In the directorial debut from Chris Messina, Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays an environmental attorney who finds her workaholic regimen thrown into flux when her husband, George (Messina), asks for a break. For Alex, George has always been the one to take the reins at home. When his unexpected departure dawns as something more permanent, Alex finds herself caught balancing her family’s demands, her aging father, played memorably by Don Johnson, and her ambitious career, which she now struggles to maintain. Soon, Alex is forced to reevaluate her life and discover what she was always too preoccupied to notice.
IndieNYC‘s David Teich was part of an ‘Alex of Venice‘ roundtable discussion with the film’s Director Chris Messina, as well its actors Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Katie Nehra and Derek Luke at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival where the film debuted. Currently you can check out ‘Alex of Venice‘ as the Closing Night Film at the 57th Annual San Francisco International Film Festival.
Part One: Chris Messina (Director, Actor)
(Note: * Indicates David Teich’s questions)
When did you decide to direct this story in particular?
I acted in a movie called “28 Hotel Rooms,” directed by Matt Ross, who I love. And that was produced by Jamie Patricof and Lynette Howell of Electric City. They knew I wanted to direct, and they were kind enough to bring me this script. When they brought it to me, it was under a different title. It was a collage of all these characters in Venice, [Los Angeles], but at the core of the collage was a family. The family was very interesting to me, and I recognized myself in them, and my family and friends. So we cut the collage and really concentrated on the family. And at some point after months of working on it, I felt like this was something I wanted to do.
Was directing a feature harder than you expected it to be?
Chris Messina: [Before I started on this project], I would do that awful thing of telling all my friends and loved ones what a good director I would be. We’d watch movies and I’d say, “Why did they cut there? Why did they use that actor? The score doesn’t make any sense.” I really knew it all. But then you’re on a set, and it’s like a bullet train that takes off, and you can’t stop it. And you go, “Oh shit, now I’ve gotta do this. I told everyone I’d be so good. And I feel like I’m so bad." I didn’t realize how much of an undertaking directing was. I was stupidly naive about. I was shooting a television show…while I was editing. I had two full time jobs. I would never do that again. I also learned about all the different departments and how hard they work. A lot of times as an actor I really took that for granted. It’s nice to go back and act now, and really have the utmost respect for the sound department, and the camera department, and the set decorator, and the producers who get you spaces and locations.
*What were your best tendencies as a director?
But the best thing I did as a director was stay out of everybody’s way. They were such a great bunch of actors that you didn’t really have to say much. In fact, if you said too much, you were ruining things. I wanted to [direct] the film in ways that I enjoy [acting in films]. I don’t like to cut a lot when I’m acting. The starting and stopping is always hard for me. You reset, and someone touches your hair, and then they give you a bunch of notes–it takes you out of it, and then you have to ramp back up into it. So what we would do a lot of times is we’d have two cameras, and we’d run them [until the memory cards were full]. And if I had any notes or directions, I’d talk while the cameras were running. It was terrible for the editor. But great for the performances.
What was the most difficult scene in the movie for you to act in?
CM: The first one I did: The one where I’m yelling at Don Johnson. It was his first day, and I was nervous that he was there. Luckily I had my friend Matt del Negro. He directed me when I was onscreen. I’ve known him for a long time, and I couldn’t have made the movie without him. In the script, it originally said that my character, George, cries during that scene, and everybody notices. And so I did a couple takes that were emotional. And it worked, kind of. But then I kept doing a terrible thing that I often do: Keep trying to repeat or find an emotion that isn’t there anymore. And it was Matt del Negro who told me I should get mad at [Don Johnson’s character]. “Don’t cry, yell at him. You’re sick and tired of being this guy in this house and living this life, and you’re frustrated. Tell him.” And at the time it felt like the wrong direction. But I always did what Matt wanted. And it just shows that sometimes you think something’s got to be a certain way, and then you’re in the editing room and you’re so thankful that somebody said to do the opposite. That was a hard scene. But I’m glad we had the yelling version.
*Aside from relying on Matt, what were some of the differences between directing scenes that you weren’t in, and directing scenes that you were in?
When [I] acted in “Argo,” [Ben] Affleck had the luxury of playback: He could shoot the take, then he could go to the monitors and he could watch what he did and what everyone else had done, and he could adjust it. But I think that movie shot for eighty or so days. We shot for twenty-one days. So we didn’t have that time. If I looked at a playback after every take, we would never make the day. Directing the others was fun, because I love acting and I love actors. I think I’m a better fan of actors than I am an actor. I love just playing around with them and trying new things. A prerequisite of the film was, “I won’t say no to you, and you don’t say no to me. Let’s just try everything and see what works.”
Looking back on the workload, do you regret both acting and directing?
No. I’d like to direct again, and try to put myself in a bigger part. I almost backed out of acting in the film. I didn’t want people to think I was directing it because I wanted a part. And I just wanted to be a director and concentrate on directing. I knew that would be challenging. About two weeks out, I said to the producers, maybe I shouldn’t [act in it]. But they convinced me to do it, and I’m glad I did, because I got to dip my foot in. And if there is a script that has a bigger role at the center, maybe I would have the guts to [both direct and act]. Or the stupidity.
Was Alex always at the core of the film, or did you change that around during development?
She was, and then she wasn’t, and then she was. At times I thought maybe it was her son’s story. At times I thought maybe it was my character’s story. At times I thought it was about two sisters. It really took on a lot of different shapes. But it was clear at some point that it would be her. And I was very lucky to have Mary Elizabeth Winstead. She’s incredible.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead is known for roles that are very different from this one, from “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” to “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” Were you ever apprehensive about casting her?
No. I saw her in “Smashed,” and I was blown away. And then she came in to read, and her reading was incredible. And she also just had a lot of passion for the movie. It was clear that she connected to the material and wanted to do it. When you’re directing your first movie, or maybe any movie, you need a support team around you, and you need leaders. Nobody was making any money. A lot of these people have families, a lot of them had opportunities to go make money on other jobs. So they had to want to be there. That was something that I required. Mary wanted to be there, and she was an incredible captain of the ship. She set a tone and a precedent for the film that I think the crew, and myself, and the rest of the actors really followed.
When was Don Johnson’s name thrown in for consideration?
As soon as the character was created. One of the writers, Jessica Goldberg, invented that character and his story. And as soon as the character was created, I thought of Don Johnson. I’d seen him in “Eastbound & Down” and “Django [Unchained].” I loved him in “Miami Vice” when I was a kid. I always thought he was a great actor. I begged him to do it. I don’t know if he really wanted do. [Laughs.]
How long did it take to convince him?
It took a while. I was pretty persistent. I went to his house. I think he had no intention of doing it. He took me to his son’s basketball game. And I pretended that I was interested in the game, and kept telling him about the movie. It probably took months. And then finally he jumped onboard. He showed up, and he came extremely prepared. I was nervous the first couple days working with him. Because what do you say? He’s got so much experience. And I’m this young guy, a first time director. Small movie, no trailers. “Don, your room’s upstairs. Would you like a glass of water? We have nothing to offer you.” You had to want to be there, and he did. He showed up every day, and he taught us a lot.
*How long did it take for you to stop being nervous?
It was like day twenty-one. [Laughs.] Then I was relieved that the movie was done. And I went into the editing room and [the nervousness] came back again. Because now I’m sitting with some things that I’m super proud of–but I’m also sitting with all my mistakes. And I go, “How do I fix it? I was the guy who was telling everybody I’d be the greatest director in the world, and now I’ve got a lot of problems and mistakes because it’s my first film.”
*In what ways did the editing process enhance the film?
There was a lot of stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor that I really, really liked, but just didn’t fit the movie…You’re just kind of reshaping things. The story starts to tell itself, and starts to tell you what’s needed and not needed. Editing’s amazing. It’s like writing the movie again. And the score and the sound made a gigantic difference in the movie. In a scene, background noise creates a reality when you watch the picture. Like if we played a scene with just us here, without that noise [Chris indicates people speaking in the background], it might seem flat, and not as real. [At first] it doesn’t really seem like an office, but if you put that noise in, and a couple of ringing phones, then you have the reality of an office. It’s pretty simple, but I took for granted what a difference that would make to a movie.
*Having taken lessons from this experience, what might you do differently next time you direct a feature?
I would want more time. That would be essential. I’d clear my plate of everything else but the movie. I can’t overlap with acting jobs. I would want more prep time, more shooting time, and more editing time. I like to go slow. And in twenty-one days, it’s impossible to go slow. There are a million different things I would do differently. You can read all the books about directing, and watch all the movies, and listen to all the special commentaries of a DVD. Until you’re out there on the dance floor doing it, you don’t know. That’s why I would recommend to any aspiring filmmaker or actor, you gotta grab a camera and go do it, even if it’s it on your iPhone. Edit it yourself, look at it, and play around. Because it’s only by those trials and errors that you learn.
Part Two: Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Actress), Katie Nehra (Co-Writer, Actress), Derek Luke (Actor)
How did you all get involved in this project?
Katie Nehra: I started writing the script six-and-a-half years ago, so it’s been a long road. And I knew Chris from the Labyrinth Theater Company, which was started by John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman [among others]. And then Chris and I lived on the same street at some point. Then we kind of lost touch. But I always wanted him to play George.
Mary Elizabeth Winstead: What initially got me really excited was the script, and how relatable the role was. And also Chris being as awesome as he is.
Katie: And then you met me.
Mary: That sealed the deal. [Mary and Katie laugh.]
Derek Luke: [First] it’s Chris: I believe the leader really sets the tone. What I loved about Chris Messina is that when we met and talked, I never felt like I was talking to a director. I felt like I was talking to a fellow actor…And I really love stories where the narratives have strong female leads. Because, being that I’ve been married for a while now, my story has a strong female lead.
Katie: Behind every great man is a greater woman.
Katie, you co-wrote the script–are you from Venice, Los Angeles?
Katie: No, but my writing partner, Justin [Shilton], that’s all him. He loves Venice, he lived there. I was never really a fan of Venice before I started writing this film. Maybe because it’s so far from Hollywood, where I live. But it definitely is a special place, and it’s so different from [Hollywood], and Beverly Hills. I sort of feel like it’s like the East Village of L.A.
Mary: I also live on the other side of town, and I had spent very little time there. But once I was actually forced to drive there every day for a month, I started to get why people lived over there. It’s so beautiful and laid back. It’s like a totally different lifestyle. It was really great to be there every day.
Mary, you’ve played roles very different from this one–for instance, in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Moving forward, how are you going to be choosing your roles?
Mary: I’m drawn to characters who get to be very human, in that they are a lot of different qualities, instead of just a few or even one. Earlier in my career, I felt like I would play a character, and the character would be [a specific] thing, and fit inside [a specific] box. And I would just try to be that. Now I’m trying to bring all my own qualities to characters, to make them as complex as possible. And if I can find roles that allow for that and don’t box me in too much, that’s the most fun for me. This was kind of perfect for that. And I’m not always going to get that, as much as I try.
*The film’s protagonist, Alex, is an environmental lawyer. A central plot point involves a case of hers (which she ultimately loses): Her firm sues to stop a local entrepreneur–Derek’s character, Frank–from building a spa on a local pond, because his construction is damaging the wildlife population. In one of the film’s best scenes, Frank argues to Alex that his spa will bring badly-needed jobs to an impoverished neighborhood–pitting Alex’s long-term concerns about the future of the environment against more immediate, human concerns. Who do you all thing gets the better side of that argument–Frank or Alex?
Mary: Well it’s funny, because I don’t think she’s expecting such a strong argument from him, so it’s a big turn for her. Like, “There’s something that I firmly believe in, and you actually made me see another side to it for a second.” And that’s kind of crazy for her, because she’s so adamant about the way that she views the world. I think that they’re both equally strong arguments. I’m probably more of Alex’s point of view. But I don’t know if I have a clear opinion on which is the better argument in this particular case, because I think they’re both important.
Derek: I think it’s a really interesting discussion: The consumption of wealth, distribution of wealth, how you use it, what’s good, what’s bad. A lot of times it’s about other people’s point of view about how they would use your money, vs. how you think you should use your money. I think Frank makes a very, very strong argument. I was even impressed when it came up. Because I probably sided with Alex a little bit, but he had a very strong defense. In his point of view, he’s doing good to the world.
Katie: There are two sides to every coin. You definitely want to hold onto a legacy–nature, something that’s always been there. But at the same time, communities are failing, people need jobs, especially in any kind of ghetto, where you want to give people opportunities to grow and make [the community] stronger. But where’s the balance? I don’t know what the answer is. I think we have these two characters that are showing two sides. Most people would side with one or the other. But I think it’s a gray area.
Mary: The whole issue is also a bigger metaphor her life and her inability to change and move forward. And so I think for her, [losing her court case] is actually kind of a good thing in disguise, because it forces her to realize that she can’t just keep things the way they are all the time, and she has to grow.
Katie: Alex has to modernize herself.
Mary: It kind of thrusts her into thinking about moving on from her current life.
Katie: I love spas and ponds. I just want to go on the record.
Read the roundtable at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
Wednesday, April 30, 2014
Monday, April 28, 2014
Interview: Jerome Sable (Director, Writer, Composer) and Eli Batalion (Writer, Composer) - 'Stage Fright'
Starry-eyed teenager Camilla Swanson (Allie MacDonald) wants to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a Broadway diva, but she’s stuck working in the kitchen of a snobby performing arts camp. Determined to change her destiny, she sneaks in to audition for the summer showcase and lands a lead role in the play, but just as rehearsals begin, blood starts to spill, and Camilla soon finds herself terrorized by a bloodthirsty masked killer who despises musical theater.
Starring musical theater veterans Meat Loaf ('The Rocky Horror Picture Show') and Minnie Driver (The Phantom of the Opera) STAGE FRIGHT mixes Scream with Glee in this genre-bending R-rated horror-musical.
What are your backgrounds as composers?
Jerome Sable: We’re both from Montreal, and we’ve been friends and collaborators for a long time. We’ve done theater, a lot of the time in small black box theaters, creating weird plays that always involve composing. We both play different musical instruments, and have always tried to incorporate musical comedy elements into our work. Then when I was in film school, I started getting into horror, and that’s when Eli and I said, let’s try to do a movie. We knew it was going to involve a lot of musical comedy. And we decided to mix in horror.
Eli Batalion: At that point we did a short film to kick things off, called “The Legend of Beaver Dam,” which was our initial foray into the whole concept of the rock horror musical. That gave us the confidence to push forward with a feature film that blended those genres, and we were able to find partners to be able to put “Stage Fright” together.
What made you decide that the horror and musical genres would fit well together?
Jerome: People talk as if horror and musicals are such opposites, but they aren’t really. In a musical number, the emotions are boiling over to a tipping point, where the characters can do nothing else but break into song. And in many ways horror movies are like that as well. Someone just reaches an emotional tipping point, and they explode into violence. In both cases, you have this cinematic expression of some internal fantasy.
Is there something inherently horrific about a theater camp?
Eli: With camp in general, there’s a heightened emotional environment, which is why I think a lot of the classic slasher films take place there. It represents the adolescent experience: Everything is the worst thing ever, or everything is the best thing ever. And it’s just like that at theater camp too.
What were some of your musical influences in this film?
Jerome: Musically, this was a lot of fun, because got to do many different styles. We did the more orchestral, old-school Gilbert and Sullivan and Rogers and Hammerstein-inspired stuff. We were also hugely inspired by Kander and Ebb. But then we also got to do rock stuff, where we basically did our own version of our high school experience: Mixing in AC/DC inspired chord progressions with Axl Rose-inspired vocals, with a pinch of Ozzie [Osbourne].
Did you come up with story and character first and then write the songs, or did you write everything simultaneously?
Jerome: We always start with the story and the characters and then the script. From there we do the lyrics, and then the music. But then what usually what happens is, once we’re doing the music, we’ll decide to change some of the lyrics. And then sometimes that’ll create a domino effect where we’ll realize we want to change something about the story, because of something we realized when we were changing the music.
Are there any examples in this movie of something that you changed?
Jerome: The song [that takes place during a climactic scene] in the kitchen at the end of the film was not the same song when we shot it. It was an entirely different rock song that we had composed, recorded, produced, and then shot. And we did not do any reshoots. We actually just reverse-engineered and retrofitted a completely new song onto existing footage during the post-production process. Completely new tempo, completely new lyrics, completeley new music.
Why did you feel that change was necessary?
Jerome: The song that existed before just didn’t feel brutal enough for that part of the movie once we had put it together. And we felt like, the way the film was shaping up, the song needed to be fun, but still more oppressive. The previous song we had was too celebratory. We wanted something with a little more edge.
Eli: In our process, we have something which we like to call killing our babies. We naturally grow partial to certain things that we’ve done, but regardless of how much work we’ve put into something, we sometimes have to come to that honest moment where we say, “This doesn’t work.” We had to slash many babies in the process of making this film.
What are the challenges of casting a movie like this?
Eli: The actors do all their own singing, so from the get-go there were some great actors we couldn’t even consider, because they don’t sing. In fact, just getting the very best in Broadway talent in some cases was not necessarily sufficient. For Ally MacDonald’s [lead] role, we did look at the crème de la crème of Broadway, and we saw excellent actresses. But it’s not just about being an amazing triple threat Broadway talent. The role needed subtlety–someone who was specifically good onscreen.
What did Meat Loaf bring to the movie? Are you fans of 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show?'
Eli: It was very significant for us to have him in the film. And certainly “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” has inspired us, though he plays a very different role in our film than he did in “Rocky Horror.” This is actually different than most roles he’s played. He’s fantastic to work with. He’s intense, and he really brings it to each and every scene. Meat isn’t necessarily a young, sprightly fellow, but there’s some deeply physical stuff in the film, and he was involved in a lot of that. He went balls to the wall.
How did you break down which types of songs would fit into which sections of the movie?
Jerome: We tried our best to musically tailor the songs to the characters and the specific moments. In “Peter and the Wolf,” there’s a different musical instrument used to represent each character. We used the “Peter and the Wolf” school of scoring. We tried to do different musical palettes and themes for different characters. And we tried to weave them in together as well. For us, the big one was the killer vs. the musical theater community, and musically that resulted in thrash metal or heavy rock vs. old school Gilbert and Sullivan orchestral.
You could have kept the film in lighter comic territory. Why did you decide to make it genuinely grisly, scary and suspenseful?
Jerome: Why not? We were taking a page from the playbooks of “Shaun of the Dead” and “Scream.” In other words, we decided to make a character comedy with satirical elements, but not to make the horror a sketch or a cheap parody. It’s just better to go all out. We decided right from the early stages to be fully committed to everything.
Read the Interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
Starring musical theater veterans Meat Loaf ('The Rocky Horror Picture Show') and Minnie Driver (The Phantom of the Opera) STAGE FRIGHT mixes Scream with Glee in this genre-bending R-rated horror-musical.
What are your backgrounds as composers?
Jerome Sable: We’re both from Montreal, and we’ve been friends and collaborators for a long time. We’ve done theater, a lot of the time in small black box theaters, creating weird plays that always involve composing. We both play different musical instruments, and have always tried to incorporate musical comedy elements into our work. Then when I was in film school, I started getting into horror, and that’s when Eli and I said, let’s try to do a movie. We knew it was going to involve a lot of musical comedy. And we decided to mix in horror.
Eli Batalion: At that point we did a short film to kick things off, called “The Legend of Beaver Dam,” which was our initial foray into the whole concept of the rock horror musical. That gave us the confidence to push forward with a feature film that blended those genres, and we were able to find partners to be able to put “Stage Fright” together.
What made you decide that the horror and musical genres would fit well together?
Jerome: People talk as if horror and musicals are such opposites, but they aren’t really. In a musical number, the emotions are boiling over to a tipping point, where the characters can do nothing else but break into song. And in many ways horror movies are like that as well. Someone just reaches an emotional tipping point, and they explode into violence. In both cases, you have this cinematic expression of some internal fantasy.
Is there something inherently horrific about a theater camp?
Eli: With camp in general, there’s a heightened emotional environment, which is why I think a lot of the classic slasher films take place there. It represents the adolescent experience: Everything is the worst thing ever, or everything is the best thing ever. And it’s just like that at theater camp too.
What were some of your musical influences in this film?
Jerome: Musically, this was a lot of fun, because got to do many different styles. We did the more orchestral, old-school Gilbert and Sullivan and Rogers and Hammerstein-inspired stuff. We were also hugely inspired by Kander and Ebb. But then we also got to do rock stuff, where we basically did our own version of our high school experience: Mixing in AC/DC inspired chord progressions with Axl Rose-inspired vocals, with a pinch of Ozzie [Osbourne].
Did you come up with story and character first and then write the songs, or did you write everything simultaneously?
Jerome: We always start with the story and the characters and then the script. From there we do the lyrics, and then the music. But then what usually what happens is, once we’re doing the music, we’ll decide to change some of the lyrics. And then sometimes that’ll create a domino effect where we’ll realize we want to change something about the story, because of something we realized when we were changing the music.
Are there any examples in this movie of something that you changed?
Jerome: The song [that takes place during a climactic scene] in the kitchen at the end of the film was not the same song when we shot it. It was an entirely different rock song that we had composed, recorded, produced, and then shot. And we did not do any reshoots. We actually just reverse-engineered and retrofitted a completely new song onto existing footage during the post-production process. Completely new tempo, completely new lyrics, completeley new music.
Why did you feel that change was necessary?
Jerome: The song that existed before just didn’t feel brutal enough for that part of the movie once we had put it together. And we felt like, the way the film was shaping up, the song needed to be fun, but still more oppressive. The previous song we had was too celebratory. We wanted something with a little more edge.
Eli: In our process, we have something which we like to call killing our babies. We naturally grow partial to certain things that we’ve done, but regardless of how much work we’ve put into something, we sometimes have to come to that honest moment where we say, “This doesn’t work.” We had to slash many babies in the process of making this film.
What are the challenges of casting a movie like this?
Eli: The actors do all their own singing, so from the get-go there were some great actors we couldn’t even consider, because they don’t sing. In fact, just getting the very best in Broadway talent in some cases was not necessarily sufficient. For Ally MacDonald’s [lead] role, we did look at the crème de la crème of Broadway, and we saw excellent actresses. But it’s not just about being an amazing triple threat Broadway talent. The role needed subtlety–someone who was specifically good onscreen.
What did Meat Loaf bring to the movie? Are you fans of 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show?'
Eli: It was very significant for us to have him in the film. And certainly “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” has inspired us, though he plays a very different role in our film than he did in “Rocky Horror.” This is actually different than most roles he’s played. He’s fantastic to work with. He’s intense, and he really brings it to each and every scene. Meat isn’t necessarily a young, sprightly fellow, but there’s some deeply physical stuff in the film, and he was involved in a lot of that. He went balls to the wall.
How did you break down which types of songs would fit into which sections of the movie?
Jerome: We tried our best to musically tailor the songs to the characters and the specific moments. In “Peter and the Wolf,” there’s a different musical instrument used to represent each character. We used the “Peter and the Wolf” school of scoring. We tried to do different musical palettes and themes for different characters. And we tried to weave them in together as well. For us, the big one was the killer vs. the musical theater community, and musically that resulted in thrash metal or heavy rock vs. old school Gilbert and Sullivan orchestral.
You could have kept the film in lighter comic territory. Why did you decide to make it genuinely grisly, scary and suspenseful?
Jerome: Why not? We were taking a page from the playbooks of “Shaun of the Dead” and “Scream.” In other words, we decided to make a character comedy with satirical elements, but not to make the horror a sketch or a cheap parody. It’s just better to go all out. We decided right from the early stages to be fully committed to everything.
Read the Interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
Saturday, April 26, 2014
2014 Tribeca Film Festival Interviews: Tristan Patterson (Director), Isabel Lucas (Actress) & Jim Sturgess (Actor) - 'Electric Slide'
1983 Los Angeles is full of beautiful girls, luxurious mansions, and glamorous parties. Eddie Dodson, a hip and charismatic dealer of antique furniture for the rich and famous, is living the high life. When Eddie meets the cool and aloof Pauline, the attraction is instant and the two live out each other’s fast-paced fantasies until Eddie’s high-rolling life catches up with him and loan sharks start knocking on his door. To pay off his debts, Eddie and Pauline begin a spree of bank robberies across LA, charming tellers at over 60 banks to hand over the cash. Now the two are not only on the run from loan sharks but also have the police hot on their trail.
Part One: Director, Tristan Patterson, Actress, Isabel Lucas
Tristan, what drew you to the real-life story of Eddie Dodson?
Tristan Patterson: When I first heard the story, there were details that jumped out at me, like the fact that Eddie made mixtapes to play on his getaways, and the fact that he sold art deco furniture. Here’s a guy who’s trying to turn his life into a movie. He’s providing his own soundtrack, he’s providing his own set decoration, he’s putting on wardrobe to get into character. He was all about performance. And I’m also really interested in Los Angeles, and that kind of character really embodies a certain mythology about the city.
Isabel, how would you describe your character, Pauline?
Isabel Lucas: She’s very enigmatic in many ways. She’s searching for something. I feel like she wants to grow up, to fall in love, to live a fantasy, to be a bit rebellious and defiant.
Does Pauline, like Eddie, have a real-life analog?
Tristan: Yeah, that’s one of the things that excited me about the story. There was a girl who came to L.A. and dated him over the nine months when he robbed sixty-three banks. And she just left afterwards. So I really wanted to make a movie that framed the story with that relationship. It starts the first time she sees him, and ends the last time she sees him. It’s a way of looking at L.A. through the dreamy eyes of the sort of girl who still sees everything as being fresh.
Why do you think these two characters are so drawn to each other?
Isabel: I think in many ways, Eddie needs someone to fit the casting for a partner in crime. He was always performing, and that was part of his performance.
Tristan: He wanted to have eyes on him.
Isabel: She’s seeking this kind of rebellious feeling that she’s seen in all these films she’s been watching. And then she meets Eddie in this spontaneous way. And they develop this sense that there are no repercussions for what they’re doing. They meet and fall in love in that mode. But that’s not sustainable.
What are some of the challenges in adapting a real-life story like this, and what are some of the changes you have to make to make it work as a film?
Tristan: You have to have a framing device, a point of view. I’m not telling the whole story of someone’s life. I’m telling a story about a moment in a someone’s life. And that “moment” is this girl meeting him and then leaving him. Everything happens, present tense, inside of that experience. It’s not a rise-and-fall kind of story, where he moves to L.A., then starts a shop, and then gets addicted to drugs, or those sort of traditional bio-pic things.
What do you think sets Eddie apart from other movie bank robbers?
Tristan: For him, robbing banks is about this idea of performance, or becoming the star of your own movie. [The real] Eddie, after robbing his first bank, described the experience in a journal, saying, “I felt like I was part Warren Beatty, part Woody Allen.”
How would you describe the film’s genre?
Tristan: I think it’s an L.A. movie. And it’s a movie about movies. It’s also a lovers-on-the-run movie, but not like “Wild at Heart” or “Badlands,” where the characters hit the road. This is about lovers on the run in the contained world of Los Angeles–the city of their dreams.
Are you from Los Angeles?
Tristan: Yeah
How do the events of the film reflect the personality of the city?
Tristan: L.A. is a city people come to invent or reinvent themselves. In a way, everybody’s giving a performance there. I think this is the ultimate version of that.
What choices did you make to evoke a sense of time and place?
Tristan: I had all of the Polaroids that the real Eddie Dodson’s polaroids took during that ear. We really tried to capture what those Polaroids looked like with as much specificity as possible. Every charcter in the film outside of the cops had Polaroid references. And it was really important to shoot a movie about L.A. in the city of L.A., and to find pockets of the city that still looked the same as they did [in Eddie Dodson’s heyday].
The movie is structured like a countdown: Each section begins with a title card featuring a number, starting with 10 at the beginning of the film and concluding with 0. What is the significance of that countdown?
I like things that have a formalism to them. It makes it so the movie is an accumulation of moments, instead of just a traditional narrative. And also, the idea was to have the film be like a mixtape about a bank robber. So each chapter is like a track, and layers are being peeled back until you get to an essential moment at the end–the “0” moment.
What does the title of the movie mean to you?
It was just descriptive of someone going down. Honestly, I wanted to change the title really badly.
What did Jim and Isabel bring to the characters that wasn’t on the page?
They brought everything. What’s on the page is just ideas and a basic concept. And then actors make it real. Isabel has this amazing combination of watchfulness and calm, but also toughness. And Jim is just willing to go to far-out places, and is fearless about taking the risks to actually sound and talk like this guy sounded and talked. It’s a total performance, a total commitment to this character.
Part Two: Actor, Jim Sturgess
How would you describe your character? What’s he like, and what does he want out of life?
Jim Sturgess: He’s pretty outrageous. He’s somebody to respect and somebody to pity at the same time. There’s something fabulous and flamboyant about him, and also a little off and creepy. He wants everything out of life, including to be the world’s greatest bank robber. Eddie Dodson lived his life like it was a movie. He was addicted to drugs, and that was all part part of the romance of the time he was living in. He wanted to be a personality amongst some of the biggest personalities hanging around Los Angeles at that time. He was larger than life. And you kind of take your hat off to anyone who could push life that little bit further. We’d all like to think about how cool it would be to rob a bank and get away with it. But most of us would would never go through with it.
Why do you think Eddie does the things he does?
Jim: He’s fueling a fantasy. The romance of it all is an addiction. He says himself, it becomes a drug. I think he’s constantly searching for a feeling, for something bigger than what life had been offering him.
Why do you think the character instinctively targets the the most attractive female bank tellers? How does he know they’ll be the most cooperative?
Jim: He knows his strengths. He knows he’s charming. He’s very at ease around people, specifically women. Eddie Dodson was brought up by women. He knew that he had the gift.
Why do you think Eddie and Pauline are drawn to each other?
Jim: They intrigue each other. I don’t know if Eddie even quite knows who this girl really is, or what she wants from him. And she just arrives into the film out of nowhere. You see her get off a Greyhound bus, but you don’t really know where she’s come from. You know she’s sort of lost and on her own in the city. But as you watch their relationship, it seems like they’re both slightly on their back foot, working each other out. It doesn’t feel like they’re madly, passionately in love with each other. There are scenes where it seems like they’re using each other, really. I mean once he’s caught, she’s fuckin’ outta there. She’s already with the next guy.
Do you think Eddie lived in a bit of a fantasy world?
Jim: Yeah, I think he lived too much in the world of fantasy and romance. He had a very warped perception of the reality he was living in, especially with drugs kicking around his veins. And I think the film tries to give you that feeling: It’s sort of hazy and lucid. And I think that’s Eddie’s head space. I love the idea that he made mixtapes to go and rob banks to. He’d put on his favorite fuckin’ Iggy Pop tune, or some Clash, to get himself in the mood. Which means he wasn’t thinking rationally. He wasn’t meticulously planning a bank robbery. He was just playing out like he was a rock star, like he was the lead part in the movie of his life.
How did the mannerisms you brought to the performance, from Eddie’s accent to the way he carried himself, complement the character?
Jim: I didn’t know anything about Eddie Dodson when I first read the script. I didn’t know how he looked, I didn’t know how he sounded. And none of his mannerisms were written on the page, really. It just said he was very charming. I I knew there was an opportunity to experinment a little bit. And after meeting Tristan, I knew that he was the kind of director that would embrace experimenting and trying different things. He wanted something different as much as I did. We both said, let’s fuck with this, let’s push it. I sent him some recordings of me putting on an accent and doing some voice stuff. And Tristan sent me these recordings of Eddie on the phone in prison, and they were really scratchy and kind of hard to hear, but they changed everything for me. I was like, okay, he’s not this cool badass. He’s sort of camp, and a bit weird.
Being English, have you have done a southern California accent before?
No, never.
How did you practice that?
Jim: I actually told a bunch of stories [into a recorder] as Eddie, and sent those recordings to Tristan. One of the recordings Tristan had sent me was of Timothy Ford, who wrote the article [the screenplay was based on], interviewing Eddie over the telephone. And there was one interview where you can’t hear Eddie’s responses–just [Ford's] questions. So I recorded what I thought Eddie’s responses would be. And that was the first thing I sent Tristan, just to see what he thought. I also once talked as Eddie about the first time I fell in love, just making up this random ten minute story. I’d go, Tristan, is this working? And he would get excited about the recordings, or he would go, No, it’s sounding too southern, let’s try and push it more into that sort of L.A. drawl.
What decisions does Tristan make to help bring out the best performances in his actors?
Jim: He gets very excited about things. He comes from documentary, and he likes new things being thrown at him, or things that he didn’t expect. A lot of first time [narrative feature] directors are overprepared, and if you do anything outside of their comfort zone, you can throw them. But Tristan is a punk rocker with a rebellious spirit. He lets you feel like you can mess around and try things. At the same time, we shot the film in twenty days, so there wasn’t time to experiment too much. But when you’re making a film, and an actor starts fucking around and trying things, you’ve gotta have balls of steel to still embrace that when the clock is ticking.
What do you think the film ultimately has to say about Eddie Dodson and his exploits?
Jim: Eddie was a romantic, and the film makes bank robbing look fuckin’ cool. It has a cool fuckin’ badass soundtrack. Eddie dresses immaculately. And that’s how he perceived himself. He was Eddie Dodson, this awesome bank robber that just walked in, charmed the tellers, got the money, and walked out as cool as he came in. The idea was to make a film that Eddie would probably enjoy watching about his own life.
Read the interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
Part One: Director, Tristan Patterson, Actress, Isabel Lucas
Tristan, what drew you to the real-life story of Eddie Dodson?
Tristan Patterson: When I first heard the story, there were details that jumped out at me, like the fact that Eddie made mixtapes to play on his getaways, and the fact that he sold art deco furniture. Here’s a guy who’s trying to turn his life into a movie. He’s providing his own soundtrack, he’s providing his own set decoration, he’s putting on wardrobe to get into character. He was all about performance. And I’m also really interested in Los Angeles, and that kind of character really embodies a certain mythology about the city.
Isabel, how would you describe your character, Pauline?
Isabel Lucas: She’s very enigmatic in many ways. She’s searching for something. I feel like she wants to grow up, to fall in love, to live a fantasy, to be a bit rebellious and defiant.
Does Pauline, like Eddie, have a real-life analog?
Tristan: Yeah, that’s one of the things that excited me about the story. There was a girl who came to L.A. and dated him over the nine months when he robbed sixty-three banks. And she just left afterwards. So I really wanted to make a movie that framed the story with that relationship. It starts the first time she sees him, and ends the last time she sees him. It’s a way of looking at L.A. through the dreamy eyes of the sort of girl who still sees everything as being fresh.
Why do you think these two characters are so drawn to each other?
Isabel: I think in many ways, Eddie needs someone to fit the casting for a partner in crime. He was always performing, and that was part of his performance.
Tristan: He wanted to have eyes on him.
Isabel: She’s seeking this kind of rebellious feeling that she’s seen in all these films she’s been watching. And then she meets Eddie in this spontaneous way. And they develop this sense that there are no repercussions for what they’re doing. They meet and fall in love in that mode. But that’s not sustainable.
What are some of the challenges in adapting a real-life story like this, and what are some of the changes you have to make to make it work as a film?
Tristan: You have to have a framing device, a point of view. I’m not telling the whole story of someone’s life. I’m telling a story about a moment in a someone’s life. And that “moment” is this girl meeting him and then leaving him. Everything happens, present tense, inside of that experience. It’s not a rise-and-fall kind of story, where he moves to L.A., then starts a shop, and then gets addicted to drugs, or those sort of traditional bio-pic things.
What do you think sets Eddie apart from other movie bank robbers?
Tristan: For him, robbing banks is about this idea of performance, or becoming the star of your own movie. [The real] Eddie, after robbing his first bank, described the experience in a journal, saying, “I felt like I was part Warren Beatty, part Woody Allen.”
How would you describe the film’s genre?
Tristan: I think it’s an L.A. movie. And it’s a movie about movies. It’s also a lovers-on-the-run movie, but not like “Wild at Heart” or “Badlands,” where the characters hit the road. This is about lovers on the run in the contained world of Los Angeles–the city of their dreams.
Are you from Los Angeles?
Tristan: Yeah
How do the events of the film reflect the personality of the city?
Tristan: L.A. is a city people come to invent or reinvent themselves. In a way, everybody’s giving a performance there. I think this is the ultimate version of that.
What choices did you make to evoke a sense of time and place?
Tristan: I had all of the Polaroids that the real Eddie Dodson’s polaroids took during that ear. We really tried to capture what those Polaroids looked like with as much specificity as possible. Every charcter in the film outside of the cops had Polaroid references. And it was really important to shoot a movie about L.A. in the city of L.A., and to find pockets of the city that still looked the same as they did [in Eddie Dodson’s heyday].
The movie is structured like a countdown: Each section begins with a title card featuring a number, starting with 10 at the beginning of the film and concluding with 0. What is the significance of that countdown?
I like things that have a formalism to them. It makes it so the movie is an accumulation of moments, instead of just a traditional narrative. And also, the idea was to have the film be like a mixtape about a bank robber. So each chapter is like a track, and layers are being peeled back until you get to an essential moment at the end–the “0” moment.
What does the title of the movie mean to you?
It was just descriptive of someone going down. Honestly, I wanted to change the title really badly.
What did Jim and Isabel bring to the characters that wasn’t on the page?
They brought everything. What’s on the page is just ideas and a basic concept. And then actors make it real. Isabel has this amazing combination of watchfulness and calm, but also toughness. And Jim is just willing to go to far-out places, and is fearless about taking the risks to actually sound and talk like this guy sounded and talked. It’s a total performance, a total commitment to this character.
Part Two: Actor, Jim Sturgess
How would you describe your character? What’s he like, and what does he want out of life?
Jim Sturgess: He’s pretty outrageous. He’s somebody to respect and somebody to pity at the same time. There’s something fabulous and flamboyant about him, and also a little off and creepy. He wants everything out of life, including to be the world’s greatest bank robber. Eddie Dodson lived his life like it was a movie. He was addicted to drugs, and that was all part part of the romance of the time he was living in. He wanted to be a personality amongst some of the biggest personalities hanging around Los Angeles at that time. He was larger than life. And you kind of take your hat off to anyone who could push life that little bit further. We’d all like to think about how cool it would be to rob a bank and get away with it. But most of us would would never go through with it.
Why do you think Eddie does the things he does?
Jim: He’s fueling a fantasy. The romance of it all is an addiction. He says himself, it becomes a drug. I think he’s constantly searching for a feeling, for something bigger than what life had been offering him.
Why do you think the character instinctively targets the the most attractive female bank tellers? How does he know they’ll be the most cooperative?
Jim: He knows his strengths. He knows he’s charming. He’s very at ease around people, specifically women. Eddie Dodson was brought up by women. He knew that he had the gift.
Why do you think Eddie and Pauline are drawn to each other?
Jim: They intrigue each other. I don’t know if Eddie even quite knows who this girl really is, or what she wants from him. And she just arrives into the film out of nowhere. You see her get off a Greyhound bus, but you don’t really know where she’s come from. You know she’s sort of lost and on her own in the city. But as you watch their relationship, it seems like they’re both slightly on their back foot, working each other out. It doesn’t feel like they’re madly, passionately in love with each other. There are scenes where it seems like they’re using each other, really. I mean once he’s caught, she’s fuckin’ outta there. She’s already with the next guy.
Do you think Eddie lived in a bit of a fantasy world?
Jim: Yeah, I think he lived too much in the world of fantasy and romance. He had a very warped perception of the reality he was living in, especially with drugs kicking around his veins. And I think the film tries to give you that feeling: It’s sort of hazy and lucid. And I think that’s Eddie’s head space. I love the idea that he made mixtapes to go and rob banks to. He’d put on his favorite fuckin’ Iggy Pop tune, or some Clash, to get himself in the mood. Which means he wasn’t thinking rationally. He wasn’t meticulously planning a bank robbery. He was just playing out like he was a rock star, like he was the lead part in the movie of his life.
How did the mannerisms you brought to the performance, from Eddie’s accent to the way he carried himself, complement the character?
Jim: I didn’t know anything about Eddie Dodson when I first read the script. I didn’t know how he looked, I didn’t know how he sounded. And none of his mannerisms were written on the page, really. It just said he was very charming. I I knew there was an opportunity to experinment a little bit. And after meeting Tristan, I knew that he was the kind of director that would embrace experimenting and trying different things. He wanted something different as much as I did. We both said, let’s fuck with this, let’s push it. I sent him some recordings of me putting on an accent and doing some voice stuff. And Tristan sent me these recordings of Eddie on the phone in prison, and they were really scratchy and kind of hard to hear, but they changed everything for me. I was like, okay, he’s not this cool badass. He’s sort of camp, and a bit weird.
Being English, have you have done a southern California accent before?
No, never.
How did you practice that?
Jim: I actually told a bunch of stories [into a recorder] as Eddie, and sent those recordings to Tristan. One of the recordings Tristan had sent me was of Timothy Ford, who wrote the article [the screenplay was based on], interviewing Eddie over the telephone. And there was one interview where you can’t hear Eddie’s responses–just [Ford's] questions. So I recorded what I thought Eddie’s responses would be. And that was the first thing I sent Tristan, just to see what he thought. I also once talked as Eddie about the first time I fell in love, just making up this random ten minute story. I’d go, Tristan, is this working? And he would get excited about the recordings, or he would go, No, it’s sounding too southern, let’s try and push it more into that sort of L.A. drawl.
What decisions does Tristan make to help bring out the best performances in his actors?
Jim: He gets very excited about things. He comes from documentary, and he likes new things being thrown at him, or things that he didn’t expect. A lot of first time [narrative feature] directors are overprepared, and if you do anything outside of their comfort zone, you can throw them. But Tristan is a punk rocker with a rebellious spirit. He lets you feel like you can mess around and try things. At the same time, we shot the film in twenty days, so there wasn’t time to experiment too much. But when you’re making a film, and an actor starts fucking around and trying things, you’ve gotta have balls of steel to still embrace that when the clock is ticking.
What do you think the film ultimately has to say about Eddie Dodson and his exploits?
Jim: Eddie was a romantic, and the film makes bank robbing look fuckin’ cool. It has a cool fuckin’ badass soundtrack. Eddie dresses immaculately. And that’s how he perceived himself. He was Eddie Dodson, this awesome bank robber that just walked in, charmed the tellers, got the money, and walked out as cool as he came in. The idea was to make a film that Eddie would probably enjoy watching about his own life.
Read the interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
2014 Tribeca Film Festival Interview: Brent Hodge (Director - 'A Brony Tale')
Born of internet mecca 4chan, the “Brony” phenomenon is a flourishing community of adult, mostly straight, male fans of the children’s cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Brent Hodge’s documentary surveys the members of this surprising subculture, framed by the journey of Ashleigh Ball, one of the show’s voice actors, embracing her unexpected fan base.
How did you become interested in the Bronies, and how did you find your interview subjects?
I was friends with [voice actor] Ashleigh Ball before the project. She’d booked the characters Applejack and Rainbow Dash on “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.” We were out for dinner, and she said that guys had been emailing her who really liked the show, really liked her characters, and called themselves “bronies.” I was completely shocked. And I just said, we have to start filming this. You have to send me these emails as they come in. And the emails started coming in a lot. At one point she told me she’d gotten a really funny email, and said I should come over and film her reading it out loud. It was her getting an invite to BronyCon. And I wanted to go and explore the brony pheonomenon. I started getting ahold of the guys from those emails. One thing let to another, and it just snowballed. I was in with the brony crew as the movement was growing. That first BronyCon was around a thousand people, and I think the latest one was eight thousand. This year they already they have ten thousand confirmed. It’s insane.
What was your reaction when you first started seeing these emails?
I was interested. I wanted to know more. I wanted to look this stuff up online. I just didn’t get it. I didn’t understand what these guys were about, and why they liked a little girl’s show. I found it really fascinating. I actually got surprised along the way by how much access I got. I got to go to the brony dj rave, I got to hang out with [Dusty Rhoades, also known as] the “world’s manliest brony.” I couldn’t stop. I interviewed one, and he would tell me about another guy, and that guy would tell me about another guy who does fan fiction. And I wanted to meet all of them. I was definitely weirded out at the start. It’s a weird concept to get your head around. But as we went through, it started to feel normal. And I could understand what these guys were doing.
Did they ever worry that you were out to get them?
That started to come up, because as I was filming this, the media started to poke fun at them. Fox News did a piece, and Jerry Springer, and Howard Stern. And the bronies became a little more wary about me coming in with cameras. But I always had Ashleigh on my side. When you’re doing a documentary with the biggest voice actor from the show, the bronies want to be a part of that. I think if I didn’t have Ashleigh, I really wouldn’t have had much access. She was like my bodyguard. I could say “Oh, I’m with Rainbow Dash. I’m with Applejack. I’m with the voice, don’t worry. I’m allowed to be here.” Then I became friends with some of them. And they introduced me to their friends, and then we were all friends.
Why do you think the bronies like the show so much?
That was always the first question I would ask. And I would always get, “Oh, the animation’s really good,” or, “The character development’s really good,” or, “I relate to this type of character,” and I would just think, okay, we got through that bullshit answer, let’s get to the real stuff. Really, why are you into the show? You told me the same thing that everyone else did. A lot of the time I would ask some of their history, and some guys had had some rough goes, and some tragedies. So they were resorting back to a show that’s simple and kind and fun and about friendship, and is easy to watch. But the thing I heard the most was, it was never really about the show. They all said the same thing: I came for the show, and I stayed for the community. There was a sense of belonging. These people were finding something that might not be normal, but that was okay, because there were a lot of people there, and they were into it.
Do you think the film dispels any stereotypes?
There are a lot of stereotypes about what it means to be a man in our current culture. What I found with the bronies was, just because they’re into something that men supposedly shouldn’t be into, that didn’t make them less of a man.
The film features two psychologists who discuss various statistics about the bronies. Were there any that surprised you?
Going into this, you’d think a lot of them would be gay. And that wasn’t the case at all. Almost none of them were.
Do you think that being a brony requires a high level of security and self-confidence?
When you’re a brony, you’re associated with the idea that you’re so confident you don’t care what anyone thinks. I mean you feel for a couple of these guys in high school, because they get picked on pretty hard. There was one student with a “My Little Pony” lunch bag, and the school actually told him to stop bringing it in. But then there are guys who are in their mid-twenties and older, and they’ve started to really find confidence. They know who they are. They don’t care that it’s a little girl’s show. And that’s pretty cool.
You’ve mentioned that a lot of the media coverage of the bronies has been contemptuous. Do you hope your film will play some part in changing that?
I never really set out to make a doc that expressed an opinion about bronies. I wasn’t trying to make them feel good, and I wasn’t trying to make them look ridiculous either. I think the film is positive, and it shows them in a good light. But it only shows them in a good light because that’s what I saw. It’s definitely way better than half the media coverage that’s coming out about them. But I hope people take away what they want. If they still think the bronies are odd, then that’s fine. I just hope the film entertains people.
Do you hope to stay involved in the brony community?
Absolutely. As Ashleigh says in the film, as long as “My Little Pony” exists, there will still be bronies. And that’s how I feel too: As long as bronies exist, I’ll probably have some kind of involvement in the community. I’ve made some friends there. I’m not a brony. I don’t love the show. I watched it critically to see what I liked about it, and it didn’t really click with me. So I don’t think I’ll get too in depth in terms of going to conventions and coming up with fan fiction and remixing videos or anything. But I’ll definitely stay connected with all the friends I’ve made.
Read the interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
How did you become interested in the Bronies, and how did you find your interview subjects?
I was friends with [voice actor] Ashleigh Ball before the project. She’d booked the characters Applejack and Rainbow Dash on “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.” We were out for dinner, and she said that guys had been emailing her who really liked the show, really liked her characters, and called themselves “bronies.” I was completely shocked. And I just said, we have to start filming this. You have to send me these emails as they come in. And the emails started coming in a lot. At one point she told me she’d gotten a really funny email, and said I should come over and film her reading it out loud. It was her getting an invite to BronyCon. And I wanted to go and explore the brony pheonomenon. I started getting ahold of the guys from those emails. One thing let to another, and it just snowballed. I was in with the brony crew as the movement was growing. That first BronyCon was around a thousand people, and I think the latest one was eight thousand. This year they already they have ten thousand confirmed. It’s insane.
What was your reaction when you first started seeing these emails?
I was interested. I wanted to know more. I wanted to look this stuff up online. I just didn’t get it. I didn’t understand what these guys were about, and why they liked a little girl’s show. I found it really fascinating. I actually got surprised along the way by how much access I got. I got to go to the brony dj rave, I got to hang out with [Dusty Rhoades, also known as] the “world’s manliest brony.” I couldn’t stop. I interviewed one, and he would tell me about another guy, and that guy would tell me about another guy who does fan fiction. And I wanted to meet all of them. I was definitely weirded out at the start. It’s a weird concept to get your head around. But as we went through, it started to feel normal. And I could understand what these guys were doing.
Did they ever worry that you were out to get them?
That started to come up, because as I was filming this, the media started to poke fun at them. Fox News did a piece, and Jerry Springer, and Howard Stern. And the bronies became a little more wary about me coming in with cameras. But I always had Ashleigh on my side. When you’re doing a documentary with the biggest voice actor from the show, the bronies want to be a part of that. I think if I didn’t have Ashleigh, I really wouldn’t have had much access. She was like my bodyguard. I could say “Oh, I’m with Rainbow Dash. I’m with Applejack. I’m with the voice, don’t worry. I’m allowed to be here.” Then I became friends with some of them. And they introduced me to their friends, and then we were all friends.
Why do you think the bronies like the show so much?
That was always the first question I would ask. And I would always get, “Oh, the animation’s really good,” or, “The character development’s really good,” or, “I relate to this type of character,” and I would just think, okay, we got through that bullshit answer, let’s get to the real stuff. Really, why are you into the show? You told me the same thing that everyone else did. A lot of the time I would ask some of their history, and some guys had had some rough goes, and some tragedies. So they were resorting back to a show that’s simple and kind and fun and about friendship, and is easy to watch. But the thing I heard the most was, it was never really about the show. They all said the same thing: I came for the show, and I stayed for the community. There was a sense of belonging. These people were finding something that might not be normal, but that was okay, because there were a lot of people there, and they were into it.
Do you think the film dispels any stereotypes?
There are a lot of stereotypes about what it means to be a man in our current culture. What I found with the bronies was, just because they’re into something that men supposedly shouldn’t be into, that didn’t make them less of a man.
The film features two psychologists who discuss various statistics about the bronies. Were there any that surprised you?
Going into this, you’d think a lot of them would be gay. And that wasn’t the case at all. Almost none of them were.
Do you think that being a brony requires a high level of security and self-confidence?
When you’re a brony, you’re associated with the idea that you’re so confident you don’t care what anyone thinks. I mean you feel for a couple of these guys in high school, because they get picked on pretty hard. There was one student with a “My Little Pony” lunch bag, and the school actually told him to stop bringing it in. But then there are guys who are in their mid-twenties and older, and they’ve started to really find confidence. They know who they are. They don’t care that it’s a little girl’s show. And that’s pretty cool.
You’ve mentioned that a lot of the media coverage of the bronies has been contemptuous. Do you hope your film will play some part in changing that?
I never really set out to make a doc that expressed an opinion about bronies. I wasn’t trying to make them feel good, and I wasn’t trying to make them look ridiculous either. I think the film is positive, and it shows them in a good light. But it only shows them in a good light because that’s what I saw. It’s definitely way better than half the media coverage that’s coming out about them. But I hope people take away what they want. If they still think the bronies are odd, then that’s fine. I just hope the film entertains people.
Do you hope to stay involved in the brony community?
Absolutely. As Ashleigh says in the film, as long as “My Little Pony” exists, there will still be bronies. And that’s how I feel too: As long as bronies exist, I’ll probably have some kind of involvement in the community. I’ve made some friends there. I’m not a brony. I don’t love the show. I watched it critically to see what I liked about it, and it didn’t really click with me. So I don’t think I’ll get too in depth in terms of going to conventions and coming up with fan fiction and remixing videos or anything. But I’ll definitely stay connected with all the friends I’ve made.
Read the interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
Friday, April 25, 2014
2014 Tribeca Film Festival Interviews: David Heilbroner and Kate Davis (Directors - 'The Newburgh Sting')
Through an insider look at the case of the “Newburgh Four,” ‘The Newburgh Sting‘ reveals the FBI’s role in targeting Muslim communities in poor neighborhoods and luring believers into committing acts of terrorism. Husband & wife team David Heilbroner & Kate Davis’ (Southern Comfort) exposé dissects the story of the four men arrested in 2009 for a plan to bomb Jewish centers in the Bronx. Led by a suspicious Pakistani businessman with questionable motives, the film exposes how these men—over the course of a year—went from being small-time criminals in poverty-stricken Newburgh to high-level national security threats. With footage gathered from hidden cameras, directors Heilbroner and Davis investigate just what homegrown terrorism means.
Part One: Director, Kate Davis
How did you and David get involved in this project?
Kate Davis: David had been wanting to do something on Islamophobia. And he went around to various legal conferences to learn about violations against Muslims in the U.S. And I kept on saying, well, we need a good story. And it took a couple years to land on the Newburgh Four as a case that crystallized a lot of the themes that we wanted to look at. From there, we got to know the defense attorneys.
How did you start reaching out to some of your specific interview subjects?
Kate: We worked closely with Sam Braverman, one of the defense attorneys, and he connected us. But that doesn’t mean it was easy to find people who would talk. Most people who know the four perpetrators were too afraid to go on camera. And even some of the defense attorneys were afraid that going on record would somehow jeopardize the appeals process. But I think the film would only help their case. In general, it took a while to get people’s trust. It was Alicia McWilliams, the aunt [of defendant David Williams], who was in a sense the bravest. She had already come out against what the FBI had done, and found other families who were victims of entrapment. So she knew a lot about the issues, and she was completely willing to put herself out there.
One of the things that makes the documentary so convincing is that you use the FBI’s own extensive surveillance footage, which makes it clear that the FBI’s undercover informant concocted every detail of the bomb plot. How did you get ahold of that footage?
Kate: Some of the material is public record because it was shown at trial. But David and I have decided we’re not going to say exactly how we got all of the footage, because we need to protect people who felt like they were risking their jobs by getting us material. But it should really all be a matter of public record.
In your mind, when you watch these tapes, is there any debate as to whether this was entrapment?
Kate: Nope. Can’t say there is. Seeing it is believing it. And I’m used to doing films that show multiple points of view and look at things relativistically. But not in this case. On the other hand, I really tried to stay open to the idea that there was some sort of method to the madness on the FBI’s part, and we tried hard to hear their side of the story. We met with a prosecutor for hours. And it really boiled down to a very simple argument that’s stated in the film: The prosecution felt that these guys were there, they did agree to do this, and that’s enough to convict. But I think for a certain price you can get most people to do anything. If you’re poor and black in Newburgh and somebody starts flashing the promise of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, eventually they might wear you down if your only other option is to be a low bit drug dealer.
What do you think made them a more appealing target, their poverty or their connections to Islam?
Kate: I think in this case targeting poor people was at least as important as the Muslim factor. Because these guys weren’t all actually Muslim. Only two of them were, and they weren’t so religious. I really think what made this formula work for the FBI is that they’re poor, and so they had no voice.
What does the Newburgh Four case say about the current state of affairs between American Muslims and the FBI?
Kate: The FBI has been criticized, and there are changes happening. They’re sending affiliates to go and make friends in Muslim communities. But they still have informants going around. So they’re kind of playing it both ways. There are so many ironies here. And one is that in the name of fighting for the freedom of Americans to live in a country without terrorism, they’re actually potentially creating more terrorists. Because the extreme radical Muslims look at cases like this as a good reason to hate us.
Do you think that the FBI was intentionally misrepresenting certain aspects of the case?
Kate: Absolutely. No question. There were just too many public fallacies. In the film, an FBI spokesperson in New York refers to the Newburgh Four as a terrorist cell that they’d been tracking for a year. It was all bullshit. These four guys were not a cell. They didn’t even know each other.
Do you think this film might change the thinking of any of the public officials who championed this investigation?
Kate: I hope so. We want to show it to Congress, and hope to have a good Washington screening at Silverdocs in June. Because I think when they do see this, they’re just not going to have any place to hide.
What does it say about the American criminal justice system that a conviction could take place, and then be upheld on appeal, when the evidence supporting an entrapment defense was so strong?
Kate: I’m not in the jurors’ minds, but I think there’s just such a fear-based climate, where we’re so terrified on some gut level of the next 9/11, that it’s really hard to let guys go when they agreed to use a stinger missile, even if it’s fake. In a way, the whole policy works because the American public is predisposed to convict whoever’s been pointed at [in terrorism cases]. It’s a little bit of a witch-hunt mentality.
Part Two: Director, David Heilbroner
What led you to this project?
David Heilbroner: Before I was a filmmaker, I was a lawyer and an Assistant DA in New York City. And I’ve written books about law and crime. The justice system, and its failings, have been a huge interest of mine for more than twenty-five years. A few years ago an old law professor of mine said I should look at how the FBI is abusing the Muslim community. And a civil rights professor named Debbie Ramirez offered to pay to have me travel to England and Washington, D.C., to talk to FBI and MI5 officials. I took her up on it, and traveled all over researching the issue. But Kate kept saying, you need a single story to tell. Otherwise it’s just too theoretical. And so we culled through a zillion cases and talked to people, and we came across the case of the Newburgh Four.
Why did this case in particular leap out at you?
David: It contained the elements of so many things that are wrong with the FBI’s tactics in the post-9/11 War on Terror era. But the best thing about the case was that it had gone to trial. And because it went to trial, we could get access to the tapes that the FBI had recorded over the course of this one-year-long sting operation. If these guys had pled guilty, those tapes would still be in a vault, and no one would ever, ever be allowed to see them.
Just how important was it to the project to have access to those tapes?
David: For a filmmaker, there’s nothing like contemporaneous footage. Even if you’re making an archival film, if you can get footage from the moment, it’s gold. Especially if it’s well shot. In this case, we had a one-year-long investigation recorded in every format imaginable. We had telephone calls recorded, we had video cameras in cars, we had video cameras in houses, we had surveillance aerial footage, we had infrared footage, we had still photographs. We had this incredible treasure trove that the FBI had essentially created–they were in the process of making their own movie. We just took their material and told it in a more straightforward fashion.
Did the FBI believe they were doing the right thing?
David: The FBI believes in this. Their feeling is–and there’s something to be said for this–that despite the fact that these men were broke with no options in life, and were being offered $250,000, planting a bomb anywhere is still a dreadful and criminal act. It’s simply wrong. But what was awful about this case was that the FBI created this crime out of whole cloth, and then sold it to the American public as, “We are busting a Muslim ring of terrorists in New York.” And nothing could be further from the truth. The FBI lied blatantly. As the old line goes, the cover-up is worse than the crime. They found these four guys and turned them into patsies, and sent them away for twenty-five years because they [the FBI] incorporated a stinger missile into the case–which legally prevented the judge from giving them a sentence that more appropriately reflected how they were hoodwinked. Let’s be straight: these were bad guys. This film doesn’t argue that four innocent people are in prison. It argues that the FBI is engaged in a systematic duping of the American public, on our dime.
As you point out, The Newburgh Four were not morally innocent. Do you think they should have been deemed legally innocent?
David: I think they should have been convicted of something. When people agree to plant a bomb anywhere, you can’t turn a blind eye to it, even if they were led by the nose. I think they should have been convicted, and the judge should have sentenced them to a year in jail. Even their mothers and aunts say in the film that they should have been sentenced to something. Alicia McWilliams says that [defendant] David [Williams] should have gotten five years for not having common sense. But it’s awful to put guys in prison basically for the rest of their lives for agreeing to commit acts of terrorism that you have seduced them into doing. And then to have [New York City Mayor] Michael Bloomberg, and [New York City Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly, and [U.S.] Senator Chuck Schumer publicly claim that the Newburgh Four were a Muslim ring that had been under surveillance–it besmirches the Muslim community, it dupes the American public into thinking that there is really a terrorist threat when there is not, it dupes Congress into thinking that the FBI is ferreting out this nascent threat, and as a result it wastes our tax dollars. The city of Newburgh does not need a multi-million dollar FBI investigation. The city of Newburgh needs better schools. It needs a jobs program. It doesn’t need [FBI informant] Shahed Hussain coming in and finding four idiots who would do anything for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So that’s really the gist of the film. It isn’t so much about the injustice done to these four guys–although it was a huge injustice–it’s about the fact that the FBI is engaged in blatantly lying to the American public about the truth of what they’re doing. And we’ve caught them dead-to-rights.
What’s in it for them to lie like this?
David: Very simple: Money. If you go into Congress, and you say, “We’re doing really well in the war on terror, there are are hardly any threats at all,” they’re going to cut your budget in half. Homeland security is a big business. Eisenhower talked about the military industrial complex. Now we have the homeland security industrial complex. I believe the FBI is by and large a deeply ethical, motivated, caring, serious organization that does a really good job. But the FBI has gone out of its way to make Congress believe there are more cases like this than in fact exist. It’s cynical, and it’s nothing new.
What does a case like this say about the state of the American criminal justice system?
David: It says that when terrorism is involved, the rules break down. I don’t think this kind of an investigation would happen with this extent of duplicity on the part of the FBI in a drug case, or a gun running case. Terrorism is a hot political button. It freaks out juries and judges, it’s scary, and it’s kind of the crime of the moment, not unlike communism back in the fifties. I think that the justice system is really falling down on the job of keeping prosecutors and law enforcement in line. And I think the appeals courts need to tighten up the rules.
What can else can be done to improve the system?
David: What needs to be done right now is what we plan to do with this film over the next year: spark a congressional investigation into why the FBI does this and lies to the public about it afterwards. And I think the Newburgh Four should be pardoned after serving five years, because that’s more than enough time for people who were sucked into doing something by the FBI. This has to be exposed. I think this is just what congressional investigations are for. There has to be some accountability. So we’ve been raising money to go across the country barnstorming. We’ve got the support of all the major Muslim grassroots organizations. We’ve now drawn the interest of major foundations. We’re going to try and change the law.
How exactly does one start a congressional investigation?
David: You need advocates on Capitol Hill. And the way you get people’s attention on Capitol Hill is through, essentially, a quasi political campaign. A write-in campaign, petitions, telephone calls, and influencing. You need to have op-ed pieces, you need to have opinion-makers on your side. So in order to pull that together, we need to go city to city. We need to have panels and screenings, targeted to certain groups. And we need to get leaders who have influence with their elected officials who will meet with them and hand them petitions, and show that there’s a real interest in reform–that the people are deeply offended when they’re lied to. And I think we have an issue that has real traction at this moment in time.
And do you think the more people see the film, the more traction you’ll get?
David: Yes, I believe that to be the case.
The Newburgh case is being appealed to the Supreme Court right now. What specific arguments are being made there?
David: I just read the brief. What’s going to the Supreme Court is the question of, what is entrapment? There are two parts of entrapment: One is, was it the government’s idea to commit the crime? And everyone agrees that it was. Even the prosecutors agree: It was the government’s idea to create this event. The second issue is, was the defendant “predisposed?” In other words, had they done this kind of thing before? Were they asking around about doing it? And in this case, lower courts ruled that if they agreed to do it, that means they are predisposed. But if you think about it, that means there can never be a viable entrapment defense. So entrapment law has essentially been eviscerated by the courts. That’s now true in New York, but it’s not true in California, where you still have to prove predisposition. So now there’s what’s called a “circuit split,” where… [different appeals courts have ruled differently]. Hopefully the Supreme Court will rule in favor of a viable entrapment defense, where you can look at the backgrounds of the defendants and say, These guys aren’t terrorists. They may have done many bad things, but they’re certainly not terrorists. And in this case, therefore, they were entrapped by the government into committing a crime they never, ever would have done on their own.
Read the interviews at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
Part One: Director, Kate Davis
How did you and David get involved in this project?
Kate Davis: David had been wanting to do something on Islamophobia. And he went around to various legal conferences to learn about violations against Muslims in the U.S. And I kept on saying, well, we need a good story. And it took a couple years to land on the Newburgh Four as a case that crystallized a lot of the themes that we wanted to look at. From there, we got to know the defense attorneys.
How did you start reaching out to some of your specific interview subjects?
Kate: We worked closely with Sam Braverman, one of the defense attorneys, and he connected us. But that doesn’t mean it was easy to find people who would talk. Most people who know the four perpetrators were too afraid to go on camera. And even some of the defense attorneys were afraid that going on record would somehow jeopardize the appeals process. But I think the film would only help their case. In general, it took a while to get people’s trust. It was Alicia McWilliams, the aunt [of defendant David Williams], who was in a sense the bravest. She had already come out against what the FBI had done, and found other families who were victims of entrapment. So she knew a lot about the issues, and she was completely willing to put herself out there.
One of the things that makes the documentary so convincing is that you use the FBI’s own extensive surveillance footage, which makes it clear that the FBI’s undercover informant concocted every detail of the bomb plot. How did you get ahold of that footage?
Kate: Some of the material is public record because it was shown at trial. But David and I have decided we’re not going to say exactly how we got all of the footage, because we need to protect people who felt like they were risking their jobs by getting us material. But it should really all be a matter of public record.
In your mind, when you watch these tapes, is there any debate as to whether this was entrapment?
Kate: Nope. Can’t say there is. Seeing it is believing it. And I’m used to doing films that show multiple points of view and look at things relativistically. But not in this case. On the other hand, I really tried to stay open to the idea that there was some sort of method to the madness on the FBI’s part, and we tried hard to hear their side of the story. We met with a prosecutor for hours. And it really boiled down to a very simple argument that’s stated in the film: The prosecution felt that these guys were there, they did agree to do this, and that’s enough to convict. But I think for a certain price you can get most people to do anything. If you’re poor and black in Newburgh and somebody starts flashing the promise of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, eventually they might wear you down if your only other option is to be a low bit drug dealer.
What do you think made them a more appealing target, their poverty or their connections to Islam?
Kate: I think in this case targeting poor people was at least as important as the Muslim factor. Because these guys weren’t all actually Muslim. Only two of them were, and they weren’t so religious. I really think what made this formula work for the FBI is that they’re poor, and so they had no voice.
What does the Newburgh Four case say about the current state of affairs between American Muslims and the FBI?
Kate: The FBI has been criticized, and there are changes happening. They’re sending affiliates to go and make friends in Muslim communities. But they still have informants going around. So they’re kind of playing it both ways. There are so many ironies here. And one is that in the name of fighting for the freedom of Americans to live in a country without terrorism, they’re actually potentially creating more terrorists. Because the extreme radical Muslims look at cases like this as a good reason to hate us.
Do you think that the FBI was intentionally misrepresenting certain aspects of the case?
Kate: Absolutely. No question. There were just too many public fallacies. In the film, an FBI spokesperson in New York refers to the Newburgh Four as a terrorist cell that they’d been tracking for a year. It was all bullshit. These four guys were not a cell. They didn’t even know each other.
Do you think this film might change the thinking of any of the public officials who championed this investigation?
Kate: I hope so. We want to show it to Congress, and hope to have a good Washington screening at Silverdocs in June. Because I think when they do see this, they’re just not going to have any place to hide.
What does it say about the American criminal justice system that a conviction could take place, and then be upheld on appeal, when the evidence supporting an entrapment defense was so strong?
Kate: I’m not in the jurors’ minds, but I think there’s just such a fear-based climate, where we’re so terrified on some gut level of the next 9/11, that it’s really hard to let guys go when they agreed to use a stinger missile, even if it’s fake. In a way, the whole policy works because the American public is predisposed to convict whoever’s been pointed at [in terrorism cases]. It’s a little bit of a witch-hunt mentality.
Part Two: Director, David Heilbroner
What led you to this project?
David Heilbroner: Before I was a filmmaker, I was a lawyer and an Assistant DA in New York City. And I’ve written books about law and crime. The justice system, and its failings, have been a huge interest of mine for more than twenty-five years. A few years ago an old law professor of mine said I should look at how the FBI is abusing the Muslim community. And a civil rights professor named Debbie Ramirez offered to pay to have me travel to England and Washington, D.C., to talk to FBI and MI5 officials. I took her up on it, and traveled all over researching the issue. But Kate kept saying, you need a single story to tell. Otherwise it’s just too theoretical. And so we culled through a zillion cases and talked to people, and we came across the case of the Newburgh Four.
Why did this case in particular leap out at you?
David: It contained the elements of so many things that are wrong with the FBI’s tactics in the post-9/11 War on Terror era. But the best thing about the case was that it had gone to trial. And because it went to trial, we could get access to the tapes that the FBI had recorded over the course of this one-year-long sting operation. If these guys had pled guilty, those tapes would still be in a vault, and no one would ever, ever be allowed to see them.
Just how important was it to the project to have access to those tapes?
David: For a filmmaker, there’s nothing like contemporaneous footage. Even if you’re making an archival film, if you can get footage from the moment, it’s gold. Especially if it’s well shot. In this case, we had a one-year-long investigation recorded in every format imaginable. We had telephone calls recorded, we had video cameras in cars, we had video cameras in houses, we had surveillance aerial footage, we had infrared footage, we had still photographs. We had this incredible treasure trove that the FBI had essentially created–they were in the process of making their own movie. We just took their material and told it in a more straightforward fashion.
Did the FBI believe they were doing the right thing?
David: The FBI believes in this. Their feeling is–and there’s something to be said for this–that despite the fact that these men were broke with no options in life, and were being offered $250,000, planting a bomb anywhere is still a dreadful and criminal act. It’s simply wrong. But what was awful about this case was that the FBI created this crime out of whole cloth, and then sold it to the American public as, “We are busting a Muslim ring of terrorists in New York.” And nothing could be further from the truth. The FBI lied blatantly. As the old line goes, the cover-up is worse than the crime. They found these four guys and turned them into patsies, and sent them away for twenty-five years because they [the FBI] incorporated a stinger missile into the case–which legally prevented the judge from giving them a sentence that more appropriately reflected how they were hoodwinked. Let’s be straight: these were bad guys. This film doesn’t argue that four innocent people are in prison. It argues that the FBI is engaged in a systematic duping of the American public, on our dime.
As you point out, The Newburgh Four were not morally innocent. Do you think they should have been deemed legally innocent?
David: I think they should have been convicted of something. When people agree to plant a bomb anywhere, you can’t turn a blind eye to it, even if they were led by the nose. I think they should have been convicted, and the judge should have sentenced them to a year in jail. Even their mothers and aunts say in the film that they should have been sentenced to something. Alicia McWilliams says that [defendant] David [Williams] should have gotten five years for not having common sense. But it’s awful to put guys in prison basically for the rest of their lives for agreeing to commit acts of terrorism that you have seduced them into doing. And then to have [New York City Mayor] Michael Bloomberg, and [New York City Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly, and [U.S.] Senator Chuck Schumer publicly claim that the Newburgh Four were a Muslim ring that had been under surveillance–it besmirches the Muslim community, it dupes the American public into thinking that there is really a terrorist threat when there is not, it dupes Congress into thinking that the FBI is ferreting out this nascent threat, and as a result it wastes our tax dollars. The city of Newburgh does not need a multi-million dollar FBI investigation. The city of Newburgh needs better schools. It needs a jobs program. It doesn’t need [FBI informant] Shahed Hussain coming in and finding four idiots who would do anything for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. So that’s really the gist of the film. It isn’t so much about the injustice done to these four guys–although it was a huge injustice–it’s about the fact that the FBI is engaged in blatantly lying to the American public about the truth of what they’re doing. And we’ve caught them dead-to-rights.
What’s in it for them to lie like this?
David: Very simple: Money. If you go into Congress, and you say, “We’re doing really well in the war on terror, there are are hardly any threats at all,” they’re going to cut your budget in half. Homeland security is a big business. Eisenhower talked about the military industrial complex. Now we have the homeland security industrial complex. I believe the FBI is by and large a deeply ethical, motivated, caring, serious organization that does a really good job. But the FBI has gone out of its way to make Congress believe there are more cases like this than in fact exist. It’s cynical, and it’s nothing new.
What does a case like this say about the state of the American criminal justice system?
David: It says that when terrorism is involved, the rules break down. I don’t think this kind of an investigation would happen with this extent of duplicity on the part of the FBI in a drug case, or a gun running case. Terrorism is a hot political button. It freaks out juries and judges, it’s scary, and it’s kind of the crime of the moment, not unlike communism back in the fifties. I think that the justice system is really falling down on the job of keeping prosecutors and law enforcement in line. And I think the appeals courts need to tighten up the rules.
What can else can be done to improve the system?
David: What needs to be done right now is what we plan to do with this film over the next year: spark a congressional investigation into why the FBI does this and lies to the public about it afterwards. And I think the Newburgh Four should be pardoned after serving five years, because that’s more than enough time for people who were sucked into doing something by the FBI. This has to be exposed. I think this is just what congressional investigations are for. There has to be some accountability. So we’ve been raising money to go across the country barnstorming. We’ve got the support of all the major Muslim grassroots organizations. We’ve now drawn the interest of major foundations. We’re going to try and change the law.
How exactly does one start a congressional investigation?
David: You need advocates on Capitol Hill. And the way you get people’s attention on Capitol Hill is through, essentially, a quasi political campaign. A write-in campaign, petitions, telephone calls, and influencing. You need to have op-ed pieces, you need to have opinion-makers on your side. So in order to pull that together, we need to go city to city. We need to have panels and screenings, targeted to certain groups. And we need to get leaders who have influence with their elected officials who will meet with them and hand them petitions, and show that there’s a real interest in reform–that the people are deeply offended when they’re lied to. And I think we have an issue that has real traction at this moment in time.
And do you think the more people see the film, the more traction you’ll get?
David: Yes, I believe that to be the case.
The Newburgh case is being appealed to the Supreme Court right now. What specific arguments are being made there?
David: I just read the brief. What’s going to the Supreme Court is the question of, what is entrapment? There are two parts of entrapment: One is, was it the government’s idea to commit the crime? And everyone agrees that it was. Even the prosecutors agree: It was the government’s idea to create this event. The second issue is, was the defendant “predisposed?” In other words, had they done this kind of thing before? Were they asking around about doing it? And in this case, lower courts ruled that if they agreed to do it, that means they are predisposed. But if you think about it, that means there can never be a viable entrapment defense. So entrapment law has essentially been eviscerated by the courts. That’s now true in New York, but it’s not true in California, where you still have to prove predisposition. So now there’s what’s called a “circuit split,” where… [different appeals courts have ruled differently]. Hopefully the Supreme Court will rule in favor of a viable entrapment defense, where you can look at the backgrounds of the defendants and say, These guys aren’t terrorists. They may have done many bad things, but they’re certainly not terrorists. And in this case, therefore, they were entrapped by the government into committing a crime they never, ever would have done on their own.
Read the interviews at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
Thursday, April 24, 2014
2014 Tribeca Film Festival Interview: Brian McElhaney, Nic Kocher & Gabe Luna (Actors - 'Intramural')
With graduation, marriage, and an uncertain future on the horizon, fifth year college senior Caleb Fuller (Jake Lacy) decides to do the one thing he vowed to never do again: get the ol’ flag football team back together. Now with the help of his Panther teammates and unorthodox head coach Grant Rosenfalis (Nick Kocher) Caleb must defy all odds and logic if he ever hopes to achieve the intramural football glory he once had.
Will The Panther’s overcome their underdog status to defeat the still dominant Titans led by Dick Downs (Beck Bennett)? Will the wheelchair bound Grant put aside his bitterness towards Caleb and coach the Panthers to a championship? Will Caleb’s fiancé Vicky (Kate McKinnon) get the wedding she’s always dreamed of? Will every sports cliche be twisted around in the most entertaining fashion?
Set in the highly popular world of college intramural sports, ‘INTRAMURAL‘ is the epic sports movie for the guys who don’t deserve one.
How did you all get your start in comedy, and how did you then get into film?
Nick Kocher: Brian and I have known each other for a long time now. We were in a sketch comedy group together called BriTANicK. We both grew up in Atlanta, and we’ve been friends since high school. We didn’t really know it at the time, but we also were on the same little league team, we were at the same performing arts summer camp, and we both took a pottery class taught by this guy named Mitch Borg, and only realized later that we’d both been there.
Brian McElhaney: Which is crazy, because he’d shout out our names when he did the class.
Nick: Yeah. He was a weird guy.
Brian: We both went to NYU. I went for film, Nick went for acting. We just started working together, and we loved doing funny stuff, and by the time college was ending, we started just making our own sketches, and performing live, and doing standup, and improv, and traveling around. That got as an agent, and that got us jobs. [Director Andrew] Disney went to NYU too, and he cast us in his first movie, [“Searching for Sonny,”] and now here we are in “Intramural.”
Gabe Luna: Well I didn’t have a heavy comedy background, but I’ve been in a few comedic plays. But oddly enough, the last two pictures I’ve done are both big broad comedies. There’s “Intramural,” and another one I did call “Gravy,” which is a really weird black comedy with horror elements and gore. But with this one, I was fortunate enough to be in the center of all these wonderfully brilliant comedians and just try and be the connective tissue between all of it.
What drew all of you to this film?
Nick: The thing that was most exciting was, Brian and I both knew [co-stars] Beck Bennett and Nick Rutherford, and sort of tangentially knew [co-star] Kate McKinnon. We saw that they were signed up for it, and the script had such a funny backbone. I was so one hundred percent certain I was going to have fun making it. And you never know how a movie is going to turn out. But as long as you’re having fun and that comes across, you’re in a good spot.
Brian: You can have a good sense of whether something is good or not. But you never really know. It’s always a gamble. The one thing you can almost always be sure of is like, do I enjoy these people? Do I want to work on this set? Disney is such a great guy. We knew he’d hire only great crewmembers, we knew we liked the cast so far, and the script was really funny. So we were like, absolutely.
Gabe: I grew up in Austin [where the film was shot]. I was in L.A. before [production], and all I knew was it was six weeks where I got to go back home, and play football, and have a lot of fun. And then I got there and realized this was a family I already had. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the producers and writers and everyone, I had some connection to a lot of them, often because they knew someone I’d worked with previously. I was the last piece they added to the cast. It was great that I was a good fit.
Brian, I notice that you tend to call Andrew Disney by his last name.
Brian: Yeah, we call him Disney, or Diz. DizNasty sometimes.
But never Andrew.
Brian: Never Andrew. Screw that.
Nick: Not when you’ve got that type of powerhouse last name. Why would you mess around with “Andrew?”
How would you describe Disney’s directing style?
Nick: He’s incredibly enthusiastic
Brian: Yes.
Nick: He’s one of the most enthusiastic people I’ve ever met. And whenever you’ve gotten the right take, you know it, ‘cause he’s screamed out from across the set, “Aaa-cuut!!” And runs up saying, “That was great! This is great!”
Brian: “We’re Making a movie! We’re making a movie!”
Gabe: At one point in the movie Jake Lacy’s character has to drop his pants. So there’s a bare-ass Jake Lacy, and just to make Jake feel good, Diz drops his pants, and he’s sitting there at the monitor with no pants on. And I was like, if I didn’t love this guy before, I do now.
Brian: Great attitude. A ton of fun. Encourages playfulness on set. A great director, especially for this type of film.
When it comes to 'Hoosiers'-eque inspirational sports films, what do you like about them on their own merits, and what makes them so ripe for parody?
Nick: What I like about them is the stakes are always so high. What’s fun about this movie is the stakes couldn’t be lower.
Brian: I think things with a lot of emotion behind them are ripe for parody. Because there’s that fine line of cheesy and lame, versus incredibly inspirational. And there’s something about the spirit of those films–there’s just a lot of inner emotion to them. A movie like this makes fun of that, but loves it and honors it, and sticks to the structure. When you’re really making the same kind of movie you’re making fun of, then it’s almost like a perfect amalgamation of both sides of your brain. There’s something really exciting about that balance.
Gabe: And there’s always the inherent theater and spectacle of gladiators, of football–it’s all the same. The stakes are there, there’s good and evil, you’re rooting for your squad. That’s all built in. That’s exciting.
Nick: And everyone can relate to that–if not playing on a team, then rooting for one, and loving it when the underdogs win. You know going in with all these sports movies, there are like two possible endings. But you’re still so excited to watch the team take that journey.
You mention the low stakes in this film. Just how low are they?
Nick: In this movie, nothing bad’s going to happen to these players if they don’t play the game. No one’s going to shut down the rec center. It’s just that they won’t have a fun time. And it’s such a deliberate choice. It would be so easy to put in the high stakes of, say, needing money for something, and there’s a prize for winning. But the movie actively avoids that. Which is so fun, because it makes it so it’s all just for this weird thrill that these guys are gonna get out of it.
Brian: Which speaks to the movie’s credit, because it shows that you don’t need the rec center to invest an audience. These guys are just kind of bored idiots who want to do something fun.
Nick, your character, Grant, is the down-and-out mentor figure, who comes back to coach the team after an injury ends his own athletic career. What did you like most about the character?
Nick: What I like about Grant is how insanely committed he is to this sort of ruse. Grant–spoiler alert–is faking a lot of things. And he’s doing that for no real reason. But he’s committing so hard to it. And he’s so big and theatrical, and is just playing a character for most of the movie. I responded very much to how overdramatic Grant is.
Brian, your character, Chance, is an emotional Goth and an aspiring magician. What did you like most about him?
Brian: I really enjoyed playing a character that I had just never heard of. When Disney told me Chance was an effeminate emo Goth magician wide receiver, I was like, I don’t even know how to put those pieces together. That doesn’t make any sense in my head. I really grappled with why I was making these choices, and how to fit together character elements that seemed so disparate. And then it all came back to Chance’s dad–that was my big character realization. I feel like in a lot of movies, you’re just sort of playing yourself. But Chance was very much not me. And I loved going to extreme places I’d never gotten to go to before.
Gabe, Vinnie is kind of the earnest sidekick to Jake Lacy’s character, Caleb. How would you describe the character?
Gabe: As Vinnie, I’m the straight guy in the thing, just there to be a level foundation, and I love my team. Vinnie’s a prankster. He’s a bit of Polyanna, he’s really positive and tries to take care of all his guys. I took great pride in kind of being a little bit of a stone in the middle of this very tempestuous comedy storm.
How much freedom did you all have to improvise?
Nick: We had a ton. Disney was very good about giving us complete free reign do it his way once or twice, and then go nuts.
Brian: Which I think is important for a movie like this. If you’re doing a David Mamet play, you don’t want the director to be, like, “Improvise!” It would be like, “No, have more faith in your script!” And it’s not like [Disney] didn’t have faith in this one–he absolutely they did. And I think most of the final product is [what’s in the script]. But he also knew that part of what was going to make this movie work was for the ensemble to be constantly having fun. There were a lot of comedians who wanted to go crazy. It was like, you know what, we’re making a goofy, big, absurd film, so go goofy, big, and absurd when you’d like.
What were some of your favorite scenes to shoot?
Nick: I give a lot of speeches in the movie. And those are always fun, just to kind of lean into how passionate Grant is. And half the time what he’s saying doesn’t even make sense.
Brian: I liked the actually football plays. Making a catch was great. It’s like, “action!”–and everyone has to do their thing, there’s a dolly, there’s a focus puller, and then you’re the last piece, you have to make that catch, and it almost feels like you’re making a play for a big game. People are depending on you, and if you mess up you hate yourself. But then when you get it right at the end it’s really exciting.
Gabe: Yeah, the football was a lot of fun. And it was really involved. We talked to Coach Mike [Sheldon] from Game Changing Films, who helped do all the sports coordination, and he was like, “Man, I worked on ‘Varsity Blues,’ ‘The Replacements,’ and there’s like twice as many plays that you guys have learned for this crazy sports comedy,” where we’re not even wearing pads or anything. It’s just flag football.
What are some projects you all have on the horizon?
Gabe: I’m starring in a show called “Matador” for Robert Rodriguez’s new El Rey network. It’s a soccer star spy show. We’re shooting in July.
Nick: Brian and I are writing a movie for Lion’s Gate, and we’re working on a pilot for Comedy Central.
Brian: Which shoots very soon.
Are you nervous about that? Or just excited?
Brian and Nick simultaneously: Excited.
Brian: We’re ready.
Read the interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
Will The Panther’s overcome their underdog status to defeat the still dominant Titans led by Dick Downs (Beck Bennett)? Will the wheelchair bound Grant put aside his bitterness towards Caleb and coach the Panthers to a championship? Will Caleb’s fiancé Vicky (Kate McKinnon) get the wedding she’s always dreamed of? Will every sports cliche be twisted around in the most entertaining fashion?
Set in the highly popular world of college intramural sports, ‘INTRAMURAL‘ is the epic sports movie for the guys who don’t deserve one.
How did you all get your start in comedy, and how did you then get into film?
Nick Kocher: Brian and I have known each other for a long time now. We were in a sketch comedy group together called BriTANicK. We both grew up in Atlanta, and we’ve been friends since high school. We didn’t really know it at the time, but we also were on the same little league team, we were at the same performing arts summer camp, and we both took a pottery class taught by this guy named Mitch Borg, and only realized later that we’d both been there.
Brian McElhaney: Which is crazy, because he’d shout out our names when he did the class.
Nick: Yeah. He was a weird guy.
Brian: We both went to NYU. I went for film, Nick went for acting. We just started working together, and we loved doing funny stuff, and by the time college was ending, we started just making our own sketches, and performing live, and doing standup, and improv, and traveling around. That got as an agent, and that got us jobs. [Director Andrew] Disney went to NYU too, and he cast us in his first movie, [“Searching for Sonny,”] and now here we are in “Intramural.”
Gabe Luna: Well I didn’t have a heavy comedy background, but I’ve been in a few comedic plays. But oddly enough, the last two pictures I’ve done are both big broad comedies. There’s “Intramural,” and another one I did call “Gravy,” which is a really weird black comedy with horror elements and gore. But with this one, I was fortunate enough to be in the center of all these wonderfully brilliant comedians and just try and be the connective tissue between all of it.
What drew all of you to this film?
Nick: The thing that was most exciting was, Brian and I both knew [co-stars] Beck Bennett and Nick Rutherford, and sort of tangentially knew [co-star] Kate McKinnon. We saw that they were signed up for it, and the script had such a funny backbone. I was so one hundred percent certain I was going to have fun making it. And you never know how a movie is going to turn out. But as long as you’re having fun and that comes across, you’re in a good spot.
Brian: You can have a good sense of whether something is good or not. But you never really know. It’s always a gamble. The one thing you can almost always be sure of is like, do I enjoy these people? Do I want to work on this set? Disney is such a great guy. We knew he’d hire only great crewmembers, we knew we liked the cast so far, and the script was really funny. So we were like, absolutely.
Gabe: I grew up in Austin [where the film was shot]. I was in L.A. before [production], and all I knew was it was six weeks where I got to go back home, and play football, and have a lot of fun. And then I got there and realized this was a family I already had. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the producers and writers and everyone, I had some connection to a lot of them, often because they knew someone I’d worked with previously. I was the last piece they added to the cast. It was great that I was a good fit.
Brian, I notice that you tend to call Andrew Disney by his last name.
Brian: Yeah, we call him Disney, or Diz. DizNasty sometimes.
But never Andrew.
Brian: Never Andrew. Screw that.
Nick: Not when you’ve got that type of powerhouse last name. Why would you mess around with “Andrew?”
How would you describe Disney’s directing style?
Nick: He’s incredibly enthusiastic
Brian: Yes.
Nick: He’s one of the most enthusiastic people I’ve ever met. And whenever you’ve gotten the right take, you know it, ‘cause he’s screamed out from across the set, “Aaa-cuut!!” And runs up saying, “That was great! This is great!”
Brian: “We’re Making a movie! We’re making a movie!”
Gabe: At one point in the movie Jake Lacy’s character has to drop his pants. So there’s a bare-ass Jake Lacy, and just to make Jake feel good, Diz drops his pants, and he’s sitting there at the monitor with no pants on. And I was like, if I didn’t love this guy before, I do now.
Brian: Great attitude. A ton of fun. Encourages playfulness on set. A great director, especially for this type of film.
When it comes to 'Hoosiers'-eque inspirational sports films, what do you like about them on their own merits, and what makes them so ripe for parody?
Nick: What I like about them is the stakes are always so high. What’s fun about this movie is the stakes couldn’t be lower.
Brian: I think things with a lot of emotion behind them are ripe for parody. Because there’s that fine line of cheesy and lame, versus incredibly inspirational. And there’s something about the spirit of those films–there’s just a lot of inner emotion to them. A movie like this makes fun of that, but loves it and honors it, and sticks to the structure. When you’re really making the same kind of movie you’re making fun of, then it’s almost like a perfect amalgamation of both sides of your brain. There’s something really exciting about that balance.
Gabe: And there’s always the inherent theater and spectacle of gladiators, of football–it’s all the same. The stakes are there, there’s good and evil, you’re rooting for your squad. That’s all built in. That’s exciting.
Nick: And everyone can relate to that–if not playing on a team, then rooting for one, and loving it when the underdogs win. You know going in with all these sports movies, there are like two possible endings. But you’re still so excited to watch the team take that journey.
You mention the low stakes in this film. Just how low are they?
Nick: In this movie, nothing bad’s going to happen to these players if they don’t play the game. No one’s going to shut down the rec center. It’s just that they won’t have a fun time. And it’s such a deliberate choice. It would be so easy to put in the high stakes of, say, needing money for something, and there’s a prize for winning. But the movie actively avoids that. Which is so fun, because it makes it so it’s all just for this weird thrill that these guys are gonna get out of it.
Brian: Which speaks to the movie’s credit, because it shows that you don’t need the rec center to invest an audience. These guys are just kind of bored idiots who want to do something fun.
Nick, your character, Grant, is the down-and-out mentor figure, who comes back to coach the team after an injury ends his own athletic career. What did you like most about the character?
Nick: What I like about Grant is how insanely committed he is to this sort of ruse. Grant–spoiler alert–is faking a lot of things. And he’s doing that for no real reason. But he’s committing so hard to it. And he’s so big and theatrical, and is just playing a character for most of the movie. I responded very much to how overdramatic Grant is.
Brian, your character, Chance, is an emotional Goth and an aspiring magician. What did you like most about him?
Brian: I really enjoyed playing a character that I had just never heard of. When Disney told me Chance was an effeminate emo Goth magician wide receiver, I was like, I don’t even know how to put those pieces together. That doesn’t make any sense in my head. I really grappled with why I was making these choices, and how to fit together character elements that seemed so disparate. And then it all came back to Chance’s dad–that was my big character realization. I feel like in a lot of movies, you’re just sort of playing yourself. But Chance was very much not me. And I loved going to extreme places I’d never gotten to go to before.
Gabe, Vinnie is kind of the earnest sidekick to Jake Lacy’s character, Caleb. How would you describe the character?
Gabe: As Vinnie, I’m the straight guy in the thing, just there to be a level foundation, and I love my team. Vinnie’s a prankster. He’s a bit of Polyanna, he’s really positive and tries to take care of all his guys. I took great pride in kind of being a little bit of a stone in the middle of this very tempestuous comedy storm.
How much freedom did you all have to improvise?
Nick: We had a ton. Disney was very good about giving us complete free reign do it his way once or twice, and then go nuts.
Brian: Which I think is important for a movie like this. If you’re doing a David Mamet play, you don’t want the director to be, like, “Improvise!” It would be like, “No, have more faith in your script!” And it’s not like [Disney] didn’t have faith in this one–he absolutely they did. And I think most of the final product is [what’s in the script]. But he also knew that part of what was going to make this movie work was for the ensemble to be constantly having fun. There were a lot of comedians who wanted to go crazy. It was like, you know what, we’re making a goofy, big, absurd film, so go goofy, big, and absurd when you’d like.
What were some of your favorite scenes to shoot?
Nick: I give a lot of speeches in the movie. And those are always fun, just to kind of lean into how passionate Grant is. And half the time what he’s saying doesn’t even make sense.
Brian: I liked the actually football plays. Making a catch was great. It’s like, “action!”–and everyone has to do their thing, there’s a dolly, there’s a focus puller, and then you’re the last piece, you have to make that catch, and it almost feels like you’re making a play for a big game. People are depending on you, and if you mess up you hate yourself. But then when you get it right at the end it’s really exciting.
Gabe: Yeah, the football was a lot of fun. And it was really involved. We talked to Coach Mike [Sheldon] from Game Changing Films, who helped do all the sports coordination, and he was like, “Man, I worked on ‘Varsity Blues,’ ‘The Replacements,’ and there’s like twice as many plays that you guys have learned for this crazy sports comedy,” where we’re not even wearing pads or anything. It’s just flag football.
What are some projects you all have on the horizon?
Gabe: I’m starring in a show called “Matador” for Robert Rodriguez’s new El Rey network. It’s a soccer star spy show. We’re shooting in July.
Nick: Brian and I are writing a movie for Lion’s Gate, and we’re working on a pilot for Comedy Central.
Brian: Which shoots very soon.
Are you nervous about that? Or just excited?
Brian and Nick simultaneously: Excited.
Brian: We’re ready.
Read the interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
2014 Tribeca Film Festival Interview: Brin Hill (Director - 'In Your Eyes')
East Coast housewife Rebecca (Zoe Kazan) lives a comfortable, sheltered life of cocktail parties and lonely nights as the soft-spoken, neglected wife of a doctor, but she always knew there was something special about herself. Across the country in arid New Mexico, charismatic ex-con Dylan (Michael Stahl-David) has paid his debt to society and is ready for a fresh start, including a new job and a burgeoning flirtation with local good-time-gal Donna (Nikki Reed). When the two polar opposites realize they are strangely connected in ways they can’t understand, a metaphysical romance begins in TFF alum Brin Hill’s film, written by Joss Whedon.”
What drew you to the script (apart from who wrote it)?
For me the most interesting aspect of the script was its theme of connection–and what it means to connect in today’s society. And I was also drawn to the characters. Joss tends to write a lot of loner heroes. If you look at “The Avengers”, or his television work, or even “Much Ado About Nothing” to some degree, it’s about these people who have to band together to overcome adversity. And I also like the idea of people overcoming their socialization and their limited environments.
In-Your-Eyes-PosterDylan (Michael Stahl-David) and Rebecca (Zoe Kazan), the two protagonists in your film, have had a psychic link since they were young children. But it’s only now as adults that they become completely conscious of it. Why is this the moment in their lives that this connection comes fully online?
That’s something that Joss and I talked about. I think we both felt that it comes when they’re feeling most alienated, and in their lowest moment. It connects when they need it in their lives. We didn’t really want to explain the phenomenon beyond that.
Dylan is an ex-convict scraping by as a car wash attendant in New Mexico. Rebeca is a high-society wife in a wealthy town in New Hampshire. Apart from their psychic link, why do these two very different characters feel such a connection?
They’re both in these small, these limited environments. When you live or grow up in these kinds of spaces, I think if you’re different in any way, people kind of look at you strangely. And I think these two characters have a kinship in that. They’re experiencing it in very different ways, but there’s a common bond there. To me, that was what connected them, aside from chemistry, and all those other things that are inexplicable when it comes to discovering love. They both feel like outsiders in these worlds, and they can’t really find their true selves without finding each other. Dylan is such an interesting character to me because he reminds me of a lot of people that I’ve known in my life, who have good souls, and good hearts, and are charismatic, but just can’t seem to turn the switch on at all. And in a lot of ways Rebecca’s very similar. She hasn’t really been able to figure out who she is because of her upbringing and her relationship to her parents, and also her relationship to her husband. People have sort of put a box around her. And a box has been put around Dylan too. I think Dylan needs somebody who can see the inner goodness in him, and the charisma in him. And Rebecca needs someone who can see what she could be if she could spread her wings a little bit and step outside that box.
What kind of change and growth does Rebecca bring out in Dylan?
Dylan is making a lot of choices just because they’re easy. And when Rebecca comes along, he realizes he can make a choice based on someone else. It’s sort of like any relationship in that way. He has to start making choices that are beyond the world in front of him.
And what kind of change does Dylan bring out in Rebecca?
Dylan is working class, and Rebecca’s in a space of wealth. She starts seeing beyond the people in her life that she finds to be kind of vapid. Now there’s a person that’s more interesting to her, and more three-dimensional, and can show her how to find her own way in the world, and how to stake a claim. There’s a scene where Dylan shows Rebecca [how to fix her own car before a mechanic can rip her off]. It shows that you don’t have to be what everyone defines you as.
Does this film take inspiration from any long-distance-relationship films that don’t have supernatural hooks?
You know it’s funny, it’s only in talking to people that I’m realizing that people are thinking about it on those terms. The characters have this inexplicable connection that’s so deeply rooted in immediacy, that I never thought of it as a long-distance relationship.
Michael Stahl-David and Zoe Kazan spend very little time onscreen simultaneously. How often during the production did Michael and Zoe actually interact with one another?
Every day, every scene. My mandate was, the way to get them to have the best chemistry–beyond the fact that they’re both amazing actors who, coincidentally, know each other socially–was for them to both be there for each other. I didn’t want them to feel like they were just monologuing everything.
What were their line readings like? Were they talking to each other?
They were talking. Like if he was in the car, she’d be on a walkie, or in the backseat. Or one of them would be hidden under a table, off camera. They couldn’t necessarily see each other, and didn’t necessarily want to. But they had the emotion of voice. And this allowed them to know how the other person was playing things. So when they had to turn around days later and do their half of the scenes, they could know how they were supposed to react emotionally. A lot of times the three of us would talk about: Where were we last time? How were we playing this?
During the editing process, what did you and editor Steven Pilgrim do to make sure that these two characters who were in different locations really seemed to be interacting with each other?
Our mandate cutting it with Steven was just to try to cut the best possible scene and not really worry that the audience would lose track of things. I think the more we pieced the movie together, we realized that people would go with it. Once you buy into the whole conceit of the film, you just kind of roll with it. And because the characters’ dynamic is so good, I think you just lose yourself in the movie.
Why did you pick New Hampshire and New Mexico?
It was actually originally written as Connecticut and New Mexico. But how we ended up in New Hampshire was, we were chasing snow. Snow was an integral part of the script, and a character in the movie. So we actually switched states several times in pre-prodcution. We started in Connecticut: There was no snow. We went to Ohio, there was no snow. We went to New York, there was no snow. We went to Massachusetts, there was no snow. And then we were in New Hampshire. We selected New Mexico, just as in the script, and we ended up shooting California [to stand in for New Mexico] because of budgetary reasons. We were on a micro-budget, and we were still able to shoot three thousand miles apart. That’s kind of amazing, and a testament to the producers.
Right after the film’s April 20th World Premiere, Joss Whedon appeared in a video announcement to announce that the film was being released digitally, directly to consumers, as a five dollar rental. Why was this strategy settled on? Was any inspiration taken from comedian Louis C.K., who has successfully employed similar distribution strategies?
I think there’s a little Louis C.K. There’s probably some Beyonce too. But it wasn’t like we pointed to Louis C.K. and said, hey, we want to do what he did. I think it was just a natural evolution for Joss and Bellwether [Pictures] to explore new modes of distribution. And I see this as being just a fun and infectious movie. I don’t want it to be taken too seriously–I just want it to be entertaining. And I thought, how can we get it out to as many people as possible? How do we cast the widest net? And all of us who were involved in this decision, including Joss, producer Michael Roiff, and producer Kai Cole–from the beginning we were all thinking, how can we do something different, and how can we be immediate with it? The traditional method is, you make a movie, and take it to a festival, and a year later you maybe get out in theaters. There’s that big waiting period. And we asked ourselves, how do we eliminate that?
What does it mean to you personally to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival?
This is my third Tribeca. I was at the first one with a short film called “Morning Breath: A Brooklyn Love Story.” What I always loved about this festival is the spirit with which founders Jane [Rosenthal] and Robert [De Niro] started it, which was just this idea of bringing film and art to a community that loves film and art. I went to NYU Film School, and I love bringing stuff to New Yorkers, because they’re gonna tell you if they love it or if they hate it. I remember being a kid and going to 42nd Street and watching movies, and people were yelling at the screen. I was like, “What is this? This is awesome.” They let you know. I feel like this is the place where all the energy is.
Read the interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
What drew you to the script (apart from who wrote it)?
For me the most interesting aspect of the script was its theme of connection–and what it means to connect in today’s society. And I was also drawn to the characters. Joss tends to write a lot of loner heroes. If you look at “The Avengers”, or his television work, or even “Much Ado About Nothing” to some degree, it’s about these people who have to band together to overcome adversity. And I also like the idea of people overcoming their socialization and their limited environments.
In-Your-Eyes-PosterDylan (Michael Stahl-David) and Rebecca (Zoe Kazan), the two protagonists in your film, have had a psychic link since they were young children. But it’s only now as adults that they become completely conscious of it. Why is this the moment in their lives that this connection comes fully online?
That’s something that Joss and I talked about. I think we both felt that it comes when they’re feeling most alienated, and in their lowest moment. It connects when they need it in their lives. We didn’t really want to explain the phenomenon beyond that.
Dylan is an ex-convict scraping by as a car wash attendant in New Mexico. Rebeca is a high-society wife in a wealthy town in New Hampshire. Apart from their psychic link, why do these two very different characters feel such a connection?
They’re both in these small, these limited environments. When you live or grow up in these kinds of spaces, I think if you’re different in any way, people kind of look at you strangely. And I think these two characters have a kinship in that. They’re experiencing it in very different ways, but there’s a common bond there. To me, that was what connected them, aside from chemistry, and all those other things that are inexplicable when it comes to discovering love. They both feel like outsiders in these worlds, and they can’t really find their true selves without finding each other. Dylan is such an interesting character to me because he reminds me of a lot of people that I’ve known in my life, who have good souls, and good hearts, and are charismatic, but just can’t seem to turn the switch on at all. And in a lot of ways Rebecca’s very similar. She hasn’t really been able to figure out who she is because of her upbringing and her relationship to her parents, and also her relationship to her husband. People have sort of put a box around her. And a box has been put around Dylan too. I think Dylan needs somebody who can see the inner goodness in him, and the charisma in him. And Rebecca needs someone who can see what she could be if she could spread her wings a little bit and step outside that box.
What kind of change and growth does Rebecca bring out in Dylan?
Dylan is making a lot of choices just because they’re easy. And when Rebecca comes along, he realizes he can make a choice based on someone else. It’s sort of like any relationship in that way. He has to start making choices that are beyond the world in front of him.
And what kind of change does Dylan bring out in Rebecca?
Dylan is working class, and Rebecca’s in a space of wealth. She starts seeing beyond the people in her life that she finds to be kind of vapid. Now there’s a person that’s more interesting to her, and more three-dimensional, and can show her how to find her own way in the world, and how to stake a claim. There’s a scene where Dylan shows Rebecca [how to fix her own car before a mechanic can rip her off]. It shows that you don’t have to be what everyone defines you as.
Does this film take inspiration from any long-distance-relationship films that don’t have supernatural hooks?
You know it’s funny, it’s only in talking to people that I’m realizing that people are thinking about it on those terms. The characters have this inexplicable connection that’s so deeply rooted in immediacy, that I never thought of it as a long-distance relationship.
Michael Stahl-David and Zoe Kazan spend very little time onscreen simultaneously. How often during the production did Michael and Zoe actually interact with one another?
Every day, every scene. My mandate was, the way to get them to have the best chemistry–beyond the fact that they’re both amazing actors who, coincidentally, know each other socially–was for them to both be there for each other. I didn’t want them to feel like they were just monologuing everything.
What were their line readings like? Were they talking to each other?
They were talking. Like if he was in the car, she’d be on a walkie, or in the backseat. Or one of them would be hidden under a table, off camera. They couldn’t necessarily see each other, and didn’t necessarily want to. But they had the emotion of voice. And this allowed them to know how the other person was playing things. So when they had to turn around days later and do their half of the scenes, they could know how they were supposed to react emotionally. A lot of times the three of us would talk about: Where were we last time? How were we playing this?
During the editing process, what did you and editor Steven Pilgrim do to make sure that these two characters who were in different locations really seemed to be interacting with each other?
Our mandate cutting it with Steven was just to try to cut the best possible scene and not really worry that the audience would lose track of things. I think the more we pieced the movie together, we realized that people would go with it. Once you buy into the whole conceit of the film, you just kind of roll with it. And because the characters’ dynamic is so good, I think you just lose yourself in the movie.
Why did you pick New Hampshire and New Mexico?
It was actually originally written as Connecticut and New Mexico. But how we ended up in New Hampshire was, we were chasing snow. Snow was an integral part of the script, and a character in the movie. So we actually switched states several times in pre-prodcution. We started in Connecticut: There was no snow. We went to Ohio, there was no snow. We went to New York, there was no snow. We went to Massachusetts, there was no snow. And then we were in New Hampshire. We selected New Mexico, just as in the script, and we ended up shooting California [to stand in for New Mexico] because of budgetary reasons. We were on a micro-budget, and we were still able to shoot three thousand miles apart. That’s kind of amazing, and a testament to the producers.
Right after the film’s April 20th World Premiere, Joss Whedon appeared in a video announcement to announce that the film was being released digitally, directly to consumers, as a five dollar rental. Why was this strategy settled on? Was any inspiration taken from comedian Louis C.K., who has successfully employed similar distribution strategies?
I think there’s a little Louis C.K. There’s probably some Beyonce too. But it wasn’t like we pointed to Louis C.K. and said, hey, we want to do what he did. I think it was just a natural evolution for Joss and Bellwether [Pictures] to explore new modes of distribution. And I see this as being just a fun and infectious movie. I don’t want it to be taken too seriously–I just want it to be entertaining. And I thought, how can we get it out to as many people as possible? How do we cast the widest net? And all of us who were involved in this decision, including Joss, producer Michael Roiff, and producer Kai Cole–from the beginning we were all thinking, how can we do something different, and how can we be immediate with it? The traditional method is, you make a movie, and take it to a festival, and a year later you maybe get out in theaters. There’s that big waiting period. And we asked ourselves, how do we eliminate that?
What does it mean to you personally to premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival?
This is my third Tribeca. I was at the first one with a short film called “Morning Breath: A Brooklyn Love Story.” What I always loved about this festival is the spirit with which founders Jane [Rosenthal] and Robert [De Niro] started it, which was just this idea of bringing film and art to a community that loves film and art. I went to NYU Film School, and I love bringing stuff to New Yorkers, because they’re gonna tell you if they love it or if they hate it. I remember being a kid and going to 42nd Street and watching movies, and people were yelling at the screen. I was like, “What is this? This is awesome.” They let you know. I feel like this is the place where all the energy is.
Read the interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
2014 Tribeca Film Festival Interview: Daniel Junge and Kief Davidson (Directors - 'Beyond the Brick: A Lego Brickumentary')
Since the birth of their trademark toy in 1947, The LEGO Group has produced over 400 billion bricks. But more and more, LEGO® bricks aren’t just for kids, and some take them very seriously. Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs) around the globe are unashamedly declaring their love of the brick, brick artists are creating stunning and surprising creations, and Master Builders are building human scale and larger structures. LEGO bricks are being used educationally, therapeutically, and have provided a universal system for human creativity and our innate desire “to build.”
‘Beyond The Brick: A LEGO® Brickumentary’ is a feature-length, theatrical documentary covering all things that surround the LEGO® brick and the global phenomenon it has created.
Did you both use LEGOs growing up? And do you use them now?
(Interviewer’s note: Right after I asked this first question, Daniel and Kief both dug into big piles of LEGO on the table in front of them, and started snapping different designs into place as they spoke. They continued to do so for the rest of the interview.)
Kief Davidson: I actually didn’t use LEGOs when I was a kid. I kind of went right from blocks to Star Wars. So I didn’t really discover LEGOs until I had my own child. My son is just obsessed with them. That kind of energized me. And I saw how at an early age it helped so much to develop his fine motor skills–just doing this [Kief snaps a LEGO brick into place] as a little kid. It turns out that’s actually very common with children: weakness in their thumbs. And LEGO is such a great tool to build that strength.
I like that you’re both actually playing with LEGOs while we’re talking.
Daniel Junge: We didn’t get to play at all during the making of the film. When you’re making a film, which can be an all-consuming process, you don’t want to involve yourself with the subject of your film with what little spare time you have. You want a few minutes of respite. So it’s fun to finally start playing with them again. I was raised with LEGO. I was in on that first generation it really caught fire with in this country.
The film makes it clear that different people like LEGO for different reasons. Is there anything that fans of LEGO all tend to have in common?
Daniel: I think there is a common theme in what [singer-songwriter and LEGO fan] Ed Sheeran says in the film: In a way it brings back a piece of your childhood. I would venture that even the serious artists in the film all still have a childlike kind of nostalgia for the bricks. Even when they’re using it as a serious tool, there’s still something comfortable and familiar about this medium.
The film is narrated by a Jason Bateman-voiced animated LEGO figurine (or, in the language of LEGO, a “minifig”). What made you want to use written narration as oppposed to relying on interviews alone?
Daniel: When you watch my films, or Kief’s films, you’ll see that their power comes from the fact that they have strong narratives. And narratives need present-tense stories. There’s only so much lip-flap you can have in a documentary before people grow tired. And one of the challenges for us was that we wanted to make a film that families could watch. For kids to watch a film, it’s got to be super, super engaging. Which means story and visual stimulation, not just people talking.
Kief: I think our animated minifig made the film more accessible for younger kids. I sat next to two six-year-olds last night [at the April 20th premiere], and they were just fully engaged in the animation.
What makes LEGO unique, and sets it apart from any other art form or science?
Kief: It’s the infinite combinations. There’s a scene in the film where Søren [Eilers, a mathematical sciences professor at the University of Copenhagen]talks about all the different combinations of LEGO when you’re using just six different bricks. And then when it got up to ten he couldn’t count anymore. What you can do with just a handful of little bricks is pretty amazing.
Daniel: And yet it’s a system with constraints as well. In some ways, a thesis of the film is that when you have a system with constraints, like musical notes, it really enables human creativity.
As documentary filmmakers working on a low budget, do you relate to the idea that constraints can actually be helpful?
Daniel: A parallel is that at some point we had to stop making this film. We had to say enough is enough. We could’ve gone on and on and on forever, but I think having time and money constraints can be helpful for filmmakers.
Kief: And a decision was made to go to the Tribeca Film Festival. That was a hard deadline we ultimately had to make.
The film really takes us through the history of LEGO, especially during an animated segment early in the runtime. How did you start researching that history?
Daniel: How did we stop researching? That was something we really battled with. Because there’s definitely an inside-baseball element to the film, in that we’re dealing with subjects who know this system so well. But we wanted audiences who were completely green or didn’t know that much about LEGO to come to the film and have a place to jump off from.
Kief: We easily could have made a whole film just about the history. But we were so taken by some of the characters that we found that their stories wound up becoming more dominant.
How did you find your interview subjects?
Daniel: We started within the LEGO company, at the factory, in the design rooms, with the corporate executives. And we tried to get the inside story while we were researching all the outside stories. And that’s the journey of the film as well: We’re starting inside the company, and then moving beyond it, and then finding a way to weave those two worlds together.
Kief: It became a little bit more difficult when we started reaching out to the community, because there were so many great builders out there, so many great stories. Ultimately we covered three different conventions, and at the first one we found out who the top dogs of that convention were, and the more people we talked to the more we got to know. But at the end of the day, like the infinite building choices you have with LEGO, it seemed like there was an infinite number of characters that we could find as well. But luckily it all seemed to jell the further we went down the road with it.
Nathan Sawaya, a LEGO artist featured heavily in the film, contests the idea that working with a commercial product like LEGO makes an artist a sellout. As filmmakers making a film about LEGO, how would you respond to such an accusation?
Daniel: Mine and Kief’s street cred is proven. We’ve both worked in the human rights and social justice field for over a decade. So if working with something that has mainstream and pop appeal is selling out, I’m happy to do it. Because I think it really stretches us as filmmakers. Nathan works within a medium that some people might say makes him a commercial sellout, when really he deals with big ideas and aesthetically challenging things. And I’d like to think that our film does the same thing.
Kief: I personally want to challenge myself and do different genres, do different things. My prior film, and Daniel’s prior film, were both very intense social justice films. Going into something as light as this, I thought it was just going to be a cakewalk. And it was far from it.
What’s on the horizon in terms of distribution?
Daniel: We believe this film has theatrical capability, not only in North America but hopefully around the world.
Kief: And I guess if it doesn’t sell, then we definitely didn’t sell out.
Daniel: (Laughs.) Exactly. Then we’ll be back to our more profitable social justice films.
Read the interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
‘Beyond The Brick: A LEGO® Brickumentary’ is a feature-length, theatrical documentary covering all things that surround the LEGO® brick and the global phenomenon it has created.
Did you both use LEGOs growing up? And do you use them now?
(Interviewer’s note: Right after I asked this first question, Daniel and Kief both dug into big piles of LEGO on the table in front of them, and started snapping different designs into place as they spoke. They continued to do so for the rest of the interview.)
Kief Davidson: I actually didn’t use LEGOs when I was a kid. I kind of went right from blocks to Star Wars. So I didn’t really discover LEGOs until I had my own child. My son is just obsessed with them. That kind of energized me. And I saw how at an early age it helped so much to develop his fine motor skills–just doing this [Kief snaps a LEGO brick into place] as a little kid. It turns out that’s actually very common with children: weakness in their thumbs. And LEGO is such a great tool to build that strength.
I like that you’re both actually playing with LEGOs while we’re talking.
Daniel Junge: We didn’t get to play at all during the making of the film. When you’re making a film, which can be an all-consuming process, you don’t want to involve yourself with the subject of your film with what little spare time you have. You want a few minutes of respite. So it’s fun to finally start playing with them again. I was raised with LEGO. I was in on that first generation it really caught fire with in this country.
The film makes it clear that different people like LEGO for different reasons. Is there anything that fans of LEGO all tend to have in common?
Daniel: I think there is a common theme in what [singer-songwriter and LEGO fan] Ed Sheeran says in the film: In a way it brings back a piece of your childhood. I would venture that even the serious artists in the film all still have a childlike kind of nostalgia for the bricks. Even when they’re using it as a serious tool, there’s still something comfortable and familiar about this medium.
The film is narrated by a Jason Bateman-voiced animated LEGO figurine (or, in the language of LEGO, a “minifig”). What made you want to use written narration as oppposed to relying on interviews alone?
Daniel: When you watch my films, or Kief’s films, you’ll see that their power comes from the fact that they have strong narratives. And narratives need present-tense stories. There’s only so much lip-flap you can have in a documentary before people grow tired. And one of the challenges for us was that we wanted to make a film that families could watch. For kids to watch a film, it’s got to be super, super engaging. Which means story and visual stimulation, not just people talking.
Kief: I think our animated minifig made the film more accessible for younger kids. I sat next to two six-year-olds last night [at the April 20th premiere], and they were just fully engaged in the animation.
What makes LEGO unique, and sets it apart from any other art form or science?
Kief: It’s the infinite combinations. There’s a scene in the film where Søren [Eilers, a mathematical sciences professor at the University of Copenhagen]talks about all the different combinations of LEGO when you’re using just six different bricks. And then when it got up to ten he couldn’t count anymore. What you can do with just a handful of little bricks is pretty amazing.
Daniel: And yet it’s a system with constraints as well. In some ways, a thesis of the film is that when you have a system with constraints, like musical notes, it really enables human creativity.
As documentary filmmakers working on a low budget, do you relate to the idea that constraints can actually be helpful?
Daniel: A parallel is that at some point we had to stop making this film. We had to say enough is enough. We could’ve gone on and on and on forever, but I think having time and money constraints can be helpful for filmmakers.
Kief: And a decision was made to go to the Tribeca Film Festival. That was a hard deadline we ultimately had to make.
The film really takes us through the history of LEGO, especially during an animated segment early in the runtime. How did you start researching that history?
Daniel: How did we stop researching? That was something we really battled with. Because there’s definitely an inside-baseball element to the film, in that we’re dealing with subjects who know this system so well. But we wanted audiences who were completely green or didn’t know that much about LEGO to come to the film and have a place to jump off from.
Kief: We easily could have made a whole film just about the history. But we were so taken by some of the characters that we found that their stories wound up becoming more dominant.
How did you find your interview subjects?
Daniel: We started within the LEGO company, at the factory, in the design rooms, with the corporate executives. And we tried to get the inside story while we were researching all the outside stories. And that’s the journey of the film as well: We’re starting inside the company, and then moving beyond it, and then finding a way to weave those two worlds together.
Kief: It became a little bit more difficult when we started reaching out to the community, because there were so many great builders out there, so many great stories. Ultimately we covered three different conventions, and at the first one we found out who the top dogs of that convention were, and the more people we talked to the more we got to know. But at the end of the day, like the infinite building choices you have with LEGO, it seemed like there was an infinite number of characters that we could find as well. But luckily it all seemed to jell the further we went down the road with it.
Nathan Sawaya, a LEGO artist featured heavily in the film, contests the idea that working with a commercial product like LEGO makes an artist a sellout. As filmmakers making a film about LEGO, how would you respond to such an accusation?
Daniel: Mine and Kief’s street cred is proven. We’ve both worked in the human rights and social justice field for over a decade. So if working with something that has mainstream and pop appeal is selling out, I’m happy to do it. Because I think it really stretches us as filmmakers. Nathan works within a medium that some people might say makes him a commercial sellout, when really he deals with big ideas and aesthetically challenging things. And I’d like to think that our film does the same thing.
Kief: I personally want to challenge myself and do different genres, do different things. My prior film, and Daniel’s prior film, were both very intense social justice films. Going into something as light as this, I thought it was just going to be a cakewalk. And it was far from it.
What’s on the horizon in terms of distribution?
Daniel: We believe this film has theatrical capability, not only in North America but hopefully around the world.
Kief: And I guess if it doesn’t sell, then we definitely didn’t sell out.
Daniel: (Laughs.) Exactly. Then we’ll be back to our more profitable social justice films.
Read the interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
2014 Tribeca Film Festival Interview: Jimmy Goldblum and Adam Weber (Directors - 'Tomorrow We Disappear')
“We are the flying birds…here today and gone tomorrow.” The puppeteers, performers, and magicians of the Kathputli colony in Delhi are the last of their kind. When their land is sold to developers to be bulldozed and transformed into luxury high-rises, these once-itinerant artists are forced to fight for the only home they know. Fending off relocation, they keep alive the mystical Indian folk arts, one day at a time.
What does the title of the movie mean to you?
Jimmy Goldblum: There’s a sense that people of the Kathputli colony are always on the brink of going away. And “tomorrow” is a very interesting word, because it could obviously mean twenty-four hours from now, or it could mean a week, it could mean a year, it could mean ten years. But there’s always that sense of inevitability, that history is not moving in their direction. And we wanted something that would capture that. We went there looking for magicians. And the act of disappearances was very present in our mind when we showed up.
Adam Weber: What Jimmy says about inevitability is a lot of what the movie was constructed around. And sometimes it helps to think of it as an “asteroid” film, or an end-of-world film, because this is a multi-billion dollar land deal, and this is the first-ever luxury skyscraper and shopping complex [in Delhi], and so there’s very little that a group of artists can do to fight against this. But they’re doing everything they can, and Puran’s out here trying to make people aware of it, and hopefully the film will help do that. But at the end of the day, it’s coming, and you just have to prepare yourself for change, whether you like it or not. That’s the struggle that the film deals with, and the title is a way of evoking that.
Tomorrow-We-Disappear-TFF-2014The developer in charge of building the new complex frequently speaks of progress. Is the “progress” he’s talking about really progress for everyone?
Adam: India, obviously, has an enormous population. It’s going to be the biggest in the world. And Delhi is just totally horizontal, and at some point they need to go vertical. It just so happens that there’s no space, and this space they picked just happened to be maybe the worst spot to pick. This is a colony of artists devoted to the traditional ways. And yeah, there’s no way around it, they’re catering to the new and the modern India. And the movie’s about what you lose when you focus too heavily on that.
Jimmy: We’re talking priorities. If you’re an artist, you have very different priorities than if you’re a developer. So you can’t build something new without losing something. This is just the reality of physics. You have to destroy something to create something. And so the question is, what are you losing in the development of the new?
How alive and well is the caste system in India right now? And what does the film have to say about that?
Puran Bhatt: Everyone has their own caste, their own religion, which dictates certain things. But in the colony, whether people are Hindus, Muslims, Christians, whoever, they all participate in each other’s lives, whether it’s a wedding, whether it’s some religious festival. There’s a real sense of unity there. This way of living doesn’t really exist outside of the colony in daily life. That’s what makes the colony unique: There’s none of the communal tension that you’d experience outside of it. When it comes to artists, whether they’re a jugglers or dancers or puppeteers, that’s the beginning and the end for them. Religion isn’t something that’s going to blind them to friendship and family. Their art is all that matters to them. Because of that, they’re able to live as one big family. Brothers and sisters.
Adam: It’s very pluralistic inside the colony. But viewed from outside, certainly from the developer’s perspective, they’re essentially untouchables.
Adam and Jimmy, what drew you to this particular story in the first place?
Adam: We read Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children.” That’s my favorite book of all time, I would say. And I recommended the book to Jimmy, and when he read it, he got to the moment at the end of the book where Saleem [Sinai, the protagonist] hides out in a magician’s ghetto. And Jimmy just googled “magician’s ghetto plus India,” and found a little blurb in the Times of India that mentioned the Kathputli colony, and that it’s endangered. We couldn’t find much out about the colony through remote research, so within months we were there, just trying to figure the place out, and meeting awesome people.
Jimmy: When you realize that there’s a slum hidden away in a city, where magicians, acrobats, puppeteers, and jugglers live, and you’re a bit of a romantic, I mean, there’s just such a sense of possibility in that notion. And there was no photo evidence we could find at the beginning, so it almost just became like a legend, and we had to go off and see if it was true.
Puran, what made you and other members of your community want to participate?
Puran: Tourists are always coming and going to the colony, taking photos, shooting video. It’s a normal everyday part of life. Whereas when we met Jimmy and Adam, you could tell pretty quickly that these guys seriously wanted to do something big. They came at the time when things with the developer and the government were coming to a boiling point and really picking up a lot of speed. So it seemed to me that if we worked with Adam and Jimmy, it could have a very positive effect for us.
What has your community been up to since the events of the film ended? What do you see for yourselves in the future?
Puran: Things between the DDA [Delhi Development Authority] government and the developer have just been going back and forth, back and forth. Most recently, in the last few months, things started to really pick up, with the developer company taking real physical steps to move everyone out. So it got to a point where we knew we really needed to take action, get everyone together, and make something happen. And at that time, through the Internet, through Jim and Adam, and friends all over the world, some ten thousand people got together online and put together online communities, photos, petitions. And now, looking at the future, it’s starting to seem like all these people coming together is actually having a pretty big effect. The court hasn’t been able to make one firm decision, because they’re looking at all of this that’s going on in the media, and they’re thinking, we can’t totally ignore this. This film is just another way for more people to come together with us. And through that, maybe we can make what we’re trying for into reality.
What kind of footprint do the Kathputli artists have beyond the colony itself?
Jimmy: There used to be bear handlers in the colonies, up until the ‘90s. They would take their bears out into the streets of Delhi, and they would do dances and songs. But then it became an issue with animal rights’ activists. The activists said they were mistreating these animals, and they needed to be taken away. So what happened was, they replaced the bears with their kids. They’d have their children coming out in the street and doing the dances and the songs. And then after that happened, people were like, this is not interesting to me anymore. They sort of just assumed that these people had disappeared. It was out of sight out of mind, even though they still lived in the colony.
One the most notable scenes in the movie is when the police shut down the magic show of Rahman, an artist from the colony, when he won’t pay a hefty bribe. Why do the Delhi authorities treat street artists like that?
Adam: There’s something called the Bombay Beggary Act, which was instated in the 50’s. It’s a law that forbids street arts, because it equates street performers to beggars and pickpockets and lepers. So Rahman in particular has a hard time, because you see him on the street, and he’s a magician, and that’s his craft, and that’s what his father was, and his father’s father, and his uncle. But on the street there, he looks like a beggar if you’re not watching the show. And he’s disrupting traffic, and maybe there’s someone who picked somebody’s pocket watching the show, and he gets blamed.
Jimmy: It’s a really complicated question. After the [Mumbai terrorist attacks at the Taj Mahal Hotel in 2008], there’s been sort of a mandate amongst the police to prevent large congregations of crowds unless the local police precinct is allowing it. So there’s this terrorist threat they’re always trying to avoid. But what happens too is that the police are underpaid. They have to patrol these large areas in the system, and they see the street artists as a very easy way to make money, and they’ll just extort them. There are a lot of people in this chain. Those cops weren’t bad guys. They were poor. And it’s sad, because when you’re put into a system like that where you don’t have many choices, you’re in conflict with your fellow human beings. And so you have the police reacting against the expense of Rahman even though they might not dislike him.
What kinds of positive effects do you hope the film will have?
Jimmy: The idea of slums being destroyed, people being evicted, it happens all the time. It’s a very common phenomenon, in India specifically, and it happens with very little transparency. There’s a moment in the film when the president of the colony gives a letter to the developers and says, these are the demands we gave to the government, and we’re giving them to you as well. And the developers are like, “Oh, you gave it to the government? It’ll just sit in a file and no one will ever look at it.” And that’s how it works. And so we took that letter and put it up on the Internet, and it very clearly stipulates what the people want before they’ll ever consider leaving the Kathputli colony. And if we can bring a level of transparency to this process, when the government and the developers are very unaccustomed to having any transparency, we would be doing a real service to these people.
Adam: Just getting people to ask questions is the main goal. And we directed people to our website, so that can constantly evolve and be updated.
Puran: The film can have an effect. The first thing that’s essential is that it’s reaching people and making them aware of what’s going on. The main problem that’s happening here is they’re putting together homes for twenty-eight hundred families when there’s around three thousand three hundred. So these people are going to be left without homes. And maybe now people can start to look at the situation from the perspective of these artists, and think about what they actually need. And there must remain a full artists’ village, a place where tourists know to go. That’s what will keep us alive.
Tomorrow-We-Disappear-TFF-2014-4What’s on the horizon in terms of distribution?
Adam: We’re hoping to have all those conversations now. The great thing about Tribeca is they get a lot of distributors to come see the films. So people have reached out, and they’re all now getting a chance to see it. And we’re looking at domestic distribution as a totally different thing than international.
Jimmy: Yeah. We’re doing the festival circuit in North America and Europe, but in India we’re actually collaborating with our executive producer Guneet Monga of Anurag Kashyap Films–she’s basically the top independent producer in India–and we’re working with her to find a pathway to bring it to India, because we could think it’s a really amazing story that would have a lot of cultural resonance for them.
Do you think on some level it would be more important to bring it to India than anywhere else?
Adam: Of course that’s always been a goal of ours and still is. Documentary is kind of a mixed bag there. People aren’t necessarily familiar with the format in a theater setting. That being said, a lot of people have smart phones. So we’re thinking about ways of bringing it to people that way. Or we’re thinking about traveling around and projecting it ourselves. We’re talking to people who can do all those things.
Jimmy: The themes of the film are universal themes. If you live in a large city, you recognize what’s happening: Culture being displaced in the name of modernity and urbanization. But obviously there’s a specificity to the story, to the art forms. There’s a deep tradition that we’re dealing with here that we’re trying to honor and preserve. And I think it’s going to be a whole different thing in India. It’s going to be very emotional. And so we’re really excited to get the film out in front of as many eyeballs as possible there.
And if you raise awareness there specifically, your film might have a more direct and immediate impact.
Jimmy: Absolutely.
Adam: Exactly.
Read the Interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
What does the title of the movie mean to you?
Jimmy Goldblum: There’s a sense that people of the Kathputli colony are always on the brink of going away. And “tomorrow” is a very interesting word, because it could obviously mean twenty-four hours from now, or it could mean a week, it could mean a year, it could mean ten years. But there’s always that sense of inevitability, that history is not moving in their direction. And we wanted something that would capture that. We went there looking for magicians. And the act of disappearances was very present in our mind when we showed up.
Adam Weber: What Jimmy says about inevitability is a lot of what the movie was constructed around. And sometimes it helps to think of it as an “asteroid” film, or an end-of-world film, because this is a multi-billion dollar land deal, and this is the first-ever luxury skyscraper and shopping complex [in Delhi], and so there’s very little that a group of artists can do to fight against this. But they’re doing everything they can, and Puran’s out here trying to make people aware of it, and hopefully the film will help do that. But at the end of the day, it’s coming, and you just have to prepare yourself for change, whether you like it or not. That’s the struggle that the film deals with, and the title is a way of evoking that.
Tomorrow-We-Disappear-TFF-2014The developer in charge of building the new complex frequently speaks of progress. Is the “progress” he’s talking about really progress for everyone?
Adam: India, obviously, has an enormous population. It’s going to be the biggest in the world. And Delhi is just totally horizontal, and at some point they need to go vertical. It just so happens that there’s no space, and this space they picked just happened to be maybe the worst spot to pick. This is a colony of artists devoted to the traditional ways. And yeah, there’s no way around it, they’re catering to the new and the modern India. And the movie’s about what you lose when you focus too heavily on that.
Jimmy: We’re talking priorities. If you’re an artist, you have very different priorities than if you’re a developer. So you can’t build something new without losing something. This is just the reality of physics. You have to destroy something to create something. And so the question is, what are you losing in the development of the new?
How alive and well is the caste system in India right now? And what does the film have to say about that?
Puran Bhatt: Everyone has their own caste, their own religion, which dictates certain things. But in the colony, whether people are Hindus, Muslims, Christians, whoever, they all participate in each other’s lives, whether it’s a wedding, whether it’s some religious festival. There’s a real sense of unity there. This way of living doesn’t really exist outside of the colony in daily life. That’s what makes the colony unique: There’s none of the communal tension that you’d experience outside of it. When it comes to artists, whether they’re a jugglers or dancers or puppeteers, that’s the beginning and the end for them. Religion isn’t something that’s going to blind them to friendship and family. Their art is all that matters to them. Because of that, they’re able to live as one big family. Brothers and sisters.
Adam: It’s very pluralistic inside the colony. But viewed from outside, certainly from the developer’s perspective, they’re essentially untouchables.
Adam and Jimmy, what drew you to this particular story in the first place?
Adam: We read Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children.” That’s my favorite book of all time, I would say. And I recommended the book to Jimmy, and when he read it, he got to the moment at the end of the book where Saleem [Sinai, the protagonist] hides out in a magician’s ghetto. And Jimmy just googled “magician’s ghetto plus India,” and found a little blurb in the Times of India that mentioned the Kathputli colony, and that it’s endangered. We couldn’t find much out about the colony through remote research, so within months we were there, just trying to figure the place out, and meeting awesome people.
Jimmy: When you realize that there’s a slum hidden away in a city, where magicians, acrobats, puppeteers, and jugglers live, and you’re a bit of a romantic, I mean, there’s just such a sense of possibility in that notion. And there was no photo evidence we could find at the beginning, so it almost just became like a legend, and we had to go off and see if it was true.
Puran, what made you and other members of your community want to participate?
Puran: Tourists are always coming and going to the colony, taking photos, shooting video. It’s a normal everyday part of life. Whereas when we met Jimmy and Adam, you could tell pretty quickly that these guys seriously wanted to do something big. They came at the time when things with the developer and the government were coming to a boiling point and really picking up a lot of speed. So it seemed to me that if we worked with Adam and Jimmy, it could have a very positive effect for us.
What has your community been up to since the events of the film ended? What do you see for yourselves in the future?
Puran: Things between the DDA [Delhi Development Authority] government and the developer have just been going back and forth, back and forth. Most recently, in the last few months, things started to really pick up, with the developer company taking real physical steps to move everyone out. So it got to a point where we knew we really needed to take action, get everyone together, and make something happen. And at that time, through the Internet, through Jim and Adam, and friends all over the world, some ten thousand people got together online and put together online communities, photos, petitions. And now, looking at the future, it’s starting to seem like all these people coming together is actually having a pretty big effect. The court hasn’t been able to make one firm decision, because they’re looking at all of this that’s going on in the media, and they’re thinking, we can’t totally ignore this. This film is just another way for more people to come together with us. And through that, maybe we can make what we’re trying for into reality.
What kind of footprint do the Kathputli artists have beyond the colony itself?
Jimmy: There used to be bear handlers in the colonies, up until the ‘90s. They would take their bears out into the streets of Delhi, and they would do dances and songs. But then it became an issue with animal rights’ activists. The activists said they were mistreating these animals, and they needed to be taken away. So what happened was, they replaced the bears with their kids. They’d have their children coming out in the street and doing the dances and the songs. And then after that happened, people were like, this is not interesting to me anymore. They sort of just assumed that these people had disappeared. It was out of sight out of mind, even though they still lived in the colony.
One the most notable scenes in the movie is when the police shut down the magic show of Rahman, an artist from the colony, when he won’t pay a hefty bribe. Why do the Delhi authorities treat street artists like that?
Adam: There’s something called the Bombay Beggary Act, which was instated in the 50’s. It’s a law that forbids street arts, because it equates street performers to beggars and pickpockets and lepers. So Rahman in particular has a hard time, because you see him on the street, and he’s a magician, and that’s his craft, and that’s what his father was, and his father’s father, and his uncle. But on the street there, he looks like a beggar if you’re not watching the show. And he’s disrupting traffic, and maybe there’s someone who picked somebody’s pocket watching the show, and he gets blamed.
Jimmy: It’s a really complicated question. After the [Mumbai terrorist attacks at the Taj Mahal Hotel in 2008], there’s been sort of a mandate amongst the police to prevent large congregations of crowds unless the local police precinct is allowing it. So there’s this terrorist threat they’re always trying to avoid. But what happens too is that the police are underpaid. They have to patrol these large areas in the system, and they see the street artists as a very easy way to make money, and they’ll just extort them. There are a lot of people in this chain. Those cops weren’t bad guys. They were poor. And it’s sad, because when you’re put into a system like that where you don’t have many choices, you’re in conflict with your fellow human beings. And so you have the police reacting against the expense of Rahman even though they might not dislike him.
What kinds of positive effects do you hope the film will have?
Jimmy: The idea of slums being destroyed, people being evicted, it happens all the time. It’s a very common phenomenon, in India specifically, and it happens with very little transparency. There’s a moment in the film when the president of the colony gives a letter to the developers and says, these are the demands we gave to the government, and we’re giving them to you as well. And the developers are like, “Oh, you gave it to the government? It’ll just sit in a file and no one will ever look at it.” And that’s how it works. And so we took that letter and put it up on the Internet, and it very clearly stipulates what the people want before they’ll ever consider leaving the Kathputli colony. And if we can bring a level of transparency to this process, when the government and the developers are very unaccustomed to having any transparency, we would be doing a real service to these people.
Adam: Just getting people to ask questions is the main goal. And we directed people to our website, so that can constantly evolve and be updated.
Puran: The film can have an effect. The first thing that’s essential is that it’s reaching people and making them aware of what’s going on. The main problem that’s happening here is they’re putting together homes for twenty-eight hundred families when there’s around three thousand three hundred. So these people are going to be left without homes. And maybe now people can start to look at the situation from the perspective of these artists, and think about what they actually need. And there must remain a full artists’ village, a place where tourists know to go. That’s what will keep us alive.
Tomorrow-We-Disappear-TFF-2014-4What’s on the horizon in terms of distribution?
Adam: We’re hoping to have all those conversations now. The great thing about Tribeca is they get a lot of distributors to come see the films. So people have reached out, and they’re all now getting a chance to see it. And we’re looking at domestic distribution as a totally different thing than international.
Jimmy: Yeah. We’re doing the festival circuit in North America and Europe, but in India we’re actually collaborating with our executive producer Guneet Monga of Anurag Kashyap Films–she’s basically the top independent producer in India–and we’re working with her to find a pathway to bring it to India, because we could think it’s a really amazing story that would have a lot of cultural resonance for them.
Do you think on some level it would be more important to bring it to India than anywhere else?
Adam: Of course that’s always been a goal of ours and still is. Documentary is kind of a mixed bag there. People aren’t necessarily familiar with the format in a theater setting. That being said, a lot of people have smart phones. So we’re thinking about ways of bringing it to people that way. Or we’re thinking about traveling around and projecting it ourselves. We’re talking to people who can do all those things.
Jimmy: The themes of the film are universal themes. If you live in a large city, you recognize what’s happening: Culture being displaced in the name of modernity and urbanization. But obviously there’s a specificity to the story, to the art forms. There’s a deep tradition that we’re dealing with here that we’re trying to honor and preserve. And I think it’s going to be a whole different thing in India. It’s going to be very emotional. And so we’re really excited to get the film out in front of as many eyeballs as possible there.
And if you raise awareness there specifically, your film might have a more direct and immediate impact.
Jimmy: Absolutely.
Adam: Exactly.
Read the Interview at IndieNYC.com
David@IndieNYC.com
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