Interview: Adriana Trigiani of “Big Stone Gap”

Posted on October 6, 2015 at 3:31 pm

Adriana Trigiani really is from a coal mining town in Virginia called Big Stone Gap and the biggest movie star in the world did choke on a chicken bone there.

Now if that is not enough to inspire a book and a movie, I don’t know what is.

Elizabeth Taylor was married to then-Senate candidate John Warner when they came through Big Stone Gap on a campaign trip. And they offered her fried chicken and she choked on a bone. All of that happens in the film, Big Stone Gap but it is almost incidental as far more important issues and characters appear as well. Like Trigiana herself, Ashley Judd plays a resident of the town who is of Italian heritage, only in this case she does not find out the truth about her paternal side of the family until after her mother’s death. Her name is Ave Maria (like the hymn) Mulligan and she owns the local pharmacy and directs the annual outdoor musical, “Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” At age 40, she wonders if love has passed her by.

I spoke to Ms. Trigiana about Big Stone Gap, “Big Stone Gap,” and the challenges of finding an actress to play the iconic Elizabeth Taylor. She said to find the town of Big Stone Gap “you can get in your car and if you are in Eastern Virginia, you just keep driving and if you drive and you look on a map it looks west of Cincinnati. It is deep in the corner of the state, shaped like a boot, and it’s the toe of the boot where the five states meet; North Carolina, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia West Virginia, and it’s gorgeous! I call Virginia the England of America. It’s very elegant. It’s a state I know like the back of my hand because I grow up there and you’ve got Charleston, you’ve got the Piedmont, you’ve got the ocean and that gorgeous coastline round the hills of the Piedmont that gives way to the Blue Ridge and the Appalachians and the Coleman Gap. The artist Cy Twombly said that Virginia was the best preparation for Italy. And he is right. The light, the sky, for an artist it’s the most magnificent place to grow up.”

They really do put on a production of “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine” every year in an outdoor theater. “It has been up and running since 1965. It’s an outdoor drama. You know, there is a certain amount of those put on in towns around the country and there’s a consortium. It’s the local actors that come together and sometimes they get a professional director and semi-professional company and it runs throughout the summer. It’s a great community activity. The original is written by Errol Hodgson Smith based on the novel the Trail of the Lonesome Pine which was published in 1903 by John Fox Jr. and when you come to Big Stone Gap everything is named for him. The outdoor drama is named after his novel; we have the John Fox Jr. house where he spent his summers. We have the June Tolliver house named for the character who is the lead in the drama. So it is really part of our local culture and it’s kind of our showbiz thing. And then in the spring we do a musical. So it was a very fabulous community we grow up in.”

The movie is set in 1978. “As you know, Nell, every great novel has to have a historical backdrop. Some people choose a famine, some people choose the World War, some people choose Armageddon and I chose Elizabeth Taylor the greatest movie star choking on a chicken bone in 1978 in my hometown. It’s a real thing and so I thought, well, I love to write comedy so I am going to redeem my little town because everyone remembers the ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit with John Belushi. This mortified us. Well it turns out that pretty much everybody in the county was in that room when she choked on that chicken bone including my parents. This thing was seismic and it’s just a part of history, in the town it couldn’t have been worse. Elizabeth Taylor is like the dream goddess of everyone because she was a horsewoman and she did ‘National Velvet’ when she was a little girl. You just doesn’t get any bigger than Elizabeth Taylor and here she had married candidate John Warner who was running for office. She came to Big Stone Gap and she’s trying to be on a diet and you know the fried chicken is the greatest in the south and she grabbed the piece of chicken and ate it too quickly and it went down wrong rushed her to the hospital.”

She had two reasons for casting Polish actress Dagmara Dominczyk as Elizabeth Taylor. First, she is a beautiful brunette and a magnificent actress. (“She is also an incredible novelist.”) And she is married to the movie’s leading man, Patrick Wilson, whose family happens to be from Big Stone Gap as well. Their two sons also appear in the movie, along with some other members of the Wilson family. We don’t see Dominczyk’s face, but just with the set of her shoulders and the gesture of her hand, she evokes the star. You know I had big dreams for this movie and a lot of plans, big plans. Our cinematographer is Reynardo Villalobos. This is a lucky thing. He was scouting another film in Virginia. When I found out that film was not going to start until the next year, I really like hit the “Hail Mary” ready hard, please let him do it. He loved the script. I had written the scene of Elizabeth Taylor and what I wanted to do was recreate her entrance into Rome in the movie ‘Cleopatra.’ And I acted it out for Reynardo and I said tan-ta-tanna-nam-ta then I said okay, then the float, then this, then that, as it was in the novel. Okay because it’s fiction you can have a ball and then she was going to come in and almost fall off the convertible. So the scheduling you have 42 speaking parts, you have all these actors,you have people like Jane Krakowski who has limited availability. How am I going to get all these people to fly in and out? I am driving everyone crazy with this schedule. Well the filming of the choking of Elizabeth Taylor on the chicken bone falls on a Saturday and on Saturday in southwest Virginia is football day and there is no high school marching band, I had planned like marching band going through and all kinds of extra things happening. We scrapped it and what you see on that screen is very close to what actually happened. So I ended up with what really happened as opposed to my cinematic dream of what happened. It almost killed me. Now you might say, ‘But there is a band!’ Well, before I started crying that day I remembered when I was a kid in high school that they had a room for when kids forgot their instrument or you couldn’t afford an instrument in band. They had an instrument closet so like if you forget like your trumpet or your tuba or your sax. I said, ‘Just go and empty out the closet of practice instruments.’ So if you really study those scenes you going to see a bunch of people in the background blowing horns who don’t know how to blow horns but you see the brass and I told them to move like in a certain way.”

It took fifteen years to make a deal for the film, in part because Trigiani was determined to film it on location. “I think one of the reasons that the movie is so alive is because of this notion, like Frank Capra, that it is infused it with this very real element of the real people and different caliber probably different from everybody you usually see in movies. The smaller roles and some that aren’t so small were local cast and I had the Wilson family who actually had roots there playing alongside the local people who are from there. And Dagmara Dominczyk has the bone structure and the coloring of Elizabeth Taylor.

Trigiani was inspired by some of the women screenwriters and directors in the early days of Hollywood. “If one studies the history of movies, when movies began, the scenarios were written by women name Anita Loos, Francis Marion, the screenplay form was invented by a woman named June Mathis. People like Mary Pickford actually edited their own movies. Dorothy Arzner was a director. Women were front and center in storytelling of movies. The great stars like Mae Murray. Everything was geared toward getting women into the theater engaging women in telling the stories of women. The biggest star in the 1930s was Marie Dressler who was close to 60 years old. I am part of the living history and it is incumbent on me as an artist to make the movies that I believe should be made. I am going to make movies that I think the audience is craving and wants to see. So that’s why I made ‘Big Stone Gap’ and that’s why over 70 percent of the cast is women and that’s why the women are the ages they are because these are fascinating stories.”

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Interview: Giulio Ricciarelli of Holocaust Drama “Labyrinth of Lies”

Posted on October 1, 2015 at 3:43 pm

Giulio Ricciarelli co-wrote and directed the German film “Labyrinth of Lies,” based on the real-life story of the courageous post-WWII German prosecutors who insisted on investigating the atrocities of the concentration camps and prosecuting those responsible. Surrounded by former Axis and Allies officials who wanted to put the past behind them and move on to fighting the communists. He talked to me about the inspiration for the film, what really happens to the movie’s couple after the ambiguous ending, and why the owners of the vintage cars used in the film drove him crazy.

The movie’s opening takes us into a world almost impossible to imagine, where concentration camp survivors are living with the people who imprisoned and abused them and the world has almost no information about what would later come to be called the Holocaust. An artist is offered a light by a teacher watching some children in a school playground. When he bends over to reach the flame, he sees the teacher’s hand and recognizes him as a former Nazi. “That symbolized the theme of the movie, the tormented meeting the tormenter. And the second thing that was important that I wanted it to be a teacher because if you imagine him teaching children that is so horrible and that’s something that actually happened a lot. And so we had these two elements and I knew that as a filmmaker I needed a point of seeming harmony in perfect world, an innocent world. A school is like that. So it was important, the tree and the school and the children playing. And then the movie starts and you realize there is something very wrong there and so it was important to have this. There is a German word that means like a mix of sane and beautiful. It’s like an untouched world.”

The “big complex task” of the film was making what is very familiar to us unfamiliar, so we could feel the shock and horror of the young Germans who came of age after the war and did not know about the “Final Solution.” The movie’s main character is fictional, a young lawyer working as a prosecutor, though some of the other characters are based on historical figures. “That‘s why we choose this young naïve main character, hoping that we enter his world, we start looking through his eyes and the reaction I get is great. It seems to be working with go back in time and go with it. The other thing is esthetically of course; first of all you got to plot what you just mentioned.” The very pervasiveness of the portrayal of the Holocaust created a separate challenge as well. It is so well known that it is impossible to replicate in a persuasive way. The audience at some level always knows it is a re-creation. “The audience can almost hear the director say, ‘Okay lunch.’ And you see actors who are well fed. So I said, ‘Okay, we will not have any of that. We’ll not even have testimony like an actor acting as if he was in a camp and we will trust that these iconic images will come when we give them room to come and the audience.” And so, when the scene comes where a survivor provides testimony for the first time to the lawyers, we do not see or hear him. We just see the reaction of the woman taking dictation, and we feel we know what she heard and saw.

One reason for the film was to recognize the courage of the lawyers who insisted on the truth. But just as important was showing that the only way to move forward after unthinkable inhumanity is to completely honest about it. “In Germany, anything we do politically or culturally is seen through that lens, that’s the reality and if you are talking about refugees if you are talking about Greece, if we talking about anything it’s all we see in the frame of this. The country who did that now does this. The thing is, you cannot deny it, that’s not the way, and you can’t leave it behind.” One way to do that is what he did here, finding a new way to tell the story by looking at a part that has not been told.

“I think what is important with our film is that it’s a not told story. I think what is most important is the movie doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the involvement of Germany as a whole because there is sometimes a tendency to show two evil Nazis and the rest of the population is confused. That’s not historical fact but at the same time not to sit on a moral high horse. That’s why the main character says, ‘I do not know what I would done.’ And if you look at the atrocities not just in Germany but all over the world the human beings are usually not heroes but they go along and they do the easy thing and they don’t risk their own lives and there are heroes but they are few and far between.” He described the continual presence of this history in Germany as an iceberg. “Under the waterline it’s still huge and it’s still usually influential in Germany, it’s certainly the biggest influence in German politics and culture today.” Everyone in Germany was supportive of the film and cooperative in helping to get it made, including Frankfort, where they filmed on location at the places where the events actually happened. One of the most striking images is the rows and rows of documents. The real archive no longer exists in that form, but they found another storage facility with old documents and used camera angles to make it look biggers.

But one challenge they faced was the vintage cars they needed for the shoot. “First of all they are very expensive, but you know what the biggest problem is? They are owned by collectors, so in the morning you always get that spit shine car and they would say, ‘Don’t dirty it up,’ but we have to spray dust over it and sprinkle it with dust and tell them to bring it back dirty but the next day it’s clean again.”

He has been very moved by the response to the film from people who still struggle with the truth of what happened. “And how much rawness there still is. Like a woman came to me and said, ‘We have a box from our grandfather and our family and it’s closed as we are all afraid to open it, because we don’t want to know how grandpa died in the war.’ Or the man who shook my hand and said, ‘Thank you for this film,’ and then he went five steps and he came back and he looked me straight in the eyes and he said very quietly, ‘My father was a bad man.'”

The movie ends on a positive note about the prosecution of those responsible for wartime atrocities, including cooperation with the Mossad agents who tracked down Adolf Eichmann. But it is ambiguous when it comes to the future of the couple in the film. I pressed Ricciarelli to tell me what he thought would happen to them after the movie. He told me he shot two endings but went with the one he thought was more realistic. Still, he smiled and admitted “there is a ray of hope.”

Interview: Randall Wallace on the Braveheart Life

Posted on September 25, 2015 at 3:36 pm

Randall Wallace tells his story, from seminarian to songwriter to screenwriter of the Oscar-winning “Braveheart” and other inspiring films in his new book, Living the Braveheart Life: Finding the Courage to Follow Your Heart. It was a great pleasure to talk to him.

You write a lot about fathers in the book. Why are they so important?

I think in everybody’s male or female, we come to see our dads in a unique way. They represent a kind of strength or weakness. They represent a power. They are our first contract with the mystery of manhood. I heard years ago, I believe it was when I was in the seminary, that some psychologists say that the way we feel about God is almost always directly linked to the way we feel about our own earthly fathers. That if our dads were loving and kind and strong then we tend to think of God that way. If our dads were violent and brutal and unpredictable then we have that impression of God and we spend our lives dealing with that. I say in the book that I believe the father relationship is one of the pinnacles of the Braveheart life, and I mean that not even if it’s not your biological father, you need to find a man in your life you can respect and you need to find someone in your life that you can parent even if that’s not your biological child. And not necessarily mean to raise them from infancy but to have that kind of loving, caring relationship with.

Was there really a piano-playing pig you named Pigarache?

Absolutely true story Nell. I majored in religion and spent a year in seminary after that and got the opportunity then to go to Nashville to explore writing and writing songs like Kris Kristofferson. He encouraged me to go to Nashville and my first job manager at the animal shows at Opryland, USA. And one of the shows that I managed was called Barnyard Animal Opry. We had 8000 people a day who would see this show. The barnyard animals were trained to play musical instruments. We had a razorback who played the piano and I named him Pigerache and put a little bright, red sequin bow tie around his neck. He was a show stopper I tell you. You can imagine how proud my parents were.

You are great at creating strong female characters in your films, and in the book you talk about women warriors.

The first book I ever did, the first two books in fact, had women as the main characters and one of the greatest compliments I ever got was when an editor from New York who was not my editor said she thought Randall Wallace writes the strongest women characters in fiction today. I thought that was a really striking compliment particularly because I didn’t think of a particular difference. When people ask me how I write strong women characters I’ve always said I just imagine myself in the situation that they are in and I suppose that their feelings in that situation would be mine, that we all long for a reason to have faith, even in the darkness. The power of believing as opposed to knowing, meaning that when we know or we think we know we’re relying on what we take to be facts but when those facts are proven to be wrong then our knowing crumbles. When we believe we are acting on something that’s greater than knowledge, we’re acting on a hope and courage. Women I believe manifest that sometimes in a deeper way than even men do because women rely on their intuition more than their brute strength and intuition I think is one of the first steps on the road to faith.

You’re not ashamed to talk about faith but that’s very rare today. Why do you think that our culture makes it so difficult to acknowledge that?

I believe the difficulty arises from what we have all perceived to be the falseness of people who present themselves as having faith when what they’re trying to do is convince others of what they don’t believe themselves and that is manifested in the people who preach a certain morality and don’t live by it themselves. People who preach tolerance but are in fact intolerant. The strange thing about this is that intolerance is so often manifested by people who claim to be tolerant. That is the secular world is more hypocritical it seems to me than the faith based world is. We’ve entered the age of the thought police in which we want to say that it should be illegal to hate. And hatred is hateful. Hatred is heinous but we are free creatures and if we suppress the freedom of other people then I believe what we lose is their freedom to change and grow and love. I didn’t invent that way of being. I believe God did. That’s why we are creatures of free will. God created us I believe and I say this in the book for the purpose of love and that’s why we have the choice to love or not because if we don’t, it’s not love, its fear and God is the opposite of fear.

The word “freedom” of course is very important in “Braveheart” and which you have it carved on your mantle.

And carved into the stone of my heart.

And which you found that word and motto connected to your family when you first started researching your ancestry. So tell me a little bit more about what that means to you, freedom from what and for what?

Nell, all I have to use is metaphors. I don’t pretend that I have now figured out how to replace freedom with new rules of my own. I see freedom as the power to grow. Freedom from fear. Freedom to move into a life of faith, freedom to live a brave life. I think that the restriction on our lives is an idea that everything we do matters, that we are God. I think the fundamental problem is the violation of the first commandment and that all the other commandments are wrapped up in the first one, love God with all of your heart, with all of your soul, have no other God before me. If we are saying that God is our physical lives then we will be condemned to a life of fear and trying to hold on to what we can’t hold on to. Young people ask me a lot when I’m teaching it various schools. I’m frequently asked by sincere, ambitious, young Christians, “How do you hold onto your faith in a business and an atmosphere that is so hostile today?” And I tell them that I don’t hold on. Holding on is fear and I’m manifesting what you just described. If I am afraid that someone else’s expression of their belief or their disbelief in anything that I believe is going to make me crumble then I am rigid and dead. If I am alive and open and trusting that whatever challenge I encounter I don’t have to come up with the answer to that God will give me the strength, the wisdom, whatever it is that I need or even the silence whatever it is that I need to respond and to grow myself and I am the only one that I am really responsible for or. And I think I said in the book there was a rabbi who once said, “if you don’t see God in other people they’ll never see God in you. “And I try to do what Jesus saw, when Jesus saw in the outcasts of society people who were flawed in every way, he saw in them the love of God. And those people were the quickest to recognize that he was the son of God.

My favorite insight from the book, which I think you’ve put very beautifully, is when you say that prayers makes us listen. I think that’s something that is fundamentally misunderstood by many people about the purpose of prayer. So I’d like you to talk about that.

This comes from hard personal experience. I so often approach prayer out of fear. My fear is that whispering voice inside me that it says if you don’t say just the right words or if you don’t pray for everyone you love every single day then God is going to let those people be hurt and God is going to turn those words against you. This is not the voice of God. Jesus clearly teaches the Father knows what’s in your heart already and who of you has a son ask for a fish would give him a stone so don’t worry about the words. And then I think I’m always giving God advice: make these to do lists for God. “I know you’ve been waiting for instructions from me.” [Laughs} It goes to that humility that says God is God and God and I’m just trying to bring myself into hearing God and listening for God. And that’s part of what I need to tell myself every day in one of my prayerful meditations that I listen for God. I don’t hesitate to do that, to pray for others. I think the Bible teaches that we should intercede but it’s not my power or my responsibility that work there. It’s God. Clearly I don’t do very well in the rest of my life but I need to listen and I recognize it and prayer reminds me of that. That’s part of the majestic mystery of prayer.

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Interview Writers

Interview: Writer-Director Carmen Marron of “Endgame”

Posted on September 23, 2015 at 3:18 pm

“Endgame” is a heartwarming family film inspired by the true story of a championship middle school chess team from a school in a poor Texas community. It stars “Modern Family’s” Rico Rodriguez and two actors from “Napoleon Dynamite,” Efran Ramirez and Jon Gries. Writer/director Carmen Marron talked to me about why it was important to her to tell this story.

How did you first hear about this chess team?

It was like three years ago actually I was working on another project and one of the producers on the other project was approached by the executive producer of “Endgame.” He knew her; they were both from Texas. He started writing a script about the story of what was going in Brownsville and he was like, “I would really like to make it into a movie and can you help me with that?” It was low-budget, they didn’t have much money. So she knew what I did with my first film, Go for It, that I basically put together myself. And she said, “Look, this is what you like to do, an inspirational movie, a movie that can help motivate youth and women in our society. This story might be up your alley. Would you be willing to jump on board and help make it happen?” I felt like it was going to be a lot of work and at the time it was not my priority. But then I researched it. I researched it online about the community, about Brownsville, about the teacher and the kids and everything and I was researching it all night and by the morning I was like, “I have to make this movie. I don’t care if I do it for free at this point.”

I grew up really poor in Chicago, one of 10 kids. My dad always raised me with the belief that one person can make a huge difference and so I felt like this is the perfect example of how this teacher in the third poorest community in the time in the US really turned it around and created so much faith and hope just for the love that he had and the belief that he had in these kids. He showed that you don’t need money, you don’t need the resources if you really have that hope and he turned it all around. It was amazing! And to see these kids, and how resilient they are. It reminded me of those kids that I worked with when I was a guidance counselor. These kids are put through so much at such a young age and you see what their potential is if they have adults around them who can make them believe that what they are going through is just going to make them stronger, it’s not going to ruin their future.

Why chess?

He said that he had it in his classroom and it didn’t cost any money. It’s very costly to put together a team and uniforms. And it’s about critical thinking and it helps keep the kids focused and in the classroom in their seats. That’s what these kids in detention weren’t able to do. And so he started doing that with them little by little and they were so perceptive. It just goes to show how resilient and so very resourceful they are. They are always thinking, they are always trying to figure out how they can survive really but he was just using it to make them analytical.

I liked the way you portrayed the culture of chess, shaking hands after every match, which you use to great dramatic effect in the film.

Yes, in addition to the analytic skill, it is important to teach them good sportsmanship and respect and to be able to look at the other kid in the eye regardless of who they are. And what he used to say is when he started the team, these were inner-city kids with no money. He put the uniforms together were just T-shirts and he said that when he first took them to Dallas the first year nobody even looked at them. They treated them like they were invisible, like they weren’t even contenders. So he wanted to teach the students that confidence. No matter who you play against, no matter how rich this kid is or what prep school he comes from you just look him in the eye and you wish him well and you have that sportsmanship which I thought was so beautiful.

It was great to see such strong female characters.

I think that’s my personal mission as a filmmaker. I did that with my first film and I am going to do that with every film. I really do believe and I think that what I learned as a guidance counselor that there really is such an imbalance of women role models or girl role models for these girls and so I really need to start creating stories that can show these young girls, older girls, older women as powerful role models and heroes and leaders in their own rights. It’s really important to me. That’s the mission that I have that I am going to continue to do because these young girls that I work with are just so hungry to try to identify with public figures. Unfortunately they are looking up to Kim Kardashian and Britney Spears and all of these women that really don’t care to be role models. And so I really want to create these characters that just have so much inner power, inner strength in them and intelligence and leadership. It is really like an obsession for me.

Now why was it important to you to include an undocumented character who was deported?

That was actually one of the requests of the executive producers because he is an attorney and he deals a lot with immigration law and also it was an issue that the coach said that he came across. Some of these kids on the team were undocumented. And so I really wanted to show that whether they are born here or not, they are living the American life just like the other kids and they are going through the journey together. You see the huge safety net that they don’t have under them that all the other kids have because all of this uncertainty with immigration laws and it shows the double burden that they are also dealing with as they are growing up but how they are also handling it with grace as much as possible.

Was it a challenge to work with so many young actors?

Well I completely understand is definitely, definitely a whole world onto itself working with kids I didn’t even know. But I have always worked with kids. I was a guidance counselor and I have a Masters in Educational Psychology so my goal is always to make a difference with kids through education. And so that was the easy part. The hard part is that dealing with the child labor laws because you have to treat them as employees in a way because you have this movie to make. I made the movie 19 days and these kids can only work six hour days and they have a teacher who has to spend time with them. When working with kids you have to be focused. You have to make sure that the kids are all on the same page before you even begin and that you just know. You have your vision and you know what it is because you really sometimes only have the one chance and you have to move on.

How do you go from being a guidance counselor to being a filmmaker?

That, I would say was divine intervention. I never wanted to be a filmmaker, to be honest with you. I always knew that I wanted to make a difference in society and that I was going to work with kids and with women but I didn’t know how. As a guidance counselor I loved what I did. I loved it, I loved it, I loved it. And then after about my second year, maybe after my first year I was thinking that I was making a difference with 600 kids. How can I reach much more? How can I reach the inner-city kids in Chicago? How can I reach them in LA and Texas? I was in Phoenix at the time and I didn’t know. I just knew that what I was doing at the school, I wanted to try to help more kids and so honestly I prayed a lot and it came to me when I was praying, when I was meditating and the answer was, “You have to tell what you’re trying to teach, how you are trying to inspire kids you have to make movies so that you can reach more.” And then from there I just followed my heart. Honestly I went to the library and I checked out a book on how to write a screenplay and then I just started writing, watching movies and then I just packed up my car and my dog and my laptop and moved to LA with a script.

“Bread and Roses,” I recommend that to everybody because when I saw the movie I moved to LA and for two years people basically laughed at me telling me that I had no idea what I was getting myself into, I didn’t know a thing about filmmaking. It’s like the worst industry to get into, to break into. Even when you are in it is even worse to try to move up. I remembered just feeling so dismayed and then I watched “Bread and Roses” and it just brought me back to life and I was like, “Those are the types of movies I want to make.” And then actually I reached out to Ken Loach, who directed it. I wrote him the longest letter on how I want to make this inspirational movie that revolves around inner-city girls and it deals with dance because I used to be a street dancer, blah blah blah and I wanted him to direct it and I wanted to be very raw and honest like “Bread and Roses.” And two weeks later his assistant calls me from London, wakes me up at seven in the morning and he says, “Ken and I read your email and he really wants me to tell you that you need to direct your movie.” And told him I don’t know how to direct a movie, I don’t know how to do anything like this, I just wrote it. And he said, “No, you really do. Your email spelled it all out and no one will have that passion like you. The hardest part is having the money and once you have the money everything is going to fall into place.” And so from there that’s when I just made the decision.

Interview: Alex Sheremet on Woody Allen (Part 1)

Posted on August 31, 2015 at 3:33 pm

Alex Sheremet is the author of Woody Allen: Reel to Real, an in-depth exploration of the work of one of the most prolific and singular directors in history. He generously took time to answer my questions. Part 2 will be published on September 6, 2015.

What elements do you find in Woody Allen’s “early funny” movies that show up in his purely dramatic films?

There is both a break and continuity within his films, but the most important thing to know is that, even in the ‘pure’ comedies, there is still the pretense of something deeper. While I think this has been overstated, it’s true that- say- Sleeper has a running social commentary even in scenes that seem just for laughs. For instance, when Luna (Diane Keaton) is bent on becoming an artist, yet recites nothing but bad poetry to anyone who might listen, it is quite similar to Woody’s take on the arts in Interiors, Manhattan, and many other films, where the talentless are obsessed with things they can never have. To Woody, this would still be a human ‘type’ even in a post-apocalyptic future. It refers to a mode of being- a set of feelings and inclinations- that are prevalent not only in the American upper crust which he so often skewers, but everywhere else too. The difference is that today they can be recorded, and Woody Allen’s films are a great record of things that (oddly enough) critics so often accuse his artistry of.

I’ve often thought that Woody’s early comedies are the best gag-driven works in cinema. Yes, Take The Money And Run, Bananas, and Love And Death are all flawed in the sense that a barrage of jokes has an artistic ceiling that a truly great dramatic film does not, but they are stellar works within their own genre. By that same token, many of Woody’s dramas (Crimes, Stardust Memories, and Another Woman, in particular) are at their own cinematic apex, as well. I know of no other artist that has mastered ‘pure’ forms and could so fluidly go between them. This, to me, implies an artistic need that Woody has to master a number of forms rather than simply being known for one or two. Look at Ingmar Bergman’s comedies- not very funny, are they? Or Federico Fellini’s style- he’s among the world’s best film-makers, no doubt, but the closest he’s come to a pure comedy is Amarcord, which Woody used as a model to utterly better with his own film, Radio Days.

In fact, the closest filmmaker to Woody that I can think of (at least in terms of sheer diversity) is Werner Herzog. Some might be surprised to hear this, but what they have in common is an ability to do pretty much whatever it is they want to: faux documentaries, dramas, comedies, and the like, with about the same number of great films to their names. It matters not that their style and their content are so different. The point is that they do whatever it is they’re able to do at the highest levels, and quite consistently at that.

Over the past ten to twenty years, my impression is that it is more important to Allen to make a film every year than to make a good film, that he would rather be filming than refining the script. Do you agree?

Yes. But to be fair, I don’t think Woody would be able to do better films now even if he’d take twice the time. I mean, he’s always made about a film a year- this isn’t really his way of pushing himself. It is simply how he works. He’s made multiple masterpieces one after the other, and I’m sure that has to do with youthful ability- when one’s energy AND mind are at their peak. Sure, he’s made excellent work with Match Point and Cassandra’s Dream, but when they’re followed by a string of mediocrities (or worse) for 10+ years, I assume it has more to do with being 79 and the inevitable creative drop-off rather than any conscious decisions on his part. His best days are probably behind him and there is little he could do about it- especially if he truly does believe that the last 8 years were in any way a success and therefore worth emulating.

Allen famously gives very little direction. Which actors do you think have worked with him most effectively?

Woody has been very lucky in the way that he was able to get a number of great actors early on, especially during his more serious turn with Annie Hall. As a comic duo, Allen and Diane Keaton were great- and I don’t think there is a better comic pairing than the one found in Love And Death. You see dozens of little tics- the way Keaton might look at the camera, or roll her eyes unexpectedly, the way her hands might move when dealing with Allen, as well as Allen’s own ripostes to such. There are so many details, within, that most actors don’t ever seem to think about but that go on to define Diane Keaton. In this way, she’s always seemed to have great instincts, which precludes any real need for direction. It’s the same with lots of professions- give a great worker a few good tools, and they’ll do far better than a mediocrity with lots of instruction.

The same can be said for Sam Waterston, Dianne Wiest, Geraldine Page, Mary Beth Hurt, Martin Landau, Mia Farrow and the much-neglected Gena Rowlands. In fact, I’d argue that the best performance, in any Woody film, is Rowlands in Another Woman. There are expressions that she makes that are so hyper-realistic that they can’t even be deduced as a reaction to one or two things, but whatever plenum of facts and emotions that a situation calls for in real life. This is hard to do, obviously- how can one reasonably channel the full import of a thing while being privy to only one part of it? Yet she does it, over and over again, and few talked about this when the film came out. That’s changing, however, in the same way that Mia Farrow’s performances in Woody’s films have earned her much praise two or three decades after the fact, at a time when both of their careers have effectively come to a standstill.

You are a defender of some of his least popular films, “Interiors” and “Celebrity.” What are audiences missing, and why?

Interiors was unjustly regarded as an Ingmar Bergman rip-off, but such an accusation is possible only when looking at the film’s patina. Yes, it’s dark both literally and figuratively; yes, it’s a slow, methodical look at family relationships; yes, some of the dialogue is flushed with the sorts of poeticisms that turns Bergman’s greatest scripts into great literature even if they’re asked to stand alone. But beyond this, the concerns are wholly Allen’s, not Bergman’s. Joey (Mary Beth Hurt) is American to core, down to her child-like leisure and inability to grasp the difference between desiring a thing she cannot have, and using this lack as a measure of her own self-worth. That ‘Joey’ type is practically a creation of the 1960s-70s, safely within the American milieu, and has only intensified now precisely in the ways that the film depicts.

Supporting characters, such as Flyn (Kristin Griffith), are given a depth- a function that goes beyond mere function, but realism- that most leads rarely have. Scenes such as Geraldine Page entering the dimly lit church- entering her ‘interiors,’ in a sense- capture a psychotic break so vividly that it’s way up there with any other depiction of illness one can think of. Michael’s (Sam Waterston) inability to deal with the ‘artsy’ but talentless type- in fact, his very inability to comprehend what is an illogical conflict, gets at the sort of illusions and miscommunications that tail many relationships. Our inability to REALLY know Pearl’s (Maureen Stapleton’s) intentions, despite the clues, also complicates both her character, as well as others’ varied reactions to her. Woody’s refusal to show Renata’s (Diane Keaton) child more than once or twice despite her ostensible importance to her marital problems is a deft move that says much- with not all of it obvious.

And so on. Yes, a few of the film’s lines could have been tweaked; a couple of symbols are too obvious or clunky, but we’re talking, maybe, 3 or 4 minutes of screen tine interspersed between 90 minutes of greatness. As for the charges of ripping off of Persona’s imagery, with the 3 women standing in one shot in the end? Ingmar Bergman’s use of the image was both visually different (that is, a composite) AND ironic. It is a comment upon the percipient than on the characters, who are mostly ciphers. Woody’s use of the image is neither lesser nor greater than Bergman’s. It is just 100% opposite in both execution and effect. I am shocked that this isn’t brought up more often. It is probably because critics tend to look for reasons to justify their aesthetic positions as opposed to looking at the evidence, first, and drawing conclusions then.

Assuming that it’s true, however- assuming that Woody’s dramas are nothing more than Bergmanian rip-offs…. why would it matter, anyway, if they are well-executed rip-offs? Had Shakespeare not written Hamlet, and a contemporary writer penned it, instead, it would be still logically be a great work of art despite having all the typical Shakespearean hallmarks. Yes, it might be less fresh, today, but great art almost by definition ages well, even if it might not do so indefinitely. And while I argue against the charge in the book, in detail, I feel half-hearted about it mostly because it is just so irrelevant. It is almost as if making a great work of art in the vein of another great artist is a dishonor rather than a great difficulty that’s been overcome. It’s just so silly and is little more than a charge made by non-artists (or wannabes!) who simply have no idea how influence, much less artistic creation, even works.

Celebrity is a lesser film than Interiors, but still unfairly maligned. I just haven’t seen many logical complaints, and the biggest one seems to be that Kenneth Branagh is “playing Woody,” as opposed to his ‘own’ character. First- so what? Whatever he’s playing, he’s playing it well, which counts first. Second, there is NO WAY that Woody would have pulled off Kenneth Branagh’s persona, himself. Remember that the film is only a comedy about half of the time. If Woody were to play this character, it’d be a farce from beginning to end- and a completely unbelievable one, at that. Branagh’s conflict, within, is that he’s trying to enter the superficial celebrity world and do typical celebrity things as a means of finding purpose. He cannot, however, and while he strikes out with women, they DO give him attention- he’s good-looking, after all, and has just enough success to turn a few heads, no matter how short-lived. For this reason, the film brims with subtleties, such as the wonderful flirtation scenes between Branagh’s character and Winona Ryder. Had Woody even attempted this, the two character’s clear sexual tension, the give-and-take of not knowing what might happen would simply not occur. It would be the sexual tension of Jade Scorpion– funny, perhaps, but ill-serving Celebrity.

Allen is not known as a particularly visual director, beyond working with top-quality cinematographers. but you write about some examples of visual storytelling that are often overlooked. What are some examples of his use of images or colors to tell the story?

The charge that Allen is non-visual is not only a cliché, but an unjustified one at that. Even in early films that are far more dependent on gags than much else, there are visual tricks that one can still recall well after the films are done: the way that the two leads’ conversation gets obscured by leaves and foliage in Bananas, almost casting doubt on their relationship, the dozens of visual allusions to other works of art in Love And Death, or the strangely daring camera work in parts of Sleeper, panning away from characters’ faces and letting their bodies or a room’s lighting to tell the story.

These are the more simple examples, of course. The further you go into his filmography, however, the deeper these visuals become. Interiors, for example, has a wonderful scene wherein Geraldine Page’s character is about to commit suicide. She is shown taping all the cracks in her apartment- using black tape, then white when she runs out of black. She then reclines on the sofa- her dress is mostly black with a bit of white. The scene outside is white stars and city lights against a black sky. In other words, the thing becomes a kind of cosmic funeral, as if she’s at her own wake. And even in death, she must keep everything clean, well-proportioned, and properly colored- a comment on her psyche which says more than even the film’s dialogue.

Another Woman, too, is perhaps one of his most visual films. You see Marion (Gena Rowlands) entering her own ‘interiors’ by following Hope into back alleys and streets, and it is clearly no longer something in the outer world- this is metaphor for the many things happening within. The appearance and disappearance of her mother gives her childhood an air of irreality- that things are not precisely as they’ve been described, simply because the memory (as related to us) is just so perfectly colored. Such things barely last a few seconds, and if they’re not noticed, they’re gone, and it seems that the original charge sticks. Crimes And Misdemeanors is similarly filled with these touches- from Martin Landau’s sudden fear over watching a sunset, as if God is behind the clouds, to the way that Dolores’s assassin (unseen at the time) first steps out of a car to observe the scenery over a bridge, thus enriching him as more than a mere thug. Or take a film like Stardust Memories, which is SO dependent on visuals to characterize, dispute, repel, and so on, that it utterly needs its fractured qualities. Recall how Charlotte Rampling’s character, Dorrie, gets about a minute of jump-cuts to show what a psychotic break must feel like? Or the way that Sandy’s (Allen) apartment’s décor shifts according to the mood he’s in? Or the way that Sandy expresses his love for Dorrie by focusing NOT on Sandy’s loving gazes, but at Dorrie’s far less legible ones? This is not any less ‘visual’ than a Malick or a Herzog film. It is visuals that work on a different set of axes, and quite well, at that.