Interview: Randall Wallace of ‘Secretariat’

Posted on October 5, 2010 at 3:59 pm

Randall Wallace, seminarian-turned-film-maker, knows how to raise the spirits and fill the hearts of the audience. In “Braveheart” and “We Were Soldiers,” he gave us some of the most inspiring screen heroes of our time. And now, as director of “Secretariat,” he takes one of the greatest 20th century stories of faith, determination, and unmatched achievement with the saga of the Triple Crown champion owned by a self-described “housewife” named Penny Tweedy who won him on a coin toss.
What makes a champion?
The victory occurs inside the champion before it occurs outside the champion. The task before the story-teller is to inspire and you can’t do that unless you are inspired. You have to change the story until it inspires you, until you have to shout it from the rooftops. Every warrior wants a battle worth his blood and Penny found that for herself. That’s what I love about being a story-teller, finding those defining moments. There are stories I heard as a child about a deceased ancestor that told me everything I needed to know about who they were and who I was supposed to be. That’s what you look for in a story. In this one, Penny not only declares who she is, she discovers who she is. Everything logical around her was saying, “You must do this” and she said, “No, I will do that.” It gave me goosebumps!
It is such fun to get a glimpse of the real Penny in the film.
She’s one of the people I not only admire the most but am most captivated by. She is really striking and uplifting. You can’t take your eyes off her. She’s magic. And she puts up with no nonsense. She’ll tell you exactly the way it is. Part of her was, “If this is done, I want to be around to see it, and have my say.” What she told me is that the right people finally came along and were willing to put the money into it to make it right.
I was very happy to see such a terrific movie with a family-friendly PG rating.
“Family movie” sometimes means mediocre. But this is a story that will speak to a person of any age or gender and confront you with the power and excitement and force you to consider what courage means. I found myself writing in my own journal “Belief is a stronger word than no.”
There’s a prevalent attitude in movie-making, politics, religion, education, certainly in entertainment that’s a sort of contempt for the audience. So many movies by the approach they choose to have indicate a lack of faith in the audience and assume they are attention-deficient. No they’re not! They’re craving something that matters, and you’re not giving it to them. When you just turn up the volume and substitute noise for excitement, you are admitting defeat and you’ve broken the covenant.
How did you make the film exciting when you had to show so many different races, all with the outcomes already known?
That is exactly what the challenge was. The audience says “I’m here, show me.” We can’t show them the same events from the same perspective over and over. I had to structure the architecture of the events. The first race is a build-up and we cut away from the moment to a freeze-frame. The next is the first time we’ve ever seen him run and he is so far behind and then he wins. Then there was the one that was 1000 frames a second as the horse has all four of his legs off the ground at once. That shot replaced a whole montage sequence. It’s far more fascinating to see it articulated in this way. That stood for six different victories. And then the Derby and the Belmont each had their own structure. The Derby we build up forever, slower and slower, and then there’s the silence which is in a way the loudest moment in the movie. And then the Belmont was going to go the other way, slow leading up to the race and then boom, what’s he doing?
You took a risk showing one race from the perspective of the people watching at home on television.
The Preakness was problematic. How is it going to look different? I had two enormous advantages. I had the actual footage which looked good. But the greater one to me was that the story was screaming for an answer to the question about the family. In the beginning, Penny makes a choice that seems to be moving away from family. Her family was there; she was somewhere else. And as a person who’s gotten on a family knowing I would not see my family for months. On my first film, I kissed them goodbye as they were sleeping at 4:30 and then again after they were in bed asleep at night. I only saw them asleep for months.
The pull you feel to show my sons as hard as it is for me and for them that a man takes care of business. I am loving them and that is defined by how I do it, not what I do but why I do. The most powerful thing I could show is what the family is feeling at home when they are watching this, to see her husband “as if the scales have fallen from his eyes.” And I got to show that in a scene that was about a horse race.
What do you look for in your projects?
People want to work on a movie that matters. And they look to the director. The speech I gave everybody was this: I’ve seen all your resumes and there are might be five films, there might be fifty. But the ones that stand out, the movies like “Chariots of Fire” or “Dances with Wolves,” this is one of those. We had a limited budget but what we did not lack was passion and imagination. We had the finest people in the world working on this film because it mattered to them.
What makes the story of Secretariat so captivating?
The story, ultimately, is about transcendence, about going beyond what anyone thought was possible, even the horse. His commitment to run that fast, and it was his choice, was what made it possible, and also what made it dangerous. He was running not against the horses in the race, but about every horse who ever ran, and then, after he rounded that corner, for the glory.

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Interview: Amy Ryan of ‘Jack Goes Boating’

Posted on September 27, 2010 at 11:10 am

Amy Ryan gave my favorite performance of 2007 as the mother of a missing girl in “Gone Baby Gone.” And it has been a pleasure to see her since then in roles as varied as Holly the human resources manager and love interest for Steve Carell in “The Office” and a journalist stationed in Iraq opposite Matt Damon in “The Green Zone.” She is now appearing in “Jack Goes Boating,” the first film directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who also appears in the title role. Ryan plays Connie in this story of two loners who try to reach out to one another. I spoke to her about this film and about her just-announced return to “The Office” for several episodes of Carell’s last season.
You came into a movie with three performers who had played those characters together on stage. Was that a challenge?
The challenge would have been bigger if I had joined them in the stage production. In this case there was about two years from the stage play to the screenplay and Bob Glaudini, the writer reworked some of the scenes and the characters. So they were re-discovering it while I was discovering it. We had a two-week rehearsal process in a room with our DP and script supervisor where we set out on it together.
You’ve now worked with a couple of actors turned directors, Ben Affleck with “Gone Baby Gone” and now Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was your director and co-star. What does an actor know that helps him as a director?
Two things that come to mind. One is truly a shared language. The bigger thing is compassion for knowing what’s it like to go to certain very dark or vulnerable places. Although I’ve had great support from non-acting directors, there’s just a shared experience. Phil never asked us to go places that he wasn’t going to himself. He had to be very vulnerable, especially those love scenes. He’s say, “You need to go there but don’t worry, I’m going to be right behind you — or I’m leading the way.”
This movie respects its audience enough that it doesn’t feel it has to give us explicit explanations for the characters’ behavior by telling us about their past. But do you need to create that for yourself in developing your performance?
Absolutely. Discussions with Bob and with Phil. I flat-out asked Bob: “What’s her story? Why does she use this language? Why is she so shy but why is she so vocal about what she wants, romantically and sexually?” He just kind of shrugged his shoulders. He really let me find it, which was at times frustrating. I wanted the answers. I knew they knew. But it was very generous in saying, “It’s okay for you to make it your own.” It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that something terrible happened to Connie. We don’t see characters like her in a love story very often. She’s in her 40’s and not good at love. She doesn’t have confidence in her workplace. She’s alone in New York City, and that’s enough. She’s an awkward person. Getting out of situations is never going to be a smooth thing.
She says very clearly, “Don’t hurt me.” She thinks too much. She says to herself, “This doesn’t feel good yet, but I’m going to keep trying. I wanted it to be like this, I wanted it to be like that, but I’m going to let go of what I imagined. But now I’m here with you. So overcome me.”
I was delighted to hear that you’re returning to “The Office!” amy ryan steve carell.jpg
Me, too! It’s good fun. That whole group, as you can imagine, truly is a barrel of laughs. I love working with Steve Carell. He is so generous. He never sets the tone of “Keep up with me or out of my way.” He really just says, “Come with me.” He is really, really fun.

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Interview: Nev and Rel Schulman and Henry Joost of ‘Catfish’

Posted on September 26, 2010 at 3:48 pm

Manhattan film-makers Rel Schulman and Henry Joost had no idea what movie they were making when they turned their camera on Rel’s brother Nev as he opened up a package sent to him from a little girl he had never met.
In a world where technology makes possible and culture makes acceptable the idea of everyone’s starring in some sort of reality show documentary, Rel and Henry were used to filming whatever was going on around them. In this case, that happened to be Nev’s increasing involvement via Facebook, telephone, and texting with an 8-year old girl named Abby, her mother Angela and half-sister Megan, and and their extended family and friends. And then, when Nev began to doubt the authenticity of the stories he was being told, the movie began to be about his impulsive journey to Michigan to see for himself who was on the other side of the digital connection.
The movie is called Catfish and it is a surprise critical and box office hit.
I spoke to them in Washington, D.C. and yes, they were filming their tour here for a possible documentary about the fame and fortune their movie was bringing them. They recorded me as I recorded them. Henry told me that he believes everyone has a story that could become a documentary. He says he and Rel would like to make feature films as well, but that they will always make documentaries. I asked him whether getting to know someone on Facebook was different from the selective revelations of the early stages of any romance. He said, “Yes. It’s digital; it’s binary. You either like something or you don’t. There’s no in between. You determine the way you are presented There’s none of that ambiguity of eye contact and body language and things you pick up in person when you are with someone. You pick this photo or that photo.”
Rel said that even as friends gathered regularly to hear updates on Nev’s developing online romance with Megan, they did not think of that relationship as the story of the film until the night in Vail, Colorado, when the discrepancies in her stories began to make them wonder who it was that Nev was falling for.
I talked with Nev about his hesitation in committing to both the film and the romance.
In the film you seem to be ambivalent about being in a movie. At what point did you really agree to commit to it?
Nev: Not until a couple of weeks before Sundance. I agreed by default in the sense that I share an office and at the time an apartment with my brother. That’s the nature of being friends with those guys. The cameras are on and if you are around them, you might be in their next short film.
But officially I hadn’t agreed. I always held that trump card. I wanted to wait and see how it turned out because I was so unsure what it would look like, so it wasn’t until a couple of weeks before Sundance that I really signed off on it and said, “here’s my signature.” I was a little concerned and nervous about the movie coming out. I certainly didn’t expect that it would get into Sundance or that it would get bought. In a way this is even stranger than the story in the movie itself. You can’t write something like this; it just has to happen.
How closely were Rel and Henry following the development of your relationship with Abby and her family?
They didn’t really know just how involved I had been with the whole experience. I only told them about certain things, funny emails, the paintings that were arriving. They weren’t aware of how emotionally involved I had become because they were busy with other things like a ballet film for PBS. This was a side project that they occasionally paid attention to. I don’t think even they knew there was a movie there until we got back from Vail . They said, “that was intense, but how do we tell that story?” I said, “There’s a lot you don’t know about.” I gave them access to my emails and texts and with that and the clips from the last nine months, they said they had enough.
What did they shoot that didn’t make it into the film?
They also did a lot of interviews, talking heads, that never made it into the film. My mom was concerned for me at the beginning of this, thinking there was something they wanted to get out of me. She reached out to Angela early on. First she was pursuing their concerns and then it was about whether their children’s romantic involvement was a good idea.
I was one of the early members when you first had to have an .edu email address. And before that it was myspace and friendster. I’m the first generation to grow up on these websites. And that is why I’m more susceptible than younger kids are. When the internet was new, it felt like very official and real and genuine. The internet’s at that crucial moment now where people are beginning to question whether what they see is real.
I was as much in love as I could have been under the circumstances. What the film speaks to is the desire to get out of your situation. I had only dated city girls and lived in a crazy urban jungle. And the internet gives you the opportunity to get in touch with people beyond your realm. Looking back, I see just how tailor-made every character was for me. She made a girl based on the pieces of the puzzle I gave her. The danger of online profiles is that you surrender so much of yourself so easily and it makes it easy for someone to say, “I also love all that stuff.”
What was your Facebook experience before you became involved with the Michigan “friends?”
I was one of the early members when you first had to have an .edu email address. And before that it was myspace and friendster. I’m the first generation to grow up on these websites. And that is why I’m more susceptible than younger kids are. When the internet was new, it felt like very official and real and genuine. The internet’s at that crucial moment now where people are beginning to question whether what they see is real.
Did you and do you think you were in love with Megan?
I came back from the trip very depressed and angry. But I realized it was me breaking my own heart and distracting myself from a real relationship with real investment. I’ve been through a lot of stuff, always my fault, and sometimes with consequences. I put myself on the line but I did it in a way that I knew I was putting myself at risk so it wasn’t totally a surprise in some way. I was so lucky with a supportive family that it made it a lot easier to come back and not feel completely lost and heartbroken.
How did it affect you to have a very personal story become so public?
I would have probably learned a lot less about what it meant and why it happened and been less self-reflective and therapeutic if I had not had the opportunity to watch it so closely on film. It has been an incredible growing experience. How often do you get to relive your most vulnerable nine months of your life and then talk about it? Every time I answer a question about the movie I think about it and reconsider it and connect with people and learn from their stories. I’ve become a sort of Facebook philosopher. But of course I don’t recommend to anyone making a movie of your most intense and emotional experience.
Is this experience so different from getting to know someone in real life?
This kind of thing does happen in person, though. You meet someone and then find out they’re married or that they have a past you don’t find acceptable.
On a first date, you’re seeing the best of someone. Six months later…
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Spoiler alert! Continue reading only if you have seen the movie!

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Interview: Lainie Kazan and Linda Gray of ‘Expecting Mary’

Posted on September 8, 2010 at 8:00 am

“Expecting Mary” is a heart-warming story of a pregnant teenager (the utterly winning Olesya Rulin of “High School Musical”) who runs away from home and is taken in by the quirky residents of a trailer park. It has an exceptionally strong cast and I was honored to have a chance to speak to two of my favorite actresses, Linda Gray (Sue Ellen in “Dallas”) and Lainie Kazan (the mother in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”). Both were very happy to talk about the film and what it meant to them.
Gray was performing in a theatrical version of “Terms of Endearment” written by Dan Gordon. She told me that “I literally cried my eyes out eight performances a week for six months. I said to him, ‘I love your writing but could you write me something lighter?'” She wanted to do something fun and funny and sweet, and she wanted to return to comedy. “I didn’t want to be Sue Ellen Ewing, I didn’t want a very powerful man. I wanted to be a woman who comes from her heart, who has an indomitable spirit.” Ever since her iconic performance as the wife of J.R. on “Dallas,” she had been cast in dramatic roles. But before “Dallas” she appeared in the short-lived Norman Lear sitcom “All that Glitters.” Here she plays Darnella, a one-time Las Vegas showgirl (Frank Sinatra gave her a T-bird), now performing in a tiny Indian casino run by a widow named Lillian Littlefeather (Kazan). She brought into the production her friend and costume designer Donna Barrish to help create Darnella’s look on and off-stage. And she is indeed funny and endearing as the kindhearted Darnella, whose essential goodness and generosity of spirit inspires those around her, including an enthusiastic truck driver (Elliot Gould), her grumpy landlady (Della Reece) and pig-tending neighbor (Oscar-winner Cloris Leachman). “Darnella makes the best of what it is, she looks at the bright side, she makes it glamorous, she has hope.”As she described the production to me, it was clear she was its fairy godmother behind the scenes as well as on camera. Everything was filmed in just 18 days, and everyone involved did it as a labor of love.
Kazan told me she could tell immediately that the script was “delicious.” She said, “It’s sweet, it’s a family film, it’s inspirational, it’s entertaining – the performances are terrific.” Like Gray, she spoke a little ruefully about being typecast too often, in her case as a series of ethnic mothers. But, she said, “I’m an actress who will go the limit. I will find the truth in everything.” She keeps a “character closet” and throws into it any odd or end she thinks might work for a character she could play. In this case, she was able to assemble the wardrobe for her character as the Jewish widow of a Native American casino owner from the goodies she had accumulated over the years.
I loved talking to her about her early days in show business. She understudied for Barbra Streisand in the original production of “Funny Girl.” “I wasn’t very interested because I knew it was a frustrating job and Ray Stark offered me $50 a week and I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ I had a front row seat in seeing the making of one of the most extraordinary stars – believe in yourself and know that if you are prepared and ready to make and accept mistakes as growth, a learning process, then you can do anything.” She is considering playing the role of the mother in the upcoming revival. She will be on “Desperate Housewives” this season and performing her nightclub act at Feinsteins on October 5.
The film opens in limited release this Friday, September 10. For information about where to see “Expecting Mary,” check this list of theaters.

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Interview: Yael Hersonski of ‘A Film Unfinished’

Posted on August 19, 2010 at 8:00 am

For decades, our impressions of the Holocaust have been formed by the images that survive and by the memories of those who were there. Now, as we near a time when the experience will no longer be within the memory of anyone alive, we rely even more on the documentation that is available. Although we recognize its limits, we recognize that it is a starting point.
“A Film Unfinished” combines some of the most well-known, intensely studied, and now-iconic images of the Warsaw Ghetto with some newly-discovered outtake footage that adds context and a great deal of new information about what we thought we knew and understood. Until now, what we have seen was the story the Nazis wanted to tell about the community where Jews were sent to live before they were sent to concentration camps. With the new footage, we are better able to understand what was really going on. The film opened yesterday in New York and it opens tomorrow in LA and on Sept. 24 in Washington, D.C.
In the New York Times, Jeanette Catsoulis called “A Film Unfinished“:

remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach. Moving methodically reel by reel and acknowledging the “many layers of reality,” the director creates a palimpsest of impressions from multiple, meticulously researched sources representing both victims and oppressors.

I interviewed Israeli director Yael Hersonski about making the movie as she was preparing to introduce the film and lead a discussion at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center.
It is fascinating that you took footage made by the Nazis to tell a lie and combined it with outtakes to make it tell a story that is truer to the actual experience.
I don’t think I am showing the truth — it is too big of a notion. I just show what happens when we don’t decontexualize these images as if it is objective documentations of history. That is the way I was educated to see it, as though it was made by history itself. When I saw this footage, visually, I felt the cameraman standing behind the camera with his own idea of limited reality, his own choices. He was serving the purposes of his commanders. The cameraman claims he did not completely understand the purposes of what he was doing. He refers to “the rich ones” without acknowledging that it was staged.
Maybe the greatest discovery of the research of this film was finding the protocols of the cameraman who took these images. You can hear him describe what he remembers he was shooting as you see the images. When I read the protocols for the first time, I was overwhelmed. I realized that everything I thought I understood was distorted by the way it was used. It’s a general visual background for so many different stories.
Something like 95% of the imagery of the Holocaust was shot by the perpetrators for their own purposes. The Nazis were the only ones who could document during the war. We have the documentation of the liberation of the camps by Americans and others but while the war was going on the only ones to take pictures were the Nazis themselves. When we say “to remember, not to forget” in Holocaust education, our memories are formed by these distorted portrayals of what was going on. So we have to understand that this footage was shot from a very specific point of view, to separate the point of view from the image, the cinematic manipulation from what suggests itself as reality.
How were the outtakes discovered?
The old footage was found in 1954. Then in 1998, two researchers, one American, Cooper C. Graham, and one English, Edwin Wood, were looking for footage from the 1936 Olympic games. They were looking in a film vault in an Air Force base in Ohio, of all places. They saw two film cans with “Das Ghetto” written on them. They knew the old footage of course so they immediately recognized what this was. They got in touch with the Library of Congress, which got in touch with the Holocaust Museum. This included nine minutes in color, which is very rare, very powerful. I realized that my reference for the Holocaust in color is Hollywood films, not reality. It looked like a Steven Spielberg movie, not the real thing. Our vision is so defined by the black and white images we all know that it does not seem right somehow to see it in color. That, too, should make us question the way our understanding is influenced and defined by the limited documentation we have available.
It is haunting to see in the footage recently discovered the cameramen themselves, emphasizing the artificiality of the situation. And then you add to that, giving us his comments.
Suddenly he has a face, he’s looking at us for a second. It’s not this far away black and white, almost symbolic image; he’s here. I wanted to prove to myself the specificity and artificiality of these images.
What was the Nazi passion for documentation? What were they hoping to achieve?
Germany was the most advanced nation in Europe for photography and cinematography. They were obsessed about it. The soldiers traveled to their front lines with their own private cameras. The documentation was massive. Ninety percent were destroyed during the last days of the war. We can only speculate on what they were trying to achieve. We do have one clue. The Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary four days before this filming began that he told Himmler, now when they start to move the Jews to the east, for “the final solution” process, it is urgent to make as many films as possible to educate the next generation. They wanted to establish the museum of the future in Prague. It would have been a memorial site for the Jewish race according to their own narrative. This would be “the last snapshot” of daily Jewish life, with the upper classes corrupted, indifferent, immoral, and the cause of poverty and diseases.
They took their own atrocities and shot it as if it was caused by the Jews. The most powerful propaganda is not entirely lies; they know how to combine what is true with what they want the story to be.
How did you find the survivors who were there during this filming?
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel, has lists of survivors. Many have already died. We found four women who were still alive. This was the most urgent part of the film-making so it was the first thing we did. I invited each one of them alone to screen the footage to make it as intense as could be so maybe they would remember things even they did not know they knew. It was one of the most emotional and exhausting part of making the film. And of course it was hard for them. But these women felt it was urgent for them to interpret this silent footage as those who were there, who were hiding from the film crew, to have the last word, the final word over these images.
It’s the most truthful way to remember something that has meaning. We cannot understand numbers like six million. We can understand someone looking at us or talking to us and saying, “I was here.”

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Directors Documentary Interview