Interview: Ben Affleck, Director and Star of “Argo” (Part 2)

Posted on October 15, 2012 at 3:33 pm

More from Ben Affleck about Argo:

What were some of the tougher scenes to film?

The scenes with the actors were the easiest scenes. We have all these good actors, they know what they’re doing, it was really fun. I got to enjoy acting with really good actors. Getting 2000 extras out in Turkey was really hard. It was cold and people wanted to go home and the idea was like, “Every hour, we’re going to give away sweet rolls!” But we’re still losing a lot of people who felt the sweet roll wasn’t worth hanging around and it was a lot of work. So that was tough. The car stuff wasn’t that bad. I was kind of excited, there was a car, sort of a Porsche Cayenne that has a huge crane on the back and it’s called “The Russian Arm” and they do incredible things with it. You can be driving like 100 miles an hour next to something else that’s 100 miles an hour and moving the crane around. They use them a lot for car commercials and I had wanted for “The Town” and we couldn’t afford it. This time I said, “We’re going to need the Russian arm” and we got it. I got play with it and that was a lot of fun.

This was something of an homage to the late 70’s, you know, with the clothes and all the TV and Walter Cronkite. Was that something that attracted you to the movie?

I’m the age of the kid in the movie and so I definitely identified with the child. When I went into his room, with all the action figures and the Star Wars stuff, it really hit me: this was my childhood. And I got really fastidious about the sheets and everything. There’s something remarkably innocent about that era. We think of the 70s as being slightly debauched in some ways, key parties and all those other sort of images we get from some other movies, but we had none of that technology, huge TVs, the people on television, you know, had these sort of crummy sets. Nowadays, we get a theme song and a graphic for every news story but then it was these gigantic cars that probably got 6 miles to the gallon, you know, it was the true sort of internal combustion engine in bloom and I don’t know—I thought there was something kind of sweet about it, sweet about the big answering machines and you just leave the house and that’s it. No one can find you until you come home. Put a quarter or a dime in a pay-phone slot…So I discovered a little bit more about it as I was doing it.

How are Hollywood and the CIA alike?

That is a good parallel, and it’s true, there is a symbiotic relationship. People make movies about military and if you go on a tour of the military, they’re all movie buffs, all these guys and women overseas. Movies are a big part of our culture, and both the movies and our military and our intelligence services (particularly our intelligence services) are inventing things, are filmmakers and actors for the sake of art and for entertainment and for our intelligence services, it’s for, God knows, skullduggery and spy-craft and all that kind of stuff. And they both tell stories. One of the themes of this movie is storytelling and how powerful it is, whether it’s political theatre or relating to our children or trying to get some people out of a place where their lives are in danger. Usually telling stories is incredibly powerful. There’s this shot I really like where there’s this firing squad and there’s a firearm, a rifle and a camera, and hopefully it’s subtle, but suggests that the camera is much more powerful than the gun. That has been really borne out, as in the YouTube era, as true.

You begin with strong criticism of the Shah and America’s support for him. Were you as tough on the people who took over after the revolution?

I don’t think anyone would argue that the Islamic Revolution was good for the country. It’s just that it was a reaction to the Shah who was not good for the country, who was embezzling a lot, and as you point out. Unemployment was low, but a lot of those jobs were done by foreigners, because they didn’t have Persians who were trained to fly the helicopters he was buying and run the cranes and even drive trucks, so there was a lot of importation of labor that the people resented. I didn’t have to show, in specific, what happened and how bad the revolutionaries became (so to speak) because you see them hanging people from construction cranes, you see firing squads happening impromptu in the streets, kangaroo courts, you see a place that’s living in fear under the revolutionary guard, so in that sense, you very much see what has happened to this country as the Islamic Revolution took hold. It’s an extraordinarily complicated scenario. Part of it was a reaction against the Shah, you know, the Savak were sort of modeled after the KGB, they were extremely oppressive, but there were a lot of people who really prospered under the Shah and the revolution was not fomented strictly as an Islamic revolution. There were merchants and communists and secularists and students and Islamists and nobody would have engaged in this revolution with most of those other people if they thought, “Well, we’re all just going to end under Khomeini.” In fact, Khomeini was able to use the hostage situation himself, which he didn’t engineer, but was supposed to be the short-term two-day thing that the students did. He sent his son to say, “You know what? Let’s keep the hostages here, let’s hold out and see what happens,” and because he sort of controlled this event, he was really able to marginalize the moderates in government. I was a Middle Eastern studies major, I took classes and classes and classes on this and still don’t feel I understood the Iranian revolution sufficiently. I do know that we tried to capture the essence of the truth; I absolutely standby the prologues, and people call it the history lesson, but I also acknowledge that we did not have the room, dramatically, to really get into the minutiae and the complexity and the nuance of what happened as the Islamic Revolution took hold. I do feel that we show it in a fairly negative light, but I also wanted to give people some context so that they see it just wasn’t just sort of mad barbarians who made a rush for a country, but that this was something that was developing over time as a reaction to the Shah’s policies.

Tell me about the character you play in the film.

I think Tony in real life was a guy who got his mission and got his orders and followed through, and it was rather uncomplicated. He had a certain amount of fear but he was going to do it. As a result, the story’s a little wonky, in a way, in the film, because it was really about the six people. If you want to talk about, like where your empathy is, where the line is that’s pulling you through the story, it’s the six people, not the guy on his horse with the sword who’s going to kill Saxons or whatever, you know. And then you start to be developed emotionally with these other characters who have different emotional relationships to the story, you know, John and Alan and Bryan and so on. I thought that was interesting, and I also sort of worked with Tony’s slightly passive personality, you know, that his focus was he was going to go and save these folks’ lives, and so they became a center of the wheel, the hub, in a way, and all of this other stuff was spokes in that way.

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Google Pays Tribute to Winsor McCay

Posted on October 15, 2012 at 12:38 pm

I am so happy that Google is paying tribute to one of my favorite artists, Winsor McCay, creator of Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend.

McCay also invented animation.

He was the one who figured out that if movies were just a series of still pictures, he could draw a series of still pictures and make a movie out of them. He personally drew thousands of pictures for his first animated movie, about Gertie the Dinosaur.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY40DHs9vc4

I was enchanted by the short films inspired by McCay Roger Ebert showed us at Ebertfest this year. This one is by Thomas Edison, circa 1904.

And I am proud to be a Kickstarter supporter of animator Bill Plympton’s new film about McCay.

Interview: Ben Affleck, Director and Star of “Argo” (Part 1)

Posted on October 14, 2012 at 3:11 pm

Ben Affleck directed “Argo,” the incredible story of a real-life 1980 CIA rescue mission, and he plays Tony Mendez, the “exfiltration” expert who came up with the idea to create a fake Hollywood film production company and get the six American out of Iran by convincing the people who had captured 52 other State Department employees that these six were members of a Canadian film crew, scouting locations for a big sci-fi/fantasy film. I spoke to him about the movie with a small group of journalists, the day after a screening attended by some of the real people rescued by Mendez.

You did something really remarkable in combining what is really two movies with two completely different tones in this film. How did you put that together so skillfully?

Well, I wish I could say it was my own skill, I don’t think it was. They’re really smart actors, they kind of looked at the material on the page and did me a favor of playing it honestly. Because it was played realistically it kind of blended anyway. If it hadn’t, I suppose I would’ve had a bunch of conversations about how we were going to get the jigsaw puzzles to fit, but all the parties, Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, and Alan Arkin were really pretty adept. They knew how to play it real, and that kind of saved my bacon.

Did you anticipate that there would be so much connection to current events and what do you think the movie can say about where we are now?

I was kind of stunned, naturally, just to see that the material that I looked at for research from 30 plus years ago all of a sudden was looking exactly like what was on the evening news. That surprised me and it surprised everybody and obviously, it was just a terrible thing for everyone. I expected the movie to be resonant to the sense of what happens when the United States gets involved with the government of another country and overlooks some of the negative things they may be doing because they’re pro-Western, the unintended consequences of revolution, those are the kinds of things I was anticipating. What it ended up being more about, in some ways, was an homage to our clandestine service and our foreign service folks, who, as illustrated by these tragic events do a lot, sacrifice a lot, put themselves in harm’s way, give up a lot to go overseas. Our Foreign Service folks are doing a lot and making a lot of sacrifices for us, and sometimes it’s even the ultimate sacrifice.

It really seems like you shot it as if it was a film made in the 70s, starting from the old Warner Bros. logo.

I thought it would be a trick of the brain, where, if you’re looking at a movie that looks like the kind of movie that was made in the 1970’s, it’s easier for the brain to subconsciously accept this notion that the events they’re watching are taking place during that period. Now, you can’t do that if you’re doing a movie about the Revolutionary War, but that’s why we had this interesting advantage. Even better, that era that I was trying to replicate, to sort of fool the brain, was a really great era for film-making, so I got to copy these great films and great film-makers, Lumet, Pakula, Scorsese.

How does it complicate things when you’re making what is basically a living history film, knowing that the people who were really there will see it?

It’s about a whole story, you know, and you have to maintain the integrity and the honesty of the spine of the story. That’s one profound responsibility because. I want them to look at it and say, “Yeah, that’s basically it.” Now, the real takeover was four hours long, and we have five minutes. That’s the kind of thing that we need to do to sort of compromise. It was raining in the real takeover, it’s not raining there. There are some details that are naturally changed. But the essential spirit of it, that has to be preserved. You know somebody did find a picture of Khomeini with the darts in it and say, “Who did this?” They really did blindfold people and things like that. I also have a responsibility to make a good movie, to tell a good story, because that’s what I do, and so those two things are constantly intentioned with one another, because I want to make it true, but I gotta make it good, you know?

How much was changed for dramatic purposes?

The main change, really, is the cars in the runway. They got to the third checkpoint, they got through, that was all the same, and they got there and sat there and they said, “Well, your plane has been delayed.” I thought, “Well, we’ve all been through that!” And then they got on the plane and left, and so in an effort to sort of externalize that and make the third act work, I added the sort of, them just barely getting away, when in fact they got away a little bit more ahead of the wire. But that really, fundamentally, in my view, doesn’t change the story. The same things happened, you know? It was a close-call in terms of trying to get out in terms of their own deadline. Most of the sins, really, in terms of story-telling, are sins of omission, you know? Not being able to include the fact that Pat Taylor got money from her co-workers or that in Ottawa they approved this special session to make these passports that had never been done before. You have people who are all alive, there’s a natural tendency to feel like, “Well, this is my story.” So you have to sort of do everyone’s story justice, and also take into account the sort of Rashomon phenomenon where you hear slightly different accounts from different people, and definitely maintain the realism of it while not sacrificing what’s really interesting about it.

What movies of the period ended up inspiring elements of this film?

There were a lot of them that I had seen and I still watched again, and I liked “The Thing” for my hair, and I liked Killing of a Chinese Bookie, the Cassavetes movie, for the sort of seedy LA, I just loved the look, the feel, the way they use zooms, the way it felt kind of raw but you also realized it was choreographed—and I didn’t expect to see that coming. There’s a movie called Let Me In that I watched, that’s really good, a guy named Matt Reeves directed it, the remake of the original one, and I thought it was really well directed and watched it with my DP, and we were looking at stuff that they did with focus in that movie, you know, keeping things in the foreground, focus, and maybe soft the background—that was something that I didn’t expect to influence me and it really did.

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Interview: Eugene Jarecki, Director of “The House I Live In”

Posted on October 12, 2012 at 8:00 am

Eugene Jarecki’s new documentary about the failure of the drug wars by any standard — economic, practical, moral — is a powerful and sobering call for treating drug abuse as a public health problem and not a criminal problem. I spoke to him about the film, his decision to include a very personal story, and what he has learned about programs that are more effective in addressing the problems caused by drugs.

You begin with a home movie about your own family and bring in a very personal story of drug abuse in a family close to you, unusual choices for a documentary about an important public policy issue. Why did you do that?

You ask yourself at a certain point when you’re making a film of this kind whether and how to be most honest about the role that you are playing as a pursuer of this information in these stories. Sometimes staying very much out of the way has its place, particularly in a movie like this where there are so many characters and there’s so much to tell. It seems like a clumsy vanity that I would be in the movie at all. I would have thought, “What business do I have being in this movie when the people who really need to occupy screen-time are the people whose the stories will appear in the film, who have so much to say about this broken system, whose lives are such a testament to its carnivorous behavior?” So what role do I have? And then at the end of the day, I played that game for a long time, but I was making a movie where it was very hard to understand what was the modus operandi of the filmmaker, because these stories were chosen in 20 or 25 states; they were all over the place at all levels of the war on drugs. When we would do early screenings for our friends and in the editing room it felt a little bit like there is a driving force in this film that is inside Eugene’s feelings about the country he lives in that is somehow missing here—and how do you inject a little bit of that without getting in the way at all? And so it meant the occasional glimpse of me as a pursuer of this national story, of trying to unravel this national mystery as well, was at least a role I could play. But to have me in there at all, of course, that brought up the fact that I had a deep, intimate, personal relationship with one of the stories I had been telling. In my early cuts in the film that early on, Nannie Jetter appears in this film just as a character, with no mention of the fact that I had an intimate reason for being interested in her. So that changed.

As a filmmaker, I’d like you to talk a little bit about the sometimes glamorous images that we see of the drug world in films, mostly fiction from feature films like “Scarface” and “American Gangster,” but also television shows.

Don’t lump “American Gangster” in with other movies that have been made about the drug war in America because American Gangster is already a post-modern take the drug war in that it is a movie that understands what my movie understands. It’s a movie made from a very critical perspective, where Steve Zaillian’s script really examines the war on drugs and the hypocrisy and the humanity of it all with a lot of wisdom, I was very impressed by “American Gangster,” particularly for a Hollywood movie. It’s hard to get good substance through Hollywood. Hollywood is a town driven by fear and by economics and the people in it, unfortunately whatever their inner politics are, they tend to make movies that portray images that are serviceable to some exploitative vision of industrialized film-making. So you end up seeing over and over dehumanization in the service of making a big box office, and the movies tend to exploit that in us which is our least and our worst rather than looking for that in us which is majestic and human. And so what I can do if I have my little camera and my little team and the idea of a movie, is to be an antidote to that, and to try and portray majesty in the human condition. That includes the majesty of a survivor like Nannie Jetter who survives slings and arrows I couldn’t imagine, or the majesty of a security chief in a prison who finds a way from his position of power to nonetheless risk his own job in talking to me and being so candid, to people up and down the chain of command who, in one way or another, demonstrate tremendous personal reserves. That’s the best antidote I can give to the dehumanized, cartoonish portraits that the industrial system produces.

You’re quite right about the conclusion of “American Gangster,” but it does perpetuate this notion of the kind of glamorous, killing machine that is at the root of drugs and I think is often part of the popular perception.

Yeah, but it does that in the middle of an argument that the U.S. government aided and abetted the injection of drugs into the inner cities. This is an extraordinarily dark aspect of the American story, one so dark I was probably too cowardly to go into it in my movie, and yet that movie, for all of its other Hollywood tropes, notwithstanding that, went into some very intense territory there. And I don’t think portrays Frank Lucas as a hero. I think it portrays Frank Lucas as a human, and as such, he does some stuff which looks and feels like a movie because there’s killing and there’s cut-throatedness, but he also is a human being trapped inside a cycle of ongoing degradation and despair in the African American community. So for him to want to get his, but he does so at the expense of his own people. That is the bitter irony of that character and it is a super-sensitive movie to have understood that. Look, Hollywood is what it is, it needs to sell some tickets, they’re going to do certain things that are conceits that are time-proven, and I don’t want them to do that. But if you gave me the choice to not have a movie or have a rather substantive movie like “American Gangster” that’s going to have just enough of those to get over and get some box-office, I’ll probably choose the second because this needs to be more talked about, not less, and I’ll lose my religion over some of those details.

You have mentioned Portugal as a good counter-example to the US approach of criminalization. Tell me a little bit about what they do well.

They pursued wholesale decriminalization, and you can Google the statistics online. The statistics of success in Portugal, in the early phases but relatively substantive phases of their process, are exemplary. And they speak to the possibility, they speak to what all of us would know to be the case, I mean, we’ve learned in New York City for example, that one of the primary determining factors of why New York City has a reduced crime rate over what it had in the past is that New York State is one of the only states in the country that has actually reduced its prison population. We know in this country statistically from criminology that the prison is criminogenic, that prisons create more crime. So this mass incarceration system creates a spiral towards increased crime and increased incarceration, and when you reduce it, you defuse that spiral, you de-energize that spiral and so when you see other countries in the world that, from a starting point, don’t have our commitment to mass-incarceration and from a starting point do not have industrialized systems of mass-incarceration like ours, you already see that they don’t have that kind of explosive tragedy unfolding and that means their spiral is not getting worse and worse all the time as ours is.

You touch on some very important stuff in the movie, the follow-the-money incentives, like federal programs now that reward local jurisdictions based on the number of drug arrests that they make.

Michelle Alexander talks about them in her book, The New Jim Crow, and she talked to me quite a lot in our interview with her, that stuff was a little bit in the weeds, it’s so specific. But yes, the grant programs that reward police departments for increased drug arrests create a climate of incentivized, low-level law enforcement harassment, so it should be no wonder, for example, that in New York City, we have several hundred thousand stops a year, 350,000 of them become frisks. Of these, 90% of these people are young blacks and Latinos. Of those 350,000 frisks a year, only 10% lead to an arrest. So 90% are just harassment. This is a grotesque system. So once you know that that’s at work, this has to be stopped.

Are there any politicians who are on-front in this issue or are they all terrified?

Congressman Bobby Scott is an exemplar on the matter of the drug war. Senator Jim Webb, who could not get sufficient support for his omnibus crime bill, but should, and should be given support for the setting up of a blue-ribbon commission to study our criminal justice system and overhaul it. Cory Booker’s one of the leading voices against the drug war in the nation and from his mayorship in Newark. And there are others across the country in their small ways, here and there, who matter deeply and who’ve gone up against the country’s drug policies. And the occasional judge will do that, and the occasional public figure will do that, but of course, it’s far too few. The real headline is, it’s far too few.

What do you think the fascination is with shows like “Weeds” and “Breaking Bad” in glamorizing small-time drug-dealers?

I think people are fascinated by drugs in America. We’re one of the most addicted countries in the world for a lot of reasons. I think drugs are a place that despairing people find solace in and escape, I think there’s an increasing level of despair in this country over a sense of existential meaninglessness. The point of being a country has been undermined by capitalism in this country.

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Interview: Matthew Heineman of the Health Care Documentary, “Escape Fire”

Posted on October 11, 2012 at 6:56 pm

“Escape Fire” is a new documentary about what does not work in our system for preventing and treating illness, and what some people are doing to make it better. I spoke to Matthew Heineman, co-director and co-producer of the film.

Tell me about the reactions you have been getting from people who see this film.

I think one of the most inspiring things for us is to really see what happens when a local community screens the film. Just two weeks ago we screened the film at 62 medical schools across the country, all on one night. There is an outpouring of optimism, that this is a problem that we can fix, a problem that we don’t have to wait, necessarily, for someone to come in from Washington, that change can really happen on the local level, sort of doctor-by-doctor community, system-by-system, and that’s how change can happen quickly. One of the real goals of the film is to transform how our country views health and habit. Medical school is the future, so their response is important. We also screened last week at the Pentagon, hosted by the U.S. Army Surgeon General, and have sort of a room full of leadership generals and medical leadership at the Pentagon. And again, they recognize this problem that they have with over-medication, recognize that the status quo’s not working, and the Surgeon General said herself that she really thinks that this film can help change the culture of medicine in the army to begin with, but hopefully with the military at large. So it’s pretty amazing, we’re already seeing impact happening.

A big light-bulb moment for me comes fairly early in the film when somebody says, “We don’t have a healthcare system, we have a disease-management system.”

We did 6-8 months of research on the topic and almost everyone was saying that. It’s a system that profits from sickness, not on health. 75% of healthcare costs go to preventable diseases, so how did this system come to be? Why did it not want to change? We wanted to try and find people out there who are trying to change it. Just to quickly mention one thing I didn’t say about your first question,

It seems to be that the problem which you touch on in the last part of the film, the inevitable corruption of corporate money and politics, is the real insoluble problem. You can have the good will in the world and you can have all the data in the world, but when people are getting paid hundreds of millions of dollars under the current system, it’s very hard to get them to change it.

There’s no question about that. As Andrew Weil says in our film, there’s rivers of money flowing to very few pockets, and the owners of those pockets don’t want to see anything changed. I think what’s different now, and one of the reasons why we made the film is that things can’t get any worse. We’re spending 2.7 trillion dollars a year on healthcare. That’s just a number, but when it comes down to individual companies or healthcare systems or cities or towns or small businesses or individual people, it’s bankrupting us. So, we’re being forced to change, we’re being forced to adapt, because what’s happening now is unsustainable. We see that with the military in our film, we see that with Safeway Corporation in our film, we see that at the Cleveland clinic, that these major institutions are being forced to change, and so I think, yes, the system is making a lot of money out of the way things are, but many of the players in the system recognize how unsustainable it is and thus are being forced to change.

Your movie makes the case that when you spend more money it doesn’t necessarily correlate to better outcomes.

That was one of the most eye opening things for us. In America we have this fascination with faster, bigger, better, now; we want the quick fix. We want that pill, we want that procedure, we view healthcare as something that somebody gives to us or does to us or something that we put in our throat, and I don’t think we really recognize that more isn’t necessarily better when it comes to healthcare, that more can often hurt us, that there’s this term called ‘over-treatment.” We reward for quantity and not for quality. Doctors, we pay for the diabetics to get their foot amputated when they’re 60, but we don’t pay for simple nutritional counseling when they’re 20, 30 or 40 to prevent that from happening in the first place. It’s just a perverse system.

What got you interested in this as an issue?

We started the film three years ago just as the healthcare debate was heating up, and I think like many Americans we were just confused by the traditional media coverage of the topic, I mean, it was so hyperbolic and so confusing; healthcare was really dividing our country. So, I think we really wanted to try to understand, systemically, how it was broken, why it was broken, but also highlight people out there who were trying to fix it. So many films like this are just polemics, that you walk out of there, head hanging low and just hopeless, and I think we knew from day one that we didn’t want to do that. We also knew from day one that we wanted to have real, powerful human narratives that would provoke audiences to want to keep watching.

What can a movie do that an op-ed or book or politician could not do?

I’m obviously biased; I’m a film-maker. I think documentary film has the power to really bring an issue that to life, with real human stories in a way that facts or articles or tweets don’t or can’t. What we really tried to do was make a film that would not only move you intellectually but move you viscerally. We look at healthcare through a number of different lessons and through a number of different characters that I think almost anyone in American can identify with, at least one, two, three or all of our characters in this film and say, “I know somebody like that,” “that’s sort of like me.” It is just the power of film to associate at a more visceral level with an issue. I think that’s what documentary has the power to do.

Why did you choose to name the film after a technique for stopping a forest fire by setting a small controlled “escape fire?”

Escape fire is a metaphor between our healthcare system and a forest fire from 1949 that happened in Mann Gulch, Montana. The fire fighters were filled with hubris, with the latest and greatest technology, they thought they’d have it beat by 10 o’clock the next morning—then the wind shifted directions and they found themselves running down this hill for dear life. The foreman, the leader of this group, came up with this ingenious idea on the spot, where he lit a match and he burned the area around him to consume the fuel, so that when the fire came over to them, he’d be safe in what is now known as an “Escape Fire.” He called to allow his fellow smoke-jumpers to join him, but nobody listened, and they kept running up the hill. They all died, but he survived, basically, unharmed. And I think it’s a really powerful metaphor because it shows that the status quo is so strong, especially in healthcare, it’s so easy to keep doing what we’re doing, and we’re making a lot of money continuing to do what we’re doing, but we really need to look outside the box and think outside the box to come up with an escape fire for our system. Otherwise we’re doomed.

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