You Might Even Say They Glow…: FFC Interviews Alan Rudolph & Michael Henry Wilson

October 21, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

ArudolphinterviewtitleOctober 21, 2002|I don't know exactly what I was expecting from Alan Rudolph, the director of such peculiar films as Love at Large, Trouble in Mind, and the frankly misguided Vonnegut adaptation Breakfast of Champions, but a smallish, balding, unassuming man with a flat west-coast accent wasn't it. (This despite his cameo in The Player pitching "a cross between Ghost and Manchurian Candidate.") In Denver for the city's 25th International Film Festival with his latest, Investigating Sex, in tow, Mr. Rudolph–along with the film's co-screenwriter, Michael Henry Wilson–sat down with me underneath the canopy dome of the Denver Performing Arts Complex, high above the bustle below of the crowd arriving at the Temple Buell theatre for the screening and reception to follow. (A privileged vantage reminiscent of the ivory tower interplay of his collection of intellectuals in the picture.) I began by asking Mr. Rudolph about his long association with friend and mentor Robert Altman.

A Get-Together with Chen Kaige: FFC Interviews Chen Kaige

October 18, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

CkaigeinterviewtitleOctober 19, 2002|Stentorian in voice and a little dreamy in mien, Chen Kaige ("Tzen KI-guh"), one of the primary members of China's Fifth Generation of filmmakers, is a tribute guest at the 25th Denver International Film Festival. A group that included Zhang Yimou (a cameraman on Kaige's Yellow Earth prior to becoming a director), the Fifth Generation introduced more intimate stories told on a larger scale than the Chinese cinema that came before. It is a movement also marked by remarkably vivid colour schemes, interest in period pieces, and epic tableaux.

The Fast and Furious Cole Hauser: FFC Interviews Cole Hauser

October 14, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, DIFF/SDFF, Film Festivals, Interviews

ChauserinterviewtitleOctober 15, 2002|I met Cole Hauser, visiting Denver with his latest film, White Oleander, in tow (it opened the 25th Annual Denver Film Festival), at the press suite of the city's Hotel Teatro. A rising star, Hauser is along with Alison Lohman the best thing about the intensely mediocre White Oleander–he's the best thing, in fact, about a lot of films. With the virile presence of a young Brando (crossed with Jon Favreau) and a glacial mien, Hauser has escaped stardom only through his steadfast decision to take roles based on the quality of director or role rather than succumb to the bright lights of easy stardom. (Director John Singleton, with whom he worked on Higher Learning, is at least partly responsible for his upcoming appearance in The Fast and the Furious 2.) I asked Mr. Hauser about playing a skinhead, about the underestimated The Hi-Lo Country, and about his once-estranged father, actor Wings Hauser.

Skins Game: FFC Interviews Chris Eyre

October 2, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

CeyreinterviewtitleOctober 2, 2002|Striking a chord with his first film Smoke Signals (based on a collection of short stories by Sherman Alexie, who himself makes his directorial debut this year with The Business of Fancydancing), director Chris Eyre is now on the "Rolling Rez Tour" with his second film, Skins, travelling across the country in a giant semi-trailer equipped with, of all things, a 35mm projector and comfortable, air-conditioned stadium seating for ninety. There's even a popcorn machine.

Psst!: FFC Interviews Christian Frei

September 29, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Interviews, Switzerland

CfreiinterviewtitleSeptember 30, 2002|While flipping through a magazine on a flight to Chicago in April 1997, Swiss director Christian Frei became acquainted with the work of photojournalist James Nachtwey, one of the most decorated artists in his field and the subject of Frei's remarkable documentary War Photographer, which debuts this week in Denver at the Argus Human Rights Festival. A fascinating, almost Lacanian separation of observer and observed indicates the piece, a film shot with a specially designed camera-mounted camera that provides an intimate point of view of the photographer at work. I had the pleasure of speaking with Mr. Frei this morning on the telephone to Switzerland as the director, fresh from a trip to Kabul researching his newest project, The Giant Buddhas, spends the next week and a half in his homeland.

Last Action Hero: FFC Interviews Steven Silver

September 28, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Film Festivals, Interviews

SsilverinterviewtitleSeptember 29, 2002|At once a startling exposé on the horror of Rwanda's 1994 genocide and a stirring portrait of heroism, Steven Silver's fantastic documentary The Last Just Man is a balanced, provocative film that demonstrates a steady hand at the rudder and an educator's philosophy at the helm. It is wrenching and difficult to consider one's own life from the same perspective once watched–thus it fulfills the noblest aspirations of the medium: to move, to inspire, to edify, all so professionally composed that it manages to disguise its mechanism. Finding the right balance between history and irony, outrage and careful consideration, is a devilishly tricky thing, and Mr. Silver carries it off with a surplus of apparent ease. I was honoured to chat with Mr. Silver on the telephone from Toronto this morning preparatory to the Colorado debut of The Last Just Man at the Argus Human Rights Festival.

In Conversation with Arthur Dong

September 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Film Festivals, Interviews

AdonginterviewtitleSeptember 27, 2002|The latest by a veteran and much-lauded documentary filmmaker based in the Los Angeles area, Arthur Dong's Family Fundamentals examines the toll that hatred and intolerance have taken on either side of the ideological divide separating fundamentally Christian families from their homosexual children. Following three families, Dong's picture is notable for its remarkable restraint–its amazing lack of stridency in the face of as insidious–and puzzling–a form of fanaticism as any in our cultural dystopia. Such objectivity graces all of Mr. Dong's late production–works such as the (twice-honoured at Sundance) documentary Licensed to Kill (in which murderers of gay men are interviewed in prison) and Outrage 69, which details, in part, the Stonewall riots of that incendiary summer of '69. I talked to Mr. Dong, a Chinese-American and an openly gay man raised in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, about getting started in film and growing up Chinese in the United States.

When There’s No More Room in Britain: FFC Interviews “Shaun of the Dead” Filmmakers Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost

September 26, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

ShaunofthdeadinterviewtitleThe makers of Shaun of the Dead on building a better zombie movie

September 26, 2002 | I met up with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright, the creative team behind the Britcom "Spaced" and now the brilliant zombie rom-com Shaun of the Dead, right before I was scheduled to host a Q&A after a free screening of the film (comprised mainly of Romero fanatics and genre geeks) at Denver's Pavilions Theater. As the movie unspooled, the four of us retired to a Planet Hollywood where they were playing, of all things, an old, unknown FIXX song from the '80s. There was something pleasantly right about that, chatting with these blokes–who had made a half-assed record collection in Shaun of the Dead into an arsenal to irritate the legions of the shambling undead–as the detritus of our glossiest, Teflon age pounded the corners of one of the most soulless prefab eateries in the world.

Cory McAbee in Black and White: FFC Interviews Cory McAbee

September 17, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Interviews

CmcabeeinterviewtitleSeptember 18, 2002|Cory McAbee's The Billy Nayer Show is a brilliant aural assault of a band that just so happens to be involved in the process of filmmaking. The American Astronaut–written, directed, and starring McAbee–is an amalgamation of traditional 35mm cinematography, still photographs, paintings, and in one particularly disquieting scene, sculpture. In many ways, the film is the logical end to years of celluloid experimentation from McAbee, beginning with 1993's The Billy Nayer Show, a 150-second animated short film created with house paint and paper; continuing through 1994's twenty-minute Pixelvision-wrought The Man on the Moon, which details a cuckolded husband who takes his cat to the moon, where he broadcasts something of a radio show back to Earth; and reaching something of an anti-climactic pinnacle with 1995's thirty-minute The Ketchup and Mustard Man, essentially a discomfiting performance art concert (complete with a bizarre sculpted application) edited in such a way as to suggest that it's the fever dream of a demented mind (which may not, after all, be far off).

Circus Vargas: FFC Interviews Peter Sollett

September 9, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Film Festivals, Interviews, TIFF

PsollettinterviewtitleSeptember 10, 2002|Peter Sollett had been judged by his cover in most of the interviews preceding mine at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. As I was packing up to leave his hotel room, he thanked me for not asking, to put it in no uncertain terms, What the hell’s an upper-middle-class white guy doing make a movie about a Latino neighbourhood on the lower east side of Manhattan? The truth is, I couldn’t care less–been pigeonholed a time or two myself based on appearances. The beauty of NYU film-school grad Sollett’s feature-length writing and directing debut Raising Victor Vargas (an expansion of his like-themed short film Five Feet High and Rising) is that he could’ve set it anywhere. The milieu is all but incidental (he picked the film’s central location based on the Latino community’s enthusiastic response to an open casting call), though it does lend verisimilitude to the boy-meets-girl story basic. Call it apolitically political.

Your Secret is Safe with Payami: FFC Interviews Babak Payami

August 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Interviews, Iran

BpayamititleAugust 25, 2002|I met Babak Payami last week while he was drinking an espresso in a leather-upholstered booth at a chichi Denver eatery. In town to discuss his second film, Secret Ballot (Raye makhfi), Payami was not the craggy visage in a fisherman’s knit-wool sweater with a shock of white hair–the living incarnation of Samuel Beckett as would befit the author of a film that plays like a cross between “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame”–I expected. Instead, I was greeted by a compact, powerful-seeming man in a sweater. Articulate and confident, yes, but there the similarity to papa Sam ended.

Butler Did It: FFC Interviews George Butler

August 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

GbutlertitleAugust 25, 2002|George Butler is perhaps best known as the maverick filmmaker behind 1977’s Pumping Iron, the benchmark bodybuilding documentary that almost single-handedly introduced a young Austrian fellow by the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger to American audiences. Each of Butler’s subsequent projects have been examinations of the urge for achievement in ages of relative leisure, from the groundbreaking female bodybuilders of Pumping Iron II, the big game hunting of the disaster- and controversy-ridden project In the Blood, and finally this year’s IMAX Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure and companion feature-length documentary The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition. Despite the similarity of Mr. Butler’s projects, the bonhomie growing between people during strife and outrageous circumstance, and the evolution (or lack thereof) of machismo, he frowns on discussions of intentionality in his work and choices of subject material. That’s something that I learned the hard way. (Please note: this interview was conducted during last winter’s awards season.)

World Traveler: FFC Interviews John Sayles & Maggie Renzi

July 6, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

JohnsaylesinterviewtitleJuly 7, 2002|There are a great many similarities between John Sayles and Billy Wilder (save, obviously, Wilder’s affection for the Hollywood studio system). Both: are writers who became directors; exhibit a knack for developing strong characters and eliciting fine performances; are loyal to a small cadre of performers and technical crew; prefer simple shooting schemes that don’t obscure the primacy of the script; generally detail the infiltration of a corrupt society; are fond of sports metaphors and analogies; and, despite some auteur hallmarks, are unbound by genre. One of the great lost Wilder projects is a professional wrestling picture called The Masked Marvel, which was to star Charles Laughton, while Sayles once wrote a professional wrestling play called “Turnbuckle”–curiouser and curiouser.

The Game of Wife: FFC Interviews Yvan Attal & Charlotte Gainsbourg

June 25, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, France, Interviews

MywifeasanactressinterviewtitleJune 26, 2002|A hot and smoky day in downtown Denver (approximately thirty miles and apparently downwind from the Hayman forest fire that at the time we didn’t know was started, somehow appropriately, by a lovelorn forest ranger) found me meeting Yvan Attal and Charlotte Gainsbourg at the café run by the Denver Art Museum. I was nervous about this interview, more so than most, mainly because I had nothing especially positive to say on the subject of My Wife is an Actress (Ma femme est une actrice), a seemingly autobiographical film–it’s Attal’s hyphenate debut–that is being praised for its romantic quirk but in which I could find neither joy nor connection. Its jokes too obvious, its characters unlikeable and shrill, and its conclusions too pat by far; I looked sadly over my unpromising notes on the ride over.

Fast Times: FFC Interviews Zacharias Kunuk & Norman Cohn

June 24, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Interviews

FastrunnerinterviewtitleJune 25, 2002|For all of George Lucas's frothing exhortations for exhibitors and filmmakers to wean themselves off celluloid, the most compelling argument for digital video exists in independent cinema–smaller productions have thus far benefited the greatest from DV's affordability, flexibility, and intimacy. Zacharias Kunuk and Norman Cohn's Atanarjuat (more commonly, The Fast Runner) (Kunuk is listed as director and Cohn as DP, but the reality is closer to their responsibilities being equal and the same), shot entirely on DV and then transferred to 35mm (much like Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones), is the kind of unique indie project that gives hope and reason to the format; without DV, The Fast Runner would have been too expensive and cumbersome to shoot. A stark and beautiful telling of an ancient Inuit banning fable, The Fast Runner is also the first major cinema product from the Inuit people, the first picture shot entirely in the Inutkikuk language, and the first picture to present Inuit people to a western audience free of Nanook of the North stereotypes. Besides being entertaining, The Fast Runner is an important film.

On the Phone with Jena Malone…: FFC Interviews Jena Malone

June 11, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Bill Chambers, Interviews, Teen

JminterviewtitleJune 12, 2002|In the six years since she played the Jodie Foster character as a young ham radio enthusiast in Contact and Jennifer Jason Leigh's troubled daughter in Anjelica Huston's acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina, Jena Malone has cornered the market on damaged adolescent goods. Maybe you remember her giving Julia Roberts lip in Stepmom, or asking Kevin Costner if he slept with Kelly Preston in For Love of the Game, or committing infanticide and pinning it on her dim boyfriend in a two-parter of TV's "Homicide". Perhaps, like me, you're a big fan of Donnie Darko, to which she brings the balance of calm–she is the film's earthy centre.

Marlo’s America: FFC Interviews Marlo Poras

June 1, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Documentary, Interviews

MporasinterviewtitleJune 2, 2002|After working as an apprentice under Martin Scorsese's brilliant editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Marlo Poras decided that she needed a change of pace from the stress of mainstream film production and followed a friend to North Vietnam to make educational AIDS videos for national distribution there. Immersed in a foreign country, one that still holds their victory in "The American War" as a source of great pride, Ms. Poras became interested in a quartet of high-school exchange students preparing to spend their senior year in the United States, a place idealized and demonized in equal measure by the North Vietnamese. Armed with a Sony VX 1000 Mini-DV camera and nothing else in the way of crew or experience, Ms. Poras narrowed her focus to one subject, Mai, and to Mai's often-peculiar experiences in rural Meridian, Mississippi.

“Dragon” Tales: FFC Interviews Timothy Bui

May 30, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

TimbuiinterviewtitleMay 31, 2002|With brother Tony at the helm, Timothy Linh Bui debuted in 1999 as co-writer of the beautiful, if slightly meandering, Three Seasons, the first American film to be shot entirely in Vietnam and a rare film about Vietnam to portray the beauty of the country and the people rather than the ugliness of what is known there as the “American War.” Highly acclaimed, Three Seasons was also the first film to score the hat trick of Grand Jury, Audience, and Cinematography prizes at the Sundance Festival. The Bui brothers’ follow-up picture is Green Dragon, this time with Tim directing (from a screenplay that he and Tony wrote). Set in Camp Pendleton at the end of the war, Green Dragon details in anthology-fashion the travails of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees awaiting sponsorship to enter the United States. Unfortunately, the film succumbs to the kind of maudlin predictability and manufactured “big” moments that Three Seasons largely avoided. Green Dragon is, however, beautiful to look at, featuring a performance from veteran Vietnamese actor Don Duong extremely naturalistic and effective and another from Hiep Thi Le that bristles with feral sensuality.

One Conversation with Jill Sprecher: FFC Interviews Jill Sprecher

May 21, 2002Posted in2000s, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

JillsprecherinterviewtitleMay 22, 2002|Small, cheerful, and self-effacing, Jill Sprecher is a girl of the midwest through and through. She speaks with the hint of a ‘Fargo‘ twang, seems resigned to the fact that her films are of limited moneymaking potential, and tends to deflect questions about her role and philosophy as a director. Ms. Sprecher is a writer first, it seems, her tutelage under director Robert Wise (through a program offered by the School of Visual Arts in New York) debunked as “amazing, but just a really basic overview course, really.” Her approach to filmmaking is one of a careful distribution of labour amongst those best qualified to handle the task. To that end, Ms. Sprecher (and her writing partner, sister Karen Sprecher) obtained the services of crack editor Stephen Mirrione (Oscar-winner for Traffic) for both her debut feature Clockwatchers and her follow-up, 13 Conversations About One Thing (“Good thing he’s a friend of ours,” Jill adds), while 13 Conversations was shot by acclaimed cinematographer Dick Pope (The Reflecting Skin, Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy and Naked). FILM FREAK CENTRAL sat down with Ms. Sprecher on her recent stop in Denver to promote 13 Conversations About One Thing. I began our interview by asking if there were conscious overriding themes running through her pictures.