Hear the Director’s Commentary on “Looper” In the Theater

Posted on October 9, 2012 at 5:04 pm

It is not unusual for DVDs and Blu-Rays to include director commentary, but it is unusual to listen to the director’s comments in the movie theater. “Looper” director Rian Johnson has recorded director has made an audio guide to the film that can be downloaded to an mp3 player or phone and listened to as you watch the film in the movie theater. According to Slate,

For those still puzzling out the film’s twisty and twirly timeline, Johnson reveals some of the finer mechanics of how the plotting works. He also confirms that the clumsy henchman Kid Blue (Noah Segan) could be Jeff Daniels’ characters’ son—or at least that he’s long enjoyed that theory. And we hear about some of the scenes that didn’t make the final cut: For thoselooking for more of the “My Dinner With Me” scene from the diner, Johnson suggests that there will be much more on the DVD.

For those interested more in the magic of moviemaking, Johnson is particularly open about revealing his intentions—and explaining technical decisions in a way that’s not too wonkish.

And he also points out some insider details — his own parents appear in the film and he has inserted a reference to his groundbreaking earlier film with “Looper” star Joseph Gordon-Levitt. A nice way to sell a second ticket to the film — but please, use earphones!

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Mel Brooks to be Honored by AFI

Posted on October 5, 2012 at 3:46 pm

The American Film Institute has announced that Mel Brooks will be presented with its highest honor. “Mel Brooks is America’s long-reigning king of comedy – and as he taught us long ago, it’s good to be the king,” said Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman of the AFI’s Board of Trustees. “He’s a master of an art form that rarely gets the respect it deserves, and it is AFI’s honor to shine a bright light on laughter by presenting Mel Brooks the 41st AFI Life Achievement Award.” Brooks is best known as writer/director of “The Producers” (he also adapted and wrote the songs for the Broadway musical), “Blazing Saddles,” “High Anxiety,” and “Spaceballs,” but he also produced the serious drama “The Elephant Man” and the lovely “84 Charing Cross Road,” both starring his late wife, Oscar-winner Anne Bancroft.

The award ceremony will take place next June and will be broadcast on TNT. I’m sure AFI will have a lot of fun putting together the line-up of stars and presentations to honor Mel Brooks, and I can’t wait to see it.

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Interview: The Directors of the New Toastmaster Documentary “Speak”

Posted on September 12, 2012 at 8:00 am

Jerry Seinfeld pointed out that when people are asked what scares them the most, more people say public speaking than death — which means that at a funeral, most people would rather be the person who died than the person giving the eulogy.

The new documentary, Speak, is about that fear and about the people who work to overcome it with the help of Toastmasters, an international non-profit providing support and inspiration to help its members find their voices. Much of the film focuses on the participants who have been so successful in telling their stories in public that they are competing for the Toastmasters World Championship. The success of story-telling organizations like The Moth and StoryCorps has increased interest in telling and listening to stories, which made it even more fun to talk to the people behind this film, Brian Weidling and Paul Galichia.

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

How did you get started on this project?

BW: I was out to dinner with my wife, who had her best friend in town from college. She started telling us a story about when she was at American Express, she worked with a woman who was terribly shy and couldn’t look anybody in the eye. One day their group had to go and give a speech or a presentation to the entire set of executives at American Express, like 500 guys, and she was the one who volunteered for it. She did really great, she got all their information across. It felt a little formal at times but it was so out-of-her box, she couldn’t believe that this woman was able to do it. So she asked her afterwards, “Pat, you could barely look me in the eye, how did you do that?” She said, “I joined Toastmasters.”

And so my wife’s friend was like, “You should look into Toastmasters, there’s something there.” That gave us the first kernel about the fear of public speaking and Paul went and started to check out the meetings and we started to talk to some people and that got us involved with wanting to talk with Toastmasters international headquarters. When we went to talk with them, they said, “Oh, you should come out to our convention and check out the world championship for public speaking,” and at that moment Paul and I looked at each other and knew there was an interesting set of stories to be had here.

What is it that people are so afraid of in public speaking?

PG: Chris Matthews says it: “You’re just scared you’re going to make a fool of yourself.” That’s the biggest thing, that you’re going to fumble and lose your place and everyone is listening to every single word that you’re saying and at some point you’re going to stumble and everyone is going to laugh at you, and you’re going to be embarrassed. There’s something very primal about that fear, and that’s kind of what I think is at the core of public speaking fear.

And at toastmasters, is it just the support of the group? Is it really the same sort of effect as Weight-Watchers or Alcoholics Anonymous and groups like them? Is it because they all share the same fear that they’re able to support each other or are there specific techniques that they use?

PG: There are definitely a set of techniques that they use. But the beginning of it–when I first walked into my first meeting I thought, “Oh my god, this is like AA.” I felt that warm, supportive sort of feeling from everybody, there was a smile on everybody’s face and every person got up there and you could tell they might be a little nervous, they were looking back at all these friendly faces—and I can’t remember which Toastmaster said it, I think it was Darren McRoy that at Toastmasters, the meetings become a place where you feel comfortable enough to fail.

If your fear is failure, that seems to be step one to overcome that fear, so if you fail, it’s fine.

BW: Something that is key to getting over your fear of public speaking is just actually doing it, and that seems to be the value a lot of people find in the Toastmaster world. It’s not only the warm environment (because it is very warm and forgiving and all that) but also you get a chance to get up and do it on a regular basis. More than anything, one of the things that we noticed, was in the way people got over the fear of public speaking, they just got encouraged to do it and they built on the self-confidence from the first speech, then the second speech, then the third speech…and I think it gives them a forum to do that.

You focused not so much on the people who were terrified as the people who were really superb; everybody that you featured was world-class.

PG: I feel like we had a place where we figured that was a great launching pad, for fear of public speaking, and to get into this world and to put it in a context of what this entire setting is going to be. And then you start meeting the people who really excel at it and then you get into their human story.

It was hard for me to imagine that any of the people who were competing came to Toastmasters because they were ever afraid of speaking. It seemed to me they all must’ve been comfortable in front of an audience their whole lives.

Paul: One of our contestants says she always felt like she never had a voice. It’s not necessarily a fear of public speaking, but they didn’t feel they had a place to express themselves.

What makes somebody a great public speaker? When you think of the great orators of our time, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton—what gives someone the power to move and inspire?

BW: Something to say is the first thing. They had a message. A lot of people get up there and they don’t really know what they’re going to say—that really hurts you as a public speaker. But when you talk about those great orators, they had very important things to say, and I think the biggest thing is the message. You have to start with a message and they all started with very important messages.

PG: They also have a great self-confidence when they’re up there. They have that presence, they have that essence of “I’m in control, I have a message to deliver and I’m going to stick to that,” so they have that self-confidence and belief. A lot of them work on their voices, they work on their body language, all those things, and I also think they have an element of empathy to draw you in, to get you personally involved in what they’re talking about.

The competitors all had these very, very personal stories of challenge and triumph. They were not talking about great ideas or visions or policy implications, they were talking about their own lives. One thing that I did learn from the movie is the way they do focus on the body language—because when you think about giving a speech, you just think about standing behind a podium, but it’s very choreographed in a way.

BW: I think those speeches are like one-man-shows. It’s one of the things, it’s like a solo-performance piece as opposed to just sitting there and reading something into a microphone. That was one of the cool things about the film, I thought, was that we had these performers and it was really exciting to watch them practice speeches, rehearse it, block it out, and then go for it.

That’s kind of like what you do as filmmakers, of course. Tell me a little bit about how you put the pieces of this film together to make a compelling presentation.

BW: Well, we started with 420 hours of footage and just culling that down to a two and a half hour cut was pretty difficult. Taking it from there, cutting out that final hour, making the decisions about what stayed and what went, that was tough. We had a lot of characters that we loved that you never get to meet because we followed them early on in the contest and then they would lose in the third or fourth round, so their story wasn’t going to resonate all the way through and it was like a red-herring taking you down one path. So, we did a lot of cuts. We looked at so many different characters and at the end, the biggest thing that we had to work on was how we take you through sort of the backdrop of the fear of public speaking and introducing you to Toastmasters without getting you stuck in that world. We knew that once you got to meet Rich and the rest of the characters, from there the movie really takes off. We tried to entertain and inform at the beginning, but then really get to the place where you get these personal stories. That was probably the biggest burden of our post-production process, what did we trim out at the beginning, how did we smooth those corners over to finally get you around the curb to where you meet the characters.

PG: They have so many conflicts, I mean, Rich puts it all on the line to win this line and Lashunda is battling through with her disease that is very severe and you’ve got that heart-warming story with the older couple—and I mean, great personal stories that everyone can kind of connect to on a certain level.

I had a feeling as I was watching it that there was probably going to be a deleted scene section on the DVD with some great stories on it that you just didn’t have time for. Is there something that just broke your heart to cut out?

BW: A lot. There are so many instances of that. Just from sometimes it being just a quirky quote that we had heard so many times that was still making us laugh, but then you’d see it in the context of the overall story and you realize…just not going to work, the audience may not even get it because they weren’t there when it originally happened, that kind of stuff.

PG: We had a lot of people that we met who were just such quirky people and kind of so entertaining in their way—you know, the trapeze artist who is trying to be the world champion of public speaking, you know? Things like that that were very compelling on their own, but once we cut them into the film they just didn’t work.

BW: Took us away from what was really happening.

PG: Yeah, it kind of diminished the rest of what we were really doing. It was sad to see those things go, all of a sudden be like, “Oh, well, that whole trip to Montana….might as well not happened.” So…

Did spending time with these people change your own approach to public speaking? Sounds like you’re both not at all shy, but did you learn anything from it?

BW: Hugely, hugely. The biggest thing for me was that I’m an and-um person. So, when you go enough Toastmasters meetings and watch them hit the buzzer every time someone says and or um, you know, filler words, that really changed me. The other thing that really changed me as a public speaker was the idea of watching these people who are preparing and realizing that the biggest thing that they’re doing is that they’re practicing. They’re working on crafting their speech, they’re spending enough time on that to really make a good message and they’re getting in front of a mirror, in front of their friends in their living room or in front of their Toastmasters club and they’re doing that speech over and over and over again—then you start to see the process of how they become better with that speech and that changed me. I know that it’s all about hard work at this point when it comes to public speaking. If you spend enough time crafting your message and then you spend enough time practicing your message, you’ll do okay.

PG: And I think knowing what you’re talking about really helps you. Another thing that I learned in the process is you kind of learn through osmosis, in a way—just being in the room is a lot, and filming a lot of speeches. You kind of start taking on the good qualities of what a good speaker is, and it was kind of a funny phenomenon at the beginning, because you’re like, “Eh, I’m not that good a public speaker,” and then it’s two years later, you’ve spent so much time in that world…

BW: As well as in the front of Toastmaster’s groups explaining what we’re doing. That’s when we first started to get our belts tightened on being good public speakers.

Do you feel that in 2012 that we are losing the ability to become a great public speaker, that the kids who are growing up today spend so much time texting each other back and forth, that we are losing the ability to communicate that way?

PG: Yes.

BW: I don’t know if that’s happened yet, I feel like when I talk to, like my old communication studies professor, I went to Emerson College in Boston.

It was a great experience. While I was there, one of the first things you do is you have to take a public speaking course. So I think that there’s a movement to try and preserve that type of oratory in the midst of texting and IM’ing and every other sort of digital way that we communicate for the most part, nowadays. I think there’s almost a struggle going on in that there is more of a premium on all this technological information being thrust on us, that the people who can speak and can look you in the eye and deliver a message are the ones who are sort of holding an advantage in society, still, and the ones who are hiding behind texts and emails and stuff like that, they’re going to have a little more difficulty. But I think that at this point, the battle hasn’t been won either way as far as whether texting is going to take over oratory forever—but you look at even the elections. There’s still something that comes down to how a person can present themselves in front of an audience and I’ll make no predictions about our upcoming election but I bet you it will have a very important role, who is a better orator, during the last few months.

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Interview: Nicholas Jarecki of “Arbitrage”

Posted on September 10, 2012 at 8:00 am

Documentary-maker Nicholas Jarecki wrote and directed his first feature film, “Arbitrage,” with Richard Gere giving one of his best performances as a hedge fund manager hiding massive losses who gets caught up in an even bigger cover-up when he and his mistress are in a car accident and she is killed. Susan Sarandon is superb as his wife and indie darling Brit Marling plays his daughter and CFO of the hedge fund. Gere and co-star Nate Parker give two of the year’s best performances. I had a chance to interview Jarecki following a screening of the film in DC.

What could you say in a feature film that you could not say in a documentary?

I think they are actually pretty closely related arts. What you can do is create a world, whereas in a documentary you document a world. In a documentary you shoot for a year and a half and you have got to find the story as you go along, but with a film you design the story in your mind first, and then you work with the group to unlock which you could not see alone in a room, and make it all that more sweet – so there is a real collaborative element to it. You get to make use of many different, exciting, artistic disciplines — set design, performance, music, staging, lighting, you combine all of those things. In the documentary you document reality, though to an extent you bring a stylistic component to any documentary (the good ones do in my opinion) so it is fake. Documentary is fake, too, but maybe less fake.

The music was extremely well-chosen in the film. Tell me a little bit about it.

We have for the score the wonderful Cliff Martinez, who I did not know before I began working on the film. We would put in temporary music, contemporary score pieces. Every time I would say, “What is that? It is great!” it was Cliff. He had been Steven Soderbergh’s composer, “Solaris,” which is just a beautiful score, “Traffic,”a lot of great film scores, and he had just done “Drive.” It was just amazing to get to work with him and we worked very closely together, I played some piano so I drove him nuts pretending that I knew something. He was very tolerant…he said I made him write more cues for this film than his last three films combined.

I think that’s a compliment!

I’m not sure he meant it as a compliment by the end. Then for the other stuff, it was finding the right feeling for a scene, so I just thought, “What would be in these characters’ world? What would his mistress listen to?” I love Stan Getz and that kind of stuff. So I put some of that in there, and in the car crash sequence. There is this wonderful Billie Holiday song from the end of her career. That one was not easy to find. My music supervisor had evaluated 1100 songs, scores, and he actually said at one point “the song doesn’t exist, you are insane, no song will satisfy you.” And I said “no, we have to keep looking,” and so we did, and I must have listened to four or 500 of them and it was the last one he found. It was number 1100. That is kind of how I operate. Billie was expensive, so we ended up getting a great deal on that because it was one of her lesser known songs, which I even like more, it was a bit of a discovery. We wanted something romantic, nostalgic, kind of cocoon-ish feeling of embrace, and yet had some lyrics that resonated with what was going on. Bjork does the closing credits song, and she is one of my favorite artists forever, never licenses for music for film. I just wrote her a letter and she said “yeah, go for it…” So it was great.

You cast two of my favorite young performers, Nate Parker and Brit Marling.

For both of those parts. I saw 40 or 50 people over the course of a year and Brit I met really towards the end. I met Nate very early on and then I had to do a silly process where I did not realize immediately that obviously, the part was his, so I had to go all around the world to come back and understand that it was Nate, but he would write me these great e-mails. He would give me a book to read, I would read it, I would say, “Hey, have you read Pictures at a Revolution?” and then he would write me some five pages about the book and it was really great. Brit we met through Skype, video Skype and she told me very quickly that she had gone to Georgetown and been an economics major and then was offered a job at Goldman Sachs, so once I heard that I was like, “Really? Okay, well, can you come to New York and meet me and Richard,” and she said “when?” And I said “now.” And she left that night and showed up the next morning and we went to my loft and we rehearsed for about 15 min., the three of us, and we all kind of looked around and it was “Yeah, okay, let’s do it!” That was it. So, they were just a joy to work with. I think they’re both really gifted, emerging people, unique, you know? They have something…Britt’s got a look like she kind of looks like everybody else, but not at all, so it’s kind of the movie-star quality, and then Nate has an intense physicality, strength…Britt said about Nate that he radiates integrity.

He does, that’s what’s so unusual. You don’t expect that in his character, and that’s what keeps you interested in him.

Yeah, he brings some humanity to it.

All the other people are very compromised and in his own way he’s the most honest person in the movie which I think is great. How do you continue to make us root for Richard Gere when he keeps doing so many terrible things?

Well, it’s a combination of, obviously, Richard’s incredible performance and his incredible charisma, you know? He’s so charming…what did my mother used to say? He could talk a dog off of a meat wagon, but I think also the design of the film helps. I’m a big fan of Aristotle, he wrote a book called The Poetics a couple of thousand years ago, which is pretty much a manual for dramatists, and I try to follow his paradigm of a tragic hero. It’s not a Madoff where, excuse my language, but he said from jail “f*** my victims.” That to me was a sociopath, and I wasn’t interested in exploring that character but I thought, “Can we do in the Aristotelian way, a good man who was great and got a little carried away?” And then bought into a kind of irresponsibility, but because you can sense that he was good at one point, I think you want it to work out for him.

What’s next? Do you want to do more documentaries, now? You want to do more feature films, you want to do both?

I would say everything. I might actually even make a commercial, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. So, I like that format, the 30 second idea, to do something beautiful, find an emotion in 30 seconds. That’s interesting to me.

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Interview: Jamie Bradshaw of “Branded”

Posted on September 5, 2012 at 8:00 am

Jamie Bradshaw and Alexander Doulerain are advertising executives and brand specialists who have written and directed “Branded,” set in a dystopian future where corporate brands have created a disillusioned population and one man’s effort to unlock the truth behind the conspiracy leads to an epic battle with hidden forces that control the world.

I spoke to Bradshaw at Comic-Con about the movie and how advertising permeates our consciousness.

How do you bring what you know as an advertiser to getting the word out on this movie?

Well, the first thing you do is you find yourself a really awesome movie distributor who has great marketing people who work at it, because you need them to help you shepherd with the kind of distance from the movie they can offer you, a campaign. I’m really grateful a bold company like Roadside Attractions is taking on such a film, because it’s a visionary film, but it’s also a film that, because it’s visionary, is very different from anything in the marketplace and easily could’ve fallen into one of the black holes of distribution, and those guys are awesome. They’re really great at marketing and they’ve come up with a very signature vision of the marketing of the movie.

Do you think people are more anti-corporate right now? Do you think people are more willing to think of corporations as bad guys?

Nope, I actually think people are kind of lukewarm on brands, I think people believe brands and corporations are things so fundamental to our life that—why would you criticize them? And I think that’s exactly why I want to make a movie like this because ultimately, when you turn a blind eye—ultimately, nothing if not critical, because if you turned a blind eye to the things that fundamentally define the world and not think about them, that’s how they get you.

There are studies showing that children recognize logos for products more often than they recognize Jesus or the President.

It’s just awesome how they manage to get you, too. I remember taking my son to McDonald’s as a kid because he demanded to go, and we were writing this film at the time, and I kept thinking, “Oh, the irony,” but he would go and he didn’t want the food, he wanted the toy. I would make him eat the food because I paid for it, for God’s sake. And sure enough, five years later, after five years of telling me, “I don’t like that food, it doesn’t taste good,” but he wanted the toy for five years; five years later, now he likes the food because the food, the taste of the food has become part of his psychology, and as we all know—that’s what marketing is—marketing is fundamentally sculpting and shaping the identity of people.

Yes, that’s right, by making you feel bad about yourself and that you need something that you will get from spending money.

Right, exactly, and over time, changing, truly, and defining, truly, what your taste buds are, how you physically react to everything from sex to buying things to death; everything about life is defined around that kind of consumption experience.

All the brands come to Comic-Con to appeal to these very passionate fans. What do you hope to get from bringing this movie to Comic-Con?

I hope we get awareness of the film at Comic-Con. Obviously I believe the film tells an original story and it has some truth-telling kind of power to it, so perhaps I sound naïve, but I’m hoping people will become more and more aware of it, because if people are not aware of your product, then they can’t consume it. So on some level, the irony of it all is that I’m here like everyone else, obviously trying to sell something to the world in the same way everyone else is. I think the difference is the extent to which this film is actually telling the truth about the world that we live in; it’s a film fundamentally defined by the truth and I don’t think that most of the films that I see are very truth-inspired these days. I think that they’re copies of films that I’ve seen before and there’s something deceitful about that, deceitful in the packaging of themselves as well, because they try to trick you (obviously) into thinking they are stories you haven’t heard—that’s the whole idea of selling a movie these days, right? You have to make it look like it’s something compelling and new that you haven’t seen before, and then—you go and they told a story I’d heard a thousand times before.

A lot of people who want to go see exactly the same movie they saw before. That’s why remakes and sequels are so popular.

Exactly, and it’s very historical and historically traceable, the way in which people can be sculpted over time to believe the things they believe about the world. In the case of movies, sure, Sumner Redstone 20 years ago decided the Blockbuster didn’t need to have anything besides a new-release section. At that point, movies became over about a 15 year period something that most people don’t know very much about at all. Who knows the history of movies? Who’s seen “Citizen Kane” these days? Very few people. Very few people see anything except new films, consumable so that you forget about them the next week or the next moment after you’ve seen them. How better to make a consumable film of that sort than to make a film that’s just new packaging of a story you’ve already seen before? It’s the easiest thing to sell in 15 seconds to an audience because it doesn’t require any story-telling effort. “Oh, I remember that person, that thing I’ve seen before, I know what that is, okay, I’m aware of it, I can go and get it from the kiosk.” But that kind of film-making is doomed to its own deceitful unoriginality.

Netflix exists in exactly the same kind of continuum and packaging space that Blockbuster did. 95% watch what they’re aware of, because how else could you watch anything else? And they’re aware of new-release movies that have saturated the marketplace with their own awareness because they spend tons of money on advertising. People watch the same stuff they watched at Blockbuster and Netflix will be gone at some point very soon, replaced by more sophisticated VOD platforms that target you on a much more psychographic level that allow you to get inside the head of what prepackaged thin you can easily consume even better that they could—it’s all going to be new stuff.

Is there a case where you can think of where branding worked, really I would say, to the betterment of society?

One would think that the 20^th century was about the rise of Marxism and socialism and all this kind of stuff. I think the Soviet Union was one of the best brands ever created. It was a pretty powerful vision of the world in stark contrast to everybody else’s view. I don’t know that the tyranny of choice has left us feeling very good about ourselves.

The world is the world for good and bad. The world exceeds ethics to me because the truth exceeds ethics; the truth is what it is. Ontology would always—any philosopher would tell you, any ontology or fundamental vision of the world—ontology would take precedence over ethics, so if you want to understand the way things are, you’ve got to look at what they are, first, and then marketing is what is; so I think the first thing we have to do is look at what is for what it really is and experience it as such. I hope that what we’ve been able to do is provide the emotional journey that will allow you to see the world for what it truly is and feel it for what it really is.

Tell me about the hero in the movie.

The hero is a brilliant Russian advertising executive, who through various supernatural circumstances was given this brilliant gift for advertising, a gift he does not understand, believes is a curse for a lot of the time, uses it at some point to make a lot of money and live a very powerful life that he then has to, at some point, at one point or another is taken from him by a conspiracy that destroys him, and ultimately it is the gift and technology he uses to turn into a weapon to fundamentally change the world forever. By the end of this film he has used as a weapon things you’ve never conceived of could be weapons, and has fundamentally turned the world into a completely different looking place.

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