Gary Ross, best known for the first “Hunger Games” movie, spent years researching the real-life story behind his new film, “Free State of Jones,” about a group of deserters from the Confederate Army and runaway slaves who declared their independence from the legal and economic oppression of the Confederacy. You can see more about the story in the “Free State of Jones” website. His commitment to authenticity included filming in the actual locations where the events took place, including the swamp where Newt Knight (played by Matthew McConaughey) and his group hid from the Confederate soldiers. “We were in the swamp for a long time but it was worth it. We were shooting where the true story actually occurred so that was kind of inspiring.” There are several books about the historical events, but Ross reviewed the original documents. “I did a lot of primary source research. When you go to the website you will see that most of the things that we cite are not secondary historians but are primary sources. I studied for about 2 to 3 years before I ever even started writing the script….There’s a tremendous amount of original sources that survived. We use a ton of sources from what was called the OR, the Original Records of the War Between the States which is the most reliable source. And we used a lot of letters to corroborate this evidence from former Confederate soldiers they were writing about the rebellion to one another as it was going on so there’s a tremendous amount of actual primary sources that exists, I mean hundreds and you can see them on the website.”
The film is set in the Civil War era, but some scenes show us Knight’s descendent in a 1948 miscegenation trial. Ross said, “I think that we need to see some perspective. It was a way of almost trying Newt in absentia a century later. These issues that were necessarily unresolved. It also let us explore what happens to memory when you lose connection with your past. This is a century later and it is still going on. I think that the fact that there was in fact this real trial which was still bizarre was an important thing to include.”
He talked about seeing the jobs of writer and director separately. “I don’t see directing as an extension of writing. It is to certain degree because you are storytelling but it’s its own thing. But you are never afraid to keep writing when you’re a writer there so I actually have more flexibility on the set, I don’t see the script as such a lock or rigid thing. And directing informs your writing. When you’re directing you think of it the more cinematically, you think, ‘Are they going to be able to actually do it?’ There is less waste in the writing. There is more of a cognizance of the cutting pattern. There is more even awareness the things like sounds design, so yes I definitely think it informs how I write now.”
There are some common themes between this real-life story and the allegory of “Hunger Games.” “Individual and personal liberty is tremendously important to me and I think that this has been somethings that has been expressed through a lot of the work that I’ve done one way or another. Newt used Scripture to justify his actions. It began as an organic rebellion. It was anti-tax rebellion at the outset but it grew into a larger meaning of freedom and it broadened out into a bigger definition of what freedom was. Once he glimpsed what true freedom meant he couldn’t tolerate his wish for personal freedom and then accept unfreedom for other people so I think that Newt expanded and grew and in his worldview and that led him been an advocate for African-Americans in the postwar period.”
Ross wants to make sure that audiences see the oppression that continued after the end of the Civil War. “The war didn’t and in 1865. The conflicts of the war went to 1876. We can see this as a continuum in the fight for freedom. I think that the only movies that existed prior to these were the original “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone With the Wind” so the record needs to be set straight because they are very misleading about the reconstruction era. I hope people who see this can talk about interracial reliance and interracial alliance. I think that’s tremendously important. Newton Knight as an ally of African-Americans in the postwar era is a tremendously important thing to celebrate. Only when we unite in America will we ever make true progress.
Interview: A. Scott Berg on “Genius,” the Story of Editor Maxwell Perkins
Posted on June 13, 2016 at 1:13 pm
Copyright Lionsgate 2016It was a very great pleasure to talk to A. Scott Berg, whose college paper about editor Maxwell Perkins became the first of his many distinguished biographies of 20th century Americans. Berg was the first to read the just-donated collection of papers from the publisher of books by Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and many others, discovering correspondence that showed the influence Perkins had on some of the greatest works of American literature. The new movie, “Genius,” starring Colin Firth as Perkins and Jude Law as Wolfe, is based on Berg’s book, Max Perkins: Editor of Genius. In an interview, he talked about how the digital world is making it hard for biographers and why Perkins wore his hat indoors.
Throughout the film, Colin Firth as Maxwell Perkins leaves his hat on, even in the office or at dinner with his family, though in that era it was considered disrespectful. Did he really do that?
He did. To be perfectly honest, it was partly a Yankee eccentricity. There is one element that we didn’t get into in the movie which is Perkins was partly deaf and so there was a longtime theory that he used to wear the hat and pushed it down to push his ears forward so it created a better acoustical situation for him. And then a lot of people thought he wore the hat indoors just so that if people walked in for a meeting and they saw him wearing his hat they thought he was on his way out so they better speed it up. But the truth of the matter is he did wear it at home. When Wolfe made a fictional character out of Perkins which he did in You Can’t Go Home Again, a character named Foxhall Edwards, he claimed that the character in the book goes to bed wearing a hat. That part is fictitious. Sometimes his wife would make him take it off in the dining room but for the most part, yes, he wore his hat indoors.
Is it fair to say that he was not a co-author but a collaborator in Wolfe’s work?
He would never say he was a collaborator. I think in retrospect if you start to examine all the work he did, especially with Wolfe, I think it dips into collaboration. I think it’s fair to say that those books first of all would not have been published without Max Perkins and they certainly would not look like the way they look, they wouldn’t read as they do were it not for Perkins. But there is many a book editor today who does as much with some writers. You would never know but some writers get completely rewritten. Perkins never changed the words; he really was there to provide structure. So it’s a fine line. How do you define collaboration? It depends on your definition, I suppose. But it’s fair to say though that that was collaboration certainly for Of Time and the River.
Are there Wolfe purists who prefer his unexpurgated versions?
Yeah, there are a few Wolf purists and in fact some years ago not all that many, they did publish the original version of Look Homeward, Angel called O Lost. And there are number of essays that came out at the time that say this is the way it should have been published and this was the pure version and some people said Max Perkins really did more harm than good. I am not of that school, I am obviously team Perkins and I say this: Thomas Wolfe never did anything against his will. It’s not as if Max Perkins put a gun to his head or said, “Tom, if you don’t change this we are never going to publish it.” These were editorial suggestions. They were strong suggestions and he had the power behind him of having brought Fitzgerald and Hemingway into print so Wolfe was inclined to listen to him but as you see in the movie they argue back and forth but basically Perkins just keeps putting stuff out there until Wolfe gets it the way Perkins sees it. But on any given moment if Wolfe had said, “You know, I am not taking this out” that’s that. It’s Wolfe’s book. As Perkins always said, the book belongs to the author and he believed that.
There are so many strong and vivid characters in this story it seems almost a mini-biography of each of them as well.
Definitely, definitely. This was my first book so I didn’t know what I was walking into but it’s definitely a group biography in some ways. I try to write it in such a way that if you went to the index and just followed all the citations of Fitzgerald or all the citations of Hemingway you could read their life story consecutively. So you do get mini-biographies of virtually every Perkins author in there. Some people like Ring Lardner you may only get a few paragraphs out of his life story but the big three certainly you can follow the arc of their lives, the parts of their careers definitely. But at the end of the day though they are ornaments on my big tree and Perkins is my tree, he’s the thing that pulls them all together.
Biographers often say that the hardest part is knowing what to leave out.
That is so very true. Ultimately that is the single hardest thing about it. For me I finally have to say, “Okay, what is my through line of this book?” What is the arc of his life? When I get to each paragraph, each anecdote, each big story I say to myself: “Does this either deepen the character or does it lengthen the story? Does it move the story forward in some way?” And if it doesn’t then I cut it out and so as a result of that and this ties into your really good prior question about many biographies of everybody else, I found that I had to trim those as closely as I could because I wasn’t at the end of the day writing a biography on Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Wolfe; I was writing a biography of Perkins and I needed to give just enough information about all the other characters to illuminate Perkins’s life. So that’s the general rule.
Scott: Well there is. What happened is, all of Fitzgerald stuff is there, that’s actually one of the reasons I went to Princeton as a teenager. Most of the Scribner family has gone to Princeton since the mid-1800’s and in the late 1960s and into 71 when I graduated the Scribner’s had donated all their company archives to Firestone Library so that meant sitting in the library arriving just as I arrived, were every letter that had ever come into Scribner’s from Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Galsworthy, Ring Lardner, you name it. So they were all there with a carbon copy of every letter of Max Perkins sent out. And again because Perkins was hard of hearing he did virtually no business on the telephone and so every thought he had he wrote down and mailed it and had a carbon copy waiting for me to discover in 1967-8-9 and that’s what I did. So yeah, there is a huge archive, tens of thousands of letters sitting there and I was basically the first person to mine that entire collection when I a sophomore in college. It was very exciting. It was just a gold mine!
So how do you as a biographer feel about the fact that correspondence doesn’t really exist anymore?
Don’t think that this doesn’t keep me awake at night! I mean I tell people: print it out, print it out! I want a hard copy! You sent a tweet, I want a hard copy of it. I am going to need that! It’s something actually biographers fret about and Perkins was a dream subject because he did write everything down and because he was so articulate. Lord, it’s really going to be a problem! I mean are we going to write books based on Donald Trump’s tweets?
The movie shows us that one reason for the strong connection was that Wolfe was looking for a father and Perkins was looking for a son.
I think it’s fundamental to the lives of each man. Wolfe himself talked about it, he wrote about it, he had conflicted feelings about his own father and he believed most of life was man’s journey in search of a father. And Perkins did want a son as Louise says in the movie; “My husband always wanted to have a son as he proved having five children.” I mean there were almost 2 halves of the Jell-O box coming together. They really needed each other personally on that level and Perkins really did become a great father figure and Hemingway Fitzgerald and Wolf all became surrogate sons for Perkins in so many ways; not just with the work they did but emotionally. The way you see Perkins interacting, giving them money, nurturing them, giving marriage counseling, giving psychiatric advice, I mean he was just always there for all of them.
It seems to me that being a biographer is a little bit like the role that Max Perkins played in that you both standing in the wings in service to what’s going on stage.
Nobody’s ever observed that to me before but I think that’s exactly right. This is my take on biography; a lot of people go into a biography with an agenda of their own and then look for the facts that support the agenda. I am of the objective school of biography; I walk in tabula rasa, I collect as many facts as I can, as many dabs of paint and see what portrait emerges from that. So where that is very much like Perkins is I don’t want my subjects to be what they want the subject to be; I want the subject to be who the subject is and Perkins was that way with Thomas Wolfe, he wasn’t trying to turn Thomas Wolfe into somebody else, he wanted to capture as much pure Wolfe as he could.
Interview: Princess Cupcake Jones Author Yileya Fields
Posted on June 6, 2016 at 3:00 pm
Copyright Belle Publishing 2016While looking for books to read to her eldest daughter (when she was 2), Ylleya Fields was struck by the limited number of titles featuring African American characters. And so she created one: Princess Cupcake Jones was created, with Princess Cupcake Jones and the Missing Tutu. It won the Mom’s Choice Award, the Gelett Burgess Award, a Family Choice Award and a IndieReader Discovery Award. It was followed by Princess Cupcake Jones Won’t Go to School, and the latest is Princess Cupcake Jones and the Queen’s Closet.
Ms. Fields was kind enough to answer my questions.
What inspired you to create the Princess Cupcake series?
Princess Cupcake Jones was inspired by the lack of diversity I saw while looking for books to read to my children. I decided to take matter into my own hands and blend the appearances and personalities of my two eldest daughters – thus creating Princess Cupcake Jones.
What is Princess Cupcake like? What does she like to do?
Princess Cupcake Jones is a curious, sassy, yet sweet 5 year old. She can be quite mischievous, like most children her age.
She loves playing, dancing, and has quite the imagination.
Who is in her family?
Princess Cupcake Jones, her mother (the Queen) and her father (the King) are the main characters in the story. However, I’m exploring the idea of giving her a sibling in a future book.
Is she based on a real-life character?
She is physically a combination of two of my eldest daughters. I blended both of their appearances and personalities into one beautiful character. Yet my two younger daughters are now providing inspiration for her as well!
Do your children inspire or influence your stories?
Absolutely! The Princess Cupcake Jones series would not have come to life if it weren’t for my children. I felt a responsibility to create this series for them as well as children around the world so they could relate to a character in a book.
Why is it important for children of all races to have books about diverse characters?
Children seeing diverse characters is important because it drives home the fact that while people may look different physically, at the end of the day, our values, dreams, wishes, etc are the same. These characters connect them and help children to relate to each other better.
What books did you enjoy when you were a little girl?
What do you want children and their families to learn from these books?
With each book having a different life lesson, my goal is to reinforce morals and values that children utilize in everyday life. By reading the books together, families can bond over the fact that Cupcake and her family isn’t that much different than their own!
What adventures will Princess Cupcake have next?
The next book in the series “Princess Cupcake Jones and the Dance Recital” is due out this summer. It’s all about Cupcake’s love for dance and what child can’t relate to that?
Interview: Whit Stillman on Adapting Jane Austen in “Love & Friendship”
Posted on May 18, 2016 at 3:37 pm
Whit Stillman is known for his elegant, shrewd, and witty drawing-room comedies about the upper classes, which makes him a natural for adapting Jane Austen. His new film is called “Love & Friendship,” the title of an early Jane Austen novel, but it is based on a different book, the epistolary (told in letters) story of a widow described as “the most accomplished coquette in England.” Lady Susan is played by Kate Beckinsale and her close friend, an American, is played by Stillman favorite Chloe Sevigny. In an interview, Stillman talked about using costumes and music to tell the story and why it took him a few years to appreciate Austen.
How was it adapting a novel told through letters instead of a traditional narrative?Copyright Amazon Studios 2016
I try to keep the letters to a minimum in it, because it could have been dominated by the letter format, so I had to stay away from that and try to make it pay off when it was used. It’s a long process and it takes a long time. It’s one thing to adapt a novel when you have the scenes and the dialogue from the scenes and you can the novel as written. In this case you had to kind of recast everything, shuffle the deck, and take at least two letters back and forth to make a dialogue scene between two people or various people. It could be more than five letters going into one scene with parts used in another scene. It requires some invention of additional characters and then those characters have their lives and preconceptions and their stories. Although people probably talk about the funny lines in their film and dialogue, everything in film has to be about the story and so it’s all leading to developments and story and characters and where they want to end up and where they’re going to end up.
The costumes are gorgeous.
Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh, who did the costumes, was one of the first crew names mentioned to me and was the first person of the crew we hired. She was also helpful with many of the other people who were very good in each department. We were talking about the period that it was earlier than what people think of as Jane Austen, the 1790s. It’s a little bit of a broad reach because we think she started writing in 1793 but she didn’t make a clean copy till 1805. So we thought that well if there are things we like in the earlier period we would use them and also the older people could be wearing things from the past and I don’t really like the lines of the later styles. Ladies’ fashion of this period gave us the opportunity to make Lady Susan and her friend, played by Kate and Chloe look sexy and interesting. Lady Susan was a widow and this whole thing of her widowhood was reflected in her clothes. She’s all in black with a veil the first time she is seen and that comes off and she seems sexier and sexier and the colours change over time. So that was Lady Susan’s progression and then the idea for Chloe was more cheerful, bright and colorful. We were down in costume departments in London for a lot of the male actors to make sure we were choosing the right costumes and right livery for the footman and everything.
Why did you switch the title?
I really believe like when you are making film just do everything the best you can. So if you don’t like the title, change it and I didn’t like the title at all. I really hated it and very early like right away when I started working on the adaptation I said I’m not going to work on a film called “Lady Susan” and I had seen Love and Freindship(sic) as one of her other titles and so I immediately titled it “Love and Friendship.” I’m surprised when people asked me, why did you re-title it? For me that’s twelve years old. She had this very Austenian title on a juvenilia story that’s not fascinating. She misspelt friendship and all that. So I thought it was good to have it in the Austenian later tradition. It’s the direction she generally went in. At first I didn’t think that the title bore any relationship to the story. After I finished the film actually I think the title is in the story.
In your first film, Metropolitan, the characters discuss Mansfield Park. So have you been an Austen fan for a long time?
Copyright Amazon Studios 2016Yes, I have been. I have first, I wrong-footed it, because at 18 when I was in a bad funk and about to take time off from college to go to Mexico, I picked up Northanger Abbey and read it but which was a big mistake because I was an 18 year old guy and I had never read a gothic novel. I had no idea what they were. I had no idea what she was trying to do. I thought it was the most stupid thing and I would tell everyone like for the next five years, “You know I hate Jane Austen. She is so overrated. You know I don’t understand it” blah blah. But my sister is very good at reading. A lot of the good reading habits that I had came from my sister and brother-in-law so one way or another I read Pride and Prejudice and liked it. Then read everything and loved it and became a big Austen fan. Then back when I moved to Paris in 98, I think I was travelling around to promote The Last Days of Disco, I said, “Oh look there is Northanger Abbey. I will buy that and see if I like it now.” And of course I liked it because I’d been in publishing. I had edited Victoria Holt. I knew gothic novels and so I liked it.
I think your Lady Susan is more sympathetic than the one in the book, maybe because Kate Beckinsale plays her so charmingly. She is still manipulative and deceptive, but we can see the reason for it.
She’s not virtuous and but she wants to achieve things that are understandable. She sure wants to achieve them fairly dishonestly. But what she actually does ends up being positive for everyone and with a catalyst it doesn’t really matter what they want to do; it matters how they affect the rest of the world. She’s kind of like that bird on the rhinoceros. She eats the bugs and helps him while she’s riding on his back.
Interview: Writer/Director Rebecca Miller of “Maggie’s Plan”
Posted on May 10, 2016 at 3:32 pm
Copyright Sony Pictures Classics 2016Rebecca Miller is the writer/director of the delightful new film, “Maggie’s Plan,” a witty romantic comedy with an unusual twist. Maggie (Greta Gerwig) falls in love with a married professor named John (Ethan Hawke), who leaves his wife, Georgette (Julianne Moore) to be with her. But this is not the happily ever after ending you might expect. Four years later, Maggie comes up with a plan to get John and Georgette back together.
Let’s talk about the hair in the movie, there’s a lot of very interesting hair.
Yes! It’s true, it’s true. I remember fluffing up Bill Hader’s hair myself. I was like, “It’s not fluffy enough; it has to be like this.” It needed to be fluffy, because it’s a little bit based on a friend of mine who had fluffy hair before he lost all of it.
And Julianne Moore’s character had that very severe pulled up hair.
Yeah well that was Julianne’s idea; she said, “I really think it as to be wound up on the top of my head.” I thought it worked great, I mean it looks like there was some other little person In that bun. Actually I remember having a discussion like, “Do you think maybe we should have a moment where the hair comes down like after when she wakes up in the morning and she’s living it with Maggie.” And she said, “I think it should kind of slide off to the side.”
And her costumes are wonderfully tactile.
Malgosia Turzanska is a Polish designer. She’s a wonderful costume designer and she started talking a lot about fur, cracked ice, textures. Julianne wanted a uniform. Like something that was the same silhouette basically like all the time. She liked these boots, I forget what they are called but there is a certain brand of boots which are clogs and people wear them a lot in New York right now. She had them specially made into long boots so that there was sort of some heaviness to the shoe and kind of toughness to it but also elegance to these long things that go over jeans and then the tunic and then the fur vest because I wanted her to be like a Viking queen.
One thing I that I always love in movies and plays is when some of the characters speak a language that another character doesn’t speak, as Maggie’s stepchildren do in this film.
I just like the idea that they have their secret language that Maggie can’t penetrate. It’s just one more thing that isolates her in away in this family that she’s trying to be a part of or create, but also connects them to their mother.
You were an actress before you did what you’re doing now. Was that what made you want to direct?
I actually knew I wanted to be director before I started acting. In a weird way I fell into acting for various reasons but before I started acting I was making films that were really what we would now call video installations. I mean I was shooting on film and they were more connected to visual art and to painting. I started to act in films partly because I thought I had an opportunity to make money to make these sculptures I wanted to make. It began as a sort of lark and I then ended up working with all these wonderful directors. I started being able to imagine myself on a bigger set to understand how sets work, to understand how movies are really made because I was a painter, I didn’t know. So that really expanded my imagination and also I started to think I would love to make art that wasn’t so glorified, that was for everybody, more populist. So that how I started thinking about it.Copyright Sony Pictures Classics 2016
The directors that I worked with were so wonderful. Mike Nichols was one of the great directors who I actually got to talk to a lot about this film before he died and was a kind of mentor on this film. I’ve studied and loved his work for years. His first film, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” is just one of the greatest films of the 20th century and then “The Graduate” and “Carnal Knowledge” and so on. So I got to work with him as an actress but I would have lunch with him and talk to him. I would talk to him a lot about pace and I would just listen to him. Pacing is very important to him and he was very open with actors. He didn’t try to cordon himself off from actors. He wasn’t afraid of actors. A lot of directors don’t really like actors that much and would prefer not to get down and not to kind of intermingle too much whereas I think Mike really loved actors. He treasured them and I’m more on that side of the fence. I really like working with actors. I really like that collaboration. I could just write books if I only want to control everything. Which I do. I do write books. But I could only write books. If I didn’t like the chaos of not knowing and being surprised then I wouldn’t make films because actors bring in the surprise element. All acting is improvisation and word wise very little of my work is in improvisation but to me every moment of interpretation is a kind of improvisation because it’s coming out directly out of the actor as a surprise.
You work with three of my favourite actors as your leads and all of them are writers too.
I certainly didn’t go out looking for a bunch of writers who were actors but at the same time I don’t think it was an accident that out of all this group of people, Greta, Ethan, but also Bill Hader, Maya Rudolph were all writers and Julianne writes also. So they’re all writers and serious writers and I think there’s just something about the way they transmit their minds, especially the leads who I had worked with really for a long time, like a year before we shot. They had really good ideas and questions that let me tailor the script to them. For example Julianne said, “I really think we need to see her working. We need to see her in an academic environment.” I answered that with that auditorium scene which is really a fun scene and that wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t said that. I wasn’t going to get to know Georgette until later and then seeing her teach was such a great idea.
Another thing that I like about the movie is that you’ve made a movie that was so fearless about smart people who are engaged deeply with ideas.
I’ve never dumbed down one single moment in the movie because I feel like people like to think and have fun at the same time.
You had a great control over the tone of the film, with a slightly heightened slightly bubbly feeling. What creates that?
It’s a strange mystery. I don’t know how you describe how you do that. It is a combination of all those things and it’s the main job of the director. It starts with the script with the tone of the jokes, the slightly absurd quality to the whole thing. I mean in a way there is a whole absurdity to the whole set-up that already lifts it up off the ground then this is where using very talented actors comes in. It’s almost like a tuning fork, they hear each other and they feel each other. They know what movie they are in according to the signs and the scripts. Partly through direction pushing them one way or another but really they have to come in knowing.
That’s why you want to rehearse a little bit but not too much before. I love to work with actors a long time before on just character, building character, not necessarily saying the words because you want freshness there when you shoot. And then there’s the design. What color are the walls? What color is the jacket next to the wall? How do you create a world that’s just that little bit heightened, as you say? What color choice might be just a little bit more than what you might see in everyday life but yet still real, real enough? And the emotion I insist is completely real. So everybody is really emotional. These are very real problems that real people have. Everyone goes just a little bit further than most people would. You know it’s like a path we know to be our own. The actors go just that much further along that path.
