Interviews Archives - Page 4 of 10

The Man with Two Brains!: FFC Interviews R.W. Goodwin

April 5, 20092000s, 2009, Authors: Ian Pugh, Interviews

April 5, 2009|It shouldn't come as a surprise, really, given that the film in question deftly balances crowd-pleasing satire with incisive critical commentary, but R.W. ("Bob") Goodwin walks a fine line when discussing Alien Trespass, his paean to cinematic science-fiction of the 1950s. At his most jovial, he pushes forward with the wild abandon of a salesman who knows that he's clinched a deal; at his most thoughtful, he seems to delicately pluck the strings of personal experience, careful not to sabotage what's on the table by revealing too much. Throughout our dialogue at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, we never stray far from the ins and outs of Alien Trespass (a very brief detour into his career as producer and director for "The X-Files" is mostly limited to the preparation offered by "feature-quality work done on a television schedule"), though I suspect that's only because we both have a lot of conflicting notions about the various modes of filmmaking on display here and we're eager to get them off our chests. What, exactly, is the worth of an infallibly earnest pastiche of the atomic era at this stage of the game? Goodwin beams with pride over positive reactions to Alien Trespass, feeling particularly validated by the idea that this, his first film, is more of a communal experience than an intellectual one. If Goodwin's perhaps a bit of a deliberate obfuscator at times, he definitely knows the score.

The Anchor of Independence: FFC Interviews Lance Hammer|Ballast (2008)

November 1, 20082000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Drama, Interviews, Theatrical

Lhammerinterviewtitle
A Sundance sensation rolls up his sleeves

BALLAST
**½/****

starring Micheal J. Smith, Sr., Tarra Riggs, JimMyron Ross, Johnny McPhail
written and directed by Lance Hammer

A man kills himself somewhere in the Mississippi Delta; his twin brother Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith, Sr.) tries to do the same but fails. After a brief stay in hospital, Lawrence is sent home to contemplate the direction his life has gone. Meanwhile, Lawrence's sister-in-law (Tarra Riggs) and nephew (JimMyron Ross) struggle to survive on a minimum-wage income. At first glance, this scenario feels almost hopelessly generic–though the long, meditative shots across empty landscapes and drained performances from non-actors serve to remind of a Bresson film. What finally makes Ballast so uniquely fascinating is how it seems to take place in a post-apocalyptic land, with the initial suicide the atomic bomb that transforms its inhabitants into defeated shells given to moments of hatred and violence without ever really understanding their own motives. (Scenes in which Lawrence raids a grocery store certainly make end-of-the-world comparisons inevitable.) Drugs and attempted suicide are not exactly ways to pass the time in Ballast, nor are they even treated as logical escapes from such hellish surroundings. They are simply the only constants in a world from which there doesn't appear to be any escape.

Ballast is well worth a look for its dignified portrayal of poverty and desperation, and of how their attendant problems tend to form a vicious cycle of silent, festering madness–but, ironically (or appropriately) enough, it starts to sputter around the hour mark, once its characters begin picking up the pieces to rebuild their lives. The film certainly leaves plenty for the viewer to figure out on his own, complete with the dichotomy of journeys vs. destinations in the elusive search for better tomorrows. Yet for a movie that thrives on such an ambiguous setting, Ballast is curiously compelled to provide concrete answers to questions it should leave a little more open-ended. And its continued reliance on defeated, contemplative stares comes across as fatuous and proselytizing in a Sullivan's Travels kind of way. While Ballast is quite obviously a labour of love and the work of a preternatural talent, a more judicious hand in the editing room, particularly as applied to its last fifteen minutes, would have helped immensely.–IP

November 2, 2008|Ballast director/producer Lance Hammer isn't really the scruffy outsider that photos out of Sundance had led me to believe–at least, not in demeanour. Indeed, sporting a clean-shaven face and a soft, folksy tone of voice, he's a very polite fellow who just happens to have given the studio system a pass in favour of self-distributing his fascinating directorial debut. Hammer occasionally borders on a somewhat distracting formality, but that's only because he has very specific ideas about his film and wants to make sure that you understand them in their totality. (He expresses genuine regret upon confirming that I had watched the film on a DVD screener instead of on the big screen.) His quiet manner belies a fierce stubbornness, an admirable quality in an artist of his budding stature; here's a man who knows exactly what he wants from his cinematic career and is more than eager to expound on the present and future of distribution, not to mention his place in it. (The corners cut and chances taken in the promotion of Ballast are readily apparent–the film's advertising budget is, apparently, so low that this interview was conducted at my local ad agency's very own offices in downtown Boston instead of the Four Seasons Hotel, where movie press tours are traditionally hosted.) Near the end of our discussion, I threw a few intentional curveballs to better assess his opinion the overall quality of independent film in the United States, but in retrospect, I wish I had challenged him a little more on his rather bleak views of the mainstream market and, moreover, the very future of cinema itself.

State of Mind: FFC Interviews “Synecdoche, New York” Writer-Director Charlie Kaufman

October 25, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Interviews

Riding a mental rollercoaster with one of our heroes.

October 26, 2008 | I meet Charlie Kaufman in a dark little passage beneath Denver’s Hotel Monaco, both of us surveying a spread of cold cuts and a nice salad of greens and gorgonzola on the final day of a gruelling month-long junket in support of Kaufman’s new film and hyphenate debut, Synecdoche, New York. His first interview of the day following a late-night, (packed) post-screening Q&A at the University of Colorado, I confided in Kaufman that I’d been vying for a chance to speak with him for over four years now after being thwarted at a junket for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind–an experience I documented in an essay that developed a fun second life, probably got one of my local publicists fired, and doomed me to never getting offered another junket again. Mr. Kaufman asked me what it was like. I said it was like being a bug buoyed on the back of an ant colony and finally expelled not for smelling bad, but for smelling bad in the wrong way. We’d come back to this a few minutes later.

Journeymen: FFC Interviews Eric Brevig and Brendan Fraser|Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (2008)

July 12, 20082000s, Action, Adventure, Authors: Ian Pugh, Family, Fantasy, Interviews, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

Satrapolis: FFC Interviews Marjane Satrapi

April 12, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Iran

April 13, 2008|I sat down with Iranian writer/cartoonist/columnist and now filmmaker Marjane Satrapi at Denver’s Hotel Monaco, right off 16^th Street Mall–just a few minutes from the Convention Center, where this year’s Democratic National Convention will be held. I thought it a serendipitous place to interview a figure known for being outspoken on at least two of the three subjects you don’t talk about: politics and religion. Colorado is traditionally a Red State, which belies the way its cultural centres, Denver and Boulder, vote–offset, perhaps, by nearby Colorado Springs, home to Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, the Air Force Academy, and Focus on the Family. Always dangerous for me to stray too far from movies (I don’t actually know very much about anything outside of movies, let’s face it), but I savoured the chance to wade into deep water with the author, touring the U.S. with the film adapted from the two volumes of her brilliant Persepolis. Someone who says things impulsively that tend to get her in trouble, Ms. Satrapi’s a kindred spirit.

Eran’s Visit: FFC Interviews Eran Kolirin

February 10, 20082000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Israel

February 10, 2008|Eran Kolirin strikes a modest figure. Maybe it was the illness: exhausted from a cross-country junket to promote the stateside release of his ebullient and in many ways extraordinary feature debut The Band's Visit (and sick besides), Mr. Kolirin met with me at Cherry Creek's Zaidy's Restaurant–home to the best matzo ball soup in Denver–over a bowl of what he referred to as a little Jewish remedy for the bug he'd been fighting on his tour. As we ate, I realized that what preparatory notes I'd made were all but useless. Though The Band's Visit is almost the definition of a political film (Israelis and Egyptians, oh my), Mr. Kolirin steadfastly avoided a discussion of his new role as focal point for the Middle East conversation–and when I asked him who he was rooting for in the upcoming American election (this was the day after Super Tuesday in the U.S. and I was fresh from listening to an NPR report on how Israel and Egypt were viewing the festivities), he said, "I don't have any idea." I began to wonder if this reticence wasn't more reluctance than indifference: as an aside, almost, at one pointed he volunteered that "Bush, yes, is quite fucked up."

Tony Gilroy: FFC Interviews Tony Gilroy

October 16, 20072000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Interviews

October 17, 2007|Meeting long-time screenwriter Tony Gilroy at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston to talk about his hyphenate debut Michael Clayton, I first notice that his general appearance does a balancing act between "relaxed" and "unkempt" that typifies the kind of laid-back, distinguished-movie-star appeal he tried so hard to suppress in leading man George Clooney. Gilroy sports barely-noticeable stubble, an unbuttoned collar, and a head of hair several shades greyer than it appears in Michael Clayton's production stills. A silly, perfunctory rumination on the reversal of traditional filmmaking roles (in this case ending with the handsome, top-billed actor re-imagined as a droopy sadsack) in turn reminds me of my own lukewarm reaction to Gilroy's freshman feature, which goes over much of the same ground covered in the Bourne films–a series of tough, bitter pills that coalesce to form an utterly devastating trilogy. Caught with tough-act-to-follow comparisons, Michael Clayton brings similar ideas of identity crisis and the discovery of the bastard within to a genre that has unfortunately bled such veins dry.

Understanding the Words: FFC Interviews Chris Tucker

August 12, 20072000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Interviews

The Twenty-Five Million Dollar Man on working with a master director…and Brett Ratner

August 12, 2007|Two interview offers recently found their way to my inbox: one with the cast of the Bratz movie, the other with Rush Hour 3 co-conspirators Chris Tucker and Brett Ratner. Though I do wonder how the toy-line movie interview would have gone, the choice was obvious: Ratner's films certainly inspire plenty of witty rhetoric 'round the pages of FILM FREAK CENTRAL (as far as critical tidbits go, the opening line of Walter's X-Men: The Last Stand review stands as a personal favourite), and I welcomed the opportunity to sit down and talk to the man about the accusations that dog him in these parts. As for my own personal experience with Ratner's movies, it ranged from hazily-positive recollections of a theatrical viewing of Red Dragon to an astoundingly negative reaction to X-Men: The Last Stand. It was time to get educated, once and for all.

Regarding Henry: FFC Interviews Henry Rollins/Henry Rollins: Uncut from NYC + The Henry Rollins Show: Season One – DVDs

July 22, 20072000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DVD, Esoterica, Interviews, Music, Television

HENRY ROLLINS: UNCUT FROM NYC (2006)
*1/2 (out of four)

THE HENRY ROLLINS SHOW: SEASON ONE (2006)
*** (out of four)

INTERVIEWING HENRY ROLLINS (2007)
Priceless

July 22, 2007|Black Flag was the first hardcore punk band in the United States, spearheading a mad Southern California scene that belched forth this idea that James Taylor was not the voice of a generation in much the same way that the cinema of the '60s rejected that of the '50s. Marked by violence and speed, the band–the brainchild of guitarist Greg Ginn–went through multiple rosters before Henry Rollins, a 20-year-old fan living his dream as a roadie for the band, replaced Dez Cadena (who lost his voice and ambition to front the group at the end of the summer of 1981) as its lead singer. Instantly the spokesman for the group, the heavily-tattooed Rollins, muscular to the point of looking like a bullet with eyes and known for performing shirtless in black shorts (as well as getting into fistfights with audience members), also demonstrated a great deal of verbal agility and improvisational ability. A tireless, stubborn autodidact, he was quick on his feet, and final shows saw the band jumping into jazz-like improvisational bursts with Rollins shouting things as they came to his mind. Think about it for a minute and it has the potential to be retarded; but Rollins, for everything he is and isn't, has an amazingly nimble mind and a pit of outrage that seems bottomless.

Eye to Eye: FFC Interviews Eli Roth

June 9, 20072000s, Authors: Ian Pugh, Horror, Interviews

June 10, 2007|I pretty much disagree with most of what Eli Roth has to say about Hostel Part II. An unabashed fan of his work for its delicate balancing act of depravity, deathly-black humour, and loving homage, I found his latest film an exciting self-reflexive exercise–a casual question mark thrown at moviegoers who would knowingly pay to see graphic depictions of torture. But the man himself insists that his primary goal lies in pleasing the audience with his specialized brand of perversion–and if, in explaining his technique, he comes across as abrasive, self-important, and longwinded, it's because he's got a lot of set ideas about what his films are saying and at whom they're targeted; furthermore, he's unafraid to expound on those ideas in excruciating detail. And yet, his aversion to accepted subtext–as well as his somewhat wishy-washy consideration of critical reaction–neatly encapsulates one of the most admirable aspects of Hostel Part II, i.e., how its finest (read: grisliest) moments at once point to something bubbling under the surface and somehow thwart a deeper reading of the Guignol thrills. Roth certainly lays a great deal of his personality and excitement for cinema on the table for all to see, but still I wonder what he's keeping hidden. I'm reminded of how his mentor David Lynch deadpanned a challenge to viewers to find the "correct" interpretation of Eraserhead.

W.W.: FFC Interviews Wim Wenders

April 2, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Interviews

Wim, with vigour

April 2, 2006|It was my great honour to speak with Wim Wenders, one the three principal architects of the German New Wave (along with the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the bulletproof Werner Herzog) on his recent swing through Denver. Sitting at a large, round, glass table (he at two o'clock, me at four), he reached over by way of introduction and examined my decrepit tape recorder, made sure it was on, and turned the built-in microphone towards his voice before folding his hands and looking at me expectantly. I took it as tacit approval of either my poverty or my Ludditism from a man whose mature work has consistently addressed the idea of spectatorship–leaving his late-American films (like The End of Violence and Million Dollar Hotel) essays on Modernism in the Eliot mold: the poet stranded between Rat's Alley and the riverbank. His Dennis Hopper-as-Tom-Ripley The American Friend still the finest screen adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel (with work like Purple Noon, Strangers on a Train, and Ripley's Game, versions of the same story, all hot on its heels), it is, like his best-known Paris, Texas and best-loved Wings of Desire, a transcendental odyssey through an existential wasteland, its blasted psychic landscape manifesting itself in the empty American dreaming Wenders has made his milieu.

Towne Country: FFC Interviews Robert Towne

March 19, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

March 19, 2006|Bill posed the question eloquently in his review of Robert Towne’s Without Limits of whether Towne actually deserves the “legend” label he’s sported since his remarkable trifecta of The Last Detail, Chinatown, and Shampoo. Script doctor extraordinaire, I’d buy (Towne presided over lengthy rewrites of personal faves The Parallax View and Night Moves while inserting key sequences into The Godfather), but doesn’t that only bolster the idea that he needs a great collaborator to create truly great work? Then there’s his penchant for attaching himself to matinee idol-types, which is fine when they’re Jack Nicholson or Warren Beatty, not so fine when it’s Tom Cruse. And it’s been Tom Cruise since long about Days of Thunder.

Into Her Own: FFC Interviews Natasha Richardson

February 12, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

February 12, 2006|If people know Natasha Richardson at all it seems it's as the titular gun-toting, Stockholm-struck heiress in Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst–a film that came closer to making her a star than the one that was supposed to two years later, The Handmaid's Tale. I myself was vaguely aware that she hailed from a long and storied English industry family, what with her father being director Tony Richardson and mother and aunt being acclaimed actresses Vanessa and Lynn Redgrave, respectively; and I knew that she'd married Liam Neeson somewhere along the line, with whom she has two children. But it wasn't until very recently that I started becoming aware of Ms. Richardson more as an actress than as something like a faint suggestion of foreign royalty. The act of freeing herself from her past began with a move from the UK to Manhattan, a few celebrated turns on the Great White Way (most notably her Tony-winning stint as Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes's revival of Cabaret), and now a couple of films (Asylum and The White Countess) that find Richardson's screen work maturing along with her actualization. Yeah, I'm smitten.

Mr. Frears Presents: FFC Interviews Stephen Frears

January 29, 20062000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, UK

January 29, 2006|My first glimpse of lanky British director Stephen Frears was in passing as he took shelter from a frigid early-December wind in a doorway in front of Denver's historic Brown Palace Hotel. Iconoclastic at the least, Frears turned his back on a career in law and began his tutelage in the arts at the Royal Court Theatre under Karel Reisz and, eventually, Lindsay Anderson, on whose fantastic If… he worked before making his feature debut with Gumshoe in 1971. A two-film partnership with playwright Hanif Kureishi later yielded My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and they, along with the magnificent Joe Orton biopic Prick Up Your Ears, brought Frears to the attention of Hollywood, where he's since had his share of ups (Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters, and High Fidelity) and downs (Hero and Mary Reilly, high-profile flops made back-to-back for the same studio).

Here Comes Mr. Jordan: FFC Interviews Neil Jordan

December 4, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews, Ireland

Tea time with the director of your dreams

December 4, 2005|I expected Neil Jordan to be towering, imposing. From what I'd read, he was a taciturn interview given to long silences and confusing discursions–and from the intelligence of his films, I wondered if I'd be able to keep up with his sources and references. But for a man responsible for some of the most challenging, courageous, and beautiful films of the modern era (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, now Breakfast on Pluto), Mr. Jordan came off as an everyday Joe (with a light Irish brogue) still amazed by the possibilities of the medium and still feeling his way through the business. His pictures always seem to be fairytales: No matter their subject matter, there are princes and maidens, wolves and woods. (Jordan's most underestimated work (and one of my favourites), In Dreams, is entirely an evocation of fugue states.) As he was on the verge of ordering an espresso, I assured him that this place–Denver's four-star Panzano restaurant–knew how to brew tea properly (in a pot, on the table). Amused, he looked me over and said, "I suppose you'd know. Tea it is."

Keen, Shaven: FFC Interviews Lodge Kerrigan

November 27, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Interviews

November 27, 2005|I got off on the wrong foot with Lodge Kerrigan almost immediately (the kind of thing I can usually avoid until at least ten or twelve minutes into an interview). It was an unexpected turn of events because I'm a fan and was dying to talk to him after getting poleaxed by his first three films: Clean, Shaven, Claire Dolan, and now Keane. It was my fault; I asked him if his films were a means by which to address his prejudices when, upon consideration, his films actually force me to address my own prejudices: prejudices about mental illness, prostitution, and the general desperation of the disenfranchised. I wouldn't call it a misunderstanding so much as a bad presumption on my part–this belief that the things that made me uncomfortable and/or crazy brought out the same feelings in Kerrigan. It's a presumption so deeply ingrained in me that I never stopped to think that the things I'm a prick about aren't the same things everyone else is a prick about, making the interview almost as interesting a prod for self-examination as are Kerrigan's films.

Noah’s Arc: FFC Interviews Noah Baumbach

November 6, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

November 6, 2005|The son of author Jonathan Baumbach and former VILLAGE VOICE film critic Georgia Brown, Noah Baumbach is married to Jennifer Jason Leigh and counts among his friends long-time husband and wife Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates (whose son, Owen, has a pivotal role in Baumbach's new film The Squid and the Whale). I know he wrote and directed a 1995 film called Kicking and Screaming that I liked a great deal, that he co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Wes Anderson and that Anderson produced The Squid and the Whale, and that he made another flick (the underestimated Mr. Jealousy) and still another (Highball) he had taken away from him and will no longer discuss. I believed that was all I really needed to know about Mr. Baumbach's personal life–and maybe too much already, besides.

Into the Blue: FFC Interviews Ira Sachs

October 29, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

October 30, 2005|He has the potential to sound pretentious and he's nervous about it–but there is wrapped up in this self-awareness the Catch-22, as they say, that if he knows he sounds a certain way, he probably isn't that way. It's a hard thing and you see it a lot these days, that if you're qualified, you downplay it–if you're knowledgeable, you pretend not to be–because there is no bigger social crime in these United States than to know more than the next guy. I had a chance to talk to Ira Sachs, co-writer and director of the fantastic Forty Shades of Blue, about cracking the hard skin that's formed over the pudding of the indie dysfunctional-family genre. Set in his hometown Memphis, where Mr. Sachs grew up "gay and Jewish," the picture–like Sachs himself, he's quick to affirm–is about compressing multiple lives into one journey.

It’s All in the Thumbs: FFC Interviews Mike Mills & Lou Taylor Pucci

October 8, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

October 9, 2005|With wistful "it" boy Lou Pucci turning cartwheels on the berber carpet and his Thumbsucker director Mike Mills horsing around in a way more fraternal than paternal, I suddenly found myself in a conference room with a couple of guys who have no use for "cool." What I vetted from these unaffected souls not caring in the slightest what I thought of their rumpus room acrobatics was this sense, undeniable, that they couldn't care less that I was even there–and less still what species of banal question I had ratting around in my proverbial pet carrier. But it wasn't arrogance (I've been around that a lot–been the arrogant one, too, if tales told out of school are to be heeded): it was something more like fatigue driven to the grist of blithe indifference–that feeling you get during finals week when you realize that after a semester's worth of fear and tension, you just don't give a good crap anymore.

Beauty and the Phil: FFC Interviews Amy Adams & Phil Morrison

August 7, 20052000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

“Maxim”izing our time with the star and director of Junebug

August 7, 2005|Colorado girl–and freshly-minted Sundance sensation (just don’t hold it against her)–Amy Adams, flying out that evening for a job in New York, was joined for a cup of coffee on this rare overcast summer day in the bowels of Denver’s chichi Hotel Monaco by her Junebug director Phil Morrison. I tend to prepare between five and ten questions for an interview scheduled to last this long (45 minutes-an hour), confident that the conversation will go where it goes and, more, that if there’s no vein to be mined, we can both cut our losses before I start tossing off the “What was it like to work with?”s and “What were the challenges of making?”s. But for Ms. Adams and Mr. Morrison, I came armed with a single question–I felt only one thing was the key to understanding the film in a larger perspective. That this lone inquiry led to a discussion punctuated by passionate declarations and fast retreats (more “off the records” in this one than in the previous five combined, I confess) is testament to Ms. Adams’s and Mr. Morrison’s closely-held opinions–and their desire to save movies from themselves, one Junebug at a time.