Interview: Peter Berg on The Kingdom

With the country now in its fifth year of a war against Iraq, filmgoers have shown more interest in documentaries about terrorism than features. Films like Syriana and United 93 received strong reviews, but failed to find an audience. The Kingdom, a Universal release directed by Peter Berg, approaches the subject from a more commercial angle. Scripted by Matthew Michael Carnahan, the story follows a team of FBI agents investigating the bombing of an American base in Saudi Arabia.

“We wanted it to be a different experience,” Berg says by phone from his office in Los Angeles. “We wanted to make a more accessible story about the Middle East, to not overly politicize or intellectualize the situation there. First and foremost, lead with strong action.”

Interview: John Dahl on You Kill Me

Director John Dahl established his career with low-key but razor-sharp thrillers like Kill Me Again and Red Rock West. With The Last Seduction, about a femme fatale who pockets the proceeds of a drug deal, he fashioned one of the most precise and cunning film noirs in the modern era. After a series of studio films, You Kill Me marks Dahl’s return to his earlier style of low-budget, independent filmmaking. Starring Ben Kingsley as an alcoholic hit man going through rehab and Téa Leoni as the slightly neurotic businesswoman who falls for him, it meshes perfectly with Dahl’s strengths as a director.

Profile: Barbara Stanwyck Centenary

What made Barbara Stanwyck a star? Her looks helped, of course, but there were scores of beauties who never got out of the chorus line. She could sling it as well as any other sexpot, but even in her loosest roles she held something back from her costars, and from her customers. She tapped into the neuroses that helped define film noir, but she played her most famous femme fatale as an icy blonde who was as dismissive of her new lover as she was of the victim he was replacing.

Interview: Johnnie To on Election and Exiled

Since the handover in 1997, no Hong Kong filmmaker has been as consistently successful and influential as Johnnie To. An increasingly prominent figure on the festival circuit, the fifty-three-year-old To has had trouble cracking the United States market. But the release this spring of his three most recent films, Election, Triad Election, and Exiled, may finally bring him the recognition he deserves.

Interview: Luc Besson on Angel-A and Arthur

Luc Besson, one of the most powerful figures in French cinema, once told a reporter he would quit directing films after he completed ten features. Now, with the release of the animated Arthur and the Invisibles and the opening in the United States of Angel-A, the director has reached his limit. Picking at a plate of berries and crème fraîche in a hotel bar overlooking Battery Park in downtown Manhattan, Besson chooses his words carefully when talking about his future.

“I’m finished,” he starts. “I’m scared of saying the same things over and over, and at the same time I have less ambition or passion. Even athletes have to accept that one day they can’t keep beating their records.” Besson has worked almost non-stop for thirty years, and collapsed twice on the set of his previous directing effort, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. He claims to be satisfied just writing and producing films for his EuropaCorp production company. Then he offers a qualified hedge: “If tomorrow I fall in love with a script, if I have a new purpose, if I have something fresh to say, if I can take on another three-year project, then maybe I will decide to direct again.”

Interview: Eric Roth on The Good Shepherd

In the aftermath of World War II, members of the OSS, the Office for Strategic Services, convinced the White House that the United States needed a formal espionage program. How the Central Intelligence Agency was formed is the subject of The Good Shepherd, the second feature to be directed by actor Robert De Niro. Starring Matt Damon, and with a cast that includes De Niro, Angelina Jolie, Joe Pesci, Billy Crudup, John Turturro, William Hurt, and Michael Gambon, the film covers some twenty-five years, from a time when ethical choices seemed clear cut to a decidedly more ambiguous post-Watergate climate.

Interview: Richard LaGravanese on Freedom Writers

When Erin Gruwell began teaching high school in Long Beach, California, in 1994, she faced a class of black, Latino, and Asian gang members seething with anger. These were the “unteachable” students, the ones who had been abandoned by the education system, the ones beset by violence and abuse before they even entered a school building. The Rodney King riots had just taken place, and the novice teacher quickly found herself stripped of her idealistic attitudes about how to best instruct her class.

Gruwell’s struggle to connect with her students forms the basis of Freedom Writers, a Paramount feature written and directed by Richard LaGravenese. He first learned about Gruwell’s program after watching a “Primetime Live” segment about the teacher. When he read Freedom Writers Diary, a book published as a result of Gruwell’s class, LaGravenese told his producing partners that it was a story that needed to be filmed.

Interview: George Miller on Happy Feet

A week before one of its first public screenings, director George Miller is still tweaking the soundtrack of his latest film, Happy Feet. A musical comedy set in Antarctica and featuring penguins as stars, it has already consumed over three years of the director’s time. But Miller is still upbeat and enthusiastic over a massive project whose staff at one point neared five hundred workers. Reached by phone at his office in Sydney, he admits, “Post-production is fun because you see all the hard work coming together. You still have the sense that you can smooth things and make everything a little tighter and creamier.”

This is the first fully animated feature for Miller, whose career includes two of the more memorable series in recent years: Babe and Mad Max. The Babe films, which featured animation and live action, helped pave the way for Happy Feet, but the new project put Miller and his crew at the “bleeding edge” of technology. The film required massive computing power, not just for rendering characters, but because Miller insisted on what he calls “photo-real” backgrounds. Two separate expeditions were sent to Antarctica to photograph locations, and as a result Happy Feet can boast incredibly exotic, but accurate, landscapes. And with the software used in the film, the animated characters can move in a much more lifelike manner. For example, Mumble, the starring penguin, has six million surfaces.

Despite the technological advances, Miller found that making the film brought him back to the fundamentals of cinema. “What I learned most about was where to put the camera,” he reveals. “When you’re doing live action you sort of have an instinct as to where the camera goes. In digital animation, once you’ve captured the performance you can alter it any way you like. It’s not a problem to shift the camera here or there. And just the way you place the camera or cut the material can have a tremendous influence on the atmosphere of a scene and how an audience receives it. I mean as a live-action director, you know that already, but this film taught me more than ever that just how important it is.”

Miller agrees that the process is as demanding as it is liberating. “The mantra of this film is, ‘Why are we doing this?’ Otherwise you can go on forever without deciding anything. You have to ask yourself, do we need that sound, that bit of dialogue, that camera movement? Our goal is to end up with a movie that is as close as possible to something where we actually went out and shot it live.”

The director attributes part of the long production schedule to building an animation facility from scratch, but also to the time he spent on the screenplay. “One of the reasons why we tell stories is to reach that enchantment that adults can feel when they get in touch with the sort of wonder that they had as a child. And I think with children it goes the other way, there must be some sort of nourishment out of the story. It can’t be mindless entertainment.”

The plot to Happy Feet deals with efforts by an outcast penguin named Mumble to fit in with his peers. Miller based the idea on the fact that emperor penguins have distinctive songs. “They sound like squawking to us, but somehow penguins can pick out individual songs from a colony of some 20,000 birds.” The concept enabled the director to use music by everyone from the Beach Boys to Prince, and to work out elaborate dance sequences that take on Busby Berkeley proportions.

Assembling a cast that included Robin Williams in two key roles meant that the script to Happy Feet was constantly evolving. Since Miller felt that it would be difficult to differentiate penguins visually, he needed strong, distinctive voices for his characters. (Everyone except for Elijah Wood, who plays Mumble, had to sing as well.) Nicole Kidman, who signed onto the project before seeing a script, plays a Marilyn Monroe-type named Norma Jean. Hugh Jackman’s penguin is called Memphis because of his resemblance to Elvis Presley. Also in the cast are Brittany Murphy and Hugo Weaving.

Unlike many animated films, Miller had the actors work together at the same time, a tactic he felt added spontaneity to their performances. “If you’ve got someone like Robins Williams, you say, ‘Let’s push it, let’s see where this thing goes.’ You get material better than what you wrote on the page. Little things, inflections. It happens in live action as well, but of course animation is more plastic. You’re able to get a little bit more than you normally would in live action. Usually when you’re editing live footage, you’re thinking, I wish I had done that, but we didn’t, or couldn’t. But with digital animation you’re able to actually get most of what you aspired to do.”

Although he has concentrated on children’s films recently, Miller has had an unusually eclectic career that includes directing the medical drama Lorenzo’s Oil and producing early Kidman thrillers like Dead Calm. The long production schedule for Happy Feet has enabled him to finish working on other screenplays that he put aside earlier. He considers only one of his future projects a family oriented film. Fans of the Mad Max series, which contains some of the most expertly staged and hard-hitting action ever captured on film, will be delighted to learn that Miller is anxious to return to live-action filmmaking.

“The biggest thing I miss is working up close and personal with actors,” he says. “When you’re working with animators, it’s like you’re directing extremely slow-motion acting. But when you’re working with actors, they’re right there, it’s like being in a body contact sport. When you’re engaged in the scene, wonderful things can happen. It’s like being the coach of great athletes, and I miss that a lot.”

Miller cites Disney’s Pinocchio, with its indelible characters and strict morals, as an important influence on his work, and singles out Pixar today for its attention to writing. He once gave a lecture on storytelling that was based on the premise that the best stories should include labels warning of hazardous material. Religions, for example, have stories so powerful they can lead to war. Miller was deeply impressed by storytelling in aboriginal cultures. Because they could not be written down, their stories contained enormous amounts of information, most of which had to do with survival. Not only moral lessons, but how to find food and water. Getting the opportunity to hear these stories first hand showed Miller the responsibility that went with them.

Pointing to films like Pirates of the Caribbean, Miller believes that mastering animation and digital effects now has to be a part of every filmmaker’s repertoire. But equally important is treating the filmgoing audience with respect. As he puts it, “You’re not slumming when you’re working with children’s films, or family films. You’re trying to push storytelling to the best level you can.”

Interview: Art Linson on The Black Dahlia

James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia marked a turning point in his career as a novelist. Based on the gruesome, real-life murder of Elizabeth Short in 1947, the 1987 book was a culmination of Ellroy’s obsession with the noir world of 1940s Los Angeles. The hard-as-nails prose, vivid characters, and feverish plotting evoked a hallucinatory pulp world flecked with blood, sex, and despair. It was also a deeply personal book for Ellroy, as it was his first to make use of the murder of his mother, Jean Hilliker. Despite the release in 1997 of the Oscar-winning L.A. Confidential, another Ellroy adaptation, getting The Black Dahlia on screen proved impossible until producer Art Linson persuaded director Brian De Palma to try.

Speaking from his home in France, Linson tried to play down the labyrinthine production history behind The Black Dahlia. “The back story of how this movie ultimately got funded is a whole other drama. You don’t get fifteen producer credits unless the script was sitting around a long time, with a lot of people taking shots at it. Things didn’t go well many, many times.” Linson was producing Fight Club when he first saw the script, which at the time was over two hundred pages and “unmakeable.” Linson hadn’t worked with Brian De Palma since The Untouchables and Casualties of War, but felt that the story was perfect for the director.

The two collaborated with screenwriter Josh Friedman, author of Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, on a new script, making the story shorter and more specific. Linson says that they needed to narrow the scope of the book’s plot to focus on the three lead characters, “people who get caught up in a world where murder happens.” The script remains honest to Ellroy’s writing, but as the producer points out, “In the end, Brian De Palma had to find a way to make it his own movie, filter it through his operatic style of filmmaking.”

Ellroy feels that the casting of Josh Hartnett, who committed to the movie before the script was finished, was crucial. He plays Bucky Bleichert, a compromised Los Angeles police detective whose search for justice threatens every relationship in his life. Hartnett narrates the film and is in every scene. Ellroy says that the actor “nails Bucky with no histrionic excess. He excels at projecting cognition. He carries the film’s moral vision: you’re fearful, but you always go forward.”

With a completed script and Hartnett on board, the rest of the cast fell into place quickly. Scarlett Johannson took the role of Kay Lake, a former prostitute rescued by Bleichert’s partner Lee Blanchard (played by Aaron Eckhart). Hilary Swank is Madeleine, a wealthy heiress whose resemblance to the murder victim becomes a pivotal plot twist. Linson singles out Mia Kirshner, best known from Showtime’s The L Word and season four of 24. “She came in to read for one of the other parts, but ended up taking the role of the Black Dahlia. She did a tremendous job, getting her character to evolve in these screen tests which are used in the movie. She’s going to get enormous attention for this picture.”

The story unfolds in a lost Los Angeles of race riots, corrupt cops, seedy nightclubs, and urban decay, all tainted by Hollywood glamour. Trying to recreate the 1940s in Bulgaria was “a daunting task,” Linson admits. “The hills of Hollywood in this movie are the hills of Sofia. Try that out for size.” The producer described the juggling act he went through with production designer Dante Ferretti and equally esteemed cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond to achieve the look of the film. “The attention to detail is the secret, but it also costs money. Getting the flavor of a time is a combination of a hundred small things, small details, and as you start to sacrifice to save ‘money,’ you lose that feeling, that period. But it’s impossible to know which one, you know what I mean? So there is this daily fight of, ‘Do we need that dish? We have four dishes, what if we had three dishes? We have three cars, what if we had two? The people in the background, no one will ever notice that those ties are from the 80’s, instead of the 1940s.’ It becomes a remarkable journey in terms of trying to hold onto the detail. No one’s clever enough to know exactly how much is enough. And no one can ever get everything they want. In fact, it took a lot of high-end screaming to try to get this to feel true. But if you start to see the slip showing too much, the magic trick is over.”

Working with De Palma again after almost twenty years was a “great time.” “We did this film in fifty-eight days,” Linson continues. “Brian De Palma is a prepared man. He’s not a guy who has to put a sequence together in an editing room. He’s a true visualist: he’s got a great eye and a great sense of where to put the camera. But like all the really good directors, he needs the material to support his vision. If you look at his best movies, they’re written by David Mamet or Oliver Stone or David Koepp or in this case Josh Friedman. Brian as a director deserves a bigger platform to dive off of.”

Younger directors with access to newer technologies may have seemed to have caught up with the startling stylistic flourishes De Palma used in his early films like Sisters and Blow Out. But Linson thinks, “People are spending way too much time worrying about that stuff. A knife against a woman’s cheek, Brian knows where to put the camera. It you want to have somebody run out of the theater screaming, he knows what to do. What changes is the material. It’s nice to have characters who can back up the visuals, who can support the cake he’s building. If they’re just icing, then you’re not getting all that De Palma can give.”

Linson’s next project is an adaptation of his non-fiction book What Just Happened?, a scathing, insider’s account of how deals are made in Hollywood. Financed in part by 2929 Productions (Good Night, and Good Luck), the film stars Robert De Niro, and is being directed by Barry Levinson. “The film will not be like the book,” Linson says. “The book is a series of anecdotes. The film will be a two-week journey in the life of a desperate movie producer.”

Asked why there are over fifteen producing credits for The Black Dahlia, Linson admits that “Brian and I probably didn’t meet or even hear of at least ten to twelve of them. Literally never met them or heard of them until we got the credit list.

“The thing about making a good movie is that everybody goes in with good intentions. But there’s money involved, and there’s other people involved. It ain’t like going out with a canvas and some oils and saying, ‘I’m going to dazzle the planet when I come back in a couple of years.’ There are so many people in the process you have to depend on, so many moving parts, that you can have really good intentions and still end up with something awful.”

Linson is thus both proud and grateful about The Black Dahlia, which is the opening night feature at this year’s Venice Film Festival. “There were a lot of stops and starts with this project before the right group got together. We all fought the fight as hard as we could, and in the end I think this is going to be considered one of Brian’s better movies.”

Interview: Allen Coulter on Hollywoodland

When he died in 1959, George Reeves became one of the first television celebrities to figure in a full-fledged, national scandal. The star of over a hundred episodes of The Adventures of Superman, Reeves became the idol of millions of children at the expense of a serious acting career. Rumors that he was murdered began to circulate almost immediately after his death was judged a suicide. As details of his private life emerged, they revealed a far more complicated man than most had suspected.

Hollywoodland, the feature debut for director Allen Coulter, uses Reeves’s death as the basis for a complex, wide-ranging look at how the movie industry, and society as a whole, changed during the 1950s. Playing Reeves is Ben Affleck, who brings to the role an emotional depth and commitment largely absent from his previous career as a leading man. Framing the suicide is another plot involving Louis Simo, a shady detective whose investigations help trigger a personal collapse. As acted by Adrien Brody, Simo sees himself as a hardboiled private eye, an illusion nourished by pulp movies like Kiss Me Deadly. Both Simo and Reeves are in effect playing roles they learned from Hollywood. Both men will find out that they are in over their heads, controlled by forces they don’t fully understand.

It’s an ambitious project for Coulter, who established his reputation in commercials and then by directing episodes of The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Six Feet Under for HBO. Hollywoodland not only compares and contrasts two story lines, but presents audiences with a shifting chronology that extends from 1959 to 1947 and back again, in some cases offering three different versions of the same event. Speaking in his office in New York, Coulter explains some of the steps he took with production designer Leslie McDonald and cinematographer Jonathan Freeman to make sure viewers didn’t become confused. “We shot the two stories in different styles, George’s like a traditional Hollywood film, Simo’s more contemporary: hotter, over-exposed, like Kodachromes left in a garage over the summer. George’s world is quiet, calm, while Simo is in the beginning of a modern world of casual dress, TVs on in every house, radios, people arguing, cacophony.”

Getting period details right was crucial, but Coulter tried to reach beyond the false, romanticized version of the past found in many films. Screening Kiss Me Deadly to see how its Los Angeles locations were used, Coulter realized that director Robert Aldrich essentially ignored props and landmarks. For a scene in Hollywoodland that takes place in front of City Hall, Coulter never focused on the building itself, or on the period cars that lined the streets, feeling that it was more important to capture the inner reality of what was happening in the story.

Reeves, in Coulter’s opinion a good actor “by the standards of his time,” had a supporting role in Gone With the Wind before military service during World War II. By the time he got back to Hollywood, roles he had specialized in were scarce. He embarked on a long-term affair with Toni Mannix (played by Diane Lane), the wife of one of the most important executives at MGM, Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins). After Superman was cancelled, Reeves tried to find work as a director. He also became engaged to Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney).

Coulter realizes that much of the audience will be unfamiliar with the real-life people and settings in his story. “To quote David Chase, ‘Someone will get it,’” the director jokes. He is also aware that Reeves still has a following of devout fans ready to pounce on what they might perceive as mistakes in the film. “Entirely out of our respect for Reeves, we were as truthful as we could possibly be based on the mixed information that’s available. There are different opinions on all kinds of things, when he met Toni, or where he met Leonore, for example. We had to be true to what we felt Reeves was. That was the longest and most important discussion I had with Ben, and with everyone on the film.”

Reeves allowed Toni to buy him a house in Benedict Canyon, an expensive wardrobe, and a sports car, fully aware that her husband could destroy his career at any moment. (The real-life Mannix, a one-time bouncer who became an “enforcer” of sorts at MGM, was involved in several scandals, not the least of which was the death of his previous wife. Hoskins captures him brilliantly, dressing down a recalcitrant actor with the warning, “You’re a face–faces change.”) Coulter and Affleck had to reach an understanding about the type of person who could accept such arrangements while still believing he deserved a better fate. In the director’s terms, “George is playing the role of a successful actor. He’s got the woman, the house, the car–all he lacks is the success. The challenge for Ben and me was like solving a mystery: Who was this man? What was he really like?”

Screenwriter Paul Bernbaum wrote Toni Mannix’s role with Diane Lane in mind. In the film, she sinks from glittering trophy wife to recluse, a departure from Lane’s glamorous image. “She wanted to play Toni because Toni is an interesting woman,” Coulter says. “I made sure that every character had a chance to reveal a secret, human side. That human quality is exactly why actors are willing to play characters who might seem unappealing. As Jean Renoir said, ‘Everyone has his reasons.’ I take that seriously, and in the movie we try to tell our story without blaming anybody.”

Finding a balance between fact and fiction, between the 1940s and the 1950s, between Reeves’s story and Simo’s, became one of Coulter’s principal tasks. “You can only think of things one at a time. They come in rapid succession, but all the time you have to hold onto the scene you’re working. What I try to do is keep things very relaxed, because you get the most complexity when people can think, when they can see and hear each other. That’s when those little moments rise up.”

Coulter readily admits that Chinatown was a big inspiration. “You can’t make a film of this nature without thinking of it. It’s one of the first noir mysteries that I was aware of that was character driven. Our composer Marcelo Zarvos even threw in a little homage to Jerry Goldsmith’s Chinatown score. And there’s a least one cut that directly references the movie.” What Hollywoodland has in common with Roman Polanski’s film is its sense of unease, of a world that is hostile when it isn’t merely indifferent. It is a bleak vision.

“Ben and I thought about how poignant this whole story is,” Coulter says. “This is a man who got what he wanted, but it wasn’t enough. Who could be a hero to millions of kids, and still feel like he was a failure. But to be harsh, that’s life. Most people think that they could have been a contender. Most people go to their graves thinking, ‘I could have done so much more.’ We now live in a country of increasing celebrity worship, where everybody wants to be a star. Where everybody imagines that the camera is somehow rolling. Where everybody lives in a state of sort of hyper self-consciousness. This film was my chance to tackle that subject.”

Coulter’s next project is a black comedy by playwright Howard Korder about a born-again traffic expert on assignment in Baghdad who becomes involved in a monumental scheme to siphon millions of dollars out of government works programs. While it may seem a drastic change of pace from the subdued and troubling Hollywoodland, Coulter notes that, “My interest is in character. I admire filmmakers like Martin Scorsese or Michel Gondry, filmmakers with a definite visual style. I have great admiration for them, but those aren’t my talents. What I do is try to give every character some human trait that connects them to the larger themes of the story. In that way I have to let the story dictate how to shoot the scene.”