Interview: Laurent Cantet of ‘The Class’

Posted on December 18, 2008 at 5:00 am

The top prize at Cannes this year went to an extraordinary film called “The Class” about a year in the life of a dedicated French high school teacher and his students, many of whom are immigrants. It is now the official French entry for the Oscars and opening in theaters across the US. I spoke to director Laurent Cantet about making the movie, which blurs the line between documentary and feature film.

Did you have a favorite teacher?

I have a few memories of some teachers who made an impression on me. I studied in school about 10 years after May 1968. Professors had also started to question their methods, and I had teachers like Francois who really tried to introduce questions, not just lectures. My parents were professors who encouraged student participation and I spent my childhood listening to people talk about school and pedagogical methods. That made an impression on me. And I have children so I see what school is like now. The French title is “Within the Walls.” I wanted to compare my experience with contemporary reality.

This film is designed to see what happens behind the scenes because school is a very private place. Children want to keep the space as a space that is theirs, their first place of independence. Professors protect themselves behind the walls of the schools.

One aspect of the school that will strike many Americans as unusual is that there are student representatives attending the faculty meetings. And indeed, the teacher in the movie finds that it creates some problems for him.

That is a requirement. It seems natural to French people to have students there, a question of honesty. There are two class representatives in staff meetings, entrusted with explaining the students point of view to professors and reporting to each student what is said about him.

What makes a great teacher?

If I knew I might be a teacher! It is indispensable that they take into account everything that the students live outside of the classroom. So the school can never seem like a sacred separate space. The world is more complex, I think, the personal stories of each of the students are more difficult, each with a very different trajectory, more than when I was in school.

The movie has elements of both documentary and fiction. It features non-professional performers and it feels very improvised, but in fact it was scripted, right?

In every movie there’s this question of reality and fiction. I like to give news, stories from the world, but I never want to do it as a thesis. I want to evaluate reality through the paths of different characters. I worked with non-professional actors who bring a way of being in front of the camera, notably they bring the experience of their own life. My job is like an orchestra leader, bringing out snippets of what they do and bringing it all together, which does not prevent me from writing a script.

What I had written was the story of Souleymane (the uncooperative boy who gets into trouble, played by Franck Keita). I met FranÃ§ois Begaudeau (who plays Francis, the teacher), a professor for 10 years in this kind of school, who had written about little moments of classes that he had himself. It was very easy for me to offer the role to him.

We had acting workshops every Wednesday for a year, improvised with the students and he proved to me that he was terrific. We opened the workshop up to all of the students and those who stayed with it got to be in the movie.

The actress who played Souleymane’s mother was the only one who was not the real-life parent. His real mother was not in France. But as in the film does not speak French, and she did children who lived through similar situations. She created the character based upon her experiences and a way of being.

When I met her she said, “When I go to a disciplinary hearing I am going to dress myself in the most dignified way possible, like a queen.”

The boy who played Souleymane, though, in real life is the complete opposite, very nice, very laid back, almost shy. But I felt very quickly that he liked acting. I had a hard time getting him to be tough enough until we were trying on costumes. When he was dressed very differently from how he dressed in real life, he felt the character. And the goth boy is not a goth in real life either. He felt like trying out something he would not dare to do in real life, and the costume did that immediately.

There have been a lot of very high-profile movies about teachers with difficult students. What makes this one different?

Those movies were my opposite example, exactly what I wanted to avoid, to be everything except Robin Williams in “Dead Poet’s Society.” I wanted the professor to have his weakness, not to have a magic wand to solve everything. Through most of the movie we see the school can be a safe place but also a place of excluding people, like Souleymane who can’t find a place in the system but also people like Henrietta who lose interest and don’t understand what they are doing there. There is a roller coaster feeling, with great moments, great depression as much for the students as the teachers. What I want to do is describe the world in all of its complexity and contradictions.

Many thanks to translator Paul Young of Georgetown University for his assistance with this interview.

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Interview: John Patrick Shanley

Posted on December 15, 2008 at 12:00 pm

I spoke to writer-director John Patrick Shanley, who has returned to film to direct his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Doubt.” Best known to film-goers as the Oscar-winning writer of “Moonstruck,” he has spent the past few years working in theater. “Doubt” is the story of a nun who accuses a priest of molesting a child and the movie, like the play, does not reveal which of them is telling the truth.

The film is set in 1964 and one of the striking differences is the very extreme and formal attire worn by the nuns in the movie, with big black bonnets. Where does that come from?
They were in an order founded by Mother Seton. She was a married woman with five kids who took her husband to Italy. When he died there she took the mourning costume of an aristocratic woman, including the black bonnet and black habit. Our costume designer, Ann Roth went back to the Sisters of Charity to get the details right, even though they no longer wear it. It is quite elaborate and constricting and has no zippers. And it is an incredibly beautiful frame for the face, almost like a Dutch master, with a deep feeling of period.
You have written for both theater and movies. How do you think differently about story-telling as you change mediums?
Theater is highly stylized and pared down to bare essentials for financial and aesthetic reasons. Look at older plays like “Of Mice and Men,” “The Miracle Worker” — older plays have like twenty people but “Doubt” has four. Adapting it was daunting, but also liberating. I thought, “Oh, now I can show the kids in the classroom, the nuns in the convent, the way they live, the neighborhood that feeds the congregation.” It was organic and natural to extend the perimeter.
What is it like to direct acting powerhouses like your cast in this film, especially when you had such strong performances by very different performers on stage?
Meryl Streep is feisty, very creative, very playful, like a very feisty cat. She is very mentally rigorous and she lives in a wide imagination. Working with her and Philip Seymour Hoffman together was great. This is the third thing they’ve done together. They have a real rapport and work in a similar way. She is always trying to get the better of Phil and he’s amused and protective. Then there is Amy Adams. Her character’s kind of a ping pong ball batted between them and Phil and Meryl tugged over her.
What was the advantage of setting the story in the past?
Two years after the story was set the nuns were no longer wearing those habits, kids were not acting that way, the Bronx was in flames. The change that was coming was extraordinary and not good. The person trying to keep the future from coming is the short-sighted one in our tradition and the other is progressive. But that is not always true. If you’re a tailor in 1931, trying to keep the future at bay is not a bad thing. In the Bronx of 1964 it would not have been a bad thing.
Why have the nun’s character reveal that she had been married?
The founder of the order was married and had five children. We all make assumptions about what nuns are like, but as the story goes on your assumptions are called into question and you have to say “There’s more to this person than my mental shorthand allows for.” That’s my intention, as the story goes on, to make you take your assumptions and look at them, to say “My assumptions are not going to carry me through this movie.”
Do you think parochial school can be good for kids?
I don’t see anything wrong with parochial school. I went to Cardinal Spellman. They threw me out. Later they were bragging that I’d gone there, so I started putting in my bio that they threw me out. I went up there to visit and I was very impressed. The student body is 90% black, there is so much spirit, it is so terrific, the educators are so committed – I started to send them a check. Talk about full circle! I couldn’t pass any of my subjects. It was just not the right place for me. I have two sons, one doesn’t respond to structure at all and the other one does.
The title of the movie refers not just to the questions of doubt and certainty and questioning assumptions of the characters but of the audience as well. Do people ever come up to you and say, “Come on, you can tell me, did he do it?”
That comes up a lot, that’s understandable. People are preconditioned. If the question is whether the guy is going to get the girl, at the end of the movie you answer the question. But that is not most people’s experience of life, unsettled questions. Giving an answer is satisfying but simplistic, just a punch line. I want more than anything else for people to start talking to each other again, a real discourse. Any small part that this movie can do to make that happen is a good thing. People are not affected by things other people say any more. People are exhausted by that. There is a hunger for a real exchange; we have to get back together as a community and that means communicating with each other.
We’re living in a time that is so balkanized. The identity of the West is so in transformation from the influx of all these kinds of people from all nationalities and religions side by side by side, the oddest ship of fools imaginable. Defining commonality is a long process. We are interconnected and in each other’s face and up each others coats, cross-pollinating in a way the world has never seen. We are establishing commonalities, banding together in cafés, reconvening at the café level, cooking like a mad soup, reaching out through the internet. Maybe it is all Gnostic, just between the individual and the divine. People have a desperate hunger for community and communal worship.

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Interview with Brittany Curran

Posted on December 4, 2008 at 8:00 am

One of the best moments for any movie critic is the discovery of a bright new talent. Brittany Curran, who co-stars with Lucas Grabeel in The Adventures of Foodboy, caught my attention from her first moment on screen because she did something many actresses with twice as much experience cannot do — she created a vivid and relatable character in a role that could have just been as the usual “girlfriend of leading male.” She projects a combination of confidence and sweetness that is very appealing and has a superb sense of comic timing. Curran and Grabeel have a nice onscreen chemistry that left me hoping to see them together again. Her upcoming projects include “The Ghost Whisperer” and a straight-to-DVD sequel to “Legally Blonde” called “Legally Blondes.”

I was very happy to get a chance to talk to Brittany about “The Adventures of Foodboy” and her other projects. I began by asking her what she did to create such an appealing performance.

My first read was in my room. I knew I needed to do something to make her something more. It’s so easy to slip into just being the girl and I wanted to make her more whole. I only had a week leading up to work on it. So, I read it over a bunch of times, just kept reading it to think about what kind of naturally came out of the lines. I wrote down some notes, letting the natural quirkiness that comes in everyday life guide me, and then later when we were filming tried to let myself go and be spontaneous.

What is it about food fights that makes them so much fun? And was the huge food fight in the movie fun to film?

They’re fun because you can throw all this junk around and not worry about it. It’s a non-lethal way of having fun and fighting, like a silly fight I got into with my friend where we threw ice cubes at each other, or like a pillow fight. But when we did it in the movie, it ended up looking really gross. It was all over and in my hair but the worst was the smell. I constantly had so much stuff in my face and I was aware I was making unflattering facial expressions just when I was supposed to be in the shot. I am usually not conscious of the camera but this time because so much was going on there was a lot of direction to “turn this way,” “look over here” so I was aware of it.

What scene was the most fun to film?

I liked kissing Lucas! The most fun was when it was just the two of us, talking like regular kids. We got along really well and I enjoyed working with him.

What’s on your iPod?

A lot of Led Zeppelin! They’re my favorite band of all time. And the Beatles and the Who and my dad, he’s a musician, too. I’m a major classic rock fan.

You’ve worked on a variety of projects. Has anyone given you some especially memorable advice?

I just worked on a episode of “The Ghost Whisperer” with Jennifer Love Hewitt. The director said, “I know what you want to do. You have the freedom to go where the words take you.” If you know the goal of the scene, you should find your own natural way to get there.

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Interview with Toto’s Trainer

Posted on December 3, 2008 at 10:00 am

Bill Berloni is the man behind some of Broadway’s biggest stars — the non-human ones. From Sandy in “Annie” to “Bruiser Woods” in “Legally Blonde,” he has trained the animals in some of the biggest theatrical productions. I spoke to him in Washington D.C. where his two “Toto” dogs are on tour with “The Wizard of Oz.”

How many Totos are there?

There is one dog named Princess, eight years old, and another as her understudy. The one we use is the more energetic of the two. “Wizard” is one of those shows that happens all the time so we always have a pair of Toto dogs ready. This is a major national tour, three years long. Princess will probably do two.

How long has Princess been performing?

If you asked me how long I was married I’d be off but I can remember the answer to that one — seven years three months, performing as Toto for five. We started training her as an understudy until around age five and then she was mature enough.

Is there a particular scene that was especially challenging for Princess?

To me the most important iconic moment of the play is when Dorothy says, “There is such a place, Toto?” and then goes into “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” If Toto’s scratching or does something to distract the audience, it’s a problem. We train them to focus on Dorothy and not move. You have to make sure the dog has the right temperament for performing. You can take a calm dog and teach them to walk across a stage but you can’t take an excitable dog and get her to stay still. They have to be able to deal with stress and be calm which for a terrier breed is tough. Staying perfectly still for “Over the Rainbow” is the hardest, then going through smoke and haze to get to the curtain. Her favorite trick is to find Dr. Marvel — she gets to eat the hot dog at the end of his stick!

In a show like this one with so many special effects, how do you protect the dog and prevent her from getting distracted?

I can manipulate the special effects so the speakers are away from the stage. The audience hears thunder but she is behind them, where it is not loud. We cover her eyes during the pyrotechnic effects and explosions. We go to great lengths to protect the dog rather than getting her used to it. For her a flying monkey is no different from a flying pigeon. The fog is co2, dry ice. It’s just a cooling mist. So those things do not bother the dogs. That’s my job — to say, “You can do that to humans but not my dog.” Toto is not always in the shot in a movie but in the play he is supposed to be with Dorothy all the time. But you think he’s on stage a lot more than he is.

How did you get started?

It’s a “right place at the right time” story. I wanted to be an actor and was building sets at the Goodspeed Opera House. They needed a dog for a new show and everyone else threatened to quit if they had to train the dog. But they offered me a part and an equity card if I would find and train a dog. My gullibility and the chance to get on stage are the reason I accepted. I found a dog at a shelter and the show was “Annie,” with Sandy the first real theatrical performance part for a dog in a major show, where the action depended on the dog and he was more than a prop. Mike Nichols’ office called and said they were doing it for Broadway. He is the best — loyal, intelligent, courageous, admits when he makes a mistake and expects everyone to be the same. The show opened at the Kennedy Center and I became a famous animal trainer.

Did you have pets growing up and did you train them?

Our pets did things because they loved us, not because we trained them. I learned I could achieve repetitive behavior without negative reinforcement.

Do you have to train the actors as well as the animals?

I’m in the wings so I have to make sure the actors know how to do whatever the animal needs. Going back to “Annie,” I said to Andrea McArdle, “You have to pretend like he’s your dog.” We have to train the actors to be as adept trainers as I am. It is much more challenging with adults. Some don’t like dogs or are allergic and that becomes my problem, showing them how to work with the animals so they fulfill those commands with respect and love. Cassie Okenka (Dorothy) is the real deal, not jaded, hard-working loves dogs, and she can sing.

We have a handler at every performance. We take the concept from the director and then can put a handler in. We’re always educating the directors and the smart ones listen. But some will give the actors six weeks to get it right and give the dog seven days. They won’t think about what the special effect will be and how the dog will respond to it.

What kinds of animal performances in movies do you like?

I am not fond of movies that make dogs talk with CGI and anthropomorphize them too much. I enjoy films where they get to act like dogs. “As Good as It Gets” was a good one.

And now the big question — what kind of dog should the Obamas get?

I am a huge shelter animal advocate and a humane society volunteer. Their decision to get a shelter dog would be the biggest thing in animal shelter I could remember. Every animal shelter is holding their breath. But they need a perfect dog, a theater dog. They need to be there and bond with the dog. But this dog will need to be a performer. I can find Broadway stars in a shelter. Through no fault of its own it has ended up homeless, nothing wrong with it. I don’t take abused animals. But I take abandoned animals.

This is my secret. You go into a shelter and walk down the row of cages. One is screaming at you, “Let me out! Let me out!” One shivering in the back. Don’t take either one of those. Take the one in the middle, the one who is hanging and dealing. It is such a stressful place for an animal, any dog who can deal with it can deal with a lot of stress. Throw a leash on it and take it home. Leave the others to people with training experience.

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Interview: Philippe Claudel of ‘I’ve Loved You So Long’

Posted on November 20, 2008 at 4:00 pm

One of the most beautiful images on screen this year is the beginning of a French film called “I’ve Loved You So Long,” the story of sisters reunited after a long absence. As the movie opens, there is a close-up on the face of Juliette, played by Kristen Scott Thomas, who appears without any make-up, utterly vulnerable. Her stillness is eloquent and deeply moving and it orients us to the story that is about to unfold.

The title comes from a French children’s song. And we find out that Juliette has been in prison for a shocking crime. She barely knows her much younger sister, LÃ©a (Elsa Zylberstein), who has come to pick up Juliette and bring her to her home with LÃ©a’s husband, daughters, and father-in-law.

I spoke with writer-director Phillippe Claudel, best known as a novelist, about the movie, and began by asking him about that opening shot.

PC: It was very important for me to begin this story with shock, to give the audience the face of a destroyed woman, a dead woman, to take the time with my camera, to take my time to give the time to the audience to explore and enter deep inside this character. I chose a very classic style without a lot of camera movement, to work with the audience, to create a connection, space for the audience. I wanted to start with a simple and tragic picture with the face of Juliette.

My first question for Kristen when we spoke about the movie was one condition. I told her, “I want to destroy your beauty, to compose with you, the real character of Juliette, to read 15 years of prison just with your face.” Many actresses would accept that in pre-production but be different in shooting, but not Kristen. She was very professional. She understood the truth of this character needed this dirty face.

NM Your previous stories were all novels. What made you decide to tell this story as a movie?

PC: You need human experience for work. The novels I wrote before age 34 were constantly bad. The beginning of the true writing requires pain, love, experience of life, to became a man. After age 34, my novels suddenly were a little bit more good. It’s the same thing for the movie process. I wrote screenplays but didn’t feel ready to direct for 10 years. By then I had magined the story so that it was very clear in my mind. I was not afraid. I was very cool and knew exactly what i wanted.

NM: The movie has a lot of stillness, especially for a first-time film-maker. What made you decide to present the story that way?

PC: When I finished the writing of the screenplay, i thought about the style and it was important to adopt a very pure and simple and classic style for the story. It is a very strong and powerful story. I want the audience to forget the camera and director, the movie-making. I want the audience just to be with the characters.

NM: Even though as the movie begins Juliette has been released from prison, emotionally she is still a prisoner through her emotional isolation. And other characters are dealing with other forms of imprisonment, like LÃ©a’s father-in-law, who is mute as the result of a stroke, and the sisters’ mother, who has dementia.

PC: I wanted to give different variations of the topic, a true prison and a metaphoric prison, the lonely life, the secrets, the little adopted girl, who has the secret of her birth, the illness of the mother. There are many many prisons in our lives. Maybe the lesson of the movie is to show the importance of others and they way they can help you to break the walls.

NM: One of the characters in the film speaks of his work with prisoners. Is that based on your experience?

PC: I worked 11 years in prison, teaching, starting when I was very young 22 or 23. when we are young like that we are too sure. We believe we know everything. It was a shock for me, a necessary shock, to discover another face of humanity. Nothing is simple, nothing is basic, all life and all people are very complex. It is impossible to have a basic judgment of good/bad, right/wrong. This experience changed me totally, i was not the same after. Many novels I wrote after this experience were very inspired by it. They were not about prison but about tragedy of our condition and the impossibility to know deeply the other people.

When Michel said the border between good and bad is very thin, it was a very personal, autobiographical scene.

When I stopped in 2000, I was always obsessed by this special universe. It was difficult to escape. I wrote a text like therapy, with sounds of music of the prison’s keys. It was an essay just different scenes of prison. It was very cinemagraphic and a French producer asked me to adapt it for the screen, but it was impossible.

NM: How is making a movie different from writing a book?

PC: I knew immediately this story was a movie and not a novel. I imagined to write a story about a woman, a desire to show this woman with pictures. Also, I wanted to work with real people. I like to write but it is a solitary and comfortable pleasure. To tell a story in a novel, you don’t need money and you don’t need people. But sometimes it is good to work with an artistic team. And my novels are about men, but when I imagine movies, it’s often with female faces.

NM: Kristen Scott Thomas is an English actress who lives in France. In the US, she is better known for her roles in films like “The English Patient.” Does she make many films in French?

PC: It is a very curious paradox. She lives in France but is constantly under-employed. It was very exciting to propose the real first lead for her in a French film. I liked having both Kristen Scott Thomas and Elsa Zylberstein do something different. Kristen is beautiful, a little bit cold, aristocratic. I wanted to give her a very complex character and a very mute character. It is wonderful to play with an amazing expressive face, a pleasure to observe her. I told her to explore the first take and after that I would direct her. And Elsa, who is known for fashion and glamour, I cut her hair and put her in very basic clothes.

NM: What makes you laugh?

PC: Many many things, maybe in this moment, the President of Italy. Often the people who govern us are very comic; maybe that’s their role. And my daughter, every day.

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