November 23, 2008
Explosions in space, fatalism and injustice, screwy flashbacks, sequels to "28 Days Later" and "Trainspotting," among other controversies. Man, this turned out to be a long interview.
PK: I'm struck by two images. At the beginning of “28 Days Later" you have London
completely abandoned. And at the beginning of this film you have series of
shots of Dharavi, which I guess is one of the most densely populated parts of
the world.
DB: Well Dharavi might be the biggest slum in the world, as
many as 2 million people live in Dharavi and it’s a very small area. So it has
that intensity of occupancy, and you're not allowed to film from the sky. It
was very difficult to get permission to film because they're paranoid about
national security there. But when you fly in, on the international flights, you
can see the extent - you can see these images, so we tried to recreate
that. We did manage to get up in a helicopter and get some shots that we
shouldn't have taken.
PK: Was it easier to make that shot than the shot of London with nobody in it?
DB: It was more fun - well - the London
shot was more fun because emptying London
is obviously a great challenge
PK: And a good idea.
DB: It’s a good idea and a great challenge and we sort of
got away with it. We did it just before 9/11, you'd never be able to do it now.
Then we had the bombings, the 7/7 things. You'd never get away with it now,
they wouldn't allow you to do half the stuff we did. but we tipped over a bus
in White Hall, which is like the main governmental street, where the prime
minister lives - tipped this bus over on its side and it’s just spilling oil
onto the side of the street
PK: Were you considering making the sequel of that? Do you
think you might do the thirda sequel?
DB: Well no, I couldn't do the sequel because I was doing “Sunshine.”
And since I took like 3 years to make that
I didn't have a whole lot to do with it, but I did do some second unit for them
and I did a bit of work on the script, threw them a few ideas, bit’s and pieces
like that.
PK: There is a sequel alluded to, at the end of the -
DB: Yeah, there is an idea for it, but it doesn't come out
at that - it’s a big jump forward really, it’s a leap.
PK: “28 Years Later”?
DB: Not quite that, but it’s a leap, a leap.
PK: “28 Minutes Later”?
DB: If we can do it, it'll be good.
PK: You'd like to direct it?
DB: Yeah, definitely. I'd love to. I watched the second one
because I hadn't had a lot to do with it. I was able to watch it like an
audience on its premiere. I couldn't believe how enjoyable it was for the
audience - you felt genuine enjoyment for the kind of ride you were on. It
makes you appreciate it more than when you make it. You feel anxious about them
when you make them, but you don't appreciate them in an easy way - in a simple
way, in an easy way. You always appreciate them in a complex way.
PK: Will there be a sequel to “Sunshine?”
DB: No I don't think there will be a sequel to
“Sunshine.” I'm certainly not going back
into space, it’s a pretty hard work in space, certainly harder than Mumbai.
PK: Makes you appreciate Stanley Kubrick’s work.
DB: It just makes you realize why it took him so long to
make it. Because it’s impossible to do and the problem is his fault
partly, because the audience is watching - you can feel them watching in
a way super critical, if you put the slightest thing wrong about what can
happen in space, they're like noooo. It’s really rigid.
PK: It always bugs me in films set in outer space, where you
can hear an explosion or other noise. That’s
why in “2001” that airlock scene is so impressive.
DB: Yes, that’s certainly one of the things that people have
mentioned to me.
PK: I’ve also heard you're doing a sequel to
“Trainspotting.”
DB: Yeah, there is a sequel to it which is this book, “Porno,”
which Irvine [Welsh] wrote as kind of a sequel to it, but our idea
for it, is like when old actors, the same actors are playing the same
characters, are noticeably older, but they look different and without
prosthetics and makeup and stuff like that. They look like 20 years has passed
- because then you get that feeling of - because really they're in they're
early twenties in the early part of the film and they're sort of in a place
when you can do anything with your body and get away with it and then it'd be
really interesting to see them in their forties, when the bodies begin to creak
and they just begin to unwind and they have those issues as well about what
they're going to do with their lives, kids and all of that kind of stuff.
Could be an incredibly boring film, unlike the first one. The problem right now
is that they just don't look old enough.
PK: You won an audience award in Toronto and people are saying this is going to
be the next “Juno” or “Little Miss Sunshine” in terms of indie success. Are
you surprised by how well it has been doing?
DB: I did think it might work in Britain,
in part because we have a good sense of India, in part because of the
colonial past, large Indian population, highly visible. Dev Patel - who plays
the older Jamal - he is from a TV show in the UK,
which is a cult show, and he definitely has a presence, so we thought it could
work in Britain.
But to be honest - here - I couldn't quite see how it could work knowing how
difficult it is to release films here. But then of course what you forget is
the underdog story and how much a part of the psyche that is here. The idea
that someone has a dream and they don't have a lot going for them but they have
this dream and it fuels everything and they chase it. The values that
people have here - it has to be allowed to come through sometimes, it’s
really important, I think thats why the film works. I do these Q&As,
people talk about it and people say - I nearly walked out when the kid was
blinded, people say that, and yet they clearly forgive it by the end of the
story, they're caught up in it and forgive it by the end.The redemption really,
it goes back to that at the end, it shows you that [blinded] kid smelling the banknotes
[years after the incident], it’s not like it avoids letting you know what it’s
like there, what things go on there, it kind of reminds you of them at the end,
but still people forgive, and that I think that is like India because you do
forgive it, some of it is unforgivable and yet you do forgive it, you do think,
wow, what a place. That was my take on it at least, you do think, what a place.
PK: Some people say
if you forgive it you’re going to allow the injustice to continue, if you
accept injustice as your destiny your destiny falls into the hands of the
people with the power.
DB: Yeah, I felt that and that would have been my take before
I had gone, definitely, that kind of fatalism is a passive - it’s a mechanism
by which the rich control the poor. But
I think that’s too simplistic definition of it, I really do, having been there.
Not everywhere; I was only in Mumbai, and I do believe it is an accurate-ish
picture of the city, of bits of the city. There’s a great book about it called “Maximum City” by
Suketu Mehta, which is about Bombay.
PK: You took a lot of
liberties wirth the book this was based on, “Q&A” by
Vikas Swarup.
DB: The novel is very
rigid; it’s like a series of short stories, it’s question - answer - question -
answer, and that would have never worked in a film. You’d bore of that. That was one of the skillful things that
Simon [Beaufoy, the screenwriter] did, he made time fluid really, back and
forward, so you could leak stuff early that would get answered later or deny
people access to things that he is apparently able to answer. I remember when I
read the script I felt intelligent and it’s not often that scripts make you
feel intelligent; it’s quite a rare quality to impose intelligence on you,
PK: You never let a screenwriter know that though?
DB: No he’s a good guy actually, he’s had a tough time
actually since “Full Monty,” he’s had
quite a rough ride since then
PK: He couldn’t make
money on the Broadway show or anything?
DB: He got - he gave
away supposedly all his points in it, before it came out. It’s one of those
kind of like oh my god stories that is typical in the films in Britain. He was
after some extra money or something for a mortgage or house extension or
something like that and they said okay we’ll give you this, but we’ll take your
points.
PK: You gave him a good deal?
DB: On this one, yeah.
PK: You mentioned the
fluidity of the time; one thing that really bugs me in movies, other than
having noise in space, is flashbacks when they are used in a clumsy way, when
they begin with one person’s point of view and end up with nobody’s point of
view. Did you have a particular scheme when you worked yours out?
DB: Well I certainly
knew on this one, I certainly wasn’t going to do huge backwards and forwards,
you know - the way they do them these days and I wanted it to try and get it so
that by the end you could literally go back in time in one line and then go
forward in time and there’s a line where she picks up the phone on the show and
he says “Whats your name!” and you just cock to her going as a kid “my name is
Latika” and I love that fact that you could - because Simon had set up this
time free time thing, if you got it right you could go anywhere really and it
makes things like the slum chase and things like that, it makes it feel like it’s
happening now even though it happened ten years ago, but it makes you feel like
you’re expereincing it all now, that’s what we were after, the immediacy of it.
PK: Music helps a lot too.
DB: The music guy is
mega famous there, A.R. Rahman, he
is a god, he is one of their gods, they worship him ,the people, he is one of
the largest signed artists in the world, nobody’s heard of him and yet he’s
sold more records than the Beatles or something. Every CD he put out sold a hundred million
copies. Of course they don’t pay very much per CD, but it does register as a
sale. He was wonderful, a lovely man, again, he’s got that thing, sooo
powerful, and yet his obligation is to give it back if he can, so he started up
this school, a music academy observatory kind of thing, incredibly modest man,
genuinely so, not superficially modest, genuinely modest man.
PK: I think you came
up with a perfect way of keeping people seated through the entire end credits,
which is to have a Bollywood musical production number
DB: It’s nice to make
em wait for the credits. 'Cause you can feel them all about to go and they - oh!
PK: Did Bollywood
have an impact on how you made the movie?
DB: I’d seen a bit of
Bollywood before I went and I saw quite a bit of it when I was there, but it
wasn’t so much that except that song and dance, especially dance, is part of
the fabric of life, it’s like, for me, if you came to Britain and made a film
and didn’t include anything about football - well soccer - I would feel it was
fake. Or it’d be like coming to America
and there’d be no motor cars in your film, it’d be fake? You got to have, if you spend eight months there, you got
to dance at some point, so it was just where to put it because it was not
related to the questions and answers. There was a music question but it had to
do with the singing of traditional Indian songs. I couldn’t put it in the film so
I put it at the end of the film.
November 21, 2008
Meanwhile, the conversation with Danny Boyle, whose “Slumdog
Millionaire” now seems to be on every pundit’s Best Picture short list. But there also are
some, such as the ever reliable Armond White, who think the film is an
exploitative sop to liberal guilt. Here Boyle continues to sing the praises of
Mumbai, despite the poverty, corruption, crime, injustice and mutilated
children his film depicts.
PK: . ..another horrific thing is the guy who enlists the
orphans into begging and then puts their eyes out and the gangsters and all
that; as shown in the film it just seems to be kind of dicey environment
altogether.
DB: I'm sorry if it comes across like that, although those thing
are true, they do happen, it’s actually an amazingly wonderful place to visit I
think. And it kind of builds something into your life that will be absent
otherwise. It gives you the respect, values that we've kind of lost a
bit, I think really.
PK: Such as?
DB: Communal value – there are these extremes there, terrible
extremes obviously and it’s one of the reasons that good storytelling can go on
there, because you've got these extremes, but they are connected, not separate,
like we tend to separate our extremes I think.
And I think it is true
that if they build a tower block, at the bottom of it is a slum, where the
people live who built it, and the people who live in the tower block don't try
to chase them away, they sort of feel connected to those people who live
underneath. And like the star of our show, Anil Kapoor, very rich man, very big
success story, the responsibility he feels towards the poor, he is very
interconnected, it’s not a pr thing or individual moral thing, it's a social
thing that they all feel. You know, they all feel interconnected. And I've lost
sight of that, but you can feel it, they're very close. It’s an extraordinary
thing really. I think it influences this idea they have, destiny, you
know - this thing it is written - which can to our eyes can look really passive
and very accepting, but it doesn't actually work like that because although you
might accept that your hands have been chopped of when you're a kid to make you
a better beggar and you see people like that, people come up and knock on the
car windows and you can see! Their hands have been cut off! It's not an accident
and it’s not a disease, it’s been done deliberately, you can see it. But
in that acceptance, you must also understand that, Anil Kapoor [the famed Indian actor who plays the gameshow host in "Slumdog"] has accepted his
destiny as well. Which in our eyes is much more glamorous blah blah, but
he still feels a responsibility towards that person, he is still connected
towards that person, it’s quite difficult to explain, you sense it when you're
there, really.
PK: Did he come from a lower level of society?
DB: Anil?
PK: Yes.
DB: Not so much, although he did portray, he is known like that,
because he portrayed that in his early films, he was, there is an extra
resonance to casting him in this film which we can't appreciate, but they'll
get in India, which is that he was, as he says in the film "I'm a slum kid
myself, I'm the only one who knows what it’s like to come from nothing and to
get everything." He portrayed a couple of people like that in his
early films. Although he himself comes from a film-making family. He
would never be described as being from a poor family.
PK: Many people have described the film as being Dickensian, I
think you have described the film in the same way. But aside from the story
telling there is a kind of call out to reform in Dickens, and pointing a finger out
injustice and so forth, do you see the film also doing such a sort of
thing?
DB: I don't think you can, I was very conscious in going there
that I didn't want to bang a drum really, I didn't first of all, want to make a
film about white people in India and I also then, as a western director I
didn't want to make a film that kind of was objective or judgmental really, to
try and make the film from the inside out really, from the view of the people
themselves and tell the story that way. So in that sense it isn't. There
are obviously some extraordinary things going on there, the police are corrupt,
like I say, there is no – the infrastructure is inadequate, there's lot of
things for them to tackle.
PK: Poor people are exploited?
DB: Poor people are exploited… Well I have to be very careful in
how I answer that because I went to this one place, Dharavi, which is a big
slum there, there was this guy and he recycled huge vegetable cans of oil, I
mean they've been recycling in a way that we've only begun to recycle, they've
always recycled, it’s part of the pattern of life, you see people throw things
away, and you think – don't throw that on the street – but they do it because
there is a whole other level of people who pick it up and recycle it and
they're sort of like, bound together. He recycles these things – the area this
was in was just in a shack - when you went in it was like a cathedral, all of
these drums everywhere, like, thousands of them being recycled, in different
stages of being recycled. And I said please can I come and film here and
he said, no you can't because I've let “National Geographic” in here twice
before and they've taken photographs — and in fact subsequently I found some of
the photographs of “National Geographic on this place, I found them on their website, amazing place.
But he
said, “I've asked them twice not to say that we're poor and, he said, every
time, they depict us as being poor. So I've decided to stop any filming or
people taking photographs anymore. You can have a look around. I don't regard
us as being poor and I’ve provided work
here for about 25 – 30 people for twenty years.” And he said, "we're very
proud of what we do, this is an industry, it’s self sufficient, it provides
work, it’s profitable, and it’s doing a good thing. Why should you call
me poor?” I was affected by that and that
really affected the film, the spirit of the film. It's like I said – you can't take your value judgments there. You
can’t just say, they're poor, there's so
much poverty here, because they don't see it like that. And they have to solve
it themselves. There are over a billion people there, which is enough
people to start a planet, never mind a country, it’s like – they will, they
have to! And that's what is happening at the moment, the focus is shifting to
them sorting their problems out and it’s rather than us coming in, IMF style,
and saying: DO THIS DO THIS DO THIS, you won't be poor! You will be fucking
poor because we still have poor of our own, in a different way, although maybe
they'll be less of you who are absolutely poor. But you have to let them sort
the problems out. So I won't argue that I could go in there and be judgmental.
I would defend my right not to be judgmental.
PK: The film is not to get people stirred up about how unjust
things are in India,
but to be entertained by their stories or to be exhilarated by the universal
human values?
DB: Yeah, yeah, if you like. I mean the values of the story are
universal. His romanticism, his like underdog status, that dream he has
that he will fulfill, whatever is put in his way he will go through
together.
PK: It’s kind of like “A Life Less Ordinary,” same sort of romanticism.
DB: I guess so, I guess so, I mean it’s made by the same filmmaker,
so I suppose there would be.
PK: I thought that was a very underrated movie.
DB: I liked that, not many people liked that. Girls like it quite
a lot. I think it’s more irrational than people normally see things as, but in
a lighthearted way, not a particularly heavy way.
PK: Then there’s “Millions.” There
you have saints appearing. You wanted to be a priest when you were younger?
DB: Yeah, I wanted as a kid. My mum wanted me to be a priest,
which is not absolutely the same thing, but -
PK: You didn't have a vocation -
DB: Don't think so, certainly not the way it turned out,
certainly not that way inclined anymore. But my mom was a very devoted Roman Catholic
and part of the aspiration of being a roman catholic is to get your eldest son
to join the priesthood it’s part of like a destiny - so she would see destiny
as something like that happening, but it didn't happen.
PK: You didn't have much of a spiritual inclination after that?
DB: No - I mean, I don't believe that things are black and white.
Like I've been reading Richard Dawkins's stuff, he's real heavy, he's very
heavy against God and he argues it brilliantly too.
PK: A fundamentalist atheist
DB: Absolutely, yeah, he really is. He argues it beautifully. He's
sort of covered every corner except that the point about spirituality is that
there aren't any corners, that’s the whole thing about it, it’s beyond corners,
in a way. You certainly feel that in India as well, where they see
spirituality as being everywhere in life. It’s not narrow about God, not one
deity - they have lots of deities, they also see spirituality everywhere, they
did this amazing thing and I’m sure we used to make fun of them about it because when you go there, they don't
knock down trees. If there is a tree they build a building around it . You go
in a building and there's fucking trees still in there coming out of the side
of the building and they build a motorway but they won’t uproot the tree.
It will go around the tree or through the tree, but the tree will stay there
protected from the motorway. They did this 20 years ago and I’m sure 20
years ago we would go there and laugh at them for their quaint idiotic ways,
but of course now we realize that their values have come into focus in a way,
so there is a lot to learn a lot to value. Their respect for life, as a
vegetarian society basically — Hinduism is a vegetarian religion, really. It’s the
best vegetarian food in the world - boy, if you're a vegetarian...
PK: Are you?
DB: I'm not actually, but you eat very well, there. You
aren't eating a lot of meat, most of the time.
PK: Are there cows walking around?
DB: The crew whom I got to know really well said I bet you show
cows walking around in your film. They would laugh at me - we'll bet you,
because you can see, they're very sophisticated people that work in the film
industry, they look at Western films, films that go there and they always show
cows walking around the street and so one guy says to me "I bet you're
determined not to show a cow walking
around the street.” But there are loads
of cows and everyone gets out of the way. Traffic, people - everyone gets out
of the way.
PK: I do not recall a cow in your film.
DB: I deliberately did want one. There is one wandering through
the rubbish, but that’ in the corner of a shot.
PK: No elephants either.
DB: There are elephants. They tried to ban them from Mumbai
actually, they tried to take them out, there've been a few violent incidents,
but you still see them a bit.
PK: They probably aren't more dangerous than an SUV being driven
by an average American.
DB: Especially if they’re DUI.
November 18, 2008
There are two kinds of opportunism. Here's an example of the good kind.
Gus Van Sant’s “Milk” is a biopic starring Sean Penn as San Francisco
City Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man ever elected to a public
office. He was gunned down on November 27, 1978, and so the film opens next week in part to
honor the 30th anniversary of that assassination. Given the groundswell of
protest aroused by the passage of California’s Proposition 8 on November 4, a
bill that would ban same sex marriages (and the passage of similar bills by
three other states), “Milk’s” screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, together with
Cleve Jones, a longtime activist and protégé of Milk who consulted on the film,
recently issued a manifesto on SFgate calling for an ongoing series of peaceful protests beginning
on November 27 and continuing until Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20.
The film, they hope, will engender more interest in and enthusiasm for these
demonstrations.
Sounds like a good idea to me. But Querty.com, a gay website, wonders if this all could be a cynical
marketing ploy for the movie. Now I’m as big a sucker for a harebrained
conspiracy theory as the next person, but even I balk at this. Wouldn’t it
involve Black, Jones and the rest of the “Milk” team fixing the election so
that Prop. 8 could win thus giving them this marketing opportunity? Sounds a
little twisted and, having interviewed Jones yesterday and seeing firsthand the
intensity of his commitment to his cause, utterly ridiculous. If their
manifesto serves to drum up a few million more ticket sales for “Milk” on the
way to achieving their goal of equality, so much the better.
An here’s an example of opportunism so cynical, venal and
hypocritical that it inspires awe.
Alan Stock, CEO of Cinemark, donated $9,999
in support of Prop. 8. He stands to make much more than that by exhibiting
“Milk” in his chain of movie theaters. Or will he? The tactic of boycott, so
effective in recent years for the religious right, was once also a tool of the
left. As can be seen in the film, it was used by Milk with canny success early
in his campaign. Why not use it again? Those interested in putting the screws to
Cinemark should check out the facebook group “No ‘Milk’ for Cinemark.”
(Note: the only Cinemark Theater in Massachusetts
is the Cinemark at Hampshire Mall in Hadley -- so this should be an easy
boycott for locals to maintain).
November 14, 2008
Which Danny Boyle will show up for the interview promoting
his new movie “Slumdog Millionaire?” I’m wondering. Will he be diabolical,
sardonic and head-butting like his brilliant “Trainspotting?” Nihilistic,
mirthfully despairing and flesh-eating like his terrifying “28 Days Later?” Innocent
and romantic like his heroes in “A Life Less Ordinary” or
“Millions?” Or cowering, defiant and relating the story of his life with hilarity and
razzle dazzle like his hero being given the third degree by the cops in his new
movie?
None of the above, as it turns out. Just a nice guy, really,
who makes (sometimes) great movies, like this one about a Mumbai street kid who
wins the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” and has to prove
he’s not cheating by telling the story of his life. Never was waterboarding so
entertaining!
PK: You seem to go back and forth between being optimistic
and nihilistic. “Millions” was a film that had this sort of upbeat quality, but
then “Trainspotting” or “Shallow Grave” and “28 Days Later.” How do you account
for your good spirits in this film, the subject of which is so harsh?
DB: That was India
really. I think I'm pretty optimistic anyway, despite sometimes what the
stories might say, there’s a spirit in the films, most of them anyway, pretty
optimistic. The one that isn't is “The Beach.” wasn't very happy making “The Beach.” I kind of ended up there looking at
a bunch of people who I didn’t like. It’s a weird thing, when you find
that, I suddenly thought, I don't like all these people and what they're doing
here. What am I doing making a film about them? 
So I tried to make it a
film critical of them, but it didn't work out really. But I think most of the
films are quite optimistic. Even if some of them haven't got obvious happy
endings, there is an optimistic spirit in them. I find that confirmed in India. I love
the place, they had to drag me away in the end, couldn't stop filming. Despite
all its horror and there is some of that there, I find it a wonderful
place. I love the people, I love the energy. I mean its not so much India, I shouldn't say India because I actually saw very little of India.
Such a massive place anyway. But I saw a lot of Bombay. The city where we made most of
the film and I really adored it actually and I adored what it did to me as a
director as well because it does change you. You can't just wade in there
and say here's my next film its going to be like this, you kind of have to go
with the place, you have to let it take you over, you can't control it,
separate bits of it, you have to just shoot and then see what you've got
because you can spend your whole fucking budget trying to organize it, you'll
get nowhere because it doesn't work like that.
PK: Do you stick to your basic script?
DB: We got a script and stuff like that which
obviously gives you a narrative, but in terms of day to day work, it’s amazing.
It has all of these contradictions. It’s very difficult to pin down what they
are and yet they're there the whole time and they're either destroying you
because you can't cope with it, or you kind of go with it and it eventually
gives you back what you need. So we always used to say it was like the ocean,
it was like every minute, every billionth of a second it was different. It was
moving, changing and yet it’s always the ocean, it’s always the same. It
sounds hippieish and it is. I'm not a hippie, I was a punk, but it does lead
you towards those kinds of descriptions,. It's the only way your head can make
sense of it.
PK: What was your first impression, the first thing
that you saw that made you think, oh, I'm in a different kind of place right
now?
DB: I guess your first experience is the traffic
really. They just launched this car – this Nano car – which is like a
really cheap car for everybody, that’s the marketing thing behind it, like a
thousand pounds, and its quite a decent little car supposedly, but where the
fuck are they going to put billions of them ? I don't know, there's no room
anywhere as it is at the moment. The infrastructure is just a disaster.
So they're going to the moon, right. and they are like the fifth nuclear power
in the world and yet there's no toilets, no roads, no infrastructure, they
haven't done anything to the sewers since the British left, it’s like – for
God's sake guys – and yet you can't – I mean you do criticize it on that front,
but on the other hand you think, that's up to them. What you can’t go
there thinking, especially if you're British, "wow, we used to make a good
job of running it didn't we." It's like, forget it, they've got they're
own pattern and they'll only allow you access to it on their terms only.
PK: It's a work in progress, I guess. For the last 4,000 years. I must say that, after
seeing the movie, especially the opening scene with a guy being tortured
because he won a TV quiz show, it wouldn't be my first choice as a place to go
as a tourist.
DB: Have you never been? 
PK: No.
DB: Oh, it’s fantastic.
PK: Do you think you'll have any problems with people in India because
of your depiction of some of the more unsavory aspects?
DB: Censors? Yes. We lied about a lot of what we were
doing, so we're bound to have trouble, I think. Ironically, the torture scene
at the beginning, we didn't lie about it. We asked for permission for that
because we needed a police station and you can't be tricky with the police
stuff, you got to be careful, get it right, because they can make a lot of
problems for you. We showed them the scene and they said it’s fine. You can do
the torture scene they said, providing nobody above the rank of inspector is
involved, that was their only requirement. It gave you a glimpse of what it’s
like in the police station. If you get arrested for anything other than a
traffic offense, you have a good chance of getting a slapped around.
PK: But no one above sergeant is involved, that is standard
operating procedure?
DB: Pretty much. I mean the local guys we worked with
confirmed that, I mean if you get picked up for something serious, you're
getting knocked around quite a bit.
PK: The electrodes and the whole bit.
DB: Well they don't see it like that. We
were in a few police stations, you can see the equipment there, they're not
hiding it. It’s not anything they're ashamed of.
PK: You said there are other things you didn't lie
about when making the movie that might be problematic.
DB: We were, what would you call it, flexible, with the
description of the things we were doing because they're sensitive about things
you can't quite second guess. For instance, the torture scene, which we were
expecting them to say no, they they were fine about. But then other things,
like a very funny, very innocuous line, where the German tourist says
"there's noting about dis in ze gayd buk" about the Taj Mahal and the
kid says "Madam, the guide book is written by a bunch of lazy, ignorant,
good-for-nothing Indian beggars." They won't let that line through.
Because it's the image of the country and things like that. You just got to wait
and see what happens.
PK: One of the more striking sequences is where the Hindus
stormed the Muslim enclave and just wiped everybody out.
DB: Yeah.
PK: Do you see that as causing a problem with the
censors?
DB: I don't think so. Those things actually do happen. I
think the biggest problem with that is filming it. You have to be very
careful in filming it that people don't get the wrong idea because there are so
many people moving around all the time, you can't inform people of what you're
doing fully, there's just so many people, and the danger with it is that people
get the wrong idea on the day and we were lucky we got away with it, in a
way.
PK: People running around on fire must have caused
some alarm.
DB: Yeah. People who live there of course, have lived
through it, and they regard it as part of the unfortunate history of the place
as well, so it’s not like they're trying to eradicate it. You just got to be
careful so people don't think something real is happening. Because it can get
out of control quickly. For most of the time, considering how intense the
population is, the denseness of the population, there is a calmness that is
beyond belief, they somehow manage to live together, to live on. Its just so
crowded and there are so many people you just wonder how does this ever work!
But it does, they find a way. Its quite interesting because though it looks very primitive a lot of it,
this is what cities are going to be like. There is no city in the world that is
getting smaller, all the cities are growing, just endless growth. It will
have to do that, otherwise you will have this incredible demand for scarce
resources, like there is there, water and sewage, electricity and things like
that. You're going to have to find a way of living together with that many
people in that area, which is what they do, they manage to make it work.
November 10, 2008
So we seemed to be going great guns, with Kaufman even
tolerating my fey digression about Proust, until I asked a gauche question
about Michelle Williams. And then the “M” word. Then it all goes down the toilet. But it neded to be ask. Or maybe not --judge for yourself.
PK: And Cottard is also a character in Proust's "In Search of Lost Time."
CK: He is, yes.
PK: Is that the first
page of “Swann’s Way” that somebody is
reading ...?
CK: Yeah, oh for sure.
When she comes and she asks him
to go out for a drink, that’s what she’s reading in the ticket box, that’s what
Hazel is reading.
[omitted exchange: embarrassingly pretentious]
PK: ...Have you read Pinter’s screenplay of Proust?
PK: Check that out. It’s really brilliant.
CK: I kinda feel like I want to read Proust before I read
Pinter’s Proust. Is that a mistake?
PK: See the movie, then if you like it... The dates, I try to pay
attention to the dates the second time I saw it, it starts out in 2005, it
seems, like in...
CK: October. No, September, first day of fall. It’s the first
thing on the radio, so it’s September 21st or something.
PK: Yeah, and then there is a October 31st and then it’s like
November 2 and...
CK: Yeah before that it’s October 15 or something like that,
which is actually the day that it was announced that Pinter won the Nobel
Prize. It’s the actual day.
PK: .. or died
CK: Right. The reaction that I had when I saw the headline and just
thought, I saw a picture of him and saw whatever it said, and thought, oh god,
Pinter died. But he won the Nobel Prize, so I stuck that in. But it’s also the
day that avian flu was discovered in Turkey and the woman runner died.
So those are all real events that happened.
PK: Except for the newspaper and the radio, occasionally, there
doesn’t seem to be any connection with the outside world. The TV is on, and is showing these obvious self-referential, well not obvious, obvious after the second time
I saw it, self-referential cartoons. Is this a deliberate kind of suggestion
that we’re not in the real world?
CK: I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. I’d hate to say that...I
think that I used a lot of dream images and dream realities in the movie and
this seemed like...I don’t know, I liked the idea of having the commentary
taking place in that interaction with the television, so I just figured I’d go
for it and do it.
PK: Those paintings, did you assign somebody to make those
paintings?
CK: I hired an artist named Alex Kanevsky to
do them. ...The paintings aren’t really tiny. That’s a trick. They couldn’t
possibly be tiny and look like that, that would be impossible. That was what I
liked about them was that they were very painterly. No, the real paintings that
Alex did for us -- he’s a really amazing artist, I asked him to do these
portraits of the women in the movie and they’re about this big...
PK: That’s pretty tiny.
CK: Yeah but they’re not painterly. You know, they’re very
meticulous looking things, you can have obviously small things like that, but
they don’t...you can’t do this. You can’t have sort of expressionistic brush
strokes. I don’t think you could do it. You know like that guy...the guy who
does those little sculptures. You know what I’m talking about? You should look
this guy up if you don’t know his stuff. He does sculptures that are, you can’t
see them without a...his name is Wigan, I
think? I want to say his first name is Willard but I’m not sure, it’s something
like that. He does these um...they’re made out of dust and paint, and they’re
small enough that he’ll do like the Statue of Liberty that fits on the head of
a pin. Or he’ll do Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs standing on a pin, and
they’re about this big. You can’t see them without magnifying glasses. And
they’re extraordinary, but they’re not, I don’t want to say they’re not
painterly, but they’re not very expressionistic. They have to be very precise
because of the size of them. So I wanted something that you couldn’t do in this
size.
PK: I’m also impressed by the sets in this movie. First of all, I
want to say that he really knew how to budget $100,000 grant over 17 years.
CK: Well it's more than that. It's $100,000 a year. It’s for 5
years, but also, it's way more than 17 years. When that actor says that thing
that it's 17 years, its not the end of the thing it’s like midway through. But
yeah, I read this one review where this guy hated the movie and he said, and it
was actually addressed to me, which I shouldn’t even acknowledge this because
it’s what he wants I’m sure, for me to say that I read this thing, because he’s
talking to me, by the way Charlie, I’ve known people who have won MacArthur
grants and it’s $100,000 over five years, you know, or $500,000, you know, and
not only that but Caden, based on his work, could never win one. And it’s like
well, this is all dreamery, I mean, I like the idea that this is an impossible
production that he’s mounting, and that you also can’t build a full-size
replica of New York City
in a warehouse. You can’t do that. By the way Charlie, you can’t build a
full-size replica within a warehouse within a full-size New York City. Yes, I know that.
PK; This was on the Internet that you read this?
CK: Um, yeah. Everything’s on the Internet. I mean, that’s where
I read things. I shouldn’t read things but I do.
PK: There are no computers in this movie I don’t think, are
there?
CK: No computers where? Oh in the movie? Yeah, no he sees, he
goes to Madeleine’s [the self-help therapist and author treating Caden played
by Hope Davis] website to see, um..
PK: Oh, right.
CK: “This book will change my life,” is what his quote is.
PK: What’s wrong with her feet, anyway?
CK: Her shoes are too tight.
PK: Is that what it was? I thought it might be that.
CK: Yeah, she’s got all sorts of blisters, and..
PK: ..It looks like she’s got gangrene at the end.
CK: They’re actually kind of prosthetics. They took quite awhile
to apply these to Hope Davis’s feet, and she had to be carried into the set,
because she could walk with those things on.
PK: So your first directorial effort, it can’t be too bad if you
get to work with all these beautiful women.
CK: Well, in addition to being beautiful they’re like, my
favorite actors. You know, it was wonderful. I couldn’t ask for a better cast.
PK: Michelle Williams [who plays Claire], had she already
suffered her loss, before making the movie or was it afterwards?
CK: [an expression of extreme disappointment and resignation at
the tastelessness of the question] I don’t...I’d really rather not.
PK: [persisting boorishly nonetheless] Well, I was just thinking,
a movie like this which is so obsessed with mortality, I mean what kind of
effect would that have on her...
CK: Yeah. I just--
PK: But she’s really good.
CK: Yeah she is good.
PK: But it seems like all the women are sort of, it's almost like
a masochistic relationship that the director has with almost all the women in
the movie.
CK: The director meaning Caden?
PK: Yeah.
CK: Um, yeah, well I guess. Is it masochistic with Hazel? She
does make him get down on his knees to beg for a kiss. Yeah, I guess there is a
lot of torture, but he participates in it, so I don’t find fault with them.
PK: has anyone brought up the “M” word with regards to the women?
CK: The “M” word?
PK: Misogyny.
CK: Oh. Um, god, I mean, you know, the one place I’ve heard that
is this guy who interviewed me for “Vice Magazine” said
that he saw it with a friend who felt that it was misogynistic and I responded
to that, because I was really surprised, you know, I..the response that I seem
to get when people respond to the movie, is kind of the opposite of that, you
know, people appreciate that I’ve written characters for women to play, as
opposed to eye-candy, or...I mean that’s the only place I’ve heard it. I don’t
know...is that something you think? It’s misogynistic?
PK: Some of the women seemed to be negative portraits in some
ways.
CK: Well, first of all, I don’t agree with that, but second of
all, I don’t think they’re negative portraits, and I don’t know what that means
so you’d have to clarify it, but I don’t think that portraying somebody with
characteristics that aren’t necessarily ideal, is misogyny. I mean I do that
with male characters, too. I mean, I’m trying to write human beings, so why is
that misogynistic?
PK: Good point.
CK: Yeah. I mean the women I know in my life are people. They
have various characteristics that make them human. And they have you know, like
anyone else, they have needs and they’re people. I do take issue with it,
because I inhabit my characters when I write. I don’t write any character from
the outside. And so when I’m having a conversation between two characters in a
movie, in a screenplay, when I’m writing this character, I’m with this
character and when I’m writing this character, I’m with this character.
PK: Would you agree with Caden that the Maria [Caden’s wife’s
lover played by Jennifer Jason Leigh] character
is evil??
CL: Yeah, I don’t know if she’s evil, because I don’t know what
evil means. I would say she’s kind of, she’s probably, the rotten-est person in
the movie. But making a woman a rotten person in a movie doesn’t make me a
misogynist. That makes me the writer of a character of a woman who’s a rotten
person, but there are women, there are kind of rotten people in the world, of various
genders. I didn’t feel that way, you know I didn’t get that response from any
of the women who were in the movie, who kinda wanted to be in it, because they
were interested in their characters, you know. They felt like they could
inhabit them.
PK: Was that scene, in the peep show ... did you see “Paris Texas?”
CK: Yeah.
PK: Is the similarity just coincidental...?
CK: I didn’t remember it at the time, actually, someone mentioned
another movie, called “Hardcore,” which
I haven’t seen. It wasn’t intentional.
PK: Going back to last night, you mentioned that one thing you
have against Hollywood movies is that they
presented a sort of stereotype of relationships, especially romantic relationships,
that is unrealistic. And it seems to me that this film is a sort of
continuation of the relationships in a lot of the other films of yours. It's
sort of the Abelard/Heloise sort of relationship, where two people are in love
for their entire life, but it's totally unfulfilled. Do you see that as a
continuing pattern in your movies?
CK: Yeah I see it cropping up, and I think that can be taken
literally and can be taken figuratively, you know. In sort of being at a
distance from yourself and not being able to kind of, become whole or complete,
but yeah I see that.
PK: Do you record your dreams?
CK: No I often think I should and often kinda get a book and
never do it.
PK: It would seem that a lot of your ideas and images come
directly from...
CK: [distractedly] They don’t, but I was thinking about dreams
when I tried to come up with these ideas. The idea of dreams was a basis for a
lot of the imagery and the logic in the movie. But they didn’t come directly
from dreams. So I don’t know....I’m still stuck on the misogyny. It’s just a
weird thing, it’s like a weird thing. I think people maybe confuse misogyny
with I don’t know what....
PK: Maybe I meant “metonymy.”
CK: Yeah. I don’t know if I should be mad about that.
PK: What about Hazel as "Box Office?
CK: What?
PK: She’s referred to as “box office” at one point which is like
a synecdoche right?
CK: Oh yeah, that’s true.
PK: So Caden’s love affair with Hazel is your desire really to
have a blockbuster movie.
CK: Which is misogynistic.
PK: Or materialistic.
CK: Which is misogyny.
PK: Do you have any other figures of speech that you want to make
movies about?
CK: No, but I found a list of them and I found...god I wish I
could remember some of them, there were some great ones...
PK: I like “chiasmus.”
CK: What is that?
PK: It’s when you have a sentence where you reverse the terms,
like ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your
country. I guess it doesn’t have much movie potential.
CK: Yeah, you can’t do much with that. But there are...if you go
on like Wikipedia you get a list of them. There’s some really amazing ones...of
course I can’t remember any of them now, but they’re all kind of exciting. They’re
like “oh yeah, oh yeah, oh wow, ok...that’s interesting..." things that I never
even thought about as ideas, they just sort of wash over you in your whatever.
PK: I think that’s one of the benefits of your movies, it sends people
to dictionaries, and to Wikipedia.
CK: Wikipedia’s great.
PK: I never knew about Fregoli syndrome.
CK:There you go. Did you know about Cotards?
PK: I had heard about it, actually there was a murder here
in Boston happened back in 2000 where this guy killed 7 people and he claimed
that he was dead and he did it because a guardian angel told him that if he
killed these 7 people it’d be Hitler and his six henchman that he’d stop the
holocaust and be able to go to heaven.
CK: Oh wow.
PK: So, you’ve said this is a horror movie. Did you have plans to
have it come out on October 31st?
CK: No I didn’t have any plans. Sony Classics is having it come
out when they wanted it to come out. You know it's one of those things that they
do based on what’s coming out and I don’t know, you know, what else is coming
out. It’s like, oh well, we’re not going to be totally buried because there’s
not another movie about a theater director who builds a giant set of New York coming out that
weekend.
PK: When you were making the movie, Spike Jonze was one of the
producers...
CK: Yes that’s right.
PK: I heard that there was some difference of opinion about
something.
CK: No, you know, there’s always difference of opinion. But I had
fun (inaudible).
PK: I heard you always were diffident about going on the set for
the other movies that you wrote the screenplay for.
CK: I had to go on set this time. I had to.
PK: So this is like overcoming your fear.
CK: Yeah, pretty quickly. I mean, within the first day. I think
the first day was very hard, you know to get up and go there, but after that it
was like work. It was, the days could be hard, they could be easy but I wasn’t
terrified. I mean sometimes, there was a new actor coming along or something,
there was a little anxiety about that, but I’ve done these plays and I think
that helped me enormously in getting over my fear of talking to actors..
PK: Was one of them “Death of a Salesman?”
CK: No I did this play that I think I told you. and then I did another play called “Hope Leaves the Theater.”
PK: That’s the one where the cell phone rings...
CK: Yeah, did you see it?
PK: No, I read about it. It’s kind of like a radio play. Like
Beckett’s.
CK: They’re not really radio plays, we try and distinguish them
from radio plays because the visual is very important for me. Or the lack of
visual. What’s not happening, what you’re hearing, what you’re not seeing
onstage, is a very interesting thing for me.
PK: I imagine dealing with actors must be one of the most
satisfying aspects.
CK: It’s the most
important thing.
PK: ..and just trying to tell them what character they’re trying
to play. I mean, because they’re all characters playing characters in another
production.
CK: Yeah, but they all understood that. There wasn’t a lot of
explaining to do in that regard. In a way, the only people who had to....well I
guess, Diane Wiest and Emily Watson and Tom Noonan all had to sort of play two different
versions, but Samantha [Morton] and Phil [Hoffman] and Catherine [Keener] were only playing
themselves. Michelle was playing herself, playing herself, but she’s still
playing herself.
PK: One of my favorite lines is, “Caden, you’re breaking the fourth wall.” How
would you know, at that point? The sets are pretty amazing too. I mean it looks
like they cost more than $100,000. What kind of process did you use to create
that effect?
CK: Which effect? The effect that the city is in the warehouse?
PK: ...and the warehouse
is in that warehouse...
CK: I mean, some of it we built in a warehouse, and then a lot of
it, most of it, later on when it got built up was in shooting in New York City
and the post-production effects people doing, building, that warehouse
structure around the entire city. So we did some computer stuff and built a
computer model of this enormous warehouse and they were able to manipulate it
and change the angles so we could find the version that fit best with whatever
city state we were existing in. So, that’s how we did it.
PK: Do you keep any souvenirs from the movies that you make?
CK: I don’t have much in this one, but I have some of Caden’s
theater posters. I have the one...there’s a burnt version of the poster for “Death
of A Salesman” which is in Hazel’s apartment when the place is really burned
down towards the end of the movie, I have that. I have that painting that was
painted on the wall of the kitchen, which is like the woman, I don’t know if
you noticed that...kind of a heavy woman kind of painted into the wall.
PK: Was that supposed to be there or was it a hallucination...?
CK: No, it's something that Adele did on the wall one morning. Alex
came in and did it. But it was supposed to be just, she paints, kind of free
character who can just paint on the walls.
PK: You don’t like talking about future plans.
CK: I don’t have any future plans. I’m trying to write something
now, but I have no, I have nothing really developed in any way that’s even
worth mentioning.
PK: So you do suffer from writer’s block occasionally?
CK: I don’t suffer from it anymore. I feel comfortable with it
now. I feel like its part of the process of letting things gestate.
PK: Are you going to vote?
CK: Am I going to vote? Yes I’m going to vote.
PK: One of the odd things about this movie is that its about a
completely interior person, with no regard for the rest of the world, tand it’s
coming out just before one of the major elections, one of the major turning
point elections in the last 50 years or so. Do you think this is a good time
for it to come out? Do you think people will be inspired to become introverted?
CK: I don’t know. I guess I don’t think of him that way. I see
him as a person struggling in the world and I think everybody’s internal and
everybody’s got their personal self involvement. But I mean I don’t think this is a commercial for
that particular form of existence. Its not like I’m advocating it, or its going
to look appealing to anyone, so no, that doesn’t...I actually think this movie
is a good movie for the time.
PK: A lot of peoplesuggest it is a signature moment when Caden
is examining his stools.
CK: Yeah. Weird. It’s weird, the stuff that you don’t really
think about and then everyone is saying, like he’s examining his stools means
his head's up his ass, or whatever it is that their saying. But there’s a lot of
illness in the movie and there’s a lot of concern about health issues and
that’s one of the things people talk about when you’ve got health issues and
it's one of the things you watch. And I wanted to show it because you know,
because everyone has feces, and probably a lot of people look at them. Maybe
people don’t poke them apart with bathroom brushes....
PK: I think everyone has done that at one time in their life.
CK: I wasn’t going to make any assumptions.
PK: Present company excluded.
CK: It’s like, come on. I guess, what I’m saying is, I don’t feel
that way about the character. So for people to say that’s obviously what I’m
saying, that he’s obviously only involved in his own shit, is kind of like, eh,
I could do better than that if I was going to come up with a metaphor, you
know? Wouldn’t be my choice. It’s fine if people think it, and I’m not gonna
disavow them on that.
PK: What about the green poop, you have any thoughts on that?
CK: I do have thoughts on it.
November 07, 2008
More so than a lot of filmmakers, Charlie Kaufman really
cares what you think. I got a chance to interview him the day after his new film "Synecdoche New York" played at the Harvard Square Cinema the crowd there seemed to really love him when I saw him the next
morning sitting in a meeting room in the Ritz Carlton I thought he looked kind
of glum and full of doubt, kind of like the character Caden Cotard, played by
Philip Seymour Hoffman, who may be his onscreen persona. He looked like he
needed a hug (maybe without the beard he looks more fragile). I didn’t give him
one, and, as you’ll see later, I think I might have made him feel worse.
Peter Keough: How’s it going?
Charlie Kaufman: Its going ok, hows it going for you?
PK: On the subway coming in I was looking at my notes and it
started suddenly and fell onto this
woman who was very nice about it. Kind
of like the [omitted: spoiler] in the beginning of your film. Has that actually
happened to you?
CK: No.
PK: I think that catches everybody by surprise.
CK: That was intentional, that it would catch everyone by
surprise, although I think you can’t have a scene with someone shaving without
creating a certain tension. Just the idea of someone shaving feels like
something bad is going to happen, but not the bad thing that you assume.
PK: It’s never the bad thing you assume.
CK: No. Speaking about the train and the shaving, I went to
Yaddo, the arts colony, I had an opportunity to go there and I couldn’t finish
this script and I wanted to go away and be able to concentrate, I took the
opportunity, and one of the things I learned was that the guy whose estate this
is, the family who donated this estate for this purpose, died shaving on a
train. The train lurched and he slit his throat.
PK: Straight edge?
CK: Yeah, it was in the earlier part of the twentieth
century, I guess when people used straight edge. So there is a shaving accident
you don’t want to happen.
PK: You used to have a beard, did you stop shaving because
of that?
CK: No no, [laughs],
I stopped shaving every once in a while because I can’t stand shaving and then
its like, it just gets harder and harder to start again, so I don’t and then I
get sick of it and then I shave it, and then I go through the process again and
again and that’s the way it goes until you die.
PK: So you’re going to let it grow out?
CK: I let it grow out, I’m doing a month of this, I’m going
around the country, so I’ll probably keep shaving until this is over, so it
doesn’t look to bad.
PK: Kind of like a
baseball player, the superstition?
CK: No, its not superstition, it’s more like I just kind of
want to try to look somewhat presentable, which is always difficult, I’ll
shave.
PK: Beard growing -- that’s one of those involuntary activities
that were shutting down for your character, like with the salivating...
CK: Yeah, the ergonomic functions.
PK: But his beard kept growing. So go figure. I saw the film for a second time last night at
the Harvard Square Theatre. How did you think the film was received?
CK: Well, I stayed
for the beginning and then I left maybe 20, 25 minutes into it and then I came
back at the end and did the Q&A.
Judging from the reception at the Q&A and from the very beginning
when people seemed to be laughing, I though it did well but I can’t speak to
anything other than the 25 minutes I saw.
PK: People were
very into the comedy part, which I suppose you appreciate?
CK: I appreciate
whatever people want to take from it, if they’re into anything in it, I don’t
care.
PK: The first time I
saw it I was unable to speak to people for half an hour.
CK: Good.
PK: Is that the kind of reaction you were looking for?
CK: I’m not looking for anything in particular, although
I’ve heard that reaction and I think that is pleasing, if there is some kind of
effect that it has, but its not a calculated or scientific thing to write this
so that people will be silent for half an hour afterwards.
PK: It was like being trapped inside somebody’s mind for
their entire life, at its good moments and bad moments,
CK: I guess it is.
PK: The audience at the Q & A, some people got testy when you didn’t give
them a certain interpretation of the movie.
But basically, I think they were worshipping you. Is that uncomfortable
for you?
CK: The worshipping
part, I don’t know what it means exactly, so its hard for me to – you were
there for the Q&A last night, the thing that the guy said at the end last
night – it was nice.
PK: You seemed to be touched by it.
CK: Well it’s a nice
thing to have someone say that, especially because I was really depressed last
night and I was not looking forward to coming and doing that thing last
night. It’s hard for me to be traveling
by myself, doing this for a month and I’m exhausted.The reaction to the movie
has been - I never know what people will come in and say, people have been
really angry with me, or if they’ll be responsive like that guy.
PK: Sometimes it’s the same person.
CK: No, that hasn’t happened, not that I’ve been aware
of. I’ve had people actually, I’ve
heard, that people can sometimes hate the movie and then can’t get it out of
their head, I’ve heard people say that, or they see it again, this is critics,
who have seen it at festivals and then they start to feel something about it that
they didn’t before.
PK: I have to admit,
as much as I admired the movie I didn’t look forward to seeing it for a second
time because it is so exhausting, but the second time it’s actually easier
because its less exhausting because you’ve already processed a lot of what’s
gone on.
CK: I think that’s
maybe the reaction that people have, that they’re afraid that they will not
understand it, or miss something, there’s a lot of stuff coming at you, you
feel you can’t just sort of sit back and
relax. I think you can, but people feel that they can’t and that’s what makes
it trying to people, if it is trying.
PK: I noticed you
didn’t go into the Cotard syndrome
[Hoffman’s character shares the name of this psychological syndrome ] question?
CK: It’s a delusion
that you’re already dead and your body, in some cases, you feel like your body
is actually decaying, it looks to you like your skin is falling of and that
sort of thing.
PK: So is he dead?
CK: Don’t know.
PK: Do you know the
Borges story, “The Secret Miracle?” 
CK: Tell me what its
about and I’ll tell you if I’ve read it.
PK: This guy is a
playwright, he’s sentenced to die, he spends the night praying to God that
he’ll let him finish this play which is his masterpiece that he hasn’t been
able to finish, he’s taken out to be executed and it seems like God has let him
down [omitted: spoiler].
CK: Oh! That’s cool. I don’t know the story, but it is like
that. And you know what it is like, that
I read in junior high school that I loved, “Pincher Martin” the William Golding
book, do you know that book?
PK: I can’t remember it very well.
CK: Well, I mean when
I first read it, it was like, oh God, this is so cool. A guy is shipwrecked, his boat sinks and he
is a sailor, he finds a little rock island and he spends the entire book
surviving on it, fishing and figuring out how to live, like Robinson Crusoe, at
the end [omitted: spoiler] In junior high school, when I read that, I thought
it was the most amazing thing, the idea.
PK: It might describe the human condition in a way.
CK: It might.
PK: Did you like “Lord of the Flies?”
CK: I did! I haven’t read Golding as an adult so I don’t
know, but I mean when I was a kid, I loved that. I remember my father’s paperback copy of it,
with the little red squiggly drawing of a person’s kid, and I carried it around
a lot. I mean I loved that book.
PK: So you had good
English teachers in junior high and high school?
CK: You mean because
they assigned these books?
PK: Yeah.
CK: I read “Lord of the Flies” before I was in junior high
school, it was one of those things that was in my parent’s library and I read
it. But I think I had the standard, I
think I read - I don’t even remember, “Fahrenheit 451” and stuff like that.
PK: I read a number
of responses to the film and not everyone seems to pick up on the fact that while
this is going on the world is falling apart outside. A bit of a doomsday movie.
CK: Some people have.
Well maybe. There’s things that are going on, I think there is a confusion of
the interior and the exterior, often, literally. In that this is taking place inside a
building, but also the world outside is existing and falling apart, but also
that, that destruction starts to enter into the warehouse city, which at first
seems like a sanctuary because the guy in the street says, “when can we get in?
its bad out here,” but it’s also metaphorically, inside his brain and outside
his brain and his life. What’s happening
inside Caden or through Caden’s life is also happening in the world outside of
him. So I’m, playing with a lot of stuff like that, but yeah, the world is
falling apart.
PK: Yeah, just look at my 401k.
CK: I can’t look at mine.
PK: Well you’ve got a
family too, you have responsibilities.
CK: I do have
responsibilities,
PK: You just had your fiftieth birthday, is that correct?
CK: That is correct.
PK: Did you have a
party?
CK: Went out to dinner.
PK: No surprise
party?
CK: I’ve never had a surprise party; no one’s ever given me
a surprise party.
PK: How sad.
CK: I don’t know if I
want one. But certainly, maybe the
people I know, know that I wouldn’t want one so they don’t do. Or maybe no one is interested in spending the
time that is needed to organize something. I kind of think it might be that.
PK: Turning fifty, is
that turning you more reflective? Though I don’t see how you could be more reflective
than your movies demonstrate.
CK: I’ve been working
on this movie for five years so I guess if it’s made me more reflective it
started at 45. So, you know, as you get older, things happen in your life that
make you more conscious, or less able to deny the inevitability of the end of
your life, I mean, so, I guess that makes you more reflective, I don’t know.
PK: When did you
shoot this movie?
CK: [Notices book I’m toting] You’re reading “The Road?”
PK: It’s a real picker upper. Did you read it?
CK: I did read it, I
didn’t like it as much as I hoped I would and now it’s a major motion picture
which also makes me nervous.
PK: I don’t know if
frozen ash and cannibalism are high concept material.
CK: [laughs] Well I won’t reveal the surprise ending.
PK: Really? He wakes up at the end ...
CK: Turns out...
PK: Turns out it’s all a play put on by Caden. What about the Fregoli Syndrome?
CK: You’ve been
reading up on me.
PK: There’s a website
that is dedicated to you, have you seen it?
CK: To what? To me?
PK: Yeah, it’s called “Being Charlie Kaufman.”
CK: Yeah, I didn’t know they mentioned that on there. What
about it?
PK: Could be a
demonstration of that symptom in the film, when everybody in the film takes the
same person, or different people you assume are the same person [in the film
characters are played in the play within the film by actors who are in turn
played by other characters and so on].
CK: Yeah, I actually
did a play called “Anomalisa” which I wrote under a pen name for various reasons and I used the name Francis
Fregoli as the pen name and yeah, it was a play about a man and everybody in
his life is the same person. So, it was kind of fun. I like psychotic syndromes.
PK: Do you read a lot
of the guy who writes “The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat"?
CK: Oliver Sacks. I
read that book a long time ago, but no I don’t. I just look things up online
and find syndromes. I think I’m out of them.
PK: There’s one more.
CK: Capgras.
[the belief that some loved one or close friend has been replaced by an exact
duplicate]. Which is kind of a - when he gets the apartment, when he
goes to Adele’s [Caden’s wife played by Catherine Keener] apartment,
the name on the board outside is “Capgras.”
PK: I didn’t catch that.
CK: Next time! Next
time. When you see it again.
PK: Third time it’s a walk in the park. How about
Korsakoff’s syndrome? Sort of like “Memento.”
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Korsakoff's-syndrome
CK: That’s related to
alcoholism, confabulation and that sort of thing.
NEXT: More literary name-dropping and the “M” word.
November 05, 2008
President Obama. Let’s just ponder that for a while.
Okay.
As I pointed out a couple of postings ago ,
all of this was foreshadowed by the switch in Hollywood’s undead preference from
zombies to vampires, which should be more than evident when “Twilight” sets
some box office records its opening weekend on November 21. Flesh-eating,
lumpen proletariat walking corpses are out. Sexy, superhuman, elitist revenants are in.
The McCain campaign tried to smear the Obama team by
suggesting that they were vampiric
elitists who live off the toil of regular Joe the Plumbers, hoity-toity
aristos who believe they are better and smarter and more attractive than
everybody else. The problem was that maybe that’s what people wanted. Maybe,
they thought, it was time to have someone who was a cut or two above the
average rather than below in the White House,
given the track record of the past 8 years.
Anyway, as fate would have it, one of the more troubling vampire
movies of all time, Claire Denis’s “Trouble Every Day” (2001), is screening
this Saturday at the Harvard Film Archive.
Denis, who is one of the greatest little known European filmmakers around, will
be on hand for the screening to discuss. In a sense, “Trouble Every Day” tends
to contradict my undead argument, for although it stars some pretty sexy actors
— Vincent Gallo and Beatrice Dalle — it might be one of the worst date movies
ever made. One scene in particular will make it very clear why. You might want
to ask Denis about it.
And if you’re intrigued and want to see more of her films,
and I highly recommend it, the Saturday screening is just part of an ongoing
retrospective of Denis’s films screening at the Archive. She’ll also be
attending a screening Friday of her rarely screened 1994 films “U.S. Go Home”
(a sentiment that might have changed after last night’s election) and her 1991
short “Keep It for Yourself.”
Meanwhile, for those of you interested in seeing some real parasitic elitists, tonight at 6:30 p.m. at the
Brattle Theatre members of the National Society of Film Critics will be
conducting a panel discussion of
their organization’s new book, “The B List: The National Society of Film
Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics
We Love”
(remember, a lot of these guys get paid by the word). Brattle director Ned
Hinkle moderates and those attending will include Ty Burr from “The Boston
Globe,” Jay Carr from NECN, James Verniere from “The Boston Herald” and myself.
See you there.
November 04, 2008
Should a white guy make films about black people? Should
independent filmmakers distribute their own movies? Will there be a “Ballast 2?”
Discuss.
PK: Did you show the finished film to the participants?
LH: Yeah, all the actors came up to Sundance, and a couple
of them came to Berlin,
and a few saw it in LA at the festival, a couple of them had been there before,
so, um, the Sundance experience was very transforming for everybody. Mike Smith
is in Poland right now,
representing the film in Krakow. We showed it
twice in Jackson,
for the cast and crew and friends and family screenings.
PK: Do they plan to pursue careers in movies?
LH: Um, Tara is. She’s been
in two films since. A Disney film, a big studio thing, with Alfre Woodard as
the star, and an independent she’s done. Johnny McPhail, the white guy, has
done another one or two films since (the one professional) and Mike Smith just
got offered a job, potentially offered a job, on a very big independent film. I
don’t know if he’s doing it or not. He’s not pursuing it, you know, unless
someone makes him the offer, he’s not going to go looking for it.
PK: He’s got gravitas, a sort of presence. The reviews have
been almost universally positive, except--
LH: There’s been some pretty bad ones!
PK: Armond White.
LH: Armond White does not like the film, I’ve learned.
PK: He’s a contrarian. But if I was Armond White, I would
say, and we’ve already discussed this, but you know, how can you be so
presumptious, as a white guy to make a film about black people?
LH: That’s bullshit, you know. Should a white filmmaker only
make films about white people? Should a black filmmaker only make films about
black people? Should a Korean only make films about Koreans? Like, what happens
to the poor people who live in Iceland
when there’s such a small population? Only make films about themselves? That’s
fucking bullshit, I’m sorry, but it makes me angry.
PK: Should I read
some quotes?
LH: Oh I read it! I mean, let’s just, come on. I took
painstaking measures to be objective. I wrote about grief, I wrote about hope,
I wrote about these things that can translate to any culture, to any race, to
any gender. And I didn’t make a film about the blues. I didn’t make a film
about civil rights. I made a film about grieving. And I made a film about a
place that I love and documented it with as much objectivity as possible. And I
gave authorship...I sought out people in this region and gave them full control
of the language and the ability to manipulate scenario as they saw fit,
whenever they wanted.
PK: I find the ending enigmatic [omitted spoiler]...?
LH: Oh, I don’t know where they’re going. I purposely
didn’t...[omitted spoiler].
PK: I see a sequel. “Ballast 2.”
LH: No, no I can’t do it. Armond White tells me I cant do
it, so I’ve got to go make movies about white people in my neighborhood.
PK: Where is your neighborhood?
LH: I live in Hollywood.
I’ll make a film about filmmaking. We need another one of those. That’ll do the
world some good, won’t it?
Pk: Do you buy the new American independent film phenomenon?
LH: I believe in the zeitgeist phenomenon and I wasn’t aware
of it when I was making it. I mean the things I was aware of was like Bresson,
and the things from the 50s and 60s. I was thinking consciously of “Breaking
the Waves," editorially. It gave me the courage to cut the film. The thing
that’s been identified later, a new American realism, I think it’s a response
to the American film market, and the world economy. I can speak for myself, and
I assume some of these other filmmakers have experienced the same things, but
what happened for me is that I had such a frustration, such a sense of futility
trying to make a project in a more conventional way. Trying to get money
through the independent channels and being so frustrated by the way that these
people who control the money alter your creative content and at a certain
point, its like, “why the fuck am I doing this?” I’m struggling for years
trying to raise pennies, just to give to give somebody the ability to control
what I’m gonna do. Fuck that. I wasn’t thinking in terms of self-distribution
at that time, I was thinking the first step was I don’t want anybody involved
in my creative process. I’m going to make something inexpensive, I’m going to
go to Mississippi
to do it, and I’m going to make a film for myself. I don’t care about the
market or what anybody else thinks. I have a very strong belief that if you do
something for yourself very personally, complete it, and present it to the
world, it becomes public property and only if you do something that resonates
with you will it have the chance to do that with other people. While you’re
making it, you can’t think about anybody but yourself. That’s where great art
comes from. That’s a mentality that isn’t compatible with the corporations that
have controlled independent filmmaking recently. We just do what we want. It’s
just a response to a breakdown of the system.
PK: Do you keep in touch with these people?
LH: Yeah, you see the same people on the festival circuit.
Different cities and the same people, and there’s really a sense of like, being
a brother in arms because it’s like going to war when you make a film. Somebody
that’s done a film from their heart, you feel this tremendous desire to be
helpful to them and to bond together and have power in numbers. I’m very
supportive of what all of these people have done. Chris Smith, who did “The Pool,”
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0911024/ I saw that at Sundance in 2007, it’s a
beautiful piece of work.
PK: Your next movie is with a movie star?
LH: Potentially. I’m going to do it in the same way that I
made “Ballast,” which is that I’m interested
in that person for that person, not as an actor. We’re going to strip
away all of acting and the requirement is that that person has be very naked
and expose themselves..
PK: Physically or emotionally?
LH: (laughs) Maybe physically, but I’m not really thinking
about that at the moment.
PK: You can’t tell us who it is?
LH: I can’t, right now.
PK: It’ll be a much different experience then, with the ego
of the actor, and a larger budget
LH: Ego is not allowed. Its not that kind of person. It’s a
person that I respect. An actor is a person first.
October 31, 2008
It's the Halloween
before Tuesday’s election, so the big question is -- how is the political situation reflected in horror
movies? And, specifically, those that deal with that fundamental source of
horror, the Undead.
There are basically two types of undead, zombies and
vampires (Frankenstein fits in uneasily somewhere), and I think it’s safe to
say that up until recently the zombie contingent has dominated the genre. Being
the socialist film critic that I am, I would interpret zombies as representing
the lumpen proletariat. Thay have been so exploited by the capitalist system that
they’re not just downtrodden — they’re dead. But they rise again — the return
of the repressed — to destroy and devour those who subjugated them.
In other words, they represent that “redistribution of
wealth” that the Republicans are scaring everybody with.
On the other hand, they also embody the Joe the Plumber
fantasy that the right wing is trying to sell to the working stiffs of America. The
working stiffs, so to speak. Those real Americans that their fellow real
Americans John McCain and Sarah Palin want to defend against the “liberal
elite.”
In other words, the Republicans are trying to co-opt genuine
working class discontent, as they have so successfully done so in previous elections, pretending to
be the supporters of the common people when in fact they are those who have
victimized them. And movies like “28 Weeks Later” and “I Am Legend” and "Diary of the Dead" are
expressions of the masses’ ambivalent fear of and attraction to their potential
revolutionary fervor.
But those are the old undead. The trend now seems to be in the direction of vampire,
a trend spearheaded by the