how God’s journey is planned in relationships and I really remember that. The whole thing with two weeks of not touching and then two weeks of this and so holding it and bringing it back. I remember I told him; maybe we can do that, like for one week to be a bride again after being separate. I think it’s about being real with him and so that’s hard sometimes…to be really exposed and then feel that the other person really gets you.

One part of the most striking parts of the movie are these very structured “dates” where the couple essentially has just one meeting to decide if they can spend their lives together. There’s this plate of cookies that no one ever touches.

RB: No one ever touches it. You know if she asks her mother for more time, she will have more. It’s about seeing if there’s chemistry and if you can go to the next date. Actually, the first one is just to know if you can go to the next one. And, by us we come and sit for three hours or four hours and some of that’s him being a man for the rest of my life and her being the woman for him for the rest of his life. They’re both tuned in on it and the concentration is on that. So, everything he says is very important and everything she says is critical and the concentration is so strong. I got married like this. When I sat with him for the first time every answer he gave was to tell me if he could be there for me forever or not. It is amazing! It’s so strong that when you decide to get married you actually nourish it from that first meeting for a long time. Because like I said everything is there now it’s just puppy love but you felt everything there and you know what kind of home you can have. How do you see life but in such a way you say that’s all I ever wanted, for him to really want me forever from the first time. This is it! This is what you want.

Did you intend the final scene of the film to be open to interpretation?

RB: The weird thing about this film is that people read it the way they read it. Some people think her mother pressures her to marry her late sister’s husband, but the mother never pressured her. She speaks to the father. She speaks to the matchmaker. The only time she speaks about it is when the mother and the father are in front of her telling her the offer and the father doesn’t want it. We get the feeling that she’s pressured but there was not real pressure on her. People really read into something that is not there.

I think she knew what her mother wanted.

RB: Wanted is not pressure. Wanted is fine. For me it was really intentional that she will not pressure her, that she would keep her feelings to herself. The mother is in sorrow. She is mourning and she is trying to do her best and yet she does not really pressure. The only one that she is a bit manipulative with is her husband, which is always what women do to their husbands. She tells him “You have to ask her, I would die to go.” This is what I believe. I believe that everything at the end comes together and you see it in life. There’s like a big plan because it’s really far out from what we want to feel. It happens with feelings and emotions and then suddenly you are realizing things…it’s like combining with the big plan. The big plan was for her to marry him. Something had to be done…an offer had to be made. The mother had to really push the father for everyone to actually get there. First of all her husband is gorgeous and sexy…he’s there…he’s a man…why not? In terms of the film of course.

And, then she’s beautiful and young and everything and all the complications and intentions are strong to say a true love story is not that complicated…and at that moment at the end where you don’t know what you’re feeling and you’re comfortable because it combines everything. It’s easy for us to say just make it like a love scene. It’s how you feel and wanting and not knowing where you’re going and the whole thing together …this is real. It doesn’t mean it’s not about love. It’s just a little different language, which is a true language because it is the way you experience it in your life. Not Hollywood.

The last shot is a shot that says see the real thing…it’s real. You can go all the way with everything in it. Sometimes you use too many emotions and then the viewer doesn’t see all that. They didn’t see the feel and they see the confusion. They just went with her being excited towards that night.

So, how do you talk to Hadas about portraying all of that, without any lines of dialogue?

RB: I think that when we did the film and we got prepared for it the one thing I knew is that it’s going to be a mixture of feelings of emotions and we were talking a lot about it…about trying to hold two different emotions together. On the one hand you want that aand it’s not just doing that it’s just jumping from one emotion to another. Right? We talked a lot about that. For me, this is being Jewish. A good example for that is when I just got into the religion a friend of mine was about to marry her eldest son in the evening and in the morning her mother passed away very suddenly. So, about 12 o’clock in the afternoon we buried her mom and then 7 o’clock that night her son got married. And, I was looking at her because she was just for the ceremony then she had to go but, that moment he got married she was there, she was happy and like a few hours ago she was really sad because her mom in a very surprising way just passed away. And, looking at that and looking at her, you think this is incredible…you can just jump from those feelings. This is from me being Jewish…really this is Judaism to be able to hold two things together.

And, what do you want people to take away from the film?

HY: I guess it’s just about being real. That’s something I learned. It’s the most difficult place to get to…like the most real, deepest, and the best place to be.

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Interview: Alex Gibney of “We Steal Secrets: The Wikileaks Story”

Posted on May 31, 2013 at 11:13 am

I spoke to Alex Gibney, one of my favorite filmmakers, about his brilliant documentary on Wikileaks.

The most interesting character in the movie is Bradley Manning. Where is he now?

He’s in prison, finally Leavenworth, after eight months in solitary confinement and being kept in a cage in Kuwait. While he was in solitary confinement, he was stripped naked, they took his glasses, they kept the lights on, sleep deprivation, no blanket. It was abusive treatment that rose to the level of torture. It’s really a shocking episode which I think was trying to send a message in the most brutal way possible. Like the British navy used to hoist the wretch on the yardarm of the ship. “Pay attention, if you’re thinking about leaking stuff. This could happen to you.” I made a film about the poor kid, Steve Bartman, the Cubs fan, and I think he’s a scapegoat. Governments and organizations go after someone who’s weak because they can. And Manning was weak — in some ways. In some ways he was very strong. That’s what makes him such an interesting character. He’s what Phil Zimbardo calls “an everyday hero.” He’s not a Daniel Ellsberg type. He doesn’t stand up there with his hands on his lapels and proclaim. He has a lot of problems, a lot of issues, a lot of emotional turbulence in his life. But he was determined to do something. And so he is important to all of us because we are all weak, flawed individuals who can occasionally do something big.

Why would the US military give a troubled, unstable person at a very low rank access to almost unlimited highly sensitive material?

They are desperate for bodies, especially smart people. He was in a discharge unit. A guy who was in it with him says in the movie, “This is the most unlikely military man you could possibly imagine.” But he’s in there because he wants to get a college education. This is the route for poor kids who want to go to college. The army doesn’t want to let him go because he is super-smart. But he has a lot of emotional baggage. He’s gay at a time of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. He thinks he might want a sex-change operation.

The music choices in the movie were excellent.

I worked very closely with a guy named Will Bates, from a group called Fall on Your Sword. He created these wonderful themes for each of the characters in an environment where you feel the space of the internet. And all of these people live out worlds in their imagination, and there’s no place to do that better than rock and roll. So you have Midnight Oil, which is a favorite group of Julian Assange. You have Radiohead for James Ball. And for Bradley Manning — he himself says he was listening to Lady Gaga singing “Telephone” while he was downloading the documents. It’s perfect in terms of what she’s concerned about — gender identity, bullying. And then at the end, the Ink Spots, “If I Didn’t Care.” There’s a ghostly quality to that moment, like “The Shining.” It takes you into the past, like an artifact in space that seemed to be mythic in some way.

What did you have to cut out of the movie that we may see on the DVD?

I wish we could have kept more on Julian’s childhood on Magnetic Island off the coast of Queensland. It got its name when Captain Cook sailed by there and said their compasses were “fouled.” What a perfect metaphor for Julian Assange, messing with military compasses. There was a big section we had on Tunisia, and a much longer section on Iceland. That’s when the goal was at its purest and they were operating on this barren rock. It was tough to let it go. This version is a haiku — we had a three hour and thirty minute cut. There are some interesting characters on the DVD extras.

Do we have too many secrets?

Maybe we don’t have enough. You have to assume once you go online, anything you put there can be made public. Yet while you’re online you feel like it’s a private, sacred space. But you’re really broadcasting to the world. When it comes to governments and corporations, we should demand that less is secret. That’s where corruption flowers. When two Reuters journalists are killed and they won’t give the video to Reuters, what’s that about? What about when the images of Abu Gharib were made public? Their concerns were not about what happened, but that when we released the photos we gave comfort to the enemy.

The New York Times and The Guardian play a crucial role in your film in acting as a filter for processing and providing context for the documents Manning provided, and making sure that what was made public was not detrimental to the safety of our troops. What will happen to that function as traditional journalism is in collapse?

There’s a part of this film that argues for renegade organizations like Wikileaks, but there’s a part that argues very strongly for traditional journalism and the kind of decisions you have to make about what should and should not be secret and how stories should be properly contextualized. When I began this movie, I was interested in the leaking machine, the technical challenge and the technical solution, which we may have to continue to pursue as the Obama administration makes journalism more of a crime. But what Manning needed was a journalist, someone in whom he could confide and trust. That relationship turns out to be terribly important.

Instead, he had a relationship — online only — with a man who had the wrenching moral challenge of protecting Manning or telling the police what he knew.

The biggest problem for him is that he lied to Manning. He squeezed him like a lemon. He said, “Your secrets are safe with me.” Maybe he meant it at the time or maybe he had decided to keep probing so he could get more secrets. He’s a complicated character. If you’re a journalist, you have a bigger conundrum. You have to examine whether this information is in the public interest, whether people will be hurt. But Assange would say journalists are too subject to political pressure.

If everything becomes secret and leaking becomes a capital offense – which is what Bradley Manning is facing — where are we at now? You’d think the law would provide us that easy guidance, but it’s much more of a gray area. The job of a journalist is to find out stuff. The job of the government — sometimes — is to keep stuff secret. There’s a natural tension there. But now they want to make finding out stuff a crime.

Who should decide what is private?

It can’t just be corporations or government. It has to be all of us.

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Danny Boyle’s Rules for Making Movies

Posted on May 28, 2013 at 3:59 pm

Danny Boyle has directed movies in a broad range of genres, from the edgy “Trainspotting” to the award-winning “Slumdog Millionaire” and “127 Hours” to the charming “Millions” and the trippy “Trance.” Moviemaker has his 15 “Golden Rules for Moviemaking,” worth reading for its applicability to many different fields of endeavor. I especially like what he says about being true to yourself but not being afraid to explore other cultures or absorb feedback — and about the daunting challenge of following a big hit.

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Interview: Scott McGehee and David Siegel of “What Maisie Knew”

Posted on May 23, 2013 at 3:59 pm

“What Maisie Knew” is a touching, beautifully acted new movie starring Julianne Moore and Steve Coogan as a couple breaking up but the story is seen through the eyes of their little girl. I spoke to the directors, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, about the film. Remarkably, though it is set in the present day and feels very contemporary, it is based on a book written over 100 years ago by Henry James.

I have to begin my asking you, how you got that amazing performance out of Onata Aprile, who plays Maisie.

DS: With pins and…you know I’m just kidding. She really is extraordinary. We’d love to be able to take more credit for it then, then we really can because she really has this incredible ability to just live in front of the camera. To shut it all down and just give her a scenario and she could really just, just sort of be in it, to live it as I was saying. When we were casting, we knew we needed a child who could be, with her face and close up to be able to convey a sense that you were getting into her head, that there was an interior life there that you were sort of understanding on an emotional level. Then boy did she deliver in spades. The only time that we’ve ever had an actor in one of our films whose had that kind of responsibility was Tilda Swinton in “The Deep End, and you know, Tilda’s a forty year old actress, very trained and very cerebral. Onata is a six year old child who wants to play with her horsie.

SM: Our only handicap, honestly, was her bedtime. We talked a lot about how to explain the story of the movie to her in a way she would understand. Her mother, Valentine Aprile, is an actress also, and really has a great relationship with her daughter. She kind of did the heavy lifting in terms of preparing Onata for the day’s work and, you know, kind of making sure she was comfortable with the emotional terrain of what the story was. And then the other actors also, Julianne Moore especially were all good about making sure Onata was comfortable if they were going to do a scene where they were screaming, or whatever. They’d say, “Okay Onata, I’m going to be screaming but I’m just pretending, and if you get uncomfortable let us know.” There was a scene I remember when Julianne had to cry and after she finished Onata was kind of giggling because she thought it was interesting that Julianne’s pretending went so far. She was very user friendly that way, if that makes sense.

The story seems so completely contemporary. Tell me a little bit about bringing it up to date.

DS: You know it obviously starts with the writers, Nancy Doyne and Carroll Cartwright. There was a lightness of touch to the script that kept it from being maudlin. We were really afraid that there would be a kind of florid melodrama. Before reading the script that’s where our anxiety was. Their idea of telling the story in ellipses really also caught our eye from a film making perspective. That was really interesting and a great challenge. And it was also the thing that made it start to feel relevant and contemporary. It allowed us, the film makers, to play with it cinematically, to play with the fundamentals of film making, where the camera is, how high it is, what comes in and out of the frame and what she hears, what she doesn’t hear, because it’s all coming from her perspective. It’s a real treat to get to play with the blocks, as opposed to play with the digital blocks that are, you know, thicker, louder and you know, more violent. We had heard anecdotally or we read anecdotally that James was inspired to write this story because he had heard at a dinner party of a couple that had chosen in a divorce settlement to share custody of a child, and he thought it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. And so the book is kind of darkly satiric and it takes place over a much longer period of time in Maisie’s life. And now joint custody being the most common thing in the world. But still it is interesting how many people who see the film identify with the struggle that the child endured.

It’s a very different role for Julianne Moore. She plays a fading rock star.

SM: We took her to a Kills concert. The Kills’ frontwoman, Alison Mosshart, was kind of a style model for us for Julianne’s character. She said that the singing aspect of this character was the thing that scared her most. But it was also the thing that attracted her. She didn’t shy away from something new and challenging. She could, just kind of jump in head on, and it was really inspiring.

What did you want from the movie’s score?

DS: The composer was Nick Urata, who did the music for “Little Miss Sunshine.” He’s the front man for a band called DeVotchKa, so he’s a player himself. The score needed to kind of feel like Maisie’s world. There’s only occasionally any classical underscoring. Most of the scoring is kind of just, a kind of filling up of the kind of our world, with music. He really got on board with that, and thought it was a great idea and we, we got the idea early on in cutting that we thought a voice would be good. A voice would help connect us to the child.

The scene with Steve Coogan first asking and then un-asking Maisie to go to England with him is heart-wrenching.

DS: He was our first choice for that role and that doesn’t happen often enough. He’d handle the emotions really well, we thought, and he’d be a little bit funny at times and bring a bit of levity to the proceedings that we thought would be really welcome. And we just lucked out that his agent had read it around the same time and also thought of him for it. Steve’s a classically trained actor and really likes to do the dramatic stuff and doesn’t get that many opportunities. We were more than happy to give him one.

What was the most fun part of making the movie?

DS: We had such a good vibe on the set of this film. We have the lucky opportunity to work with several long time collaborators like Kelly McGehee, Scott’s sister, who’s been our Production Designer forever and Giles Nuttgens who shot and Stacey Battat, who did the costumes, and a lot of the seconds and thirds on the crew were great people. It was a pleasure to show up every day. And it doesn’t happen on every movie and, and you know you could just feel it. And we had a little six year old who just wanted to be there. She had so much enthusiasm and that never waned… Seven weeks, five days a week, a dozen hours a day. That was amazing.

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