Interview: Writer-Director Todd Graff of ‘Joyful Noise’

Posted on January 11, 2012 at 8:00 am

I love Todd Graff’s first two films, Camp and Bandslam. Both were fresh and warm-hearted stories about teenagers who are passionate about music and performing, inspired by his own experiences as a theater-mad kid. His new film, “Joyful Noise,” has Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah as warring gospel choir leaders, and again he deftly manages to make the audience care about a group of exceptionally appealing characters and fills the theater with heart-lifting musical numbers. It was a real pleasure to talk with him about growing up listening to his mother rehearsing the Hadassah choir in his home and his surprise homemade gift from Ms. Parton.

The closing credits of the film pay tribute to your mother’s work as a choir leader for the Jewish women’s group Hadassah.

It may seem strange, but Queen Latifah’s character is really based on my mother.

Not strange at all! I think this is her all-time best performance, and I loved the scene where she tells her teenage daughter a few things about what beauty means.

When Dana signed on to do the movie, I had not even written that scene yet. After she joined, I said, “I want to see Dana do what Dana does!” And that’s when I wrote that scene.

Tell me more about your mother.

My mom was an amazing woman. She was a housewife but she had a degree in music and taught piano.

She was a singer and a choirmaster and a community activist. She was always down in the basement at the mimeograph machine running off handbills to hand out. I would wake up and there would be a blind child there and she would say, “You should hang out.” She just thought he could use a friend. The bad thing is that it’s a lot to live up to. One of the things she did was she had these ladies in the choir over to the house twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays for my whole childhood, and she was really tough on them. For an amateur choir, where the most they would do was perform in a nursing home, she still treated them like professionals. The line in the movie where Queen Latifah’s character says, “You have to look at me because Jesus doesn’t know where the cut-offs are” — that is my mom. She’d say, “I’m thrilled that you’re into it but God doesn’t know where the cut-offs are.” I couldn’t get her voice out of my head and this movie really took shape around that voice.

This is your third film in a row featuring teenagers. What is it that appeals to you about featuring kids that age?

In all honesty, it just started out, as so much of my life, as fear-based. They wouldn’t know if I knew what I was doing or not. My first movie none of the kids had even been in a movie before so I thought I was safe. I seem to have enough of an arrested maturity level that we could communicate well and those stories interested me.

Tell me how you go about casting a film like this.

In my movies, you have to sing and dance so I won’t read anyone until after the choreographer has winnowed down the people who audition to the ones who can dance and musically we have narrowed it down to the ones who can handle the singing. So that gets rid of two-thirds. Of that last third, even though I’m a big rehearsal guy and we rehearsed for a month on this, you don’t have a lot of time. I don’t have the time to break kids of entrenched bad habits. So I look for kids who are as natural as I can find while still having some degree of chops. They have to be directable. Because it is a musical and the musical numbers take up a big chunk of time that non-musical movies don’t have to worry about, I can’t just have the kid that you discover and has a quality but hasn’t done anything before. I want someone who is honest and true and real but can hit a mark and stay in their light and talk to another actor believably.

The music in the movie, as in any religious setting, is half worship and half performance.

It’s a changing world and the influence of secular music and other forms of expression in sacred music is where we are now. I did a ton of research and I would see huge gospel competitions in 18,000 seat arenas sold out. There was praise dancing and stand-up comics did religious themed material. There still is old-school traditional gospel and there will always be. But I was interested in a character who introduces the concept of change with a character who has to feel in control of everything because she feels if she lets one ball drop everything is going to fall apart. As it is, she’s treading water right up to her nostrils. So this is the last straw. She feels: “If you’re going to change what I do in church on top of everything else, I’m not going to be able to take it.”

Queen Latifah’s character has a son on the autism spectrum. What led you to include that kind of disability in the film?

Autism is an umbrella term and a broad spectrum. This version of Asperger’s is about the inability to understand social cues and so it makes contact difficult, difficult to connect with the community and with family even. He won’t even allow his mother to hug him, even his father in the big emotional moment of the movie, dad can’t hug him. That is very dramatic to me and germane to the stuff the movie is trying to talk about.

You worked with two very different ladies in this film. What was it like to direct Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton?

Not as different as you might imagine! But of course Dolly is her own special creation. God bless her, I worship the ground she teeters on in those eight inch heels. Precious! She gets up an hour early no matter what time her call is and she cooks breakfast for everybody — pancakes, grits, eggs. I would have a Hershey bar in the afternoon when my energy was down. She came in one morning with four pounds of fudge in Tupperware she stayed up all night making. She said, “I know you like your chocolate but I don’t want you eating that junk! This is made with real milk and real butter and a whole lot of love and if you finish this, I’ll make you some more.” She is real. And Dana is also incredibly generous as an actor, as a person, kind to the extras and the crew. She and Dolly had a love-fest. They were a joy. They’re both real church girls, so they share that. They both wanted to make a movie that uplifted people and touched people. They saw it from the beginning as more than a comedy piece — it was really important to them that the message be evident.

We had no drama, no complications all through the movie and post-production. It was almost too good to be true. And then the tragic thing is that after it was all over Joe Farrell died. Really really terrible and sad.

And Dolly Parton wrote some of the songs in the movie?

She wrote three songs for the film. She would write them and send them to me with very elaborate demos, full orchestration. And I would say to her, “This is great but for the scene in the movie you’ve written a song in 2 and I need one in 4 and you have a walking bass line and I need –” and she would say, “Honey, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She can play 12 instruments but she can’t read music. She would say, “If you don’t like it, I’ll write another one. It only takes me an hour.” I’d say, “Why don’t we just fix this one?” She said, “No, I’ll write another one.” She ended up writing 12 songs and said she would use all the other ones somewhere else.

What was your biggest challenge?

The big concert sequence because I only had four days to film three musical numbers with all the extras and all the backstage scenes, the cafeteria stuff, and kids who can’t work full hours. There is not a single real choir in the movie. I cast all those people and put them together. Mervyn Warren and I turned them into choirs.

Why is choir music so moving?

Someone said that one star is just a star but many stars is a constellation. You can’t harmonize by yourself. When you can be part of a whole that creates such a gorgeous, layered, powerful, communal experience you are part of something that makes you feel more connected to the world and less alone.

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Interview: Tom Shadyac on the DVD Release of ‘I Am’

Posted on January 2, 2012 at 12:03 pm

I spoke to Tom Shadyac last March about shifting from big Hollywood films like “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” and “The Nutty Professor II” to a small and very personal documentary about just about everything called “I Am.” Shadyac was one of the most successful directors in Hollywood when bicycle accident left him in terrible pain, physical and spiritual. He began to think about the emptiness of his form of success and he began to study two questions: what’s wrong with our world, and what can we do to make it better? He documented his own journey, including fascinating encounters with people who are questioning some of our most fundamental assumptions about the way we interact with each other and the universe, from cutting-edge scientists to people who study history, culture, and theology.

It’s my DVD Pick of the Week and I am delighted to have a copy to give away. Send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com with I AM in the subject line and don’t forget your address. I’ll pick a winner at random on January 8.

Good to talk to you again! Tell me what the reception to the film has been since we spoke in March.

We went on a little show called “The Oprah Winfrey Show” with her audience of 20 million. So that changed the awareness of “I Am” and we began to get a lot of requests for seeing the film because it wasn’t available in every city. We’re finally meeting that request with the release of the DVD on January 3. She’s such a powerful voice in media and such a supporter of the film that we decided to have the broadcast debut on her network, OWN. We’ve continued touring the country and doing Q&A’s and trying to start the conversation wherever we could.

What are some of the questions you get asked by people who have seen the film?

Are you crazy? That’s one I get asked a lot. No, the most common questions are things like “What do your show business friends think of this?” As though that’s an indictment! What do you do when people don’t see what you see? How do you change those people? It’s not my job to change anyone. It’s my job to share what I know and feel passionate about. Are you a communist? Are you a socialist? Those are some of the questions I get asked. Many people take exception because they think my ideas are utopian and not grounded in reality. But I did a film about the ultimate reality. I call it the ultimate reality show.

Have people brought their own stories to you?

Of course! I hear all the time from people whose lives and perspectives are changed by the film. Some meet the film by brain injury so they tell me they were suffering from something similar or some other life challenge physically. I hear from people who are simplifying their life or stepping more into their passion, people who are leaving money for meaning. There are also some schools creating curriculums around “I Am.”

That’s great! I especially like exposing students to your integrated approach of looking at issues from the molecular level up to the cosmic level.

It’s all the same. When I began to explore different disciplines I realized that the academics, the poets, the mystics, the scientists, the spiritualists are all saying the same thing, telling the same story. Life is life. Life shows up everywhere, science and poetry. The truths that undergird life transcend all boundaries.

What are you reading now?

Thomas Merton‘s philosophy was that you can read every book or you can read a handful of books and become those books. I continue to read the people who light up my soul are writers like Daniel Ladinsky’s translation of Hafiz and Rumi — Coleman Barks’ translation, Mary Oliver, Emerson, Rilke, I just hover in those worlds. I do dust jacket reading on a lot of things but I keep going back to those.

And what about music?

I’m not the hippest cat in the room, but I love music. One of my favorite parts of the movie business is scoring — it’s just an opportunity to add a beautiful piece of music to the world. I even listen to what the young folks are listening to!

What was it like for you, after directing supremely confident performers like Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy, to step in front of the camera for the first time — as yourself?

It was really awkward at first. My 20-year history in show business had always been talking to that person in front of the camera. But we worked so quickly, shooting and then editing, that it was surprising how quickly I could look at that long-haired freak in the film and see him as a character. Not “I have to protect something here,” but let’s let him be flawed, be unsure, like any character. Like Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy minus the brilliant comedic gifts!

Last time we spoke, you talk about the pleasures of filming with a three-person crew. How has that experience affected you as a director?

I have yet to direct again in the 200-person-crew world but it is very freeing to know you don’t need all the bells and whistles. You can go out with a couple of people like in film school and do something that has dramatic, comedic, emotional value. How we make movies in show business is very inflated. One crew member can move a plant and one can water the plant and one can light the plant. But when you’re a student the director is doing all of that. It’s less weighted, more improvisational.

What’s next?

We’ll see. Let some more people into the conversation. I’m writing a book, I have a deal with Hay House, and I am deep into that, and we continue to pursue a talk show possibility. And I’ve got a couple of film comedies and a drama we’re getting up off their feet. I think a sequel will happen in one form or another, maybe through the book or the talk show rather than a movie. Of course there were people I wanted to get to talk to that we did not get to include but I don’t think they would have revealed any essentially new or additional points. But I wanted more color, more diversity, more feminine energy. I wanted to interview Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, Maya Angelou and Mary Oliver and Vandana Shiva and the Dalai Lama. I tried to talk to all of them but for one reason or another they were not available at the time. They are all people who have seen something and what they see parallels very closely what you see in the film.

What do you want families who see this film to talk about afterwards?

Every family will see it from where they are. Maybe there’s a conversation about possessions, let’s think about where these toys come from, or finding a wealth in sharing, what it means to have enough. Maybe a conversation about including the greater good in how we do business, about how the family includes all of life. Love is not an idea but a force. I don’t see it as okay but essential. We’re getting there but we haven’t gotten there yet.

Interview: Sarah McCarthy of ‘The Sound of Mumbai’

Posted on November 23, 2011 at 12:42 pm

“The Sound of Mumbai,” premiering tonight on HBO2, is a touching documentary about the most unlikely of productions, a concert performance of “The Sound of Music” featuring the “slumdog” children of one of the poorest communities in India. These children have so little contact with the world outside that they had to be shown a photograph of a mountain to understand what “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” was about. But they thrilled to the music of Rodgers and Hammerstein and the opportunity to perform in front of an audience. I spoke to director Sarah McCarthy about making the film and a young singer named Anish whose confidence and spirit are especially endearing.

Does everyone in the audience cry when they see this movie?

Lots of people do. The sniffling in the theater when Ashish sings his solo, and then others hold out until the end.

It was interesting that the conductor was an Austrian. It was a culture shock for him. How did he feel about working with songs set in Austria but written by Americans, about a family that escaped from Austria?

He was invited because of the connection with “The Sound of Music” and he really didn’t know what to expect. He was kind of overwhelmed by the whole experience of the slums and running around with Ashish and seeing how the kids live, about how they sleep on the floor and about how one of them was nearly sold for adoption and he couldn’t really believe it. He’s talking about going back in a year or so. It was an extraordinary and overwhelming experience for him.

I think Austrians have mixed feelings about the show, “The Sound of Music” because they were compliant with the Nazis. The first production they have ever put on in Salzburg is going on at the moment. For a long time they rejected it and it’s only now that the new generation is embracing what is, after all, the biggest musical of all time.

How did you come to this project?

My producer, Joe Walters, sometimes conducts the Bombay Chamber Orchestra and was always at me me to make a film about it and I thought that sounded really boring. He sent me the announcements of the concerts they were doing and one was about children from the slums singing songs from “The Sound of Music.” My ears really pricked up because I thought how strange to hear these iconic songs that make you think of mountains and green space and rivers sung by these kids — that audio/visual disconnect would be quite cool for your brain to try to make sense of. Off we went to India and made a trailer and fell deeply and instantly in love with every one of the kids. We came back to London to try to raise money, failed, and went back anyway, with the tiniest most ridiculous budget, running out of money on the shoot and working off of credit cards. It wasn’t until we showed the film at the Toronto Film Festival and sold it to HBO that I could pay our cameraman.

What is your background?

I’m Australian and went to film school in Australia and then came to London and worked in development at the BBC and an independent channel. I made a movie called “Murderers on the Dance Floor” about the 1500 inmates at the maximum security prison who performed to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and became an internet sensation. The prison governor is really deranged. They practiced 8 or 9 hours a day. He also had them do Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby!” Then I made a film for the BBC about a 77-year-old “killer granny” who killed her husbands for the life insurance money. I’ve just come back from a month-long shoot in Russia and the US about an American family that adopted three Russian children.

How did Ashish become so confident?

It comes from his family unit. He’s genetically engineered to be that way but his mom and dad and brothers and sister are very close-knit. Those places can be dark and dangerous but they all live on top of one another and have to learn to be friends. There’s a real community there and the kids thrive on that. I was blown away by how socially sophisticated these kids were. These kids have a close family but not a safe place to live or enough to eat. The kids in my next film have had a safe place to live but no family ties or community. Ashish’s school is also very encouraging, though they’re not academically rigorous. It’s pretty tough to be on such minimal resources. That is the biggest struggle for us. We’re interested in using the film to further these kids’ education. We’re working with the school to raise funds to put these kids through university but they also need to catch-up support to be able to do the work. We talked about putting him in a different school but decided it would be too tough for him. They don’t have the basics — a quiet place to study, a structured lesson plan, a desk. You can have all the determination and commitment in the world and it is still really hard.

Ashish has moved to a better place. He now lives in an apartment with a door that locks and a tap he shares only with about 30 people instead of 300.

How did you gain the trust of the kids so they could be so candid with you?

I have two younger brothers. And I love kids. I love hanging out with them. Ashsish and I became friends very quickly and played a lot of games. He almost became part of our crew. I’m in touch with him all the time. We Skype at the school principal’s office and I remind him not to show off and brag all the time. But he remembers that concert very clearly. He snuck into his neighbor’s apartment and watched it three times in a row.

HBO’s teachers guide is available for download.

Interview: Punk Rock Parenting with the Moms Behind ‘The Other F Word’

Posted on November 10, 2011 at 8:00 am

One of my favorite documentaries of the year is “The Other F Word,” a film about what could be called Extreme Parenting. It is the story of punk rockers and other men who have made careers out of rebellion and outrageous behavior and the way they cope with the challenges of fatherhood. I spoke with the two women who made the film, writer-director Andrea Blaugrund and producer Cristan Reilly, two mothers who told me that what drew them to the project was the way it illuminated the adjustments that everyone makes to parenthood.

The heart of the movie is Jim Lindberg, lead singer of the punk band Pennywise, and author of Punk Rock Dad: No Rules, Just Real Life. Reilly said, “I grew up knowing Jim in high school. We were friends but lost touch. I heard he had written this book and knew I had to read it. I read and loved the book, and thought it would be an amazing documentary and Jim needs to be in it. I gave it to Andrea because we have the same world view and laugh at the same things. She called me back and said, ‘I’m in.’ I dragged her out of her semi-retirement.” Reilly told me that, “We made this on a shoestring, did a whole DIY. Some people offered money but we didn’t want anyone else weighing in.” A large part of the small budget went for the rights to the punk songs on the soundtrack. Blaudrund said, “There were 44 sides we needed to clear of music, over a third of the budget, but we had to have it.” The use of the songs was more than background. The content of the film reframes them. “It is such an opportunity to listen to these songs you have one opinion of and hear them a different way.” They told me about a 15-year-old punk fan who went to the film with her mother and said she heard the Everclear song “Father of Mine” in an entirely new way because the movie made its wistfulness come through.

Reilly has 13 year old twin boys and a 7-year-old and Blaugrund’s children are 12, 9, and 6. They made the movie while juggling carpools and play dates, just like the punk dads in the movie. It is Reilly’s first film but Blaugrund said, “She learned how to be super-efficient by being the mother of twin boys. I had worked at ABC news and NPR and written for newspapers and the documentary unit for Peter Jennings and made a short that got an Oscar nomination. There was something about that accolade that gave me permission to hang up my hat for a couple of years.” Blaugrund added, “I was being super-mom and was making babies and dealing with schools, but when Cristan brought this to me my youngest was starting pre-school and what better way to come out of my supermomness than a movie about parenthood?” They knew very little about the punk world but did a lot of research and insisted on a cinematographer/editor who was a punk fan and who could give the film a genuine punk energy and vitality.

And yet, the core appeal is from the universal themes. “They’re coming from so far on the other side.” said Reilly. “We all go through this of course, if you look at it from the most extreme you can get the largest swath and you can relate to the most people.” Blaugrund said, “One of the greatest surprises about this whole process for us is how many different types of people it’s touched. Lawyers and accountants tell us ‘this was my favorite band growing up,’ or ‘you’ve awakened the sleeping punk in me’ and even people who can’t relate to punk at all, especially men who say, ‘These are the guys I used to try to avoid, but dude, I get exactly what uyou’re going through, let me buy you a drink.’ There are so many things people can relate to with their own parents and their children. We get to see plenty of bad examples of fatherhood, but here’s something in the more positive column.”

The charm of the film is the way it breaks down stereotypes, and it is enormously fun to see a guy with tattoos tenderly singing “The Wheels on the Bus” to a child in a car seat or Lindberg packing to go on tour and explaining he only has room for one Barbie in his suitcase. But what is moving about the film is the way these men speak of having no fathers of their own. They are, in Blaugrund’s words, “creating their own templates and trying to figure it out.”

I wondered if it was hard to get the men to speak candidly about how transforming fatherhood was for them. Reilly told me that, “Andrea was asking them questions they don’t normally get asked. ‘You don’t want to talk about my bass player?’ Falling down this rabbit hole we could ask whatever we wanted; there was no sacred ground. It was a whole different side of their personalities and they were glad to show it.”

The film is open in New York and LA and expanding around the country.

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Interview: Lavinia Currier of ‘Oka!’

Posted on October 28, 2011 at 3:59 pm

“Oka!” is a simply wonderful movie based on the real-life story of music scholar Louis Sarno, who left New Jersey to study the music of Central Africa. I spoke to director Lavinia Currier about casting the film and what the natives thought of it when it was done.

I would never of thought of British actor Kris Marshall (“Traffic Light” and the guy who meets all the supermodels in Milwaukee in “Love, Actually”) for the part of a guy from New Jersey, but he is just perfect in the role.

He is wonderful at physical comedy. He knows how to work his body, as you can see in “Love, Actually,” and “Death at a Funeral” and also the Noel Coward movie, “Easy Virtue.” Especially for a British actor, I liked that he could do body comedy. And British actors really hold up well in adverse conditions! The only thing to do on days off was play in the river so he and all the crew would be jumping in the river all the time and he got some hideous parasite. So for a big percentage of the shoot he was quite ill but he never missed a day of work. And being British he liked to be text-based and we had no text, essentially, so he learned Oka and was very proud of his Oka. I was so glad to have him because he was wonderfully inventive but also a trouper. He is an urban person, but so is Louis Sarno. He is not particularly sporty or outdoorsy. He does not spend his summers camping. It was his intellectual interest that took him to Africa. People said, “He’s a character actor, not a leading man.” But that was perfect because he is playing a character with some courage but not a hero.

I was also stunned by the cinematography, which is just gorgeous and more high-end than you normally see in small-budget films.

I met Conrad Hall through my producer who has a strong connection with his sister and had met his dad years ago. What I liked about him is that he insisted on a kind of classical approach to the film. I might have wanted to be more quick and dirty, more hand-held, smaller equipment. We wanted to shoot in 35 because we wanted to do justice to the landscape but we also needed a camera that could handle the humidity. Conrad insisted on quite cumbersome equipment but it served us well because it allowed us to maintain the feeling of a feature film and not a documentary. We had very primitive and limited ability to light but he did a great job.

Tell me about filming in the wilds of Africa.

People said, “Aren’t you scared of bugs or snakes?” But I wasn’t. The fear I had was the pygmies would be willing to take the job and then as soon as they had more money than they’d ever seen, which they would after two weeks of filming, they would say, “We have enough money now; we’re going hunting.” We did a long period of preparation and exercises and determined who had concentration and was right for the part but we kept three people for every part. About three weeks into our ten-week shoot some of them took leadership and were really into it. It suddenly clicked in and still I’m not sure why but when the others were clowning around they would make them stop. After the film was finished we took it back there to show them and asked them how they felt about it and why they decided to do it. Some said it was great to be respected and had employment. But they didn’t relate to it the way I might do, to say, “This is my story and I want to share it with the world.” It was more that they embraced what we were doing and went with it, and you could really feel it palpably when it happened. Something about being with the Bayaka, you feel more optimistic about human nature. They are really fun, nice, resourceful and playful people. They don’t have an easy life. But they’re just cheerful.

Is that because of their music? Or is the music a reflection of their spirit?

I talked to Louis Sarno about the music a lot. I don’t pretend to understand it because it is actually very complex. They use 28 phrases and Western music is like 4. But Louis says that their music is played the way nature plays music, they wait for a niche to jump into. Sometimes they sound like birds — they are incredible mimics. They could mimic us speaking English even if they didn’t know what the words meant. I had a Chinese bicycle and finally it fell apart and so I was walking and I heard a sound behind me and there were two children behind me imitating my bicycle! Often at the end of the day we would see them sitting in a circle recapping the day, laughing and imitating what happened during the day. Louis said, “Each one of you has a nickname and you’ll never know what it is.”

How did you come to this story?

I went to Central Africa 12 years ago to cast a film about a famous story about a pygmy named Otabenga who was brought to the World’s Fair in 1905. It was a tragic story. he actually was exhibited in the Bronx zoo and then was taken to Virginia by African-Americans who tried to convert him to Christianity and he committed suicide. We had this screenplay I loved that I wrote with a partner and everyone who read it cried. I met Louis as a translator. I began to have my doubts. I felt like I would be doing to the pygmy actor what the Americans did to Otabenga. The Bayakans said, “That’s a terrible story! Why do you want to remember that?” I went back to Louis and said, “Let’s do something contemporary, and talk about some of what you’ve faced and what the Bayakans have in their daily life.” He had written a memoir but it was in storage with his mother so it took a while to fish it out. I read it and I laughed. He was so self-effacing and so not the white hero saving the natives but someone who finally found his home.

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