Sometimes history is made by groups of people in labs or courtrooms or legislative bodies or battlefields. Sometimes history is made by two people talking to each other quietly. We hear those stories less often. It may be that what makes those changes possible is keeping them secret. Perhaps that is what makes imagining them so irresistible. That is what screenwriter Anthony McCarten has done in fact-based films like Bohemian Rhapsody, The Darkest Hour, and his latest, The Two Popes.
For the first time in nearly 700 years, a pope (Sir Anthony Hopkins as the more conservative Pope Benedict) resigned instead of serving until death. That made it possible for him to play an unprecedented role in encouraging and supporting the choice of his successor, Pope Francis (Jonathan Pryce as the first pope from the Americas).
Copyright Netflix 2019
In an interview, McCarten talked about what “great directing” by Fernando Meirelles added to the film, and why this is his “most adventurous” film…..Minow: In some of your other films based on real-life characters you had tremendous amounts of information about what went on even in their private moments. You had correspondence and diaries as well as a lot of documentation of their public moments. But here you really had to imagine conversations that no one knows anything about.
McCarten: You’re quite right. This is probably the most adventurous of the films I’ve done. There’s some artistic license but, I hope no less responsible than anything that I’ve done and ultimately, hopefully, no less truthful. These conversations that I imagined are based on deep research. In fact I did so much research that there’s an accompanying nonfiction book that you can buy in all good bookstores which shows how I really went into their pasts and looked at all the circumstances surrounding the resignation of Pope Benedict. It’s essential in all these ventures that you get it right as much as possible and in this particular case it is literally sacred ground. So, it cannot be careless and it cannot be flippant in any way. It has to be embedded in known truths. In fact, even when I create these long dialogues between these two, those dialogues are reflections of their stated positions about the future of this 2000 year old institution.
Thanks to Hollywood Genes and Zoe Krainik for This Lovely Interview
Posted on October 10, 2019 at 3:32 pm
Zoe Krianik from the wonderful Hollywood Genes blog was kind enough to interview me.
An excerpt:
What is your earliest memory of watching a classic film? What did it do for you? Why do you remember it?
My dad says the first movie I ever saw in a theater was the Disney film Westward Ho the Wagons when I was four, and that after that I wanted to see a movie every day. Now I do! But the first film I remember seeing in a theater was another Disney film: Snow White. I instantly became a fan of Disney animation, musicals, and sitting in a dark room watching stories on a big screen.
Which is your favorite (fictional) film family and why?
The Sycamores in You Can’t Take it With You— because they are all so encouraging of each other’s dreams. Runners-up: the Marches in Little Women, the Winstons in Houseboat (who would not want to have Sophia Loren and Cary Grant as parents?), the Gilbreths in Cheaper by the Dozenand Belles on Their Toes, the Mackays in Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, and the Browns in National Velvet because Anne Revere is my favorite movie mother.
Interview: Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails of The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Posted on June 22, 2019 at 9:13 pm
Copyright A24 2019“The Last Black Man in San Francisco” is stunning debut film from director/co-writer/co-producer Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails, who co-wrote the story, based on incidents in his own life, and who plays a character named Jimmie Fails in the film.
The exquisite lyricism and meditative, poetic images give a grand, elegiac quality to the story about Jimmie’s dream of returning to the grand Victorian mansion that was once his family’s home in a rapidly gentrifying San Francisco that is making it impossible for lower-income and middle class residents, especially non-whites, to continue to live there. Fails, with Jonathan Majors has his character’s closest friend, Montgomery, give deeply moving performances of quiet power, and it is one of my favorite films of the year.
In interviews, Talbot and Fails, lifelong friends, talked about what their home city means to them and why it was as important to them to tell the story of a friendship as it was to present loss and longing for the home.
Something we don’t see very often in movies is such a beautiful portrayal of a friendship so tell me a little bit about why that was something that you really wanted to have front and center in this story?
JF: I think it was important to see two males being gentle with each other and especially for black men because we always feel like you have to be this masculine tough guy or something or you can’t show your feelings to your friend so I think more particularly with black men that was important to show a friendship like that.
What inspired the beautiful, lush images of the film?
JT: I grew up watching a lot of old Hollywood films, pre-code and noir, with a particular interest in films in San Francisco from the 40’s and then obviously into the 70’s with movies like The Conversation. Actually sort of in getting ready for this film I dug for some lesser-known San Francisco movies that I hadn’t seen like Petulia, one that I love.
There is something about San Francisco that I think lives nationally in the imagination of filmgoers because it is a place that has been filmed for a very long time. But Jimmie and I felt like our side of San Francisco didn’t get that same cinematic treatment in film. We spent what feels like a lifetime walking around the streets of San Francisco. It’s strange because a lot of that’s disappearing. Our favorite places that Jimmie and I would go on these walks through the mission and Bernal and along those routes. Some of our favorite spots have been bulldozed and there have been new condos erected in their place and so as much as we wanted to make it a sort of valentine to San Francisco, the beauty of the city both in the architecture and the people, it was also just trying to document what we loved about it before it was all gone.
That obviously had a big impact on our approach to the way we wanted to show it as being sort of a magical place, and that also came from Jimmie and his character. He loved San Francisco very much and I think in his mind particularly when you meet him in the film it’s going to hold a certain romance for him as much as it can feel like it doesn’t love him back.
It was important to show the city as being lush and having these saturated rich colors partly just because that’s to me what the city feels like, what it looks like. The Victorians lend themselves to that and there’s also a regal quality.
When Jimmie and I first started talking about it we would say sometimes it felt like it’s the story of a deposed prince trying to get back the family throne and he’s on this odyssey-like journey. Every so often, he and Mont, as we see them do in the beginning, they take this journey from the outskirts of San Francisco, literally the furthest corner of the furthest point back into the heart of the city, to the old castle that he once lived in. That’s part of why we shot the scene when Jimmie’s yelling at the Segway tour led by Jello Biafra because that was supposed to show how he’s restored to the throne. Jonathan in his brilliance, when he comes out on the balcony and he says to him you look like King Jimmie each time he waved; that was all improvised by Jonathan but he really understood that scene on a deep level and it comes out in improv moments like that.
One of my favorite scenes in the film is when Mont essentially directs the guys who hang out on the corner all the time and essentially act as a counterpoint or Greek chorus in the film. He talks to them as though he’s a director giving actors notes on a scene.
JT: It’s funny you mentioned that because that’s another scene that was entirely improvised. Jonathan is wonderful to work with. He really studied the script and he’d quote it back to me, when I would try to change a line. He’d say, “No, we can’t change that line and this is why we can’t change it.” He really absorbs every word. Everything has so much conviction; every line he reads, and he gets very particular about them. But that was a scene where we felt like it just wasn’t working.
Originally he was supposed to cross the street and perform a magic trick as a distraction and on some level he did essentially the same thing. He took on the energy that was coming to Kofi but he always felt like Montgomery is observing the world as theater; everything is theatrical to him and of course an hour and a half of observations throughout the film all of that comes out then finally and expressed by him in his play.
I think in that moment it was a beautiful idea that Jonathan had that what if he cross the street and he treated them like performers because in a way we all in our own ways are performing something and in that moment it’s a toughness. I think those guys have more layers than what we see in that moment even though the guys were sort of leading the bullying of Kofi all have complicated feelings about that inside. Some of that confusion by them was somewhat genuine because there was no script to look to about what he might be doing.
Jimmie, your character wears pretty much the same clothes throughout the film. What does that hat and shirt tell us about the character?
JF: Joe made it. It grew on me. I didn’t necessarily like it but it was supposed to be reminiscent of a different era a little bit like kind of the old school sort of thing. I was very inspired by Brando in On the Waterfront with the beanie hat, the kind of longshoreman sort of look and there were a lot of longshoreman in San Francisco, black longshoreman, so it was kind of supposed to be like that sort of thing.
The magnificent Victorian house is so important to the film, really a character in the film. What was it like to be inside it?
JF: From the moment you step into that house it’s like everything outside doesn’t even exist. We were trying to find Victorian because we couldn’t use mine (the actual house the story was based on). It took us a while to find the house because all the places we went would be like Victorians on the outside and we go inside it would just look all new and it didn’t have the old sort of Victorian style inside. S o when we found that one and the owner was so nice to let us in.
Did you have a favorite room in the house or a favorite detail?
JF: The library for sure. The books he has in there — it’s insane. He has National Geographics that go back to like 1800 and something, like he literally has it’s insane what he has in there; I think it was like some of the original copies.
It must have been a challenge to take a story that is in part based on the real life of the person who is writing and performing it and then say, “Well, that may have happened but we can’t do it that way in the movie.” How did you navigate that?
JT: It’s interesting because I feel like everything I’ve ever made even going back to our first movies as teenagers came from something that happened in our lives. One of the first movies that Jimmie and I made with my younger brother Nat was about two friends who wind up in the suburbs for the weekend and they are lured out to the suburbs by two girls that they meet and I’m in it and Jimmie’s in it and it starts to go very wrong very fast.
It’s about two city kids who were very weirded out by the suburbs and we end up fleeing back to San Francisco in the end but that was basically something that had happened to me. So in a way it’s all natural that we would be talking about Jimmie’s life as we often did or with my life and then that would somehow end up being turned into a movie.
I think for this in particular some of the stories are pulled directly from Jimmie’s life; the scene with his mother is something that actually happened when he saw her on the bus after having not seen her for a long time and the character Mike Epps plays, Bobby, was a guy who drove off with the car that Jimmie and his dad was living in, they didn’t really acknowledge it.
Through a collective imagination, part of the film was not just retelling things that had actually happened but imagining different ways to tell them or to elaborate on them so thinking, “What if this guy drove off with Jimmie’s car never really acknowledged it even years later and still sort of said that he was just borrowing it and even if he picked Jimmy up and drove around town?” It was funny to think, “Who could do that so well?” Mike Epps is one of the funniest people in the world.
Even for the scene with Jimmie and his mom, it was like wanting to shoot that in a way that both felt honest and real. That was his real mother playing his mother in the movie. Part of what’s important about that is they look so much alike, he’s really his mother’s son in some ways, but also wanting to show in the way we shot them like that, shot reverse shot, a very stylized look, that there’s a distance between them as the world is sort of whirring past them both.
So I think that was actually from me and Jimmie as kids that first bonded on telling stories to each other, that was one of the most fun parts of this, how to take these real events and spin them into something that was partially fiction and partially true.
Jimmie always says for him every scene was emotionally true, even if the events and the characters were changed.
What has been the most gratifying of the reactions that you got from the film?
JF: Just people saying, “Thank you for being vulnerable.” It’s the best thing I could hear. People say a lot of beautiful things about the cinematography, about the actual art of it but when people thank me for that it means everything. It was hard for me to put myself out there, so that means everything to me.
Interview: The Miseducation of Cameron Post’s Chloe Grace Moretz, Desiree Akhavan, and Mathew Shurka
Posted on August 7, 2018 at 3:42 pm
Copyright FilmRise 2018Sundance winner “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” takes place in 1993, when a teenager is sent to a Christian “gay conversion” program something between boarding school, boot camp, rehab, and prison. Chloe Grace Moretz gives a performance of great subtlety and sensitivity in the title role. My friend and fellow critic Leslie Combemale and I spoke to Moretz, director Desiree Akhavan and gay conversion survivor and activist Mathew Shurka about the film.
I always think that one of the greatest challenges an actor can have is a part like this one where your character is so much an observer, with no big speeches.
Chloe Grace Moretz: What’s beautiful about the film is that it really is an ensemble piece. It’s called “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” but I walk through it with you guys, perceiving and understanding and taking in and comprehending this space that I’ve been thrust into. We shot the movie chronologically. We only had 23 days to shoot the movie. It was wonderful because we just walked through each beat. Because we didn’t have much rehearsal time, there wasn’t much to do other than feel and hear and listen and perceive.
Because my character didn’t have a lot of lines, all this stuff is happening to her and around her and she’s having all these projections put on her about of what she is and what her problems are. And all she says is, “I don’t think so.” It all happens in her head and it was really fun for me to play with that and depict it all through my face and my eyes. It’s what I like doing best as an actor, ever since I was a little girl. It’s always been something I enjoy, showing context and subtext in my head and having it pushed it out through my eyes, not having to vocalize it. A lot of times in life, when you’re faced with sadness and depression and anger you can’t really formulate words for that. When someone is looking at you and telling you everything you’re doing is incorrect, sometimes the best you can do is say, “I don’t think so.” You internalize that.
Desiree Akhavan: That was the character. Someone who wasn’t that talkative. An introverted, athletic lesbian, an ode to every woman I’ve ever loved. I was building a type. I’ve been asked if that was something that changed specifically through casting Chloe, because she has a strength for communicating without words, but it was just a happy marriage, when the character meets the right actor.Copyright FilmRise 2018
Mathew Shurka: It was incredibly powerful to see that in Chloe. It is so hard to turn conversion therapy into a film. All the subtleties are really clear in the film. My favorite part is when she just walks into the conversion therapy center and Reverend Rick is playing the guitar. There’s a shot of Chloe’s face. There’s doubt, there’s fear, and “where am I” and it’s every teenager. As a survivor, it read really clear to me, what was going on with her character.
We’d like to believe we are wiser now than in 1993, when this movie takes place, but how many states still allow conversion therapy?
Mathew Shurka: Only 14 states have banned conversion therapy for minors, which means that some form of it is still permitted in 36. But it’s legal for adults in all 50 states. A majority of conversion therapy programs are religion-based, but not all. This movie shows both, an actual therapist and a pastor. In reality, that’s how it goes. All of my treatment was conducted by licensed professionals. My father, who was the one who was really adamant about me going into conversion therapy did his due diligence and he wanted someone who had gone through the training of a therapist to conduct this.
They’re fighting these bills so a lot more are getting licensed as therapists to have more credibility, because they are fighting these bills. There are licensed and there are unlicensed and then the overlap who are both, pastors and licensed therapists. We say you have to choose. In the states where we passed those bills, people say, “What if there’s a pastor who wants to conduct conversion therapy?” and we say, “You have to honor and obey the terms of your therapist license.” You have to choose. You want to be a pastor and have those rights, fine, but if you’re acting as a therapist you have to honor that license.
Because these issues are still so present, did you ever think of setting the film in the present instead of in 1993?
Desiree Akhavan: We thought about it because it would have been cheaper. But no, it was always really important that they were as isolated as possible. For the dramatic stakes to be as high as possible, Cameron could not even know about other gay kids, let along see them on Instagram or reach out and ask for help. I didn’t want there to be a world outside of what they knew around them. I wanted to be loyal to the book but I also didn’t want to deal with technology and the whole host of changes that would bring to their lifestyle and personalities and their identity and their self-expression. The way kids live right now is very different from the way they lived in 1993 and it was important to keep it that way. But it is a very relevant film and when I began this process I didn’t realize how relevant it would become through the course of production.
Interview: Rachel Dretzin and Andrew Solomon on “Far from the Tree”
Posted on August 2, 2018 at 8:00 am
Copyright IFC 2018“Far from the Tree” is a new documentary based on the award-winning book by Andrew Solomon that explores the challenges families families face when they have children who in one way or another seem to be especially different and hard to understand. The movie uses Solomon’s own story as a gay man whose parents struggled to accept him as a starting point to examine other families: a mother and her adult son with Down syndrome, a teenager with autism and his parents who tried every possible therapy until one had a remarkable result, three people with dwarfism and their families, and the parents and siblings of a young man who committed a brutal murder when he was still in his teens.
In an interview, Solomon and director Rachel Dretzin talked about the lines between nature and nurture and between helping and accepting people who are different.
I remember in the 1960’s and 70’s, the authorities were still blaming “refrigerator mothers” for autism. Now we see it as entirely a matter of physical causes. Where are we in the attribution of our abilities and personalities between nature and nurture?
Solomon: Well, I think both nature and nurture can occur, and we look at a range of conditions in the film. I mean Down syndrome was not caused by nurture, but how well someone with Down syndrome is able to function in the world may have something to do with nurture. Different people with Down syndrome have different capacities, just as different people without Down syndrome have different capacities, but there’s no question that really good parents are able to bring their child to a higher level of functioning. So, certainly refrigerator mothers don’t cause autism, but mothers who are warm and engaged and supportive are able to help their children through autism. The family you see in the film devoted themselves one hundred percent to their autistic child, and ultimately were able to help them quite a lot.
So that’s what parenting is, is figuring out what their nature is and then nurturing whatever their nature is?
Solomon: Well, nurturing whatever their strengths are and helping them to realize their full potential. I mean parenting involves loving your children, it involves accepting your children, and what it shouldn’t involve is trying to transform their children because you are uncomfortable with the way that they’re different. You don’t want to have families to say “I have a child with Down syndrome and I’m going todo all of these things because I hate having a child with Down syndrome and I want to make it disappear and go away.” You recognize that it can create a lot of difficulties in life and so here is the way that we’re going to help him to be independent or self-reliant or give him as much education as we can and so on and so forth.
We all as parents have a responsibility for changing our children. We have to educate them, to give them moral compass, teach them some manners, and we also all have to accept and celebrate our children for who they are. Some things clearly need to be accepted and celebrated and some things clearly need to be changed and a great deal falls in a very funky middle. The film is really about how people navigate through that foggy middle
While we know different in theory, do we still somehow expect that our children will be Xerox copies of ourselves?
Dretzin: I think we all have some fantasy when we have children. Andrew says it in the book, I think it’s the first line, “There’s no such thing as reproduction.” Having children is an act of production. It is always a leap into the unknown and we all know it’s a leap into the unknown, so I think imagining that our children are gonna be just like us is a sort of comforting way of padding the jump.
The families in the movie have very little overlap with the book. How did you select them?
Dretzin: The first decision that we made, which we made very, very early on, was not to for the most part not to use the same stories that are in the book. Jason Kingsley is the one character in the film who’s also in the book, but his life has kind of moved into a new phase and a whole set of new experiences that were not part of the book, so that’s part of the reason we decided to include him.
Once we decided we were going to find new characters it was about really narrowing down the scope of what we were going to look at. There are twelve chapters in the book, ten of which are devoted to different identities. We knew we couldn’t do them all, so we thought about it thematically in terms of stories that would address some of the most important ideas in the book, and not necessarily repeating them.
So for example, there’s a lot of overlap between the themes of the Deaf chapter in the book and the themes of the dwarf chapter in the film. Both are about communities that have wrestled mightily with the question of whether cure is something they want, both are communities that have an organized empowered community that is very positive, if not celebratory, of their condition. So we decided we would do dwarfism because deafness is something that’s been looked at a lot and is further along.
Then we went out and met people. My producer, Jamila Ephron, and I spent about a year meeting dozens and dozens and dozens of families. Whether it was conferences or conventions or through different groups, then narrowing it down, then meeting them in their homes multiple times before we ever brought cameras in.
You were dealing with very intimate, often painful topics. How did you make them comfortable with you and with being so public on screen?
Dretzin: We’ve built a lot of trust. I mean, again, the film was made over a couple of years and we spent many, many, many hours with these families, multiple visits. So, in some cases the trust was there right away. Emily Kingsley and Jason, partly because they had been in the book and they knew Andrew and partly because they were just further along, they’ve done quite a bit of media before, they were comfortable almost immediately. But other families took time. It’s a funny thing that happens. You spend enough time with people and you like them enough and they like you enough, and eventually everything else just kind of goes away and people really do just relax and there are times where nobody is thinking about the cameras because we’ve been there for so long. I hope those are reflected in the film. That’s the magic moment.
There is a moment in the film at the Little People convention where they discuss a possible “cure” for dwarfism and some people are reluctant. As one of them says, “I don’t think I need to be fixed.” How do we decide and who decides whether something needs to be fixed?
Solomon: The question is whether it’s addressing short stature because it’s uncomfortable to be in the world with short stature, or whether it’s addressing short stature and these other health complications and proposing ways to avoid all of the complications that are involved. Every condition that we looked at has elements of social deficit and elements of inherent deficit. So if you’re a dwarf and you need spinal decompression, that is a biological reality, that is something that no degree of adjusting our social attitudes can address and it needs a biological response, but if you said the problem with dwarfism is that everyone stares at you and people take pictures without permission, and you can’t reach things in grocery shelves, those are all things that can be shifted and fixed, and they should be shifted and fixed and there should not be reasons for eliminating dwarfism from the spectrum of human experience.
The question is to try to tease apart the inherent problems of the conditions, and the social problems of the conditions, and to ensure that more medicine is focused on the biological issues, and that social reform is focused on the social issues.
If I had a deaf child, if one of my children was born deaf, I would get him cochlear implants because I think communication between parents and children is paramount and I’m not good at languages and I would not have become fluent in sign in three weeks, it would have taken many, many years. But I would also bring that child up around other Deaf people and learning to sign as the surest way to leave the child later on with the option. You can keep the implant on and function mostly in the hearing world, and you could move back and forth between those two worlds in a fluid and easy fashion.
Dretzin: I would just add to that that I think there’s been a kind of misconception about the inclusion of a crime story in the film that we’re trying to equate what Trevor did with being deaf or being a dwarf or any of these other sorts of conditions. It’s really in the film to show the enduring nature of parental love, and that story challenges parental love in ways that none of the other stories in the film actually can. It’s not there to suggest that we should fully accept what Trevor did or that he doesn’t meet to be fixed or anything of that nature.
I loved the music in the film. Tell me about it.
Dretzin: Well, we have two composers actually, Nico Muhly was one of the prodigies featured in Andrew’s book, so that was kind of a no-brainer. His music is beautiful particularly what he does with the autism section with Jack. You hear those voices and the buzzing and it mimics some of what is going on in Jack’s brain. Yo La Tengo was an absolute delight to work with. They came into the project a bit late because there was a song of theirs that I wanted to use and I approached them about using it. We got into a conversation about the film and they expressed so much interest in getting involved. One of the most interesting moments was actually when I screened the film for Yo La Tengo for the first time. It was a rough cut and they loved it but they thought there was too much of their music in and actually encouraged me to pull back, which was the smartest call I think that they could have made. We really had to be careful with this film not to get sentimental or manipulative emotionally because it’s such an emotional film and the music has a lot to do with that. So we really tried to pull back with the music and not overdo it, and in the end I think that that helps make the film not feel sappy.
The movie is about family members, who are often very different from one another and still find ways to support each other. But it is also about the importance of being with other people who are like you, about finding your tribe, whether you are born into it or not.
Solomon: We live in the era of the internet, I think a lot of these families find other families going through similar experiences. If you know only people who are like you you become a caricature of yourself but if you don’t know anyone who’s like you it’s hard to figure out who you are.
