Finally, the sequel…
This is so funny and bizarrely heart-wrenching. Someone give the creators a TV deal, STAT!
Saw an early screening of “The Artist” tonight and it’s my favorite film so far of 2011. The lead actor Jean Dujardin needs a Best Actor nomination, although I would give an award to the dog, too. The director, Michel Hazanavicius (whose other films I now need to get from Netflix immediately) told the audience that at first he wanted to remake “The Invisible Man” until he realized that making a silent film with an invisible protagonist was a really BAD idea.
Enjoy this podcast of the Q&A which followed the screening between host Jeff Goldsmith and writer/director Michael Hazanavicius. It’s fascinating.
http://www.theqandapodcast.com/2011/11/artist-q.html
And here’s the trailer!
The novelist’s inner voice
Nov 13
Stewie hassling Brian about the novel he’s writing is one of the greatest moments of Family Guy. And since I’m a writer, it also makes my eye twitch.
Saw this show in Los Angeles on Saturday. A cabaret featuring the music of Tarantino films. Particularly floored by renditions of “Love is a Red Dress,” and “Stuck in the Middle With You,” but where was “Little Green Bag?”
Their next show is “For the Record: John Hughes” and I intend to be there. “Don’t You Forget About Me” AND “Danke Schön?” How could I miss it?
by Carolyn Cohagan
Dearest Chumbudu,
I hope this letter finds you well. Indeed, I hope it is able to find you at all. Since you returned to the island, we have heard not a peep from you, and we can only pray to the Gods for your safety. Mother cannot sleep, she is so distraught with the idea of you falling prey to a Whangdoodle or Vermicious Knid, so please write to her as soon as possible, and put her mind at ease.
Although I did not understand your decision to return to our homeland last year, I must confess that now your departure seems like a wise and prescient move. The chocolate factory has not been the same since the retirement of Mr. Wonka. Our benevolent employer did his best to leave us in good hands, but I am sad to report that chaos reigns in our candy kingdom.
“The boy wonder,” as Mr. Wonka called him (although downstairs we prefer “boy blunder”) made his first order of business to cut our daily teatime, and suggested that room and board at the factory did not mean “all you can eat.” He then proceeded to initiate a ration system. Well, I thought there would be a riot! But you know us, Chumbudu. There was a lot of passionate singing and fervent rhyming, but not a fist was thrown.
Next thing you know the boy removed all the nuts from the factory. That’s right! All of them! Pistachios, almonds, coconuts . . . Just because he doesn’t like them. In one misguided decree he has removed all texture and nuance from our art. I’m glad you left the country before you had to see a brittle without a peanut. You would have wept.
And then came the worst offense. He slashed our pension plans! Just like that. This time I wasn’t having it. No amount of dancing could placate me. And so I marched into his office and demanded justice. And you just won’t believe what the insipid little urchin said. He told me in no uncertain terms that Mr. Wonka had smuggled us into the EU illegally, that we were undocumented workers with no rights, and that we were getting an excellent deal that we should be very happy with. He said if I wanted to leave I was happy to go out and join the unemployed Jamaicans hanging out by the hardware shop!
I tell you, it’s a dreadful time to be orange in Britain. There are no jobs, and people are losing their homes, and this is when society looks to blame anyone who is different. There has been a bout of depression among the workers. Last month sweet Hulanadee drowned himself in a vat of marshmallow.
Not only was it tragic, but it was a hard, hard funeral. No one could think of anything that rhymed with marshmallow. Of course since that day, it’s all I can think of: harsh & shallow, dark gallows, face so sallow, oh I could go on for days . . .
But enough of my complaining! Things aren’t all bad. Sidaaraha had her baby, a gorgeous little girl, called Neepee. And Tondaroo and Shaylandoo finally got married (between you and me, I heard Shaylandoo is already licking someone else’s gobstopper, but that’s another story). And soon it will be time to celebrate Hodidake, my favorite holiday, but it won’t be the same drinking pig fat from our shoes without you, my dear cousin.
All I ask is this, if you should ever decide to return to this cold land of fog and tall man odour, please bring with you some sort of weapon. We did not have the foresight to arm ourselves when we embarked upon our long journey so many years ago. We were blinded by the charm and kindness of Mr. Wonka, but now the veil has been lifted, we have plummeted from our sugar high, and we could greatly use any sort of axe, hatchet, or machete that you are able to smuggle in on your person. Just one should do.
With deepest affection,
Jupudah Loompa
This is an interview I did with Terry Gilliam for Film Independent in December of 2009
To call Terry Gilliam an auteur almost seems like an understatement in today’s Hollywood where so many directors are also writers – producers – actors, but it takes more than hyphenates to earn one’s own adjective. “Gilliamesque” is a word that conjures up a rich world of surrealism, humor, beauty, risk, and sometimes failure. My own love for the director began with Time Bandits, which I probably saw 20 times, but nothing could match that first viewing when I watched slack jawed as the hero’s parents blew up at the end of the film. Who does that? No one in Hollywood, that’s for sure. These kind of absurd and unorthodox choices are what lead Mr. Gilliam to his permanent status as an ex-pat independent filmmaker extraordinaire.
His latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which FIND is screening on December 9, has gotten more press than any in decades, due to its standing as “Heath Ledger’s last film” and fans of Ledgers will not be disappointed. He has a surprising amount of screen time and his talent and passion are in full bloom. But the film should also go down in history as the moment when CGI finally caught up to the imagination of Terry Gilliam.
The movie is Faustus on acid, and it is impossible not to be enchanted by the stunning imagery and the vision of contemporary London as lived by a group of seemingly medieval actors wobbling around the city in a horse drawn carriage/house/portable theater. At the center of this eccentric troupe is Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) an immortal man who has promised his lovely daughter (Lily Cole) to the devil (Tom Waits) once she turns 16. Parnassus decides to take advantage of the devil’s lust for gambling and offers him one last wager in an effort to save her.
Mr. Gilliam spoke to FIND about the joys and frustrations of filmmaking, inspiration, and his own dance with the devil.
By Carolyn Cohagan
Even after all these years of making films, you still seem giddy about filmmaking. Where do you get your inspiration?
I don’t know if I am giddy. I may just be a very good actor pretending to be giddy. I’m normally giddy at the end of the process, because it’s over and we’ve got a film and it works. During the process, I’m not like that at all. I’m much more worried and concerned. It’s just a great thing to be able to make films, to be able to work with the kind of collection of people that are necessary to put a film together, from carpenters, electricians, writers, dancers, actors, singers, the whole lot. You’re in this mini-world of people who for a brief period of time are all focused on one thing – getting this film done and that’s great.
When is your favorite part? Preproduction when the idea is coming together and you’re finding those people? Or is it the middle when you’re on set, or when it’s over and it’s in the can?
To be honest, I think editing is the best part. In the beginning, in preproduction, it’s all about the dreams, the possibilities, and it’s all exciting, and it’s going to be great. And then shooting is the reality and you run out of time there, you don’t have enough money to do that, and you make a mistake there. Shooting is always nerve wracking. And then you come to editing and that to me is finite. You’ve got the pieces, or enough pieces to play with hopefully, and I really enjoy that part. It’s quiet and it’s me and the editor, and it’s like you’re doing it yourself.
I read that at one point you were a real pain in the ass in the editing room, that because of your background in animation you wanted to be involved in the cutting of every frame.
(Giggle) That was a difficult moment. That was on Jabberwocky and the editor Mike Bradsell wasn’t used to a director who was in there every day. He was used to people who would come in and look at the film and then go away for a few weeks and come back and say, “Well done. Change two little things,” and that was it. And coming from animation, I was more aware of what every frame was, or what it could be, or what it meant, so I was a bit focused on minutiae. It wasn’t necessarily the best way to work and eventually I wore myself out. I think the hardest thing when you’re editing is to maintain objectivity.
And now you’re able to stand back a bit more?
I think maybe I get bored more easily now. (laugh) But I try to keep myself back more and once you’ve found good editors who you like working with and who are on the right wavelength, you can let them fiddle with whether it’s one frame or two frames, that way or the other way.
So it’s a lot about trust.
Yeah. Eventually, over the years, you find the right people.
Dr. Parnassus keeps making deals with the devil. You’ve compared raising funds for your films to working with the devil. Do you think artistic compromise is inevitable if you want the public to see your work?
It depends if you’re somebody who wants to communicate to an audience, whether you like the audience or not, or whether you’re just a complete egomaniac and want to say or make something that only pleases yourself. I’ve always liked audiences and I want them to come and I want them to enjoy and appreciate the film, to get involved in it, so I’m always thinking about audiences. It’s never just about my idea, which is the most brilliant thing on the planet and must be preserved at all costs.
When you start working on a script, you’re trying to write a story that people will find interesting. The compromise that I won’t allow to happen is when the studio wants to change the story after we’ve made it, presumably to reach a larger audience and that’s just not fair. That’s not part of the game. Brazilwas the perfect instance of that. We all set out and we made exactly the movie that we had enscripted and then the studio wanted to give it a happy ending and change very essential elements. I said there’s no way that’s going to be allowed and so we go to war.
Do you miss the immediacy of cartooning?
Cartooning was nice because it was basically a one-person job. It could be me doing what I want do to and not having to spend a lot of time convincing other people of my ideas or what I think we should be doing. But working on films is great because you are collaborating with a lot of people, and so you are testing your ideas all the time and whoever you’re working with suggests something else, which you can either accept or not, and usually their idea is an interesting one, and that triggers a new idea in my mind, so the thing is constantly growing and that’s equally exciting. So it just depends on my mood, whether I want to be gregarious or whether I want to be alone. (laugh)
If you were just starting out now as a filmmaker with the Internet and Youtube at your disposal, what do you think you’d be up to?
I have no idea, frankly, because I really don’t know what’s going on anymore. On the one hand, you make little films on your digital camera and you edit on your computer and you put them out over the Internet and people can see them and that’s great. I’d probably be doing things like that. Whether that leads to proper filmmaking, I don’t know. Before I ever directed, I had a Bolex 16mm and I’d take a three minute roll of film and on a weekend I’d write a little story and I’d try to shoot a little film. And with the Internet I’d probably make my three-minute film and share it with a lot of people. I never thought I was reaching a larger audience back then, but they were fun little things to do, and I would probably be doing that now.
What is it about medieval imagery and iconography that inspires you and feeds you?
It’s a bit of everything. I’m a real magpie. I’ve always loved painting – Brueghel, Bosch, the Surrealists, the Symbolists – the work I love, most of my visual ideas, have come from reading books and listening to the radio, frankly, because I’ve got to imagine the scene. And comics are wonderfully free and uncensored. I don’t watch that many movies now. If I have films in my head they’re from 20 years ago.
I loved seeing the combination of contemporary and medieval London in this film. The traveling stage was unbelievable – the height of it. I can’t imagine what it was like to film it.
It was a nightmare. We thought this little traveling stage was going to be very simple, it was a nightmare. It had to be adaptable so one minute it could be static and then it could open up and it had to be pulled by horses, so in each mode a lot of work had to be done to transform it into the next stage. By the end of it, we were quite angry with that little theater.
You have complained about a lot of current filmmaking being repetitive and formulaic. Can you name some filmmakers that you think are doing interesting work?
My problem is I’m not watching films. I’m so bored with them. The Coen brothers always do good work. Guillermo del Toro. Have you seen the film Let the Right One In? That got me going. The Lives of Others. I thought that was a fantastic film. What’s happening in America is that there are too many film schools, too many film students. They seem more interested in how to have a successful career rather than in being bold and taking chances.
You once said that you were making the same movie over and over again. Is that still true?
I keep playing in the same playground over and over again, this borderland between fantasy and reality. I guess they’re all about that in one form or another.
After you finish something, how do you refill the well? Do you return to certain locations, books, art or films?
I don’t know. What usually happens is I finish the film and I spend four or five months promoting it, and by the end of that I hate the film, because I’ve been talking about the same thing for so long. And then if I’m lucky, I’ll sink into a deep depression that will take up a few more months, and then little by little, if I hit bottom, then I start crawling my way back up, looking at some old ideas, looking at some new ones. Hopefully someone calls me on the phone and says, “What about this?” And little by little you start reassembling a world worth living in.
Join us at the FIND Film Series screening of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus Wednesday, December 9.
Lynn Shelton recently won the Acura Someone to Watch Award at the 2009 Spirit Awards. She continued her lucky streak with the much-lauded Sundance premiere of her latest film, Humpday, which was picked up for distribution by Magnolia Films. The actors starring in Humpday, including Shelton herself, improvised all the dialogue, and the result is a candid and hilarious tale of two straight men who decide to have sex with each other in the name of art.
Our members love to hear the logistics of how a film gets made. Can you tell me about your shooting schedule and budget?
The budget was very lean. It was under half a million. No one got anything up front.
I pulled it together with a lot of in-kind donations. I gave everyone back-end (points) so that when I made money, they made money. I’ve worked with these guys over the years and so we’ve developed a relationship. And our shooting schedule, because of the nature of the production, was a 10-day shoot.
Wow, that’s impressive. What was your background before you started making films?
I have a BA in theater. I was an actor in my teens and twenties, but I became disenchanted after a while. It wasn’t fulfilling all my creative needs, and it became unhealthy for my mental state. So I transferred my addiction to photography, a side interest of mine. I ended up getting an MFA in photography at SVA, the School of Visual Arts, in New York, which, luckily for me, also had “related arts.” The school was more about trying to help you find the artist that you were meant to be. We worked with computers, sculpture, and video. I made three video pieces while I was in school. I was trying to figure out if I was going to be a video artist like Bill Viola.
I had one marketable skill when I got out of school: editing. When I moved back to Seattle to raise my family, I started getting a lot of jobs editing narrative films. And that’s where I learned about narrative structure. I came very late to filmmaking. I guess I needed this long circuitous route. I don’t think I would’ve had the confidence when I was younger.
Is this the first film you’ve directed and also acted in?
Yes. It was hard. When I’m acting, I have to be completely unselfconscious. I can’t be watching the scene from the outside, and that’s exactly what you need to do as a director. At first I thought, “I can never do this again,” but later I thought, “I can, I just have to have a lot more pre-visualization.” The scene I was most featured in was the most difficult to shoot [the party scene], and it involved a lot of people. Plus we didn’t have enough time in that location. That was the only big, big challenge. But I learned so much from doing it. It was really a delight.
How did you decide to take the role?
I was stumped on who to cast, and [cast member] Mark Duplass suggested I play the part. At first I dismissed the idea, and then I realized it would be easier – one less person to beg to work for nothing. Plus I didn’t want to cast an actress and then describe this person that I had so clearly in my mind. A friend had cast me in a short film a year before, and I’d learned a lot about acting for the camera, so that also gave me an extra bit of confidence.
I know you work organically and get inspiration from the people you know. How did the idea for Humpday come about?
It started with me wanting to work with [director/actor] Mark Duplass, who was working on a film in Seattle [Baghead]. I was a still photographer on that set. I hoped to meet him and bond with him, and my little plan worked. He blew me away, his acting in particular. He said, “Let’s do it. Let’s make a movie,” and he went back to LA.
I was trying to think of ideas, and a buddy of mine came and stayed with me in Seattle, another filmmaker, and he went to this local festival called “Hump,” which showcases amateur porn videos. It was the first time he had sat down and watched gay porn, and he was totally compelled, but he couldn’t say exactly why. He just said it was fascinating visually, like sculpture.
I thought it was very amusing and it got my wheels turning, just thinking about straight guys and the boundaries of their sexual identities. It’s unique. Male friendship is really compelling to me. Over the years I’ve seen male friendship with so much passion that it verges on homoerotic, and yet there’s this terror that they might secretly be gay.
I once asked a male friend why he was so adamant about not sharing a bed with another straight man and he answered, “Because in the middle of the night, I might forget I’m not gay.”
[Laughs] It’s like they’re all terrified of their latent sexuality. And I decided that it was an interesting dynamic to explore. At first I approached Mark about being the traveling character, but he had just gotten married and had a baby so he was like, “I’m so feeling the domestic thing.”
What was the dynamic between your lead actors on the day of the big “hump” scene?
They were well prepared. We shot the whole thing in order, which is such a luxury. We didn’t know what was going to happen. I had an outline, but the actors improvised the actual dialogue. We didn’t want the outcome to be a foregone conclusion. By the time we shot it, they were really close to those characters – it was almost like they were those characters.
It was the first time either of them had kissed a guy, period. There was this one improvised scene that was half an hour long, and it was unbelievable. I was holding the second camera most of the time, and it was so hard to keep it still. They just, completely off the cuff, improvised the whole scene – taking off their clothes, putting them back on, the Pretty Woman line, running to the bathroom. It was really exciting.
So at this point the guys didn’t know if they were going to end up in bed?
The guys were pretty clear about how far they were going to go. They were so invested. I think they would have done it if it had felt right. Josh said that it was the first time he’d kissed a man and it felt wrong, off, but if it hadn’t, nothing was predetermined.
Were there lessons from your last film, My Effortless Brilliance, that you used on Humpday?
My Effortless Brilliance was very pure. I created a process out of a reaction to frustrations I’d had with my first film [We Go Way Back]. I made it in the traditional way, with a full crew, a script, I auditioned actors, and we shot on 35mm. We were on a very, very tight schedule, which I observed was really hard on the actors. And people who had blown me away in auditions, mostly theater actors, didn’t have that comfort on a film set.
I longed for a more organic process. I had an idea for an experiment, where there would be no script and I would just use people I already wanted to work with, rather than hold auditions. I was delighted when there was a movie at the end of it. Afterwards, I felt so much more confident.
But with Brilliance I probably cut too many people off set. I had no lighting. It was just me and my DP. So the next time out, I wanted to up the quality and my DP felt the same way – better eyelines, better lighting, just better looking. I wanted Humpday to have a strong narrative drive, to be a more classic movie experience.
Also, on Brilliance I was the sole producer on set. It was stupid and I don’t know what I was thinking. So this time I had a couple of producers. We also had an editor ready to go. It was the first time I had worked with an editor – I had edited all my own films before – and it was a big deal to hand over the controls. But that turned out to be a beautiful relationship.
People have described you as part of the “Mumblecore” movement. Do you think that’s accurate?
Oh God, I don’t know. Isn’t that term passé? [Laughs] A lot of people when they write about “Mumblecore” describe young, single, white guys – slackers – writing about their lives, which is not my category. At the same time, if you look at my work from a technical view – the shoestring budget, hand held cameras, a lot of improv – I suppose it could fit. “Mumblecore” is a bit of a ridiculous moniker. It was good for a while, but now it’s outworn its usefulness.
What advice would you give to filmmakers wanting to use improvisation and collaboration to create their scripts?
Casting is essential. Not every actor is up for this kind of work. It can be too loose and meandering. And some people feel a need to riff and be funny, but I find that if everyone has a clear objective and action in the scene, that need lessens. I’ve always hoped that the people who are attracted to this kind of working are going to be good at it. You know, everyone uses improv in such a different way. Mike Leigh, he workshops with people and writes down their words and creates a script. I don’t rehearse at all. The final draft happens in the edit room.
What are you working on now?
David Gale of MTV, who used to be with MTV Films and produced Election, moved over to their new media department and contacted me a day later. He asked if I’d be willing to create a relationship with them and create a web series. It’s a hybrid of documentary and narrative format, based on a series called $5 Cover, about the music scene in Memphis. It’s musicians playing themselves with music interwoven into the whole series. It’s very authentic feeling, and really great, and I really like the particular aesthetic. But instead of trying to clone the Memphis version, they want me to add my vision to the Seattle version. I’m in development on that.
And I have another movie that I am planning to shoot after the web series. It’s a sort of My Dinner with Andre film – a nice, easy, one location shoot.
There was a bidding war for your film at Sundance. How did you finally choose Magnolia?
Magnolia gave us the best deal, that is, unless the film totally tanks, because they gave us a decent percentage of the gross. Which means their model is the same model that I used to make the film. I love [president of Magnolia] Eamonn Bowles and [senior vice president] Tom Quinn and they were the ones in Park City pitching to us.
I wanted to sell the picture to people who really, really believed in it and who could give it a large theatrical release. Magnolia has the means to do that – they have that relationship with Landmark – and they promised us a 15 city minimum. Their belief that it could succeed in theaters and their willingness to give us a percentage of the gross is what tipped the scales.
We met with a lot of great people. I wanted to sell the movie to everyone! [laughs]
Shortly after this interview Humpday was selected as part of the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. To see Humpday at the LA Film Festival please visit LAFilmFest.com
This winter Cherien Dabis made a splash at Sundance with her debut film Amreeka, a terrific comedy about a Palestinian woman and her son immigrating to Illinois. The film manages to be funny, charming and relevant on multiple levels. She is a FIND Fellow who has participated in Project Involve, the Director’s Lab and Fast Track.
When FIND last spoke to you, you were in post-production for Amreeka. Now you have been to Sundance, received rave reviews and the film has been picked up for distribution. How does it feel?
Incredible! (laugh) It’s been quite a ride. The response has been phenomenal. It’s really sort of awe inspiring to me. While I had lofty dreams about where it could go, I was always very realistic about what would most likely happen. I didn’t allow myself to dwell too long on the big dream, because it was more about loving the process and just giving it everything that I had, and holding onto myself, so that if it wasn’t well received or the outcome was different I wouldn’t be shattered. I was well prepared for a different kind of response, and the response I have gotten has been really tremendous.
Can you tell me about any new opportunities that have risen for you as a result?
A number of things- one, I have an agent now (at William Morris.] Love him and Josh Welsh [Director of Education at FIND] introduced us last summer, way before the film had gotten into Sundance. I tell people all the time that this film is such a success story of lab programs and Film Independent is such a huge part of that. Josh Welsh has been such a champion of this movie. I could go on and on about all the ways he helped me get here.
The film is being distributed by National Geographic Entertainment. Can you tell me how that came about?
We were talking to them about a year or two before we went into production. They were at Sundance, and they had been tracking the project, and so they were at the world premier. I found out shortly thereafter that they loved the film and were really, really interested and we sat down with them and learned more about the fact that they are expanding their brand. They want to be in the business of releasing fiction films and they feel Amreeka is the perfect first film for them. There was a really great meeting of the minds. Their brand and this film coalesce very well.
Did that give you any hesitation since it was their first narrative film distribution?
Certainly. We had a number of conversations about that. We wanted to be certain that they had a great strategy- that they really knew how to market the movie. But they were so great from the very beginning. They very quickly brought on Laura Kim, who used to be at Warner Independent, and she is such an amazing expert at releasing movies. We immediately felt we were in great hands. I started to feel really lucky.
Plus it’s really special to be someone’s first film. And there were so many firsts involved with the film. I am a first time filmmaker and my producer was a first time feature producer. There were non [professional] actors, plus the investors. There were a number of things that came together based on this idea of firsts, so there was something that felt right and organic about it.
And what is their strategy for releasing the film?
We’re looking to release it in late September. It’s going to open in two cities to start and then increase to five and then keep going from there. One of the reasons we were so excited about National Geographic is that they believe the film really has cross over potential. So we’re really working hard right now to start the word of mouth buzz. It’s amazing to me how many people already know about the film and that’s not just from the festivals- that is thanks to some of the work that National Geographic is already doing.
I’m sure our members would like to know how you found the initial funding for the film.
It really has to do with the labs. I was shopping the script around for a couple of years and I did the FIND screenwriters lab and then the Sundance lab and then in 2007 Josh Welsh called me and said I should apply to Tribeca All Access. So I applied, got in and ended up meeting my executive producer. She introduced my producer and I to a whole world of Arab American private investors and that’s how we found our anchor investor. We ended up securing about half of our budget through our executive producer.
Your family has seen the film. What was their reaction?
They love it and they are so proud. We went through a really difficult time during the first Gulf War in this small town in Ohio. Some of those experiences are very real for them, so the fact that I was able to take those events and depict them in a way that is acceptable and universal and light and humorous was really cool for them to see.
Your cast members were virtually strangers to each other when they met on your set and yet you manage to create an incredible sense of intimacy and family. What directing techniques did you use to bring your actors together?
So much of it is about chemistry. I was very aware of my own chemistry with the actors when we were casting. I needed to feel a sense of intimacy. I didn’t get to see the family all together until two days before shooting. I tried to rehearse as much as possible but we shot in Canada and the cast flew in from all over the world, from New York, Toronto, Paris, and Tel Aviv, so it was pretty intense.
Two days before shooting we all went out to dinner and I wanted them to get to know one another on a personal level and tell stories and talk about their characters together. I think that was really helpful. On set they really felt like a family. It was a lovely environment
What’s going to be next for you? Do you have a new script?
I do. I’m about half way through the first draft and it’s sort of the reverse of Amreeka. A thirty-something Palestinian-American goes to Jordan for the summer to connect with her roots. It’s kind of a Woody Allen-esque comedy. It looks at a side of the Middle East that we haven’t really seen- a group of middle class and upper middle class young people looking for love, very westernized, who speak more English than Arabic.
There is sort of a cliché about using up one’s life experience on a first book, album or film and then having nothing left for the second one. Does that worry you at all?
Amreeka was inspired by my family. This next movie is a little more me, and my own personal experience. Thematically there will probably always be something binding in my work. Where do I belong? What place do I call home? Growing up in Ohio and Jordan, these vastly different places, I think I will always draw from that reality.
FIND will be screening Amreeka as part of the LA Film Festival. Please check LAFilmFest.com for venues and showtimes.
Davis Guggenheim has a rare and enviable career. He has directed episodes of some of the best television shows in the last decade (i.e. The Shield, Alias, 24, NYPD Blue, ER, Deadwood,) but has also managed to forge an impressive identity as a serious documentarian. In fact, you may have heard of his Oscar winning 2007 documentary, a little sleeper hit called An Inconvenient Truth.
His new film, It Might Get Loud, might be described as a film about the electric guitar, but it is actually much more; it’s a treatise on the artist’s journey. But in the end, who really cares about the theme or raison d’être of the film. It’s Jimmy Page, The Edge and Jack White sitting around talking and playing guitar with one another. Enough said.
By Carolyn Cohagan
You career has been an extraordinary combination of television and documentaries. How do you pull it off?
I’m kind of like a junkie that has to pay for my habit. My habit is documentaries. I love them. I have to feed my habit by directing television, which I’m doing right now [the Melrose Place pilot]. I get a lot of creative satisfaction from doing television. And it’s fun and it’s lucrative, and in a week I’ll be done and be back to making documentaries.
Can you tell us a little about your background?
My father [Charles Guggenheim] made documentary films. He was pretty renowned. He made many seminal documentary films in the sixties and seventies [Robert Kennedy Remembered, The Johnstown Flood, A Time for Justice, etc.] and I grew up wandering around his office, watching these editing machines whirl, and being transfixed by it. Even as a five-year-old boy I used to go on shoots with my father. He did the media for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign and I remember going with him on a plane to do that. And lot of other really exciting and intense documentary shoots- coalmines and shrimp boats and things like that.
I went to Brown, and afterwards my father said, “Come and work for me in D.C.,” and I was like, I don’t want to do that. I wanted to break out on my own. So I moved to LA to break into Hollywood. I thought I’d never make documentaries. I started directing television, and about ten years into it I got pulled back into making documentaries.
After you won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, the world was your oyster. You could have done most anything. What drew you to It Might Get Loud?
[Producer] Thomas Tull, whose idea it was, a few months before the Academy Awards, called me to his office in Burbank and said, “What do you think of the electric guitar?” and I said, “I love the electric guitar.” And he said, “Well, how would you like to make a documentary about it?”
I spoke to my producing partner, Lesley Chilcott, and we both said, “This is great,” because I have environmentalist instincts but I don’t want to be a filmmaker known just for making environmental documentaries. I want to tell stories about everything.
I like to jump around between different genres and I enjoy how they cross-pollinate. This summer Leslie and I did a film about Barak Obama for the Democratic Convention in Denver, and then we did parts of the infomercial that played before election night. Right now it’s really exciting because documentaries are changing and the opportunities are opening up. People are really hungry for well told documentaries.
When Thomas Tull brought you into his office, did he already have the three guitarists in mind?
That came later. It struck me that if you made this documentary about the electric guitar and you had 30 different guitarists in it, you would learn a little bit about a lot of people, but you wouldn’t learn that much. You would just skim the surface. But my theory was if you picked three really amazing artists (there are plenty of great guitarists, only a handful of them are artists), if we found three that were distinctly different and of different generations and told their personal stories, then you would come around and learn about the guitar through osmosis.
There are so many documentaries that are full of platitudes about how the guitar changed the world and how it was this metaphor for sexual expression or power. I didn’t want to do any of that. I just wanted to tell the story of three really interesting people and the guitar happened to be part of it.
Jack White said it best. After he saw the film he said the guitar is really “the McGuffin” in the film. It’s not really about the guitar, it’s about these three guys and their journey and you could easily be a singer or a writer or a painter and get just as much out of it, because their journeys in finding themselves and how to express themselves is universal.
How long did it take to get Jimmy, Jack and the Edge in the same room?
It was an interesting process picking the three. We were sitting around talking about who it could be. First thing everyone said was, “Jimmy Page won’t do it.” He’s famously resistant to this kind of stuff and he hasn’t done many interviews in the past twenty years. So we moved on. And the next day I called Thomas and said we have to try. So I wrote Jimmy a long letter and flew to New York with my music supervisor, Peter Afterman, and met with his managers and they said, “Sure, why not?” And Peter was like, “You don’t understand. These guys never say yes.” And that was just yes to meeting Jimmy. So then I few to London a month later and sat down with Jimmy and talked it through, and he said, “Okay, let’s do it.” And then Edge and Jack said yes, and we had a movie.
Both Jack and Edge had a lot of questions. They really wanted to make sure it was done right. A lot of documentaries about rock-n-roll are about car crashes and how a member of the band died. That story is so told and it’s sensationalistic. And the other ones are told from the point of view of the fan: this rocker is a God. That’s not very interesting either. Jack, Edge and Jimmy all understood this was about something different. This is about “How did you become an artist?” and “How did you go from being a kid wondering what was going to happen in your life in Dublin or Detroit or London to this person that we all think we know, but we don’t.”
What is it that the Edge says at the end, about what he might have ended up doing?
[Laugh] “Who knows what I might be doing. I might have ended up as a banker.”
It’s as he’s walking out the hallway of his school where he first met Bono, Larry and Adam. And we took him there for the first time since. We were blown away, but I think he was even more blown away, to be in the classroom where they used to practice. It was amazing how moving the experience was for these guys.
How many hours were Jimmy, Jack and the Edge together?
One premise of the movie was to tell their individual stories very deeply and then the other was, “Wouldn’t be interesting to see what kind of questions they would ask each other?” I wanted to know what Jack White would ask Jimmy Page. And then, what is the Edge’s reaction? The big premise they all loved was “Let’s just sit down together.”
So we got this big stage at Warner Brothers and put three chairs facing each other with their guitars and amps behind them. We didn’t introduce them until then. We all picked separate doors, so they entered without seeing each other, so we see them meet for the first time. I gave them absolutely no agenda. I said, “If you want to talk, talk, if you want to play, play.” We did that for two full days. I put a record player on the side. I knew there were a bunch of albums that were important to each of them. They put albums on and listened to them, and if they wanted to stand up and demonstrate something, they did. All of us watching behind the monitors were in total disbelief about some of the things that happened.
Can you tell me a bit about their dynamic in the room? Was there a lot of ego?
There really wasn’t ego, and I think a big part of it was who these guys are, their nature. They’re about their work, which was part of my instinct to have them ask each other questions.
What was your favorite music growing up?
I had deep connections to U2 as a teenager. I remember when my brother brought home Boy. I’d never heard anything like it. I felt, “This is new music. This is my music.” I was a dopey fan. I’m also a big fan of Led Zeppelin and Jack White. I love them all.
When they were done with the shoot did you feel like there had been some relationships forged, that they would stay in touch?
I think there is a real bond between them now. We went to the Toronto Film Festival and they all three showed up and there was a lot of affection. I think they learned a lot about each other. They’re separated by generations but also by fundamental music ambitions. By making the movie, they started to see past that and see how really similar their experiences are. There’s this moment- they were talking for three or four hours before anything happened- and suddenly Jimmy was talking about a certain guitar. He just stood up, plugged in his guitar and started playing “Whole Lotta Love.” And both Edge and Jack stand up and sort of look at how he’s playing. And you see their faces transform into these 13 year old boys –
They have those massive grins…
Yeah! Because for them it’s seeing behind the curtain. It’s interesting to see a rock star turn into an adoring fan. And it happened the other way around too – Jimmy learning about Edge. Edge’s guitar playing is so different from Jimmy’s, and Jimmy started to really appreciate what Edge does. It’s not necessarily about virtuosity of guitar playing. It’s about landscapes and sounds that he does through these machines that he has. And then there’s Jack, who has these plastic toy guitars, and Jimmy and Edge have guitars worth millions of dollars, and there is Jack getting this incredible, monster sound from a little guitar sold at Montgomery Ward through a little amp bought at Sears. And Jimmy and Edge were profoundly impressed.
To me the picture speaks to the universality of artists, and how the good ones are always searching, always growing. Do you feel that way about your own career?
It’s interesting. I wouldn’t call it a mistake, but a case of “necessity is the mother of invention.” When we were making An Inconvenient Truth, I found that interviews with Al [Gore] when we had a big crew around were hard. It was hard to get the intimacy that I was after. I learned over time that if we had a very small crew or no crew at all, we would get these very, very personal, powerful moments. And so the best interviews were just him and me with a microphone, no crew, no camera. And we used those as the spine of the emotional story of Inconvenient Truth.
So the way I started It Might Get Loud, I just started with interviews. I met Edge in a recording studio with just a microphone and a sound recording machine. And we just talked for three hours. Same with Jack and Jimmy in a hotel in London
I went back to the editing room and started cutting the sound, almost like a radio show. And out of that came the core of what the story would be. It was amazing because you get these things you would never get if the cameras were rolling, because everything becomes so formalized. People tend to think very carefully about their answers or they’re not emotionally spoken.
And that’s why I think this film is very different. The nature of the interviews was very intimate and very deep. It was a total discovery as a process.
That comes across watching the film. I felt like it was just me and the Edge walking around his old school.
I would hope with this film that people would watch and think, “I never knew Jimmy Page was like that. That’s a side of him I never understood.” After Jimmy saw the finished film in Toronto, he came up to me and said, “I learned something about myself,” and that was the most gratifying thing, that he learned something about himself watching the movie.
Were there other documentaries out this year that you particularly enjoyed?
The exciting thing is that it is a golden era of documentary. There are so many good documentaries right now. Food, Inc is amazing. Every Little Step, about A Chorus Line is amazing. Anvil, The Story of Anvil! and King of Kong. Those wouldn’t have happened ten years ago.
An Inconvenient Truth still holds the record for the biggest audience ever at the LA Film Festival.
It was so weird. There I was back stage with Bon Jovi, and Al and Tipper are clapping along. I made a film about the environment and here I am with these rockers.
So maybe now that you made a film about rockers, you’ll end up backstage with Arianna Huffington.
[laughs] Exactly. That would be awesome.
Join us at the LA Film Festival for a screening of It Might Get Loud, Friday, June 19 at 7 pm at the Mann Festival Theater in Westwood. Tickets available at LAFilmFest.com
