The Tree of Life

Written & Directed by Terrence Malick

_____

On what it's like working with Terrence Malick..
The Rough Cut Interview with Jim Caviezel (The Thin Red Line); 1999

"He is an extremely kind, kind man. You would see an extra walk along and he would treat the extras as well as he would treat me or Sean Penn or Nick Nolte or anybody. As far as a director is concerned, he's like a farmer. He likes to make sure the soil is tilled right and we're, like, his crop. He really takes care of his crop. He works real hard. He works from, like, 4:30 in the morning till 12 at night, and it's never done. And he's always calling you up and saying that, "Well, let's work on your accent a little bit more." He's got this way about him that's wonderful. He's a great listener; [he] doesn't forget a name. You could be some complex five-syllable name and he'd remember [it]. He's extraordinary that way. As far as a director and his techniques, no two days were the same. One day you could come out there and it'd be real intimate and another day he's giving you line readings. I enjoyed not knowing what he was going to do. One day he'd say, "Jim, we don't have a scene yet put down today, I don't have anything written, but maybe I know something needs to be done there between you and Sean (Penn), and so we're gonna try our best to figure it out." So, we'd sit down and thoroughly think through a scene that's not even there yet. It could be real controlled chaos, some days. He likes to keep the actors around him, like we're paints. Some of the guys would complain. Maybe we're up a hill and have to hike and it'd be like 40 minutes away from where our trailers were, so he needed us right there. But it was really hard because of the heat -- you know, 100 degrees every day, humidity was real hard -- and he'd keep you by him like you were a paint and that's how he did it. And then, when he was done, he'd just kind of painted this piece of art, this film."

Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha
Directed by Rob Marshall
Written by Robin Swicord (screenplay) and Arthur Golden (book)
Produced by John Deluca
Starring: Ziyi Zhang

on preproduction...
Rob Marshall: "...its sort of a documentary, sort of authenthic style...I saw it as a fable. We did an enormous amount of research so we would know from where to depart. And I only felt we needed to depart from the reality of this world in order to serve this story. And it's told through a child's eyes and it was important to really see it that way."

John Deluca: "That was the one blessed freedom Ron gave all of the creative team was that he wanted us to do the research as if we were filming a documentary but then let it go and let our own artistic sense come in."

RM: "That's all we can really do as artists--is your own impression of the world."

Chris Cunningham

While he has a knack for getting adult fingers wagging, the desire to tap the fears and free imagination of childhood is at the heart of Cunningham’s creative process. He explains: “When I draw, whatever comes out is what comes out naturally. I don’t see it as ‘dark’. You’re trying to work instinctively, to make stuff as you would when you were 12.”

(BBC Interview; Skye Sherwin 17 June 05)

"caught a rush on the floor from the life in my veins"

Atmosphere


Slug: I didn’t know I was going to have another [kid], honestly. But then two years ago, my wife was like, ‘Let’s have a kid.’ I was hesitant at first. I had all these reasons why I wouldn’t have another kid. Any excuse you could think of: I’m too busy. I’m too selfish. The carbon footprint of having a child. And then she said something to me that clicked. She said, ‘If you really want to make the world a better place, you’ve got to have kids and raise ‘em right. You’ve got to balance out all of the idiots that are having kids.

I was like, I can’t argue with that. It just is so logical to me, because really, I recycle, but that’s not saving the f—in’ people. It might be helping the deer in the long term. It might be helping the bears that we recycle, but we’re not gonna save the people because the people are still on a self-destructive mission. So it’s like, yeah, she’s right, the only way to save the f—in’ planet is to make f—in’ awesome kids.

(source: interview by Ben Salmon; Turning the page: Slug on Atmosphere’s new babies, new music)

kitchen sink

Dir. Alison Maclean, 1989

Burial

"Inspired by the darkside drum'n'bass of the Metalheadz label, Burial decided at the outset to avoid at all costs the rigid, mechanistic path that eventually brought drum 'n' bass to a standstill. To this end, his percussion patterns are intuitively arranged on the screen rather than rigidly quantized, creating minute hesitations and slippages in the rhythm. His snares and hi-hats are covered in fuzz and phaser, like cobwebs on forgotten instruments, and the mix is rough and ready rather than endlessly polished. Perhaps most importantly, his basslines sound like nothing else on Earth. Distorted and heavy, yet also warm and earthy, they resemble the balmy gust of air that precedes an underground train." - Derek Walmsley, journalist

visual poetry

capturing life as a reflection

Andrei Tarkovsky




Tarkovsky interviewed by Tony Mitchell; Sight&Sound 1982

T: The film clips which I am showing represent what is closest to my heart. They are examples of a form of thought and how this thought is expressed through film. In Bresson's Mouchette the way in which the girl commits suicide is particularly striking. In Seven Samurai, in the sequence in which the youngest member of the group is afraid, we see how Kurosawa transmits this sense of fear. The boy is trembling in the grass, but we don't see him trembling, we see the grass and flowers trembling. We see a battle in the rain and when the character played by Toshiro Mifune dies we see him fall and his legs become covered with mud. He dies before our eyes.

[...]

T: To me cinema is unique in its dimension of time. This doesn't mean it develops in time — so do music, theatre and ballet. I mean time in the literal sense. What is a frame, the interval between "Action" and "Cut"? Film fixes reality in a sense of time — it's a way of conserving time. No other art form can fix and stop time like this. Film is a mosaic made up of time.

Black Swan

"His films are immaculately calibrated surrenders in which his heroes splinter and break upon the rocks of their own consuming obsessions." - Thomas Shone; http://nymag.com/movies/features/70817/

The XX

"The XX have an authentic, original, and an excessively casual style of music. Listening, it sounds almost careless in the way the melodies meander, but it retains beauty and meaning. Oliver Sim sounds like he is singing in his sleep. If music were a water park, his voice would be the lazy river attraction for all the tag-along parents. Their album is the type that I can put on repeat while doing work, and neither be bored, nor over-stimulated and distracted. Despite its ability to work as background music some of the sounds are definitely pretty interesting, namely the first half or so of Fantasy. The eerie hollowness resembled in my mind the distant lonely drone of a Muslim call to prayer in some middle-eastern city. Where low-fi bands like Wavves overload the senses, The XX leaves me with a craving for more." - Carrotflowerking; songmeanings.net

Dario Argento

Suspiria

"I like films to have something inside, I don't mean a message, I mean something from the soul." - Dario Argento

building from meat flesh : Lajos Parti Nagy

Taxidermia
Directed by György Pálfi
based on short stories of Lajos Parti Nagy

FilmLot interview with György Pálfi
FL: You mentioned that your screenplay is based on stories by Lajos Parti Nagy. What was it about those stories that lead you to write Taxidermia?

GP: When I read Lajos Parti Nagy’s novels something clicked with those short stories and I said this is the kind of film I want to make. He thinks the same way I do, he sees the world in the same way as I do – which is a weird mix of realism and something mysterious and magical… it’s a strange mix of both.

[...]

FL: We’ve described the film as having some visually disturbing moments, but it’s shot so beautifully that it’s hard to look away!

GP: I’m glad to hear you say this. We always wanted to have an outsiders kind of [view]… We used a lot of long crane shots to keep some distance from what was actually happening. But the story itself was told in a very personal way, with a lot of interior storytelling and looking in to the character. So these two oppose each other, the nature of the narrative and the nature of the cinematography. They’re two sort of different points of view.

FL: Were you surprised how shocking some of the scenes are when you saw the first edit?

GP: Yes it did have a big affect on me, but it wasn’t a surprise so much, because we knew that this was what we wanted. It was more a question of how we could use these disturbing shots in the film. So we decided, actually in the editing room, that every shot which served the purpose of telling the story would remain in the film, whether it was disturbing, or disgusting or not. [Laughs] And everything that didn’t serve the purpose of telling the story we just cut – which usually weren’t the disturbing, disgusting scenes.









(source/s: thelist.co.uk; http://www.taxidermia.hu/rendezoien.htm)

"I would like to create a lasting, personal-authorial film, the story of a man tortured by eternal dilemmas, not actual ones. Past exists only in memories. It becomes a story only in Lajos Balathony's interpretation. And why cannot it be true? Why could not the world be like this? Why cannot the fertile human imagination toy with the facts of history, personal fates, details of lifestyles? Maybe this is the common border of things really happened and truth." - Palfi

i'm here

Spike Jonez



(http://www.imheremovie.com/)

Charlie Kaufman

MovieMaker Interview by David Fear | Published March 19, 2004

MM: You have a knack for putting absurdism into the mixes of your narratives, but it never feels like wackiness for the sake of wackiness. There's always a strong and rather surprisingly moving emotional undercurrent that seems to blend in with it. How do you maintain that balance?

CK: I don't know if I maintain it in a conscious way. My theory about creative work is that 99 percent of it is intention. When you go in with the intention of exploring something real, then that's what you'll get no matter what's around it. It may not even be successful-people may not like it and it may make no money-but that is what you'll have. And if you go into something with the intention of showing off and just being absurd for absurdity's sake, then hey, that's what you'll get. I'm interested in trying to find a real moment between people, and hopefully that's what people get out of my work.

I took an acting class when I was in college and our first exercise was to go across the room and pick up a pen. And no one could do it. Everybody was just acting like they were picking up a pen! It was a very difficult thing to do, because you have this idea of being a character and what acting is and all this shit, when your intention is really just pick up that pen. Just do that! Let all that other stuff go. It was a very basic sort of truth that's stuck with me in what I do creatively.

[...]

MM: Since you've been a playwright and a TV writer, do you feel like you were sufficiently schooled in the fundamentals that you can get away with writing more complex, puzzle-like narratives?

CK: I honestly don't think I ever really knew the rules enough to break them. I feel like I knew how to write a TV script because I'd watched a lot of TV as a kid, and because I had a natural affinity for understanding how comedy works-joke, set-up, punchline, that sort of thing. When I started screenwriting, I never really knew what I was doing, but I instinctively understood how to do it. (laughs)

MM: Well, sure, but it has to take a solid foundation to write off the beaten track and still make it understandable, right? Okay, take Picasso, for example: Look at his early work, you'll see he was more than capable of doing straight, realistic portraiture painting.

CK: .when he was 12! And the stuff he did even when he was 12 was amazing!

MM: Exactly! He was perfectly capable of doing the "classical" form of the art, which allowed him to break away from it. And considering that playwriting and TV writing emphasize a traditional three-act structure, and are very "Point A to Point B" when it comes to conveying information, I'd think that having to write in that discipline gave you the basis to practice.

CK: .Cubist screenwriting! (laughs) Yeah, I see what you mean. Most screenwriting is very formulaic writing, and the reason my stuff breaks away from that is that I'm just not interested in the formula. But maybe it's in there in my head, and on some other level I do understand how I'm breaking away from it. I've never really thought about it that way... Sometimes I do things as a reaction to the conservativeness of the medium. But more often, it's just that I feel I have the freedom to do whatever I want in my writing.

I was doing this Q & A session at a college a few weeks back and this kid came up to me afterwards and said "I'm trying to write a movie where the resolution comes first. Can I do that? Is that possible?" I wasn't sure what to tell him other than, well, yeah, if you can do it, then it is possible!

[...]

But that was the challenge to me. Not just for abstract reasons, but because it served the story I wanted to tell and I wanted to figure out if it would, in fact, work. That was what I was interested in doing, and if there's any sort of disoriented quality to how I tell a story, it's because I allow it in there. It's more that I'm interested in doing something that's distinctly mine. And really, audiences are a lot more sophisticated than most people think.

automatic writing

William Kentridge

La Vie En Rose

Photograph: Emil Cadoo/PR


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iM945FbjDOE

From the film...

Journalist: Hello, they said you were on the beach. Thank you for granting this interview.
Edith Piaf: My pleasure.
Journalist: It’s odd to see you so far from Paris.
Edith Piaf: I’m never far from Paris.
Journalist: I’ve a list of questions. Answer whatever comes to mind. Well…what’s you favorite color?
Edith Piaf: Blue
Journalist: What’s your favorite dish?
Edith Piaf: Pot Roast.
American Journalist: Would you agree to live a sensible life?
Edith Piaf: It is already the case
American Journalist: Who are your most faithful friends?
Edith Piaf: My true friends are my most faithful.
American Journalist: If you could no longer sing…?
Edith Piaf: …I could no longer live.
American Journalist: Are you afraid of death?
Edith Piaf: Less than solitude.
American Journalist: Do you pray?
Edith Piaf: Yes, because I believe in love.
American Journalist: What is your fondest career memory?
Edith Piaf: Every time the curtain goes up
American Journalist: Your fondest memory as a woman?
Edith Piaf: The first kiss
American Journalist: Do you like night time?
Edith Piaf: Yes, with lots of light.
American Journalist: Dawn?
Edith Piaf: With a piano and friends.
American Journalist: The evening?
Edith Piaf: For us, it’s dawn.
American Journalist: If you were to give advice to a woman, what would it be?
Edith Piaf: Love
American Journalist: To a young girl?
Edith Piaf: Love
American Journalist: To a child?
Edith Piaf: Love.
American Journalist: Who are you knitting for?
Edith Piaf: Whoever will wear my sweater.

Directed/Screenplay by Olivier Dahan
(excerpts from Ion Cinema interview)

Q: Did you map out how you wanted to structure it?
OD: No, no I wrote straight from the first page to the last. I didn’t have any plan, I just wrote. The structure came naturally. The first ten pages I wrote in Los Angeles over two years ago. I really didn’t want to write the film myself, I wanted the producer to hire a scriptwriter, but he wanted me to do it and I just wrote the first ten pages and went from there.

Q: Why Edith Piaf?
OD: At first it was a photograph, a not well-known photograph so I don’t think you’ll know what I’m talking about. I often go into bookstore just to flip through books, I’m not an avid reader but I keep buying books. I was just looking through this photography book and I just fell on this special photo of Edith in her early years. She was about seventeen and looked like a punk rocker! It was so different then this iconic image most people have of her. The next page had a more traditional picture of her in a black dress and everything. It was the mix of the two pictures that really struck me as powerful.

Q: You say you don’t like to rehearse, how do you prepare for shooting?
OD: I don’t prepare really because I trust my intuition for a lot of things and I don’t have the actors rehearse because I don’t like to use the actors minds before we film. I don’t know, when I’m on the set I don’t have a sense of abstraction, I point the camera and its either right or wrong. I don’t use any storyboards for that reason, I don’t think about what I’m going to shoot the day before. When everything comes together, it just works.

Q: What interests you the most about filmmaking?
OD: I don’t think it’s an interest in one thing or another. It’s my way of talking; it’s just a question of communication. I don’t like to talk so much in life, I’m more comfortable with pictures. When I’m on the set I don’t feel like I’m working, I just feel natural.

Marion Cotillard
(The New York Times)

Darren Aronofsky

Interview - Darren Aronofsky

STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

...on The Fountain
"The Film is more of an experience than it is a movie. [...] It's about one man's search for eternal life and to hold on to eternal love."

"When you make a movie you can make a cohesive universe, its own world."

"I always describe what I do as I'm very much a tapestry maker in the sense that I take all these ideas from different places that I think are interesting and cool and I kinda weave them together into its own new thing."

Q: Your films really evoke strong emotions for the viewer, how do you get inspired to instill this?
A: ...That's why we go to the movies, it's to feel...

"In Hollywood, anytime you try to do something different, it's very difficult. We were persistent, we stuck with it, it took a long time, and we're all proud."

Re: the aesthetics of The Fountain
"The entire film, when you watch it, you'll see it's an entire movement from darkness into light and for us that was a movement from fear into acceptance. And so everything is positioned that way, so visually it was a very very specific film and we made...every shot was just framed and lit with a lot of care."

Tarsem Singh & Eiko Ishioka

The Cell
Director: Tarsem Singh
Costume Design: Eiko Ishioka
Cinematography: Paul Laufer


Eiko Ishioka Interview

What kind of design research is involved in preparing to design for a film like The Cell?

A: When I began designing these costumes, I did not consult a single visual reference. I let my mind roam free and after a repeated process of trial and error, came up with some basic ideas.

Is there any project that you wish to do or particular person you wish to work with?

A. If the request is from a director with the talent and courage to experiment and take risks with visual expression–people like Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Schrader and Tarsem–I’d like to continue doing production design and costume design. I’ve always been careful about choosing projects, and have only accepted ones that I truly wanted to do. In the future, I’d love to be able to strike a 50/50 balance between projects that I’m asked to do and those that I initiate myself. If I had the opportunity to direct and design films like "The Red Shoes" and "Kwaidan," I’d be very interested.

(source: Fata Morgana-communitylivejournal.com)

tribute to "after-school"

DJ Shadow, DJ Krush, DJ Cam

rounded w. a sleep

(image source: rosalieee.files.wordpress.com)

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
Shakespeare's The Tempest
Act 4, scene 1, 148–158


In his book Religion and Science, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) wrote: "Individual existence impresses man as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole." To Einstein this mysterious, "cosmic religious feeling" was "[t]he most beautiful experience we can have. ... It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science."

Bruno Aveillan

becoming

"This is the account of how
all was in suspense,
all calm,
in silence;
all motionless,
all pulsating,
and empty was the expanse of the sky"

- Popol Vuh, Part 1

Haruki Murakami

"The first book [A Wild Sheep Chase] where I could feel a kind of sensation, the joy of telling a story. When you read a good story, you just keep reading. When I write a good story, I just keep writing."

sufism: the religion of the heart

Hazrat Inayat Khan

There are three ways of seeking God in the human heart. The first way is to recognize God the divine in every person, and to care for every person with whom we come in contact, in our thought, speech, and action. Human personality is very delicate. The more living the heart the more sensitive it is; that which causes sensitivity is the love element in the heart, and love is God. The person whose heart is not sensitive is without feeling; his heart is not living, but dead. In that case the divine spirit is buried in his heart.

A person who is always concerned with his own feelings is so absorbed in himself that he has no time to think of another. His whole attention is taken up with his own feelings: he pities himself, worries about his own pain, and is never open to sympathize with others. He who takes notice of the feeling of another person with whom he comes in contact practices the first essential moral of Sufism.

The next way of practicing this religion is to think of the feeling of the person who is not at the moment before us. One feels for a person who is present, but one often neglects to feel for someone who is out of sight. One speaks well of someone to his face, but if one speaks well of someone when he is absent, that is greater. One sympathizes with the trouble of someone who is before one at the moment, but it is greater to sympathize with one who is far away.

The third way of realizing the Sufi principle is to recognize in one's own feeling the feeling of God, and to realize every impulse that rises in one's heart as a direction from God. Realizing that love is a divine spark in one's heart, one blows that spark until a flame may rise to illuminate the path of one's life.

(Source: Jivanta-Dharmashaiva.blogspot.com)

Hubert Selby Jr. (Cubby)

"I would replace 'the american dream' with a quest for the VISION of life...and a vision transcends dreams. Dreams can come from the ego. Vision comes from the spirit. And instead of striving to 'get', to believe that you can achieve anything through 'getting', I would stress that fact that life is not getting, life is GIVING and you never know what you have to give until you're in the process of giving it away and when you make that commitment, you will find within yourself all the infinite resources necessary to fulfill your commitment to life and you can end up making money doing it and get all the 'stuff' and everything, But as a result, not a goal."

"Sometimes we have the absolute certainty that there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel."

"Being an artist doesn't take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it's no big deal. They are one and the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission."

"What I have done is put all the energy I possibly can into the perfection of my art and so when you do that you're involved with creation and the eternal now of life, so it would have to be pertinent to any period of life."

"I understood that the primary responsibility of the artist is to be free of the human ego. And I don't have the right to impose myself between the work and the reader, so I worked very hard to get me out of the book. And I write by ear. So music is very important to me, so I have to develop a style of writing, a typography, that reflects what I hear and I have to find the right words to describe what I see and what I feel. And what I want to do is put the reader through an emotional experience which means that I have to experience every emotion that I put into the book."

Duncan Elkinson] Q: The book [Requiem for a Dream] is very cinemaesque in the way that it's laid out ad the way that it reads; were there any difficulties in translating the words into action the action back into words?
"Well that's always a task, especially with a good book because what makes a book different than an ordinary book is an ineffable quality that can't really pinpoint necessarily and to retain that while translating it or transposing it into another medium that can be a very difficult task, but Darren [Aronofsky] is a real vision, he's a real filmmaker, he's not just a hollywood moviemaker, this guy's a real filmmaker and he found ways of bringing this, not only bringing that element to the screen, but of bringing it in a contemporary way...really extraordinary."

"What happens in my work is there is no catharsis [...] it's just such intense suffering and darkness that the reader finds within themselves the ability to love the unlovable and I...I didn't figure out that oh this is what I'm going to do--of course not--but if that's the result I think it's absolutely wonderful and magnificent...I mean if I can do that I can't think of a greater goal to work for and towards than than to help another human being find out that the light they're seeking is just within them and it's always there."

"I don't think the word "service" really describes what he [Albert Schweitzer] and Robeson and Gandhi and people like that do--it is so much beyond that, it's total surrender of self to something divine and not like divine in the sense of a church or a religious god but the divinity in man, the divinity in each and every one of us...seems to me that that's what they were worshipping in their way and dedicated their lives to, and they have helped make the world a little more comfortable for all of us."

"As a kid I couldn't understand why we were always hurting each other...it baffled me...and when I was 8 years old I decided I was going to be a bacteriologist and find a way to heal all the pain in the world [laughs warmly]."


-Hubert Selby Jr. (Cubby)

"kinetic sculptures"

You've Got the Love

Florence and the Machine
(The XX; cover)

Jennifer Connelly