Interview: Rob Margolies of ‘Lifelines’

Posted on February 15, 2009 at 8:00 am

“Lifelines,” which I wrote about as one of the overlooked gems of 2008, opens April 3 in New York. It is about a deeply wounded family’s visit to a therapist and the revelations and connections and consequences that result.

I interviewed the writer/director/producer, Rob Margolies.

What made you want to be a filmmaker?

One of my earliest memories is the day I first discovered Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth” on VHS. I was no more than 5 or 6. It was the first film I fell in love with. I must’ve watched it nearly every day after school for months.

Not long after, I was introduced to films like: “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” “The Never Ending Story,” “The Goonies,” “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” etc. Within the following 5 or 6 years, my love for movies grew stronger and matured with such defining films as: “The Shawshank Redemption,” “Pulp Fiction” (which I’m proud to admit I snuck into when I was 11), “Schindler’s List,” and “Forrest Gump.”

Storytelling, creative writing, and concocting elaborate skits using friends as actors were vital hobbies of mine long before I hit puberty. I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker before I was 12 (the age I began writing screenplays).

To answer the question, I am a filmmaker to inspire and entertain others.

Were there particular films or directors or screenwriters who influenced you?

In addition to the films above, as far as filmmakers go: Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spielberg, Truffaut, and Alexander Payne…

How did the idea for this story begin?

NOTE: I can’t fully answer this question without giving away spoilers.

However, I will admit that I was diagnosed with ADD at a young age, and in order to be properly treated for such a condition I had to visit handfuls of diverse psychiatrists and psychologists for a large part of my life. The concept of a family journeying to see a shrink on a Saturday to mend their own issues has always been a topic I wanted to explore cinematically. I believe every human being can relate on some level.

You gave some very challenging roles to young actors — how did you work with them so that they did not indicate or give away too much too soon?

My New York-based casting director, Judy Henderson, has had a lot of luck casting children in the past. I sought her out based on her past work on such indie films as “L.I.E.” and “Twelve and Holding.” Judy came through again, finding incredible newcomers for “Lifelines.”

Each actor, Robbie Sublett (Michael Bernstein), Dreama Walker (Meghan Bernstein), and Jacob Kogan (Spencer Bernstein), understood the dynamics of their character from their first audition. I truly lucked out. We really didn’t even rehearse that much! When they had questions, we discussed the answers. When they weren’t in character or did something that needed improved (which was infrequent), I let them know and the problem was solved almost instantly. All three of them are already extremely successful, and deservingly so. Again, I truly lucked out.

Jane Adams is one of my favorite actresses. How did you come to work with her and what was it about this role that attracted her?

Jane was my first choice for Nancy Bernstein – I’ve always been a fan of hers as well. My Los Angeles-based casting director, Lindsay Chag, agreed that Jane was perfect for the role. Intuitively, I knew she would connect with the character. And she did. You would have to ask her what attracted her to the role for an authentic answer…

What do you most want people to take from this movie?

Nobody is perfect. And if anybody thinks they are, they’re most imperfect. I’d love people to watch this movie and subliminally start accepting their own family members and friends for precisely who they are, putting all inherent shortcomings aside. But ultimately, I made this movie for people to know they aren’t alone in the world. If you have an open mind, somebody will always be there to hear you out in times of need.

What are you doing next?

A feel-great father/son comedy titled: “In the Meantime.” It puts an insightful new spin on the coming age subgenre as well as road trips, and the definition of love & lust… We will be filming sometime this summer. Currently we’re making offers, getting close to attaching a star for the lead role. The rest of the principal cast is pretty much set. A bunch of the actors are already listed on IMDB and the rest will be added within the upcoming months.

Also, please check out my website for more info on “LIFELINES” and all of my upcoming projects.

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Interview: Director Ed Zwick of ‘Defiance’

Posted on January 14, 2009 at 4:00 pm

Edward Zwick, the director of the new Holocaust movie “Defiance,” is well-known for both historical dramas (“Glory”) and intimate personal stories (the television series “Thirtysomething”) – and for finding the small moments in big stories and the big emotions in small ones. This is the ideal sensibility for the new Holocaust drama “Defiance,” the true story of The Bielski Brothers, who hid and protected 1200 Jews from the Nazis and the Russians in the Belarussian forest.

I spoke to him in Washington, D.C., where we quickly discovered that we graduated from different campuses of the same high school in the same year and have a friend in common and that lead off a lively exchange about the movie’s themes and what went into getting it made.

What are some of the movies that influenced and inspired you when you were still in school?

“The Guns of Navarone and “Lawrence of Arabia when I was young, but I was a real addict of “The Late Show” and watched everything, especially anything from John Huston, Howard Hawks, and George Stevens.

Is there one theme or thruline that is a part of all the projects that interest you?

You’re the critic — that’s for you to pick out. If I try to think objectively about myself and my work, I would say I want to be intuitive and distinctive. You can’t help but reveal your bias, and you can’t but invest personally in any story that you tell. I like to reveal people with some of the niceties of social behavior stripped away and the moral, ethical, and political issues are revealed.

One of the questions that drew me to this project was the question of how Jewish culture has survived. The Passover Seder is about telling the story of the exodus. Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity. There is a perverse irony in commemoration of the dead in the Holocaust with little attention to the survivors and the resistance, especially the Jewish resistance. Its immensity can’t be underestimated and it is a story that needs to be told. We all know these iconic images of Jews in the Holocaust and those are important but we have come to accept them as the only images and that needs revision.

It came to our attention through Tuvia’s obituary. We found our way to the family and they were very generous with anecdotes, pictures, videotape, and Tuvia’s unpublished autobiography. The comment at the end of the film underscores the rising to the occasion aspect of what they did. They took off the mantle of responsibility and the burden of doing certain things they were not proud to revisit. They had a hard-won normalcy. Having done things that were very extreme and had to do with survival, they preferred that it was not better known.

You had three actors, two British and an American, playing brothers. How did you create that sense of connection and history between them?

I did some of it and they did some of it. They created this lovely kind of rough-housing sibling regressive behavior that they developed on the set and it was an approximation of their boyhood. Liev Schreiber and Daniel Craig got into this very competitive sibling thing that was important for the relationship of their characters. We also had an extraordinary dialect coach, because we wanted a consistent sound, that commonality.

And we worked with Jenny Beavan, one of the goddesses of the costume design field. Her gift was to find the real pieces, to find in each character that silhouette and watch that silhouette change, to subtly watch characters become more assimilated, losing and picking up pieces. At one point Liev steals the coat from the milkman, and then we see Daniel’s wearing the coat and then he gives it to Alexa and then we see it covering them in bed. There were no new things but everything had multiple uses and that, too, helps to tell the story.

Tell me about working with James Bond – Daniel Craig has been working in a very different genre.

He is a character actor, real protean, and he is very determined not to be only one thing. He reminds me of Anthony Hopkins who is also a working class classically trained British actor and there’s nothing like that. He is very internal. And he wanted Liev’s character to seem more dominant; he is very generous that way.

What were some of the issues presented in telling this story?

It is a complex subject, but it is important to understand the difference between passivity and powerlessness. These people were stateless. They had no access to weapons. The police were hostile. But they had this urban natural setting. Everywhere there was a forest, a part of the natural world, there were Jews who hid in it. There was God in the forest – denoted, in the juxtaposition of the natural world, the forest as a place of sanctuary. It embraced and sheltered them.

It was important for me not to describe this group as a monolith, all of them like each other and acting as one force. That objectification leads to prejudice and genocide. There were many divides: religious and secular, class, sexuality, aggression — all ways to individuate it. I think of the W.H. Auden poem “September 1, 1939,” when he says “I and the public know/What all schoolchildren learn,/Those to whom evil is done/Do evil in return.” In the interest of survival they may cross lines even into the emulation of their tormentor. For me, that made it more heroic because it made it more believable.

It also happened to be true.

Interview: Steve James of ‘At the Death House Door’

Posted on January 3, 2009 at 8:00 am

I last wrote about the superb documentary At the Death House Door when I interviewed its subject, Pastor Carroll Pickett, who served 15 years as the death house chaplain to the infamous “Walls” prison unit in Huntsville. The film was the first-time direction collaboration between award-winning directors Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”) and Peter Gilbert (“Vietnam: Long Time Coming”). James was nice enough to answer some of my questions about the film.

How did you first hear about Pastor Carroll Pickett?

Steve James: Gordon Quinn at our film company Kartemquin was approached by The Chicago Tribune because they thought we would be interested in doing a film focused entirely on the investigation of the Carlos De Luna case by Steve Mills and Maurice Possley. Gordon knew that Peter and I would be interested in the subject and set up a meeting with the reporters. In the course of telling us about De Luna, they also mentioned Pastor Carroll Pickett who had been haunted by the memory of De Luna, and recorded these feelings in an amazing audio tape about the execution right afterwards. When they revealed he’d recorded audio tapes about all 95 executions he’d
ministered to, we were hooked. We decided from the get-go, that we wanted Rev. Pickett’s journey to be our main story, and bring us to why De Luna was so important to him.

What was your original intention for the film and how did it evolve?

SJ: See answer above… As stated, the original intention of the Tribune was to have us do a film about Carlos De Luna, but its hard to do a film about a man who was not famous or led a well-documented life, and who was executed 17 years before. With the mention of Pickett, it was clear that we had a unique and potentially powerful story to tell about a man’s past and also who he is today. This is one time when the original conception of what the film could be was pretty much on target for what the film ultimately became.But that doesn’t mean that the filmmaking process did not evolve. We didn’t anticipate guard Fred Allen, nor Carlos’ sister Rose, nor Carroll’s family and the significance they would all play in the film. Nor did we anticipate just how closed and “well armored” Carroll was as a person and how this film would ultimately – in his words – prove to be “the therapy he never got.”

What films inspired you to create documentaries? What documentaries most influenced your approach?

SJ: I was initially influenced by fiction films – one director in particular whose work was always characterized by complex portrayals of his subjects. That director was the great Jean Renoir, director of such classics as The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion. But I was also affected by less celebrated films of his like “Toni” and “The Crime of Mister Lange.” Renoir was the ultimate humanist filmmaker, a great observer of the human condition. Documentary influences were the films of Barbara Kopple, particularly Harlan County, U.S.A., 35 Up by Michael Apted, and The Times of Harvey Milk by Rob Epstein.

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Interview: The Tustys of ‘The Singing Revolution’

Posted on January 2, 2009 at 8:00 am

Tea thrown overboard. Freeing the prisoners. Knocking over a statue. Every revolution has a moment when the people say that they will no longer tolerate tyranny. In the case of Estonia, the Baltic nation that suffered under two of history’s most brutal and oppressive regimes, the Nazis and the Soviets, it was a song.

Laulupidu, the Estonian song festival held every five years that features 30,000 singers on stage In November 2003, UNESCO declared Estonias’s Song and Dance Celebration tradition a masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. In 1988, 300,000 Estonians in Tallinn sang national songs and hymns that were strictly forbidden during the years of the Soviet occupation, as Estonian rock musicians played. It signaled and hastened the end of Soviet domination.

I was delighted to see this film because my family has been to Estonia and we heard a little bit about the Singing Revolution when we were there. I began by asking Maureen and James Tusty how they came to make The Singing Revolution documentary.

MT: We never get tired of talking about it. We spent four years in production and the past year in distribution and promotion and we are still excited about it.

Jim’s father was born in Estonia, in Tallinn. We had a chance to teach in the first media program in the Baltics. We were teaching filmmaking and people started telling us stories. We asked ourselves, “How could we not have heard of this?” If we were ever going to take on a personal project this would be it. They came up with the name “the singing revolution.” It is central to the Estonian nature. It is such a small country and they are quite modest. People would talk about these events and we would say, “You did what?” “Oh, well, I told my mother and the babysitter to come,” they would say it so casually, and here was this event that was so transforming.

JT: The Estonians in particular dislike bragging and as a result they did not boast about what happened.

How did you shape the story as you filmed and edited?

JT: We shot about 40 days over about 3 months, February to July 2004. We pre-interviewed about 200 people, then interviewed about 40 on camera and of those maybe half of them ended up in the film. We wanted not only the leaders but also those who simply participated. One of the interesting things is that there was no one character to focus on, no central hero in the film. It is easier in one way because the entire nation is the hero. But it is a challenge in another way. How do you make that a personal story? The film gave the nation a personality.

The first singing protest was in 1988 after a rock concert. There was no one person saying, “Here’s what we do.” Everyone just came together. It was one of the pivotal events and the leaders emerge after the will of the people is evident.

How did the Estonians respond to the film?

JT: The film premiered in Estonia on December 1, 2006. We were concerned that they would feel, “Who are you to tell our story?” but we got an unprecedented standing ovation. I think it was good to have someone who cared about Estonia but who also had an arm’s length view and some objectivity. What they did not even really have a name at the time but now everyone thinks of it as “the singing revolution.”

There had been other versions of the story focused on all three of the major events, but this is the first one to show how these three movements interwove with one another. It was released theatrically in Estonia and became the most successful documentary ever shown there. The history of the song festival is a possible project for us in the future. It always had a political aspect – it was founded with a view against tsarist Russia.

MT: Part of the challenge was the way we represented the leaders. Many are still involved in Estonia today. We spent quite a bit of time to make sure we had the balance and accuracy of the events. We finally had all three of these different factions agreeing, “Yes, this is how it happened.” Each knew only what they had been talking about.

JT: We did that independently so they could each make sure we had their part right. It would be like getting Al Gore and George Bush to agree on the Florida recount!

And what about in the US?

MT: It was released just a year ago in NY and LA. We wanted to go for a theatrical run, but the majority of distributors were discouraging. We just felt this story would so resonate with people that we decided to go for it. It was held over for five weeks in NY. We were able to play in over 140 cities across the US and Canada and it is still playing even though the DVD is out.

JT: Part of what makes our film unique is that we had a regular theatrical release; it was not just an event film. We got to experience the film in many different cities. It brought in several different kinds of audiences: Baltic-Americans, singers, people interested in non-violence, and people in the freedom movement. It began with those four constituency groups in particular, and we would narrowcast our marketing, but then word would get around town and by the third week the general community would find us.

MT: Estonian choral music is quite known in the community of people who sing in choruses, so they really supported this film.

JT: And they are already organized, so they would come in groups.

What else have you done to help people understand the extraordinary events of the singing revolution?

MT: We have developed a three-DVD educational set for high schools and colleges with teacher materials, maps, and PowerPoint, so that schools can use this story to teach students not just about Estonia and this particular struggle but about non-violence and freedom fighting. To accomplish what they did without violence is really remarkable, especially with what they had lived through, an amazing human story.

JT: Ironically, the Estonians are quite an independent people, as they said, “The miracle is not that we beat the soviets, it is that we got hundreds of thousands of Estonians to hold hands together.” We have done dozens of films, but this one is highly personal and unique. We feel there are millions to reach with this story because of the grace and elegance of the protest and how effective they were. We think we have it hard sometimes, but look at the Estonians and see how they prevailed.

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Interview: Scott Derrickson

Posted on December 22, 2008 at 7:00 am

Scott Derrickson is a rarity in Hollywood — a committed Christian director who openly admits that his films reflect his religious views and serve as a kind of testimony. I spoke to him about his latest film, the remake of the 1951 Cold War classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. He was nice enough to begin by saying that he is a fan of Beliefnet.
I am glad to be talking to a website about messages and ideas. I read the site and like it very much. I have an ever-growing feeling that movies should have messages that trust the audience and do not give all the answers. I am resistant to being told what to think or how to vote. This movie has a lot of things to say but it is less a message than a very American perspective about America and human nature itself. We have this dual side to our nature, destructive and creative and at the same time as individuals and as a nation and as a species we have to make mistakes and evolve and grow. If you can get something like that into a big Hollywood popcorn movie without sounding preachy, that is a great thing.
Did you see the original film as a child?
The first time I saw it was in college. It was very much a product of its times, the Cold War, the bomb, the U.N. This is the story for a new time and a new era; this is a post-September 11 movie, a movie that acknowledges being in a country that has experienced a bit of a disaster.
How does this movie address its moment in history?
I knew that the movie would come out when we would have elected a new President but before he took office. This campaign was different — no one made a big deal about the race issue until Obama was elected and then everyone on all sides agreed that it was something to celebrate, a step toward healing the deepest wound in American history.
I read something recently: “We’re now living in a time when we saved our banks but destroyed our biosphere.” The movie is a reflection of that idea, of these messes that we’ve gotten ourselves into, but it is not cynical or pessimistic, it has a refreshing sense of optimism, of radical change for the better coming to the world at large. Things have gotten bad enough that we are going to roll up our sleeves, start admitting our mistakes and start dealing with them.

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