Interview: Director Bess Kargman of the Ballet Documentary “First Position”

Posted on May 17, 2012 at 8:00 am

First-time filmmaker Bess Kargman brought her own experiences studying dance to her documentary, First Position, about a crucial, career-defining competition for young ballet artists. The Youth America Grand Prix was launched in 1999 by two former dancers of the world-renowned Bolshoi Ballet, Larissa and Gennadi Saveliev. Its mission is to provide extraordinary educational and professional opportunities to young dancers, acting as a stepping stone to a professional dance career. I spoke to Kargman about how she selected the students she followed through the competition and why classical ballet is still a vital element of the performing arts.

You must be very excited about how well your film has been received.

I am! It’s very exciting, and I never expected anything, so it’s very thrilling.

Tell me how the project got started.

I danced my entire childhood, and this film was one that I always wished had existed. I don’t mean a dance competition film, because actually, I never competed growing up. Dance competitions didn’t appeal to me, and the Youth American Grand Prix wasn’t even around. What I mean is, a film that takes you far behind just the studio and the stage. I was so curious when I would watch dance films (especially dance documentaries) —what else? What do they eat? Whom do they live with? What are their relationships like with their friends? I just was very curious about more of the day-to-day or (some might call it mundane) activities in their lives that I thought maybe could count for a really full and interesting story. I ended up quitting my job to make this film, my first film, and I thought maybe by choosing a topic that was quite dear to me and that I had lived for a number of years growing up—maybe I’d be able to do this story justice.

Is it possible to be a dancer without a very supportive family? It seemed to me that these families were giving up as much as the girls and boys were.

I think in Europe and potentially other parts of the world, it’s possible to make it as a dancer with less support, but in America, where a 12-year old can’t drive him or herself to ballet class, a 12-year old can’t pay for point shoes, a 12-year old can’t pay for costumes, it really requires the whole-family’s buy-in. In Europe it’s more common to go to Ballet boarding school from a very, very young age and in that case the school takes on the burden of the costs.

How did you find the dancers that you focus on?

The story of how I found the first two dancers is sort of magical. A year before we began filming I was walking along the street in lower Manhattan and I saw huge banners for the American Grand Prix. It was the 2009 finals. I had heard about the competition but I really didn’t know all that much about it, so I snuck into the theater and got the last seat, high in the nosebleeds. If I had gone for a coffee I would’ve missed it—out on stage walked the most splendid, itty-bitty baby ballerina I had ever seen for someone so young. She was 11 at the time and I was just blown away by her strength and artistry and technique and maturity on stage. So I got up and walked out, and said, “This has to become my first film, I have to do this.”

I had no idea who it was, but I knew I wanted her to be in the film, and I recall that her name sounded half-Asian, so I went through the roster of 300 soloists that year, and the name Miko Fogerty popped up, and I said, “Oh my gosh, this has to be her.” And then her brother, Jules Jarvis Fogerty, his name was also under hers, and I said, “Oh, this is too good to be true. She has a brother?” So you know interesting things might happen when you have a sibling duo, so they were the first two people.

I then set out to sign a really diverse array of kids. When you’re making a competition film, if you try and predict the winners you’re risking the entire success of your film on factors you have no control over. I just couldn’t live with the idea of shooting for a year, shaping a film which no one would watch because it all came down to who would win—and I chose the wrong one. Instead, I chose kids whose personal stories and personalities and hobbies and families were so unique and interesting that I thought, even if the last five minutes don’t go so well at the competition, and no one takes anything home, that maybe the audience would still have a wonderful time if they fell in love with these dancers and learned who they are as human beings. That’s why the competition really only takes up a third of the film, I focused less on the competition and more on young dancers having a shared dream and being really diverse from all over the world, all different types of personalities and different age groups. Interestingly, when I was getting some advice from some very experienced film-makers they said I was really setting myself up in a bad way if I chose kids from all different age divisions, rather than from one age division. They said that if I didn’t have the kids fighting against each other on the dance floor, that it would lack a lot of drama—and I just thought to myself, well, the whole point is to show how the stakes differ depending upon age and to show how a dream differs depending upon your age or not. Maybe the 11 year olds want it just as badly as the 17 year olds, so I thought even if maybe there wasn’t that backstabbing and there weren’t kids giving each others terrible looks right before they’re about to go on stage because they’re not in the same age division, I was still willing to take that risk because I really did want to show more than just one age division. And what mattered was the individuals, not who they were competing with.

Why did you leave dance?

My advice to young dancers who want to make it as professionals is: Do not do it unless it is literally the only thing that you want to do with your life. It’s really difficult. It’s so demanding both in terms of your time and the way you have to use your body and it’s expensive. So, basically I came to the determination when I was thirteen and half and said, “I love other things just as much.” That signaled to me that maybe it wouldn’t be smart or healthy for me to focus on that exclusively. I became an athlete and I loved sports just as much, and then I wanted to go to high-school and play sports. So, I think what’s good about the age that I left dance was that I never lost that glorious appreciation for it. I think maybe if I had continued to stay in it and pushed myself, full knowing that I liked other things just as much, maybe I would’ve come to resent it or be bitter. I know that sometimes young dancers are hurt badly with ballet, because they’re pushing themselves, like every day is a struggle.

Where did you learn how to make films?

I never went to film school. I earned a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia and in my final semester there, I took a very influential, inspiring class with a substitute teacher named John Alpert who is a documentary film-maker for HBO, and he kind of challenged me to see if I could make a film myself. A couple of years passed before I was willing to take that risk, so I freelanced as a journalist and then I found a subject that I couldn’t not do. I always give advice to first-time film-makers and my advice to them is: you have to do for your first film a topic that is very personal, where you have some sort of area of expertise to compensate for the fact that you’re a first-time director—so I thought, “I know a couple of things, I know hockey and I know ballet,” and thought, “Let’s try ballet.”

How did you get your young performers to be comfortable enough to be honest with you?

One thing I learned very quickly is that dancers are used to expressing themselves with their bodies, not their mouths, so in the beginning they were exceptionally shy which is scary. At first, our cameraman said, “You’re going to have to recast this entire film because they’re not opening up to you.” We then decided to turn the cameras off and really bond with them and to get to know them. We worked to earn their trust. I don’t blame them, you know. If were expecting them to really open up their lives and share their stories, then we should allow them to get to know us as well. I got a skateboard for my cameraman so he could go skateboarding with them and we’d go point-shoe shopping and just do some fun stuff, and then they opened up in a big way, which was essential. I am fascinated by their stories and would love to come back and do a sequel in ten years: “Second Position.”

There are so many great movies about ballet. Do you have favorites?

The one that I watched over and over on repeat growing up, was The Children of Theatre Street – The Story of the Kirov Ballet School, the one that’s narrated by the princess. Forever engrained in my memory are the slow-motion shots of the dancers running, doing grand jetés on the beach. There are also all of the classic ones that I would find—in the days before YouTube. There is now an abundance of ballet content, but some of the things that I would watch on VHS tapes growing up were not translated, they were Russian documentaries—but it didn’t matter because you just absorbed the visuals.

You touch very lightly but candidly on the issue of ballet’s traditional approach of focusing on white dancers with long, thin, slender bodies.

It was important to me on that and other issues to let the people in the film speak for themselves. You never hear my voice, even asking questions. It is a complicated issue because ballet is grounded in traditions that include a very particular body shape and line. But dance has many varieties and opportunities and everyone who loves dance can find a place.

What do you think it is that makes classical ballet so enduring over hundreds of years in a world where people listen to hip-hop, and as you said, watch Youtube videos—why is it that we still go to a live theater to see dancers dance the same dances they’ve been doing for hundreds of years?

I think that there’s something about ballet which is magnetic. When you see people doing things with their bodies that are so disciplined and practiced, and requires so much of both TLC and training. I think that you don’t even have to know anything about ballet to know when you’re seeing something on stage that is incredible. I think that ballet’s focused on lines of the body. It’s just beautiful, it’s really beautiful, and I think that-everyone marvels when people can do things with their bodies that the average human being can’t do.

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Interview: Writer-director Marc Erlbaum Asks About the Meaning of Life

Posted on May 14, 2012 at 4:32 pm

I am always happy to talk to Marc Erlbaum, who makes films that inspire and challenge as they entertain. I love his audacious new project. He is “crowd-funding” a new film about the biggest question of all: the meaning of life.

Where did this idea come from?

I’ve been researching crowdfunding sites lately because we’re considering a campaign to raise money to do a soundtrack for my film “A Buddy Story.” I get requests all the time for the soundtrack of my last film “Café,” but the distributor never produced one, so this time we’re thinking about doing it ourselves. Simultaneously, we have this great facebook community for my company, Nationlight Productions, and so I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how to keep people entertained, engaged and energized on a regular basis. As I was exploring the crowdfunding sites, it occurred to me that it would be great to come up with a huge campaign to involve people in something big and meaningful and push the envelope a little bit.

What is crowd-funding and why is it the best way to launch this project?

Crowdfunding is this innovative and alternative way for people to get projects funded. Rather than raising large amounts of funds from traditional investors, it’s a way to harness the communal spirit of the internet to pitch a huge number of people on giving you a small piece of your goal. For the one raising the funds, it opens up a tremendous potential funder base. For those contributing, it offers the opportunity to get behind something from the inception and help it along toward realization.

As far as this particular project goes, crowdfunding is the best way to launch it for 2 reasons:

1) Pragmatically, it would be hard to convince someone to invest the requisite funds for this – the revenue potential is iffy at best, and frankly it’s a bit hair-brained (but in a good way!). With crowdfunding, the contributors aren’t looking at the financial revenue potential, they’re supporting something that interests them, and they’re more concerned with helping out and being entertained than they are with fiscal rewards.

2) Ideologically, I believe the “meaning of life” probably has something to do with community and generosity. Undertaking this kind of project with thousands of collaborators is much more exciting than going about it yourself or with a few people looking over your shoulders to see if you’re making the most commercial decisions. We’re going to be asking our contributors where to point our cameras – they’re feedback and participation is what’s going to make this interesting.

Where do most people get their ideas about the meaning of life?

Good question. My sense is that most of the time we’re too busy or distracted to think about the meaning of life. Those who are involved in some sort of spiritual practice – whatever it may be – do seem to tend to set aside a fixed amount of time either each day or each week to consider the bigger questions, but then we get engrossed in our mundane affairs and we may lose consciousness of what’s really essential. My goal has always been to try to keep my head in the clouds and my feet on the ground – engage in the world, but don’t lose awareness of a higher purpose, and never stop trying to figure out what that is at any given moment.

Where will you find your interview subjects?

From the Beliefnet files of course! The truth is that we’ll be doing a lot of research on our part to find both known and obscure figures who have something to say about life and its meaning. But we’ll also be looking to our contributors and fans to make suggestions – someone’s shoemaker may be an amazingly profound person who no one has never thought to interview before.

How will you keep your funders up to date?

We’re going to launch a website called lifemeanswhat.com (I’ve already paid $9.99 for the url, so I better raise this million dollars!) In addition to videos that we plan to post a couple times a week, we’re also going to have an ongoing blog which will keep everyone right there with us every step of the way.

Why is making a movie a better way to explore this question than writing a book?

The primary output of this project will be a year’s worth of web content which we may or may not decide to compile into a feature film when we’re done. Contributors are buying into a year long experience rather than a one-time program. I think this will feel more like one’s along for the ride rather than just getting it all at once. One could do it as a serialized print piece, but I’m a visual storyteller, so I’m probably a bit biased toward visual media. What I really love about doing this as a web project is the transmedia opportunity to document our search in so many different ways. There are some who love to read, and those who never read anymore – so I think we’ll have something for everyone.

Why is this question so hard to answer?

That’s too hard, I can’t answer that!

But that won’t stop me from giving my opinion of course. I think that everyone wants meaning, but a lot of people don’t want it to be shoved down their throat. And we’re suspect of those who try to push it on us. How do I know that your meaning is THE meaning? Is there only one meaning, or can everyone have his/her own meaning? Unfortunately, purveyors of meaning have often exploited something pure for purely selfish aims, so we don’t know who to trust and we’d often just prefer to distract ourselves with more immediate concerns than wander into those murky waters.

Why is it important?

My goal is not to push any one meaning of life. What’s important to me is to encourage people to search for it. There are those who believe there is no meaning, and others who have never really been encouraged to stop what they’re doing and look around. My feeling is that if we can make the search fun and relevant, people will be surprised what they find even if the ultimate riddle still remains to be solved.

Who have been your most important guides and teachers in answering this question?

My parents taught me to always think outside the box. My wife and children teach me that every moment is precious. The Baal Shem Tov taught that it is not enough to find one’s own way, but each of us needs to carry a torch that shines a light for those around us as well.

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Interview: Simon Wincer of the Horse Racing Film “The Cup”

Posted on May 11, 2012 at 8:00 am

Australian director Simon Wincer specializes in movies featuring big animals. His most successful film is “Free Willy,” but his most frequent stars are horses, in films like “The Young Black Stallion,” “The Man from Snowy River,” and the fact-based “Phar Lap.” His newest film, “The Cup,” is based on the real-life story of the 2002 Melbourne Cup, when jockey Damien Oliver, devastated by the loss of his brother, best friend, and fellow jockey Jason Oliver in a tragic racing accident, rode the Irish horse Media Puzzle, to a triumphant win. I spoke to Wincer about working with the great Irish actor Brendan Gleeson, who plays the Irish trainer, about the real-life mother of the Olivers who supported her sons even though their father died in a racing accident, and what he wants families to learn from the film.

What were some of the challenges you faced in making this film?

Raising money to make it was one. It took a while but they were changing the track where we were shooting the film. I wanted to capture it as it was before it changed, so we had to shoot some of it in advance. Then eventually when we did start production, it didn’t take all that long, although because of Brendan Gleeson’s availability—he was just available for a very short window—we ended up having to shoot the film in winter. and of course, it was Melbourne’s wettest winter I think in almost forever. So the racing sequence had to be abandoned and shot in the spring when the tracks had dried out. It was an adventure, but it was fun. The weather is always a challenge. I’ve been to places in the world, as for example, in Turkey where it has never ever snowed on the Mediterranean, and of course we were shooting there and bang! Snow. I’ve seen it in the desert where it hasn’t rained in five years and guess what happened when we arrived to make a film? We got ten inches of rain, so that tends to happen to film crews, but that’s the whole fun of it.

It was a very big important story in the news when it happened, but what made you think it would be a great movie?

It was such an extraordinary story, the fact that the mother had been through it twice really interested me, how a woman can be so strong and put under such extraordinary stress in life. I suppose I’ve always wanted to do a film set around Australia’s biggest annual event, which is the Melbourne Cup. In Australia it’s called “the race that stops the nation” because literally everyone in the country stops—this is the Melbourne Cup and every office has a suite, everyone has a bet on. It’s a tradition and it’s part of our culture. This year it’ll be the 152^nd Melbourne Cup, so it’s a very old tradition. It’s a public holiday and all that sort of stuff, so it’s just part of that culture, you know? And that fascinated me to build the story around that; you need a good story to do it and I felt that was the story.

Tell me more about Mrs. Oliver. She lost her husband and her son and still wanted her other son to keep racing.

She’s a very strong lady. She was very much part of a racing family and it was just their lives, despite the fact that it’s touted as the world’s most dangerous job. It’s highly dangerous, but it’s just in their blood. She’d seen these two little boys wanting to be like their dad and grandfather. I think she just wanted Damien to make up his own mind whether he decided to ride or not. She’s quite an extraordinary woman. She’s quiet, but she’s very strong and very, very brilliant to go through that emotionally, which I tried to capture when she walks into the hospital to see her son, flashing back to the memory of her husband, which was exactly what she had been through pretty much. It was extraordinary. I suppose it comes from a slightly different era when values are different and she’s just one of those stoic women, just extraordinary.

I want to ask you the same question I asked the director of “Secretariat,” which is how do you make a race exciting when everyone knows the outcome?

People have said to me in Australia, “God, you know, I was on the edge of my seat, thinking that he wasn’t going to win the race, even knowing that he won the race.” I wanted, first of all, to make it real. I didn’t want it be hokey. Quite often in these horse-racing movies you see the hero horse gallop past and if you look closely, the horses are being gently held by the jockey so the hero’s horse can run past them. I decided not to do that. Because I’m also a horse person and I’ve been riding and around horses all my life, I can certainly detect something like that, so I just wanted to keep it real. And I wanted to capture the sound. It’s incredibly dynamic when those horses go fast; I can remember every take, the crew— many of them hadn’t been to the races in their lives—just the excitement to see these things come passed us at extraordinary racing speed and so close together. Everybody just goes, “wow.” So, I wanted to capture that on the screen. I couldn’t change the result because there it was in history, but I just thought if we could make the staging and the filming of the race dynamic enough, people would get wrapped up in it because they’ve shared in this transformational journey before the race happens, and then they can share it and triumph when he eventually does win. The race which we restaged is almost identical to the actual race, and I was a slave to that and wanted to do it exactly the same. It’s been viewed by so many people, I didn’t want it to get it wrong, you know?

You had quite a casting challenge, not just to cast actors to play real-life people who were well-known, but also to cast the horses. How did you cast the horses?

We looked at about 800 horses, I think, before we eventually settled. We bought 60 and leased another 40, and again, I wanted them all to match the originals. In real life Media Puzzle wasn’t an easy horse, it was a difficult horse. Somehow of course, Damien has this incredible relationship with it, so you need to find something a bit special that’s got a bit of attitude and all that sort of stuff. You have to have several because one could get injured, and you can only do a couple of takes a day when you’re doing the racing scenes. Then you have to change the whole field. So we had more than one Media Puzzle. The main one who did the close-ups with the actors was a horse called Spike. He’s now in another show I did, playing a tribute to a famous horse called Phar Lap, which is another movie I made a long time ago. He’s just a wonderful horse because he just has this sort of attitude and you know, he’s a bit of a handful, but that’s what you want because they easily make wonderful trained horses. He does the most extraordinary act in this new show and it’s quite moving because he’s just so graceful when you see him galloping into the arena in the spotlight, all on his own, no bridle and stuff like that, it’s fantastic—and that’s what you look for, you just look for something just a little bit special with the right look in the eye and that sort of stuff.

Brendan Gleeson is wonderful in the film.

Brendan is another joy, yes, he is one of the world’s greatest actors, I don’t think anybody would dispute that when you look at the body of his work which is extraordinary. When I first talked with Brendan, I was introduced to him by telephone, and I was in Australia and he was in Ireland. He told me, “I’d just like to clear one thing up, I think that the Irish dialogue needs a little work,” and I said to Brendan, “That’s just what a Texan and an Australian think of as Irish dialogue.” That sealed the deal, because he was concerned that he didn’t want to change a word without our go-ahead, of course, but his input was fantastic. So, I happened to have to go to Dublin, and Brendan and I were able to spend a couple of days together going through the screenplay and all these scenes and then we were able to introduce him to the real Dermot and then he was able to go down and spend some time with Dermot, just outside Dublin and really get to know a bit about a trainer’s life and boy, he’s just wonderful—I guess when you work with a great actor, it raises everybody’s game, and it might be playing tennis with someone better than yourself and you rise to the occasion. I can’t speak highly enough about what a nice man he is and what a pleasure to work with and what he brings to the set, not only the energy and good vibes but just great ideas.

What lesson would you like families to take away from this film?

The theme is how we choose how we to want to live. Damien chose to do it by riding in this race. I suppose it is the drive and the human spirit. He was so down and everyone thought he shouldn’t be doing it and he had this terrible losing streak but persistence wins through in the end. It’s about dealing with adversity in a positive way. I think if people are lifted up at the end, then I’ll be very satisfied because while it’s extremely sad, it’s incredibly uplifting at the end when he rides — and that magic moment when you touch the heavens, it’s been forever etched in Sydney Australian sporting folk lore.

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Interview: Writer/Director Richard Linklater of “Bernie”

Posted on April 27, 2012 at 8:00 am

Richard Linklater has directed some of my favorite movies like “Waking Life,” “Before Sunset,” “School of Rock,” and “Dazed and Confused.” He talked to me about his new film, “Bernie,” starring Jack Black as the real-life Bernie Tiede, the most popular man in the small Eastern Texas town of Carthage even after he confessed to killing a wealthy widow and stuffing her in a freezer for nine months. Tiede, now in prison for the murder, was a funeral director who became friendly with octogenarian Marjorie Nugent, known as “the meanest woman in east Texas.” She lavished him with gifts and trips and made him her heir, but then became possessive and demanding and abusive. He shot her, hid the body in her freezer, told everyone she was in assisted living, and spent a lot of her money helping people in the community. Shirley Maclaine plays the widow and the prosecutor is played by Matthew McConaughey. As Ms. Nugent’s nephew wrote in the New York Times:

There are little things in “Bernie” that aren’t exactly true, bits of dialogue, a changed name here and there. But the big things, the weirdest things, the things you’d assume would have to be made up, happened exactly as the movie says they did. The trial lawyers really did wear Stetsons and cowboy boots and really were named Danny Buck Davidson and Scrappy Holmes. Daddy Sam’s barbecue and bail bonds, just a few blocks from the courthouse in Carthage (population: 6,700), really does have a sign that says, “You Kill It, I’ll Cook It!” And they really did find my Aunt Marge on top of the flounder and under the Marie Callender’s chicken potpies, wrapped in a Lands’ End sheet. They had to wait two days to do the autopsy. It took her that long to thaw.

One of the highlights of this film is the commentary from the people in Carthage. Are those real townspeople really talking about their own experiences?

Oh, they’re definitely, mostly real people, I mean, “non-actors,” but some are actors. Most are people from the area of the state near Carthage and surrounding towns. Some of them were actually intimate with Bernie and Mrs. Nugent, so it’s kind of a mix.

It feels so natural. Was it unscripted?

No, it’s scripted, but they kind of put it in their own words, quite often. I looked at a lot of people and found people that could be themselves, doing material and throwing in. You know, some of my favorite ones were things that people just threw in there. When Sonny Carl Davis, who’s an actor, goes off on the town, “He’s my daddy, he’s my cousin,” you know, he’s got a way with words. And Juli Erickson saying, “Honey, there are people in this town who woulda shot her for five dollars,’ stuff like that.

What made you decide on this quasi-documentary format?

I really never thought of it much as documentary, because the stories were dramatic. I saw a story told from town gossips—and Southern gossip is such a huge thing. I attended the trial, and read and got my hands on everything. I was going through Skip Hollandsworth’s journalistic notes where he had interviewed everybody, and what they were saying was really kind of funny, I felt, and very telling of the town and of the situation. If you think about it, Bernie was in jail, Ms. Nugent was gone, and they’re not there to speak for themselves. As in small towns, with any event like this, all that’s left is the community itself reverberating around with opinions. If you were to go to Carthage, anybody over a certain age would be able to tell you what happened; how they knew Bernie, about the nine months she was in the freezer, how he preached at church, “we hung out, went to a party at his house,” maybe how he should’ve killed her to get away with it—everyone has their own idea, how they would’ve done it? You know, it’s just one of those crazy things. It’s a very rare event, such a notorious crime in that area. The guy says on closing credits, “we don’t have stranger killings, usually it’s family.”

You certainly deglamorized Matthew McConaughey. I love the choice of the glasses, they were wonderful.

Oh, you liked those? Let me think about it, he also had little plumpers in his mouth, and a little gut, an extra 25 pounds. He still had a ways to go to get to the real Danny, but he tried.

And you were at the trial? I never heard of a change of venue to a different city because the defendant was too popular!

Yeah, no one’s ever heard of that. I’ve talked to every judge, DA, defense attorney, since this trial. “Have you ever heard of a trial being moved because it was too because he was too well liked and they didn’t think they could get a conviction, so they had to move to get a jury of his peers?” People just kind of go, “No, I’ve never heard of that.” Skip’s article probably didn’t help Bernie—it just was not on terms that were any good. I think Danny Buck started feeling pretty confident at some point and there wasn’t a plea bargain, or it didn’t work out or something. At the end of the day he definitely got a really hard sentence. Well, the deck was stacked against him. First off, the change of venue, and then the judge disallowed the psychiatrist to examine him, who was going to speak on behalf of his disassociated moment, temporary insanity, and that got disallowed. That was his only hope. As Scrappy tells it, I had a guy who had confessed and told em’ everything and he didn’t have a lot to work with by the time he was with Bernie and yet he was really going for this thing…. The evidence that Danny was allowed to show him at trial, pulling Ms. Nugent out of the freezer, with some really horrific images and out of context. And he successfully prosecutes him as the other— not like us— flying first class, going to the opera.

Tell me about working with Oscar winner and old-style Hollywood movie star Shirley MacLaine.

There’s no one like her. I had always had her in mind for this part, I guess because she had played a Texas grand dame a couple times already, as Aurora in “Terms of Endearment” and the sequel, and I was just lucky she did it. I think she wanted to work with Jack. It’s not a huge part for her, but I think she had fun. It kept her laughing, but she was sort of perfect. What was funny, I think, Shirley liked Ms. Nugent. The first thing she told me was, “even after she’s dead, she’s still around. That’s how I’m going to be! That’s how I’m going to be, you can tell me, that’ll be me.” I think she’s right! There was so much historical record, there was so much testimony. It is a little bit of a dance of how much of a bitch, to what level the bitchiness should reach, but at the end of the day, Ms. Nugent was actually a lot worse than Shirley was in the movie, according to all accounts. Shirley kind of humanized her, but that was my goal. I think the fun part—and this is why I love Shirley for the part—is that she still has that little girl infatuation, she’s still very sensual. When they were first together we called it the honeymoon, the time where she was happy, when out of the blue this terminally miserable lady who could never be happy with anyone or anything, had some fun, a guy paid some attention to her, before she had to possess him and ruin it. There were some happy times there.

I know you’ve worked with him before, but Jack Black would not have been the first person to come to my mind for this part, because Bernie’s a very restrained character, a kind of repressed character—and I think of Jack Black as irrepressible.

Well, that’s what you know from parts you’ve seen him in—but I know him, and having worked with him before, I knew he could do it. I was just lucky he wanted to do the part and found it interesting. And you know, a good actor like Jack, you find there’s a part of Jack that could relate. Bernie is a guy who’s non-confrontational and Jack really is the sweetest guy in the world, a total nice guy. He saw Bernie very clearly, and could in some ways relate to him. And who else could sing like that? There’s really no one else at the end of the day who could play this part, who could sing to Bernie’s actual level.

I love the parts when he sang, when he steps in at that funeral and sings “Amazing Grace,” it was fantastic. What was it like to stage a big musical number from “The Music Man?”

Fun! A dream come true! Anytime, you’re making a musical, it’s just fantastic. I felt like, “I’m Vincente Minnelli, and it’s the fifties and I’m making a musical!”

Interview: Philippe Falardeau of “Monsieur Lazhar”

Posted on April 25, 2012 at 3:32 pm

“Monsieur Lazhar” is an Oscar-nominated Canadian film about an Algerian immigrant who takes a job as a substitute teacher even though he is not qualified and ends up learning a great deal from his students and teaching them more than either they or the school expected. I spoke to writer/director Phillippe Falardeau about his remarkable, if almost accidental, start in film-making, how he worked with children to create such sensitive performances, and the challenges of adapting a one-man play to tell a story on film.

How do you work with children on such a sensitive and difficult subject? The film opens with two of the children finding that their teacher has committed suicide. Ho do you take children to whom nothing bad has happened and help them create that performance?

There are some important things in what you’re saying. First of all, how do you work with children to craft a film that’s saying that and the fact that you’re saying we want to protect the children from that. I think the school wants to do the same thing. The school has all kinds of protocols and rules and regulations trying to figure out all kinds of possible situations, but the film is saying no matter how many protocols we have and how many rules, we won’t be able to prevent stuff from happening, because life happens, period.

And some of those rules have the opposite impact, like saying that a teacher cannot touch a child for any reason.

Exactly. So, working with the children—it’s interesting, because, we see the film and we see the stuff happening through the children’s characters. But you have to remember that when you’re crafting the film, these things happen over a period of three to four months so they see the stuff coming. There’s an audition, and then you talk about the subject with the parents and with the children, and so it’s slow in happening. It’s never a traumatic experience for the young actors, because it’s an abstract idea on paper, first, and when we’re on the set, we’re at three months later and we’ve talked about it a lot. And I found out that at that age, ten eleven, twelve, they’re often dismissed as too young to talk about it, but that is not true. Even though none of these events happened to me when I was a young kid—I hated it when adults were saying, “It’s not a subject for you. We can’t talk about it. You’re too young for that. You’re too young for that.” Especially when I had a question about something. So, I wanted a film that would say, “No, they’re not too young for that, actually,’ and Bachir Lazhar is not treating them like that—he’s treating them like equals.

Even when he makes a mistake in thinking they’re capable of more than they are.

Exactly, and I think life finds a way—or the children will find a way—of saying, well, this is just a little over our heads. Because there is the issue of competence: are they able to do a dictation taken from Balzac? And there’s the issue of life and the questions that are raised by some events; you cannot hide them from children, even if they’re ten years old. So for me, it’s just a long process of audition, taking your time, not just throwing them in front of a camera and saying, “OK, read your lines,” and then, “Bye.” It’s meeting the person, giving them 15, 20 minutes—and if I like them, I invite them back for another audition that’s more complex, and then I work with a coach—she’s an actress also—but she’s good with kids, so, she rehearsed with me and she knows where I want to go in terms of tone, so when I’m off on other tasks, she keeps working with the children. We never leave the children alone. And the third part which is probably the most important, I tried to make the set a summer camp. They know it’s work—but if they have fun, I believe that they trust you, and if they trust you they can reach into their own emotions to give you some personal stuff, like the cathartic scene with the boy. I wish I could say I have a director’s trick I can use on children. I don’t. It’s just life happening there, because I think the children feel comfortable. With the young girl, it’s a little bit different because she’s a very good actress, and she could snap out of the emotion and just look at me and say, “Do you want another one? Do you want another take?” and she could get back into it. The boy was a slow process and difficult process. But in any case, I think trust is the key to work.

And they seemed to develop a very nice relationship between the two of them—a trust relationship.

Yes, yes, absolutely. And all these kids became friends for the duration of the shoot. At the end of the shoot, it was really emotional—it was like the end of a full school year–and they had this nice experience. I wish I would’ve been them when I was young, living through that experience. Some of them probably won’t become actors. I think they she will, the young girl named Sophie Nélisse who plays Alice, if she wants to, but she’s a gymnast and she’s a gymnast at a very, very high level—and that’s her goal in life, so I think she’s an accidental actress.

You took quite a challenge to adapt a one-person play into a movie and can you talk a little about that? You worked with the playwright, I think?

A little bit. She was the first person who read my different drafts and we bounced ideas, although I didn’t want her to co-write, and she didn’t want to co-write either. She knew the play had to transform and become something else. On stage, there’s one man interacting with people who are not there and that we don’t see or hear, but by his reaction we can make them out in our minds. As members of an audience, we’re actually making a film in our head while we’re watching the play. so it’s not that difficult for me to make that into a screenplay.

Tell me what is important about making your main character an immigrant.

In Canada, we have so much land, so much space, and so few people. Now we’re up to 32 million. We’re a country of immigrants. First of all, French immigrants and then the British immigrants, but soon after the Confederation in 1867, you need to colonize all the West, the farming land; so Ukrainians, Polish people—they all came from Eastern Europe to the west, there’s Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, and then the new wave of immigrants, the Chinese immigrants, and the west of to Vancouver. And in Quebec during the 1990’s, there were a lot of immigrants from Algeria because of the civil war there. Because they speak French, it’s more natural for them to go to France, but they have a difficult relationship with France because it was an ancient colony, so it makes sense for them to come to Quebec. America is so good at integrating and assimilating culturally and identity-wise with people because it’s such a strong political melting pot. In Canada, it’s a tapestry. It’s really something that immigrants can continue being immigrants for at least one generation without really embarking on what is Canada. You know, because, I don’t think Canada has a strong identity, except for some political choice we make, like health-insurance, for instance. We have a hard time defining ourselves…we often define ourselves negatively, we are not Americans.

In Quebec it’s different. We don’t have that identity crisis because we speak French, but we have this crisis of “will we exist in still 50 years” because we have linguistic assimilation. So, in the past ten years I’ll have to admit that our policy has been aligned to the U.S. politics in the post 9/11 era—we’ve been closing our doors to immigrants and refugees.

I was interested in having an immigrant character, but for me the most interesting thing that I was able to revisit who we are through his eyes. You have this guy who comes to school, he knows nothing about the rules and protocols, and he’s kind of clumsy, and he’s not a teacher. I like the fact that he’s lying to get his job, and he’s telling the truth to the immigrant officer—so it’s a nice way for us to look at where we’re at and it allows us to ask ourselves, is that a comfortable place? It’s like the Polaroid of where we’re at, and on certain issues like touching or not the children, I think we’ve gone too far…but by using this man who knows nothing about our values here, he’s like candid, in a way—he just does what he does we see ourselves through his eyes.

One thing that I thought was really strong in the film was the look of it. Can you talk a little about what your discussions were with the cinematographer and what you were trying to say? I thought the look of it matched the emotional tenor of it very well.

The first decision I had to make was with the format. Was it going to be the normal rectangular format or the cinemascope? Since it’s not an action movie or there’s no landscape, you don’t think of cinemascope. Then my director of photography, said, “I think you should shoot your first cinemascope format,” and I said, “Why? I want a documentary feeling.” He could not tell me why rationally, yet he had this instinct. So I said, “Ok, I’m going to do some tests.” So, we’re testing, and we have children in the classroom, and it’s two weeks before shooting, so I’m testing the different formats and I’m holding the camera at the height of the desk, and I’m realizing that with the cinemascope format, you have a feeling that you have more children, because you’re horizontal. You’re skipping the roof and the bottom. You don’t have more children, but you have the sense that there are more children. So that was the first decision. The second decision, I wanted only natural light from the exterior, I wanted it to be very bright, very luminous, colder at the beginning, just bluish at the beginning, and as the season progressed and as the film progressed, just a little warmer. So the premise of that film is so dramatic that I didn’t want the film to drown and be heavy—so I used the photography to pull the film towards the light. I also used also the music to do that. The music is not dramatic; it’s Mozart, it’s Scarlatti, and the music composer—when I pitched him the film, I said, “There’s going to be Mozart in there, so, bring your A-game on that one!”

I so admire the work of the National Film Board of Canada.

Unfortunately, they’ve been struggling and the conservative government has done some major cuts. It is ironic because we just had three films at the Oscars and the Minister of Culture was proud to announce that Canada had funded a film that was nominated for an Oscar at the same time they were making cuts. The National Film Board is still way up there in terms of animation, but for documentaries they are struggling and they have not financed a feature film since at least 18 years. It was a nice place to do films without engagement from distributors and television for financing a film so they could take risks. But I was influenced by them when I was younger.

Most directors say that they were inspired to make films by the movies they watched as children, but that was not what got you started, was it?

I knew I would make a feature film only at the age of 27. I studied political science and international relations and had the intention of becoming a journalist or work in foreign affairs. I had no intention of making a film. The first person to make me realize there was someone behind the film was Steven Spielberg. I saw his name on “Close Encounters” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.” and said, “I want to see what he does next.” He was my first influence but it is ironic because he is everything our film industry is not — big Hollywood movies. And then I saw “Amadeaus” and what Milos Foreman did and it brought me into another spectrum of what film could do. And then then I participated in a contest from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the French side, a contest called “The Race Around the World.” Every year they would chose eight amateurs and give them cameras. We had to travel alone for six months and do 20 short films in 26 weeks in 20 different countries. The movies were shown before a panel of judges live on television. When I came back from that my life had changed and I wanted to make documentaries. Ken Loach and Mike Leigh became my real inspirations.

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