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

Posted on May 17, 2012 at 8:00 am

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

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

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

Tell me how the project got started.

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

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

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

How did you find the dancers that you focus on?

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

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

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

Why did you leave dance?

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

Where did you learn how to make films?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Interview: Morgan Spurlock of “Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope”

Posted on April 6, 2012 at 8:00 am

I was especially excited to talk to Morgan Spurlock about his newest documentary because it is about one of my favorite events of the year, San Diego’s Comic-Con. Produced by Comic-Con heroes Stan Lee and Joss Whedon, the film follows five people — two artists with portfolios who want to become professional comic book artists, a costume designer who is participating in Comic-Con’s famous Masquerade competition, a dealer hoping to sell his $500,000 Red Ryder comic to keep his business going, and a fanboy hoping to propose to the fangirl he met at Comic-Con the year before, with a ring modeled on the one in “Lord of the Rings,” of course. The movie was filmed during Comic-Con 2010 and it includes some of the people and events I saw when I was there. The movie is available everywhere On Demand today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqC1pGb89XQ

Your movie makes clear that Comic-Con attracts the most passionate fans of comics, movies, games, and television in the world. What makes people into super-fans?

I think that if you can openly profess your love for something, then that makes you a real fan. I think that for a long time, a lot of things that were in the film weren’t cool to like, whether it was comic books, or video games, or collecting toys—it was one of those things that was shunned. We live in a world where we’re told to grow up and throw away childish things, and we live in a time now where these are things that really do start to define you as a person, as a character, as an individual, as a creative person. They kind of shape your world around you, whether it be a hobby or a desire that can’t get fulfilled anywhere else.

One of the things that struck me about this film is the way that it presents a more gentle and affectionate view of commercialism than your previous films. You’re looking at it from this consumer side this time. Do you think that there is a beneficial side to the commercialism that you’ve been critical of in previous films?

Well, I don’t know if it’s beneficial. I think that if you’re a fan of something you’re going to buy whatever you want and get whatever you like. Anthony Calderon, nothing was going to stop him from getting his 18 inch Galactus, no matter what it was, and if he didn’t get it then he would’ve been online that night buying one on eBay. I feel like when you are a collector and you buy certain things, you’re supporting that hobby. I collect art, I buy a lot of low-brow and street art, pop-art—and it’s one of the things where it is a constant desire for me to seek these things out, and I think that it’s just part of who you are. It does really start to define a part of your psyche and your individuality.

How did you find the people that you focused on?

We put out a kind of mass casting call through websites, through comic book shops, through Ain’t It Cool News. Harry Knowles came on as a producer for the film, and we just got this deluge of submissions, probably around 2,000 people from around the world—e-mails, videos—and from there we started to whittle it down. We wanted to find people who were going their own, to find people who already had tickets, you know, we weren’t giving people tickets, we weren’t flying you there, we were just coming along for the ride. We wanted to find people who were going with a real purpose. We didn’t want somebody who’s just like, “Yeah, it’s my first Con, I’m so excited, I can’t wait to see what it’s like!” That’s not a good story. You want to have somebody like Holly Conrad, who’s like “I’ve already competed in two masquerades, this is the final time I’m allowed to compete, if we don’t win I don’t know what’s going to happen, I really want to use this to break into the costume design business.” That’s a great story, she’s a great character, and she’s incredibly talented. Eric Hansen and Skip Harvey, who are going to comic–con for the first time to try and finally get this closeted desire to draw comics out into the world. They’re basically putting their egos on the table in front of the likes of Marvel and DC and Dark Horse; those are great stories, and those are the things you never get to see or hear about when it comes to Comic-Con.

That’s right. The news reports are always about thousands of people waiting in line for the big events at Hall H with all the movie stars.

And that’s what people love to talk about, they say, “How do you feel about movies taking over Hollywood?” And it’s always journalists who ask this, and I say, “Well, just to be clear, movies haven’t taken over Comic-Con. Movies have taken over your coverage of Comic-Con, because somehow somebody said that this is all that matters, this is all that’s important at this giant, pop-culture Mecca. And, we’ve turned it into, “Here’s Angelina Jolie, she’s putting out her new movie—and look at these freaks in costumes,” that’s all the media ever wants to talk about. I went there in 2009, and there’s a much deeper story to tell here that isn’t being realized in any of the coverage.

I think it’s also fair to say that Comic Books have taken over movies.

That’s true. Comic books have become this never-ending well of brand-new characters and entertainment for the studios, and for television, and so now the comic-books, the guys who are actually trying to sell these paper comics are saying, “We’re getting pushed to the side, we’re getting shoved out of the convention.” They’re getting shoved out of everything. The reality is, the comic book business is a dying business.. The Comic Book industry is not a dying industry, but the actual idea of printing paper comics is, just like printing paper books is dying. We don’t even buy paper books. I don’t even know the last time I bought a book, but since I’ve gotten my iPad, I’ll tell you what—I buy more comics now as an adult than I did probably in like 10 years as a kid, because it’s much easier to download them straight to my iPad.

I love that there is still a real heritage to Comic-Con, there’s still a respect for that heritage, the artists who dated these comics are still there, so I disagree that comics are getting pushed out of comic-con. I think it is transforming into something else.

Tell me a little bit about the guy who proposed to his girlfriend at Comic-Con. Did he get in touch with you and not only wanted to propose in public, he wanted to propose to her in a movie?

He wanted to propose to her at Comic-Con. It was part of the casting that we sent out, we wanted to find a couple who fell in love because of a mutual appreciation and passion for some geeky thing, whether it was “We both love Star Trek” or “We both love that video game.” We got a ton of submissions from people who fell in love or got married because of that and this story of James Darling and Se Young Kang was so fantastic because they had met the previous year as they were both getting ready to go to Comic-Con and fell in love because they both love these things at Comic-Con. So they basically talked about, “We’re going this year, we both love Kevin Smith, we’d love to be in the film,” and after the end of their joint submission video, they cut to James Darling in a closet, holding the camera next to his face, and he goes…”but what I really want to do is propose to Se Young at Comic Con this year.”

Some people say that Comic-Con is so driven by big business products that there’s no imagination any more and people are just taking the imagination that’s imposed on them from a commercial entity. How do you respond to that?

Well, I think there’s a tremendous amount of creativity in the world, it is exploding with creativity. You see it in this movie, you see it in people like Holly Conrad, you see it in people like Skip Harvey and Eric Hansen, and so I disagree with that. I do think that there’s a tremendous amount of spoon feeding of genres. The fact that we’re continuing to make remakes of movies that have been made, we’re continuing to reboot the franchises, that’s the more frustrating thing—that there’s not a search in that world for new ideas, or that many new ideas. So when someone like Christopher Nolan comes along and makes a film like “Inception,” you’re like, “Oh my God, this is the greatest thing ever,” because it’s not derivative, you’re not living off of something you’ve seen seven, eight, nine times.

Which is even more reason for everyone to stay home this weekend and watch “Comic-Con: Episode IV,” to put on your costumes and have a fantastic geek-out party.

What’s the best way for them to watch it? Is it on Video-On-Demand?

We’re opening this weekend in select cities, so this weekend it’ll be in theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland—if you live in any of those three cities, you should put on your costumes and come to the theater and create the new “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” I feel like everyone one of these screenings should feel like Comic-Con. I encourage people all the time, “Wear your costumes, come to the movie, and let people see what it’s really like.” That will be awesome. If you can’t come and you want to see the movie, you should have a Comic-Con party at your house, have a little mini-con, play video games, bring your comics over, put on your Spock ears and your hobbit feet and your Wookiee mask, grab your light saber, and tell your friends, “We’re going to have a Con party!”

Not only is it on Video-On-Demand, it’s on iTunes, streaming, if you download movies through the Xbox platform, it’ll be available there. It’ll be iTunes worldwide, so it’ll be iTunes streaming world-wide this weekend as well.

What do you, as a film maker, think about that kind of distribution method? Did that open things up more than traditional theatrical release?

With “Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” we had so much press leading up to that film, and the week before the movie opened I was on Conan, Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, all within ten days and then the movie opened on 18 screens. So the majority of the people in the United States couldn’t even see the movie. I’m a film-maker, and I have yet to have a movie show in my own home town in West Virginia where I grew up. There’s got to be a better way—especially when it comes to documentaries.

If you’re not making a big, giant, huge mainstream Hunger-Games-esque film that’s going out on 3000 screens, how do you start to compete with those movies? For me, the best way to compete is by collapsing the window, giving anyone across the country who wants to see this film access to it immediately. You know, there’s a great line in ‘The Greatest Movie Ever Sold,” “In today’s world, in today’s media landscape, there is a cultural decay rate of ideas that is about two weeks.” So you basically have two weeks to capitalize on whatever surge you have around your moment, your film, your music, whatever it is, get people to get excited about it, to see it, to consume it, to share it—because really soon, something else will jump in there—there’ll be another movie, there’ll be something else that’s the conversation driver. So, for me this weekend, I just wanted to make sure that anyone who wanted to see this film could see it.

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Directors Documentary Interview

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: J.C. Chandor of ‘Margin Call’

Posted on October 21, 2011 at 8:00 am

J.C. Chandor wrote and directed “Margin Call,” a sharply-scripted thriller about one night at a never-named Wall Street firm. The top executives discover that they are at risk of catastrophic failure and have to decide before the markets open in the morning whether they or their clients will take the losses. The movie stars Jeremy Irons, Keven Spacey, co-producer Zachary Quinto, Stanley Tucci, and Demi Moore. It is specific enough to make some very pointed commentary on the financial meltdown but universal enough that its themes of betrayal and externalized costs could be set in any industry or indeed in any organization.

How did you come to write about the financial meltdown?

I had written several different things in several different capacities but had never done anything even sort of remotely topical let alone completely topical. This was being written for myself to direct so it was from a very personal place, not a Hollywood script to go out and sell. A lot of what has become the strength of the project and drew people to it came from an odd place, from production restraints I placed on myself to keep the budget realistic.

I’m a total real estate junkie and took time off to set up a partnership to renovate an old building and it happened to be on the other side of the real estate bubble. The godfather of one of my partners was a very prominent investment banker, a ground-breaker, an intellectual, invented the concept of a real estate hedge fund, a whole new model. He intervened in his godson’s life and about halfway through our project came to him and said, “Those offers you’ve been getting to buy the project half-completed — take them. I’ve been leaving millions of dollars in deposits on the table because it is time to get out.” We took his advice, mostly because we were having trouble with one of the other partners but also because we had the feeling things were not going well in the markets. We just broke even and felt like a defeat at the time but a year and a half later I felt I had a new lease on life.

As things really started bubbling to the surface I thought back to that man and what it was like to be walking around — you never know for sure, but he felt pretty strongly things were bad enough that he had to take a financial hit to avoid a worse one and warn us. I thought it was an interesting issue to look at it from the inside, and do a small character-driven story about investment bankers as they see what they thought their lives were about changing in a deep way and what their responsibility was, all those things that were a little bit unsaid in the film but that the actors and I knew were all there. I have only so much time, so much energy, this skill set, and this is what I’ve used it for.

It has the setting of a drama but it feels like a thriller.

To be there on that day was an interesting limited view into a wide problem. It’s a ticking time bomb structure, which is a thriller by its very nature. The one total deviation is that 45 minutes into the movie you know the bomb can’t be defused. The drama is who will they hand the bomb to?

Do you see them as villains?

What most people would choose to do in this scenario is what these characters do — to look out for themselves. To look at it in the macro viewpoint, they made the decision when they walked into the door coming out of Harvard or wherever they were to use their time and skills and very intense intelligence and education and have the big majority of those people get siphoned off into this world. People who have already made that choice when they walk in the door it is unrealistic to expect them five, ten, fifteen years later to make a different choice about who to take care of.

Your father worked on Wall Street, at Merrill Lynch. Did he guide you at all on the script?

For superstitious reasons I didn’t show the script to anyone in my family. I’ve had a lot of false starts if you know what I mean! I didn’t really tell my family I was doing this until we were really at the point of no return. But what I learned from my father and from friends over the years is the toll that it takes on the people who stay behind and keep their jobs when others are let go. It’s one of the only businesses that even in their best years still culls 5-10 percent of the workforce every year purely for motivation. The people who last are the ones who play the game correctly. For certain characters like Spacey’s it’s not about greed; it’s about survival. For others like Simon Baker’s and Demi Moore’s it is about ego and the way you define yourself.

I originally wrote the scene when it wasn’t the big dramatic day, yet. It was supposed to be more run of the mill, but as things developed in real life by the time we shot it, it became too subtle.

The way it was revised though, gets Stanley Tucci’s character out of the building, and that is important for the plot.

The fun thing about Stanley’s character, Eric Dale, is that I have a hard time naming characters and I usually use names from people in my life. Eric Dale just worked and it is amusing for him because every character says the name through the film as he becomes the symbol of the paranoia that the information will get out.

I won’t give it away, but I wanted to tell you how much I liked your ending — you took something of a risk and it paid off.

The ending and the music are the things most people feel comfortable having an opinion about. For me, the movie started with the ending and then you figure out how you get there. Kevin Spacey would say something different but for me the most important thing is what’s behind him, the house. It became very important to understand that in his mind, he did need the money. No matter what you make, the way people rationalize their connection with money is almost identical. As Paul Bettany says in the film, “You learn to spend what’s in your pocket.”

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Directors Interview Writers

‘The Help’ — Viola Davis

Posted on July 11, 2011 at 12:00 pm

In my opinion, Viola Davis is the finest actress in movies today. In “Doubt,” she gave the best performance of the year in one short but very powerful scene as the mother of a boy who may have been abused. She has made an indelible impression in brief appearances in movies as sympathetic therapists in “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” and “Trust,” best friends in “Eat Pray Love” and “Nights in Rodanthe,” as a mayor in “Law Abiding Citizen” and as a space ship captain in “Solaris.” It was truly a thrill to speak to her about playing the strong, quiet, principled maid Aibileen in “The Help.”

Like the other people working on the movie, she was very aware of the about the influence of the setting. “It’s easier to do this because you’re in Mississippi. It’s a different world. A different energy that informs everything you do. Going into Baptist Town you feel the spirits of the past.”

We asked about developing a Mississippi accent. “The accent is a work in progress. I was born in South Carolina and raised in Rhode Island. It’s my mother’s voice I hear in my head. I don’t want the accent to be as strong as it is in the book. I’ve read the criticism about the dialect online. I don’t want anything to distract from the character. I want to make it accessible.” Her research about the era included books, the Eyes on The Prize PBS series, “a documentary about maids, my mother, relatives, everybody.” She also remembered a teacher in college who was part of Freedom summer and came back to campus to talk about it.

Asked about the challenges of the story, she frankly acknowledged, “There’s a lot of pressure. There are two stories going on. It’s the experience of a lot of Caucasians with substitute mothers and the story of these maids, my mother’s story, who these women were when they went home. That’s the part that makes it a dirty secret, not palatable. That’s the story of those who worked for other people. Abeline was born in 1911. By she has has 53 years of incredible history. You feel an incredible responsibility not to make it sanitized. That’s what Hollywood always does.”

And she spoke of the challenges of playing a character who by nature and culture seldom says what she is thinking. “Your internal dialog has got to be different from what you say…. makes it so rich.” It was sometimes very difficult to do. “You feel the rage, the frustration, the repression, the intense level of sadness, of going to your grave without ever realizing your dreams and hopes. Now we can speak our minds more. To be silent so much – it’s hard not to carry that rage when you leave the set.”

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