Some Came Running

A few words with David Cronenberg about "Cosmopolis"

David Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson on the set of Cosmopolis.

The other day I was allowed a few minutes on the phone with David Cronenberg, whose masterful adaptation of Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis was one of the best movies of the year, in my estimation. The DVD and Blu-ray editions of the picture come out on January first from Entertainment One. 

    SCR: Watching the film, it kind of struck me as funny that it took you and Don DeLillo so long to come together because there seemed to be so many very distinct affinities, particularly with the way you both use language.  I wondered if you could talk about coming to this text and deciding that you were right to adapt it.

     CRONENBERG:  Sure.  Well, I had read quite a few things of Don's and I did know for example that his epic, Underworld, had been bought, I think, by Scott Rudin and then never made.  And that doesn't surprise me, because it's—you know, you can make about 10 movies from that book.  So I guess it's really a question of which project, you know.  And I hadn't actually read Cosmopolis, or even heard of it for some reason, when Paulo Branco the Portuguese producer, very experienced, he's done about 300 movies I think, came to Toronto and said, I have the rights to this book, I'm in touch with Don DeLillo and I think you should direct this.  And so really it was—when I read it, yeah, it was love at first sight.  I thought, I really need to—what I'm going to do is I'm going to see if—I'm going to do a sort of preliminary kind of rough screenplay from this book to see if I think it really is a movie.  Because there is a lot in the book and in all of Don's writing that is not directly, you know, translatable to cinema.  And that's the case with most novels.  People say to me, why do you end up doing these unfilmable novels?  And I say, oh, really, all novels are unfilmable in essence, because the two art forms are really quite different.  And there are so many things you can do in a novel that you simply can't do in movies and vice versa.  And that was true of Cosmopolis.  There's so much that's interior and metaphysical and metaphorical and all of that.  So I wanted to see if there was a movie in there and I wrote—it was the dialogue, exactly, that was the key to me.  And I transcribed all the dialogue, just on its own, and put it into script form.  And said to myself, OK, is this a movie?  And I thought, yeah, it is a movie and in fact it's a movie I really want to make.  And it really literally took me only 6 days to write the screenplay.

     SCR:  I think people make a similar misapprehension about your work as they do with DeLillo’s; is they don't see the comic aspect of the language, this baroque deadpan.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah.  It's true.  I mean a lot of the reviews of the movie even were very solemn.  And I thought, well, there are a lot of laughs in the book and the movie, and why aren't they seeing that?  Or responding to it at least.  And of course, if you don't do that, then your perception of the movie is going to be quite distorted, I think.

     SCR:  And it gets even more heightened at the end too, where the combination of your visuals and the dialogue really catapult you into Burroughs territory.  And I always thought in DeLillo's work such as Great Jones Street there's this streak of a Burroughs-type consciousness that is not his but that kind of enters from without and comments on what's going on.

     CRONENBERG:  Well, and of course Burroughs was incredibly accurate with his dialogue in a similar way to Don.  That is to say, it is stylized but it's also real.  It really nails some—the realities of American speech and the mentality that's behind that speech as well.  So it can be quite devastatingly funny in a satirical say as well.

     SCR:  You've often spoken about how much you rely on the production design and other aspects of the people you collaborate with during the film making process because you don't storyboard and you don't have an idea of how to shoot until you're actually on the set.  But there's something in Cosmopolis that makes some of the angles and some of the cuts—it's a really refined marriage of the verbal content and the visual content.  And I wondered the extent, if at all, your working method has evolved over the years, whether, as you write or as you conceive, where you see the cuts, if at all.  If that's changed at all.

     CRONENBERG:  It has changed.  I'm just more confident basically.  My director of photography, Peter Suschitzky, says that I shoot very differently now than I did in 1988 when we did our first movie together, Dead Ringers.  It's just—I don't—I just don't shoot as much.  I just know better what I want and what I need.  And that's just experience.  I don't think it's anything other than that.  But it's always been the case—the reason that I don't want to really think about something like story boards, unless it's a very complex physical action scene, let's say or special effects scene, I only—I've done a couple of story boards for let's say The Fly but not really since then, and that's just a special effects question—is because I want the visual aspects to come directly organically out of the scene itself as it's being played, by those particular actors, as they speak that particular dialogue.  To me, the dialogue in this movie really shapes the visuals.  Of course I've done design things with the interior of the limo and all of that, and you do a lot of stuff in prep that is the equivalent in a way of story boarding because you're setting yourself up for certain angles and lenses and so on by the way you design the set.  So there is that prep.  But ultimately, I want to hear the actors saying the dialogue.  I want to see what they look like and I want to see what there is about their face that pulls me to one side or the other or dead on or above and what lens I use.  It's very intuitive but to me it has to spring from the reality of that moment.  And so, in a strange way, despite the fact, you know, the control and as you call it, the refinement of the visuals in the movie, there's a documentary element involved, a kind of spontaneous documentary element.  My cameraman and I are really responding to what's right in front of us at that moment.

     SCR:  The extent to which this movie—it's set before 2001 and it's set before 9/11 and that's everybody's reference point.  But it's written in 2006 and it seems to very accurately predict 2008, among other things.  And it almost—it seems to go hand in hand with, say, the theorist Slavoj Zizek’s formulation of capitalism being the thing that is eating itself.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah.  Yeah.

     SCR:  A lot of people didn't see the irony or the satirical posture behind you and Pattinson ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah, I know, some people thought that we were betraying the movie by doing that.  I thought, no, no, you're really not getting it at all.  That was so perfect.  I couldn't believe when they were asking us.  But that was the perfect expression of capitalism.  They were lovely there.  They were so excited, they love their Stock Exchange and, after all, we were selling a movie and selling is what they know.  So it was all perfect.  A capitalistic enterprise, and there we were.  Yeah, it's interesting, because Don and I on panels, in a way, that's when I kind of learn some things about his attitudes to things that I didn't really know or need to know but I'm curious about.  We both don't feel that being a prophet is part of our job description.  But if your antennae are sensitive enough to what's in the ether, you will inevitably anticipate some things that are just sort of accumulating but are not all that visible.  And I think that's really the case here.  As Don took pains to say, no, the book didn't begin with some grand, grandiose concept of coming to terms with financial responsibility globally and all of that kind of thing.  It had to do with limos.  It had to do with who would want one of those in the streets of Manhattan and why would you be in it, and who is it—and where do they go at night, and all of that kind of stuff.  It begins with details.  And it's the same with a film maker even more.  You cannot film an abstract concept.  We're in the concrete world, film makers. 

     SCR: I imagine—if you proceed from a point of view where you think you're going to sum it all up, that way lies madness. 

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah.

     SCR:  But maybe there's some retrospective satisfaction in looking at this and saying, well, whoa, we got it.  Artists often don't even know that they're doing what they're doing; then it comes out and they've done something that is a summation. 

     CRONENBERG:  Sure.  Well, I mean, and then you do get the delicious moments on the set, for example, when I got a text from Paul Giamatti who said, I can't believe Rupert Murdoch just got a pie in the face.  And we had not long before that shot the scene with the pie in the face in the movie.  So the resonances were kind of satisfying, even though it didn't really change what we were doing at all.  But it is satisfying, that aspect of it. 

     SCR:  As much invention as you have in the production design, and I wanted to ask about how you recreate the New York City streets in shooting, unless you are nitpicking, and as a New Yorker I'd be in a position to nitpick, but unless you're are very specifically nitpicking, it is convincing journey from 47th Street and 1st Avenue to 47th Street and 11th Avenue.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah, well I'm glad you say that because I read some reviews that said they obviously, you know, Toronto shot.  And I thought, I don't think it's that obvious.  Because 47th Street now in particular is not what it was when Don wrote his book.  A lot of those places that he mentions aren't there.  Even if I did shoot on 47th Street, I would have to invent some things because they're just not there anymore.  And weirdly enough, the parking meters, the ones that deliver those little slips of paper, are exactly the same brand and color and shape and everything else in Toronto, as they are on 47th Street.  We took pains to try to not go crazy, because obviously this isn't Mean Streets or something like that, but given that you're seeing New York primarily through the window, through the screens of the limo, I thought it was not bad. We took pains to try and make it as much like New York as we could.

"Goodbye First Love" and Mia Hansen-Løve: an interview

Lola Créton in Hansen-Løve's film.

I was extremely taken with Mia Hansen-Løve's feature, Goodbye, First Love (original French title: Une amour de jeunesse) when I saw it at the 2011 New York Film Festival. At that time I interviewed its director, ostensibly for this start-up for which I was editing an online movie magazine. Then the online movie magazine folded, Hansen-Løve's film got a relatively unheralded U.S. theatrical release, and now it's on DVD. The interview kind of fell through the cracks, but as the film is part of my 2012 best-of list, I thought now might not be a terrible time to run the interview, in which I ask long-winded questions and Hansen-Løve provides patient, intelligent answers. It is probably best consumed after you see the film, which I highly recommend. 

    Some Came Running:  I wanted to ask you about the relationship the film has to the lead character.  You never, despite the fact that there's a suicide attempt and there's all sorts of problems, the film never looks at her through the perspective of pathology.  The film seems very much with her, both in the shooting style and just the way her character is portrayed.  And I was wondering the extent to which that was a really conscious idea of treating this theme or something that evolved, to the extent you even thought of differentiating the film in terms of its perspective from other films about young love, in other words.

     Mia Hansen-Løve: This film, like my other ones, are actually about things that could be very melodramatic. For me in a way it could be a tragedy.  I mean this girl, she's crazy about a boy who always goes away and leaves her.  She attempts—she tries to commit suicide and she overcomes it, but not really.  And then he comes back and then leaves her again.  It could be really big melodrama.  But I never tried to do a melodrama.  I always tried just, as in my previous films, I want my children to look at it in a way that so that the film doesn't belong to a genre but is simply a film about life.  To me the film cannot be about reality, about real life, if it's part of the genre.  It's a kind of paradox because as a viewer, as a spectator, I don't have any problem with that and I can be crazy about film, I can really love some films that are melodrama.  But it's not the same thing when you are a spectator and then when you make your own films.  You don't try to get the same things.  And as a spectator, I'm very open. But as a film maker I try to be as honest as I can about life and about my experience.  And I feel if I tell a story I want it to be as—I want to try to transmit a feeling of truth, and not—even if at the end people—I don't try to make people cry as much as possible or to make them laugh.  It's not that I don't care about that but to me it's not as much.  I prefer that they, when they go out of the film, maybe they're not so sad as they could be if I put the music at this point or if I make more dramatic scene.  But I prefer that they have a feeling of truth and of reality.  That's what I try to get.

An interview with David Cronenberg

That's not him, obviously. That's Keira Knightley, in A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg's new film, and below the fold are Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen as Jung and Freud.

The interview, which I've edited from the transcript more minimally than I might have under other circumstances, was meant to appear in the discontinued Nomad edition, Wide Screen. Its loss is your gain! My review of A Dangerous Method for MSN Movies is here. Some prior thoughts on the film based on my New York Film Festival look at it are here. The interview follows. I have deleted our greeting pleasantries.

     KENNY: I saw the film a couple of times, and I saw your press conference with Michael Fassbender at Lincoln Center.  And you said during the press conference that when you're making a film that you never or rarely if at all think about stuff you've done before, themes relative to things you've done before, but sometimes that's the critic's job to do that.  And I was thinking relative to a few things that this film reminded me—there's a scene in the film where Keira's character is receiving the treatment and she's breaking down a bit with Michael's Jung and she talks about how she's vile and she needs to be put away and never allowed to be let out.  And that and a few other things reminded me, many things that the film's theme is partially about, the threat of a woman's sexuality.  And it reminded me a little bit of Rabid.  And because her presence in is so disruptive, in a way, to the world of Jung and Freud and I was wondering if I might be on to something and if you'd elaborate on it, if so.

     CRONENBERG:  Sure.  Well, once again, I mean quite apart from Rabid or any connections it had, it was absolutely of the essence of psychoanalysis.  How sexuality in general is disruptive.  And certainly one of Freud's revolutions was to give full acknowledgement to a woman's sexuality.  Freud has been criticized by feminists at some points for his patriarchal elements and so on.  But in fact, it can't be denied that he was one of the first—especially in that era, where women were revered as goddesses but were therefore not supposed to have sexuality or intellect—one of the first to give full voice to both women's intellect and sexuality.  And that's one of the reasons why Freud was considered subversive and disruptive and dangerous.  It was not just because of sex but also because of female sex.  There's no question about it.  And here was—you have in that scene that you're talking about—and that's a real quote from Sabina.  That's accurate reporting, she did say those things in her diary.  She…the whole idea that a woman should suddenly be asked for the first time to talk about these things, that was the talking cure.  It sounds innocuous to say it's the talking cure, but nobody wanted to hear what these crazy people had to say, until Freud said, no, no, you should listen to the crazy people because they are telling you what's going on.  They're telling you how to heal them, telling you what's wrong with them.  And of course in Sabina's case, for a young woman to be talking about being sexually aroused by her father's beatings was completely unacceptable and completely, you know, just intolerable.  And suddenly for the first time she has a man who she doesn't know giving her permission to talk about those things.  And with the concomitant sort of pain and trying to say the things and then trying not to say the things.  So yeah, I mean I think whether it connects—the various things that are disruptive forces, whether it's sexuality or other things, sure, of course they're of interest to—well, to me I think they're of interest to any dramatist really.  Sex and death.  I'm not the first.  I can't claim to be the first to deal with them. 

     KENNY: Well, that's another interesting thing, because when we're talking…well, there were three things, themes that I thought about.  Another being, this is also a film in a sense that's about the creation of the language that we use when we talk about what we talk about and when we talk about the themes of your films.

     CRONENBERG:  Well, it's also…it's really in a sense; and certainly John Kerr in his book, A Most Dangerous Method, said it this way: that these three people, in a way, invented the 20th century.  They invented modernity.  Up until this point, talking about those things, in that way, was unprecedented.  You would never have men of the professional dignity and stature of Freud and Jung exchanging the letters that we have, that they did, talking about bodily fluids and orifices, erotic dreams and stuff.  The stuff that people talk about all the time now, and you can see on anybody's blog.  But it was unthinkable for people to talk about that stuff, especially, as I say, professional people.  And then you had Sabina giving voice to the woman's version of that.  And she was absolutely their intellectual equal.  And they accepted her as that as well without condescension.  Really, all of that was quite extraordinary, and was quite new.

     KENNY: And one more thing that I think relates to some of your prior work is the theme that comes in a little later after the break between Freud and Jung, and it's in the conversation between--it's most prominent in the conversation between Freud and Sabina, and then of course in the title cards that tell you the fates of the respective protagonists, is the theme of the Jew, and the Jew as other, which is very close to something you explored most explicitly recently in the short film you made for Cannes, for the “Chacun son cinema” section in celebration of the 60^th anniversary of the festival, a short called At The Suicide of The Last Jew In The World In The Last Cinema In The World.

     CRONENBERG:  That's quite true.  It was absolutely also of the essence.  I mean Freud was acutely aware of the position of Jewishness and Jews in Austria; he couldn't avoid it.  At the time Jews were accepted in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but they had limited roles to play.  They were not allowed to be in the military, they were not allowed to be in government.  And he was very aware that psychoanalysis could be dismissed as Jewish mysticism, or some kind of Jewish charade or trick, or something.  Which is why he was very straightforwardly desperate to get Jung to be the leader of psychoanalysis in the future, because Jung was a good bourgeois Protestant Swiss German.  It would take the curse of Jewishness off the movement.  And that was absolutely one of the attractions for Freud of Jung. 

     KENNY: Have you—in terms of this theme of Jew-as-other, being something you've been exploring more recently; is there a story behind that, or is this something that you may have been exploring in more implicit ways throughout your career, or--

     CRONENBERG:  No.  No.  I certainly have friends who as they get older, suddenly become Orthodox when they were not, prior to that, very interested in being Jewish.  Is that what you're talking about?

An interview with Michael Fassbender

Another piece that originally appeared in the late Nomad Edition, Wide Screen. This one of a slightly older vintage, having been conducted and run in February of this year in conjunction with the release of Jane Eyre. But we also discuss (a little) Shame, which had just started shooting, A Dangerous Method (from which the above shot derives), and Haywire. I chopped a good deal of my "YOU were in a Soderbergh movie?!!? I was in a Soderbergh movie!!!!" blather from the transcript before putting this in for the edit. 

I think that, much-commented on genetic gifts aside, Fassbender really has got it. The whole thing. The most impressive film lead actor I've seen come along in a decade. So, enjoy. 

The role of the brooding, romantic, secretive Jane Eyre hero Edward Rochester has been essayed in the past by a veritable hall of fame of great actors and/or leading men: Orson Welles, Charlton Heston, George C. Scott and William Hurt, to name but a handful. Now, in a version of the Charlotte Brontë literary classic directed by Sin Nombre helmer Cary Fukunaga and costarring Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, The Kids Are All Right) in the title role, the very busy half-Irish, half-German thespian Michael Fassbender takes a stab at the role, and the results could very well solidify Fassbender’s status as both a great actor and a very viable leading man for American audiences.

Fassbender impressed cinephiles with his turns in the likes of Steve McQueen’s Hunger (playing real-life IRA martyr Bobby Sands) and Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and made an impact with larger audiences in the far-ranging ensemble of Quentin Tarantino’s crazed and very revisionist-history treatment of World War II, Inglourious Basterds. On the eve of the release of Jane Eyre, which opens on March 11, the 33-year-old Fassbender talked about his burgeoning filmography (one picture not discussed was his upcoming entry in the blockbuster category, X-Men: First Class, in which he portrays the villain Magneto), his approach to character, and the exciting roller-coaster ride that’s been his career over the past few years. 

WIDE SCREEN:  In the films you’ve worked on, there have frequently been some very interesting narrative and/or directorial strategies coming in to play. In Steve McQueen’s Hunger, the Bobby Sands character, who you play, really isn't introduced as the lead character until almost a third of the way into the film. When you're working with someone like McQueen, or the idiosyncratic French director François Ozon on Angel, or Andrea on Fish Tank, both of whom also take unusual choices in their films, do you feel coming in that you're more of a creative collaborator, that you're in on what they're about, as you're going through the process? I know it varies with each director, but working on Hunger, for instance, how acutely did you realize that the Sands character was going to be oozed into the film, as opposed to being introduced in a more conventional way as the subject of the film? 

FASSBENDER: I was aware, because it was it was explicitly that way in the script, you know! We didn't get to meet him till I don't know what page it was, but it was quite well into the story. And that's fine. It doesn't bother me one way or the other really. I mean, my job kind of entails getting the character and learning my lines and hitting my marks and all of that. So what sort of style a director wants to shoot it or what sort of way he or she is going to present it, it doesn't really ; I don't know that we discussed that.

I was very lucky to work with François. He was the first guy that gave me a leading role in a film when nobody knew who I was then at all. So I just I turned up with the character, did my work on the character, and tried to sort of get inside his head and figure that out. And that's the sort of conversations that I would have with him. It's like he'd be saying, “Oh, why don't you do X?”  And I'd be like, “Oh, well would we do X when we do something like…” — or, you know, “Wouldn't you do rather, Y?” or — “wouldn't you do something like this?”

But in terms of the style of the film, or what [Ozon] was trying to do, that's kind of not really my department. So it keeps everything nice and clean if I need to take care of what I need to take care of, and the director does his thing. That's what I love about film. You said it's a collaborative thing.  It's like, I’ll approach the prop guy, I’ll say, “Oh, I've got this lighter, do you think that's interesting for the character?” Or costume or hair, make-up, they create a look for you, and you're like, “Oh, I didn't see it like that myself.” There are all sorts of eyes on the piece, all sorts of input. It’s like, if you read a story and I read a story, you'll read it one way and I'll read it a different way, and we'll have different ideas of it. So then when we come together and try and work on putting it across, I might think, “Oh, wow, I didn't think of that at all,” or “I didn't see that.” And then you put it all together with lots of people; like the DP's, and the art department; the heads of all the departments. That's what's interesting. Does it come together and does it jell, or not? 

WIDE SCREEN:  With Jane Eyre, it's, like Angel, another period piece; Rochester is a character who's, of course, been played rather famously, in other films. Was that something you were particularly conscious of, or did you want to ignore the other film versions go back to the literary source? 

FASSBENDER:  Well, no, I watched pretty much I think all of them. As much as I sort of could get my hands on. I watched Orson Welles; I'm obviously a big fan of Orson Welles. But, while I thought I'd find some things for the character with what he did, what was going on in the [1943] film played in a very dated way. Very sort of over-dramatic, for the purposes of where we wanted to go with the piece.

That was the same feeling I had, when at one point I thought I was doing Wuthering Heights, and I watched Laurence Olivier's version and again, it was like wow, the particular approach here just dates big-time. And again, very dramatic, emphatic style. So I did dial it back to what I thought I could bring. I just studied the character as is in the book and the script, and what I found him to be… obviously he's like this Byronic hero, there's a little trace of that. But I also thought there's something quite bipolar about him, and I just didn't want him, I don't know, to fall into total moodiness. I didn't want to play him with large brush strokes, I wanted to find all the little fine, strange details about him. 

I think that’s what the director, Cary Fukanaga, had in mind. That's what interested me as well. Number one, of course, is that my mom and my sister love the story! So I kind of thought, well, it would be nice to see if I can give them a Rochester they like; let's see what they think of my Rochester, sort of give it a go. So that was attractive to me from the beginning.

And then once Cary got on board I thought, well, this is really interesting now. And then Mia, I was like, oh, even more impressed. I had seen her on In Treatment, and I was blown away. She's got so much maturity and makes really original choices. I don't feel like she's ever lying in her performances.  She's amazing as Jane. She comes on set and like wow, it's Jane. And then you see Mia as she herself is, and she's totally different.

WIDE SCREEN: You bring a lot of physicality to certain roles, from the emaciated hunger-striking prisoner in Hunger to the object of desire for both mother and daughter in Fish Tank; what did you try to do for that side of Rochester?

FASSBENDER:  I thought that he should have a weight to him. People of that era, I think, were used to riding horses and being in the saddle for hours and working out in the countryside. Obviously they're landowners, so they have to maintain the land. I really like the idea that he's a hands-on sort of guy around the land when he's there, when he's home. So I just wanted to give him a lot of weight. 

I wanted this feeling that he's got this weight on him, Bertha in the attic. I wanted that with him everywhere he goes, this shadow sort of hovering over him. And he had that in his physical life as well. But yeah, I didn't… it didn't require me to put on weight or go the gym or anything like that.

WIDE SCREEN:  In Fish Tank, which is just out on DVD in the States, yours is an interesting role in a lot of ways. Your character is kind of the lust object, for both the camera itself and a couple of the female characters. Also, your character seems kind of on the ball; he's got interests, intriguing musical tastes and so on. And it's almost as if the viewer can view him as a surrogate. Then it turns out he's really not that good of a guy at all.

In a sense the film sort of pulls the rug out from under the viewer. How much of this were you juggling as a performer during the making of the film? Because you do keep the character sympathetic in a certain respect, despite the fact that he's doing bad things.

FASSBENDER:  Yeah. Well I think it's more interesting, because it's just like if you have somebody sitting in the audience and they go, wow, that guy's actually kind of a normal sort of guy. And normal people do things that aren't so cool. But, you know, this was a case where I never got a script. Andrea didn't want to give us a script. But when she gave me the breakdown of the story, I knew what was coming, I knew how it was going to be, and I knew the reason she didn't give me a script was because she didn't want me to load it with anything. 

So I knew that I just had to play [Connor] like really kind of easy and free and encouraging and charming. And that's what’s kind of interesting, because when the people leave the cinema, they're like well, it makes them feel… it's an uncomfortable feeling because it's closer to them.  It's like we all have the capabilities of doing all these things, like killing somebody, or taking advantage of somebody like that. And when you make it very real in embodying a person that you can relate to and understand or say, ‘Oh, I know that guy,’ then I think it makes the whole experience more real for people and therefore they have to question things, morals and principles. It's more interesting. 

WIDE SCREEN:  Is that kind of stuff you look for when you're looking for parts?

FASSBENDER:  Um. I think ambiguity is something that I do like to try and find within characters, yeah.  

WIDE SCREEN:  In Fish Tank, you worked with Katie Jarvis, who's brand new, not an very experienced actor. And in the upcoming Haywire, you worked with Gina Carano, who's not an experienced actor but is well versed in mixed martial arts. What’s it like to work with people who aren’t as well-trained or well-versed in performing?

FASSBENDER: Well, Katie's amazing. When you see it on the screen, she's completely vivid and there. It was great working with her because we did an improvisation and she was game. No fear. She's not really interested in acting. So it gives her that sort of extra sort of something, I suppose, that she doesn't care. I think in the hands of the right director, like Andrea Arnold, who did Fish Tank, or Steven Soderbergh with Haywire, it works.

Anyway I think acting, it's 90 percent intuition.  Training is good. I think you learn most out there in the field, practically. But I do think, having had training — I went to drama school — when things go wrong and when you sort of get the fear or lose focus, I do have a structure that I can fall back on. It's like, “Where am I coming from? Where am I going? What do I want from this person? How does this person make me feel?” There's a drill that I can go back into that will get me so that I can focus. And that's a great thing to have.

But with dealing with non-actors, it's always interesting, because they're bringing something fresh. It's interesting when you bring in somebody that hasn't learned from the same rule book, so they're just bringing whatever they bring from their world into the mix.

WIDE SCREEN: You’ve been working an awful lot, and you have worked and are preparing to work with some really world-class directors, including some of the people we’ve talked about, and also Quentin Tarantino for Inglourious Basterds , David Cronenberg with the upcoming A Dangerous Method, and a Ridley Scott project coming up…

FASSBENDER: It’s been kind of crazy! It's like I'm in a dream, really. When I realized that I wanted to do acting, I was 17, and when I was 18, I put on a play of [Quentin Tarantino’s] Reservoir Dogs. So Quentin was a massive influence right at the beginning for me. But to be on set, being directed by him and working, and to be in a new scene that was a classic Tarantino Mexican stand-off, in one of his film… it was really just sort of a dream. I couldn't believe it. And he is everything that you would imagine him to be. Full of energy, full of enthusiasm, full of information and just — he just lives, sleeps, breathes film. 

And then Cronenberg is like an engineer. He's like a scientist. He's just so precise, so gentle and so easy. His films can be quite different, but the energy on set is very pleasant and bright. He's just so super bright. And very non-taxing on his actors. And similar to Steven Soderbergh in that precision and intelligence and pleasantness; you can see it in both of them, the way they size everything up the minute they walk on to the set. It’s fantastic to work with people who are so creative and have such a grasp of the situation on a film set.

An interview with Alexander Payne

The below originally appeared a couple of weeks back in the now-defunct Wide Screen, an online publication from Nomad Editions. It turned out pretty well, I thought, so I figured I might reprint it here before it went down the virtual rabbit hole. I have an only slightly dated Michael Fassbender interview from that publication I might want to post here in time for A Dangerous Method and/or Shame; let me know in comments if, as Francis Bacon once said to Kingsley Amis in a very different context, this sort of thing interests you. 

The writer and director Alexander Payne has a quietly elegant presence that’s a comfortable match for his penetrating intelligence, an intelligence that’s a sparkling feature of his conversation and, of course, a crucial component of his films. With producer and frequent co-writer Jim Taylor, Payne has made five feature films (and one notable short, in the omnibus picture Paris, Je T’Aime) that are searching and sometimes sardonic studies of unique but nevertheless representative American characters in unique American settings. The social-activism satire Citizen Ruth, the high-school-as-metaphor-for-cursed-life comedy Election, the dying-of-the-light road picture About Schmidt, and the wine-dark story of love for possible losers, Sideways, have all made their mark in both the critical and commercial realms. And now Payne delivers his most accomplished, and moving, film yet, The Descendants. Based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants begins with a lyrical image of a woman enjoying some power boat time in the blue, blue Hawaiian waters. But all is not well for long. The moment we see is directly before a disaster that puts the woman, Elizabeth, into a coma, and sends her husband, affluent lawyer Matt King, into a frenzy of emotional turmoil as he tries to deal with his two young, troubled daughters; the sale of a large parcel of land owned by his family, and the various pressures concerning that sale that his less-prosperous kin are bringing to bear on him; and finally, the knowledge that his wife had been conducting an affair. Funny, wise, deeply sad and deeply compassionate, The Descendants may just be the film of the year. Wide Screen talked to Payne about its themes and creation as the film was premiering at the New York Film Festival in early October.

GK: I have a couple of questions to start with, to which the short answers would invariably be “It’s called acting, stupid.” But I’m hoping you’ll indulge me with longer answers. To begin with, I’m just blown away by the way that George Clooney and Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller, who play his daughters, achieved this dynamic that is so seemingly natural and so present. Despite, say, that Clooney himself is not a dad, and so on. So I’m wondering how you were able to lead the performers through the creation of that particular dynamic.

ALEXANDER PAYNE: Part of the answer is “it’s what I do,” and part of the answer is “it’s what Iobserve.” My other experience in doing this sort of thing was in Sideways, when I had to have those two guys, Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church, appear as though they had been friends for years, even though they had only met two weeks before shooting. Because in that case, if you didn’t believe their friendship, there was no film. So I had them come out to Santa Barbara County two or three weeks before shooting, not just to have rehearsals with me but so they could spend time together and go play golf and see movies. They were as eager to forge a relationship as I was, because they wanted the movie to be good. So the same thing applied for this film. I brought all those players out about two weeks before shooting and we got together at the house I was staying at in Hawaii, and on locations. It’s always important to take actors to locations before you shoot. And we just hung out. And then they just hung out. And then it started to show up on screen. The process of making a film is so long that each day is a bit of rehearsal for the whole rest of the shoot. And the only compliment I really pay myself in filmmaking is that I cast well. And I think that, a), they were well-selected, and b), I thank the film gods that those particular actors reached me because for none of those three parts — Clooney, Shailene or Amara — was there an also-ran for the role. It was really them, those three specifically. It’s as if, for example, well, who else is going to play you?

And then, of course, there’s film’s remarkable capacity to lie. [Laughs.]

GK: I think Clooney goes as deep as he’s ever gone. In part it’s because of the themes. Did you discuss this beforehand, or did you just keep it specifically related to the character and the narrative?

PAYNE: The latter. 

GK: Because he’s a smart guy. He doesn’t need you to lay that stuff out…

PAYNE: No, he gets it. He knows what’s going on. Then it’s just a matter of what you get day by day on the set and take by take. Little surgical instructions I might want him to find helpful, like what I tell him between takes. And then decent editing.

GK: I wanted to ask you about the editing.

PAYNE: Thank you. I’m real proud of the editing in this one. 

GK: I wanted to talk about how long it took, because you have this narrative through line that’s incredibly strong and never feels over-determined. You’ve got the engagement of the audience at all times without ever over-emphasizing any one thing. How’s the process go for you and your editor, Kevin Tent?

PAYNE: Kevin and I typically edit for a long time. Election we edited over a year. I still think it’s my only film that’s not too long. Sideways and Descendants were each about 36, 37 weeks total. It’s not all just picture cutting, it’s also sound and sound effects, music and stuff. But start to finish, it was about 37 weeks, so just over 9 months, 10 months. And we screened a lot. Actually, we had a couple of those Hollywood screenings. I forget what they call them – you know, recruited-focus-group-type screenings – we had two of those. But I screen constantly for friends and people who come into the cutting room, or rent a small screening room, watch it, cause that’s really the only time when you know what you have or how it’s functioning. And then we just go on, continuing to calibrate tone. And it takes a while.

GK: There’s a real looseness—

PAYNE: I just think many films today are under-edited.

GK: Well, you get the emotions to resonate without hammering them. 

PAYNE: Thank God. I can’t stand being hammered in a movie. I get it. I’m there. I want the viewers to bring their part, their component, to the film-watching experience. 

GK: Right. You lead them through it and it feels loose, but I think there’s also a real meticulousness to it and a real consciousness of the way you’re using the devices and you have — this film has the confidence where it can start off with this voiceover narration and then just dispose of it.

PAYNE: Correct. 

GK: Nobody is going to ask, “Where did the narration go?” But that’s the sort of thing that somebody else might worry and say, well no, we need to bring that back at the end, to close the parenthesis or what have you. Or we need to bring it back in the middle. But you —

PAYNE: You know, I thought of all that. But I’m 50 now, and I think I’m at a stage where I can use whatever film techniques I need at whatever time for whatever efficacy. There’s only one wipe in the film. Typically you’d say, well, no, if you’re going to have a wipe, you need to have more than one wipe. But I didn’t need more than one wipe. The wipe worked well there, the one place I needed it. And you’re right about voiceover. It worked well to get us into the story and then I jettisoned it. I didn’t need it anymore. The film just uses what it needs.

GK: So you begin with Matt in voiceover giving you a bit of a reality check as to what life in Hawaii  is like. It’s paradise but it’s not paradise. And then, it’s not as if you’re not aware of the landscape, but there’s that one shot where the characters look at the land they own, and it’s beautiful.

PAYNE: You cannot deny that there are jaw-dropping vistas out there. I think the land in that shot is, like, the land owned by Matt and his family, actually in a trust, that will elapse at some point. It’s on Kaua‘i, I forget the name of the family who owns it; a huge, huge ranch. They make money at that ranch by allowing ATV tours. These old estates have to resort to a lot of commercial tricks like that to keep afloat.

I did do a lot of research about Hawaii history cause inasmuch as a history is even implied in the title of the film, but he’s from one of those fancy old families in Hawaii. I needed to know what I was dealing with. And then get a larger sense of that complex and sometimes intimidating social fabric.

 The book on which the film is based, a novel by Kaui HArt Hemmings  reached us, and by us I mean my producing partners, Jim Burke and Jim Taylor, about four, five years ago. And Jim Taylor and I were in the midst of writing something else, which I haven’t shot yet. And so I eschewed it for the moment, even as I recognized its merits. And so Jim Burke went ahead and he hired a couple other writers to just get the thing up on its feet. And then they lured another director who was involved for a while, Stephen Frears, who was very interested in doing it. And the writers did a couple drafts for him. But anyway, finally, in ’09 I decided to do it after Stephen Frears dropped out. He had a conflict with something else. So then I did my own adaptation. And there we were.

GK: Did you like the idea of going to Hawaii?

PAYNE: Absolutely. I think more and more my filmmaking, not that I’ve made that many films, but each one takes a lot of effort and time. And I find myself now auditioning place as well as much of the story there. So yeah, recently — for example, recently, I’ve been flirting with a book that would half take place in Dublin. I had never been to Dublin, so I flew over to Dublin a few weeks ago, just to sniff around. And it was lovely, but I didn’t find it particularly inspiring to me on a superficial visit. So I don’t think I’m going to do it. But Hawaii was a place I had loved already. I’ve been there many times and had a sense of that complex cultural fabric. And not just Hawaii, the island itself. I was interested in seeing Honolulu, which is a real city. I had never seen Honolulu in a film. 

GK: And you do get this really engaging sense of place, not unlike the sense of place you brought to bear on Sideways.

PAYNE: Which is a skill set I finally began to get a handle on in About Schmidt. And the short I did for the omnibus film Paris, Je T’Aime was a kind of a reinforcing exercise for me about humans in foreground, place in background. Even when I did a pilot for Hung…I didn’t go quite as deeply, but even that, I think, has a genuine redolence of Detroit, where it’s set and was shot. 

GK: People are going to ask why has it taken so long between this and Sideways. And obviously you do other things. But for a filmmaker who does the kind of films that you do, is it just more difficult to get things going?

PAYNE: No, I think it’s just … it’s always about material. Everything is always about material. The fact that it was essentially four years between when I was able to put Sideways to bed and picked up the pen on The Descendants — that was about, well, most of that time was spent writing. Writing the script that Jim and I have yet to see shot. And for dough we script-doctored a couple of other things. And I did the Hung pilot. Time just went by fast. But I rue that, because I am in this to make features. I like it! Fun.

GK: In terms of the casting, how much were you aware of playing a little bit with iconography relative to George Clooney’s celebrity status and having him cuckolded?

PAYNE: Every once in a while I’d hear, and even maybe now you might — before someone’s seen the movie — “Well, who’s going to cheat on George?” Well, everybody cheats on everybody.

GK: Matthew Lillard, who plays the character with whom the wife had had an affair; it’s interesting because Matthew’s so often played a goof, and there’s a scene where he has to deliver one of the film’s more profound moment, when his character steps back and admits, in so many words, “I didn’t do it for this reason, it happened.”

PAYNE: Yeah. 

GK: It’s a beautiful moment, painful and true.

PAYNE: He does a good job, that guy Lillard! See, though, I hadn’t seen him in anything else. I saw Scream a million years ago, but I didn’t remember it. I’ve never seen him. He just auditioned really well.  

GK: Patricia Hastie, who plays Elizabeth, the comatose wife — what was she like?

PAYNE: Thank you for asking about her. I am so proud of her work. She was a local hire in Hawaii. She was really, technically, a “featured extra,” because she was a local hire with no dialogue. But I ended up bumping her up to giving her front-end credit and full scale, or however much she was paid. That woman took it very seriously. She lost a bunch of weight. She would stay up all night, come in to work the next day, go through hair and makeup, climb into bed, get hooked up to the IV’s, take a melatonin and say, “Don’t wake me even for lunch.” She was out a lot of the time. And we’d have to re-adjust her body, because  they’ll get bed sores. She really showed up for work. There’s an old Latin phrase, Dum tacet clamat. "Although silent, she speaks."

Christopher Sorrentino on "Death Wish," the so-called "New York film," received critical wisdom, and a little more...

Speaking of Charles Bronson movies, and stuff:

In November of last year, Soft Skull Press initiated a series called "Deep Focus," a series of sort-of monographs precisely not in the style of the much and justly revered BFI Classics series; editor Sean Howe is commissioning terrific writers to treat films that are not necessarily, let's say, universally acknowledged as being great, or even good and good for ya. To wit, the first two books of the series look at John Carpenter's 1988 They Live and Michael Winner's 1974 Death Wish. I know, some of you are saying right now, "Why these are hardly controversial choices as far as noteworthy cinema is concerned," and I'm with you, but we are not really in the mainstream on this. That said, both books are damn fine, provocative, revelatory and engaging "reads," as they say. The one on They Live is by Jonathan Lethem, the novelist behind the likes of Chronic City, The Fortress of Solitude, and Motherless Brooklyn, who writes beautifully on film in any context and who was kind enough, a decade ago, to contribute a wonderful essay to a collection of pieces on the Star Wars films that I edited. The one on Death Wish is by Christopher Sorrentino, also a novelist (Sound on Sound, Trance) and recently the editor of his late father Gilbert Sorrentino's last book, The Abyss of Human Illusion. Christopher doesn't just examine the film itself in his book; he provides an acerbic view of the near-hysterical critical dismissals it received in its day (the reaction of then-New-York-Times film critic Vincent Canby gets close examination) and grapples with the notion of whether a fictional film can convey something of the reality of the place in which it's set/shot.

Sean Howe very kindly put me in touch with Christopher, and we decided it would be perhaps instructive to conduct a brief interview via e-mail. I asked four questions; those and Christopher's answers are below. 

Some Came Running: So when, precisely, did you begin developing that chip on your shoulder with respect to poor dead Vincent Canby?

Christopher Sorrentino: It's not Canby, per se. But given that he was the chief critic at the Times, which with NPR is sort of ground zero for middle American cultural striving, one of his reviews can give you a really good view of the received wisdom that prevails at any given time. If you go back and look over his reviews, you can set your watch by them: a movie hyped as an "important" film gets respectful treatment, even if Canby has some mild reservations; most of the rest find Canby either enjoying them or not, usually for totally arbitrary reasons; and every now and then he sinks his teeth into a film coded as "trash" that he can savage with impunity, like Death Wish. And it may well be that Death Wish is trash, but that doesn't necessarily make it less interesting than one of Hollywood's prestige productions (I am guessing, for example, that Death Wish is a more enduring, and no more schlockily exploitative, movie than Lenny, which appeared the same year and was nominated for six Oscars, and was accorded a thoughtful, if ultimately negative, review by Canby). And the Death Wish review, and the follow-up feature article he wrote about it, really show you the symbiosis that took place as Canby and the choir to whom he was preaching regarded each other in a state of unanimity. He writes about it as if it's an unearthed artifact used in some primitive ritual, totally unselfconsciously referring to its audience as if it's something quite apart from his good Masterpiece Theater-loving readership. It's a bad film, Bronson is a bad actor, its politics are right-wing, it has a bad effect on its audience, it's "irresponsible." There are a thousand ways that you can eviscerate a movie, but as soon as you say that it's a threat to public morals my Geiger counter starts clicking.  

Some Came Running: It seems you simultaneously embrace and reject the entire notion of the so-called "New York" movie, claiming that (and correct me if I misrepresent you) no location-shot picture, regardless of how accurate, can ever convey what the city was "really like" at the time it was shot. For all that, you have a pretty deep knowledge of New-York-shot pictures. I myself find that such ostensible grade-Z pictures as Lustig's Maniac pay off big time in terms of, for lack of a better phrase, Proustian rush, summoning my own private nostalgia for the mud and making the actual materials of such a film all the more resonant. For as much as you deny that...perhaps...as a component in Death Wish, do you truly believe yourself immune to such a response?

Christopher Sorrentino: I actually respond really viscerally to that stuff. I have a permanent soft spot for relatively obscure (and probably not so good) films like Jenny, The Hot Rock, and Queens Logic because of the madeleine effect they induce, each of them having been shot partly on location near where I grew up. And of course there are thousands of brilliant Hollywood films that are "New Yorkish" -- i.e., The Thin Man. But what I was talking about, and what I probably wasn't absolutely explicit about in the book, is the almost bullying "atmosphere" that passes for filmmaking in some movies. Friedkin is a master of that, and The French Connection is one example I use in the book. He keeps telling you that you can't criticize the film, it's "really like this." But it isn't, and even if it were (which it isn't), I don't think the viewer's apprehension that "this is really like that" is the highest of aesthetic experiences. It ranks pretty low, for me. It's like junior art. "Real" can't be the point. We already have real.  

Which brings me to a guy like Lustig, and by commodious vicus, to Death Wish.  Lustig clearly couldn't have cared less about either reality or about being criticized. Maniac has got to be among the most un-real movies ever made. I wonder if Manny Farber ever saw it, because that's a termite film if ever there was one. For Lustig, New York was a cheap and expedient tool. If Lustig had been living in New Haven, Maniac would have been shot there. It's the almost incidental look of the New York in a movie like that which intrigues me, and that's what gets me about Death Wish, too.  There are maybe a total of five exterior shots in that movie that scream, "Look! The New Babylon!" It's very anonymous looking. Nothing in it has a social or economic "reason," it just is. There are bad people and Charles Bronson kills them.  We remember it as a movie that depicted New York as a hellhole, but that's just our filling in a blank that Winner leaves for us. When that movie came out, we "knew," mostly from a lot of other movies, how dirty, how sleazy, how crime ridden, how ethnic, how not white New York was.  Winner didn't have to do a thing.  Where he does—the Times Square diner scene, with the prostitutes and the two black men who end up attacking Bronson—it's awful and klutzy.  

Some Came Running: I am largely in sympathy with you concerning your impatience, or seeming impatience, with forces that call for a certain kind of "social responsibility" in the arts. Not that I don't think an artist ought to adopt such a perspective if he or she so wishes, but the notion that a sense of "social responsibility" is a necessary component to art strikes me as...dumb. As does, too, the liberal tsk-tsking that greets a picture such as Death Wish. I think your view of the material, or of such material, is a little different than my own. I have often championed what the critic Robert Benayoun calls "authentic sadistic" cinema, films that, in his words, partake in an "atmosphere of perdition." I don't know if you have any truck with this slightly Surrealist view, but in any event, if you did, would you slot Death Wish into this ostensible category? If so why, and if not, why not?

Christopher Sorrentino: It's completely dumb. Especially since, of all the Eternal Verities of the Human Condition, "social responsibility" is the most protean. If we were to catalog the social responsibility of all existing works of art solely on the basis of the community standards existing at the time of their creation, Deep Throat would end up being a more socially responsible work than Jude the Obscure.  So we can't consider such things—I mean at all—when evaluating art; and if you try to make a work of art whose defining virtue is its virtuousness, then good luck: it's not going to stick. About nine million Stanley Kramer movies have demonstrated that to my complete satisfaction.  I have to admit that I'm not familiar with Benayoun's work or the context he's referring to, but I will take as a sort of distant analogue Jean Genet's concept of the beauty of evil. In those terms I don't think so. I might be inclined to say that the film's relationship to both virtue and vice is a negative one; that in adapting Brian Garfield's novel, Wendell Mayes and Michael Winner emptied it of its Stanley Kramer-ish, "vigilantism is bad," content without quite substituting "vigilantism is good." I do think that the film celebrates the idea of having a motivating force in one's life, and that it doesn't matter what that is. Everybody else in the film begins to look faintly stupid in comparison to Bronson, with their chatter, their armchair moralizing, their politicking, their bureaucratic hassles. Bronson still has to deal with all that, but it's made clear that it's not his real life any more. He's become a man with a secret mission. The Eco epigraph I use [at the book's opening] sort of sums it up: that we hope that "from the slough of [our] actual personality" some Superman can emerge to redeem our "mediocre existence."  

The film does screw it up; it introduces some smart cop into the scenario who catches Bronson and makes him stop, but I think the film is joyous, in a strange way.  Bronson realizes that who and what he had been has become irrelevant, and he locates his relevance in something taboo.  In a weird way, it's a classic '70s movie: it's a portrayal of discovering one's freedom in the aftermath of adversity.  

Some Came Running: Are there any examples in contemporary cinema of work that contains the particular kind of charge that Death Wish did/does? If not, why do you think that's the case?

Christopher Sorrentino: I would have to think really hard about what transgression means anymore.  Maybe not "transgression," because to the extent that Death Wish was a transgressive movie, its sins were interpreted politically. There was a bumper crop of transgression back then, but as long as the work could be interpreted as being consistent with the supercilious or paternalistic centrist liberalism that's often characterized Hollywood's prestigious films that deal with social issues, transgression was kind of OK.  All in all, with Death Wish, a perfect set of conditions obtained: not only did it fly in the face of those centrist liberal conceits, but it was a basically shoddy movie, based on a pulp novel, directed by a journeyman, and starring second-rank actors. Plus it was funded with real money, and released to big first-run movie houses -- so reviewers had to pay attention to it. If it had been a B movie or a grindhouse kind of feature, it would have vanished without a trace. You could even take it a step further and suggest that if the reviewing establishment had been at all serious about really, truly loathing Death Wish to the bottom of its collective heart, it would have ignored it. But it couldn't. A certain algebra existed. Dave Hickey makes the point that "the raw investment of attention, positive or negative, qualifies certain works of art as 'players' in the discourse. So, even though it may appear to you that nearly everyone hates Jeff Koons's work, the critical point is that people take the time and effort to hate it, publicly and at length, and this investment of attention effectively endows Koons's work with more importance than the work of those artists whose work we like, but not enough to get excited about."  I might suggest that there's a sneaky quid pro quo here; that emphatically hating something for grandstanding reasons is a more personally profitable venture for a commentator than reasonably taking the measure of something. Now, I can't really think of a recent movie that's lit a fire under both the reviewers and a mass audience. I think everything's too demographically and technologically atomized nowadays. There is no way you'll ever have to see one of the Saw or Hostel films even if your kid is playing it on the computer across the room. If you're willing to take an example from an industry that still just dumps its product indiscriminately into the marketplace, though, how about Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones?  

O Brother, where art thou?

Once more diversifying my journalistic efforts—because, as we see more and more clearly day by day, film criticism is a mug's game—I recently interviewed Gregg Allman for the MSN Music website. The fruits of my labors may be found here. Among other things, Mr. Allman makes a liver transplant sound like a rather arduous procedure to endure, and I take his words to heart. His new solo album, Low Country Blues, is what they call a good 'un—soulful, heartfelt, a real groover record of the old school well worth your time. The above image depicts Allman with Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh in 1991's Rush, a rare foray into film acting for Allman. He played an extremely cold-blooded drug dealer and was, as far as I was concerned, the best thing about the picture. He and I did not get around to discussing this episode in his life, but hell, this Is ostensibly a film blog so I figured I needed to make something of an effort to stick to that. In any event, enjoy.

Some words with Bruno Dumont and Julie Sokolowski on "Hadewijch"

Julie Sokolowski in Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch.

Hadewijch, the new feature from the...what's the word? "interesting?" "problematic?" depends on who you talk to, I guess, I myself think both or either quite a lot of the time...French director Bruno Dumont, opens theatrically in New York on Christmas Eve, and never let it be said that IFC, the concern responsible for this U.S. engagement, doesn't have a sense of humor. For this film is a story of a young woman of privilege who feels herself consumed by her love of God, and for her troubles in this resepct is kicked out of the convent in which she seems so happy. After which she takes up with some young Muslim jihadists. What ensues largely eschews the oft-graphic content of some of Dumont's prior films, which include L'humanite, Twenty-Nine Palms, and Flandres.I was impressed with the film and impressed with the performance of lead actress Julie Sokolowski, who plays the sort-of title role; her character also goes by her given name, Céline. 

As the film approaches its U.S. opening, there has been some debate in various social media as to what actually happens in the picture, and some of this debate has been heated, and some of the heat has been emanating from my own self, as I see the film as being pretty unambiguous with respect to what "actually" happens...in that it, you know, actually shows what happens on the screen, within its frames, and so on. Others feel that events as  depicted, or "depicted" in Hadewijch are more open to interpretation, such as it is. If I seem to be dancing around the issue, it's because I want to spare any spoilers from readers who have yet to see the film, which I believe is a noteworthy one and well worth seeing. These questions or matters of interpretation go straight to the heart of what kind of movie Hadewijch is. Or perhaps they go straight to the heart of a statement made by a friend who doesn't share my admiration for the director's work, that is, "I don't think he knows how to make a movie."

As for the interview that runs below, it could be said to constitute one long spoiler in and of itself, in a sense, particularly so after the jump, and so I want to emphasize that I am offering it here, earlier than I might have, as a kind of "service" to readers who've already seen the film and want to get back on Twitter and get into a virtual screaming match with people who think...well, never mind. What the reader who hasn't seen the picture yet might want to do is bookmark this and come back later if he or she is interested. 

In the interest of not looking like I'm cheating or anything, I reproduce the interview straight from the transcript (complete with occasional "[unclear]"s), my long-winded questions included. The interview was conducted in early October of 2009 in New York City. 

    Q: I want to talk about the impetus for this particular film.  Flandres, I think, can be looked at as a film about war and about love.  And this can be looked at as a film about love and war, or a certain form of war, or the war within the heart, the war without.  And I wonder if there was a specific bridge between your conception of Flandres and your conception of this film, or if they're totally discrete objects.

     BD:  (through interpreter) Just the fact of being inside someone who's so passionate and how that can then go over and veer off into something that's totally different, the opposite of love.  And that's very disturbing for me and that's what I want to explore.  When does the door open?  That fact is very disturbing metaphysically. 

Elvis: A legendary performer

To show off my journalistic versatility, and because I was asked, I interviewed Elvis Costello about his new album National Ransom for MSN Entertainment News. The piece, which I think turned out pretty well, is here. 

Jackal time

Above, Julia Hummer as Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, also known as "Nada," in Olivier Assayas' Carlos, which opens this Friday at the IFC Center in Manhattan and is showing on the Sundance Channel as well.

I've watched the five-and-a-half hour picture twice now, and am completely convinced that it's a great film, in serial caps, as it were; and looking at Assayas' other work (I'm rediscovering/catching up with the early stuff via a terrific ongoing retrospective at the BAM Cinematek), I'm growing in my conviction that Assayas isn't just one of the most vital filmmakers working today, but that he's one for the books, as the saying goes—a major figure in his country's cinema, and world cinema. I do intend to say more in this respect; in the meantime, an interview of some length with the director is now up at The Daily Notebook. Not to get all pat-myself-on-the-back-like, but I think this is among the best such things I've ever been involved with; of course with a subject as brilliant, engergetic, and articulate as Assayas it's hard to mess up. Hope you enjoy it.