It’s not always easy to be a Mila Kunis fan. Certainly, there’s a lot to draw you in—keen comic timing, a voice that routinely shows more range in a single scene than some actresses manage over their entire careers, and alluring, distinctive features. Yet these very apparent strengths are all too often drowned out in Jupiter Ascending, the Wachowskis’ latest maximalist CGI onslaught which wobbles between borderline-incomprehensible spectacle and failed operatic drama.

Kunis plays Jupiter Jones, a toilet-scrubbing maid in Chicago who learns that she is genetically identical to the queen of the universe. She finds herself in danger but is saved by the half-man, half-wolf Caine Wise (a similarly wasted Channing Tatum), who goes on to be her guide. Unfortunately for the audience, explaining how exactly one ends up being the genetic replica of the queen of the universe, and what exactly that means, takes up two-thirds of the movie, with the sort of banter that seems to be required for most action films now. (The dialogue is like reading a website’s FAQ aloud: “We don’t have much time before the aegis come.” “The aegis?” “They’re like cops.” “Space cops. Sure.”)

The premise isn’t actually that convoluted, as it’s fundamentally a property dispute. A handful of planet-owning families “harvest” the genetic essence of these planets’ populations in order to extend their own lives. The queen to whom Jupiter is genetically identical is in fact dead but bequeathed her planets to her predictably decadent and corrupt children—Balem (Eddie Redmayne), Titus (Douglas Booth), and Kalique (Tuppence Middleton). The existence of Jupiter (who comes to light when she tries to make some extra money by selling her eggs) throws their holdings into question.

The coercion and foul play the siblings attempt aren’t terribly interesting when done through their various agents (the aforementioned “aegis” and assorted half-human creatures). But once these malicious heirs begin interacting directly with Jupiter, the movie acquires an almost subversive strain of camp. Regal and ridiculous, Titus suggests a Feyd from Dune (at one point, he’s even glimpsed floating around in flagrante delicto with several women in zero gravity), and the film’s best setpiece comes when he attempts to marry Jupiter—inside a cathedral that’s inside a spaceship—while a space battle rages outside. However, the real scene-stealer is Redmayne, who alternates between a husky whisper and abruptly shouting certain words at random. His delivery undercuts the seriousness of earlier moments between Jupiter and her Chicago family, but, as true camp does, underlines the outlandishness of a Cambridge-educated actor playing opposite an eight-foot tall CGI lizard man in some equally fake-looking castle on Jupiter (the planet).

Redmayne’s farcical grandiosity harkens back to science-fiction serials of the 1930s, but unfortunately so does Jupiter’s passivity throughout the film. I eventually lost count of how many times she needed to be saved by Caine, and while there’s an argument to be made about the film’s canny rejection of narrative closure, it’s incredibly tedious to sit through and builds towards nothing. (The Tom Cruise vehicle Edge of Tomorrow is probably the closest that mainstream film has come to commenting upon Hollywood’s reliance on formula and repetition, but even that failed to say much, let alone be very engrossing to watch; sadly, there has yet to be a Jeanne Dielman of the genre.)

But the Wachowskis repeat themselves a great deal in Jupiter Ascending without much insight.  Among the hoards of homages to other films (including Brazil, complete with Terry Gilliam cameo) is the film’s use of the “you are the chosen one” narrative—inaugurated by The Matrix (99) and seen again and again in the current wave of dystopian YA-novel adaptations. There are also a few instances of bullet time—Caine has rocket boots, which means his shootouts are slowed down and are unbound by gravity—but even those aren’t as inventively realized as the original.

The most accomplished moments prove not to be the CGI battles, but instead the unbelievably lush, exquisitely designed costumes that are primarily bestowed upon non-speaking extras: flowing robes, vaulted cowls, floral embroidery on everything, and high-slit gowns. (The glaring exception is Tatum, clad in generic body-suit and given terrible facial hair and dog ears, which blunts his good looks.) Between this fashion savvy and appreciation for camp—previously seen in their equally uneven Cloud Atlas adaptation—it’s pretty obvious that the Wachowskis should abandon action entirely and get into musicals.

Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, out this week on Blu-ray, is the best American movie of 2014. Gilroy constructs an exciting and enraging vision of contemporary life from the spectacle of TV-news freelancers scrambling through L.A. at night to record gory accidents and crimes. This film is incandescent verbally—Gilroy’s eloquently slangy script has been nominated for an Oscar—and visually—the great Robert Elswit did its electric cinematography. The movie boasts gutsy, imaginative performances from Jake Gyllenhaal as tyro videocam stringer Lou Bloom; Riz Ahmed as his naïve assistant Rick; and Rene Russo as veteran L.A. news producer Nina Romina, who starts out as Lou’s mentor and becomes his accomplice. The eyewitness-news ethos—“If it bleeds, it leads”—has often been depicted in films and TV shows, but rarely with the boots-on-the-ground veracity of Nightcrawler. Gilroy captures how digital technology has escalated the tabloid-TV race for unique pictures of disaster to a diabolical intensity.

Neither an exploitation film nor a message movie, Nightcrawler is a psychological thriller about a character with a deceptively positive psychology. Lou progresses from total outsider to industry hot hand because of talent, ambition, and total amorality. Spouting business data and human-resources jargon that he’s inhaled from the Internet, Lou embodies a ruthless, deracinated, digitized pragmatism that’s part Horatio Alger, part Tony Robbins, part The Art of War. Gyllenhaal plays Lou with a smile that’s initially disarming and ultimately chilling.

Thanks to its wildly original protagonist, beautifully observed milieu, and can-you-believe-this? black comedy, Nighcrawler is the strongest debut for a writer turned writer-director since Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton (2007). Tony, Dan’s older brother, is one of Nightcrawler’s producers. John Gilroy, Dan’s fraternal twin, did the editing. (All three previously collaborated on Tony’s The Bourne Legacy, which Tony directed and cowrote with Dan, and John edited.) Russo is part of the family, too. Dan met her on the movie Freejack and married her in 1992. He moved to Los Angeles to be with her, and has lived here ever since.

Both Tony and Dan became directors when they were already mature artists. Tony was 51 when Michael Clayton played the Toronto Film Festival and Dan was 55 when Nightcrawler premiered there. It’s a family tradition. Their father, Frank D. Gilroy, became a writer-director at 46, with Desperate Characters (1971), after two decades of writing teleplays and stage plays that included the Pulitzer-prize winning The Subject Was Roses. He’s still writing Amazon Singles at age 89. 

“I grew up in a house where our father was a working writer and working at home,” Dan says. “We got to see him write, and that demystified the process of becoming a writer.” His father’s decision to direct “demystified that process, too—‘Oh, writers can become directors.’ You read about it and you certainly see films where it happens, but to have your father do it—that sticks in your head! So when you reach a certain point in your writing career, it’s like, ‘Hey, the old man did it! Let’s do it!’ “

Frank Gilroy, Dan says, was a “tough gambler from the Bronx,” who “got pulled into World War II, saw combat, came out” and went to Dartmouth on the GI Bill “after being turned down by seventy other colleges, literally.” He found steady work writing in Los Angeles, but eventually moved his family about an hour north of New York City. “It was a literary house in the sense that there were books in the house and he was writing, but just as often I was betting on football games with him, or we were doing something outside. It was a very active, physical house, between the three brothers and our dad and our mom on this very large rural property. He’s a tough son of a bitch in the best possible way. He imparted to all of us that it’s a tough world and if you want to do something you’ve got to really focus and devote all your energy to it.” John and Dan followed him to Dartmouth. (Boston Globe film critic Ty Burr was a classmate there, and Dan took one of film critic David Thomson’s classes.) “I was an English major,” Dan says, “and I was obsessed, and still am, with Victorian literature. Trollope, George Eliot, and Dickens—the first one who came up with the idea of the serialized form, the cliffhangers, way ahead of his time.” Frank Gilroy’s plan was to keep his sons far away from “the industry.” It didn’t pan out. “I think when we all got into our twenties, it was like, ‘Ah, man, the movie business seems like a good way to pretend you’re working.’”

I spoke with Dan by phone, eight days after he received his Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay.

I saw Nightcrawler with a regular Saturday matinee crowd at the AMC Burbank, and everyone responded to it, laughing at the smartest jokes and applauding at the end.

I’m glad you got a chance to see it in a theater because all films play differently with a crowd. And you don’t get that laughter unless you’re with other people. I think when someone starts to laugh it gives you permission to laugh and it releases some of the tension, and it’s also subversive, which works for this film.  When I see it with an audience, this movie’s humor comes from the huge gulf between what Lou says is going on and what you see is going on. The humor comes from the absurdity of that.

What’s distinctive is how you connect the tabloid side of TV news to Lou’s particular character. He’s like a 21st century version of the 19th century Horatio Alger hero—he works hard, he’s thrifty, he prides himself on being direct with coworkers. He also uses every bit of pseudo-wisdom about business success that he’s gleaned from the Web. I saw Nightcrawler after reading the coverage of the New Republic meltdown. Some of the quotes from the new CEO—using “vertical integration” to create “a sustainable business model”—sounded like Lou explaining his view of building a news company to Rick or to Nina.

I heard a great quote: “We shouldn’t be afraid of robots becoming human, we should be afraid of humans turning into robots.” I feel we live in a hyper-capitalist society, in the sense that everything now is the bottom line—it’s really a world reduced to transactions. In this world Lou is so far ahead of everybody else, because he’s only about the bottom line. So his way of speaking, in the line of that integrated-vertical-synergistic bullshit—that’s literally his religion. Lou is a corporation. He admits as much at the end when he says to Rick, “I can’t jeopardize my company’s success by retaining an untrustworthy employee,” which is basically saying, “This is why I just killed you.” He believes that fully, and Jake delivered that line with full earnestness and credibility.

In research I’ve sometimes had to do on this, I’ve read scientific studies that show you can often find sociopathic tendencies in the boardroom. Jake and I always believed that if you came back in ten years Lou would be running the corporation. There’s no stopping Lou. He’s only going to ascend and get stronger. He’s found his niche, he’s got his foot in the door, and he’s going to burst his way through. Capitalism is capitalism, success is success, and people who strive and are not encumbered by the usual, more fragile societal things that we put importance on, are usually going to do better than someone else. 

Your movie reminded me of Nathanael West’s satire A Cool Million, except that West’s novel is about a loser, and your movie is about a guy who looks like he’ll end up on top.

As much as I like satire, I did not want this to become a satire. The tremendous thing of Jake’s performance is that if he takes one step too far one way, it becomes a sociopath study or a psychopath study, and I’m not interested in that. It’s just too reductive. If he takes a step another way, it becomes satire. It becomes, “Oh, this is an amusing, dark, violent film,” and I didn’t want that, either. Jake makes you understand that Lou is feral. He’s unencumbered by human emotion and conscience.

Part of what keeps it from becoming satire is Lou’s action hero or villain physicality.

Jake is really credible at that. A lot of younger actors can’t pull it off. Jake is a physical being. Jake is very athletic, Jake is graceful, and he’s incredibly strong. He weighed 168 in our film, and I think for Southpaw he went up to 195. He’s got beautiful athletic moves, and I always thought to get that physicality out early was important for the character. He’s credible, he’s scary, and when he says to Rick, “I might be obliged to hurt you for this,” you believe it—he could hurt you for this. You don’t want to be in a car with Lou when he’s angry.

Which came first, Lou or the nightcrawler milieu?

The first component was learning about this world of TV-news stringers. I got excited, because it seemed like a great backdrop for a film. I lugged this idea around for years, thinking I was going to use it in a conspiracy film like Chinatown. There were other variants, but none of them panned out. Then I thought, “Well, maybe I should start with the characters,” though usually I start with the plot.

I started plugging heroes into the story. From a literary standpoint, I was following convention. I was thinking, “OK, I need a hero.” This is the way you think—most of the time you’re mired in the hero notion. Again, nothing worked. So I put it aside once more. Then, I don’t know why, I suddenly thought, “Why don’t I try an antihero?” I certainly know about antiheroes, but I’d never written an antihero.

As a literary device, a genuine antihero is fairly rare, because he’s literally the hero and the villain simultaneously. One, it’s difficult to pull off, and two, antiheroes are usually really dark, and I’m not interested in psychopath movies. I don’t find psychopaths in and of themselves to be particularly interesting. So I thought I would start breaking some narrative conventions. “Okay, if I go with an antihero, I don’t want to do a reductive story of a psychopath. I want to do an antihero success story.” Right away something clicked, because it became something very personal to me.

The idea of taking a character who is maladjusted, who leaves his humanity behind, and to make him a success—that’s what I was going for. The literary device of the antihero, as a tool, led me to this equation—because we framed an antihero story as a success story, and put no morality in at all, and did not judge his actions, the audience would say at the end, “Wait a minute, maybe the problem isn’t Lou. Maybe the problem is the world that creates a Lou and rewards him.”

In horrifically traditional cinematic storytelling, you have a hero, and he’s flawed, and that allows for an arc. Throughout the course of the story, the character bends to the world—the world gives the hero part of something that he needs, and he becomes whole at the end. That’s the hero. 

What I found fascinating about the antihero is that he makes the world bend around him. He doesn’t change. He forces other characters to do things that they normally wouldn’t do. What I learned is that because antiheroes make the world bend around them, they hold a mirror up to the world. They expose the world in a way that I don’t think you have the opportunity to do with heroes. Because when the hero is flawed by definition, and the world around him supplies what’s missing, the world has a rosier patina inherently. With an antihero, the world has a more realistic tone to it.

And the world right now, from what I see… there’s a huge socioeconomic disparity. Globally, wherever I travel—I was in Italy a few weeks ago and I saw in the paper that 48 percent of people under 25 are unemployed. That’s a staggering number. 

I feel Lou is spouting the lexicon of the world today, which is based on the idea that people, human beings, are just another commodity to be data-mined and exploited to whatever degree you can sell them something. They’re consumers of whatever you can unload on them.  And “vertical integration,” and those kinds of terms, just grease the wheels for that process.

Even that “classic” hero structure you refer to is rare now. Today we have a superhero model. 

And the flaws the superheroes have are so minimal now. They’re not even flaws. I don’t know what they are any more.

When you talk of antiheroes influencing other people, I immediately think of Nina saying that Lou has inspired everyone in her department to step up their game.

Cinematically, I always try to visualize the end instead of the beginning, because it gives you something to aim for. The last shot, of Lou’s two vans going off in two different directions—I always imagined that Lou was like a virus, and those two roads were like capillaries going into the body, and he was now going to infect the rest of us. Because of Lou’s three innocent, young—God help them—little interns who’ve just been hired. And yeah, he’s infected Nina. She was infected before, but now he’s really won her over—it’s a little bit like Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.

You come from a close family—you even work with your brothers, and apparently like it. But you depict Lou as having absolutely no family.

I do have a strong support system and a strong family and I enjoy that. It gives me tremendous comfort and it makes me sleep better. I want all that—I’m a very blessed person. At the same time, families are rough, because you wake up at three o’clock in the morning worrying about them. They consume a lot of emotional energy, and use up a lot of time, as well as they should, because they’re worth it. Lou lives an existence that I think some people would imagine to be heaven. He has no emotional encumbrances whatsoever. He never has to worry about anything; he never has to think about another person. He is literally focused on moving forward. He’s an animal!  There are times when I watch animals that I think it must be a very beautiful, pure existence not to think about anything but survival. Jake and I talked about this: Lou has a lucidity you and I will never know, he has a purity that you and I will never know—the kind that a coyote has, which is the animal Jake latched onto as an inspiration. But at the same time, Lou is in hell. Because he’ll never know the other side of life, the human side of life, the thing that separates us from animals.

I gave him no backstory. You always have to have a backstory, but that’s one of the rules I wanted to break. All I give Lou is an implied past of abuse and abandonment. So I learned something else doing this movie: losing the backstory enables you to engage audiences, because it allows them to create. Where does Lou come from? Audiences will imagine it. You’re allowing audiences to kick in, in a way that they’re able to do, and they’re usually not allowed to do, because everything is always explained to them all the time. Here they can supply part of the story that’s not being given, and that makes it personal for them.

Did the “success story” dictate your structure?

Everything is structure—for me even characters are structure. They serve a purpose. You’re starting out with a young man who’s looking for work at the beginning of the film and at the end he’s the owner of a thriving business. With all the darkness and immorality—that’s the story. It’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, you know? It’s a touchstone for almost everybody on the planet. Everybody can understand the desire to find work. Once you find work, everybody can understand wanting to climb the ladder. It instantly takes this character with maladjusted, sociopathic tendencies and makes him more like us.  People are always asking, “Are you surprised how dark Jake went with the character?” I am always saying, “I’m so surprised by, and love, the humanity he found in the character.” That’s what we were trying to put into it. He’s a guy who wants the job, wants to succeed, wants a relationship. He’s polite, he presents himself well, he treats his bosses and people above him with great respect. And he smiles like us! Everything was geared toward making him seem just like us. One thing that works to our advantage and does not get nearly enough credit is James Newton Howard’s soaring, very uplifting score. If you could isolate the score, you could apply it to a film about the triumph of the human spirit. James and I decided early on that his score would be the music in Lou’s head. It’s the soundtrack he’s walking around listening to. We didn’t want to have a typical suspense score, which would indicate to you that he really is crazy. Whether he is or not is really not to me the ultimate relevant thing.

Why did you want to become a director? Was it the love of film and the desire to handle all its many elements? Or was it what John Huston told James Agee, that he got sick of seeing what “professional” directors did to his screenplays?

The John Huston quote. That’s ultimately the reason why. Things become so personal to you it becomes horrifically painful to hand them off to other people. You spend a lot of time on them and then someone reinterprets them to whatever degree they do. I can’t go through that any more. It’s too painful. 

What were your best experiences as a screenwriter?

Working with Tony on The Bourne Legacy [12], but also working with Tarsem Singh on The Fall [08]. I love Tarsem. It’s one of the favorite things I’ve worked on, and working with Tarsem was just a joy.

Before Huston made The Maltese Falcon [41] he did drawings of every setup. Did you go in, knowing, well this is how I’m going to visualize it?

Not at all. Look at the script online. There are no interiors, no exteriors, no “NIGHT” or “DAY.” There are one-line descriptions of things. It’s like one long run-on sentence. I just wanted to tell the story in a style that captured the energy of it. Translating that to film was really a question of sitting down with Robert Elswit, our cinematographer, who’s a staggering talent, and meeting with him months before, starting to shot-list every scene and thinking about what we wanted to do with every scene. I had some understanding of lenses and cinematography, obviously not even a fraction of what Robert knows, but enough to have a conversation with him. Robert and I would go out at night, because he was just finishing Inherent Vice and he had a couple of months before my movie. We would go out in L.A. at three or four in the morning in a Dodge Challenger [Lou’s dream car], just looking for shots and talking about the story. We bonded cinematically. The idea for L.A. was for it to be physically beautiful. That’s how I see it. I wanted to capture its wild, untamed energy. Robert and I were always trying to use wider angles and deep focus when we could. We shot on Alexa for the nighttime stuff and shot on film for the daytime stuff.

It looks as if you had a good time directing. I’m thinking, for example, of the pawnshop scene, where Lou rides his stolen bike while negotiating a better price for it.

That’s a classic example of doing what was organic to what was there, at the moment. We only had 27 days to shoot his movie, eight and a half million dollars, and we were moving very fast. We shot-listed the pawnshop scene, but when we got there, it was just boring. We only had the location for a couple of hours and it’s two guys talking across a counter, and we were trying everything. As we started talking about it, Jake, who rides bikes, hopped on the bike and started riding around the store as he’s talking to us. Robert and I looked at each other—and like, “Wait a minute, he’s riding the bike, let’s just do that!”

The stuff with the TV news anchors has an improvisational feel. They’re great at playing who they are.

That’s Rick Chambers and Holly Hannulah: Rick is on KTLA, and Holly is the traffic person on KNBC. I had scripted a lot of what they said, but there’s a lot that they improvised, I just had them watch what Lou recorded and start talking. They bring their own realism to it.

How did you get us inside Lou’s head, without any tricky POV shots?

Some of that comes from the shooting, but a lot of it comes from the writing. From the moment he beats up the guy to steal his watch, audiences are starting to make a decision about Lou. In the next scene, though, he goes into the salvage yard, and pleads for a job in the most respectful, well-rehearsed way possible. I think that pulls audiences up short. We’re saying, “You can’t judge this guy yet.” We’re pulling them into this character. And this is where Jake just physically works so well, because he’s so charismatic and so affable—or at least comes across that way in this character. He’s so earnest, he’s like WALL*E running around, looking for work to do. The music, again, is very subversive. The score when he steals the bike—the first crime he commits that you actually see—it literally could be a music cue out of WALL*E, for this earnest little guy, doing his job, with the don’t-mind-me attitude. Jake is in every shot, pretty much, even the over-the-shoulder stuff. Even when we’re not doing classic POV shots and saying, “Here, you’re the character,” he’s such a presence in the film. His drive, the thing that’s motivating him, is so raw and understandable, and he keeps surprising you. I think he kills seven people directly or indirectly in the course of the film, but at the end some people in the audience go, “I don’t know why but I was so invested in this character!” That’s another thing I learned: antiheroes, if they’re done properly, can be like a magnet. They can attract this darker instinct in you and draw you in.

Whatever is going on between Lou and Nina, we accept that he exerts power over her.

I think that’s a testament to Rene’s acting, because what you realize is this strong, hard-nosed businesswoman can be extraordinarily vulnerable. And Lou can smell weakness. Lou can smell fear. That’s the horror of working with someone who recognizes a weakness in you, and can exploit it. They’ll use it. With Nina, Lou, in his feral way, just goes for it. Rick at one point in the script tells Lou, “Your problem is, you don’t understand people.” I always thought that was ironic. Lou understands people the way a lion understands a gazelle.

Kung Hei Fat Choy

Kung Hei Fat Choi! Sometime between late January and early February, the Chinese New Year holiday lands like an atom bomb. Work is canceled, relatives are visited, married couples distribute red envelopes full of cash to any unmarried people who wish them “Kung Hei Fat Choi!” and some of the year’s biggest movies get released. But unlike Christmas or summer release dates, Chinese New Year movies are their own genre. Not for export, aimed at the hometown Hong Kong audience, they’re fun for the whole family, full of hyper-local humor, sloppy but high-spirited filmmaking, mah-jongg games, big stars acting like idiots, musical sequences, blackface, cross-dressing, and the occasional rape joke.

Before the Chinese New Year movie became its own genre, the holiday was already a big release date for films. For Shaw Brothers, New Year mostly meant kung fu movies. They premiered The New One-Armed Swordsman on Chinese New Year 1971, starring Ti Lung and David Chiang and debuted Chen Kuan-tai’s Boxer From Shantung (72) on New Year’s, as well as Heroes Two (74), before they basically ceded the slot to Lau Kar-leung in 1977 starting with Executioners from Shaolin, followed by The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (78), Spiritual Boxer, Part 2 (79), My Young Auntie (81), Legendary Weapons of China (82), The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter (84), and Martial Arts of Shaolin (86), which was basically the last movie Shaw ever produced.

Their biggest rival, Golden Harvest, was nipping at their heels, dropping their big Angela Mao movies into the same slot (The Skyhawk, 74; The Himalayan, 76), as well as filmed Chinese operas like John Woo’s Princess Chang Ping (76). Independently produced disco comedies had a brief heyday between 1979 and 1980 with Disco Fever (79), Disco Sex Fever (80), and Disco Bumpkins (80; a Shaw Brothers joint). And sex comedies were always popular, like Naked Love (70), Cheating in Panorama (72), and The Gigolo (74).

Aces Go Places

Then Raymond Wong happened. Wong and his partners, Dean Shek and Karl Maka, founded their production company, Cinema City, in 1980, and two years later, they brought together every single strand of New Year’s releases to make one volcanic Voltron of holiday films: Aces Go Places. An action comedy full of romance, music, local jokes, and special effects, it tells the story of two friends, a thief, and a cop, who alternately plan and foil jewel heists while dealing with their wives and girlfriends. Starring baldheaded Karl Maka and Cantopop star Sam Hui (brother of hot comedians Ricky and Michael), it spawned five sequels with its formula featuring car chases, special effects, local comedy, Michael Hui whistling the theme song, robots, foreign locations (New Zealand!), and foreign guest stars (Peter Graves!). These big-budget, lighthearted spectacles weren’t just hit movies, they were the biggest hits of the decade.

The light ’n’ bouncy Aces series went into hibernation for three years after part four in 1986, then returned with the fifth installment in 1989, directed by Lau Kar-leung. Film critic Sek Kei writes of it:

“A sense of crisis and tragedy pervades what is supposed to be a happy holiday picture. Its two heroes . . . are no longer portrayed as good buddies. They are unemployed, disappointed and unloved characters. The film climaxes with scenes of the heroes taken prisoner in a Peking jail and undergoing various forms of torture and coercion by the military.”

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World

Needless to say, that was the last of Aces Go Places for a while. But by 1989, audiences had been trained like Pavlov’s dogs to drool in anticipation of new Aces-esque pictures each New Year, like Sammo Hung’s Lucky Stars series or a new Hui Brothers comedy. Sammo would release his gritty and intense Vietnam movie, Eastern Condors (87), in July, but his ensemble Wild West comedy kung fu flick, Millionaire’s Express (86), was 100 percent a Chinese New Year flick. Jackie Chan made a point of releasing his more lighthearted movies on Chinese New Year (17 times between 1980 and 2001), but the next step in the evolution of the CNY movie came from zillionaire Dickson Poon’s D&B Films: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World (87).

Some of the most cynical comedies ever made, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World and its sequels It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World II (88), and It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World III (89), were Aces Go Places-sized hits starring middle-aged horse-racing commentator “Uncle” Bill Tung and portly TV comedian Lydia Shum as a married couple who keep getting rich then losing it all. In Part One, they win the lottery but lose it in a bank crash. In Part Two, they move to Canada and win the Canadian lottery but lose it when they miss the deadline to pick up the prize money. In Part Three, they finally get their Canadian winnings, then lose it all in a bank robbery.

Everyone in these movies is obsessed with money: winning it, gambling it, playing mah-jongg for it, borrowing it, collecting it, and waving big thick wads of it at the camera. They’re also raging greedheads, constantly trying to get one over. MMMW II starts at a New Year’s party where Uncle Bill has different denominations of red envelopes stashed in different pockets so he can give the cheapest ones to maids and children, while saving the ones containing the most cash for his boss. When he needs to raise money for a plane ticket back to Vancouver to collect his lottery winnings, Uncle Bill scams it out of his Hong Kong friends in a poignant speech full of quotations from Chairman Mao, telling them that his daughters have been maimed in a house fire and he needs to go be with them as they die.

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World 2

The lowbrow Canto comedy showcased by the MMMW movies doesn’t shy away from racial humor, and the screen is jammed with geeky Taiwanese tourists, loud Filipino maids, violent Vietnamese immigrants, smelly Indians, and hillbilly Mainlanders who spit on the floor. Things reach maximum xenophobia when the family moves to Vancouver and encounters Canadians who all speak with hick accents, Native Americans walking around in full headdress, and punks named Punkie, not to mention—horror of horrors—watching their daughter make friends with a black man at school. It’s rare to find a CNY movie without at least one instant of blackface, and the trend reaches its nadir with the 2005 New Year film, Himalaya Singh, that reduces India to an extended gallery of vulgar stereotypes.

Raymond Wong kept the freak flag flying for Chinese New Year films in the Eighties with the on-the-nose Kung Hei Fat Choy (85), the Chow Yun-fat vehicle Eighth Happiness (88) and The Fun, the Luck and the Tycoon (90), aka Coming to America starring Chow Yun-fat. But 1991 saw his dark star become ascendant. Shek Kin and Karl Maka retired from Cinema City and their absence gave Wong the courage to double down on Chinese New Year with All’s Well End’s Well (92), the ultimate Chinese New Year movie.

It stars Sandra Ng as a put-upon housewife, Leslie Cheung as her effeminate brother-in-law, Stephen Chow as her lady-chasing brother-in-law, Maggie Cheung as the object of Chow’s desire, and (unfortunately) Raymond Wong as the philandering husband. Wong casts himself in almost every one of his movies, which is unfortunate because he looks like a shaved chipmunk.

All's Well End's Well

When Wong’s not on screen, this movie explodes with manic energy. Maggie is obsessed with Hollywood, prompting parodies of everything from Madonna’s Truth or Dare to a spot-on send-up of Ghost. Leslie is a gay man, while his cousin, Teresa Mo, is a butch lesbian and they hate each other (at one point she threatens to rape and murder his father, prompting Leslie’s mother to softly demur, “Please, your cousin is too old to stand raping.”). Audiences are taught the pressure point for “smooth shitting,” Stephen Chow falls in love with his bedpan, Sandra Ng sings the entire Cantopop playbook (badly), there’s a long mah-jongg sequence, red envelopes are exchanged, Maggie is seduced with the amazing Eiffel Tower Double Inversion Kissing Technique, the actors are barely able to deliver their lines without cracking up, Leslie and Teresa get turned straight thanks to drunk sex, and the movie ends with four weddings, after which the cast turns to the camera and sings a song before wishing everyone in the cinema a happy new year.

Wong got the band back together for All’s Well End’s Well, Too (93), only this time it’s set in the Song Dynasty, allowing for anachronistic gags like villagers who carry frogs instead of pagers (and debate the merits of screaming frogs versus silent, trembling frogs who are slimmer and only have to be fed once per day), hot dogs that are actual dogs served hot, gamblers dreaming of ancient Chinese credit cards, and a whole lot more cross-dressing. Stephen Chow and Maggie Cheung are absent, replaced by Aces star Sam Hui, his brother Ricky Hui, Once Upon a Time in China star Rosamund Kwan (who, at one point, pulls out a joint and tokes up in a temple), and Stephen Chow’s on-screen comedy partner, Ng Man-tat.

Gender politics are downright Twelfth Night-esque, with Ricky Hui playing an old woman, while Ng Man-tat dresses as a woman and falls in love with Leslie Cheung, who’s also dressed as a woman in order to pursue Rosamund whom he met while she was disguised as a man. (The cross-dressing tradition in CNY movies reaches its pinnacle with 2001’s Wu Yen, a retelling of a classic Chinese tale of a warrior in love with the emperor in which all the main roles are played by women.) The pop-culture references flow fast and furious (Leslie plays a magician named David Copper Feel, and occasionally dresses as Batman), and the movie is full of jokes about the Joint Declaration with China, and Basic Law (which is invoked as a magic spell to fix anything that’s broken). Again, the movie ends with all the characters getting married and singing to the audience.

All’s Well End’s Well 2009

Wong’s entry into the Mainland market came with action movies like Tsui Hark’s Seven Swords, and then the blockbuster Ip Man kung fu series, but Mainland distributors told him that his ultra-local New Year movies would never be hits. In 2009, Wong decided he was rich enough to know best and released All’s Well End’s Well 2009 in Mainland China, which made a mint, prompting All’s Well End’s Well Too 2010, All’s Well End’s Well 2011, and All’s Well End’s Well 2012.

But no one embodies the best and worst of CNY movies more than Tsui Hark. His Tri-Star (96) is a low point for the genre, embodying its worst tendencies. Three major stars (hence the title) each play against image: Leslie Cheung is a Catholic priest, Lau Ching-wan has a beard, and cutie Anita Yuen trades her pixie bob for long hair and plays a hard-bitten club girl. The movie features car chases, several musical numbers, mah-jongg games, a cameo by producer Raymond Wong, and ends with a wedding. But while CNY movies always feel like slapdash star parties, this one feels too slapdash. The drama is too good-natured to elicit any tension, entire scenes seem to have been chopped out at the last minute, and by the time Leslie Cheung is putting on an Elvis costume for no good reason, the “anything goes” CNY shtick feels like a punishment.

But Tsui’s previous film, The Chinese Feast (95), is easily the best CNY movie of them all. Leslie Cheung and Anita Yuen are an odd couple united to save her failing family restaurant after her dad suffers a stroke while competing against a corporate super-chef who wants to take over their tiny hole-in-the-wall. The cooking is inspired by kung fu movies, and it’s stuffed with guest stars and cameos, even featuring a brief musical number by Anita Yuen. But Tsui keeps the on-screen shenanigans on a short leash, resulting in a movie that’s practically Kubrickian by CNY standards. At the end, as the united family has dinner in their tiny restaurant, they raise their glasses to wish each other Happy New Year. Then they turn to toast the other actors, including the bad guys, who then join them in turning to the screen and raising a glass to the audience. As the camera pulls out, we see the film crew drop their equipment and pick up glasses, and the movie ends in a sweet meta-moment, actors and filmmakers in a tiny city that’s about to face one of the biggest economic and political crises of its life, all taking a moment to stop what they’re doing and wish each other the best.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

Dragon Blade

... Chinese New Year starts on February 19 this year, ushering in the Year of the Goat. Movies being released include the Jackie Chan/John Cusack/Adrien Brody IMAX 3-D vehicle Dragon Blade, the officially sanctioned Mainland Chinese production Wolf Totem based on  a novel about a student sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution (and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, whose Seven Years in Tibet previously got him blacklisted in China), Wong Jing’s From Vegas to Macau II starring Chow Yun-fat, Nick Cheung, and Carina Lau, and the sure-to-be-a-blockbuster aviation comedy Triumph in the Skies directed by hitmaker Wilson Yip, starring Louis Koo and Sammi Cheng, and based on a popular TV series.

... Speaking of weddings, in an event that was not in any way, shape, or form staged, Zhang Ziyi’s boyfriend, rock star Wang Feng, threw her a million-dollar birthday bash complete with giant portraits of the actress, flying drones, and a not-at-all choreographed moment when he dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him. Even thought the two of them had never ever rehearsed this romantic moment, and it came as a complete and total surprise to Zhang Ziyi, she accepted. Wow! Stars! They’re just like us!

... Don’t piss off Joko Anwar. The Indonesian filmmaker has 710,000 Twitter followers thanks to his penchant for pulling off stunts like visiting the local Circle K naked. Anwar also doesn’t tolerate fools. Recently he took to Twitter to denounce the Indonesian government for spending money to fly 10 cronies and bureaucrats to the Berlin Film Festival while denying travel funds to many filmmakers, some of whom are actually participating in this year’s festival. It’s a well-known fact that government money often goes to line patron’s pockets with perks like hotel accommodations and airfare on the international festival circuit, but a country with such a small international profile as Indonesia can’t afford to be trading their cinematic future for cronyism.

Overheard 3

... The Hong Kong Film Awards have been announced with real-estate drama Overheard 3 receiving 13 nominations (possibly because its two directors each got separate nominations for Best Director and Best Screenplay, making four total). The dark horse is Pang Ho-cheung’s Aberdeen, a flop that took in six nominations, which may result in it getting another look from audiences. Sentimental favorites are Ivana Wong with two nominations (Best Supporting Actress, Best Newcomer) for her hilarious and heartbreaking performance in Sandra Ng’s Golden Chickensss, and three screen vets are nominated who definitely deserve a trophy: Shaw Brothers star Kara Hui for Best Supporting Actress in The Midnight After, Johnnie To regular Lam Suet for The Midnight After, and Stephen Chow’s on-screen partner, Ng Man-tat, for Best Supporting Actor in Aberdeen.

... Oh, drugs. Kai Ko, the irrepressible male lead in Taiwanese romantic hit You Are the Apple of My Eye, and Jackie Chan’s son, Jaycee Chan, got arrested in China a few months ago for toking up together at Chan’s house. Chan got six months in prison, while Ko only got two weeks but it’s still killing his career. He had already wrapped production on Hong Kong’s Edko-produced, US$30 million adaptation of the hit property Monster Hunter, and the movie was set for a release this Chinese New Year, right around the time Jaycee is getting out of jail. But, worried about controversy, the movie, which was already screening its trailer, has now been pulled and is being reshot with Kai Ko replaced by actor Jing Boran.

... Japan is home to lots of enormous pop groups featuring many shiny, happy children. One of these groups is 3B Junior, made up of 27 singers between the ages of 10 and 16. One of these 12-year-old bright-eyed young scamps was participating in a stunt on TV Asahi that involved inhaling helium, but instead of making her voice sound silly it gave her a brain embolism and she was rushed to the hospital. The network tried to hush up the news, but eventually issued a formal apology to her family. I’m sure that made everything much better for everyone, except for the 12-year-old who is still in a coma over one week later.

Y/Our Music

... Y/Our Music, a documentary about Thai musicians, has been chosen to play SXSW. The trailer alone rocks harder than pretty much every other film they’re showing this year (judging from... other trailers).

The main reason Kingsman: The Secret Service leaves you feeling rooked is that it wastes a once-in-an-actor’s-lifetime opportunity. Casting Colin Firth as a lethal gentleman super-spy and stranding him without elegant derring-do is like catching lightning in a bottle, then opening the stopper and letting it flash out.

Firth plays Harry Hart, code name Galahad, a member of an independent British secret service that patterns itself on King Arthur’s Round Table. (Michael Caine plays the chief, code name Arthur.) Firth is focused, trim, primed for action. In what passes for a master movie strategy, audiences 25 and up are meant to smile at seeing their beloved humanist star take down a pub-full of thugs and mow through a mob of addled fundamentalists. Audiences from 17 to 24 (the movie is R-rated) are led to identify with Galahad’s protégé, Gary “Eggsy” Unwin (Taron Egerton), a bright, strong, goodhearted lout from a North West London housing project. Eggsy is the son of a Kingsman agent who died to save a handful of comrades, including Harry. The agent takes on the lad as a cause, hoping to honor the debt to his dad and to prove that the agency should re-invigorate itself with proletarian blood. In one of the film’s scattered semi-funny riffs, Harry asks Eggsy whether he knows Trading Places, La Femme Nikita, or Pretty Woman. The answer is no—but Eggsy does know My Fair Lady.

I preferred it when Firth’s hyper-rational magician played Henry Higgins to Emma Stone’s psychic Eliza Doolittle in Magic in the Moonlight. In Kingsman, writer-director Matthew Vaughn and co-writer Jane Goldman don’t summon the finesse to bring off high-style espionage or the primal pep to make over-the-top action scenes build and then pay off in shocked laughter and thrills (they’re aiming for that combination). The Kingsman headquarters is a Savile Row tailor shop, and the idea of the agency producing gentlemen spies is reduced to bulletproof bespoke suits and tricked-out umbrellas, watches, and signet rings. The only bit of business that’s remotely charming or memorable is Harry using an umbrella handle as a sling to turn a beer glass into a shot glass. A few straightforward scenes promise to be palate cleansers, like Eggsy using gymnastic skills to clamber up, down, and over project rooftops while escaping from a gang of knuckleheads. But even that simple piece of action falls short of the exhilarating get-up-and-go of similar parkour scenes in numerous modest action films (including Paul Walker’s fleet-footed swan song, Brick Mansions). Though cinematographer George Richmond executes intricate, sweeping camera moves, the movie feels sour and slaphappy.

Instead of wit, we get strained, sadistic jokiness. Samuel L. Jackson uses a theatrical lisp to portray a billionaire digital pioneer named Richmond Valentine, while his female assistant/assassin, Gazelle (Sofia Boutella), employs her razor-sharp prosthetic feet to slice away at their adversaries. (Vaughn says he came up with the gimmick before the Oscar Pistorius scandal.) If Vaughn had a surer hand with performers and an ease at shifting tones, Jackson’s speech-challenged technocrat could have been a chucklesome routine, like Gilda Radner’s Baba Wawa. Instead it becomes an irritant and an embarrassment. Gazelle’s feet offer a topsy-turvy take on Oddjob’s deadly hat in Goldfinger. It’s one of the numerous ingredients culled from vintage Bond films, but Kingsman is more like a poisonous pop-culture potpourri. It’s the kind of cheaply anarchistic action comedy in which an implanted computer chip programmed to release aggression will result in mobs of people tearing each other apart and a mother advancing on her baby with a knife.

In a clunky blend of origin story and apocalyptic fantasy, Kingsman gadget-master Merlin (Mark Strong) puts Eggsy and his fellow recruits through their oddball basic training while Firth strives to solve mysteries related to the disappearance of political, cultural, and scientific celebrities and Valentine’s obsession with global warming (and, it turns out, global genocide). Except for Eggsy, the male trainees are clueless upper-crusters. The females are sympathetic, but even the kind, collegial Roxy (Sophie Cookson), who comes close to resembling a real human being, is ultimately blank. Then again, if the characters were more engaging, we’d be more enraged by a training regimen that’s confused and cold-blooded. (Human and canine life seems to be treated cavalierly.) And Egerton is so callow that when he finally puts on a Kingsman suit, it looks like Merlin is sending a boy to do a man’s job.

Based on the comic-book series that Vaughn and writer Mark Millar co-plotted (with Dave Gibbons as artist), Kingsman: The Secret Service lacks the courage of its own harebrained convictions. It’s composed of gaudy yet also hollow set pieces. It’s promising to see Valentine lead Harry into his dining room past a series of giant panda paintings, but the big joke at their dinner scene is that the butler serves the finest McDonald’s cuisine (Harry picks a Big Mac). Is it racist (as some have suggested) to show a black tech tycoon serving McDonald’s? Or does it appeal to an adolescent boy’s fantasy that the height of “class” is to know which fine wine goes best with which particular fast food? Vaughn has said that he grew up with Roger Moore’s Bond. This homage resembles the worst of Moore’s Bond movies, Moonraker, especially in a frantic climax that intercuts Eggsy taking on Valentine’s personal army at his mountain hideout, Merlin hacking into the billionaire’s mainframe, and Roxy venturing into the exosphere on a twin-balloon rig made while President Reagan was still pushing the “Star Wars” defense system. In the most elaborate and lamest exploding-head sequence of all time, blown-out brains spiral into the air like candy-colored mini-mushroom clouds.

The film is in some ways cruder than the comic book: here Eggsy knows he’s made the grade when a Scandinavian princess who’s been imprisoned by Valentine offers Eggsy anal sex for saving the world. But the original had a shameless melodramatic vitality while the movie becomes numbing. In the comic book, the Kingsman who mentors Eggsy is his uncle. Being an uncle to Eggsy and a brother to Eggsy’s abused mother would have given Firth more to play than the enlightened paternalism of a righteous aristocrat lifting up a plebe.

Before becoming a director, Vaughn trailblazed “laddism” on film as the producer of Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (99). You might remember laddism as the British pop and fashion trend that turned mean-streets male rowdiness into a perverse kind of chic. These days Vaughn still evinces a laddist’s view of Firth’s career. He finds it tremendously witty just to drop Firth’s Galahad into a fight with a bunch of pub rats. How naïve could a hip director be? Of course Firth is polished, handsome, and graceful, yet he derived his special charisma by playing against those qualities, becoming an international TV superstar as the superlative yet off-putting Mr. Darcy in the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice (a role that defeated Laurence Olivier in the 1940 movie). Whether embodying Jane Austen's Darcy or his contemporary counterpart, the forbidding human-rights lawyer Mark Darcy in Bridget Jones's Diary, Firth achieved something difficult—a hard charm, not an easy charm. And as the stammering King George VI in The King's Speech, Firth never went for simple pathos or poignancy. He intermingled shyness, stubborn pride, and ingrown arrogance whenever his speech therapist (the equally great Geoffrey Rush) overstepped proper bounds. When Firth appeared on Inside the Actors Studio, he told James Lipton: "I got to play Jack Frost in the school play. And it involved little tight satin pants and a blue sash and a billowing white shirt and a polystyrene crown. And I felt like God. I was mobbed and clawed at by members of the opposite sex, it was like, you know... I just thought, next stop it’s cocaine in the back of the limo." The man who made that statement could have played a super-agent in his late prime with bone-deep irony. Now he’ll probably never get the chance.

As a director, Vaughn has proven more effective at playing off established grooves, in Layer Cake (04) and X-Men: First Class (11), than at staking out supposedly fresh territory. In fact, Layer Cake, another entertaining piece of big-screen laddism, starred the pre-007 Daniel Craig as a GQ-obsessed cocaine dealer, and got far more rueful laughs from a character’s stylishness than Kingsman. Vaughn’s Kick-Ass (10) received tons of publicity as a would-be pop-art milestone that "redefines the superhero movie genre,” but it didn’t redefine anything. It merely took the base appeal of a certain kind of superhero movie—a bloody revenge of the nerd—and used an 11-year-old girl to push the violence level to 11. When Vaughn thinks he’s creating new subgenres, he tends to concoct novelty numbers that he varies only by making them more hyperbolic and frenzied.

The one time he displayed a touch of the pop poet was in his Neil Gaiman adaptation Stardust (07). Vaughn is able to rise to the level of his source book. He just needs to choose better material next time.

Yann Demange’s ’71 occupies an intriguing position in current British cinema—a rare hybrid between hard-nosed realism, on the cusp of a quasi-documentary style, and genre thriller-adventure. Set in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, at the height of the Troubles, it suggests an unlikely collaboration between the Paul Greengrass of Bloody Sunday and Walter Hill or John Carpenter in their primes. Despite these comparisons, it’s a very individual and uncompromising film—for most of its running time, at least.

Jack O’Connell, the fast-rising poster boy of young U.K. cinema, plays British soldier Gary Hook, a private from Derby posted to Northern Ireland with his regiment. He was clearly hoping for something more glamorous to escape the daily grind of English life (which was a pretty morose affair for most people in the first years of that decade). “We’re not going to Germany?” he blurts out when he’s told. His superior barks back: “Northern Ireland—United Kingdom—here. You are not leaving this country.”

Being posted to Belfast means at once imprisonment for Hook, and a sort of exile—because “here” proves to mean “here but worse,” a grim version of British streets that he could never have imagined. In effect, he’s going to hell—but ’71 makes it very clear that Northern Ireland at that time was hell above all for the people who lived there. British soldiers at least stood some chance of getting out eventually, albeit not necessarily alive. As a corporal (Babou Ceesay) says when Hook’s platoon reports for duty: “Don’t worry—you’ll only be stopping here till one of the paddies shoot you anyway.”

The platoon’s lieutenant (Sam Reid) greets the “new boys,” shyly grinning that he’s “a bit of a new boy myself,” and it’s instantly evident that this soft-spoken toff is hopelessly out of his depth (a lovely touch is the Corporal’s muted response, a contemptuous teeth-sucking sound). The platoon is assigned to accompany the Royal Ulster Constabulary on a house-to-house search in the city’s Catholic area; the lieutenant, committed to a softly-softly approach, makes the mistake of insisting on berets rather than helmets and riot gear. The platoon get a nasty shock: it begins with boys hurling insults over a fence, then hurling piss at them. As the RUC officers storm houses, making liberal use of truncheons, the situation escalates into a riot—very dynamically staged by Demange, previously known for work on the TV show Top Boy. The soldiers retreat, but one private has been shot dead, and Hook is left behind, alone and terrified, in a hostile part of town.

The rest of the film tracks his attempts to get back to barracks alive. Written by playwright Gregory Burke—famous for Black Watch, about British soldiers in Iraq—’71 neatly belies the screenwriting myth about dramas having to be defined by active heroes pursuing a goal. This is a bracingly simple narrative about someone who does very little, says little too, and for the most part pursues the simplest possible aim—to stay alive—while being acted on from all sides by forces he can’t begin to comprehend. On one hand, there are IRA gunmen on his trail; on the other, his supposed allies in the British army regard him as expendable at best, and at worst, an inconvenience to be eliminated. No less a danger to Hook than the IRA are the members of the MRF (Military Reaction Force), an undercover unit working within the British Army, and by all accounts a brutal law unto itself (as one former MRF operative recently put in a BBC documentary: “We were there to act like a terror group.”)

Hook becomes a marked man when he blunders into a classic wrong-place-wrong-time situation, as shown in the film’s second big coup de cinéma, following the riot. Wandering the streets at night, Hook meets a young Protestant boy (Corey McKinley) who’s only too delighted to meet a real British soldier, and promises to guide him back to safety. The kid takes him to a pub, where his uncle—a prominent Loyalist militant—is upstairs involved in some business. That business involves a time bomb to be planted in the Catholic area—a bit of MRF skullduggery that Hook wasn’t meant to see. When the bomb goes off prematurely, Hook is in deeper trouble than ever. The explosion sequence is the terrifying crux of the film, a sudden eruption of eerily quiet streets into a fiery abyss. Hook staggers into the pub to save the boy—and finds him, a charred corpse with its arms torn off.

On first arriving in Belfast, Hook’s platoon is given a briefing so that they—and we—can get up to scratch on the city’s geographical divisions between the Protestants loyal to Britain and the hostile Catholics. But the briefing is prefaced by the words, “Roughly, very roughly…”—and the real state of play is indeed more complicated than that, not least because the IRA is itself divided between old-school militants and the more radical Provisional IRA. The old guard is represented here by Boyle (David Wilmot), the Provos by his sworn enemy Quinn (Killian Scott). The latter has a young lad named Sean (Barry Keoghan) in tow, an aspiring gunman who is offered a coming-of-age blooding ritual, the chance to kill his first Brit; the scene recalls a similar graduation moment among Neapolitan criminals in Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah.

To complicate matters further, Boyle is colluding with the very people you’d expect to be his arch-enemies, the MRF; they order him to “sort out” Quinn, and you can bet they mean “with extreme prejudice.” It’s giving nothing away to tell you that later on, the MRF will say exactly the same to Quinn about Boyle. Or that, when Hook’s lieutenant ineffectually protests about the MRF’s actions, it’s made clear that the British Army too has its own agenda, indifferent to cricket pitch fair play.

Compellingly, ’71 brings these tensions to life without spelling them out—and if we find it hard to follow exactly what’s happening around Hook, that’s as it should be, because it’s not so easy for him to make sense of things, either. He spends much of the film either in a pain-induced state of bewilderment, or pelting through back alleys and internally wrecked rows of terraced housing without time to look back and worry about exactly who’s on his tail. The film is edited with brisk muscularity by Chris Wyatt and shot by Tat Radcliffe, who gives the city night a toxic orange glow, sometimes fortified by rain, smoke, or fire.

There are a couple of strokes that don’t quite convince. One is the casting of Sean Harris as Browning, the MRF captain—a nasty piece of work topped by a semi-Beatle cut and sideburns. Harris is destined by his looks (think of Aki Kaurismäki’s late weasel-faced star Matti Pellonpää, only more unsavory) to play conniving, brutish characters, and it’s a calling he embraces with gusto. He’s always good, and this film is no exception—but this particular role is a little too close to the corrupt Northern cop he played in the Seventies/Eighties–set trilogy Red Riding (09), which leaves the character of Browning seeming a touch ready-made.

Here’s also a pedant’s quibble. A copy of music weekly Melody Maker provides a plausible excuse for Hook to get chatting with the daughter of the Catholic doctor who tends his wounds, but it’s unlikely that in 1971 (if the film is literally set in that year) they would have been talking about David Bowie; he didn’t mean much to a wide public until he performed “Starman” on Top of the Pops in July 1972. And I suspect that a macho lad like Hook would have had something a lot pithier to say about him than just: “He’s for girls, really.”

That’s neither here nor there: my real cavil is with the episodes which frame the film. At the start, after we see him in training, Hook visits his kid brother in the children’s home where he himself was raised; the theme is reprised in wistful mode at the end. I can see what these sequences are doing: humanizing Hook, making him more sympathetically vulnerable, and then, finally, giving his experience the proverbial closure. But seriously, do we need anything more to make us care about Hook than the very fact that he’s running for his life in a hostile war zone? Perhaps the worry was that without the opening, the film would have to work a lot harder to establish that he’s not just an army bully boy—that some emotional special pleading needed to be done for a British soldier in Northern Ireland. In fact, the framing sequences dilute ’71, making it a more conventional film than it might have been; I wished Demange had stuck to the tautness and concentration of the film’s main body, and kept us wondering if there was any world at all outside the combat zone that Hook falls. Otherwise, ’71 is a dynamically effective piece of work, and a very economical one that doesn’t have to use too much talk to bring home the point that war, as one character puts it, is a state of affairs in which “Posh cunts tell thick cunts to kill poor cunts.”

While Mason, Samantha, and all the other characters of Boyhood were growing up on screen, an astounding number of technological shifts occurred over the 12 years it was shot. These changes most directly affected the editing of the film, among other things leading to a switch between nonlinear editing systems (from Avid to Final Cut and back to Avid again), changes in frame rate between storage formats for the footage, and coping with film labs during a transitional period for the medium.

Of course, the seamless final film doesn’t reflect any of these woes, and that is to a large extent due to the work of editor Sandra Adair, ACE, who has collaborated with Richard Linklater on nearly all his films from Slacker (91) on. Adair’s approach to editing could be easily mislabeled as a “light touch”; rather, she finds the rhythm in leisurely scenes, naturalistic performances, and thoughtful conversation by emphasizing the actors’ body language and physicality, getting to the heart of each scene’s emotional core.

Adair recently spoke with FILM COMMENT from her home in Austin about establishing that rhythm, the nitty-gritty of her collaboration with Linklater, and the subtle differences between the intuitive and the planned in their process.

You’ve worked with Richard Linklater for so many years. Do you two have a shorthand that you use? How do you determine what is and isn’t working?

We definitely have a routine at this point: we’ve worked together for 22 years, made 18 or 19 films so far. If we can watch the dailies together, that’s a great luxury, to get his thoughts early on in the process. But if I’m not able to interact with him during shooting, I just proceed with my editor’s cut, and then once we wrap production, I’ll screen the editor’s cut with him, and we review it a couple times. Then we just sit down and take notes—he sends all of his notes to me, and I take very detailed notes, then he goes away and I’ll address his notes. But in terms of shorthand, he shoots in a way I understand. I can always see what he’s going for and where he’s headed. Sometimes we’ll have very general conversations about the feeling he wants to create for a piece. But his films are very grounded in reality, so that always guides my editing process.

You were there during the shooting, watching dailies, and also present at the end of the process, like color correction and the sound mix. Is that because you have that sort of relationship with Richard Linklater, or is it something that you can ask for at this point in your career? Is that an ideal situation?

Oh it is ideal. There’s a lot that happens in those final days of finishing a film that can impact how people perceive the movie. If color correction, titles, the sound mix, the music need to be changed—if it needs to be, you know, moved forward eight frames or pushed back, or if it needs a cut in the song and a different ending on the song… Every time I’ve ever been on a film that I haven’t seen to total completion, I have regrets that I wasn’t there. I really like to and try to be there to the bitter end if I can.

Unlike other films, there wasn’t much room for traditional post-production work like reshoots, ADR, etc.

Well, there were no instances where we felt we needed to reshoot scenes, except for technical reasons. On one occasion, we noticed that there was a minor technical issue, but our producer managed to schedule a reshoot right away. In terms of ADR, we made a list of ADR lines that we thought we might potentially need. The only ADR that we really did year by year was for the kids, because we knew their voices would change. So we had them do their ADR as quickly as we could diagnose the problem.

As you went through each year of filming, how did you establish a logic or rhythm for the independent pieces before you started to join them together?

We found the rhythm of the pieces early on, but we’d adjust it over time. So, for example, when Mason is a young kid, there are lots of scenes where he’s just observing what’s going on. He may be participating, too, but he doesn’t have a tremendous amount of dialogue. But we needed to have each year feel consistent. I was assembling the years as they were cut, making sure that they were stylistically consistent.

What sort of changes did you wait to make until you had the twelfth year of footage?

We knew we were going to make some internal cuts in the lengthier dialogue scenes. The darkroom scene, for example, was something that we revisited many times to try to just make some internal cuts with the teacher and Mason. We also took small bits out of the car ride with the Beatles’ Black album, the truck ride with Mason and his girlfriend to Austin where they talk about Facebook, and in the scene where Patricia and Ellar are in bed together and he’s asking her about his dad. It was like a surgical strike to go in and lift one back and forth out, to get to the core of what the scene was about.

Do you feel that in more serious moments you would favor shots that were closer spatially to the actors? I’m specifically thinking of how the character of the stepfather changes over the years—I saw it in Austin, and everyone in the theater laughed the first time you see him pouring a big drink.

Well, it just depends on the moment. When he’s doing that thing where he’s going through the kids’ cellphones and he’s sitting on the coffee table interrogating them—that was a scene where the stepfather’s footage was remarkable. He was so intense, controlling and overpowering the kids, that I liked keeping in that medium shot of him so that you could see his body language and his very upright posture. Originally I had cut that scene so that when he’s talking to each child, it was on that child as they were interacting. But in year 11 I went in and added one or two shots of Mason. I did one pass where I went through the whole movie and added a few more pieces of Mason in different scenes where I felt like I really wanted to be seeing all of this going down from his point of view. And though the scenes were originally structured and designed to incorporate a lot of Mason and his perspective of everything, I feel like those strategic little moments that I added really enhanced our experience of the stepfather and his key moments throughout the movie.

Would you say that’s true of the haircutting scene as well?

[Laughs] Haircutting really didn’t change that much from the first cut, honestly. That scene broke my heart when I saw it. Those are the kinds of scenes where you’re confronted with the task of editing something where the poignancy is in there. It’s in the performance; it’s in the story. It’s just ingrained in it. So when you edit a scene like that, and you pull in all the elements—the taunting of the stepfather with the stepbrother, Mason’s look of utter humiliation and annoyance and not being in control of the situation—when you get that right, when you find the right tone in the scene, it’s just right, it feels right, and you don’t have to monkey with it too much.

As you said before, Mason goes from being a passive participant to being more of a fully formed person. And he starts having more Linklater-esque conversations. There’s a difference between when he’s first discovering girls—talking with that girl on the bike on his way home from school—and when he’s at the diner in Austin having a really intense conversation with his high-school girlfriend.

That café scene in Austin was another a scene where we lifted out a couple of little back-and-forths. In the first scene with his girlfriend Sheena, I really wanted to feel an electricity, a connection between the two of them—it’s sort of an awakening for Mason. He may have had other girlfriends or flirtations with other girls, but we didn’t get to see those. In this one, I really wanted to show his shyness and his vulnerability, and at the same time, this flirtation and connection between the two of them. That’s much different than the scene in the café or the diner where they’re now looking at their future going off to college—they’re off on their own in Austin, and out from under the wing of parents. It’s a very different type of maturity.

How would you say you approached his father, Ethan Hawke’s character? I feel like in the beginning you keep very close to him with these very intimate shots, and as Mason gets older and his father remarries, you start to pull away a bit.

It’s interesting that you would pick up on that because it’s not something that I select consciously—those are just things that I do intuitively. It probably had more to do with the physicality. That scene where they’re in the nightclub and he’s giving fatherly advice—there’s a lot of movement in that scene, they’re walking and talking, and you kind of want to see the environment that they’re in. I just don’t feel like those scenes when there’s that kind of movement require close-ups. There is one little part in that scene where I do cut in a little closer: they stand still and they have a kind of a little back-and-forth.

But the thing about that talk: as intense and as telling as it is about that father-son relationship, they have a casual relationship. It’s not like he’s in his son’s face trying to tell him something really important. It’s a casual walk where he’s just imparting his wisdom and relating to his son in a very casual way. You would only want to use close-ups and closer shots if it was like super-intense and really important, and I think that Rick shies away from that kind of stuff. He just doesn’t want to purposefully make things feel important. He wants the audience to just get it and to experience it in their own time. I feel like the close-ups of the dad early on had a lot of wonderful warm energy.

Maybe this gets at the difference between a conscious choice versus something more intuitive. In the transitions between years throughout the film, there’s never a moment where you cut from a shot of him at one age directly to another age. There’s always a space between those moments, where you know you don’t necessarily realize that time has passed. Can you talk about how you engineered those transitions?

Those transitions were very purposefully designed by Rick. Not to take away from what I brought to the movie, but he and I had several conversations about that and we didn’t want to have a clear delineation between one year and the next year. We wanted the years to wash by and for people to take a minute or however long until they realized “Oh, wait! Somebody looks different, or their hair is different, their voice is different, they have facial hair.” Those transitions came about in a way that had to do with the fact that we were able to shoot, edit, and live with the outgoing year and study the outgoing shot for each year, so that the next incoming years could be designed to transition well with it.

Having said that, we did editorially figure out the very first transition from year one to year two. It was the trickiest one, because she drives the two little kids to Houston to the new apartment and they arrive outside. The way it is in the current film, she parks the car and then the next cut is Mason bursting into his bedroom getting ready for school, and it’s the next year. But there was a shot in-between, which was the last shot of year one, where she parks the car and then we cut inside and they come into the brand-new empty apartment and they put down their pillows and all that stuff and then they’re like: “Can we see our room?” and they run down the hallway to see their new room. I think we had one version where we cut the tail off of that interior empty apartment shot so that they just come in and like put their stuff down, and then cut to him coming into the door from year two. And eventually we figured out: if we just removed the shot entirely, then what you’re expecting is, you’re expecting the next cut to be interior apartment and it is, but it’s a year later.

It’s playing with audience expectation, but it still creates a seamless transition that really sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Exactly. And once we nailed that, I feel like we got a lot better at making those annual transitions work, and of course we used a lot of music on those transitions to the new years too, which helps drag the audience in. It feels good to hear a song and you’re seeing new stuff and then suddenly you’re like, “Oh wait! Everybody looks different.”

How much input did you have on the musical choices? Music is always such an important part of Linklater’s films, but especially in this one.

Yeah, we worked for 12 years on that soundtrack. [Laughs] I mean, we did a lot of research and identifying the songs of each year, and we even had a few music consultants that were the same age as Mason who would give us tidbits of their experience of some of the songs. Rick and I worked together on those… At one point we experimented with putting score in the movie. You know with that musical part of the process was an ongoing dialogue that we had for many, many, many years.

You only had an abstract of what the story was going to be before you began the project. As your understanding increased, did you feel differently about certain scenes and want to change them?

Not at all. Because of the way that we worked, I didn’t really have to worry about what was coming next because it just didn’t exist yet. And I knew that Rick had these milestone moments in his head where he was going to go with the piece. He would tell me year by year where we were headed, and in the time between the shoots we would talk about Boyhood and talk about the characters, and he would give me a glimpse of where he was going to head the following year. But not having that pressure, and not knowing really exactly where it was headed, allowed me to be more Zen with the year that I was currently working on. I was just making sure that all of the moments that were in the footage that I actually had were resonating with me and feeling like I had really gone in there and found the moments that were going to best express what he was intending to do with those scenes. Having the patience to see what was going to be revealed the next year and not trying to second-guess anything… I wasn’t trying to lay my own interpretation of anything onto the scenes. They’re very simple scenes that have poignant moments, and I wasn’t trying to overdramatize or over-manipulate anything.

Pitfall

Of course the women who were involved in that loosely defined phenomenon we call film noir would outlive their leading men. Women live longer, and they were younger to begin with—that was part of the setup, the Venus flytrap baited with something sweet. Jean Simmons, who wasn’t especially associated with noir but gained a measure of immortality in Angel Face when she backed off a cliff with Robert Mitchum in the car, went in 2010. Last December we lost Audrey Totter, who wielded bosoms like artillery at a cowering Richard Basehart in Tension (49), at the ripe age of 95. And now, some days after the event itself, news arrives that Lizabeth Scott, aged 92, has died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Having to turn to the obituary mode, if it isn’t your specific job description, can feel like a failure. Whenever possible it’s better to talk about people in the present tense; you ought to have gotten there already. I meant to, at least, for Lizabeth Scott is an actress who always made an impression on me, through the fact of her existential presence if nothing else. Scott was a blonde. Not usually a platinum blonde, though she photographed that way, for her time in pictures was a great time—maybe the great time—for brunettes. She had a heavy sculptural brow, wide-set eyes, almost impossibly symmetrical features, a broad mouth that turned down ever so slightly at the corners, and, her calling card, a deep, damask-plush burr of a voice. Even when playing light comedy, Scott betrayed a close acquaintance with dolor. Commenting on the characters in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (46), one of them played by Scott, a young Manny Farber wrote that they “act as if there were no evil that hadn’t been imposed on them.” This quality makes Scott all the more touching when she succumbs, however momentarily, to giddiness, as in Andre de Toth’s Pitfall (48): an employee of the Olympic Insurance Company, John Forbes (Dick Powell), comes to the home of one Mona Stevens (Scott) to collect the gifts that her now-incarcerated boyfriend bought for her with embezzled funds; Forbes decides to let her take one last joyride on the speedboat she keeps in Santa Monica Bay and, as they get out into open water, she fleetingly forgets herself, flashing an enormous smile. It’s a strange smile, but everything about Scott is strange—the girlish self-consciousness combined with a voice that speaks of ancient experience, the unheard-of name (“Lizabeth”?) that she cooked up for herself. Despite this strangeness, she went largely uncommented on by the better critics of her day, and of later days—in vain one searches glossaries between George C., Randolph, and, God forbid, Ridley. So I would like to say a few words for her here.

The woman who would become Lizabeth Scott was born Emma Matzo, in 1922, to parents of ambiguous Eastern European extraction—Ukrainian? Russian? Slovakian? Rusyn?—in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The city is not known for evoking glamorous associations. It’s given as the home of down-and-out Roy Munson in Kingpin (96), while other native-born contributors to motion-picture arts are director Cy Endfield, who was run out of the U.S. in Blacklist times, like many who’d been involved with the noir cycle, and Jason Miller, The Exorcist’s Father Damien, who died of a heart attack in 2001, over lunch at the city’s since-closed Farley’s Pub and Eatery. At the time when Scott was being raised in the Pinebrook neighborhood, northeast of downtown, the Electric City would’ve still been at the height of its boomtown years, a rail hub and center for the anthracite coal industry, textiles, and gramophone pressing.

I Walk Alone

Emma’s shopkeeper father, who ran his store from the ground floor of their house, did well enough in his business to afford her elocution and piano lessons, which started her on her way to New York City and the stage. It was while living in the Upper East Side and studying at the Alviene School of the Theatre that Matzo devised her new name, “Elizabeth Scott,” inspired by Maxwell Anderson’s Mary, Queen of Scots—curiously, the Catholic Emma opted to identify with Elizabeth I instead of her papist sister. This piece of information comes from the Wikipedia entry on Scott, which is more gruelingly researched and annotated than that on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, citing such varied and multiple sources as The Scranton Republican, Karen Burroughs Hannsberry’s Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film, Burt Prelutsky’s Sixty Seven Conservatives You Should Meet Before You Die, and Bernard F. Dick’s Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars. As I cannot hope to better the comprehensiveness of this piece of work, which will have to stand in the stead of an official biography until one arrives, I will try to limit myself to the most salient details of her career.

Scott’s first professional gig began in 1940 when she was hired onto one of the many touring companies performing Hellzapoppin’, sans originators “Ole” Olsen and “Chic” Johnson. Subsequently, producer Michael Myerberg hired Scott as an understudy to Tallulah Bankhead in the original Elia Kazan–directed Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Bankhead was originating the role of Lilly Sabina, housemaid in the home of the play’s protagonists, George and Maggie Antrobus, and a sultry, distracting, disruptive presence. The whole of human history—right down to and beyond the then-present moment of international crisis—is compressed and conflated into the three acts of Wilder’s play, while the Antrobuses and Sabina are all archetypes: the eternal Patriarch, Matriarch, and Other Woman. Unlike most other literati, Wilder seemed to be able to handle himself in Hollywood, where they also tended to work in archetypes, and while The Skin of Our Teeth’s run continued, his collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock, Shadow of a Doubt, appeared in theaters in 1943, bringing with it a corrosive new nihilism.

Scott had been hired onto The Skin of Our Teeth as insurance and as a threat to “keep [Bankhead] in her corner, so she’d not get too obstreperous,” as Scott recalled in a 1996 interview. It wasn’t the last time that the young actress would be employed as a counter-move, a stand-in, or a replacement. When producer Hal Wallis, who’d recently joined Paramount after leaving Warner Bros. in a huff, signed Scott to a contract in late 1944, the scuttlebutt was that he was looking for a counterpunch to Lauren Bacall, then being primed for stardom at Warners, and Scott would be haunted by belittling comparisons to Bacall throughout her career. (In fact Scott never had Bacall’s protective veneer of sophistication, and was best when she didn’t try to.) At any rate, Scott did eventually get to play Sabina in Boston, dropping the “E” from her name for the occasion, and apparently retained the memory of the opening monologue until the very end of her life: “The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me… Don’t forget that it wasn’t that many years ago we came through the credit crisis by the skin of our teeth! One more tight squeeze like that and where will we be?”

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

Scott made her screen debut in the summer of 1945, when the world’s latest tight squeeze was almost through. The picture was You Came Along, a service dramedy produced by Wallis, directed by John Farrow, and written by that ever-lovin’ cutup, Ayn Rand. (Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, among Scott’s favorite authors.) It wasn’t until Scott’s sophomore role, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, directed from Lewis Milestone from a script by Robert Rossen, that she started in on the sort of films that would define her career. It was one of the movies that would retroactively be labeled film noir, which as far as anyone has been able to figure out has something to do with German expressionism brought over by a swelling émigré artist community in Hollywood, the psychic trauma of the war which the United States had just scraped through by the skin of its teeth, a jaundiced view of humanity of the sort evident in Shadow of a Doubt, and the eternal Other Woman, who was now traveling under the name of femme fatale.

Scott isn’t a femme fatale in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers: her Antonia “Toni” Marachek is a girl on a run of bad luck trying to get out of a factory town called Iverstown, which might be the Scranton of Emma Matzo’s girlhood. She’s introduced putting a rather aggressive pickup on Sam Masterson (Van Heflin), a local boy who’s come back home after 18 years to get himself tangled up with some old acquaintances—Martha O’Neil (Barbara Stanwyck), formerly Ivers, who married the third wheel of their childhood days, Walter (Kirk Douglas, another Wallis discovery, debuting here), and manipulated him through law school and right into the seat of District Attorney. A dry-dick drunk with a jealous streak, Walter’s a bad enemy; using Toni’s past trouble with the law as a means of control, he strong-arms her into setting up Masterson for a warning beat-down by some of his enforcers, and the stakes keep going up from there. While everyone else in this setup has an angle, whipped-by-the-world Toni is more acted-upon than actor—though to hear Walter O’Neil tell it moments before a double suicide, this is a universal, or at least national, condition: “It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s just the way things are.” (Rossen would soon be temporarily put out of work by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which is just the way things were.)

Columbia borrowed Scott to star opposite Bogart in John Cromwell’s Dead Reckoning (47)—a bald attempt to reproduce the success of the studio’s Gilda of the previous year, replete with big nightclub numbers. Scott’s singing voice was dubbed by Trudy Stevens, as it would be in the Byron Haskin–directed I Walk Alone (48)—another torch singer, another set of intrigues, these noteworthy as a pretext for the first pairing of Douglas and Burt Lancaster. Too Late For Tears (49), also directed by Haskin, gave Scott her first full-fledged femme fatale role, one of her most remarkable. The film begins with Mrs. Jane Palmer (Scott) bickering with her husband (Arthur Kennedy) as they’re on the way to dinner with some mutual acquaintances whose high-hat snobbishness she can’t bear to face. As he prepares to turn around, a passing car flings an overnight bag filled with $60,000 in unmarked bills into their convertible—a botched ransom hand-off. Mr. Palmer wants to return the cash, but Mrs. Palmer still gets chills thinking about having grown up “white-collar poor, middle-class poor,” and so Mr. Palmer winds up at the bottom of the amusement lake where the couple had their first date, while newly single Jane starts working her charms on the shakedown artist, Danny (Dan Duryea), who comes looking for his money. Soon enough Danny’s in thrall to Jane, thanks to what he calls “that trick with [her] eyes”—the glint that, along with the crushed velour voice, was something like Scott’s signature. “That trick” gets quite a workout when Jane slips new partner Danny a cyanide mickey and takes off for Mexico where she intends to embark on a ritzy new life. The brief glimpse we get of Jane living high off her ill-gotten gains shows Scott at her most vivacious—she flashes something like that emancipated smile on the speedboat in Pitfall—and it seems like she’s on the cusp of a new, happy, unattached life, of the sort that Scott herself enjoyed. Jane might take up a pen, become another Rand preaching a doctrine of greed—but of course decency (and Joe Breen) demanded that her transgressions must catch up with her, at which point there’s nothing left for her to do but backflip off the balcony of her luxury hotel.

Too Late for Tears

Jane Palmer is a creature of beyond-good-and-evil glamour and calculation, though Scott’s greatest role was on a life-sized scale. Andre de Toth, many years after the fact, described his casting of Scott opposite Dick Powell in Pitfall: “I did not want a fashionable Hollywood bambola to cheapen the story. For Forbes’s ‘pitfall’ I wanted a warm, sincere, vulnerable human being. She had to have the talent to feel, not to play the part. For me, there was only one on the ‘market’: Lizabeth Scott.”

As in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Scott is playing a good-bad girl, “the poor little waif who gets involved with the wrong element,” as she described this sort of role. When Powell’s Forbes asks Scott’s Mona Stevens how she got herself into such a predicament, she shrugs, “Just lucky, I guess”—and is she ever right. The next guy she falls for is Forbes himself, who forgets to mention the fact that he’s married until after they’ve made it, by which point she’s attracting unwanted attention from MacDonald (Raymond Burr), a PI hired by Forbes’s agency, and her jailbird ex- (Byron Barr), who’s whipped up into a froth of jealousy by MacDonald’s Iago act. There will be grave repercussions for Forbes’s lapse, but before the bullets start to fly, de Toth gives us a movie that is startlingly frank and—even more rare—entirely unhysterical about such little-discussed commonplaces as middle-aged stultification, squelched desire, and the attrition of going day to day with ever-diminishing expectations. Forbes lives a chartered, flatlined middle-class life, while Mona gets by on little modeling jobs which leave her at the constant disposal of men—there is a particularly painful scene where MacDonald comes to bully her on the job and she can do nothing about it, because that is the job. Scott and Powell’s scenes together are without exception extraordinary examples of scaled-in acting, from the first flush of flirtation, when she gives a charming discourse on the pleasures of daytime boozing, to the coming-clean and the breakup. (“I’m sorry, Mona…” “I rather imagine you are.”) Here, for anyone who cared to see it, was evidence of what Scott could do with the right part and the right director.

The one person who might’ve really made a difference didn’t seem to take the hint. Star-maker extraordinaire Wallis, who’d “discovered” Scott, who purportedly carried on an affair with her over the course of over a decade, and who by some reckonings was in love with her until the end of his life, seems to have had no idea what to do with her. There were more chanteuse parts in Dark City (50) and The Racket (51); the latter one of her undistinguished loan-outs, to RKO (Easy Living, 49; The Company She Keeps, 51) and Columbia (Two of a Kind, 51; Bad for Each Other, 53); and a teaming with Dean and Jerry, also Wallis signees, in Scared Stiff (53). From this period, I have a certain fondness for a film which Scott made in the United Kingdom, Stolen Face (52), in which she plays a concert pianist, Alice Brent, who has a passionate flirtation with a brilliant plastic surgeon, Dr. Ritter (Paul Henreid), then abruptly breaks it off to protect him from the knowledge that she’s already engaged. Heartbroken, Dr. Ritter decides to “give” Alice’s face to one of his charity cases, a female criminal who was mutilated in the Blitz. From here on Scott plays a double role, as the “artificial” Alice dubbed in a Cockney accent and carrying on in a fashion which confirms the worst fears of criminal recidivism. A parody of social welfare of the Pygmalion school, Stolen Face has been cited as a precursor for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, as well as a predictor of director Terence Fisher’s future work in the horror genre under the auspices of Hammer Film Productions. (Coincidentally, the gossip pages of 1950 had linked Scott to a prominent plastic surgeon, Dr. Gregory Pollock)

Silver Lode

Where Joan Bennett had Fritz Lang and Ella Raines had Robert Siodmak (and vice versa), Scott never found a collaborator who could consistently activate her talents—maybe there wasn’t room for one with Wallis around. She made three films with second-rater John Cromwell, three with William Dieterle (none of them his finest), and two with Haskin, more distinguished as a special-effects innovator than director, though not without a measure of vigor. She worked only once with de Toth, Fisher, and Allan Dwan, a holdover from the D.W. Griffith era who kept steadily working in ever more marginal settings right into the Space Age. The Dwan film, a Western called Silver Lode (54), was Scott’s first after professionally parting ways with Wallis, and the first of several that the director would make with actor John Payne and Benedict Earl Bogeaus, a Chicago-born zipper magnate turned independent producer. Dan Ballard (Payne) is ready to be married to one Rose Evans (Scott) when a certain U.S. Marshal McCarty (Duryea, more unsavory than ever in spurs) rides in from out of nowhere and demands the arrest of Ballard on the basis of unsubstantiated accusations.

Because Silver Lode tells the story of a man who gains power by sowing seeds of distrust, and because this man’s name, McCarty, sounds an awful lot like McCarthy, it has been taken as a parable for the political witch hunts then being led by the Senator from Wisconsin. Silver Lode was released in June of 1954, mere weeks after Joseph N. Welch had gelded the flop-sweat-bathed Senator on national television during the Army-McCarthy hearings. And while McCarthy was done for, the great American tradition of gossip and backbiting lived on. In 1955, a story accusing Scott of lesbian intrigues was on the galleys for Confidential magazine. Written by Howard Rushmore, the scandal sheet’s editor, the piece, titled “Lizabeth Scott in the Call Girls’ Call Book,” stated that Scott traveled in “off-color joints” using the nickname “Scotty,” appeared in “the little Black books kept by Hollywood prostitutes,” and had recently consorted with Parisian nightclub manager Frédérique “Frédé” Baulé, “that city’s most notorious lesbian queen.” (For the record, Colette had died in August 1954, so it’s possible the crown was up for grabs.) Rather than pay out to kill the story, as was usual practice, Scott had her attorneys level a $2.5 million libel suit at the magazine, which ran the story tout de suite. (There is some dispute as to whether the libel charge was over the reporting of same-sex trysts, or the allegation that Scott used call girls.)

With or without the legal fracas, it’s quite possible that Scott’s film career would’ve been on the way out anyways. Her increasing stage fright had taken the savor out of playing star. She patched things up with Wallis, who wrangled her into one last gig opposite his newest cash cow, Elvis Presley, in Loving You (57), then essentially called it a day in the picture business. In 1958 she recorded a 12-song LP for the Vik Records label with Henri René and his orchestra. Those looking for a glimpse into Scott’s psyche should drop the needle on “A Deep Dark Secret,” which speaks of a hush-hush hookup with a gender-neutral someone, and ends with Scott teasing “Well, if you really want to know…” before trailing off. She never married, though she got close—a 1969 engagement to a San Antonio oilman was broken when he dropped dead, followed by a disputation over the will that, it needs be said, has some noir-ish overtones. Through the Sixties she popped in for TV spots here and there, appeared for the museum piece novelty in Mike Hodges’s Pulp (72), and then effectively went into retirement, having apparently invested wisely. She audited university classes whenever time allowed, and the late-in-life interviews which she selectively gave showed she had a marvelous vocabulary to show for it. Her last listed screen credit is for the Michael Jackson: 30th Anniversary Celebration, when she was one of “Over Fifty Legendary Ladies of the Silver Screen” to convene in Madison Square Garden to witness a valedictory performance by the King of Pop and opening acts including Shaggy. Many of these women who sat to witness Mr. Boombastic’s performance of “It Wasn’t Me” were better-known names, but few could claim to have a Pitfall on their resume, and as Mr. Welles once said: “You only need one.”

Belluscone: A Sicilian Story

Some of the most intriguing titles in this year’s edition of Film Comment Selects—which begins this Friday and runs through March 5—resist easy categorization and prefer to flirt with two or three genres at a time. There’s enough song, dance, and glitz in Belluscone: A Sicilian Story, for example, to justify calling it some kind of musical-essay, but director Franco Maresco, who began filming the documentary in 2011, is more interested in a different kind of show business: the sleazy populism of Italian politics. Writing about last year’s Doclisboa, Giovanni Vimercati explains that Maresco’s film arose out of the attempt to complete a documentary about Italy's former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his putative connections to the Mafia. Somewhere between Berlusconi and Belluscone, Maresco abandoned traditional journalism. As Vimercati puts it: “Unlike the many and useless documentaries that have been made throughout the years on the ‘colorful’ Italian politician/TV mogul/institutional pimp/self-made man/et cetera, Belluscone finally exposed Berlusconi for what he really is: the result and not the cause of his country's problems . . . That it took a manic-depressive genius to make the first valuable film on the mastermind of Italy's political circus only adds further evidence to the fact that we need new linguistic ways to describe a world spinning out of control—where ‘normalcy’ often amounts to sheer delirium.”

Spring

If Belluscone shows Italy rotting from the inside, then Spring, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s audacious follow-up to their 2012 thriller Resolution, depicts the country struggling to resolve a love-hate relationship with foreigners. The protagonist, a young California blonde named Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci), decides, for no particular reason, that il bel paese is the perfect place to drift around after his mother’s death. As soon as he’s settled into life on a farm, Benson and Moorhead proceed to infuse their horror hybrid with absurdities and surprises. As Gavin Smith wrote in his Toronto International Film Festival coverage, Spring becomes “genuinely original and semi-unclassifiable,” when Evan falls for Louise, “a charming but strangely elusive woman . . . despite the fact that she suffers from a mysterious affliction that causes her body to mutate and drives her to feed off whoever’s unlucky enough to come her way. Defying run-of-the-mill genre expectations, the supernatural forces here are primordial and mythic in origin, and as unlikely as it sounds, try to imagine Before Sunrise redone as a horror film.”

The World of Kanako

The World of Kanako, Tetsuya Nakashima’s first feature in four years, might qualify as horror, if only for Nana Komatsu’s disturbing turn as the quintessential hell-raising adolescent, but its strongest influences lie in Japanese New Wave cinema. As in Suzuki’s Branded to Kill, Nakashima prioritizes spectacle over logic and subtlety, and his story—about a volatile ex-cop who investigates his daughter’s disappearance, only to discover that she was running a drug and prostitution ring—is pure pulp. In a crime film this dark, the brazen visuals and loud-and-clear themes make for riveting but disturbing viewing—and for Smith, The World of Kanako reestablishes Nakashima as “someone taking cinema to new if morally questionable places.” Even so, it would be wrong to accuse Nakashima, a prolific director of commercials, music videos, and shorts, of stylizing around his work’s misogynist (or even misanthropic) undertones. Rather than provide comfort, the soft lighting and slow motion imply, in their seductiveness and soullessness, a critique of the entire millennial generation—the world of Kanako, as it were.

The Smell of Us

Notorious youth portraitist Larry Clark’s in-your-face cameo as a homeless man named Rockstar seems both wholly consistent and completely at odds with the realist ambitions of his latest feature, The Smell of Us: either he pulls viewers into the realm of grime and three-day stubble, or his reputation keeps them at a distance. Set in a world of sexually active, drug-addled teenagers, the film will inevitably provoke comparisons with Kids, as well as some of the same accusations of exploitation and sensationalism that dogged the 1995 film (and made it an indie hit). The de facto protagonists Math and JP divide their time between skateboards, raves, needles, and anonymous sex, but Clark refrains from passing moral judgments on either of them. His claustrophobic images frequently offer confusion instead of clarity (more often than not, our first glimpse of the teenagers’ world is through a grainy iPhone camera), so when a rare panorama reveals that the action takes place in green, sunny Paris, it’s almost more shocking than the encounters with sex and drugs. Moments like these make Clark’s ninth film feel as fresh and energetic as a debut.

Bypass

Things aren’t much better for young folk across the Channel in Duane Hopkins’s Bypass, which details the travails of a small-time thief in a former industrial town in England. As Nicolas Rapold wrote in our January/February issue, life is grim: “Barely out of his teens, Tim (George McKay) ekes out an existence stealing and fencing goods . . . His parents are gone, he works for violent thugs, he’s the legal guardian of his truant sister, and debtors come knocking at their door every day.” Yet in spite of his character’s “manifest anxiety,” Rapold finds that “McKay conveys a will to survive and a fundamental decency without ever making Tim seem a martyr, even when he becomes afflicted with a punishing nervous disorder. Hopkins and DP David Procter follow Tim through concrete cityscapes that sometimes overwhelm both the frame and Hopkins’s protagonist, but the digital camera reads these well-cast faces well, the lyricism and lucidity of the sometimes disorientingly edited images endowing them with unexpected warmth.”

Tales

Cutting a broad swath across Iranian society, filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad returns with Tales, a return to the international stage that Olaf Möller declared “the best news of the year” in his Venice coverage (November/December 2015).  Bani-Etemad’s first fiction film in nearly a decade “offers a panorama of contemporary life in Tehran focused on those rarely seen in Iranian cinema nowadays: middle-class citizens faced with self-serving bureaucrats, drug addicts, women afflicted with AIDS-related illnesses, striking workers, etc.” The framing device of a documentary filmmaker who strings together the disparate storylines allows the film to tackle a formidable amount of material, and the result “boasts a strong narrative construction and impeccable dialogue—the quality of the acting, the finely tuned rhythms of body language, and each episode’s overall development at least suggest that the actors had something perfectly wrought to work with.” Möller concludes: “Bani-Etemad handles the material with a rare sense of tact rooted in her sense of solidarity with the people she portrays. As such, it’s political filmmaking of the most enlightened kind.” Novel, familiar, farcical, and dramatic, the film’s diversity could describe the series as a whole.

Film Comment Selects runs February 20 through March 5 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Check back for interviews with filmmakers in the series and more coverage.

Joe Dante is the most casual and colloquial of American genre-movie masters. Whether in a werewolf movie like The Howling (81) or a one-of-a-kind coming-of-age film like Matinee (93), set in Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he keeps the images fresh and unpredictable, the dialogue snappy, and the characters humorous, individual, and accessible. Dante grew up movie-mad (especially horror-movie mad) in Morristown, New Jersey, reviewed films for Castle of Frankenstein and for the trade journal Film Bulletin, put together the mammoth compilation film The Movie Orgy (68) and cut trailers and did film editing for Roger Corman before co-directing Hollywood Boulevard with Allan Arkush (76). He went solo with Piranha (78), hailed by me as a “fast, campy swim-off of Jaws—fun if you go without great expectations.” His biggest career lift came from shooting the most acclaimed of the four episodes in the anthology film, The Twilight Zone: The Movie (83), alongside directors John Landis, Steven Spielberg, and George Miller. My doggerel review: “Landis is blandest / Steven’s uneven / Miller’s a thriller / Dante’s enchante.”

Few directors have such a vast knowledge of movie history and such an instinctive sense of how to use it to pursue their own obsessions. Gremlins (84), Dante’s benchmark hit, elicits nostalgia for the idealized small town created on Hollywood back-lots. It rouses nihilistic glee with the demonic antics of the title critters, who rip its greeting-card façade apart. Dante’s ability to embrace opposite qualities with equal fervor gives his movies their peculiar zest and enduring fascination. In Gremlins 2 (90), Innerspace (87), and Small Soldiers (98), Dante plants anarchistic comic fuses into ticking-clock plots.

Within minutes of watching any of his films, you can tell Joe Dante is at work. He’s a virtuoso doodler, filling each frame with expressive filigree. His prescient HBO movie The Second Civil War (97), about states’ rights, immigration, and the politics and journalism of image, uses screens within screens at a cable-news studio to contain drama within comedy, and vice versa.  He has also deployed satire as a weapon of mass instruction, especially in his powerhouse anti-Iraq war zombie film, Homecoming (05), a black-comic entry in Showtime’s Masters of Horror series.

Dante moonlights as a director of episodic television (Hawaii Five-O) and the inspired curator of the website Trailers From Hell, a forum for directors, writers, and other movie craftsmen to praise cult and classic films while their trailers unwind. The “My Funny Valentine” lineup included director Dan Ireland (The Whole Wide World) on Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, frequent Dante film editor Marshall Harvey on Preston Sturges’s Unfaithfully Yours, and director Arkush (Rock ’n’ Roll High School) on George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib.

Dante’s imaginative foray into 3-D, The Hole (09), a fantasy about a bottomless pit in a suburban basement that summons repressed fears to the surface, never won an American theatrical release (it’s available on streaming video and Blu-ray/DVD).  Over a year ago, Dante completed Burying the Ex, a zombie romantic comedy starring Anton Yelchin. In early February, Image Entertainment announced that it was picking up the film for release this year.

As part of the Film Comment Selects series, the preview print of Gremlins screens Sunday, February 22. A month before the screening, I interviewed Dante in his office on The Lot, former location of the Pickford-Fairbanks, United Artists, Samuel Goldwyn, and Warner Hollywood Studios.

What will Gremlins fans learn from seeing the preview cut at Lincoln Center?

One of the great things when you work for Steven Spielberg, aside from him keeping the studio off your back, is that you get to finish your movie completely before you show it to the public. Instead of taking out a beat-up work print with a temp score and lots of splices, you present a finished movie at the preview. We went to San Diego with the version of the movie that’s going to run at Lincoln Center. It was a tremendous success, to say the least. I mean, this was a movie no one expected anything from—certainly not the studio [Warner Bros.]. I think it was derided a bit as “Spielberg’s Folly,” because this was the first project for Steven’s company, Amblin. The studio executives just didn’t get it; they didn’t understand what the tone was or anything. So when they went to the preview and the audience was jumping on the ceiling, they were astonished and excited. We did a little more fine-tuning after the preview—that’s what a preview is for. We shortened the movie by six or seven minutes. We also beefed up the role of Gizmo, the little fuzzy critter, so that in the final version, at the end of the picture, he saves the day, not the nominal hero [Zach Galligan], who was very miffed when he saw the finished movie because he no longer pulled the shade up and killed the gremlins.

In this version, there’s more of Judge Reinhold, whose character gets lost in the release version. The only thing I dislike about this version is that the gremlins-in-the-bar scene, which was in a temporary state when we ran the preview, is shorter than in the release version. Some of the best gags were added later, particularly one with the gun-toting gremlin who is playing cards with his transvestite gremlin friend. They’re seen in this version, but there’s no payoff to it; he doesn’t shoot her.

The studio would have been happy if we released it right there, the way it was. I do think it got a little better. But cineastes can see this print and relive the first time anybody ever saw this picture.

When I was movie critic for Rolling Stone, my terrific New York-based fact-checker visited L.A. with her boyfriend and another couple, one of whom turned out to be Chris Columbus. He said he told Spielberg that after writing Gremlins, he really wanted to direct it—and Spielberg told him: “You have to think of your directing career as a runway, and a lot of other planes are waiting to take off in front of you.”

When Steven saw the script, he was noodling around with the idea of starting his own company. He wanted to get off the ground with a low-budget horror movie, which is obviously why he chose me. Steven had seen Piranha and he had seen The Howling.

Chris wrote the script as a spec. It was sent around town as a writing sample. The lead kid was younger in the original script. He was about 13. Later, his age was bumped up, though he retained almost all his childlike aspects—and his best friend was still 11! Chris stayed on for the whole picture. When we did reshoots on a little stage on La Brea, he was working on Goonies at the time. Steven and he would sit in the corner, and he would write. I wouldn’t call Amblin at any time a “factory,” because they didn’t make enough movies for that. But they did have a lot of things going on, and often going on simultaneously.

When we were storyboarding it, we hadn’t decided what process we were going to use to make the gremlins happen. At one point we thought we could use monkeys. We put a monkey in a mask, which was a bad idea because he ran all over the room and shat on everything. The efforts we put in to try to make the gremlins do what they had to do were prodigious.

[Dante points to a framed cartoon of a winged-dragon-like gremlin looming over a couple of beleaguered filmmakers, under the thought balloon, “Don’t feed actors after midnight.”] That’s actually a drawing by Chris, which he sent me afterward—he really did basically design what the gremlins look like, and we didn’t get far from what he wanted. While we were trying to figure things out, it seemed as if we’d need the backing of the studio. I think Steven thought we could make the film at the Osmonds’ studios in Utah, but it was obviously going to have to be a more expensive picture than he’d been hoping. So Steven took it to Warner Bros. They were happy to get a Steven Spielberg movie. When the Twilight Zone accident happened [a helicopter crashed during the filming of Landis’s episode, killing three people on the ground—Vic Morrow and two children], they would probably have shut down the movie, except for the fact that Steven was doing one of the episodes, and they wanted to have a Steven Spielberg movie. So George Miller and I got to make our stories.

On Gremlins, it did become a problem, though, when Steven had to sign off on everything. We had to get him to make up his mind. For example, we had a lot of different designs for Gizmo, and Steven always found fault with whatever they were. We were getting to the point where we really had to lock this down, or we weren’t going to make our dates. So we came up with the idea of giving Gizmo the color of Steven’s cocker spaniel, so that he would be happier with the design.

We had some pretty ropy designs—I mean, one looked just like Peter Ustinov. But we finally worked out the design for Gizmo. And we thought we had figured out how to get Gizmo through the first 25 minutes of the movie. At that point in the script, Gizmo turned into Stripe, the bad gremlin. But Steven liked Gizmo so much that about three or four weeks before shooting, he decided that Gizmo should not turn into the bad gremlin. Instead, Gizmo should be the hero’s friend, and he should stick around for the entire movie. We were flabbergasted. We had no idea how to make this little bucket of bolts appealing and realistic enough to be able to hold the screen for the entire picture.

Chris Walas, who was doing the monsters, did some frantic R&D. We managed to figure out enough ways to cheat so that we could make Gizmo look real. We knew there was no way he was going to walk. So we figured the hero could carry him around in a backpack, and he could stick his head out. We could pop him into the action that way. But at other times Gizmo really had to emote, and there was no way to fill this little head, which was almost immobile, with enough gears and bolts to make it move. We had already prepared different faces for him. You wanted him to be happy, you put the happy face on; you wanted him to be sad, you put the sad face on. But the only way to show a change of expression was to build a giant Gizmo head that must have been six feet across with the ears. With that, there was a lot of room in there for different levers and gears. We shot close-ups of him changing his expression, and Gizmo ended up getting a lot of screen time he wouldn’t have had otherwise. It was the single smartest idea Steven had on the movie. I contend that without Gizmo that movie would have been as popular as Critters 2. Having Gizmo connect with audiences and kids made the difference between a monster movie and a movie that had heart. We were kicking ourselves in the head, and it was driving us nuts, but of course it was a great idea!

Watching Gremlins today, it does bring back 1984, but it also brings back this whole lost world of American movie culture. The film is full of movie references, and it asks for an old-fashioned suspension of disbelief. It’s Christmas time, and there’s snow everywhere, but you don’t see any frosty breath. I assume that’s deliberate?

It’s deliberate in the sense that it would have been impossible, so it was just, “Don’t bother.” We shot it in the middle of summer, so there was no way we were going to be able to fake that. Today, if you wanted to spend the money on CGI, you could actually make it look real, but that’s still pretty expensive. In Gremlins, the unreality is what counts. I was adamant that it not look realistic—that it look like what we remembered from old movies. It’s what the Zuckers did on Airplane! They tried to make the movie look old-fashioned by the clothing and the props; the photographers in Airplane! have old flashbulb cameras.

I intended Gremlins to be kind of timeless. Going out on city streets was originally the plan, but it struck me that shooting the movie in a realistic fashion would never work, especially when I saw the gremlin designs. You couldn’t just take this rubber thing out in the city streets and hit it with light—this movie had to be stylized. It had to look like an old movie. And I thought it should be shot on the back lot. It’s a Wonderful Life was obviously the model for the town. Luckily the back lots of Warner Bros. and Universal were very quaint and went back to the Forties and even earlier. So we were able to make an idealized small-town environment for our admittedly slightly corny movie. Everybody was an archetype. We even had the evil old lady who is going to take over the town with a chemical company [Polly Holliday, doing Margaret Hamilton from The Wizard of Oz]. And into this seemingly idyllic little town comes this disruptive force. It’s The Birds meets It’s a Wonderful Life. That was pretty much the model for doing it.

We tried to have eccentric, likable characters, like the father, an inventor. When we were casting the father, we had a lot of different actors come in. One of them was Pat Hingle. He gave a reading that was so heart-rending, wrenching, and moving, that I had to say, to this great actor: “I can’t give you this part! This is too real.” He would have been brilliant in this movie but it would have been a James Agee movie. Hoyt Axton was perfect because he had all this folksy charm, and he was good with an ad lib. Casting is so important. Just to find the right people for the parts—it’s everything. That’s the movie, that’s what people are going to look at. They’re not looking at you; they’re looking at the cast.

It seems you have just as much fun building up a fantasy American small town as you do tearing it down.

Well, you can’t do great satire if you don’t love what you satirize. Somebody said I make my own movies and the Mad magazine parodies at the same time. I don’t know why this is. It’s just my sensibility. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve been able to do a lot of work that reflects my personality, whereas in general, usually, it’s considered that movies with an edge or movies that are a little quirky and odd have to be made a little less odd, a little less quirky, so that more people will like them.

I was surprised at how far you were able to go with the comic sadism—like having the gremlins tie up the dog in the Christmas lights.

They used to kill that dog. In the original version, they ate him. This was a distinct improvement.

Was the rewriting pretty constant?

When we finally got to the point where we were going to make the movie, the script was pretty much there. The tone may have changed somewhat while we were making it, because I think the movie turned out to be funnier than anticipated, which I felt was the only way to make the material palatable. And there were things that we had planned to do, and we thought we knew how to do, before we discovered that they just didn’t work. So we had to improvise. We had a working list of “Funny things for gremlins to do.” It was on a piece of paper that we posted for the crew. Everybody would write down stuff, and some of them were do-able. Hanging Gizmo on the dart board for the gremlins’ dart game was one of these improvs, because we figured we could hang him up on the dart board and throw darts at him without killing ourselves.

When I saw the movie with my family at the Fantasy Theater in Rockville Center, Long Island, and Phoebe Cates began that famous or infamous monologue about why she hates Christmas—everyone was silent or agog. After she finished, my mother just burst out laughing, then the rest of the theater joined in. Was that your desired response?

The tone of the movie is summed up in that speech. She’s telling a story that’s completely ridiculous. However, if it actually happened to you, it would be horrible!  It’s like the guy falling on a banana peel. It’s funny if you’re across the street, but not funny if you break your back. I like the complexity of it. Originally, it wasn’t her character who told that story, it was a guy who owned a McDonald’s. At the McDonald’s the gremlins would come in and eat the people but not the food. When that character and that bit disappeared, I said to Chris, I hate to lose that character and that speech. Let’s give it to Phoebe’s character, Kate, because she doesn’t have much stuff going on except being the heroine, and this gives her a secret. The audience has to find out what it is. She doesn’t like Christmas—well, why not? And now we find out why. And that’s a better character arc for her. And she did it beautifully. I remember we came back from the screening of rushes that day, and the editor turned to me and said: “That’s never going to be in the picture.”

How did the people in the preview audience react?

They had no particular reaction to it one way or the other, because they were busy looking for more gremlins. You could hear a pin drop; they took it seriously. That didn’t stop the studio from wanting to cut it out after the preview. That was one thing they really wanted to do. 

You were making this movie during the Reagan Recession, so the 1980s stuff about foreclosures and land grabs merges pretty seamlessly with the quasi-1930s atmosphere.

 Well, it was the Reagan era. Just say no, and all that. I think that’s actually part of what made the movie seem a little bit more acceptable for audiences.

How important was it for you to get a piece of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in the scene when the gremlins invade the neighborhood movie theater? It’s a great juxtaposition—no one who’s seen it will ever forget the gremlins bouncing in their seats as the dwarves sing “Heigh Ho!”

If we had waited another six months to make that movie, we never would have gotten that clip. The Disney organization at the time was in flux. When Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg came in, they put the clamp down on all Disney material. We managed to make a pretty good deal to use this footage and it was one of the highlights of the movie. If you had a different movie it wouldn’t work. It has to be Snow White, because it’s the first movie a lot of kids ever see, and it had such love, such devotion, particularly in the Eighties. It wouldn’t have worked with a Max Fleischer cartoon.

Is it harder to make references like that in a movie today?

The people who hold the rights to the clips make it expensive and difficult, because they really don’t want to be bothered. So that’s one thing. And Snow White and Disney may be a special case, but in general, movie literacy has plummeted. When you and I were growing up, our casual acquaintance with old movies and movie stars and the world of the Thirties and Forties could be renewed all the time—everything was there to be sampled. Every time you turned on the TV there was an old movie. In the middle of the night, there was Movies Till Dawn. Even people who weren’t really that into it were forced to soak up what the culture had been doing. Today there is one place, Turner Classic Movies, owned by Warner Bros. (which owns the majority of old movies), where you can see these things. Conversely, when I was a kid, you’d stay up until really late at night and try to get Channel 6 from Philadelphia, because they were running a movie you hadn’t seen it, and you’d have to try to hear it, and look through the snow on the screen. But it was Devil Girl from Mars, I’d never seen it, it’s the only place that’s playing it!

On UHF, they not only ran movies you could never see anywhere else, but they never censored them. They didn’t look at them—they just put them on! And I remember seeing nudity, and violence—The Mad Doctor of Blood Island, a Filipino movie. I remember turning on Channel 47, and there was nudity, this girl was getting chopped up, and her breasts were out and there was blood everywhere! Oww! How did they get away with this! And the reason they got away with this was that hardly anybody was ever watching—and they weren’t paying attention.

You had a sense of adventure tracking down movies even on TV. Does the loss of that sense affect how people view the art form?

I think it explains why it’s not special to people. They didn’t have to hunt for it or become a film collector like I did. It’s there, it’s on your wristwatch at noon, but not only at noon, at any time you want to watch it. So you don’t think you’re going to watch it. It’s just so hard to get people back into the habit, because the habit is gone. And that’s rippled into movie attendance at theaters, which everyone knows is between the ages of 15 and 30. Hardly anybody my age goes to the movies any more. The people at the Academy watch their videos on their computers—so too bad, David Lean!

Now, there are all these movies available to see, more than have ever been available in my lifetime. Movies that haven’t seen the light of day for 75 years have been rescued. The problem is, nobody knows what they are, because there’s no film scholarship. Nobody has a clue about this stuff. You can get your Netflix queue out, and it’s just a bunch of titles. If they’re not from the last 10 years, nobody recognizes them!

So that was one of thing I was trying to do with Trailers From Hell, was to take film history out of mothballs and try to get people interested in seeing things they never heard of, being spoken about by people they have heard of. It’s to give everyone entrée—well, if you like that, you should see this! And this and this and this and this and this! It’s watching people talk about an experience they had, and you can share that experience with them by watching that movie.

You need to know who Billy Wilder was. You need to know the names of people who are no longer alive. Because it’s very important—it’s what our history is made of. You need to see the movies the way they were—with the racism, the violence, and the censorship. All the things that let you see what the movie past had been so you understand where we are! But really nobody’s interested in that right now. Their interests are so bifurcated.

Isn’t Gremlins a reference point everybody knows?

Of all the genres, the ones that were the most kicked to the curb in my childhood were horror and science-fiction films. They were made for children, and very rarely would a famous director try anything with them. When Hitchcock did Psycho, people were horrified that he would lower himself. However, that genre has proven to be the most resilient of all the genres.

Who would have ever thought that the Western would go away? But it is completely irrelevant to today’s audiences. First Westerns became motorcycle pictures, and then they became car-crash pictures. Now, anything with dirt or a horse in it—nobody wants to see it. When somebody tries to make a Western, like Tommy Lee Jones just did, people stay home. They don’t care. The stories of people on the frontier are now so far away from them—it’s to today’s audiences like silent movies were to us when we were growing up. It seems just totally not relevant to them.

So the choices of what you can make have narrowed. Part of that is because stories that used to be made as serials in the 1940s, on a $1.98 budget, are now being made for billions of dollars. They’re blanketing the culture. You can’t get enough superhero movies. Superhero movies had been the lowest—lower than zombie movies. They were considered junk. Technically, they couldn’t do them right. When Superman had to fly in the serials, they had to turn him into a cartoon. The Fleischer cartoons—they were wonderful. We love those. But that was like, “He’s already a cartoon, so that’s fine.” When Kirk Alyn turned into a cartoon to fly in those serials, it was like—“What? Doesn’t work.” And now the junk has won.

Even with horror movies being as big as ever, it’s still really surprising to me that Gremlins is so popular. They make Gremlins dolls in Japan—new ones! Go on eBay, and they’re expensive! And it’s new merchandise for a movie that’s 30 years old! It’s kind of remarkable. 

Continue to part two.

Read part one of this interview.

In your movies, you see through corporate honchos as slick, exploitative gladhanders, but in the last reel you don’t always feel compelled to punish them.

Well, John Glover in Gremlins 2 is probably the best example of that. In the original idea he was the bad guy. He was Ted Turner and Donald Trump rolled into one. And casting this particular actor changed the entire part, because he was so likable. We ended up playing him as this big, enthusiastic kid, instead of the evil corporate guy. You don’t want to demonize people, and you don’t want to play a cliché.

Watching Gremlins and Gremlins 2, I wished you could have made Gremlins movies the way Hope and Crosby and their team made Road movies—maybe not once or twice a year, but at least once a decade. In Gremlins 2, the characters played by Zach Galligan and Phoebe Cates have gone from their small town to work in a Manhattan skyscraper that combines an urban shopping mall with Glover’s multimedia corporate headquarters. It provides an environment in which gremlins seem to belong: everything is automated, from phones to relationships, and then it breaks down. These ideas are both “of their moment” and ahead of their time. What took you so long to make this one? Were you just sick of dealing with gremlins after the first one?

It was a very hard movie to make, and we had no support from the studio because they basically felt it was something they were doing just to make Steven happy. I was happy it was going to be successful, but the last thing I wanted to do was another one of those.

The studio came to me a couple of years later and asked: “Do you want to make another Gremlins movie?” I said, I don’t think so. They went off and tried to make their own Gremlins movie. They spent a quite a bit of money on a lot of different approaches, but they could never figure out what was working about the first picture. Eventually they came back to me and Mike Finnell, the producer, and said: “We want to put out another Gremlins movie next summer, and if you do it, we’ll let you do whatever you want.” That promise lured me back into the fold.  To do anything you want on a studio movie, with approximately three times the money of the first movie, was pretty appealing. I got [screenwriter] Charlie Haas involved, and we came up with a plot, a story and a setting. We ran it by Steven and we got to make the movie. They let me make the movie I wanted to make, though they really didn’t get it. For example, they just didn’t understand why I wanted to have the gremlins “break” the film. They said: “Everyone will leave.” I said: “No, they’re not going to leave. It’s a joke!” I have found over the years that the process of breaking the fourth wall is more and more difficult. It’s become very difficult to be Brechtian in any obvious way. Studio people don’t like the idea of reminding people that they’re watching a movie. They think somehow people are unaware of the fact they’re in a theater watching this movie with other people around them. You couldn’t do a Road picture today. Nonetheless, they let me get away with the movie, and for me it was a more personal movie, because the first movie was an assignment and a script that came to me. And this was my take on all of that stuff.

The sequel feels cathartic. You even make fun of the rules—keep the Mogwai out of the light, keep him away from water, don’t feed him after midnight. You even have a gremlin recoil at the sight of a microwave, as if he had some genetic memory of an ancestor going splat inside of one.

We made fun of a lot of things!  I think that Steven and Chris were not amused by it, particularly, but it’s a movie I had a great time making. I’ve seen it with an audience recently, and it’s pretty funny.  It has the benefit of being the sequel to a movie that the audience has definitely seen. 

In Gremlins 2, Phoebe Cates starts to tell another story, this time about Lincoln’s birthday….

Well, I figured it was such a controversial part of the film. It was something we could not not make fun of. We had to acknowledge it somehow.

What’s the organizing principle in a movie like Gremlins 2?

Well, if you look at a Hope and Crosby Road movie—the kings of breaking the fourth wall—there’s always a plot, something going on, where Bob is being used by Bing to do something, to get the girl or a piece of microfilm, or whatever. There’s got to be a plot on which to hang these gags.  You can’t even know what gags you’re going to do until you have the plot. In Gremlins 2, for example, the idea of the Christopher Lee character being a geneticist came in because [special makeup effects artist] Rick Baker didn’t want to do the movie unless he could design new gremlins. So how are we going to get new gremlins? Well, we’ll have a character who can create them—this mad-scientist geneticist—and we can have a big scene where we introduce all these different kinds of gremlins. It was fun for Rick and it made the movie better. We love the new gremlins! We love the Brain! And Tony Randall, the voice of the Brain, who I just worked with for one day, was so great. All these people I’d meet I’d think, oh, I’d love to make another movie with them.

Part of the fun of both Gremlins movies is that they’re totally puppets.

Yes, that technique is part of the appeal of Gremlins, which is why I tried to talk them into not doing Gremlins 3 as a CGI movie, if there ever is one. Because you gain a lot with CGI, but you lose the actors’ relationship with the puppet, and so much of the believability of these things rests on the actors’ reactions onscreen. You don’t want to lose that. Not a lot of actors are able to look at a fixed point in space and make you believe that they’re really looking at the edge of a desk and not the wall behind. Especially if you’re dealing with kids, and people who haven’t done this kind of movie a lot, it’s very helpful to have prosthetics and animatronics on the set. Even though the technology we used was ancient even by the time we did the sequel, it’s still very useful. I think there’s a lot of really good work done by those people that can’t be picked up by machine.

When you see a Ray Harryhausen movie, you respond to the sensibility behind it, whether or not the effects are “dated.”

It’s the King Kong effect. You look at King Kong today and it’s creaky – but it’s still a great movie. And you can imagine the impact it must have had in 1933 when people were not used to seeing this kind of thing onscreen. You can understand why a young Ray Harryhausen would say, “This is what I want to do with my life.” When I was a kid, the Harryhausen movies were thrilling. That’s the only word I can use: thrilling. The first Sinbad movie, even now, is just great, though nothing happens in the first half hour. So is Jason and the Argonauts, which is the best one, I think, because it has the best screenplay. You look at CGI today, and you can’t identify anybody, because there’s so much work, no one man could ever do it. You look at Harryhausen’s work from the 50s and 60s, and that’s one guy’s work, not a whole bunch of people. With CGI you gain, obviously, the ability to do a lot of things, but you lose the personality that King Kong had, or that Harryhausen’s dragon and Cyclops had. They were done by one guy, who was also a master of lighting, which is one reason why they look so great. That was Ray’s genius and he was beloved for it. But I think the day he saw Jurassic Park he realized his day was over.

I think Jurassic Park has dated worse than Harryhausen movies, because it’s in a realistic style that’s been outdone.

True, and the story was softened, to make the Richard Attenborough character kindly and nice, which I thought was a terrible mistake. I was one of the four guys who were up for that picture. We all had to talk to Michael Crichton on the phone, and he was going to make the decision. When I heard Steven was up for it, I thought, that’s a no-brainer, of course Steven is going to do it. But I did say to Michael, “Don’t let him change the bad guy into a good guy.” And he did anyway, of course, probably for the benefit of the box office. But for me the story just didn’t work because of that. There’s no reason why that guy should be a nice guy, except maybe that Richard Attenborough is one of the nicest people I ever met.

Has the photorealistic bias of CGI changed the mass audience’s expectations?

One of the big barriers to people being able to watch old movies is that if it doesn’t look like they’ve been taught to expect it to look, then they’ll think something’s wrong with it. And that includes not being in color, because they think, “the world is in color, what happened to the color?” That’s probably the most tragic thing about people’s inability to relate to old movies. Black-and-white cinematography is an art form. You can’t just throw color in there. When Ted Turner started colorizing movies, people didn’t go for it. It wasn’t just because it was badly done, and Topper’s moustache was moving all over his face. It was the fact that people became movie stars in black-and-white movies because audiences looked at their faces. As soon as you colorize those movies, audiences look at the drapes. The color values are never right. Even when the colorizers are good at it, the movies never look the way they would have looked if they were shot in color. Except for Shirley Temple movies and other films that parents are trying to get their kids to watch because they won’t watch in black and white, I think that phase is over. People aren’t interested in old movies any more, so there’s no real reason to colorize them. Before Warner Archive started, I was constantly talking to people and saying: “You’ve got to put out your old black-and-white movies. You’ve got to do it now while the audience is still alive, because there’s at least the possibility that you can entice someone younger into watching them.”  

There was a colorization joke in Gremlins 2 where John Glover is watching It’s a Wonderful Life in black and white, and he’s frowning, and he goes and turns on the color and he’s happy. I had to cut that out because The Big Picture came out three months before and had the same joke. But there’s still a joke in Gremlins 2 with an announcer hyping “Casablanca, now in color and with a happier ending.”

You’ve had great partnerships with John Sayles, Charlie Haas, and Sam Hamm, who wrote your two Masters of Horror segments, Homecoming and The Screwfly Solution. Should we call you a ‘writer’s director?’

I like writers. I have them on the set if possible. I write parts for them. On Piranha, it was great just to have John Sayles around for the time it took to shoot his cameo, because we came up with this whole scene for Dick Miller, explaining about “the swimming swine.” There was all this local color on location, and I thought, “This is great, we can use this.” John wrote away, and we added scenes.

You’re open to putting things in movies that are maybe not deeply analyze-able, but are one-of-a-kind things—like Phoebe Cates’ monologue, or even that Casablanca joke, which will stay funny whether people remember colorization or not.

Yeah. It’s the personality thing again, it’s trying to put your stamp on a movie, so when people see it they can say: “Oh, that’s a movie by so-and-so.” If you watch a movie for a couple of minutes, you can say: “Oh, that’s a John Ford movie,” or “That’s a Preston Sturges movie.” Sometimes you can tell just by the people on the screen. There are a lot of movies, like pictures directed by Robert Wise—you’re not going to be able to tell right away. Wise liked that about himself; he liked the idea that he was able to do a good job on all different kinds of movies. But I’ve always been more attracted to Sam Fuller, Peckinpah, people like that—you can identify the style right away, because nobody else would have made the movie that way.

John Boorman’s Queen and Country, his sequel to Hope and Glory (87), is bracingly sane about war, peace, and young adulthood. In this engrossing autobiographical saga of life in Britain’s National Service at the time of the Korean War, Boorman’s surrogate in the comedy-drama, 19-year-old Bill Rohan (Callum Turner), exudes a smart, buoyant wariness. He registers the lunacy of rigid officers like Sergeant Major Bradley (David Thewlis) and out-of-control army rebels like his fellow Sergeant Instructor and close pal, Percy Hapgood (Caleb Landry Jones). Bill differs from the dreamy autobiographical figures we’ve come to know in movie memoirs like I Vitelloni and Diner.  He’s already splitting away from home and family. His free-spirited older sister, Dawn (Vanessa Kirby), runs back home from a bad marriage in Canada (she has two young kids), and asks Bill why he’s against everything: “The army, the war, royalty, the Tories, the class system, God, Dad’s patriotism.” She says she’s for “life, love, freedom, adventure,” but Bill ignores her breezy answer and deflects the question. He’s on his way to becoming a resolutely independent moviemaker.

Drawn largely from Boorman’s own experiences at an army training camp and Education Centre, Queen and Country is a portrait of the artist as a sly young man. Bill’s life is full of surprises. Boorman renders his adventures in a tragicomic spectrum that ranges from uproarious slapstick and domestic farce to seriocomic rebellion in the ranks, from a rollicking Peeping Tom prank to a poignant chivalric courtship, and from cheeky iconoclasm in a military classroom to pathos in a military hospital.  Boorman, now 82, has rarely directed more fearlessly. He displays masterly command and élan as he mixes languid and staccato rhythms with lush or lowering atmospheres.  In a typical offhand feat, he turns marching drills into musical-comedy choreography. He never loses sight of his overarching subject—the human comedy.

This film starts right where Hope and Glory ends, as children celebrate a day off from school, courtesy of a Nazi bomb. (“Thank you, Adolf!” proclaims one blissed-out boy.) It then leaps into 1952 and lands near the family bungalow known as Sphinx, on Pharaoh Island on the Thames at Shepperton. The house has no buzzer or phone. A visitor must ring an actual bell and wait for one of the Rohans to row a boat or punt across the river. We first see the grown-up Bill taking a dip and watching a Nazi officer fall dead in the water, repeatedly. A war film is being produced at neighboring Shepperton Studios. The idea that in movies, unlike in life, you can get something right by redoing it, exerts an inexorable pull on Bill. But nothing in this film feels labored. Almost immediately, Bill receives his call to duty, and his father, Clive (David Hayman, the only actor to repeat his role from the first film), pities the officers who must turn his callow boy into a man. At the barracks gates, Bill and Percy meet and swap the “beginning of a beautiful friendship” line from Casablanca. They’re soon under the thumbs of military personnel who pride themselves on defeating the Nazis and don’t understand why Bill and Percy would question the war in Korea. The whole film hinges on the conflict between the older generation’s patriotic sureness and the rising generation’s appetite for unvarnished truth and unrationed joy.  

In the movie’s most inspired sequence, Bill recalls the brotherly love of the barracks as he chats and smokes with the woman of his dreams—nicknamed Ophelia (Tamsin Egerton)—in her Oxford University apartment. The flashback unfolds behind his chair, as if Bill is creating a short film for her. Twenty conscripts gather around a stove to dry off 20 cigarettes accidentally drenched in strawberry preserves. Each soldier then lights up with delight, including Bill, who’s never smoked before. He shares the intense camaraderie of his brothers-in-arms; they’re determined to wring a tobacco-lover’s victory from a puddle of fruit. As Bill spellbinds sad-eyed Ophelia, an upper-crust blonde with her own smoke-screen of mystery, Turner’s face registers undiluted joy over sharing this vision of male bonding with a beautiful, intelligent older woman. You can see why Boorman cast Turner as Bill: he’s canny, affecting, and anti-histrionic. More important, the staging, cutting, and performances suggest a wizardly director in the making—and confirm the intuitive brilliance that has marked Boorman’s filmmaking since he made Having a Wild Weekend some 50 years ago. How many writer-directors can do what Boorman does here? He summons an ensemble performance of heightened, shared emotion, then blocks, shoots, and cuts it to glide you into the group feeling. Boorman’s expansive talent reminds you of movies’ power as a popular art. He makes a score of cigarettes on a stovetop perimeter come off as a circle of life. 

Queen and Country isn’t as engulfing as Hope and Glory, and it lacks the emotional completeness of that unassuming masterpiece. The earlier movie, about the Blitz as seen through 9-year-old Bill Rohan’s eyes, captured what Boorman had been seeking throughout his career—a quality of “found,” lived-in mythology. World War II had turned the United Kingdom into a dangerous and enchanting Magic Kingdom for lower-middle-class English youth. They reveled in proprieties falling by the wayside and new possibilities opening up amid the rubble. In Queen and Country, characters in flux stumble through a country in upheaval. The movie is more limited, visually and lyrically. Its characters grow by increments, often in tight corners. But it’s wise, unpretentious, and funny in a tough-minded way. And cinematographer Seamus Deasy’s collaboration with Boorman ranks with Philippe Rousselot’s in Hope and Glory. The men and women still seem lit by the sharpness or tenderness of the director’s memories.

Boorman retains the scruffy humor and grainy textures of the episodes he takes from his 2003 memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Boy, which include the risky filching of a regimental clock.  The lived-in feeling of these anecdotes allows Boorman to bring his characters into adulthood without inflating typical coming-of-age traumas: first love, private betrayal, and public shaming. Rather than being sent to fight in Korea, both Bill and Percy are assigned to teach conscripts how to type. Hapgood, a claustrophobe with a psychological secret, is driven crazy by army rules and regulations. He almost instantly vows to murder Sergeant Major Bradley, their immediate superior, a man so devoted to military tradition that he demands that students sit at attention while typing. Bill is more restrained. As the film makes clear, he isn’t a laggard or a coward. He simply has the sort of temperament that compels him to sift data and impressions before framing his version of the truth and committing to a plan of action. He sympathizes with Percy’s innate rebel spirit and is drawn to yet appalled by his extremism. When Bill stages his own mini-revolution, it’s a revolt of honesty. Ordered to lecture on Korea to his conscripts, he cobbles together pertinent observations from critical articles in The London Times, including the United Nations’ bungling of the demarcation between North and South, and the widespread fear that U.S. General Douglas MacArthur had gone crazy before being called home. When one pupil refuses to fight in Korea, Bill is charged with “seducing a soldier from the course of his duty.” His case even makes the daily papers, shaming his jingoistic dad.

The entire cast has a comic field day reacting to the wording of “seducing a soldier….” But the episode’s real value lies in Bill’s response to MI5 agents who press him on whether he sides with Communism or capitalism. Bill says he supports neither—a courageous stand in an era of dangerous certainties. His ability to maintain a natural distance while absorbing the world around him enables him to grapple with life-or-death intricacies. By the end he can be generous both to Percy and his nemesis, Bradley. As Percy, Caleb Landry Jones conjures a stripped-wire sensitivity that’s alternately wrenching and rib-tickling. This acting style wouldn’t work if Turner weren’t around to sop up his excesses. (Jones is a Texas boy who had a recurring role on NBC’s Friday Night Lights.) Thewlis gives the performance of the movie as Bradley. He lets you see the desperation behind his character’s monkish attachment to the army.  In his memoir, Boorman writes that when 30 hands would “shunt back” the typewriter carriage, “the sound came pounding through the flimsy walls of the [Education] Centre like rifle shots.” With perfect audiovisual judgment and super-empathetic acting, Boorman and Thewlis put over Bradley’s reflexive, agonized twitch whenever he thinks he’s heard a fusillade, with just the right, fleeting emphasis. (Bill and Percy don’t seem to notice.) It’s a PTSD symptom before people knew how to spot one.

Some early reviews have criticized Queen and Country for being “a service comedy,” but the strength of Boorman’s film is that it reminds us of what a service comedy is—the spectacle of cogs rising up against their machine. This film’s military rogues’ gallery includes Commanding Officer Major Cross (Richard E. Grant), a pragmatic figurehead who wants his unit to run as silky-smooth as the figure he cuts at the Regimental Ball, and Regimental Sergeant Major Digby (Brian F. O’Byrne), who is pathologically protective of his rank and wishes that conscripts like Bill and Percy couldn’t rise high enough to eat at his table. He punishes them by serving curry so hot that it leaves them gasping. Along with Thewlis’s more complicated Bradley, these officers, simple in themselves, form a group character of considerable complexity, thanks to Grant’s gift of expressing ferocious boredom and O’Byrne’s grasp of bottomless sadism.

In a season when critics are quick to call any combat film “anti-war,” Queen and Country gets at the core of military horror. Private Redmond (Pat Shortt), a notorious “skiver” (a mix of wheedler, scrounger, and sneak thief), tells the boys that the army aims to brainwash soldiers into advancing toward machine guns instead of running away from them. In Redmond’s view, it’s brave to shake off that conditioning and be a coward. To both Redmond and Hapgood, a training camp is like a POW camp, with them as the prisoners, so thievery is one way of preserving their dignity. Still, Boorman won’t let Redmond off the hook. He’s a selfish, callous man, who mocks Bradley when he twitches. And Boorman doesn’t let audiences forget that there’s a war on. You may think Bill is being roguish when he advises recruits to get clothing from their families to protect them against Korea’s cold; he tells them that the British Army, unlike America’s, won’t provide weather-protective uniforms. His counsel proves tragically spot-on.

If the film’s view of romance were as barbed, poignant, and insightful as its take on the military, Queen and Country might have been a knockout. But Ophelia is too dreamy and abstract a figure. Bill doesn’t fight for her when she drifts away. He too readily accepts the kindness of a warm-blooded nurse. Apart from some happy, ribald byplay at the nurse’s window, the film’s peak amorous moment comes when Bill’s mom, Grace (beautifully played by Sinead Cusack), waves wistfully from afar at the lover she had during the Blitz. All they can do to celebrate their love is perform this ritual once a day.

In one of this film’s high points, Bill and Ophelia see Kurosawa’s Rashomon. He’s blown away by the technique of telling a single story from three disparate points of view. She thinks the director’s point is that in all three versions, a woman has been raped. Boorman, like Kurosawa, is a virtuoso and a humanist.  While younger directors prove their talents by unfolding entire stories as if in a single shot, Boorman, with greater ease, does something more exhilarating. He uses every tool in a director’s kit to bring audiences inside all his characters.

Queen and Country ends with a close-up of Bill’s wind-up camera. It keeps filming after Bill jumps in the water to be with his postwar love. Though this film is a realistic comedy-drama, Boorman remains one of cinema’s last great mystics. He believes that a camera creates everlasting moments even when a director isn’t looking.  

I admire Pedro Almodóvar all the more after watching the Argentinian portmanteau movie Wild Tales—you have to applaud his generosity in supporting a filmmaker who can do in-flight farce so much better than he does. Seeing the credit for Almodóvar’s production company El Deseo at the front of Damián Szifrón’s film, then realizing that its first sequence is set on an airplane, I suffered a flashback to the Spanish director’s dreadful 2013 airline farce I’m So Excited!, which nosedived before it could get off the ground.

But Szifrón’s in-air skit is a lot funnier and sharper. It starts with a woman boarding a flight, then getting into conversation with the man in the next seat. She’s a model, he’s a music critic, and it turns out they have something in common. Then someone else joins in, and… never mind what else. Suffice to say that the situation accelerates with breathless pace, leading up to a punch line roughly eight minutes in, and boom—we’re hooked. By the time the opening titles start—a glossy montage of wild animals, set to Gustavo Santoalalla’s slinky lounge theme—Wild Tales has you on its side.

Hence the palpable good cheer that greeted the film’s press screening Cannes last May. Maybe it was partly relief that we were getting a chance to let off steam with some comedy; that doesn’t happen very often in the Cannes competition, and given that (if I remember rightly) we’d endured the rigors of Winter Sleep just previously, Szifrón’s offering felt very welcome indeed.

There are plenty of pleasures to be had in this very sleek collection—one of this weekend’s Academy Award nominees for Best Foreign Language Film—although the airplane gag is by far the punchiest and most economical. Other stories involve a diner waitress getting even with a loathsome customer; two motorists fighting a battle to the death; a wedding party that goes terribly wrong… The old Human Condition, don’t you know. These vignettes, scripted by the director, have the sort of single-mindedness that you traditionally expect from portmanteau sketches, especially comic ones; this is pretty much the stuff of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, except that not all these stories have a twist ending. They don’t all even have punchy endings—in fact, one of them ends with an act of sudden violence, yet given such throwaway treatment that you almost miss it, then find yourself appreciating the perversity of Szifrón’s offhandedness. On the whole, though, you could say that Szifrón is great at thinking up stories but doesn’t always know the best way to tell them.

 Take story three, which ought to be the pithiest and most concise—and very nearly is. It’s about mortal combat on the road—Duel, basically, except we get to see the ugly face behind the other wheel. A city slicker is whizzing along a desert highway in his shiny new Audi, until some guy in a beat-up Peugeot (Walter Donado) refuses to let him pass, apparently from sheer malice. Iturralde, the Audi guy (Leonardo Sbaraglia), shouts some yokelophobic abuse from his window, and immediately we know where we are: on the wrong side of the line with a yuppie who’s transgressed on backwoods etiquette, and is now a certified yuppie-in-peril. The story does little to subvert this generic template, but efficiently delivers Iturralde to the spot where the showdown will take place, then efficiently squeezes the situation for the maximum venomous hostility between the two. It finally delivers a macabre verbal and visual punch line that pays off nicely, but a little too late. This story would have been a lot pithier if Szifrón had given us a little less of the car-ad glossiness at the start, with desert tarmac zooming away under our feet. Beautifully photographed (the whole film is shot by Javier Juliá), this episode suggests a live-action Road Runner cartoon, or parts of the Coens’ Raising Arizona (which is essentially the same thing), and if only Szifrón had cut to the chase, I’d have been a lot happier.

OK, I recognize the paradox here—it’s always lovers of Slow Cinema, we who like nothing better than a nice languorous eight hours of Lav Diaz, who are forever complaining that commercial entertainments drag their heels. But it’s true—and maybe prolonged exposure to the lento mode ends up sharpening your appreciation of how films ought to work in the allegro to prestissimo range. If Szifrón had managed to lose, say, 15 minutes from his two-hour film, Wild Tales would have been that bit wilder and more deadly.

The point is, I suppose, that we’re all wild beasts at heart, although some of us are like the opening credits’ sharks and tigers, others like their zebra and giraffe (Szifrón himself cheekily places his credit over a fox). Wild Tales is a direct translation of the film’s Spanish title Relatos Salvajes, but in France the film is known as Les Nouveaux Sauvages—The New Savages, referring to its characters, but also by way of echoing the Italian portmanteau comedy I Nuovi Mostri (The New Monsters, 1971; Dino Risi, Ettore Scola, Mario Monicelli). How very French to play the film-historical card.

In a way, though, the French title is more accurate. These stories aren’t all wild in themselves; one, about a wealthy family trying to cover up their son’s hit-and-run crime, is altogether somber and downbeat (and again, extended beyond its optimum length). But the tales all show people’s worst instincts emerging when the civilized veneer cracks. No news there, but when the formula works, it works very nicely. The closing sequence looks all too familiar—an opulent wedding takes a nasty turn when the bride (Erica Rivas) realizes that the groom (Diego Gentile) has had an affair with a guest. She has her own fling, venomously lets rip at the assembled company, and things look set for an apocalyptic ending. It’s all elegantly handled, though, Szifrón neatly catching the suspicious looks that flash to and fro across the venue. And the most eloquent moment is wordless, as the groom glimpses a little cluster of people conferring through an open doorway, and you suddenly can feel his stomach dropping, because he knows that they’re talking about him. Finally, just as you think this episode has nowhere left to go, Szifrón delivers a gentle tweak, a low-key ending that finishes it all off with rather benign mischief. It lets you leave the cinema with a smile of gentle satisfaction, thinking that maybe the savagery is what makes being human fun after all.

Where the film most engagingly straddles the line between farce and the ordinary comedy of everyday life is in the story of an arrogant explosives expert (Ricardo Darín, probably the most widely known Argentinian actor, from Nine Queens, The Secret in Their Eyes, et al). Having just demolished a power plant, he stops off to buy his daughter a birthday cake, but has his car towed away; the film’s most acute comic insight is into the humiliation of this man, a would-be omnipotent god of destruction, now reduced to the level of us ordinary mortals as he queues to plead with a callous city official behind a Hygiaphone.

I’m only guessing, but I suspect that this story would particularly tickle an Argentinian audience. Simon’s plight is pretty much universal, as anyone’s who ever had an unjust parking ticket anywhere will recognize—but it may be that the particular stresses he suffers have the unique mark of the Buenos Aires Traffic Department. Two other elements in Wild Tales may have specific local resonances, given Argentina’s recent beleaguered economic history: one is the story about the rich family, bribing their impoverished gardener to take the rap for a crime (echoes of Ceylan’s 3 Monkeys). Then there’s the story of the diner waitress, urged by her cook to murder the evil loan shark who’s now standing for mayor: “That’s our country,” says the cook. “Everyone wants these guys to get what they deserve but no one is willing to lift a finger.”

None of that, of course, makes Wild Tales anything but cannily universal. And that’s the trick that makes a movie work as world cinema—an Argentinian (or Greek, or Taiwanese) audience will watch a film and know that the situations on screen are specifically its own. But international audiences will recognize that “our country” is their country too, that we all suffer from our own rich families and loan sharks and traffic departments. The only danger is that a filmmaker ends up making a “globally local” or “locally global” product that, in appealing to everyone everywhere, fully belongs to, or speaks from, nowhere in particular. It’s a risk that the globally sleek, eminently exportable Wild Tales just about avoids—for the most part with a reasonable degree of wild style.

Sometimes it’s impossible for a filmmaker to escape being identified with one of their groundbreaking early works, no matter how many different genres or types of stories they may explore in subsequent years. A case in point is 55-year-old Japanese multi-hyphenate filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto.

Although his professional debut feature—the independently produced sensory assault Tetsuo the Iron Man (89)—turned 25 years old last year, Tsukamoto’s career has been defined ever since by its minimalist, cyberpunk aesthetic. One reason for this may be that, with only a couple of exceptions, he has remained defiantly independent of studio and corporate association throughout his career, perhaps the only filmmaker working in Japan to have done so, yet he also been able to tap into the international sales and distribution market, and see his films repeatedly screened at major film festivals. Without a studio, manager, or publicity organization around to rehaul Tsukamoto’s image with each new project, the continued reach of his initial success has remained very strong.

His latest work, also independently produced, is a new adaptation of Shohei Ooka’s 1951 semi-autobiographical, historical wartime novel Fires on the Plain (Japanese title: Nobi). After having its world premiere at the 2014 Venice Film Festival and a U.S. premiere this Saturday as part of this year’s Film Comment Selects, the film will open in Japan in the summer, strategically timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Despite its budgetary limitations, Fires on the Plain is a bombshell that depicts the spiritual and physical trials lone soldier Tamura (played by Tsukamoto himself) undergoes while isolated in the jungles of the Philippines near the end of the war. Without food or a clear sense of where the rest of his unit is, Tamura is assaulted by the unseen enemy and by his fellow soldiers, some of whom have resorted to cannibalism to survive.

Although it shares many similarities with the first film adaptation of the novel directed by Kon Ichikawa in 1959, Tsukamoto chose to bring some of his more traditional genre film experience to the project in order to create a more vivid portrait of the horror and obscenity of war. While some might see a period war film, or a literary adaptation, as a departure from Tsukamoto’s earlier films, it continues recurrent themes in his body of work, particularly that of a solitary protagonist struggling to survive in a hostile environment.

Tsukamoto supports his self-financed filmmaking endeavors by acting in features of filmmakers he likes, and as a voiceover artist for the lucrative TV commercial market. FILM COMMENT spoke with the director via Skype as he prepared to act in a new film shooting in Taiwan. This interview was conducted in Japanese, and translated into English by the author.

Could you tell us about your relationship with the novel Fires on the Plain, and when you first realized that you wanted to adapt it into a film?

The first time I read it was when I was in high school. It tells the story of the wartime experiences of an ordinary man who was also an intellectual, and the impact it made on me was as though I’d gone through a war myself.

Twenty years ago, when I was in my mid-thirties, I began to take the first steps toward adapting the novel into a film. But because it was an epic piece of work, doing it in my usual way as an independent film would have been difficult, and though there were a few opportunities here and there, in the end it all fizzled out due to the large budget required.

About 10 years ago, when most of the veterans were getting to be about 80 years old, I decided that I wanted to hear the real voices of those individuals, and so I interviewed many of them about the horrible things they had experienced. I also went with some of them to collect the remains of their fellow soldiers in the Philippines and through these experiences, the pain of those real-life war veterans began to permeate my own body, and I again thought about adapting it into a movie. But, like before, I couldn’t assemble the money required.

Up until that point, it was only a problem of the budget that had kept me from being able to start, but eventually, I noticed that not only did my producer show little interest in making the film, it seemed like he was actually growing disgusted with it, due to various fears of making something that depicted the real horrors of war. Because our country is steadily moving toward a more warlike state of mind, I thought that if I didn’t make the film now, there would be no chance in the future. Even more urgently, I felt that it was a film that had to be made now. As always, we had no money, and my own production company had even fallen into hard times during the recent economic crisis. I wrote the screenplay and drew my storyboards, then relied upon the power and help of many sympathetic people, and successfully completed it in the end.

Japan has definitely drifted in a more conservative direction under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, notably in his re-interpretation of Article 9 of the 1947 Constitution, which repudiates war and the threat of arms. Do you believe that people in Japan today still hold antiwar feelings?

I think that what’s becoming more prevalent today is that the people who might say “War is absolutely bad,” and who know the actual pain of war, are growing fewer in number, and as a consequence, the tendency for people to say “Let’s go to war” is becoming more common. The government is certainly of that mindset, and therefore, the number of ordinary citizens who strongly oppose it is growing smaller. Instead, the number of people who hold the feeling that to be antiwar is tantamount to doing nothing [with regard to regional or self-defense] might be growing larger. It’s also possible that people have no awareness of the situation at all, or no opinion about the direction the government is headed. And by not having this awareness, they’re tacitly giving approval, and we’re seeing a new generation that doesn’t hold any dissenting opinions, and thus the feeling that we’re getting closer and closer to war. 

When we think of history, it’s nothing but the same thing happening over and over, which to me feels stupid and useless. Japan hasn’t gone to war for 70 years now, and we need to extend this miracle even further. If we don’t, and if the country turns toward war again, it would be a terrible thing.

With that in mind, do you think a film like Fires on the Plain is required to get audiences in Japan today to really think about the reality of war?

Because Fires on the Plain is a strongly antiwar film, it’s possible that it’s become necessary to show contemporary Japanese audiences the reality of war through violent means. War is horror, plain and simple. But you have to keep in mind that a film is not a fixed ideology or ideological statement. At its best, it’s an artistic creation. Because audiences have the freedom to decide how to feel on their own, film should not be a means to express one fixed idea, but rather a means for audiences to feel something about what they see onscreen. In the end, I made the film to stimulate a more general reaction from the audience.

Once you finally got started on making the film, how did production proceed? Can you speak a bit about casting, locations, and the other aspects you’re personally involved in?

At first I just sent out a message via Twitter, and assembled a bunch of potential soldiers through basic auditions. We needed everyone to be thin, like starving soldiers, as well as guys who could grow a beard easily. I also needed people on the crew as well who were thin and could grow beards, since they’d also have to appear in the film. Because this film was made primarily with a volunteer staff, we needed people who, no matter what they did on the film, they could also appear in it. For our main actors, I specifically invited Lily Franky and Tatsuya Nakamura. I first met Lily Franky when we appeared together in director Teruo Ishii’s final film Blind Beast vs Dwarf [01]. We became close friends at the time, and since then he’s grown into a wonderful actor. Nakamura first appeared in my film Bullet Ballet [98] and had done several films afterward, but is mainly a drummer and musician. But he has a great presence as an actor, and I was happy to have him appear this time. So these two were like guest actors, and all of the rest of us were wearing two hats as both cast and crew.

Regarding the production, it all took a lot of time. Originally, I thought I would only be able to make the movie by myself. The first storyboards I drew were along those lines, in fact, with me setting up the camera in a fixed position, then going around to perform in front of it. That’s really how I thought it would turn out—that I’d have to go to the Philippines alone. I worked on the solo version for about six months, and then in March 2013, I received permission from the novel’s author to make the film. From that point on, it really took off. Eventually, we were able to assemble a decent crew, primarily of volunteers, and together we made the uniforms, helmets, guns, and so on, and obviously it took a lot of time to get that finished. Location hunting, prep, and photography took another six months, then six months for editing and postproduction, which included some additional photography. So in the end, it took a year and a half to actually make the film, closer to two years when I really think about it.

In looking for locations, I wanted to stick very close to the novel, since the setting is described very vividly: vast natural areas, a beautiful, blue sky, white clouds, red flowers, and deep green vegetation. That kind of natural color makes a deep impact in the novel, particularly when contrasted with the human elements, and the horrible things that happen to them. I really wanted to create the same kind of imagery, but because of the budget we had, I wasn’t able to rely only on locations available in the Philippines. So we only shot the sequences where I appear alone on location there, since it was important for me to include footage actually shot in the Philippines in the film. For scenes featuring more of the cast, but without major events or difficult sequences, we shot in Okinawa. And then finally, for scenes featuring battle footage or explosions, we shot in some wooded areas in the suburbs of Tokyo. It made it a bit of a puzzle during editing, to put something together shot in so many places but meant to appear as though it was all from the Philippines. Additionally, the scenes featuring the largest amount of natural beauty were shot in Hawaii, in Kauai. That was where we shot the biggest, most natural landscape—it was a luxury to be able to do so much on such a small budget.

The jungle setting of Fires on the Plain makes it unique among your films, since almost everything else you’ve made takes place in an urban setting. But given how your characters seem to be adrift within or assaulted by the city, it seems like there are similarities between the jungle and its urban counterpart. Do you feel there’s a relationship there?

Most of my films up until now, including Tokyo Fist [95] and Bullet Ballet, and of course Tetsuo and Tetsuo II [92], have been about human beings’ relationship to the city, to the high-tech concrete jungle. The “hard” and high-tech city contrasted with “soft” humanity is what I’ve usually depicted, and there’s been little awareness of natural things outside of that environment and relationship. For example, in Tetsuo, the ending was simply the destruction of the city.

But in Vital [04], you could say that the natural environment was represented by the interior of the human body, in terms of the story being about autopsies and dissection. In that sense, the physical self, when viewed this way, becomes “Nature,” hence the image of the woman dancing in a forest from the film.

Although I’ve developed this theme of human beings struggling to exist in an urban environment, I’ve also gradually come to feel that what we call the “urban environment” is more like a small concrete boat floating in the middle of a vast sea of nature. So I’m slowly realizing that those stories about concrete cities, which I’ve told up to this point are all about a small, floating boat, within which we are gradually gaining an interest in the massive natural environment on the outside.

It was after I made Vital when I really felt the strongest need to make Fires on the Plain. It was then that I felt a desire to try to visit that outside natural world, you could say. That’s the point when I felt that my films might shift course away from concrete and toward something more natural. Whether it’s the same sort of experience for the protagonist, I think for me, it’s not. It’s a different meaning. A new theme for my work, that’s what’s inside Fires on the Plain.

It does feel substantially like a new start, but when I compare Fires on the Plain to your other films, I think that it sometimes feels very close to your 2005 short feature Haze, which also features a solitary protagonist [again played by Tsukamoto] who cannot get himself out of a place he is stuck in. In Haze, it’s a claustrophobic concrete channel and in Fires, it’s the vast Philippine jungle, but thematically the two feel very close to me. Do you think the films share anything?

That’s surprising, because Fires on the Plain takes place in the most sprawling environment in any of my films! But it’s also interesting because, yes, the action of Fires on the Plain sets a solitary protagonist against a huge background in what’s essentially a “locked-room story” [misshitsugeki], a mystery drama that takes place in a small room. In making Fires on the Plain, my intention was to center a lone protagonist within a special type of empty space, and no matter how many other people he encounters in the story, that protagonist always has the feeling that he isolated. But unlike a typical locked-room story, there is no adversary waiting outside the room. More than that, you don’t even see the superior officers who give orders to the protagonist, nor do you see the enemy. Although it takes place on a more grand stage, I think it’s very interesting to compare it to Haze.

Another powerful theme in the film is that war is not only a violent, horrific experience, but also a chaotic, absurd one. In several parts, your film reminded me deeply of Apocalypse Now, particularly of that film's sequence set around Do Long Bridge, when Colonel Willard is unable to find whoever is in charge of the chaos that’s happening there. Was there an inspiration there, and why do you sometimes think of absurdity rather than horror, when you think about war?

Haze once again comes to mind, since it’s a story of confinement in a very small space, with the protagonist continually wondering “Why? Why?” about everything that’s happening to him to the point of absurdity. Fires on the Plain is set against the backdrop of Mother Nature, and yet I wanted to impart that same feeling. As I mentioned earlier, he’s unable to see the enemy, yet bullets abruptly come flying at him as he’s walking along. Or bombs fall from the air and blow up the hospital, and everything abruptly changes at once, leaving the characters wondering how things could have gotten even worse. It’s never explained in the film who the enemy is, or even where the protagonist’s own allies are. He isn’t even sure whether the order given to him by his superior officer—“Assemble with the other troops at Palompon”—will lead him anywhere. Everything is uncertain, yet the protagonist has no choice but to keep walking. I wanted to convey the ultimate horror of war by stripping and scraping away all but the simplest elements of Tamura’s reality, to reveal the absurdity within it all.

Therefore, rather than being a densely plotted story, it’s more accurately a succession of individual episodes—strange, absurd, and horrible ones—one after the other. You could say that Apocalypse Now, through its narration by Martin Sheen, is also a story told through individual episodes, as the protagonist goes deeper and deeper into his own jungle. My film is also an absurdist drama told with the background of Mother Nature.

What do you think of Kon Ichikawa’s original 1959 film version of Fires on the Plain? Do you consider your film a remake of it?

My film isn’t a remake of Ichikawa’s. From the start, I wanted to make another film version of Ooka’s novel, and have always stressed that I didn’t intend it to be a remake of the earlier film. I first saw Ichikawa’s film when I was in high school, and thought it was fantastic. You could say that I’m a fan of Ichikawa’s movies in general, and I hold him in high esteem as a filmmaker. In black and white, Ichikawa told the internal story of these human beings, keeping the camera very tightly focused on the human characters. Since the film was shot in Gotenba [outside Tokyo, near Mt. Fuji], he had no choice but to use close-up camerawork and focus on the internal drama of its characters, since he wasn’t actually in a Philippine jungle. When I read the novel of Fires on the Plain, I was more interested in the contrast between the vast jungles of the Philippines and the filthy, mud-covered humans. I wanted to explore the contrast of why humans take part in such foolish actions amidst all that beauty. Because of that specific emphasis, my approach had to be very different than Ichikawa’s.

Your adaptation does share many similar scenes with Ichikawa’s, but also some notable differences, such as the final, postwar scene. Why did you choose to have the protagonist survive the war, and what is he thinking about in that haunting final shot?

That final scene is taken directly from the original novel. In the last scene of Ichikawa’s film, the protagonist dies in the Philippines, but in the novel he survives and returns home, and I followed the same storyline in my adaptation. There’s some additional story after the protagonist returns home and, while I shortened that section in my film, it’s essentially in the same spirit as the novel. That is, when someone who’s experienced war comes back to the “real world,” it’s often impossible for them to return to a normal lifestyle, due to the massive trauma they’ve had inflicted on them. That’s what the ending is saying.

As for what the protagonist is thinking in the final shot… In my performance in the role, I tried to convey that, even though the war had ended some 70 years earlier, the fires of the title are appearing before my eyes once more, leading the character to reconsider his actions at the time, with his facial expression betraying his deep regrets for what he’s done. When I read the novel, I felt that the “fires on the plain” were a very abstract symbol that I couldn't fully understand, but that, to my mind, there were two meanings. One is of ordinary fires we use in our lives, that people need to survive. The other is the fire of war, fires that were caused by conflict. Keeping both of those interpretations in mind, I wanted to show how at any moment, the fires of war could consume the ordinary life that we struggle to live.

Another major difference between your film and Ichikawa’s is that, in your adaptation, it's made clear that the protagonist eats human flesh. But in Ichikawa's version, because his teeth are falling out, the protagonist cannot partake. Is the protagonist’s participation in cannibalism also directly from the novel?

In the original novel, yes, he does wind up eating human flesh. In my film, toward the end, the young soldier Nagamatsu tells Tamura that it’s dried “monkey meat,” and since he’s starving on the verge of death, Tamura eats what he’s been given. But at that time, he feels an instinctual regret, as if in his heart, he knows full well that he’s eating human flesh. I’m fairly certain it’s described the same way in the novel, as well. I think Ooka wrote: “There was a mysterious sadness within it.”

Also in the novel, the protagonist is Christian, which imparts a particularly religious guilt to the question of whether he’s eaten human flesh or not, and his anguish grows greater as a result. In my film, I did away with his having a relationship to religion, as I simply wanted to pursue the question of whether or not an individual human being ate human flesh. In Ichikawa’s version, I think it’s also clear that he decided not to make the protagonist a Christian.

On the Philippine front, there were many more soldiers who died of hunger than who were shot and killed by bullets, so I think what’s more important than the theme of an individual’s conflict over whether or not to eat human flesh is the depiction of the horrors of war in general, and that’s what my intention was in the film.

What are your plans for distribution of the film in Japan, and what do you think the reaction will be from audiences and critics?

Because this film is more of a challenge to promote, due to its subject matter as well as to our current political climate, rather than contract with an outside company, I’ve assembled more sympathetic people and we’re doing it ourselves. It’s all people who share the same passion I have for the film, and are enthusiastic about it. They’re heroes to me.

The only thing that I’m unsure about is the reaction. It may be that people in this country aren’t feeling much opposition to the warlike direction we’re headed, or possibly that they might be kind of happy about it. It sounds strange, but people of that mindset may find the film enjoyable. It might also be that, instead of having an opinion about the film, audiences simply feel overwhelmed by it. Though because I really want to make a deep impact on the people who are already strongly antiwar, I very much want them to see it.

In preparing for this interview, I read some old reviews of Ichikawa’s film, which was distributed overseas in 1963. Surprisingly, many reviews from that era were extremely negative, despite the film being considered a classic today. Most of the complaints were about the film being too dark, or showing too much of the true horrors of war. Your film garnered some similar reactions when it was first screened at festivals, most notably from Variety, which uncharitably compared it to a splatter film. Do you think that audiences have changed at all in the last 50 years?

I’m also surprised to hear that the Ichikawa version received some bad reviews! I think it’s a spectacular film, and not bad in any way. As for my film’s pros and cons, those who like it have said it’s quite good, and those who said it wasn’t any good… yes, the main reason is that they say there’s too much violence and that I went too far. And actually, that splatter-like, blood-spray scene was something we added after the film was initially shot and edited.

My way of thinking was that, if someone goes off to war, they’re going to witness the completely horrible things that happen—arms and legs flying off, guts spilling out—and that I had to include them, no matter what. More than depicting the human drama, I think it was important to depict the absurd and cruel things an individual person might experience, over and over again, in wartime.

Even though someone might say that the film has its pros and cons, overall, I think it might function well as a kind of strong medicine for today’s generation, a powerful antidote without which we’d find ourselves in a greater danger. As long as young people can see the film, and grasp some kind of appreciation of what war is really like, then I feel as though that’s a good reason to have made it and included those elements.

As for whether it’ll attract an audience and make any money, honestly I’d like to make some money this time since, of course, most of my films have been financed with the proceeds made off the previous one. I’m always thinking about my next films, and while I don’t have anything specific coming up, I’m always saying that I’d love to do a jidai-geki [samurai film] or kaiju eiga [monster movie], and there are also various children’s scary stories from the Sixties and early Seventies that I’d like to make into a film. So, if only in order to make the next film, I’d like for this one to make some money. But foremost in my mind, rather than box office, is that I’d like people to see the film.

I certainly think that all my films are a little strange, and that they appeal to a special kind of audience. If those audiences are happy with the film, then I’m delighted. With this film, it’s important that certain people see it and wonder “what’s going on in Japan today?” I think it’d be good if it sparked debate among friends and acquaintances on various topics about the current situation in Japan today. But in the end, an odd movie like this can’t change everybody.

The ballots came thundering in for Boyhood over Birdman (among other 2014 films), with Godard’s Goodbye to Language—the runner-up in our Critics’ Poll—shunted to lucky #13. Readers also went their own way in plumping for the dastardly doings of Gone Girl (#9), Nightcrawler (#10), and Foxcatcher (#17), as well as the nobler impulses of Selma (#14) and Interstellar (#19). Note: numbers in parentheses refer to the film’s ranking in the Critics’ Poll (Jan/Feb 2015). For each ballot, a first-place choice was allotted 20 points, 19 for second, and so on. Congratulations to the winners selected randomly from this year’s poll participants to receive Criterion Collection DVDs of their choice! And many thanks to The Criterion Collection for its generous donation of DVDs.

1. Boyhood Richard Linklater, U.S.

2. The Grand Budapest Hotel Wes Anderson, U.S.

3. Under the Skin Jonathan Glazer, U.K.

4. Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance Alejandro G. Iñárritu, U.S.

5. Ida Pawel Pawlikowski, Poland

6. Only Lovers Left Alive Jim Jarmusch, U.S.

7. Inherent Vice Paul Thomas Anderson, U.S.

8. Whiplash Damien Chazelle, U.S

9. Gone Girl David Fincher, U.S.

10. Nightcrawler Dan Gilroy, U.S.

11. Two Days, One Night Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, Belgium

12. Snowpiercer Bong Joon-ho, South Korea

13. Goodbye to Language Jean-Luc Godard, France

14. Selma Ava DuVernay, U.S.

15. The Immigrant James Gray, U.S.

16. Force Majeure Ruben Östlund, Sweden

17. Foxcatcher Bennett Miller, U.S.

18. Mr. Turner Mike Leigh, U.K.

19. Interstellar Christopher Nolan, U.S.

20. Stranger by the Lake Alain Guiraudie, France 

If I were to identify a theme at this year’s International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam—at least in the films I saw—it’d be the human element amidst vast political change. Not “human” in the trite marketable sense of heart-swelling uplift, but rather the often contradictory variations and idiosyncrasies in personality and belief that made for the best films on display at the Amsterdam festival. Amidst the hundreds of screenings in the 27th edition was a cadre of strong documentaries and very rare retrospective revivals that might not leap out immediately to casual observers of the robustly attended 10-day event.

Democrats

A standout, Camilla Nielsson’s excellent, richly ironic Democrats avoids policy-paper treatment of its subject—the making of Zimbabwe’s new constitution in a not-really-quite-post-Mugabe era—to give a breathtakingly candid, on-the-ground view of people in action. Granted extraordinary access in a country known for police-state tactics and prone to banning foreign media, Nielsson’s (talking-headless) verité one-ups the classic horse race of Primary (60) with its two larger-than-life personalities and life-threateningly high stakes. During a competitive public-comment process that the Mugabe government exploits by busing in claques praising strong central rule, democracy itself is fiercely re-negotiated. The chief players, whom we follow from dusty city outskirts to conference rooms (if not to prison), are Mugabe crony Paul Mangwana of the ruling ZANU-PF party and the opposition, Western-educated lawyer Douglas Mwonzora of the Movement for Democratic Change. Mangwana, a toothy rotund Tammany Hall type, and Mwonzora, diligent idealist in glasses, can even chuckle over disagreements, but any smiles come with the awareness of menacing forces lurking just offstage. That goes for both sides, as Mangwana is justifiably paranoid about how his government views his cooperation; while able to keep up appearances, he’ll also huff and puff against “this level of disobedience” during the constitution-writing process. Whereas another filmmaker might have stuck with Mwonzora—we do see his touching sense of triumph, albeit limited, as the constitution is put together—Nielsson lets Mangwana give perhaps some of the truest, double-edged editorializing: “If you don't change, you will be changed. Politics is about doing what is popular and what is popular changes.”

Invasion

Abner Benaim’s Invasion, about the 1989 military incursion by the United States into Panama, is another documentary about a political process—that of memory and history. Benaim portrays the stories of anguish and pride behind the greater narrative, assembling a mosaic of recollections, and mapping the sites and rough timeline for the seizure of that “tropical Saddam Hussein” Manuel Noriega—all the way up to el jefe’s flight (under a tarp in the back of a car) and refuge-at-gunpoint in the Vatican Embassy. Traversing the city, which is periodically shown in snow-globe long shot, Benaim foregrounds his evenhandedness without getting pious or bogging down lurid serial anecdotes from Panamanians, who run the gamut from a family who saw a missile land in their home, to a diplomatic Canal Zone official, to passersby on the street, to an upper-crust woman who served a soldier a T-bone steak. The invasion’s haunting central image is that of corpses strewn in the streets during the covered-up assault—a morbid tableau Benaim reenacts with eager participants, along with other incidents such as the looting of a refrigerator. All of which is recounted with rich and strange detail that should enlighten even those familiar with 1992 Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary The Panama Deception. Influenced by The Act of Killing in his dogged, reflexive approach and his use of shock cuts, Benaim helps retrieve the invasion (again) from the memory hole. In a broader context, his film made a good other-end-of-the-bomb companion with another IDFA selection, Drone, which shows how the disconnect of modern warfare is only increasing. But as Benaim balances anti-gringo and pro-democracy sentiments, he reclaims the ordeal as a Panama story first.

Of Men and War

Veterans endure their own traumatic memories in Of Men and War, perceptively programmed in apparently its first festival appearance since its Cannes premiere. Perhaps Iraq fatigue and the film’s own exhaustiveness in depicting a gradual therapy-driven recovery process have accounted for the low profile. Director Laurent Bécue-Renard (whose De Guerre Lasses focused on Bosnian war widows) films how the experience of violence continues to rip apart the patients of The Pathway Home, a treatment center in Napa Valley. Group therapy sessions, which are the emotional centerpiece of the film, seethe with frustration, survivor guilt, and despair; shades worn indoors and chair-flipping walkouts are not uncommon. But Bécue-Renard hangs on—as does chief counselor Fred Gusman, of course—without pretending that all of the men will recover. Bécue-Renard’s work won an award for Best Feature-Length Documentary, and, while it might seem perverse to mention both in the same sentence, so did Tea Time, another film facing the formal challenge of portraying group conversations in a room. Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi (The Lifeguard) shoots her subjects—high-school classmates who have been meeting regularly over tea for over 60 years—mostly in extreme close-ups, letting us read their experienced faces as we listen to their banter. Friendships and class dynamics, through snipes and sidesteps, go on display (and doll-house-perfect table sets are arrayed). The attitudes mingle conservative and let-it-all-hang-out viewpoints, making for a group portrait that’s a faithfully amnesiac crowd-pleaser without getting too cutesy (despite some way-too-easy reaction cuts to an embittered spinster).

Something Better to Come

IDFA also had the world premieres of a couple of showy, variably successful documents of stamina against all odds. In Something Better to Come, Hanna Polak, telescoping 14 years of coverage into a single film, follows a pale teenager and her family and companions who live in a dump outside Moscow. It’s as poignant and eye-opening as one might expect (though I prefer Eduardo Coutinho’s Boca de Lixo), and perhaps headed to one-liner comparisons with Boyhood, but Polak’s arduous work manages to be stubbornly resistant when it comes to the psychology of its main subject especially, and adds in some ill-advised music cues. But if that film’s shortcomings could partly be attributed to the unusual challenges of its shooting conditions, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is a maddening example of a filmmaker who hobbles his work with a misguided artistic conceit. Featuring a Leviathan-esque cold open on a refugee boat on the high seas, director-cinematographer Morgan Knibbe takes a Wings of Desire approach to chronicling the sufferings, indignities, and loves of immigrants to Europe. Overusing what might be called a FloatiCam simulated-angel technique, and voiceover musings that seem to come from beyond the grave, Knibbe chooses a distracting, hamhanded poetics to tie together this urgent material.

How to Live

Better sleight-of-hand could be found among IDFA’s retrospective presentations, specifically within a selection curated by Dutch artist Aernout Mik (who had a show of installations at MoMA a few years back). Mik’s own 2006 installation Raw Footage, showing at festival’s De Brakke Grond space, was a jaw-dropping channel-surfing collection of war rushes from Bosnia in the Nineties that reveals, among other things, female soldiers fully made up for battle. But my favorite was Marcel Lozinski’s How to Live, a deeply unnerving and at times hilarious hybrid documentary about a summer camp for young families run by the Union of Young Polish Socialists. Amid rickety lakeside cabins, husbands and wives are observed and graded on their political commitment and their participation in activities, with nosy supervisors awkwardly dropping by to ask questions. Lozinski, a leading light in Poland’s rich history of documentary, is keenly attuned to the satirical and dramatic possibilities of the bizarre situation, pitting one overeager official (who neatly illustrates the tendency toward cronyism) against an outsider couple who couldn’t care less about the whole charade. Which, arguably, might describe the film itself (without insult): Lozinski freely staged scenes and constructed his narrative in seeking to expose the perpetual window-dressing and conformity demanded by Communist rule.

1974, une partie de campagne

IDFA 2014 also programmed a series at the EYE Film Institute based on reenactments entitled Framing Reality, which I had the pleasure of Q&Aing and which accordingly I’ll leave at that, with just a brief special mention for one revival title: Jon Bang Carlsen’s enduring 1981 hang-out in the demimonde of Hollywood extras, Hotel of the Stars. One final, rare treat: Raymond Depardon’s droll early feature about a French presidential campaign, 1974, une partie de campagne, awaiting its double feature with Primary, or Democrats, for that matter. Depardon’s film spotlights a 48-year-old patrician candidate for “change in continuity,” Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who’s first seen wandering a forest in his suit, and later adored by crowds despite his bureaucratic campaigning skills (albeit with the help of Charles Aznavour at a rally). It’s a dispiriting and all too apt record of the political process as a mundane and weirdly lonely drive to power. Quite literally: at one point, d’Estaing beetles along at the wheel of his own car, and away into the night.

Fifteen minutes into Sharky’s Machine (81), the third feature credited to Burt Reynolds as director, we’re treated to a strange, somewhat patience-testing helicopter aerial shot. We are above the lights of Atlanta, hovering outside a cylindrical skyscraper with a reflective glass façade. This is the 73-floor Westin Peachtree Plaza, the tallest building in Atlanta at the time of the shoot, and, upon opening in 1976, the tallest hotel in the world, surpassed the following year by Detroit’s Renaissance Center (also designed by John Portman & Associates). The Peachtree Plaza’s attractions include a massive atrium lobby, a two-story revolving restaurant that looks out over the city, and two scenic elevators allowing access to the upper floors. As the camera moves closer to the building, it hones in on an elevator on the way up, tracking its ascent. We get just close enough to make out its occupants, a man and two women, before a cut puts us inside the building just as the elevator opens and dislodges its occupants into the hallway: a mustachioed, middle-aged man and two pieces of arm candy, all three of them piled under fur coats. The fellow with the moustache, we will learn, is Victor (Vittorio Gassman), the proverbial man-behind-the-curtain, and the skyscraper is the command tower from which he runs the vice rackets in Fulton County.  

This shot stuck out to me while recently watching a badly aged, tomato soup–palette print of Sharky’s Machine, in part because of its unusual duration—it lasts around a minute, all said, lounge jazz tinkling all the way through—in part because of the extraordinary lengths that it goes to convey very little narrative information, other than emphasizing the physical fact of the Peachtree Plaza, its singular, imposing presence over the low-slung Atlanta skyline. Reynolds obviously thought this emphasis was essential. The movie’s first image is the skyscraper, which appears isolated against a black backdrop, shaded blood red, alongside the credit “A Deliverance Productions Film.”  It’s also the scene of the film’s climax, in which Sgt. Tom Sharky (Reynolds) and his team bust into Victor’s apartment to find that his brother, a junkie hit man, has just killed their target. (Henry Silva plays the brother, though when Burt catches up with him and sends him plummeting off of the side of the building, it’s stunt man Dar Robinson who’s taking the free-fall.)  

After the movie, I got to talking with a cinematographer friend who suggested that the unusual style of Sharky’s Machine—the abundance of closer-than-close-ups and the paucity of coverage, neither of these recognizable signatures from other Reynolds movies—was evidence that the direction had been handed over to cinematographer William A. Fraker. Fraker was an accomplished cinematographer whose CV at that point included Bullitt (68), Dusty and Sweets McGee (71), and Exorcist II: The Heretic (77), directed by John Boorman, who Reynolds had at one point wanted to handle Sharky’s Machine. Fraker also directed a handful of films in his own right, most notably A Reflection of Fear (72), and shot Reynolds’s Gator (76), which, though otherwise quite different from Sharky’s Machine, also makes rather free use of the helicopter aerial shot—in fact, both Gator and Sharky’s Machine begin with them. The helicopter aerial in Gator follows a police expedition into the bayou after Reynolds’s moonshiner Gator McKlusky, accompanied by a title track performed by country and western star Jerry Reed, who also plays the movie’s heavy. This might be called a motivated helicopter aerial, as we do see a chopper with the police expedition—later drawn into a madcap chase and downed—and the view could conceivably be that from the pilot’s seat. The helicopter aerial shot that opens Sharky’s Machine is, insofar as we can tell, unmotivated. After curling around the top of the Peachtree Plaza from above, it then descends, heading due west, the setting sun’s orange rays occasionally streaking the frame, until finally picking up a lone figure moving along the railroad track: Sharky, on his way to an undercover rendezvous. A very close variation on this opens Reynolds’s Stick (85); this time the helicopter approach, begun over open water, looks up to see the outskirts of Miami then, after a cut, picks up a freight train coming into town, and a stranger hitching a ride. (Like Sharky’s Machine, Stick also concludes with Dar Robinson falling from a great height.)

Los Angeles Plays Itself

The helicopter aerial shot is, today, ubiquitous. It is also extravagant, silly, and, from the standpoint of classical narrative, almost always inessential. I know it isn’t important because when I Google “helicopter shot,” the first results all refer to M.S. Dhoni, the captain of the Indian national cricket team, who has apparently had unprecedented success batting with a shot of the same name in limited-overs cricket, whatever that is. Nevertheless, the helicopter shot was indispensable for Burt Reynolds, as it is for certain other directorial personalities. My mother, on a flight to Los Angeles some time ago, was seated next to a fellow who introduced himself as the camera operator on Michael Bay’s helicopter shots. “Everything you’ve heard about him,” he noted, “is true.” (The “him” is Bay, though I’m not certain why he assumed that my mother, who is old enough to be my mother after all, and was probably reading an Anne Tyler novel, would have heard anything about Michael Bay.) Essential or no, the aerial is one of the medium’s more impressive superpowers. In Thom Andersen’s chronicle of that most chopper-patrolled of cities, Los Angeles Plays Itself (03), the dour narrator speaks over helicopter aerials of L.A.’s SimCity downtown skyline from The Thirteenth Floor (99) and Blade (98): “Movies have some advantages over us. They can fly through the air, we must travel by land.” A diehard pedestrian, Andersen implicitly begrudges the movies this elitist advantage as something like the “advantage” enjoyed by the oligarchs of São Paulo, who travel from rooftop to rooftop by helicopter, never touching the ground.

The aerial shot predates the helicopter by a few decades. The movies (born circa 1895) and the airplane (ca. 1903) practically grew up together, and the boom years of Los Angeles were fueled by the arrival of the motion picture and aviation industries in Southern California. No sooner had controlled, powered flight been mastered than it was undertaken with a camera aboard—probably at about the same time that someone had the bright idea of attaching a machine gun to an airplane, and the histories of military and cinematic aeronautics have been intertwined ever since.

The helicopter came late onto the scene. The first functional vertical take-off and land rotocraft, the Focke-Wulf Fw 61, was manufactured in Germany in 1936, but neither the Nazis nor the United States, who quickly hopscotched their enemies in helicopter technology thanks to the genius of designer Igor Sikorsky, were ready or able to employ rotocraft in significant military operations before the end of the war. Bell Aircraft’s Arthur Young designed the first helicopters for civilian use; his Bell 47 was ready for the market in 1946, and would remain the standard for decades afterwards—those so inclined can see a Bell 47D-1 on display at the Museum of Modern Art, next to where they keep the Olivetti typewriters.

They Live by Night

The exact moment that the helicopter came to cinema is unclear. I had long labored under the impression that the helicopter aerial that opens Nicholas Ray’s first film, They Live by Night (48)—following a Model A Ford driven by Howard Da Silva as it tears down a dirt road, away from a bank job—was the first, though there there’s some disputation on this point. Patrick McGilligan’s Ray biography states that the helicopter aerial “was trumpeted as a first in Hollywood and attracted coast-to-coast wire-service coverage during the first week of filming,” while Bernard Eisenschitz’s bio of Ray has it that “Helicopters had been used before, and still were, for establishing shots, panoramic views of cities and landscapes, but never for an action shot.” According to an April 1945 item in The Hollywood Reporter, a helicopter was used on the set of George Sherman and Henry Levin’s The Bandit of Sherwood Forest to film a scene in which Robin Hood’s son and Merry Men case out a castle they’re about to storm, which gives it a decent claim for “first.”

Whatever the case, early in the They Live by Night shoot, in June of 1947, Ray and cameraman Paul Ivano went up with a hired Marine pilot, shot four takes of the drive-by, the second of which went into the finished picture, then, after lunch, knocked off 15 more setups. Eisenschitz’s bio includes a photograph of the occasion, showing a Bell 47B with the words “Armstrong-Flint Helicopter Co.” written on the tail. This would make it the property of Knute Flint, a veteran of World War II who had flown rescue missions in China in a Sikorsky R6 Hoverfly II. According to James R. Chiles’s The God Machine: From Boomerangs to Black Hawks: The Story of the Helicopter, Armstrong-Flint also did a seasonal business in “Santa-hauling,” delivering Father Christmases to improvised helipads on the roofs of department stores; the Ray film, however, was likely their entry into the motion picture business. Armstrong-Flint would later shoot the helicopter aerial climax of Jean Negulesco’s Johnny Belinda (48), filmed after They Live by Night, but released to theaters first, this being not the last example of professional misfortune to befall Raymond Nicholas Kienzle over the course of his career. Here is how the Johnny Belinda press release describes the shot:

“The ability of a helicopter to fly backwards and gain altitude at the same time was employed in photographing the final scene of Johnny Belinda. The scene is a traveling shot showing a buggy being driven along the rugged coastline. The camera pulled back and up going out to sea. The buggy reduced further and further in the distance leaving as a final impression only a small segment of earth on which the story was played.”

This particular kicker—the gradual withdraw leaving a figure dwarfed in the landscape*—is effectively the inverse of the Reynolds “where is my protagonist now oh where could he be oh look there he is” opening shot. I suppose the Johnny Belinda withdrawal confirms the smallness of man in the grand scheme of things, while the Reynolds-ian approach, singling out one story in the naked city, confirms the importance of the protagonist, with the added benefit of setting the scene. It is tempting to use Antonioni’s terms from his famous Cannes speech on Eros and call the withdrawal Copernican, the approach Ptolemaic, but both ultimately confirm the centrality of man. McGilligan quotes Ray, in a 1963 interview with Movie, stating that the helicopter aerials in They Live by Night were “intended to represent the long arm of fate, doom”—The God Machine, indeed.

Play Misty for Me

The coastline mentioned in the description of Johnny Belinda is that of the Monterey Peninsula in Northern California where another star-director who would go on to considerably more critical acclaim than Mr. Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, shot his debut feature Play Misty for Me (71), which includes some picturesque helicopter aerials of Clint zipping around the Carmel Highlands in a 1957 Jaguar XK-150. It is also the scene of another early helicopter shot, this one found at the conclusion of King Vidor’s Japanese War Bride, a sensitive, lovely, and mostly forgotten melodrama of 1952. Jim Sterling (Don Taylor) has tracked his estranged wife—the eponymous war bride, Tae (Shirley Yamaguchi, best known from Sam Fuller’s 1955 House of Bamboo, and a fascinating woman in her own right)—to the seaside bluffs of Monterey. The couple first met and fell in love when Jim was wounded fighting in Korea and Tae, then a Red Cross nurse in Tokyo, tended to him, though their life together after returning to his family’s Central Valley ranch has been difficult, and baseless slander has driven them apart. Confronted by Jim again, Tae is ready to throw herself onto the rocks rather than return “home” with him, but he pulls her into an embrace, at which point the helicopter aerial takes off in much the fashion described in the Johnny Belinda shot. It is a moment of emotional eruption, a sudden falling away of barriers, although with an additional poignant undercurrent—the ocean we’re suspended over is the ocean that separates Tae from her homeland.

It is worth noting that the Korean War from which Jim has returned, and which is still very much a going concern when Japanese War Bride was released in January of 1952, was the first conflict in which helicopters played a crucial part, though still in the role of medevac vehicles. The most common association here is with M*A*S*H, either the 1970 film by Robert Altman or the frightful CBS television show (72-83), which begins with Bell H-13 Sioux helicopters coming over a rise in Malibu Creek State Park while a drippy, Muzak version of Johnny Mandel and Mike Altman’s “Suicide Is Painless” plays on the soundtrack. (If you, like myself, were a child of Democrats in the Eighties, this particularly anodyne audiovisual combination meant that your depressing, Mike Dukakis–loving parents were about to huddle around the television, and that all fun was done for the night.) It was not until the Vietnam War,** and the introduction of the Bell UH-1 Iroquois, better known as the “Huey,” and Bell AH-1 Cobra, in 1967, that the helicopter would establish itself as a viable air support force, leading to probably the most famous motivated helicopter aerials in cinema, the “Ride of the Valkyries” strike by Col. Kilgore’s attack helicopters in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (79), shot by the cameraman David Butler and pilot David Jones. (To return briefly to Eastwood, his American Sniper contains a prominent instance of simulated drone-vision, created via CGI.)

Altman had previously contributed to the popularization of the helicopter as a regular director on the single-camera drama Whirlybirds (57-60), born of the union of Desilu Studios and Bell Aircraft, part of a small TV helicopter craze along with Highway Patrol (55-59), which also “starred” the Bell 47. Through the Fifties and into the next decade, the helicopter aerial was gradually integrated into the vocabulary of filmmaking—though maybe integrated is not exactly the word. Because footage taken from an unsteady, vibrating helicopter invariably suffered from a bit of frame-jostling, these aerials couldn’t be smoothly matched*** with fixed-tripod or dolly shots—the heyday of handheld, also anticipated by Nick Ray in his On Dangerous Ground (51), was still a ways off—hence the tendency to limit the helicopter aerial to stand-alone, sweeping gestures, the grand opening or grand closing. Hitchcock had wanted a long, slow helicopter aerial approach across Phoenix and into the room shared by Marion Crane and Sam Loomis at the beginning of Psycho (60), but according to assistant director Hilton A. Green, “This was several years before the real solid [camera] mounts were developed,” so the graceful action Hitchcock desired was impossible. This was remedied with cameraman Nelson Tyler’s development of what would be called the Tyler Major Mount, first used on John Sturges’s The Satan Bug (64). The Tyler Major Mount was soon joined by the first “ball mount,” a stabilized sphere four-foot in diameter which affixed to a helicopter’s nose, developed for military purposes by a Canadian division of Westinghouse. An embarrassment of information on both innovations is available in this “History of Aerial Photography” by one Nick Spark.

Whirlybirds

Hitch did eventually get his opening helicopter aerial, swooping down the Thames at the beginning of 1976’s Frenzy, and Gus Van Sant corrected the compromised series of lap dissolves settled for in the 1960 Psycho with his shot-for-shot remake of 1998. The solid mounts ushered in a new era of no-quake helicopter aerials, the most iconic of these being the ones that follow the Torrance family on their wending drive towards the Overlook Hotel at the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (80), shot in Glacier National Park by Greg McGillivray who, per Kubrick, “spent several weeks [emphasis mine] filming some of the most beautiful mountain helicopter shots I’ve seen.” (The brief glimpse of rotor shadow has occasioned more discussion than I dare go into here.) Through the late Sixties and Seventies, the establishing shot of a city skyline, either opening a movie, introducing a city as character, or as interstitial cutaway, became a commonplace. My favorite instance of motivated helicopter aerials occurs in Don Siegel’s Coogan’s Bluff (68), which incorporates one of the passenger helicopters of New York Airways, then in the last year of making scheduled drops on the top of the Pan Am Building.

Come today, the helicopter aerial establishing shot has become a rank cliché, a fallback way to open a movie or roll into a city with a splash. Arriving from a body of water is usually considered a plus: think of innumerable approaches to lower Manhattan across the Bay of New York, Chicago from Lake Michigan, or Boston from across the Harbor, the last-named preferably with The Standells’ “Dirty Water” playing, though the desert approach to Las Vegas is also much-beloved. Typical examples include the introduction of downtown Chicago in John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (86), the approach to the amusement pier in “Santa Carla, California”—in fact the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk—at the beginning of Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys (87), or the introduction of South Beach, Miami, in Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage (96) (Accompanying theme music is The Flowerpot Men’s “Beat City,” Gerard McMahon’s “Cry Little Sister,” and Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” respectively.) Any really memorable helicopter aerials from this period have to go the extra mile—I am thinking in particular of Jackie Chan being dangled over the spires and radio towers of Kuala Lumpur in Police Story 3: Super Cop (92), though I also have a soft spot for John Badham’s Blue Thunder (83), a to-live-and-die-in-L.A.’s airspace actioner starring Roy Scheider and a modified Aérospatiale SA-341G Gazelle, which spun off a TV series that survived for all of half a season.

Nevertheless, we live in an age of digital cameras with no cap to shot duration, and while the lovable drone makes inroads as a cinematic tool (see here and here), I have not given up hope that the helicopter aerial shot may yet do new, great things for cinema: a single-take heist-and-highway-chase film in real time! A domestic drama taking place in a Midtown high-rise shot entirely in exteriors! An opening shot à la Sharky’s Revenge, but where the camera never picks up a protagonist, or picks up and disposes several! A Rashomon-like interrogation of what really happened to Brian Williams and that Boeing CH-47 Chinook on that fateful day! If Kiarostami did it with a car, why can’t somebody do it with a whirlybird? The sky is yours, young cineastes—seize it!

* An interesting variation on this occurs at the end of the first episode of Louis C.K.’s FX comedy Louie, which riffs on the double meaning of “pilot.” Louie goes on an unsuccessful date with a young woman (Chelsea Peretti), and when he fumblingly attempts to kiss her on a bench at one of Manhattan’s piers, she breaks away, sprints to a waiting helicopter, and lifts off, leaving our schmo protagonist to helplessly watch her escape.

** In the interest of not unduly libeling my parents, I should mention that my depressing Democrat father participated in our adventure in Southeast Asia, which probably had something to do with dampening his enthusiasm for the gung-ho Reagan presidency.

*** Speaking of badly integrated: in the 1956 American re-cut of Ishiro Honda’s Gojira (54), re-titled Godzilla, King of Monsters!, featuring clumsily inserted hulking Canuck Raymond Burr as an identification figure for round-eyes, the word “helicopter” is pronounced as “helio-copter,” some indicator of just how exotic the contraption still, at that point, was.

Since the dawn of time, man’s natural predator has been the ninja. The only way to study the ninja safely, without him shooting throwing stars through both your eyes, is to capture him on film, and many brave souls have sacrificed everything to bring him to the silver screen.

Bionic Ninja

Rage of Ninja (88), A Life of Ninja (83), Clash of the Ninjas (87), Born a Ninja (91), Bionic Ninja (86), Full Metal Ninja (88), Shaolin vs. Ninja (83), Mafia vs. Ninja (85), Zombie vs. Ninja (88), Alien vs. Ninja (10), Cobra vs. Ninja (87), Ninja vs. Ninja (87), Twinkle Ninja Fantasy (87), Ninja, Phantom Heroes USA (88), and Thunder Ninja Kids: Wonderful Mission (91) are just a few of these ninja nature films.

But there are two series that are the most deadly of them all, and both are from Cannon Films: American Ninja 1 - 5 and the Ninja Trilogy of Enter the Ninja (81), Revenge of the Ninja (83), and Ninja III: The Domination (84). Cannon formed the molten core of ninja movies because it was founded by two Israelis, Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan, who understood that ninjas are basically supercool Jews. Both groups like black clothing, obey ancient traditions, and have strict codes of behavior that must be followed or they lose their power. Ninjas are small in number but extremely powerful and capable of taking out much larger opponents, like Israel.

The Jewish immigration to America is well-documented, but how did the ninja immigrate? In 1980, author Eric Van Lustbader’s thriller, The Ninja, hit the New York Times best-seller list for five months and was promptly optioned by 20th Century Fox who pledged a $20 million budget and lined up super-producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown (The Sting, Jaws) to make them a ninja movie. Golan and Globus immediately had brain embolisms. They knew that God wanted them to make ninja movies, not 20th Century Fox, so they rushed Enter the Ninja into production. Using whitey to ease audiences into the world of ninja, Franco Nero, Italian star of Django (66) was cast as a ninja whom we first meet dressed in white, stabbing, slashing, and shooting arrows at a bunch of red-suited ninjas (which means they’re extra-spicy). Then he fights a black-clad ninja (which means he’s extra-deadly), jumps off a waterfall, cuts off an old dude’s head, but it turns out that it’s a fake head and this is the ninja equivalent of graduating magna cum laude from ninja school. Going to school wouldn’t seem this cool again until Harry Potter. In theaters across America, little boys experienced their first orgasms. 

Enter the Ninja

Like many recent college graduates, Franco Nero has an enormous mustache and no idea what to do with himself, so he bums around the Philippines where his old buddy Frank runs a farm with his sexy wife played by Susan “Straw Dogs” George. But Frank has a problem. “She’s a very sexy lady,” he tells Franco of Susan. “I mean, she wants it all the time. But the problem is, I can’t get it up lately.” Ninjas not only understand how to kill a man with their bare hands, they also understand erectile dysfunction. It turns out that Frank is suffering from two problems, alcoholism and Mr. Venarius, an evil rich guy who wants his farm. 

Unfortunately, death is the only cure for Frank’s alcoholism, but Franco Nero does cure his Mr. Venarius problem by murdering the evil dude with throwing stars. He also demonstrates his ninja lovemaking skills with Susan George, so it’s a win-win for everyone except Frank, who is dead. Enter the Ninja may be shoddy and cheap but it was monumental for two reasons: it kicked the ninja trend into high gear, and it introduced the world to Mr. King Ninja himself, Sho Kosugi. 

Cast as an extra by Mike Stone, the movie’s writer and action choreographer, Sho had charisma and martial arts skills that earned him more and more work on the Enter set until he doubled almost every single actor and landed a feature part as the man who answers the call when Mr. Venarius pitches a fit and shrieks, “I want my black ninja and I want him now!”

Revenge of the Ninja 

Convinced that their black ninja was made of money, Golan and Globus signed Sho up for Revenge of the Ninja. The first Hollywood movie where an Asian actor received sole star billing (Bruce Lee shared top billing with his co-stars in Enter the Dragon), Revenge opens with a rowdy band of ninjas showing up at Sho’s Japanese home and redecorating it in wall-to-wall dead family members. As Sho’s pal Keith Vitali growls: “Ninjas are the worst bastards the world has ever known!” 

To heal his pain, Sho moves to America and works in Keith’s art gallery, sharing with humanity his greatest gift: an extensive collection of tiny dolls. Unfortunately, he is burdened with one other survivor of the massacre: a terrible baby who grows up to be a mouth-breathing ankle-biter with a giant pumpkin head. This is Sho’s real-life son, Kane, and he is terrible. In later films, Sho will be joined on screen by his second son, Shane, but audiences will have to wait until 2012 to meet his third son, Bane.

Things get complicated because while Keith Vitali is Sho’s good friend, anyone with a brain knows that he’s a treacherous dickbag because he drives around in an enormous Cadillac with the vanity plate SENSEI 7. By the half-hour mark he’s slipping into bathrooms, putting on a silver mask and ninja suit, and getting into the heroin business with mafia guys who could not be more stereotypical if they were made out of linguini. 

Ninja III: The Domination

It ends in a shocking explosion of ninja-on-ninja rooftop violence that feels like the Eighties stabbing you in both eyes with a jacuzzi, smoke bombs, ninjas posing against the skyline, scythes, swords, and a flamethrower. Another hit was born, and now the G&G Exploitation Factory doubled down on ninjas, Sho Kosugi, and the Eighties with their next movie, Ninja III: The Domination. Directed by Revenge auteur, Sam Firstenberg, and starring Sho Kosugi and Lucinda Dickey (the same year she shot Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo for Firstenberg) it’s basically The Exorcist meets Revenge of the Ninja with a part-time aerobics instructor (Dickey) possessed by the spirit of an evil ninja. None of the Cannon movies have an identifiable filmmaking style beyond “get the shot”—but drenched in dry ice, aching with random bursts of neon wall art and laser-light-show lighting effects, Ninja III comes the closest to having “style.” Firstenberg loves synthetic fabrics, Day-Glo colors, and borderline-musical numbers, like aerobics scenes and on-the-nose songs on the soundtrack whose lyrics underline the onscreen action. He would have felt right at home directing episodes of Saved by the Bell.

Realizing that ninjas = money, Cannon planned to make American Ninja with Sho Kosugi, but he left the studio over creative differences to strike out on his own, so they turned to Chuck Norris, who’d had his own primal ninja-perience in The Octagon (80), but he turned them down, too. Finally they settled on model-turned-actor Michael Dudikoff. For insurance, they paired him up with Michael Stone on action, and Sam Firstenberg on direction, and the result was the ninja movie as bar mitzvah.

Dudikoff plays Joe Armstrong, a young American soldier with amnesia who learns how to be a man. When his convoy is attacked by horny ninjas who want to kidnap the colonel’s daughter for sexual intercourse, he instinctively defeats them using ninja skills. In a sequence right out of Gentleman’s Agreement (47), he’s discriminated against because of the things that make him different. It’s not until an elder ninja teaches Dudikoff the great traditions of his people (ninjas) that he is able to embrace his heritage and become a man. A ninja man who beats orange, red, blue, and yellow ninjas sporting wrist lasers. This celebration of manhood climaxes when, instead of reading the Torah, he jumps out of an exploding helicopter. Mazel Tov!

American Ninja 2: The Confrontation

American Ninja 2: The Confrontation (87) reunites Stone, Firstenberg, and co-stars Dudikoff and the inimitable Steve James, as two rangers/ninjas investigating a series of missing marines on an island so anti-American that soldiers have to wear jams and muscle shirts instead of their uniforms in order not to antagonize the locals. Also, the costume budget was probably maxed out by multicolored ninja jammies. Eventually it’s revealed that the Marines are being kidnapped and turned into genetically engineered ninja superwarriors to protect powerful drug dealers. Kids today might be surprised to learn how popular this weapons program was in the Eighties, and the editors of this website feel that the Ninja Arms Race is an understudied aspect of the Cold War. Apparently made because everyone wanted a beach vacation, American Ninja 2: The Confrontation is an easy, laid-back affair that offers up one low-budget gem after another, including what must be the best line in all ninjadom: “What is this? Ninjas? Drug pushers? My men being kidnapped and murdered? This is really beginning to get on my tits!” 

There would be three more American Ninja movies released in 1989, 1990, and 1993, each featuring declining quantities of Steven James and Michael Dudikoff, but despite ending with a whimper and not a bang, the American Ninja movies might be the only film series from Cannon that had official licensed merchandise. 

Mock ninjas at your peril. Cannon’s ninja boom taught us that ninjas come in every color of the rainbow, they are comfortable killing us with lasers and flamethrowers as well as with their bare hands, and they successfully revived the mainstream martial-arts movie in America, which had died with Bruce Lee back in 1973. And pity poor Eric Van Lustbader. That 20th Century Fox adaptation of his book, The Ninja, with a $20 million commitment and two super-producers on board? It still hasn’t seen the light of day. He recently posted optimistically on his website: “The good news is that the project has been revived, has a director attached to it and is awaiting a screenwriter.” Sorry, buddy. You should have bet on Golan and Globus instead.

LINKS! LINKS! LINKS!

Ninja III: The Domination

... Speaking of ninjas (and who isn’t?) on Friday, February 20 at 10:45 p.m., Film Comment Selects is screening the holy grail itself, Ninja III: The Domination, on 35mm. As an added bonus, it’s preceded by the epic Cannon Films documentary, Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films.

... Also, did you know that February 22 is an actual holiday called Ninja Day in Japan? Expect it to become a national holiday in America any minute now, because otherwise ninjas are going to kill us all with weighted chains and Tekko-kagi claws.

... Long considered one of the worst restaurants in New York City, Ninja New York still exists! Yes, the bad sushi restaurant where the waiters dress as ninja and jump out at you, shrieking from the shadows, and then do terrible magic tricks at your table, is one decade old this year. The New York Times is not impressed.

... The long-in-the-works movie adaptation of the comic book Cowboy Ninja Viking, about a man in a government program who is all three of those things in one burly body, might finally have a director(s): John Wick auteurs Chad Stahleski and David Leitch.

... Korean hitmaker Choi Dong-Hoon (Tazza: The High Rollers, The Thieves) has finally wrapped production on his epic period piece, The Assassination. Starring Ha Jung-Woo, Lee Jung-Jae, and Jeon Ji-Hyun (My Sassy Girl), it’s about a bunch of resistance fighters taking on the Japanese in Thirties Korea. The movie has been filming since last August, making this an almost six-month shoot. Now all that remains is postproduction. And speaking of long shoots, rumor has it that Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Assassin, starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen, which has been shooting since 2013, and which pulled out of Cannes last year, may finally be heading to Cannes this year. We’ll believe it when we see it.

... Remember how badly the Hong Kong government was treating Hong Kong TV, a new television station with lots of money that wanted a free-to-air license to compete with ATV and TVB? Well, wouldn’t you know it, ATV wasn’t able to pay its license fees in January, nor its employee salaries. Thanks to the sale of some farmland they own, they finally scraped together enough money to make salary. Cutting cash-rich HKTV out of the picture is looking more and more like the kind of smart decision Hong Kong’s current Chief Executive is becoming known for.

... Last but not least, Kung Hei Fat Choi! It’s Chinese New Year! Welcome to the Year of the Goat! Chow Yun-fat, Donnie Yen, and Aaron Kwok wish you a happy one!

Called the “First Lady of Iranian Cinema,” Rakhshan Bani-E’temad may not be as well-known outside her country, but for three decades, she has sketched some of the most striking portraits of life in Iran—seen, for the most part, through the eyes of the least privileged. Constantly blending the powers of documentary and fiction, Bani-E’temad’s oeuvre is brave in its study of human resistance under ever-challenging social conditions, from the critically acclaimed Nargess (92)—a story about innocence consumed by cruel love—to Under the Skin of the City (01), a riveting drama that tells of the disintegration of a working-class family in contemporary Tehran.

As a filmmaker, the Tehran-based Bani-E’temad herself has been continually tested by the powers that be. Refusing to submit to strict censorship criteria imposed on Iranian cinema, Bani-E’temad took a break from fiction films in 2006 and instead pursued her social and political investigation through the documentary form—her most notable one in that period being We Are Half of Iran’s Population (09). Now she has “returned” with Tales, a panorama of the lower-depths of Tehran, where economic hardship, abuse, corruption, and drug addiction coexist in a movingly candid portrayal of social decline. Organized into a series of short films—a strategy initially adopted to avoid censorship—the film beads together the fates of several characters (nine of them from Bani-E’temad’s previous films) who fight to preserve their dignity in a world where, it seems, there is very little left.

After its much-praised debut at the Venice Film Festival—where it won the Best Screenplay award—Tales went on to Toronto and other international festivals, and this weekend screens at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of Film Comment Selects on February 20th and 22nd. From societal inquiry to autobiographical quest, FILM COMMENT and Bani-E’temad discussed her approach to filmmaking, with a clarity and directness reminiscent of her films.

The protagonists of your previous films, including Abbas and Touba from Under the Skin of the City and Nargess from the eponymous film, return in Tales to offer a glimpse of their fate. What was the thought or sentiment behind extending and merging their stories?

The characters in my movies, from the very first one up to now, although they are fictional characters, are based on people that I have lived with and that I have come across during my research for movies. They have always been on my mind and whenever I stop and think about them, I think about what they would be doing now, at this age, at this time. So they’ve never left my thoughts. Even though they were, you know, movie characters, for me, they’re like living people, and people whom I know and whom I have touched. Because of that, I’ve always been thinking about what stage of their life they would be at right now and what they would be up to, et cetera.

Was this also an opportunity for you as an artist with 30 years of experience, to make a kind of synthesis of your work? To be able to investigate, as it were, how all of your films come together and what they ultimately mean?

In fact, as I get older, I’m more keen to experiment, more and more. And the Tales were for me a new experiment, which really fit well with the feeling I had during that time, when I started making the Tales. I had not been making movies for a few years, and I was missing it. And this format gave me the opportunity to have a new experience in filmmaking.

It seems like the protagonist of Tales is Tehran itself. The city is home to these characters, and yet it feels like a destructive force that sucks them in and consumes them… It is like a microcosm of the larger “system” they’re being played by.

Naturally, when we look at these characters, they are in different social conditions. And we don’t look at them in isolation, we also look at the impact of the society on them. And Tehran being a metropolitan city, obviously it has many different characteristics and many social conditions which have different impacts on different people. I just want to emphasize that no film can be a complete reflection of any society. And Tales is not a mirror-reflection of the whole Iranian society. What it reflects is the issues that I’m concerned with and that are interesting to me, such as issues of workers, women, drug addicts, people suffering from economic hardship, et cetera.

Can you talk about the satirical scene with the obnoxious bureaucrat, and its significance to you?

We have a bureaucratic system which obviously is not modernized and has serious flaws in it. And one of the flaws that I concentrate on in this film is the communication between the person who is responsible and answerable to people, which is the Hassan Majooni character—the bureaucrat. I’m not saying that the whole bureaucratic system in Iran is like this, but this kind of behavior does exist and I wanted to focus on it. Our society is becoming modernized but on this journey to modernity, there are problems and there are signs of flaws. And as a filmmaker, I wanted to highlight some of these and bring them to the attention of the audience and the people.

The minibus scene in which a group of unpaid workers pour their hearts out to the documentarian’s camera is one of the most memorable scenes in the film. It is a handheld-shot, 10-minute-long single take, which involves more than 30 actors. The fluidity of the camera, which constantly bounces from character to character as they speak, and the authenticity of the performances truly give it a documentary quality. How did you approach the filming of that scene?

Generally, I don’t like to have anybody filming behind-the-scenes action when I’m making a film—you know, what actually goes on during the filming. But this particular scene is one where I wish I had somebody doing the behind-the-scenes filming so that you could see what happened and how I filmed it. [Laughs] We did not have any room for even adding one small extra camera in that scene, so that’s why there is no behind-the-scenes.

This scene involved professional actors, amateur actors and non-actors, and in addition to those: myself, the cameraman, assistant cameraman, sound recorder, assistant sound recorder… Everybody was packed into this minibus which was already full, and our voices could be heard. And this required rehearsal after rehearsal. We rehearsed this for a full month, and we rehearsed it even again on the day of filming. And on the day of the filming, we managed to successfully do it on the seventh take, and the seventh take was near sunset, where we would have lost the light. So we were lucky that on the seventh take, we managed to do it successfully.

Ms. Touba, whom the workers have chosen as their spokesperson, delivers a haunting speech. “Honorable authorities,” she begins, “whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, please come and see for yourselves our miserable life.” But at the end she adds: “Who are you showing these movies anyway? And even if someone watches them, so what?” I think this is a key line for many of your films.

The sentence which Touba says in the film, the first time I heard this exact sentence was 24 years ago. I was making a documentary and a character called Mehri asked me: “Who do you show these films to anyway?” And this sentence had so much meaning that it stuck with me. And I used it time and time again in many films that I made since then. And I think the reason I use it is as a reminder to authorities to know what people are feeling and be aware of their sentiments.

This sentence also suggests that your characters are aware of the futility of their struggle, and yet they keep fighting…

I believe very strongly in resistance and fighting for my rights. And because of this, my characters in the movies have the same characteristics. They always fight for their rights and they believe in resistance. And I think this is the essence of social change, and my characters are never victims, they’re all fighters, and they all believe in resistance.

Another scene that I found especially poignant is the one in which Nargess is visited by her abusive husband at the clinic. I’m from Turkey and can very much relate to her case, especially now that violence against women has become an ever more pressing issue in our country (see Ozgecan Aslan Murder). Can you talk a bit about Nargess and the other female characters in the film and how they reflect your ongoing interest in women’s place in Iranian society?

Sadly, though we are in the 21st century and we’ve reached the peaks of technological advancement, violence, especially against women, seems to still be acceptable in our society. There is violence against women all over the world. In some countries, in some societies, it is more than the others but it is still prevalent. And as it is one of my main concerns, I think that it’s something that I always try to show and it’s something that needs to be discussed. And there has to be more awareness of the subject all over the world.

Reading some of the American reviews for Tales, I often encountered the word “melodramatic” to describe the Nargess scene. Why do you think Western audiences tend to label such scenes as melodramatic, a term they might use to describe an “overdramatized” or sensationalized situation (though a scene like this is very common in our countries…). Is it because they have trouble relating?

Definitely, I agree. I think that the cultural and social conditions in their countries may make them think of these scenes as melodramatic—though I don’t see melodrama as a negative point in films. But because they cannot understand our culture and our social conditions, maybe they feel that there is too much emotion in these scenes and this is why they label them as melodramatic. At the same time, when we look at some of the films made by those societies, maybe we think that there is insufficient emotion and there is too much coldness between characters, and we expect them to show more emotion. So it works both ways.

Tales is your first fiction film since Mainline (06) and has been sitting on the shelf since 2011. Can you talk a bit about that period of censorship and your decision to make documentaries rather than fictions?

I have always been interested in making documentary films. It’s one of my main loves in cinema. And the period where I was not making any fictional films, and I was making documentary films, doesn’t mean that I was out of work or not active in movies. I was actually very active. And even sometimes when I’m making documentaries, I’m thinking I’ll turn them into a fictional film later. And… I wasn’t censoring myself, I was just not happy with the management and the people who were running the film industry in Iran, especially you know, at the management level, and people who were responsible. And therefore, it was a kind of sanction that I placed on them—that, for these years, I will not make any movies until I am in a position to be happy about the environment and I find it suitable to my taste to make movies again.

The documentary filmmaker in Tales says at the end of the film: “No film ever stays in a drawer. Someday it will be seen.” Throughout the film, we watch him being shut out of the places where he wants to film. And yet he can still speak optimistically… Do you see this character as a kind of alter ego for yourself and your latest filmmaking experiences?

Yes, definitely. It’s naturally a reflection of me and other filmmakers like me that, whatever the conditions, we go on making films and we believe that these films, some day, will be shown. They will not be kept in a drawer forever.

Was Tales released in Iran? How was it received?

Tales was shown at last year’s Fajr Film Festival in Tehran, and we are waiting for it to have a public release. Really my main concern is for the film to be shown in Iran so that the Iranian audience can go and watch the film, because it was made for them.

Last year I went to all of the screenings of Tales at the festival, all over the town, from the poorest districts to uptown. And the reaction of the audience was incredible. It far exceeded my expectation. Some of the cinemas, when they saw how many people wanted to watch the film, they would stay up until 2 a.m. to put extra screenings to satisfy the huge demand for watching this film.

Your cinema is often compared to that of Ken Loach in the U.K. or the Dardenne Brothers in Belgium, who, like you, come from a documentary background. Do you feel close to their sensibilities? I ask partly because their cinema, like yours, is very much grounded in their countries of origin but still manages to acquire a universal scope.

I believe that these filmmakers—and there are other filmmakers similar to them—move from the surface of the society and go and look deep into the society, deep into the characters’ unique characteristics, and then the feelings and characteristics of those people touch people all over the world. They find that they can relate to them. You know, if you go deep into the society, you will find things which are common among all societies and all countries. And they [these filmmakers] have managed to do such things.

Maybe it’s something in the water. That’s one explanation offered by writer-director Riley Stearns for the recent deluge of films dealing with mind control and cult deprogramming. As Stearns hastens to add, though, the works themselves are tonally distinct and categorically diverse, ranging from elliptical thriller (Martha Marcy May Marlene) to soft science fiction (Sound of My Voice); from psychological drama (The Master) to found-footage horror (The Sacrament). Stearns’s addition to the canon, Faults—which screens tonight as part of Film Comment Selects—introduces a dark and idiosyncratic vein of humor, and complicates the standard hierarchy by making deprogrammer Ansel (an eye-opening Leland Orser) more unstable than Claire, the cultist in his charge (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, also the film’s producer).

After writing for short-lived but acclaimed TV series My Own Worst Enemy and Tower Prep, Stearns moved to short films, writing and directing Magnificat (11) and Casque (12), both featuring Winstead (to whom Stearns is married), and The Cub (13), a five-minute parable marked by the warped comic sensibility fast becoming his signature. The Cub, which screened at Sundance, introduced the “dubious role models” trope he identifies as a motif in his work, embodied in Faults by both the desperate, disgraced Ansel and Claire’s hapless, frustrated parents (Beth Grant and Chris Ellis). Theatrical in its economic and inventive use of space (confining most of the action to a drab motel room, as did fellow Texan Richard Linklater’s Tape), Stearns’s first feature exhibits deft and daring mood swings and refuses to shrink from its material when the going gets weird. Stearns recently spoke with FILM COMMENT about tight spots, false memories, and why cult movies are now enjoying much more than cult success.

How long has the story been germinating for you?

We’re kind of losing track of the years now. I probably came up with the idea a little bit before Sundance 2013. I had a short called The Cub, which I made the summer of 2012, and I was working on that, kind of waiting for that to come out. We got into Sundance and I had this idea for a script which ended up being Faults and I wasn’t sure exactly how it would be made, or the tone and where the story was going to lead, but I knew that it would have something to do with the world of deprogramming from a cult. After I made the short, I did realize that it didn’t have to be a straight-up drama, that I could be a little bit weirder and funnier with it. After Sundance that year, I went back home and wrote it in two weeks.  There are actually very few changes from the first draft that I wrote.

Is it this true that the seed for it was planted from an episode of Cops that you watched when you were a kid?

That’s what I say, but I haven’t been able to find any record of that episode. I wrote that in my director’s statement for a festival (might have been SXSW), and it is as real as can be in my head, but I can’t find any record of an episode dealing with deprogramming. My dad doesn’t remember the conversation when I brought it up with him, either. So it’s funny that I do remember this so vividly, and it’s been this thing that’s stuck with me for years and years, but maybe it was some weird dream that I had. I don’t know. But I guess I’m still sticking to it that there is an episode out there of Cops where deprograming takes place, but as far as the records show, there hasn’t been an episode like that.

That’s hilarious.

It’s so weird because I’m positive that it existed but, again, can’t find any proof.

I understand that one reference point was Ted Patrick—the father of deprogramming, if you will, and the author of Let Our Children Go. I wonder how his activities and his writings inform the screenplay.

He didn’t inform it at all. I knew about his kind of career and that he started doing this without any medical degrees or any real knowledge of cults, and that he was more than just this enforcer-y kind of dude who had a method and was trying to help people get their family members back. But Leland Orser, our lead actor who plays Ansel, referenced him heavily in building his character, specifically in terms of being this weird guy who isn’t necessarily someone you’d think would be the perfect guy for a job like this, but somehow does it really, really well. Leland read the book, and then gave a copy to Mary and myself. The funny thing is that Ted Patrick signed Leland’s copy, and our copy, which he found on eBay, was also signed by Ted Patrick. In our movie we have Ansel signing books for people and knocking the price off just to get a couple of bucks. I guess Ted Patrick did that a lot too.

But in reference to research, I did read one book from the Eighties, a guy who did some deprogramming and was involved with The Moonies when he was younger. He wrote a book after he got out, got his counseling degree and everything, and he was able to help people. So his deprogramming was a little more grounded in scientific research. I used his book as a blueprint of how deprogramming would go down instead, which got more into the specifics of it. I did throw a lot of facts out the window when I started writing it. I knew that our film, even though it is sort of real, is stylized as well. I didn’t want to be too grounded in reality. 

Leland Orser has said that there were films that you and he watched and discussed to elucidate which part of the character is humorous and which part is tragic. I’m curious which films those were.

I am a huge fan of Yorgos Lanthimos, who directed Dogtooth and Alps, and I probably referred to him a lot to Leland. I was very much inspired by Lanthimos’s methodology, and his style of getting a removed performance from his actors—a deadpan performance, you could say. And I told Leland that I saw it as not being as removed in terms of performance as they are in his films. We have a similar thing in that a lot of the dark subject matter in our films are actually quite funny, and sometimes something that is so dark can actually be funny, even though you would not normally think of it as being that way. So we pulled a little bit from Dogtooth, and just the way Ansel talks most of the time—he said everything in a more matter of fact, deliberate way.

I can’t help but make the connection that Dogtooth, Faults, and The Cub are all about impressionable people who are placed in the charge of others with dubious motives. Is that something that you’re interested in?

Not consciously, but it’s funny, what you said about the parents and the being raised by people with dubious motives, be it a parental figure or actual parents. That’s kind of a thing with me, at least for the last few years. Not necessarily intentionally—I think that I like doing things about characters and about real people and having their surroundings be the strange part of it. It’s funny that the past two films, again super different from each other, share that common bond of dubious role models.

One of the most interesting things in Faults to me is the way that Ansel is introduced as being irrational, almost delusional. Then, later on when his competence begins to shine through, he’s still the most volatile and desperate figure on the screen. I wonder if you set out to invert the standard dynamic where the deprogrammer is the stable one.

Not to give too much away of the movie, but that’s his arc. He’s a guy who starts off in a bad place, but he refuses to take responsibility for his actions that have led him to this point. The film begins by just throwing it at the audience, just a day in the life of this man, and watching things breaking down—not even just the deprogramming where he’s supposed to be the strong one, but generally. A lot of times the protagonist is superhuman, and he makes all the right decisions and even if he makes some missteps here and there, it all comes around in the end. The way that I’ve always looked at this film, is that Ansel starts in a bad place, ends in a worse place, but thinks that he’s in a better place. And in his mind, at the end of this movie, he thinks that everything is better than it could ever have been and we know it be the opposite.

How would you describe Claire’s arc relative to that?

I think that she’s in a place where you never really know what she’s thinking. We’re inside Ansel’s POV the entire time, and it shows that people can be whoever they want to be to you, and you have no way of knowing the truth. If they say one thing, that’s the truth that you’re getting, and the only way you can go forward with interacting with them is taking that truth at face value.

The claustrophobia of the setting contributes to that anxiety too. What was the hotel room like to shoot in? How was that limiting and how was that liberating?

This is my first feature, and I’ve never had the budget to do the soundstage thing before—I’ve never had an idea that needed to be on a sound stage. But we did shoot all the interiors of the motel room inside a soundstage in Long Beach, California, which was nice because everything was controllable. We were able to do anything that we needed to do. We could remove a wall if we wanted. We still tried to treat it as if it were a real set, out in the real world. The color palettes were more of a creative process, which was really nice for our production designer. It’s the way that you position furniture that makes it feel more claustrophobic. So any claustrophobic feeling that there is on screen is a testament to the way it was shot, and the lighting and the production design—just everyone who was involved. We definitely transformed the space that was quite cozy actually, pretty nice, into something that feels a lot less desirable on screen.

In particular, an extended late scene in the bathroom…

Yes, which is my favorite scene.

Mine as well. You start with something that is already rather constricted and you move to a space that’s even more so.

Yeah. We always knew we were working toward that scene, so I met with Tom Hammock, who is a production designer who had done a few other films with my producer. He tried to get me to think about what the most important scene in the film was, and he said something that struck me: “What do you think the iconic image of the film would be?” I immediately thought of our three bathroom scenes. That’s where a lot of the progress or the momentum of the film is figured out. So after that, we made that bathroom feel like a completely different space. It’s a lot cooler—very blue. That was the one room that was a bit more constricting in terms of space to shoot in.

That really benefited the scene itself because the actors were in there with our cinematographer and our sound guy and a focus puller. I was by the camera every single scene of the movie except for that shoot because that room was just so tight and cramped. And you would feel it. They [Winstead and Orser] would come out of the room and they would be sweating and emotionally drained. The scene really needed to be urgent, it had to have a certain gravity to it. And I couldn’t be prouder of the way it turned out.

How long did it take for you to shoot that scene?

We had a day to shoot that and another scene—after we finished that, we had to shoot another scene as well. Luckily, it was our third- or second-to-last day of the entire shoot, so we’d been building up to it. Normally people like to get their toughest scene out the way early on, and I was glad that I had time to get used to the world of the film for this. A day feels like a very short amount of time to shoot 10 pages, but we ended up getting through it very quickly. It didn’t feel like we were rushing. It felt like we were moving on when it was right, and again that’s just Leland and Mary knocking it out of the park.

I’m a big fan of films about cults myself, and about deprogramming. In the past three or four years we got a lot of them. Do you think that’s a response to anything in the culture?

There’s gotta be something in the water. In the Seventies and Eighties it was Satanic panic and the cult scare, and I think the movies reflected that. And then we got Holy Smoke [99] and that was by itself, kind of in the middle of nowhere. Our trailer mentions Martha Marcy May Marlene, even though I had the idea of doing of a deprogramming film before Martha Marcy May Marlene. And I’m sure that Sound of My Voice had been percolating for a long time, and The Master was somewhere else inside Paul Thomas Anderson. It definitely feels nice that there are these films out there. Like you, I’m a fan of films about cults. I find them to be super-fascinating—I’ve always been afraid of them ever since I was a kid, the idea of somebody being able to control you even though you are a strong-willed person who is intelligent and aware of what’s happening.

They’re totally different from each other. Yours has a strain of absurdist comedy that is not in the others. I noticed that all of the characters, even on the fringes, exhibit this peculiar, almost cultist behavior. Like the Jon Gries character: he despises rudeness, he detests nicknames, and he hates informality. You seem to be saying that even if we’re not in a cult, we all exhibit these behavioral patterns that are programmed.

Definitely. The thing about caricature, whether it is grounded in reality or a little absurd, is bringing character traits out of people and having certain elements shine a little bit brighter than others. The Coen Brothers are masters of doing that and bringing interesting character traits out of their leads or their side characters. Everyone is given a back-story. And with us, I feel like that’s me wanting to make something that was interesting no matter who’s on the screen. 

II want to ask about the nosebleed motif, because your characters, when they are having an epiphany or coming close to the truth, they get nose bleeds. What was the idea there?

I’ll give two answers. The first answer is that I wanted something that the characters could bond over. I wanted something Ansel and Claire could share, and have that be something that she sees happening with him, and then she’s able to share that later on and they feel a closeness or a bond they don’t have when they first meet. My second answer is that when I was writing it, I thought it was cool, and once I put it in there, it took on a life of its own and started to appear more and more. I didn’t really know why it was there. Sometimes you’ll have an idea and you don’t know why it needs to be there, but you keep going with it. When Leland, Mary, and I were sitting at my kitchen table talking about the script and what it meant, we got to the nosebleeds and Leland asked me what I thought it meant, and I gave an answer but was also like, I’m not sure.

That kind of scared me, that I didn’t know why something was in my script. I mean, I should know. And Leland said: “Well, I’ll tell you what the nosebleeds mean,” like the wiping of the blood in the bathroom for his character. He told me that when Ansel sees the blood and he’s cleaning it up, he’s envisioning the blood of Jennifer who was the cult member that he couldn’t help, who he wronged in some way. And when he sees the blood, all he can think about is her, and it’s a very abstract and internal idea for that character himself, but that starts to become a very real reason for me and I latched on to that idea. I know that people think of nosebleeds as being very cliché, but I’m glad that I didn’t know that when I wrote it because I wouldn’t have kept it.

What’s next for you?

I’m mainly just excited for Faults to come out. I wrote the script two years ago and we premiered at SXSW last year. The film will come out almost a year to the day from when it premiered last year. In the meantime, I have a short I wrote a while back that I still would like to try to do. I don’t want to stop making shorts even though I’m doing features now. I also have an idea for a feature that I started breaking the story for. It’s still a little too far away to put into words.

Of the handful of contemporary filmmakers who have found their own fruitful, imaginative twists on the essay film, the Paris-based artist Eric Baudelaire stands apart. Born in Salt Lake City, Baudelaire took up photography after having already established himself as a gallery artist. Soon after, he started devoting himself more seriously to filmmaking, which he continues to treat as one element of a broader artistic practice that also involves installation work, photographs, written texts and the staging of live performances.

Baudelaire’s two most recent nonfiction films—generous works of fierce intelligence sometimes belied by their serene visual textures and careful pacing—both revolve around unsimulated exchanges of letters. In the case of Baudelaire’s exchanges with the Japanese radical filmmaker Masao Adachi in The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (11), the mail in question was electronic. In the case of the prolonged correspondence he kept up with Maxim Gvinjia starting several years ago—the exchange that eventually became Letters to Max, his new film—their exchange left, against many odds, an actual physical trace.

At the time of his correspondence with Baudelaire, Gvinjia was part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a country that did not, technically speaking, exist. Since the fall of the USSR, Abkhazia—a small Soviet splinter state in the Caucasus—has been lobbying for recognition as an independent state. Its recent history is profoundly contested. In the early Nineties, the Abkhaz expelled thousands of Georgians from the region during a highly chaotic civil war that spiraled into a widespread, horrific program of ethnic cleansing. The Abkhaz, however, insist that they were the victims, not the aggressors, of a system of ethnic and cultural domination. Many Georgians with roots in Abkhazia are still barred, as Baudelaire suggests late in Letters to Max, from coming home.

The movie leaves much of this story unspoken, but not unfelt. Its subject is the great difficulty of creating a historical narrative around a place, of making a place divulge its secrets, and, by extension, of orienting oneself in a place—physically and morally.  

FILM COMMENT spoke with Eric Baudelaire on the eve of the film’s U.S. premiere at the 52nd New York Film Festival last fall. Baudelaire will appear at the Museum of Modern Art tonight for a special screening of Letters to Max.

What is the weather like in Abkhazia?

In the summer it’s hot and sunny. In the winter, it’s very moist and foggy. It’s a subtropical climate, and so it’s a very strange climate: all the heat from Turkey glides over the Black Sea and then it gets stuck in the Caucasian mountain range, which is very high. Abkhazia is almost like a diagonal country, because it goes from sea level to 15,000 feet in the course of a few kilometers. The horizon isn’t diagonal.

How did you first encounter the place?

I have an old friend who is one of the foremost political science specialists in the small field of those who study de facto breakaway regions in the former Soviet Union. He’d been telling me about these different states, and one summer we planned a trip together. We went to Transnistria, which broke away from Moldova, Abkhazia, which broke away from Georgia, and Nagorno-Karabakh, which broke away from Azerbaijan. This was in 2000, and that’s the first time I went to Abkhazia—with this friend, Leon Colm.

Did you shoot anything there at the time?

As a photographer. It was one of my first projects as a photographer, even though I was already 27 years old. It was a time when I was starting to veer away from what I had been doing and was becoming more and more interested in images. I took thousands of photographs. I never did anything with them, but they were the first layer of work that I had done in that region.

How did you meet Max?

He came to pick us up at the Russian army base where we were staying the first morning. He was kind of sent over by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, because he’s a good English-speaker. He showed up at the army base wearing, I remember, sunglasses, blue jeans and an “I Love New York” T-shirt. He was 24 years old, and we just immediately hit it off. Every time I returned to Abkhazia, we reconnected. He came to visit me in New York in 2001. We were friends before anything else. At the time, he didn’t have many responsibilities: he was a relatively low-level employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As he rose on the ladder, I was gradually moving away from photography and towards film, so we sort of had this parallel movement in our lives—but at the same time, it had become very clear to both of us for a very long time that we should make a film together in Abkhazia.

But you shot the footage we see in the film after your correspondence with Max had already ended.

Yes. All of the footage was shot in September of 2013. It was all shot a year after I had sent the letters.

To what extent did you find yourself choosing what to shoot based on what you knew the content of the letters to be? And to what extent did you find yourself led by what you found there at the time?

I’d say it’s a bit of both. Because I’d photographed so many times and places in Abkhazia, Abkhaz, my friends there joke that I’ve been to more places in Abkhazia than they have. It’s a small country, and I’ve driven around for weeks and months at a time with the same person—Sergei—in the car. I’m very familiar with the landscape there, and so while writing the letters I was often thinking about particular places. Then when I listened to Max’s responses a year later, I would often think of places to film in. But this is really what my work as a filmmaker has been about for a while: the relationship between sound and images. It’s an asynchronous relationship.

There’s not a direct correspondence.

Yes, but there’s also a gap in time. We’re used to, in film, thinking about the sound and the image being synchronized. That’s what film is about: synchronicity of sound and image in time. I have been very interested in messing with that relationship, and Letters to Max is very much a film that’s based on asynchronism.

Was there any characteristic of the landscape of Abkhazia that you were hoping to bring out in the visual texture of the images themselves?

There are some images that have always been in the back of my mind when I’ve been photographing or filming in Abkhazia. When I say images, I mean something like visual universes. One of them is Kafka’s The Castle, which is allegorically a little bit like the story of a filmmaker or photographer who’s going to a place. In the case of Kafka’s book it’s a land surveyor who’s trying to survey the land of a castle that’s nowhere to be found, cannot be surveyed because it cannot even be reached. The castle, allegorically, is the state: it’s the structure of power under which the community is organized. In my project that’s been going on for 15 years—trying to chronicle the non-existing state of Abkhazia—there’s something akin to this character wandering around the landscape, trying to find the castle. I think in my mind I’m trying to shoot the castle, find it. That’s one of the reasons why there’s always a lot of fog in the films. A lot of impossibility of seeing things.

There’s also a big visual relationship to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. In many ways, Abkhazia is the Zone: the place where you come to fulfill your dreams, the place that is impossible to reach. You need a stalker to take you around; it’s a place where the relationship to time and space is different. The vegetation and the landscape also remind me very much of Stalker.

Having traveled to many of these breakaway Soviet states, was there anything that surprised you about Abkhazia in particular?

I think there are 150 different ethnic and religious groups in the Caucasus, which is a region smaller than Texas. Some of them are completely unique. The Abkhaz language has 56 consonants, a handful more vowels and no roots to any other known languages. It’s a completely autonomous cultural existence. There are very few languages that have no known roots to other languages. It’s a very weird thing. This speaks to the nature of Abkhazia as a community: it exists in no relation to anything else. In a way, the fact that they’re an unrecognized state today is not a surprising change in the setup. They’ve always been autonomous—linguistically, culturally—and yet absolutely mixed with all the other cultures and ethnic groups in the Caucasus.

If you look at a Soviet map of the world, fold it into four pieces and open it up again, the region of intersection—the cross-point of the folds—will be Abkhazia. They always joke about the fact that they’re the place where the North and the South converge and the East and the West converge. And that’s very true. There’s something very Eastern about Abkhazia and something very Western about it; something very Northern, and something very Southern. It’s a place where, culturally speaking, these four regions of the world connect: Asia and Europe, Slavic lands in the north, and the Black Sea and Arabic lands in the south. It’s a point of convergence.

The epistolary form is notoriously hard to express on film. Some critics argue that including too much text on screen sinks a movie, or that the nature of letter-writing is somehow anti-cinematic. There are great films involving the movement of letters through space, but not that many having the actual form of a letter. How do you go about structuring a film like this?

I wouldn’t know how to describe why it is that the epistolary form occurred to me. In The Anabasis, it was natural that I would have an e-mail exchange with Adachi because that’s how we meet people today.

The reason it’s a letter with Max is that I wanted to send him something that would not arrive. I’ve been sending e-mails to Max for 10 years now. But I really wasn’t sending him a letter the first time; I was sending a letter to the French postal system. I wanted to see what would happen when a French post office worker had to look up the country in the system and it wasn’t there. What would they do? What would be the big red rubber stamp they would put on the envelope? “Wrong address”? “Address does not exist”?

And then I forgot about it. When I got an e-mail from Max 10 years later, I was very surprised. Soon it became a ritual. I knew he wasn’t getting my letters for 10 or 12 weeks, and some do get lost and returned. It was like a meditative exercise in the morning trying to figure out what to say to Max today, knowing that he won’t hear it until much later—and that I won't hear back from him until much later after that. What happens when you break a conversation down into these very stretched-out time frames?

How do you go about adapting an exchange of letters into a film? What shape do you give it?

I think that maybe 10 or 15 letters into the correspondence, when it became clear that we were going to make a film, I started to think about the letters as one thinks about a screenplay. The structure of the film starts to emerge. When you interview somebody, the order in which you ask the questions is extremely important in driving the narrative of the response. This is something I’ve been working on since The Anabasis. The rhythm in which you ask questions, the rapport you establish: it all gives a particular texture to the response. Making The Anabasis, I did six hours of interviews with May Shigenobu; it was all over the place. When I met Adachi two years later and did his interview, it ended up in the film almost unedited. I’d thought about the structure so much that I knew the exact order in which I wanted to talk about things.

With Max, it’s similar. By letter 10, I was really thinking about when to raise what questions. How do we develop the character? When do we want to hear about Max’s family? Since I’m not hearing his responses, it’s a one-way scriptwriting exercise. Then it comes back, and it’s obviously completely altered by everything that he had to say. But if you look at the Final Cut Pro timeline, it’s fairly linear. We start with letter one and end with letter 74, although there’s some mixing around in the middle, inversions, and things that are removed.

What other films have struck you as useful in thinking through these methods? Were there any works in particular that motivated your transition to filmmaking?

I feel Chris Marker is an extremely important filmmaker for me, but the form in which Marker made his films—with written commentary, which is beautiful—also determined the fact that I refuse to work with written commentary in my films. I cannot out-Marker Marker. A lot of contemporary filmmakers work with commentary now that the essay film has come back very strongly, and very few can write it the way Marker did.  

The other end of it is, obviously, Godard and his particular use of commentary, which is far more entertaining, based in dialogue and fictional characters.

Though less so in some of the later films. In Histoire(s) du cinéma, you’re getting a more Marker-like mode of address, if not a more Marker-like voice.

Yes. So then how do you make a film about the real if you’ve also rid yourself of using archival material—which is another decision I made, to avoid using archival material as much as possible, and only use it for very specific reasons—and set aside the traditional vocabularies of the essay film? I’ve always been a great admirer of oral historians. How do you make a film around that? One of the differences is that the histories in my film are highly edited.

I’ve gradually developed this self-made theory about the relationship between images and sounds—when they’re very much in tune with each other, and when they’re disjunctive. That’s the language that became my little space in filmmaking: interview-based films and correspondence. Then, it really becomes about what you film and how you piece it together—how you close and open up gaps between the sounds and the images.

I’m curious how you see your first-person voice within this framework. In a late Godard film, for instance, the first-person voice is the guiding intelligence behind the film and the movement of the images. There’s still an “I” addressing a “you”—and that’s a very traditional essayistic mode. The “I” in your films, I find harder to place.

I tend to become a character in the films. The “I” is placed by the subject of the film, not by me. Adachi will talk about Eric in the interviews. He’ll say, “When Eric does this…” because he’s talking to my translator, so he talks about me in the third person.

He’s directing you.

Yes. And Max is addressing me because he’s answering me. I think maybe my place in Letters to Max is easier to identify. My address to him places me as the letter-writer, and he addresses me in return. But as to who I am…

Of course, you’re also the author of the images, which do have a kind of first-person perspective. That’s especially interesting when they’re layered over a soundtrack on which Max is addressing you.

And the ultimate control is that I’m the editor of the films. The cut is really where all of this gets organized.

To what extent do you see a tension between the person through whom the images speak and the soundtrack?

That tension is the creative tension in the works. Obviously, you appropriate the material. Everything becomes yours. The six hours of tape become yours. You cut them, invert them, and turn them into whatever you want—even if they weren’t yours initially, but something you collected. But that appropriation, and the juxtaposition of that appropriated voice with the images, is really the place of creation for these films. It’s the land from which the film grows.

Think of Marker’s Sans Soleil: whose voice is speaking there? It’s a fictional cameraman writing letters that he did not write to a woman whose voice is read by Simone Signoret, speaking about this fictional cameraman in the third person and the past tense. Where is the voice of Chris Marker? His voice is that entire construction, plus the images that we’re seeing, plus the editing. And for me, my voice is a kind of collusion as well. You can enter it wherever you want; you can identify it as either the entire construction, or just this “Eric” that is sometimes referred to within the film.

To be honest, I don’t spend a lot of time trying to plan that. A lot of these films are very organic processes: I wrote the letter, I didn’t expect it to arrive, then I wrote a bunch more, then it slowly became a film, then I set it aside and was busy with The Ugly One for almost a year, then The Ugly One is released in Locarno and two weeks later I’m on an airplane to Abkhazia with a camera. In that process, the question of how to construct the voice of “Eric” is not at the front of my mind. It occurs a bit more on the editing table. But I’m comfortable with the fact that the voice is the entire film, from the credit typography to the music that’s chosen. The position of “Eric” is ambiguous in that construction—and I’m OK with that.