November 22, 2019 / sucity / Comments Off on SUSAN’S INTERVIEW: “Beanpole” Director Kantemir Balagov
Susan Kouguell interviews the 28-year-old Russian director and co-writer Kantemir Balagov about his award-winning second feature film “Beanpole.
This is not a story about a historic period: this is a story about the world today. The fact that we live in a world where wars still rage, makes Beanpole a very universal story.
—Kantemir Balagov
Kantemir Balagov
During the New York Film Festival, I sat down with the 28-year-old Russian director Kantemir Balagov to talk about his second feature film Beanpole, which received the FIPRESCI Prize for Best Film and Best Director in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
Born in Nalchik, Russia, in 1991, Beanpole marks his second feature film; his first feature was the multi-award-winning Closeness (2017). Balagov graduated from Alexander Sokurov’s directing workshop at Kabardino-Balkarian State University in 2015. During his studies, he made a number of fiction and documentary films which took part in various domestic and international events.
Beanpole
1945, Leningrad. World War II devastated the city, demolishing its buildings and leaving its citizens in tatters, physically and mentally. Although the siege – one of the worst in history – is finally over, life and death continue their battle in the wreckage that remains. Two young women, Iya and Masha, search for meaning and hope in the struggle to rebuild their lives amongst the ruins.
KOUGUELL: Let’s start with the meaning of the title Beanpole.
BALAGOV: In Russian it means not only about height, it’s about clumsiness too. So, every character in the film is a beanpole in some way. They feel clumsy, they move clumsy. The way they try to start a new normal life is clumsy.
KOUGUELL: The book The Unwomanly Face of War by the Nobel Laureate Svetlana was your inspiration for this film. How closely did you follow the book when writing the script?
BALAGOV: If we’re talking about the plot of the film, it’s original. If we’re talking about the intonation about female destinies it is close to the book. The most touching was the female side of this because I didn’t know about the role of women in the war. Before I read the book, I thought they were serving only in the medical centers and hospitals, but when I knew more, and the amount of sacrifices that they did, I was just blown away. I knew when I finished reading the book in 2015, that I wanted to make a movie about it.
I wanted to show audiences who are the same age as me, that female side because in modern Russian films no one really shows the female side.
BALAGOV: Terekhov is a great Russian writer. Before we met each other, I split the script into small episodes, like a treatment. I sent it to him, and he didn’t like it. I liked that he didn’t like the treatment and we started from scratch. (Balagov smiles.) It’s a funny thing, we had some fights while we worked on it and he said to me that you want me to talk in whispers and I want you to scream. We tried to figure out this middle. He’s a very talented writer; and he knows almost everything about that era. He was a journalist, and worked a lot with archives, and then he started to write books.
KOUGUELL: Masha and Iya are layered and complicated characters; they’re at times in psychological opposition to each, but neither is stereotypical; neither is all good or all bad.
BALAGOV: The layers and shades came to me from literature. My professor Alexander Swgurv told us that I should read more books and watch less movies; this is the motto for the director. I always try to understand my characters and for me as a director it’s always interesting to understand the moral actions of my characters; we’re not black and white.
KOUGUELL: You chose not to include any traditional communist symbols from this era.
BALAGOV: Cinema is a tool of immortality and these women and these men who are in the film, I think they are immortal. I think these kinds of (representations of) political characters don’t deserve this immortality in my films at least, that’s why I didn’t include them.
KOUGUELL: There is a stillness about the film when Iya freezes due to her PTSD. It was visually and emotionally striking.
BALAGOV: We had history of cinema lessons with Alexander Sokurov. He showed me that cinema is a visual code and told us that if you want to see the connection between camera, rhythm, and the characters, to watch Fassbinder’s films. After I saw some of these films, I understood the connection between character and point of view, and for us, with the DP it was really important because that’s how we try to be closer to them and I want audiences to feel close to them, too. It relies on each other, not just editing cuts, etc.; it should be more than that. It’s all interconnected.
I recently had the pleasure to speak with Phillip Youmans about his journey as a writer and filmmaker, and bringing Burning Cane to the screen. The film was featured at the Urbanworld Film Festival in September in Manhattan, which I attended and I was excited when our schedules finally synched up and we could talk.
Written, directed, shot, and edited by Phillip Youmans during his final years of high school Burning Cane tells the story of a deeply religious woman’s struggle to reconcile her convictions of faith with the love she has for her alcoholic son and a troubled preacher. Set in rural Louisiana, the film explores the relationships within a southern black protestant community, examining the roots of toxic masculinity, how manhood is defined and the dichotomous role of religion and faith.
Burning Cane won the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival for Best Narrative Feature, Best Actor (Wendell Pierce) and Best Cinematography.
Phillip Youmans
PHILLIP YOUMANS (Writer/Director/Cinematographer/Producer/Editor) is from the 7th Ward of New Orleans. Before high school, Phillip began writing, directing, shooting, and editing his own short films. During his high school years at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), Phillip solidified his technical foundation of filmmaking in their media arts program. Phillip’s most recent video installation titled Won’t You Celebrate with Me premiered through Solange Knowles’ creative agency Saint Heron at the end of his senior year of high school; the installation is a showcase of black female unity in a non-material, alternative future.
His latest short film NAIROBI, also made with Saint Heron, about a Harlem-based family of francophone West-African immigrants, will premiere on their platform in 2019. Phillip is in postproduction on his short documentary about the Grammy-nominated jazz musician Jon Batiste titled The Vanguard: Days with Jon Batiste.
KOUGUELL: The film has a very poetic quality. There isn’t that much dialogue. Tell me about the writing process.
YOUMANS: I had gone through the script and it had a lot of dialogue; it was explaining too much. The first pass was to see what we communicated through action lines and then I began axing dialogue from there. I approached it with that lens. So much of the crafting and staying within those moments were found during the editing process. During editing there was still too much talking; it was too exposition heavy. It didn’t drop us into the world, it over-explained the world.
Burning Cane began as the short film The Glory that Youmans penned in November 2016, in his junior year of high school. During this time, Youmans began working at Morning Call Coffee Stand in New Orleans City Park to raise money to shoot the short.
The original short screenplay featured most of the same key characters as Burning Cane: Reverend Tillman, Helen Wayne, and Daniel Wayne. Akin to Burning Cane, The Glory followed a protestant woman as she deals with an unexpected visit from her estranged son.
Wendell Pierce
KOUGUELL: How did the The Glory evolve into this feature?
YOUMANS: The short film was very centered on the two pillar characters — Helen, living in isolation and surviving independently, and her son randomly appearing. In the feature I wanted to give more backstory to the characters.
When Wendell Pierce came on board, it changed everything. One, he’s a phenomenal actor and two, I was able to expand the role of Pastor Tillman. His character is in a mayoral position, and what he’s preaching he doesn’t believe in; all that was built upon after the prospect of Wendell being attached came to fruition.
KOUGUELL: Given your age, were there naysayers that said you couldn’t make this happen?
YOUMANS: There were a couple of local filmmakers in New Orleans that I volunteered on their sets who thought it was a monstrous undertaking and not possible to do this and raise the money. But, I was working with people who were my friends and didn’t care about getting paid. They wanted to be on set. A lot of people’s reservations were valid but my situation was different. I went to NOCCA; we had a full sound stage, mixing room, great cameras and audio gear and a crew of people that I would have been hanging out with regardless of making this film.
KOUGUELL: What questions do you wish people would ask you about your film and your journey?
YOUMANS:: What it’s like submitting a film to a festival. Letting it go after investing so much energy. After so much time and hours, donated hours, I wanted the film to be seen, I wanted people to connect to the work, I wanted it to resonate with the world. The process was tough. My mother said, ‘Let it go, you can’t keep on it forever.’
When I first made the film, the first cut was three hours; the script was 80 pages. The first cut was me being too attached to the material, I overindulged. I got feedback and listened, and took it into consideration. The feedback sessions changed the whole game.
KOUGUELL: Advice for aspiring writers and directors?
YOUMANS: When I was younger I thought I needed to be in New York or Los Angeles to make a name for myself and find a story. But, falling back into my roots, into the world I knew and people I was familiar with, I gave an authentic perspective and unapologetic statement on my work.
My advice — fall back into the things you really know and what means something to you. People are very interested in a story that we haven’t spoken about in a new way before. The only way to bring in a new perspective is if it’s coming from you with authenticity and from whatever you can honestly speak on.
Burning Cane opens in theaters in New York City October 25, and November 8th in Los Angeles. It will be released on Netflix November 6th.
Tony Shalhoub, Caroline Aaron, Alex Borstein, Daniel Palladino, Amy Sherman-Palladino, Rachel Brosnahan, Michael Zegen, Kevin Pollak, and Marin Hinkle attend the Making Maisel Marvelous featuring Amazon Prime Original The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel at The Paley Center for Media (Photo by Lars Niki/Getty Images for Amazon Studios and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel)
At the opening of the interactive exhibit Making Maisel Marvelous at the Paley Center for Media, I had the opportunity to speak with the creators and cast members of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Our focus was on the writing of the series and the resonant characters brought to the screen. The show recently received 20 Emmy Award nominations, more than any other comedy, including nominations for Outstanding Comedy Series.
About The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
In 1958 New York, Midge Maisel’s life is on track—husband, kids, and elegant dinners in their Upper West Side apartment. But when her life takes a surprise turn, Midge has to quickly decide what else she’s good at—and going from housewife to stand-up comic is a wild choice to everyone but her.
Interview Highlights
Alex Borstein and Rachel Brosnahan (Photo by Lars Niki/Getty Images for Amazon Studios and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel )
Kouguell: What initially attracted you to the material and the role of Midge Maisel?
Rachel Brosnahan : I knew I wanted to do this project from the bottom of the first page. The first scene of the pilot, at the wedding, Midge is really patting herself on the back. I loved how sure she is. I loved her world. I loved how unburdened she is. She’s funny. She’s smart. She’s flawed. She’s selfish. She believes she’s the center of the universe. We’re watching her grow and getting taken down a peg.
Kouguell: Some of the choices Midge makes are nontraditional for that era, and perhaps some might even consider for now. What’s your take on some of the criticism about Midge’s character regarding her mothering?
Brosnahan: I find some of that criticism valid at times but also frustrating. The kids have two loving parents, four loving grandparents. They have a village, including a nanny who is devoted to them. They have a mother who’s not always around; she’s pursuing her dream and as a result, is asking their father to step up, asking the neighbors to step up, and asking the grandparents to step up and help raise them. The kids aren’t wanting for anything.
I was asked once in an interview if I thought Midge loved her children, and Alex Borstein (Susie) turned around and said, “Well, do I not, not love my children because I’m here doing press and I feel the same.”
I get frustrated when people say that it feels like lazy writing as opposed to attributing it to her character; she’s not a perfect 1950s ideal of a doting mother that we’re used to seeing on television. In a show like this, I appreciate the idea of what a good mother could be—someone who is out to provide for her children, looking to make herself satisfied, and to grow. I don’t know what part of that makes Midge a bad person.
Kouguell: What drew you to the character of Susie Myerson?
Alex Borstein: I was on my way out of the country when Amy (Sherman-Palladino) said, ‘I have this part I want you to audition for.’ So, I read it and I said, ‘Oh damnit it, it’s so great, how do I not do this?’ I like playing characters with a unique voice and Susie’s got that. I like playing people who are dissatisfied and angry, there’s some joy in that for me. Someone who’s battling uphill. And Susie is all of that, a perfect storm of what I want in a character. She is strong yet incredibly vulnerable and that’s hard to find in female characters. Susie’s really fun to play, and I get to wear flat shoes.
The way that Amy envisions things is extremely thorough. She uses as many words as she can in any given sentence. It’s really challenging to memorize it all sometimes, to find a pattern that feels somewhat theatrical yet somewhat believable. Her material is theatrical in a sense, in a good way. It feels like a Katherine Hepburn-Cary Grant relationship between Midge and Susie sometimes. It’s fun to have it feel like a game, but you want to find the truth in it, the reality. That’s always the challenge but that’s what’s fun about this material.
Kouguell: The relationship between Susie and Midge continues to be realistic, unpredictable, and not stereotypical.
Borstein: Yes! It’s a love story. A platonic love story. You rarely get to see a good one of those regardless of gender. It’s more interesting in a way because you don’t have this, ‘Will they, won’t they’ type of element that you would have with a Kathrine Hepburn-Cary Grant comedy or Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd—remember Moonlighting? Those kind of shows and films where you’re always teetering on that ‘will they won’t they?’ and this is not what it’s about. It’s: Will Midge trust Susie with her career? Will Susie trust Midge to give up everything at the Gaslight and really move forward and just focus on her? It’s terrifying but that’s what makes it fun for both characters.
Kevin Pollak, Michael Zemen, Carolyn Aaron. (Photo by Lars Niki/Getty Images for Amazon Studios and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel )
Kevin Pollak: (Moishe Maisel) As a proud member of the WGA since 1987, I love Script magazine! Everything starts on the page and in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel the subject matters and the relationships jump off the page. I’ve never personally played a loud obnoxious Jewish man, which is a weird irony, starting out as a stand-up comedian and then becoming somewhat of a loud obnoxious Jew in my real life. The show continues to raise the bar and then top it.
Kouguell: Joel’s character, Midge’s husband, is not the stereotypical antagonist. He’s empathetic; he’s both sympathetic and unsympathetic.
Michael Zemen: When I read the pilot I thought he was going to be the villain, but as the season progressed, there was a peeling away of layers, and I realized he’s not the villain, he’s a human being who’s made some mistakes. That’s what I love about him; there are so many layers to him. It’s apparent that he’s a good guy, he’s a good father, and he does care for Midge. I don’t feel bad for him; he did this to himself. At the same time, he was the catalyst for Midge to pursue her stand-up career and without him she wouldn’t have discovered her secret talent.
Carolyn Aaron: I play Shirley Maisel, not the Marvelous one, but the other Mrs. Maisel. Joel’s mother. I have a daughter who watched Gilmore Girls incessantly. When my agent called me about auditioning for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I said you know my status with my daughter is going to be incredible.
We talked about our respective 20-something daughters growing up watching Gilmore Girls, and how Carolyn Aaron was struck by the unique mother-daughter relationship portrayed in that series, and the humorous yet realistic portrayal of the family relationships in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.
Marin Hinkle and Brosnahan. (Photo by Lars Niki/Getty Images for Amazon Studios and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel )
Marin Hinkle and I talked about the choices Rose (Midge’s mother) makes to seek more independence, pursuing her own goals and dreams outside of her marriage, and a voice within her marriage. Hinkle stated: “There are few roles out there for women (air quotes) of a certain age, and one that is so complex like this one.”
The Creators
Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino . (Photo by Lars Niki/Getty Images for Amazon Studios and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel )
Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino serve as showrunners, executive producers, and have directed and penned most of the episodes. The show was inspired by Ms. Sherman-Palladino’s upbringing.
Sherman-Palladino: We have complete creative control. That’s the only way we’ve done things ever. We had complete creative control over Gilmore Girls because they kind of forgot we were there.
We talked about the layered characters in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which each of the actors with whom I interviewed, marveled and admired.
Daniel Palladino: That was the goal, to have multi-dimensional characters who had depth.
Kouguell: What advice can you give to writers trying to break into the business?
(There was a beat and then the three of us chuckled, saying “OYE” in unison, like right out of an episode from Gilmore Girls—for fans of that show, we did not add the infamous phrase: “…with the poodles already” though I whispered it under my breath.)
Palladino: There are a lot of hurdles. Stay true to your core. Even if they (executives) are happy, the audience won’t like it. They’ll sniff it out. The audience has the final say.
Sherman-Palladino: You got to keep remembering why you love the project in the first place. The deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more people that chime in, the more people who have ideas, good, bad or indifferent, you got to keep remembering why you love the project.
The exclusive New York engagement of Making Maisel Marvelous is free and open to the public and will run at the Paley Center for Media August 10 through September 6.
Season 3 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will air on Amazon Prime at the end of 2019.
August 27, 2019 / sucity / Comments Off on Susan Kouguell Speaks with “The Farewell” Editor Matthew Friedman
Susan Kouguell speaks with Matthew Friedman about his work on The Farewell and his collaboration with Lulu Wang on their third film together, and his editing philosophies.
Writer and director Lulu Wang’s The Farewell opened with a limited release on July 12, yielding the best platform opening of the year, and continues to maintain a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, in just over a month of its release, this low-budget independent film continues to average at number 7 at the crowded summer box office of big budget studio films. If numbers are any indicator, audiences have a strong desire for poignant, character-driven stories, and The Farewell is just the proof to build such a case.
About The Farewell
In this funny, uplifting tale based on an actual lie, Chinese-born, U.S.-raised Billi (Awkwafina) reluctantly returns to Changchun to find that, although the whole family knows their beloved matriarch, Nai-Nai (grandma), has been given mere weeks to live, everyone has decided not to tell Nai herself. To assure her happiness, they gather under the joyful guise of an expedited wedding, uniting family members scattered among new homes abroad. As Billi navigates a minefield of family expectations and proprieties, she finds there’s a lot to celebrate: a chance to rediscover the country she left as a child, her grandmother’s wondrous spirit, and the ties that keep on binding even when so much goes unspoken.
Matt Friedman
I had the pleasure to speak with Matthew Friedman about his work on The Farewell and his collaboration with Wang on their third film together, and his editing philosophies.
About Editor Matthew Friedman
Matthew Friedman has edited features around the world and has credits in numerous genres, including Alvin And The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, the 3D dance movie Step Up Revolution, the comedy What Happens In Vegas, the Netflix original film Step Sisters, and several pilots, including the pilot for the series The Loop. His most recent credits include Posthumous and Life In A Year. He edited the short film Dog Food, which premiered at SXSW and won San Diego Comic-Con’s Best Horror/Suspense Film Award. He has worked with directors and producers, including Betty Thomas, Shawn Levy, Andrew Lazar, Adam Shankman, Karen Rosenfelt, Jenno Topping, and Charles Stone III. Friedman has collaborated with Wang on both of her feature films, as well as her award-winning short film Touch. He is perhaps best known, however, as the voice of the talking bird in Scary Movie 2.
Kouguell: Let’s start with your background in editing.
Friedman: I went to film school at Northwestern in Chicago. They didn’t have a specialty editing program, but I always enjoyed editing. When I graduated, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I thought maybe direct but having directed a bit in college I didn’t really like it. I found out about an internship with a studio in Atlanta in 1993 and faxed them a top 10 list of why they should hire me. Funny things like: ‘good at math’. I got a call almost immediately after I faxed them. They offered me an internship in either the art or editorial department. I fell into a great situation working with the editor Emma Hickox—she’s Anne Coates’s daughter who edited Lawrence of Arabia. Emma is magnificent and taught me so much that I didn’t learn in film school. She said, move out to L.A. and I will hire you as an assistant. And I did and she hired me.
Kouguell: Tell me about collaborating with Lulu Wang.
Friedman: One of the great things about Lulu is that she’s incredibly tenacious and never gives up. On our first project together, she was cutting Posthumous in Berlin with a different editor and not getting the response from the screenings, so they looked for someone to come help them polish it. I went out to Berlin for three months in the summer to recut the film with her.
One of the things that happened early on, that goes to my philosophy, is that every frame on the screen must be placed there consciously to further the story. If it’s not there to support the story it should be cut. The way we worked, for example, is that I went through the first reel, and then we worked together on what I cut. Sometimes when she asked me to put something back in and I would suggest to tighten it up, she would suggest: “OK, split the difference.” This leads to another philosophy when I’m editing, which is to ask: ‘What is this character thinking? What’s in a character’s mind?’ You can’t edit a scene without understanding what characters are thinking in order to cut their performance.
Kouguell: You’ve worked on projects of all genres. What makes this one unique for you?
Friedman: I got my start cutting big, broad studio comedies which was very enjoyable, but I wanted to start working on more risky and more unique, character-driven projects. So, I stepped away from those and started cutting more independent films. The Farewell is the culmination of that desire and that move. The reception it has received is amazing and humbling, and I couldn’t imagine a better result when I made the decision to work on independent films.
I like cutting in multiple genres. Obviously, The Farewell has a lot of comedy and a lot of crying so the skills I’ve acquired from cutting different genres I am able to work that together.
Kouguell: Did you stick close to the script?
Friedman: It’s a matter of degrees. This is true in virtually every movie. The script is the jumping off point; it’s a road map made before the contributions of the other creative people, including the director, actors, and director of photography, step in.
The intention of the script is followed completely. Lulu understood the story she wanted to tell. All the other creatives brought their flourishes into it. That’s why I like being an editor; I can put my finger in all that everyone’s contributed.
Lulu is such a tenacious person, she is always rewriting through the editing process and she considers what she can improve in post-production, she never stops.
Kouguell: The film’s pacing has a definite rhythm to it. For example, not rushing through quiet moments, seeing characters think and breathe on their own.
Friedman: I was vicious in terms of every frame matters. There are scenes that are cut quite quickly and when you shift to those quiet moments it helps to bolster the emotional effect of the performance. Indeed, there were times I would cut something, and Lulu would say, ‘I would hate losing that’ and we’d discuss what the intention was, and sometimes we’d come to the conclusion that it shouldn’t be there.
Other times I would try to cut something, and she’d say, I want more space for emotion’. Like the groom crying. All those moments are specifically designed. Lulu and I had intense conversations about how long everything would be, to the frame. Nothing was arbitrary. It was important to understand what was going on in the characters’ minds, what they were wrestling with, and give them enough time to move through those emotions, their decisions, and what they were processing.
Final thoughts
Friedman: I went to see The Farewell at a movie theatre with a full audience on a Sunday afternoon. It was the first time I saw it with an audience who paid money to go. Watching their reactions and feeling their reactions was really the reason I got into filmmaking in the beginning. Helping to tell a story like this, bringing them to laughing, to crying and move them finally to hope, is just such a rewarding experience.
There was a random guy behind us who said after the film, ‘I’m going home to call my grandma’. Lulu said in interviews that’s what she wanted, to move audiences to build connections with other people. The critical responses have been the icing on the cake.
To learn more about Lulu Wang visit her website here.
Filmmaker Rodney Evans discusses his deeply personal feature-length documentary exploring how his loss of vision may impact his creative future, and what it means to be a blind or visually-impaired creative artist.
“As a filmmaker with only twenty percent of my visual field remaining, I am forced to work in new, more collaborative ways while also being part of a long tradition of artists seeing in highly idiosyncratic ways.”
— Rodney Evans
I had the pleasure to speak with Rodney Evans following the press screening at the Ford Foundation in Manhattan and Q & A with Evans and dancer Kayla Hamilton. As it turned out, Evans and I are both MacDowell Colony fellows and even occupied the same studio during our respective residencies.
Emerging from the event into the summer heat of midtown, I found it particularly profound from a personal perspective as a writer/filmmaker, reflecting on each of the artists portrayed in the film, who not only redefined their lives with impaired vision, but redefined and discovered new ways to communicate and express themselves through their respective art-making practices with poignant beauty and vulnerability.
ABOUT RODNEY EVANS – DIRECTOR/PRODUCER/EDITOR/SUBJECT
Rodney Evans
Rodney Evans is the writer/director/producer of the feature film Brother To Brother which won the Special Jury Prize in Drama at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and garnered four Independent Spirit Award nominations, including Best First Film, Best First Screenplay, Best Debut Performance for Anthony Mackie and Best Supporting Male Performance for Roger Robinson. Evans has received funding from The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, The Ford Foundation’s JustFilms Program, The Creative Capital Foundation, The Rockefeller Foundation, The NY State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), The Independent Television Service (ITVS) and Black Public Media (BPM). His second narrative feature, The Happy Sad, has played at over 30 international film festivals. Evans has taught at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Princeton and Swarthmore. His documentary short Persistence of Vision screened at BAMcinemaFest and Frameline: The San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival and won the Jury Prize at the Ann Arbor International Film Festival in 2017.
ABOUT VISION PORTRAITS
This deeply personal feature-length documentary explores how Rodney Evans’s loss of vision may impact his creative future, and what it means to be a blind or visually-impaired creative artist. It’s a celebration of the possibilities of art created by a Manhattan photographer (John Dugdale), a Bronx-based dancer (Kayla Hamilton), a Canadian writer (Ryan Knighton) and the filmmaker himself, who each experience varying degrees of visual impairment.
Winner, Outstanding Documentary at the 2019 Frameline International Film Festival, and Official Selection at many festivals, including the 2019 SXSW Film Festival—Documentary Competition, 2019 BFI Flare London LGBTQ Film Festival, 2019 Inside Out Toronto LGBTQ Film Festival, 2019 Outfest Los Angeles Film Festival, 2019 American Black Film Festival, 2019 Sydney Film Festival, BAMcinemaFest, and the 2019 Black Star Film Festival.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT—RODNEY EVANS
Vision Portraits is my personal story of going on a scientific and artistic journey to better understand the ramifications of my deteriorating vision. My aim is to come to a deeper sense of knowledge through illuminating portraits of three artists: a photographer (John Dugdale), a dancer (Kayla Hamilton) and a writer (Ryan Knighton).
The film consists of four chapters which profile each artist and also follows a medical procedure centered on the restoration of my lost vision through the use of cutting-edge technology at the Center for Vision Restoration in Berlin, Germany. The film is told from my perspective as a filmmaker who was diagnosed with a rare genetic eye condition in early 1997 called retinitis pigmentosa resulting in the loss of my peripheral vision and much of my night vision.
Kayla Hamilton
Kayla Hamilton was born with no vision in one eye and has very minimal peripheral and night vision in the other due to glaucoma and iritis. She incorporates her unique perspective on the world and embodies resilience and empowerment in her solo dance piece, Nearly Sighted.
John Dugdale
Photographer slowly loses his vision at thirty-two in St. Vincent’s Hospital at the height of the AIDS epidemic due to CMV retinitis and continues to take photos with the sliver of sight that remains in one eye.
Ryan Knighton at the Moth
Ryan Knighton, a punk-rock teenager, is diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa on his 18th birthday and finds writing as his salvation through the process of going blind.
All of the artists are deeply influenced and motivated by the power of art to heal and transform.
HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE Q & A
PERSONAL JOURNEYS
Rodney Evans: I wanted the film to specifically focus on the ways each artist was impacted by the loss of their vision and the ways in which their creative process thrives in spite of their blindness.and also follows a medical procedure centered on the restoration of my lost vision through the use of cutting-edge technology at the Center for Vision Restoration in Berlin, Germany. The film is told from my perspective as a filmmaker who was diagnosed with a rare genetic eye condition in early 1997 called retinitis pigmentosa, resulting in the loss of my peripheral vision and much of my night vision.
The film offers a deep dive into the work of each artist and incorporates their art (photography, dance, literature and filmmaking) to provide an immersive way to experience how they “see” the world through these unique perspectives.
CINEMATIC TOOLS
Evans: We utilize rich and evocative sound design and detailed audio description channels specifically created for the visually impaired and blind community so that they have the ability to access the film.
The film includes a mixture of in-depth interviews, vérité footage of each artist’s daily experience, creative process, and exhibition/performance. Sound design, still photography, visual text, macro cinematography and subjective camera positions chronicles the experience of each artist.
There is some use of experimental POV footage to visualize some of the remnants of sight that remain for each character. This involves use of overexposure, roll outs, flares and cropping to mirror the subjective experience of these artists similar to the ways in which films like Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Nostalgia for the Light (Directed by Patricio Guzman) and filmmakers like Stan Brahkage and Leslie Thornton use abstract, subjective viewpoints to immerse the viewer deeper into the emotional experience of their central characters.
WHAT DREW RODNEY EVANS TO THE ARTISTS PORTRAYED IN THE FILM?
Evans: Ryan Knighton and I were already friends and I had already read his memoir Cockeyed, which is incredibly powerful and moving. It’s about his retinitis pigmentosa diagnosis at 18. I learned that it had been adapted into a screenplay that had gotten into the Sundance Lab, and I asked Michelle Satter at Sundance and mentioned that I had the same condition, and she was nice enough to connect us.
John is someone whose photography I knew very well; it’s beautiful, stunning. My brother’s friend dated John for 10 years. I think it was difficult for John to go back through a lot of those memories. He asked to see a film of mine, and I showed him a film about my own coming out to my own Jamaican family, and I think he was moved by how intimate that film was and how vulnerable I was in that film. I think that made him trust his story with me.
With Kayla, I didn’t have the pleasure of knowing her before. I specifically asked a colleague at Swarthmore where I teach if he knew of any women dancers of color, and he said yes. It was fortuitous timing meeting Kayla, we met on a Sunday, and I asked if I could film her rehearsal. Four days later, my DP and I went and shot at the space in the Bronx.
PLEASURE AND CHALLENGES
Kayla Hamilton: I was asking myself: If I lose 100 percent of my sight, how can I consume dance; how can I see it? How do you describe movements to someone who is not a dancer? What are the possibilities? What can that mean for a sighted person and someone who doesn’t see out of their eyesight? Challenging ways we take in movement as vision as the primary source.
Evans: Visual style, for me, one of the great pleasures and challenges was putting the viewer in the subjective position of the different ways we all see differently. When John describes his vision as the aurora borealis, and these flashes of color he gets and that he constantly has his optic nerve firing.
In the film world, because it’s a visually-based medium, if you are visually impaired, there is a stigma. I don’t know a lot of people who are ‘out’ about it, with audio descriptions there are so many ways to execute visuals through language.
One challenge is how do you create a visual language that an audience can experience? The visual language of the film came about the various ways we talked about seeing in different ways, waking up and blinking, things being abstracted and literally light and shapes, and asking how do you move around and navigate space.
VISION PORTRAITS opens in theaters August 9th in Manhattan at the Metrograph and August 23rd in Los Angeles at Laemmle Royal with a national rollout to follow, courtesy of Stimulus Pictures.
Patricia Rozema and I met for our interview in a Greenwich Village hotel restaurant to talk about her new film Mouthpiece. It had been several decades since we had last seen each other; her film I’ve heard the Mermaids Singing was just picked up for distribution by Miramax Films where I was working in the story department. There was certainly a lot to catch up on.
When I first saw I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, I was immediately struck by Rozema’s distinct vision, story sensibilities, sense of humor, and her willingness to take chances. I closely followed her career since that time and continue to be inspired by her often rule-breaking work.
We started our interview talking about the expectations and sacrifices of mothers and daughters in relation to Mouthpiece, as well as with our respective daughters whose mothers work in the film industry—well known to have hiring and pay inequities.
There is a scene in Mouthpiece when a clip of Ruth Bader Ginsburg pops up on Cassandra’s laptop with Ginsburg’s words: “Women will not have equality until men are involved in raising the next generation.” Rozema commented: “That’s how RBG did it with her husband. I think there should never be a choice between developing yourself as a skilled human and having a family; you should be allowed to have both.”
ABOUT MOUTHPIECE
Mouthpiece is a powerful, funny and highly original look into the conflicted psyche of Cassandra Haywood—a fiercely independent millennial woman. Cass is a single writer who lives by her own rules. She’s also a bit of a disaster. Following the sudden death of her mother, Elaine (Maev Beaty), she finds herself in crisis, unable to think straight with a debate raging inside her head. This movie makes that invisible conflict visible: Cassandra (Amy Nostbakken & Norah Sadava) battles it out while figuring out what to say at her mother’s funeral. What unfolds is a wild careening through grief, anger, sex and self-sabotage in an exploration of the messy lives of women from both generations. Raucous jokes, musical numbers and heartbreaking memories add up to a deeply moving and political portrait of a mother and a daughter as seen through the eyes of one conflicted young woman.
Patricia Rozema
PATRICIA ROZEMA – Director, Screenwriter, Producer After an Honours B.A. in Philosophy and English from Calvin College in Michigan, Patricia Rozema distinguished herself as a writer/director with her internationally celebrated first comedy feature, “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing” at the Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, where it won the Prix de la Jeunesse. It then opened the Toronto International Film Festival in 1987. Other highlights: writing/directing the contemporary lesbian love story “When Night is Falling,” adapting/directing the politically progressive Miramax Jane Austen feature “Mansfield Park” with Harold Pinter, and co-writing HBO’s “Grey Gardens” starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange (PEN Screenwriter’s award, Emmy nomination and a Golden Globe). She also won an Emmy for writing and directing a Yo-Yo Ma/Bach film “Six Gestures.” In 2015, Rozema adapted and directed the apocalyptic thriller “Into The Forest” with Ellen Page and Evan Rachel Wood. She has also directed “Anne with an E” and “Mozart in the Jungle” for Netflix/CBC & Amazon. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Rozema with Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava
FROM STAGE TO SCREEN
Rozema was introduced to the stage play Mouthpiece by her now 22-year-old daughter (she also has a 14-year-old daughter) who was working as an intern at Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre. “It was so fresh and strong and tapped into a visceral feeling that I had never seen represented before” says Rozema, who then insisted that Alexandra Hedison and Jodie Foster check it out while they were working in Toronto. Foster and Hedison said, “When we first saw Norah and Amy’s breathtaking performance, we were speechless. Mouthpiecetouches on every part of the female experience from birth to death using dance, music, and wicked humor with just a bathtub for scenery. The result is a new kind of feminist language which ignites pure, intravenous emotion. It’s impossible to describe and truly unforgettable.”
The theatrical production consisted exclusively of Cass, played by Nostbakken and Sadava, wearing white bathing suits, often sitting in a bathtub. The film, on the other hand, is much broader and very visual.
THE INTERVIEW
KOUGUELL: Tell me about the adaptation process and collaborating with Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava, bringing their play to the screen.
ROZEMA: We did a lot of talking. The thing I brought to it was to add the mother character. The play was one hour. I have daughters and my mother had died so I thought I had the right to be in it. We just riffed and told stories and wrote them out. Mostly I was at the keyboard, sometimes they were. They didn’t know the format of screenplays, like Final Draft, so I would write it, then after a session I would polish it up and then share it, It was like a writers room. I loved it. I always wondered if I would enjoy a writer room, but I loved it.
Their senses of humor are so close to mine and their B.S. detector is similar to mine. I also brought to the story was the Christmas section. I thought what was needed in the film, was a bit more of a narrative drive so, I thought, ‘What was the question that remains unanswered?’
KOUGUELL: The question of: What happened at Christmas?
ROZEMA: Yes, What happened at Christmas. It’s amazing, if you have one tiny hook like that, you can put so much on that’s emotionally and socially relevant.
KOUGUELL: Tell me about the shoot and post-production.
ROZEMA: The shoot was 28 days. We did a lot of screenings during the editing process. I said: Is this a pizza with too many toppings? The trick is that the film needs to be unified, yet diverse. If it’s too unified it’s boring, if it’s too diverse, it’s a pizza with too many toppings, and it’s a mess. I had test screenings with people who didn’t know me and had nothing to do with the film every couple of weeks during the editing just to see what do they get, what do they not get, are they confused, and so on.
KOUGUELL: You have been working in both feature films and television, including ‘Mozart in the Jungle’—have you found any differences working in these various mediums?
ROZEMA: It’s all just storytelling; filmed fiction. I have a huge appetite for novelty, for newness, I can’t have done it before or seen it before. I’m very open as to length, format, decimation, it’s all just story. I tell my agent: big budget little budget, I don’t care, just give me a story that needs telling, that is new, and let me play.
It’s interesting, Paul Schrader and I have the same background. We both went to Calvin College, we were both Calvinists, that was our world. Schrader was 10 years before me and I heard him speak recently about his film First Reformed and his nomination, and he was saying something about the fact that he never enters into the making of a film, thinking it’s going to be like this other film I saw, it’s always, ‘I wonder if this will work’ or ‘oh, I’ve never seen this before, I’m going to try this or try this crazy combination.’ I thought, is there something about being a lapsed Calvinist that makes you seek out novelty? I wonder if there is something about our formation.
KOUGUELL: Maybe the strict rules?
ROZEMA: Maybe. They say when you leave that religion, you’re like the colt that escapes the coral, you have no rules. So, there are the rules of the 3-act structure for example, and I think let’s break some of these rules.
KOUGUELL: It was a powerful and effective decision not to portray the two sides (the bifurcation) of Cassandra as one good and one bad.
ROZEMA: I had so much pressure to do one good and one bad.
KOUGUELL: The overall choreography and particularly the physical battle was very moving.
ROZEMA: That synchronicity was in the play, and done with such natural gestures, and that thrilled me. I was hungry to put that into the film. There’s no trick to that. It’s work. Looking in the mirror. Take after take after take.
The fight scene was just a fight scene that we choreographed but we wanted it to feel harsh.I wanted it to feel like the things I say to myself, what we say to ourselves.
I loved how Catherine Lutes lit it, she did an amazing job; very classical, very eternal. i loved it being an empty church. That was in the play. I loved her throwing herself down eventually. I loved this idea of the fight, the self-defeating metaphor.
KOUGUELL: Do you feel there are more opportunities as a Canadian woman?
ROZEMA: Yes. I sort of self-selected out of the big Hollywood situation; I felt why would they be interested in me as a woman, a lesbian, with female leads as an inclination, and my work which is a combination of comedy and non-comedy.
KOUGUELL: You have a very unique sensibility
ROZEMA: There’s money for things that are not genre, that aren’t obvious crowd-pleasers, but even more profound than that, if I make a film that no one wants to see, my kids still have health care, and they still have good schools they can go to. That is profound. So, I can make dangerous artistic choices, I can take risks, I can experiment, and not risk starvation. That is a big difference for me, living there. It’s also very progressive and creative.
Finding collaborators who have just the right politics, sense of humor, worth ethic; that’s a needle in a haystack and I always like to try new things.
“As a filmmaker, I believe it is my duty to tell stories with truth and empathy. We are living in a divisive time, and it’s important to shed light on voices that lie in the shadows.”
— Ani Simon-Kennedy
The Short History of the Long Road had its world premiere screening in the U.S. Narrative competition at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival where it received the Best Screenplay Special Jury mention: ‘To a story of a woman finding her biological family and her logical family on the highway’ for writer and director Ani Simon-Kennedy.
About The Short History of the Long Road
For teenage Nola, home is the open road with her self-reliant father and their trusty van, two nomads against the world. When Nola’s rootless existence is turned upside-down, she realizes that life as an outsider might not be her only choice. In this coming-of-age film, The Short History of the Long Road depicts the fortitude of resilience, especially when following the most devastating of blows, in the most under-resourced of areas.
Ani Simon-Kennedy
ANI SIMON-KENNEDY – Director / Writer / Producer
Raised in Paris and based in New York, Ani Simon-Kennedy is a feature film, documentary and commercial director. Under the banner of Bicephaly Pictures, she collaborates with cinematographer Cailin Yatsko on socially-conscious stories. Her first feature film, Days of Gray, played at top festivals around the world with an original live score by Icelandic band Hjaltalin. The sci-fi silent film was deemed “an assured debut” by the Hollywood Reporter. She has directed award-winning campaigns for Colgate, Smirnoff, Intel, Glamour, The New Yorker and Vice. Her work has received support from the Sundance Institute, the Tribeca Film Institute, IFP, Film Independent, Chanel and AT&T. Her second narrative feature, The Short History of the Long Roadpremiered at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival.
Bettina Kadoorie
BETTINA KADOORIE – Producer
Growing up in Hong Kong inspired Bettina Kadoorie to tell stories from all over the world. Her first film, Taste, was accepted to The Short Film Corner at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. She then produced and directed the documentary Child of Cambodia in 2012, before moving to New York to attend Columbia University. There, she wrote three features and interned on The Eagle Huntress in 2015. She graduated in 2017 with an MFA in Screenwriting, Directing, and Producing. The Short History of the Long Road marks Bettina’s first time producing a narrative feature. She is an Executive Producer on the upcoming documentary I am Belmaya about Nepal’s first female filmmaker and has directed two shorts currently in post production: Santiaguera, shot in Cartagena in January 2019, and a documentary on Chittagong’s shipbreakers, shot in February 2019.
Sabrina Carpenter as Nola
As I was perusing the Tribeca Film Festival catalogue, seeking projects to cover for this publication, it came as a wonderful surprise to find the name of my former film and screenwriting student, Bettina Kadoorie, listed as one of the producers on this project. However, it was absolutely no surprise that her dedication to her craft and commitment to filmmaking continues to blossom, and that she is working with an impressive group of young filmmakers.
Bettina and director Ari Simon-Kennedy, and cinematographer Cailin Yatsko met while attending the Prague Film School about seven years ago. (The year after that, in 2012, I taught at the summer program at the Prague Film School.) It was a special conversation not only to reminisce about our respective times at PFS, but to learn how they grew and evolved as filmmakers.
KADOORIE: We wrote and directed many shorts together at the Prague Film School and it was cool to move to New York at the same time.
SIMON-KENNEDY: At the Prague Film school, Cailin and I were the only two in the cinematography track. I wanted to be a DP, and we started shooting everyone’s work and that’s how we came up with the name for our company Bicephaly Pictures. Then I had an awakening that I wanted to be a director, and we’ve had the company for seven years.
COLLABORATION
KADOORIE What was great was that I continue to learn from Ani; she knows what she wants as a director, and she is a strong writer. I was so impressed at how rich and deep the script was. Ani made another feature, Days of Grey, which unfortunately I was not able to work on with them because I was working on another film.
SIMON-KENNEDY: Bettina and I have been friends forever, and she has an amazing writing background, and is always a huge support. We share a lot of writing commiseration, (they both laugh) and her notes were incredible. She has a great eye for detail.
KOUGUELL: It’s interesting that this is a film set in the U.S and takes place on the road, given that you two did not grow up in the United States.
KADOORIE: Nola is a unique character that we could all relate to, despite the fact that we were not raised in the U.S. She was so inspiring and universal to us.
THE WRITING PROCESS
SIMON-KENNEDY: I started writing the script about five years ago, after Days of Gray. That film has no dialogue; it’s very sparse, and I wanted my second feature to be a talky.
Writing is lonely. The way I write is unusual; I map out the story in my head, and then I buy friends dinner and tell them the story, to gauge what’s working and what’s not working. I like that immediate feedback and to see what they’re interested in or confused about. There’s a lot of oral storytelling before I put it on the page.
I also attended the Cine Qua Non Lab that takes place in Mexico for two weeks. It was a really wonderful international place to workshop the screenplay.
Van-dwelling is a growing subculture in the US that is thriving. The hashtag #vanlife has been used over two million times on the platform since it first appeared in 2011.
SIMON-KENNEDY: I grew up in France with American parents and I feel at home in Paris and I feel at home in New York. I feel at home in both places. I was very drawn to characters who seem one way on the outside but have a backstory that you wouldn’t attribute to them. That’s why van-dwelling appealed to me. The van-dwellers are very connected, they have a very vocal presence online. Some live in vans out of necessity and others it was a choice, and that was something that fascinated me and made me very attracted to that story. I travel to make movies and make movies to travel.
KADOORIE: Ani spent two years interviewing van-dwellers of all ages and backgrounds.
SIMON-KENNEDY: The appeal of the van-dwelling lifestyle is undeniably tremendous. There is a freedom that is hard-earned and terrifying at times, but one that is endlessly expansive, too.
In France, every citizen has a right to health care, shelter and education, which is a different approach in the U.S., and having not grown up in the States, I fundamentally didn’t get it, and that was a bit part of the script and fascination I had for a long time that I wanted to get some kind of clarity. How people figure it out.
THE CHARACTERS
KOUGUELL: The characters were multi-dimensional; many are flawed with gray areas. Their choices may not be sympathetic, but they are empathetic characters—we feel for them—even if it’s frustration and judgment because you’ve examined why they chose the actions they did and their motivations. The audience was truly at the edge of their seats rooting for Nola to survive.
KADOORIE: It’s interesting to see people react when watching the film, there is an inherent fear for Nola. Sabrina Carpenter (the actress portraying Nola) changed up her look, and she embraced this role of a girl living in a van, exploring it with nuance.
SIMON-KENNEDY: The threat of what could happen to her was very real, Nola escapes because she has her wits about her.
KADOORIE: What’s great about the character of Nola, is that who she is on the screen is who she was on the script. Ani knew this world and populated the world with characters of this world. Ani went so deep into her.
SIMON-KENNEDY: Every person Nola encounters is someone who is trying to survive and who might not have a safety net. Miquel’s character built his own shop, he’s a lone wolf, and Cheryl, (Nola’s mother) who didn’t have the tools to have a kid made a brave choice not wanting to be a mom and not being able to in a material way, and Marcie has her big flaws. They’re all trying to do the best with what they’ve got because there’s no help, there’s nothing to fall back on, you have to be self-reliant.
I loved Agnès Varda’s Vagabond, but I didn’t want to write a cautionary tale, I wanted Nola to belong on the road; that’s where she feels the most comfortable. So many women I spoke to love it. I wanted to show Nola surviving through her unconventional upbringing and how her father gave her the tools to survive.
PRE-PRODUCTION, PRODUCTION, AND POST-PRODUCTION
KOUGUELL: How many days did you spend on pre-production and shooting?
SIMON-KENNEDY: It was a 20-day shoot. We did one month in pre-production in New Mexico on the ground there for three months, then we went back for two days for driving shots, shooting the landscape out the window.
KOUGUELL: And the editing process?
SIMON-KENNEDY: Our editor, Ron Dulin, was fantastic. We wanted to find an editor who would be on set with us. I love working that way for the editor to get the sense of the place, and atmosphere, it shapes their perspective. We were all living together in Albuquerque, like college, Ron had an editing suite there which was helpful, and we could apply to the Sundance editing lab because he was on set with us; he was cutting while we were shooting. That was hugely helpful in shaping the film. We wrapped at the end of May and went right to get the full assembly together, went to Utah, did the lab, and edited in July, August, and September. In October, we started sending out festival applications. And then we finished post—we had a wonderful kind donation from Eggplant Picture & Sound in Toronto, and we did sound and color out there.
IMAGERY
KOUGUELL: Ani, you mentioned that visually, you and your cinematographer Cailin Yatsko were inspired by Justine Kurland’s work, particular her series of photographs depicting life on the road with her young son.
SIMON-KENNEDY: Imagery is a huge part of how we work. We do a lot of mood boards. I loved Kurland’s work forever. One of the most exciting things is the fact that she lives the lives of her subjects, and she had long periods of time on the road with and without her kid, and incredibly familiar. I had not spent time in New Mexico before. I was completely taken by the landscape. It felt like nowhere else in the States that I had been to. There was such a rich culture and history there.
For filmmakers Ani Simon-Kennedy and Bettina Kadoorie, the filmmaking road certainly looks to be long and bright. To learn more about screenings of The Short History of the Long Road, visit the film’s website and follow them on Facebook.
In early December of 2018, I spoke with filmmaker Sam Green about his new project A Thousand Thoughts. Green performs a live (poignant and often very funny ‘voiceover’) narration on stage throughout the 85-minute piece alongside the Kronos Quartet, who are also performing live on stage and often alongside images of themselves.
Kronos Quartet violinist David Harrington describes the work as “a live documentary”—a film, a concert and lecture.
A Thousand Thoughts is a unique and powerful experience that is not limited to an audience of music lovers or just fans of the Kronos Quartet; its themes are universal and its presentation, captivating.
Sam Green
ABOUT A THOUSAND THOUGHTS
Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Sam Green (The Weather Underground), in collaboration with Emmy Award®-winning writer and editor Joe Bini (Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Grizzly Man), takes the stage with the legendary classical-music group, Kronos Quartet, to create a “live documentary” that chronologically unfolds the quartet’s groundbreaking, continent-spanning, multi-decade career.
Wildly creative and experimental in form, A Thousand Thoughts is a meditation on music itself-the act of listening closely to music, the experience of feeling music deeply, and the power that music has to change the world.
Green narrates the piece live onstage while the Kronos Quartet performs the score, and a rich blend of archival footage, photos, and interviews with members of the Kronos Quartet—as well as longtime collaborators like Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Terry Riley, Tanya Tagaq, Steve Reich—unspools on screen. After premiering at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, A Thousand Thoughts screened at the National Opera House in Athens, Greece, and is touring nationally. It received the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival.
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
Director, Writer, Editor Sam Green is a New York-based documentary filmmaker. He received his master’s degree in Journalism from University of California Berkeley, where he studied documentary with acclaimed filmmaker Marlon Riggs. Green’s most recent live documentaries include The Measure of All Things (2014), The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (with Yo La Tengo) (2012), and Utopia in Four Movements (2010). With all of these works, Green narrates the film in-person while musicians perform a live soundtrack. Green’s 2004 feature-length film, The Weather Underground, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, was nominated for an Academy Award, included in the Whitney Biennial, and has screened widely around the world.
Director, Writer, Editor Joe Bini is best known for his long-time collaboration with Werner Herzog. Their work together is comprised of over 20 films in all, including the narrative films Rescue Dawn and The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and such notable documentaries as Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Grizzly Man, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Into the Abyss, and the 2015 drama, Queen of the Desert. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, a film that Bini cut and co-wrote, won the Documentary Film Editing Award at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival and an Emmy Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Writing. He won the Prix Vulcain De L’Artiste-Technicien at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for We Need to Talk About Kevin.
ABOUT THE KRONOS QUARTET
For more than 40 years, San Francisco’s Kronos Quartet—David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello)—has combined a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually reimagine the string quartet experience. In the process, Kronos has become one of the world’s most celebrated and influential ensembles, performing thousands of concerts, releasing more than 60 recordings, collaborating with many of the world’s most intriguing and accomplished composers and performers, and commissioning over 900 works and arrangements for string quartet. Kronos has received over 40 awards, including the Polar Music and Avery Fisher Prizes, two of the most prestigious awards given to musicians.
THE INTERVIEW
The filmmakers had extensive archival material from which to work, as well as the Kronos Quartet themselves and its former members. During the film, filmmaker Chantal Ackerman’s News from Home (the 1977 avant-garde documentary) is referenced, and how this work captured America unraveling during this era; this reference underscored the historical context that coincided with the 40 years of the Kronos Quartet’s existence and how the history of the past four decades are an integral part of the evolution of the Kronos Quartet as musicians, as well as the music they perform and commission.
KOUGUELL: In A Thousand Pieces you discussed the definition of documentary, and what this film is and isn’t. Please expand on this.
GREEN: There are many different types of documentaries and some subjects are permanent and never changing. There are many reasons I thought the live format would work for this project; experiencing it in person is a completely different thing than just including recorded music.
I generally don’t like music documentaries because they’re so formulaic. Like the “Behind the Music” types; they’re predictable and what I don’t like in that is it’s just a little bit of music, and the music fits into it. (Green laughs) And Kronos was not trashing hotel rooms in the 70s.
In a normal documentary, when you have three minutes of music it’s way too long. In the live format there are no rules, so this form is well-suited, and music is at the heart of it. The live experience is unique and in some ways the form reflects it.
KOUGUELL: How many times have you presented A Thousand Pieces?
GREEN: To date, this project has been performed 15 times. We have fine-tuned things; some small changes. Every show is different based on the size of the room, the time of day, is the audience drinking alcohol, and so on. There are a million intangible things that I like a lot.
KOUGUELL: Let’s talk about your collaborations with Joe Bini and Kirsten Johnson, and the collaboration with the Kronos quartet.
GREEN: Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson and I are old friends. I was floored by her documentary Cameraperson—the sensibility behind it, it was so wise and insightful, and I knew I had to have her on this project.
Joe and I met at a Sundance event, and he was so smart and radical, and we became friends. The editing was challenging and complicated. My collaboration with Joe was one of the best I’ve ever had.
Working with Kronos was great, we interviewed them, and showed them the film at the end.
KOUGUELL: In the film, you mentioned that this film was an “unauthorized biography” of the Kronos Quartet. What was the reaction of the project by the Kronos?
GREEN: We had no rules about what we could include or not include in the documentary. There were some small things they didn’t like; the bigger things like when Harrington talked about losing his son, the quartet doesn’t like sitting through that, they rather not be in that, but they recognize that it’s a big element that evokes something deep and complex.
KOUGUELL: Let’s talk about the writing process and script.
GREEN: We started with the music and created scenes from around the music and pieced together a story. Joe and I wrote the story, we pieced it together with words, images and music. It’s a tech-based piece, and it is a script, and I’ve memorized it.
A funny thing: I’ve never been able to write with someone else, but while Joe and I were working, I said I’d work alone with the first section and he gave me a weird look, and suggested we try it together. It totally worked! I asked him, ‘How do you know how to write voice-over?” and Joe laughed and said: “I worked with Werner Herzog for years.”
Anne McCabe, editor, started in the cutting rooms of Woody Allen, Brian de Palma and Sidney Lumet. She has collaborated with Director Greg Mottola on several projects, including The Daytrippers, Adventureland, and the award-winning pilot for HBO’s Newsroom. She also worked closely with Kenneth Lonergan on the Academy Award-nominated film You Can Count On Me, and Margaret. Her television credits include Nurse Jackie, Damages, Younger, The Purge and this summer’s HBO’s hit drama Succession. Navigating both drama and comedy, she cut Chris Rock’s acclaimed movie Top Five and is currently editing the untitled Tom Hanks and Matthew Rhys Mr. Rogers movie, also directed by Marielle Heller.
About Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Melissa McCarthy stars as Lee Israel, the best-selling celebrity biographer (and cat lover) who made her living in the 1970’s and 80’s profiling the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Tallulah Bankhead, Estée Lauder and journalist Dorothy Kilgallen. When Lee found herself unable to get published because she had fallen out of step with the marketplace, she turned her art form to deception, abetted by her loyal friend Jack (Richard E. Grant).
Melissa McCarthy in ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’
THE INTERVIEW
I spoke with Anne McCabe by phone for our interview; it was certainly fortuitous timing as McCabe was in the editing room working on her next project with director Marielle Heller on the new (untitled) Tom Hanks film about Mr. Rogers.
Kouguell: Tell me about your collaboration process with Marielle Heller.
McCabe: I was drawn to project because it was a different type of story than we usually see. As an editor I’m told, ‘Can you make this woman more likeable? Does she have to do this terrible thing?’ It was wonderful to work with Mari who was unafraid to make Lee Israel super grouchy, correct people’s grammar, and so on. Lee was a difficult person and not a typical character you often see on film.
Mari is drawn to stories we haven’t seen a million times; even the character of Jack is not one we normally see. Often, we see an English character who is more informed, for example, but Jack is shallow and Lee is smarter than he is.
Kouguell: Did you refer directly to the shooting script?
McCabe: Absolutely. Several people spent an enormous amount of time writing this script, and I try to create as close to it as possible. Occasionally on set lines might drop, but very much what was written, is on the screen.
Before we started shooting we talked about the script, and while Mari was shooting we would discuss scenes, and the story beats. We stayed as close to the script as possible in the first cut of the movie. We did spend a lot of time reshaping the film while staying true to the story.
Kouguell: Were you cutting as they were shooting?
McCabe: Yes. I would cut the dailies the next day. Continuity was often a challenge because they were shooting in New York and there was so much changing weather.
Kouguell: You’ve worked across all genres. Tell me what made this experience unique.
McCabe: It was great to work with a lot of women who are clever and confident. I love that Mari is bold and taking chances. I worked with producer Anne Carey before on Adventureland. Mari and I had a great connection. It was great to also work with Jane Curtain and Anna Deveare Smith.
Kouguell: Let’s talk about your reaction to McCarthy’s dramatic performance.
McCabe: Melissa Mccarthy was fabulous – she’s a beautiful woman in real life, she embraced the ‘not-looking-gorgeous’ in this role. The film starts with a close-up and they put makeup on her to make her look worse, it was a brave thing. Even the cat crap under her bed, she dove in. She embraced this grouchy, difficult person. Lee Israel is complicated, and McCarthy has so much warmth that she brought to the character.
Kouguell: Some final thoughts about the film?
McCabe: I love the fact that the film centers on two gay characters but it’s not a central theme. It’s looming, regarding the AIDS in New York City during this time period. That last scene I was most proud of. We worked hard on that. There were a lot of ways to go. The moment Lee really becomes honest and goes through all the different stages of a relationship. They’re uneasy, there’s humor, sadness. Their lives are so lonely, everyone can relate to that feeling of ‘you don’t fit in.’ Lee gets ignored because people often don’t acknowledge women in their fifties, and it’s the same for Jack. And for each of them, finding that friend.
Recently, I had the honor of interviewing documentary director Frederick Wiseman at Manhattan’s Film Forum the day before his new film Monrovia, Indiana was beginning its run at the same venue.
ABOUT FREDERICK WISEMAN
Since 1967, Frederick Wiseman has directed 42 documentaries—dramatic, narrative films that seek to portray ordinary human experience in a wide variety of contemporary social institutions. His films include TITICUT FOLLIES, HIGH SCHOOL, WELFARE, JUVENILE COURT, BOXING GYM, LA DANSE, BALLET, CENTRAL PARK, BALLET, LA COMEDIE FRANCAISE, BELFAST, MAINE, and EX LIBRIS—The New York Public Library. He has directed a fiction film, THE LAST LETTER (2002). His films are distributed in theatres and broadcast on television in many countries.
Frederick Wiseman received his BA from Williams College in 1951 and his LLB from Yale Law School in 1954. He has received honorary doctorates from Bowdoin College, Princeton University, and Williams College, among others. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has won numerous awards, including four Emmys. He is also the recipient of the Career Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Society (2013), the George Polk Career Award (2006), the American Society of Cinematographers Distinguished Achievement Award (2006) and the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the Venice Film Festival (2014). In 2016, he received an Honorary Award from the Board of Governors of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was a Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University in 2018.
ABOUT THE DOCUMENTARY MONROVIA, INDIANA
Founded in 1834, Monrovia, Indiana (pop: 1063) is a small farming community that might be passed over en route to larger cities like Indianapolis or Fort Wayne. Yet 46 million Americans live in rural towns like Monrovia, once the backbone of American life. In his 44th film, master documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman trains his legendary camera on the town, exploring its conflicting stereotypes and illustrating how values like community service, duty, spiritual life, and generosity are lived—Christian sermons, a freemason ceremony, industrial agricultural work, a town council ruling on expanded development, and gun-shop talk. All punctuated by cinematographer John Davey’s stunning, big-sky Midwestern landscapes. The importance of rural America as a formative center of American politics and values was demonstrated in the 2016 presidential election; MONROVIA, INDIANA provides a window into a way of life that, although central to this country’s history, is often overlooked by city dwellers.
THE INTERVIEW
We began our discussion with Mr. Wiseman’s choice to explore the town of Monrovia in his new documentary.
WISEMAN: I told a friend of mine who is a law professor in Boston that I wanted to make a film in the Midwest about a small town. She had a friend who taught at the Indiana law school, whose family lived in the same small town for six generations. By chance, a couple of weeks after that I had been invited by the University of Indiana in Bloomington to show some of my films. So, I called the Bloomington law professor to say I was interested, and he said, “Come a day early, and I’ll take you to Monrovia.” He introduced me to his cousin who is the town undertaker in the cemetery, an extremely nice woman, and she offered to help by introducing me around.
I looked around Monrovia for about two hours. This was mid-April and I was planning on shooting in May. In the interim, she contacted the people she thought would be important for me to meet, like the head of the school board, the police and fire department, store owners, the vet. And then I called them, and because she made the introductions and I had the ‘Good Housekeeping seal of Approval’ they were very receptive. I had no problem getting access.
KOUGUELL: How long was the shoot?
WISEMAN: About ten weeks.
KOUGUELL: How long did you prepare for it in terms of meeting people?
WISEMAN: Only the two hours when I was in Monrovia in April. That’s always the case. I don’t like being around a place doing what’s called research and not being able to shoot. In my view, the shooting of the film is the research.
KOUGUELL: What size is your crew?
WISEMAN: Me and two others. I direct and do the sound. I work with a cameraman, and the third person assists us both. It’s fun. It’s a nice way to work.
KOUGUELL: Did you need to get releases signed from the participants?
WISEMAN: I ask people’s permission. I usually get tape-recorded consents. They’re just as legal as written consents.
KOUGUELL: Have the participants seen the finished film? Were you there for the screening?
WISEMAN: Yes, they seemed to like it. I was there. There were three screenings in one night; I took over a multi-plex.
KOUGUELL: At the end of the film, and without giving anything away to the readers, there are moving and poignant sequences about the passing of one of Monrovia’s residents. How were you able to get the family to agree to being filmed?
WISEMAN: The undertaker asked them. Her company was in charge of the event, so to speak.
KOUGUELL: Much is often made about categorizing your films. Do you consider them Direct Cinema? Cinema Verité?
WISEMAN: I don’t like any of those words. I don’t know what Direct Cinema means. Fly on the Wall is obnoxious; I think I’m more conscious than a fly. Observational Cinema is too passive; as if somehow you sit in a corner and let things happen in front of the camera when a movie is made up of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of decisions. I like to call them movies. A simple, old-fashioned word.
KOUGUELL: You said that the themes and POV emerge at the end of the editing process.
WISEMAN: I don’t start a movie with a thesis in mind because I think that would be too limiting. I like the movie, in one sense, to be a report on what I learned as a consequence of making the movie within the context of it being a dramatic narrative. If I start the movie with a specific idea, then it’s like a horse with blinders, you’re not seeing other things.
I don’t know anything about these places before I start. I really learn about it in the editing. I have to review the rushes, decide which sequences I want to use, how I’m going to edit, and order them. That requires a careful analysis, a reading of each sequence. I have to think that I understand what’s going on in each sequence in order to decide whether I want to use it, how I’m going to edit it, and where I’m going to place it.
KOUGUELL: You mentioned that for this film you shot between 100 and 120 hours of footage. Let’s talk about your editing process.
WISEMAN: I like editing. During the shoot, we send back a hard drive to an assistant in Boston. She would categorize it, for example, all the shots in the supermarket, farmers, and then write a one-line description of each shot, and make sure that the sync was okay. Then when I come back from the shooting, I start looking at the material. That takes me 6-8 weeks; this first pass. At the end of that, I put aside about 50 percent of the material, and then I start editing from the other 50 percent of those sequences that I think will make it into the final film. That takes me 6-8 months. Then when the candidate sequences are edited, I do the first assembly in 3-4 days. That’s my first attempt at structure, which is usually about 30-40 minutes longer than the final film. Then, over the next 6-8 weeks, I work on the rhythm of the film, and make sure I have a dramatic narrative that works. I work on the internal rhythm of a sequence, and the transitions between the sequences. When that’s done, I look at all the rushes again to see if there is anything else that will be useful to include.
A good part of editing doesn’t have to do with the physical manipulation of the material, it has to do with what the material says to me. The conversation between me and the rushes.
KOUGUELL: A distinctive aspect of your work is the lack of voice-over narration and interviews, or reflexive (revealing to the viewer some part of the filmmaking process) elements.
WISEMAN: Right, you don’t physically see me but every aspect of the film, you see me because you see the choices I made.
KOUGUELL: What appeals to you with this style of filmmaking?
WISEMAN: The way I make movies is more novelistic than it is journalistic. I make the argument that my films are fiction films because, for example, reducing a sequence from an hour-and-a-half to seven minutes, and it’s never seven consecutive minutes, it’s 20 seconds here, 40 seconds there, and edited like you’re watching it in sequence. It’s fictional in a sense that the camera is looking at the people in a different way than the eye.
To learn more about Wiseman’s work and upcoming events visit Website.
