what he stood for...

Photo by: Jeff Widener

Hedwig and The Angry Inch

Directed by and starring John Cameron Mitchell



...a love story that illustrates the construction and deconstruction of creation which leads to "gnosis" of oneself.

The Natural History Museum

visit on 1/1/11

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."