Pride Unprejudiced at Movie City News

Sideshows, pageants, E-ticket rides: why do all the best words for modern big-budget moviemaking come from the amusement park, the carnival or the sideshow? I'm starting to think we're decades past thumbs-up and thumbs-down: now it's all about the movies that expend their most creative energies extending their own digit to the audience. (Maybe that's the original of the word "flick": A lightweight movie is just flipping you off.) Or, you have a smaller import, like Francois Ozon's sweet gloss on the artist's consuming the muse, Swimming Pool, which is being advertised by Focus Features, brazenly and well, for the ecdyiastic talents of young gamine Ludivine Sagnier. I'll offer few words about Pirates of the Caribbean and gratitude at its giddiness, followed by an extensive Q&A with Sagnier. (We discuss one of the movie's core conceits at length; I'll post a spoiler warning just before we get explicit about the plotting.

What does a hundred, a hundred-twenty million dollars get a public corporation's stockholders these days? Over the Fourth weekend, I ran into all too many friends who wanted to share their enthusiasm for Charlie's Angels 2's air-conditioning. Haven't seen it, haven't felt it, I had to concede. (But thanks, as always, for the word-of-mouth.)

Why do we forgive? We forget a lot of the safe, unshapely megadecamillion dollar sequels that litter the multiplexes, but why be forgiving of scurvy movies? Audiences already expect to be rooked. The circus is in town, this big weekend only, come see the amazing lifelike remake! Years ago-Jesus, how time and patience fly--a movie like Nashville might make someone like me want to make movies or write about them, but the second Flintstones movie? Scooby-Doo? Still, there's an old joke about the man who sweeps up after the elephant when the circus comes to town, he's at the bar complaining to his pal about sweeping shit off the highway day in and day out. His friend says, "Why don't you quit?" To which he replies, shocked, "What? And give up show business?"

I've been mulling for a while about writing a piece about the critical vocabulary different critics have developed for writing about cynical, clumsy product, but most reviewers seem to fall in one of two camps. One says, in so many words, that it's shit, the corporation in question is taken to task, then another 1,300 words of a review are shot through with doodles about the movie's cultural (in)significance. Or, saying, "It's just a movie. It's just entertainment. It's mindless fun. It's brainless fun."

Puh-leeze. Down this path lies the like of Australian-bred website freelancer Paul Fischer, who committed one of only two pull quotes in the latest Charlie's Angels 2 print ad that I've seen--"explosive, exciting and just out-and-out hilarious"--and who was the only sentient being on earth who was willing to pen praise for the crass stinkbomb The Sweetest Thing. (Check a DVD box cover near you.) It's a pirate's attitude, and the Jolly Roger they're flying keeps the ad industry healthier than the movie business.

In the almost two hours of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, directed by Gore Verbinski (Mouse Hunt, The Ring) and produced by Jerry "My Films Have Worldwide Revenues of Over $12.5 Billion in Box Office" Bruckheimer I have one insignificant quibble: Someone is referred to ungrammatically as about to be "hung" rather than "hanged." (I had to work to come up with that one.) I almost don't want to bring up that it's based on a Disneyland ride, but that's one of the things that make it such a treat. It outpaces its callow origins in the first couple of minutes-there's a lovely camera move that reveals something behind a raft in the sea that only hints at the craft to come. Some reviews complain about pacing, such as Roger Ebert's, but Pirates is one of the most outrageous, goofy, giddy, hilarious juggling acts I've witnessed in a movie theater in a long, long time. Plus? It's smart.. It's the kind of movie where you exchange a whole volley of rapid double takes with your date, just to check out that smile.

Johnny Depp has the usual time of his life as Jack Sparrow, a self-promoting pirate whose schemes alternate between epic laziness and intent inspiration. He wants one thing in life: the return of his ship, The Black Pearl, which now sails the seas with an undead crew led by Geoffrey Rush, never one to pass on a serving of ham. Nut-brown, with as much kohl clotted around his flashing eyes as a Bollywood deity, gold-toothed, word-slurring, with amulets knotted into his dreads, Depp plays Sparrow as an unlikely, adorable, crazily inspired mix of Keith Richards, Pepe le Pew and Hunter S. Thompson. The "A" plot stirring around Depp's antics involves Will Turner, an orphan and dashing shade of Sparrow, who longs for the hand of Elizabeth Swann, golden daughter of the island's governor (Jonathan Pryce). She's played by Keira Knightley (Bend It Like Beckham) who resembles a willowy Natalie Portman, if she were only human.

Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who wrote The Mask of Zorro and Shrek, bring their flip, knowing wit to the table, which should cause mutinies against those who line their reviews with the best jokes. There's a plot, there's a criminally good cast, and only one joke I'll give away: Sparrow pulls a fast one on another character. Depp looks at him, with a perfect physical balance of head-cock, body-sway, and wide-eyeing and comic timing, pointing to himself, uttering but a word: "Pirate."

It's the first PG-13 movie released under the Walt Disney banner, and Pirates is rich with the implication of raunch, and the scares are orchestrated with consummate glee. Beginning a few months ago, movie studios began "security" procedures at advance screenings, usually by posting a rent-a-kid somewhere in the audience with a battlefield-type nightscope to keep an eye on shiny-shiny objects and furtive behavior. The bored anti-pirate at the Pirates advance and I found ourselves with our eyes in the same spot at one moment, when the tow-haired little boy in front of me responded to a particularly efficient and nasty bit of fright by quaking with audible sobs. Yes, dear reader, he had been scared shitless, his bloodstream enriched with adrenaline, his nightmares littered with suggestion, and he will remember this movie for the rest of his life. I can't wait to read someone else's review of his first movie in twenty years or so.

How many guy writers were happily inveigled into an audience with Ludivine Sagnier (Loody-veen Son-yay ) to promote Swimming Pool? I chose to read very few, laughing instead at the sarcastic links on the front page of MCN. Me, I talked to her at Chicago's Four Seasons. I flew back a few hours early from a few days away to see if there's an hour of charm from this strikingly intense young actress.

Charlotte Rampling, in her second collaboration with write-director Francois Ozon (it's Sagnier's third), plays the brittle Sarah Morton, a Ruth Rendell-type English police procedural writer who, feeling burned out, accepts an offer from her publisher, John (Charles Dance) to stay at his house in the South of France in the off-season. She falls into the village's easy pace, drawing on her loneliness. Her reverie is interrupted by John's reckless, earthy daughter Julie (Sagnier), whose brazenness and sexual exploits irritate Sarah to no end. The increasingly dark turns in Sarah's mind soon find their way into her work and the larger world: murder is not out of the question. Julie makes her deepest splash around the Hockneyesque blue pool in the back yard, in various stages of provocative dishabille. Meeting the 24-year-old Parisian, she's another variation on the girl-woman she's been in Ozon's Water Dropping on Burning Rocks and 8 Women: she shrugs, smiles, her eyes twinkle as this slight woman embodies all-too-many attributes easily reduced to Gallic cliches. If you've seen the movie, you'll recognize the forcefully accented rhythms of her imperfect, yet charming English.

Sagnier: In Ah-merry-kah, it's going to be four. I would not count the whole world.

Pride: Are you done with P.J. Hogan's Peter Pan movie? He's an energetic talker.

Sagnier: He is, he is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a bit less now because he's exhausted. He's been shooting for nine months. So that's long.

Sagnier: I came to the U.S. last summer but it was because of Peter Pan. I did some scaling for ILM, you know, the company of George Lucas? They did the special effects. But it was my first time! This is my second.

Sagnier: L.A., San Francisco, here and I am going to New York tonight. I spent a whole weekend in San Francisco and I loved it. It's fresh. You feel the ocean! It's windy but the air is pure. I don't know, I liked it very much. In L.A., it was the June Gloom, as they call it. It was gray all the time. We did not have a ray of sun for a week. Lots of people, lots of traffic. I didn't see that much in L.A. I just saw Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Burbank Studios.

Pride: If you can't walk around, it doesn't seem like a city to me, I want it to be like Chicago or New York or like Paris.

Sagnier: Okay, you should go to, I can't remember this place. I have the streets in my mind, from Italy. It's... I forgot the name of the city. A wonderful city where there is only pedestrian walks everyone. Bologna! Rome is a wonderful place. It's a bit... it's a bit frightening if you are anti-religious because there are churches everywhere. But very ostentation? Ostentatious? Os-ten-tay-shus. Sorry. Ostentatious churches with lots of gold everywhere from financing so much murder in the name of the religion and all that. It's a bit awkward, but otherwise, the city is lovely.

Pride: So does your Tinkerbelle speak? Are you able to act in a more American English?

Sagnier: That's why they cast me, as part of an international cast. Tinkerbelle is mute. She' doesn't talk. That is a good question, because in Ste-Stevoh-agghhhh! [She stumbles on pronouncing the director's name.] In Steven Spielborrrrrg's movie, sorry! In French it would be the same problem. In Steven Spielberg's movie, Julia Roberts speaks. He made her talk. But I think it's a good idea for her not to talk. We have to respect her infirmity. [laughs]

Pride: I've seen your films with Francois out of sequence. I saw 8 Women, and I didn't know how old you were. I presumed you were the age of the character. Obviously, I hadn't seen Water Dropping on Burning Rocks, which I watched yesterday on DVD. When I wrote about 8 Women, I wanted to write about how you were dressed, that pair of pale green pants that are hug your hips, but I edited myself. I thought the character was cute and sexy, which is canny in how the film turns out, but... it didn't seem right. Then when I saw Water, I went pfffffff. That is a nude and pneumatic movie.

Sagnier: I think she's 18 or something like that [in 8 Women]. I think Francois wanted that ambiguity, to be obvious. That's what he found about me, he found that I was like a, how do you say? Child-woman? He liked that idea because this terrible guy is [doing] whatever he can to have them under his control. So it was good to have like a very naive woman, very young, very ingŽnue? It was funny because I was 19 doing Water Dropping on Burning Rocks, then 21 when I did 8 women, but I looked six years younger or something.

Sagnier: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It changes a lot. The way I walked, the way I talked. I think I have as much composition as in Swimming Pool, for 8 Women. It was kind of a hard work to get rid of all the femininity, to take this ungrateful feeling of being a teenager sometime, again, like I was 16.

Pride: There's a phrase in the U.S. press kit: "On 8 Women, when he gave me the role of what was essentially his stand-in, I realized there was an artistic complicity between us." Artistic complicity. But he also has that with Charlotte, he has the older woman...

Sagnier: Yeah. He worships the older and classy women and all that. I don't understand it; I don't which one he prefers. I think older women are more representative of like his mother, I suppose, and then I'm more the kind of women he would shag. [laughs] Sorry. You may not [be able to] write that.

Sagnier: So anyway, he's got two different muse, and that's why maybe he puts them in the same movie. Charlotte represents the older glamorous actress he always worshipped. She represents, y'know, like the glory of cinema and glorious actresses. In his movies, Charlotte is always like the pillar of this very realistic and intimate style, whereas I'm more representing the theatrical and conceptual side of his work.

Come back when you've seen the movie. We'll be talking about embodying a role, feeling possessive of your muse, women's hair, Britney, the Actors Studio and James Schamus.

Pride: I watched the last scene of the film and I realized I didn't get it at all. It was about four hours afterwards, I went, doh! There's the gimmick. It brings up an interesting question about how you act a role like this, one in which our imagination of the character shifts after we've been given certain key bits of information, how we have to revise our memory. How do you play that? How do you talk about that with a director?

Sagnier: It was wonderful for me, because the idea of... The process of creation is something that I feel deeply. When I embrace characters, I give myself up to creating. I know what it means to imagine someone who doesn't exist, to make it exist, and to make it feel, and then to wave goodbye at the end, to be the widow of something you've created. I really felt that closely, but that doesn't mean it's easy to perform. I didn't know whether I should act like a natural girl or I had to play a ghost. I was always on the edge between reality and fiction. And Francois didn't really help me, because he wanted me to be lost. He really wanted me to be hovering between two sides, and to be, y'know, to be abandoned and defenseless? Something like that? So I worked on my character before shooting the movie in a very physical way, because for Francois, physical compositions are very important, they are really the basis. So Once I have this girl in front of me with hair extensions, a tan, nice shape and all that? I felt I could, y'know, I could say the lines in English and all that. I felt, all right, I am ready to dive. And then I dived into something that I couldn't control at all. I wasn't in control at all. In 8 Women, it was much more easy because it was like, ummm, it was a comedy, so it was a question of, like, beats, the way you say your lines. It was almost musical, y'know, you have the good rhythms so the audience would laugh. In a certain way, it was much more technical. Whereas in that film, I didn't know, I couldn't control anything. That was nice. I had this previous experience with 8 Women, and I was like, what's going on? Am I not able to handle a character anymore? And all that. And Franois was very mysterious on purpose. He would never answer anything in order to make me feel this weakness and this feeling of... I knew I was playing a fantasy. I wasn't allowed to know anything more. I was like, c'mon, am I a whore? Or something? And he wanted me almost to feel dirty in order to get Julie's proper feelings. And that was very disturbing. I needed some rest after the shooting!

Pride: There's a lovely, strange camera movement with Charlotte at her typewriter when her character realizes she's going to write about Julie, it reframes the negative space behind her head from the left to the right, like her she's walking off narrative possibilities in her head.

Sagnier: Yes, exactly! Also in the process of creation, you can see that she takes a few drugs and then she gave them up, she doesn't take them, y'know, they're not worth it, so she goes on another track, another track. You can see certainly the story building there. I think it's wonderfully described.

Pride: There's another tiny grace note in Ozon's films, how the spoken French has these almost puns: "See the Sea," "Regard la mer" in French can also be a pun for "Look at the mother," right?

Pride: Which sums up the horrifying final scene of that movie. And in Swimming Pool there's a scene where someone says, "Julie est jolie." (Zhoo-li ay zho-lee) It's another little slippery note.

Sagnier: Yeah, the dwarf, yeah, yeah, the midget. "Julie is a bit jolie." And also Francois' daughter is called Julie! It's funny, even Charlotte... She lost her sister, I don't know if was released in the press or not, but in very tragic coincidences. Her sister was called Sarah, and she asked Francois to be called Sarah in the story. So, y'know, it so true that when you create something, you have the feeling that you're stealing your own reality in order to feed the fiction. But after a while, you realize, that fiction can even heal your reality. That's the kind of therapeutic. That's the therapy of art. It's like a, how you say, cathar-seese?

Pride: You're describing your roles the way a friend of mine occupies a hotel room. She always throws everything around, puts personal stuff all over the place right away. Making it home.

Sagnier: Uh-huh. Yeah. You have to have some... I don't know how you say it. But for a boat on the sea, the slight, I don't'--

Sagnier:Yeah, you have to get the signal of reality that helps you drive into the darkness of fiction.

Pride: The three female leads of the last script I wrote all have the middle names of ex-girlfriends.

Pride: It's boring as an in-joke, but you're talking about personal significance to--

Sagnier: yeah, and even though the audience doesn't know it, you know that you're using your own thing. I've done a really bad joke in Swimming Pool. Once there is the old guy with leather pants, who says, "Ou est la fille?" It means, where's the girl? And she says, she is with Marcel, the gardener, by the pool. And then I say, um, Francois just asked me, okay I am just going to shoot this and you improvise the scene. You do whatever you like. So I took him behind the trees and all that, and I said, "Marcel, let me introduce you, Bernard," and I say [of the man in the leather pants], "Yeah, he is my father. I am kidding!" And my father is called Bernard! And I called him that! But y'know, nobody would know it, but for me, it was like, I don't know, maybe it's pervert, but it just gives you strength to assume all these speeches. Because, especially this movie is about, y'know, the link between fiction and reality, so I tried to do my best.

Pride: I'm always interested in stories about people who transpose their needs onto someone who doesn't expect or deserve that. I've heard stories about someone being obsessed with someone, say, a musician, until they really get to know them. But then they can't live up to their songs.

Sagnier: Yeah, but that's always like that. Every time I meet a star, I'm disappointed! Fantasy is far more interesting than reality, I totally agree. That is why I'm doing this work. [She laughs, a low giggle, almost a snort.] Otherwise I would get bored! Do you mind if I smoke?

Pride: I dated a hairdresser for a couple of years, and I used to go to movies with her. When you're around someone a lot, you learn, sometimes too much, about their trade or craft. She worked on a movie last year that was a total disaster, but I wouldn't have seen it anyway, I'd just imagine her running her hands across the actress' hair one last time when they called "Action!"

Pride: We'd see a movie like Benoit Jacquot's A Single Girl, the first hour of which more or less is supposed to take place--

Pride: When we saw Run Lola Run, on one viewing she figured out how many styles and weights and volumes Franka Potente was actually wearing for different scenes. When I talked to Tom Tykwer, he was kind of surprised anyone would notice that kind of detail. In Swimming Pool, it seems like her hair seems shorter or longer and different styles, depending on how Sarah perceives Julie at different moments.

Sagnier: It's always the same, but I wanted them to be attached, [to be extensions]. It's the small details that you build that nobody cares, but it helps the entire atmosphere. Hair is very important in movies. For example, I change a lot. I look very different with different hairdos. For me, it is the base of composition. You start with the hair. If you look at 8 Women, you will see that the continuity of my hair is disgusting! It doesn't work at all! Because I had three hairdressers, because all of the stars had their own hairdresser, and I was the dismissed child! So I took whoever was available for me. And they never did my hairdo the same each time. But it's okay. Nobody notices.

Pride: Peter Falk used to say he couldn't start on a character until he has the character's hat. Even if he didn't wear a hat!

Sagnier: [laughs] Yeah, I've read some things abut the Actors' Studio and some of the things are mad! There is a folder that is called like, One Hundred Fifty Questions to Know About Your Character. Like, was your grandfather a drug addict? What do you think about baseball? What does your character think about... Everything. Silly questions! I'm not as Method-ist as Actors Studio, but I need to fill myself with a lot of details.

Sagnier: Yeah. I think the closer you are to the character, the less you have to, to, to, you don't have to kill your whole family [in your head] if you just feel what the character feels. I have this image of a very low-key movie, Ghost. It is what it is. When Whoopi Goldberg speaks to the ghost, and they are coming to her, she's in harmony with them. It is a question of being available or not.

Pride: I always liked the story about Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man, he's doing all these physical exertions to get ready for a scene, and Olivier says something like, "My dear boy, why don't you just act?"

Sagnier: [laughs] Yeah, it's funny. But I admire this, I think it is good stuff. But I realize that I take the information and then I do my own cooking with my character.

Pride: Have you had any really absurd, amusing American questions about nudity and sexuality?

Sagnier: No, usually it is the first question that people ask you. So I'm getting used to it. But what I don't understand is that Americans see the French as very laidback about nudity and sexuality and all that, whereas they have those singers, those video clips with explicit contents, and people who swear that much and there's so much violence and there's so much idiocies on TV. I mean, yes, in a certain way, American stars like Britney, like Christina Aguilera are much more sexually aggressive than Julie is in Swimming Pool. It's a character. I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't play naked, pose naked for a newspaper, for example.

Sagnier: Yeah, yeah, it's true. So I'm quite amazed by that, but otherwise, [the questions] are very surprised, everybody saying there wouldn't be any American studio that would produce such an erotic movie. But I don't really think it's an erotic movie. It happens to be, that kind of vice that's described, that kind of fantasy-

Pride: The film's sensual in every respect, sun, water, skin, food, liquor, sweat.

Pride: What's scary about scenes in many American movies is how modular, how disposable they are. They're not integral to an overall atmosphere of sensuality. A scene where an actress is topless or whatever, the other content is usually perfunctory, it's like, "Cue the breasts." And, oh, the actress is naked, as opposed to the character.

Sagnier: Yeah. I think that is true. I dunno. Maybe because Francois is behinds the camera, he frames all his own movies-

Sagnier: Yeah, yeah. He's got a D.P., but he's always behind the camera. Maybe that's the [difference], because he delivers his own sensuality, maybe. It is as simple as that.

Pride: I think you're wrong about an American studio, since Focus Features is part of Universal, and their taste in acquisitions and productions has been pretty adult so far, from 8 Women to The Pianist to Swimming Pool, and the co-head of the company, James Schamus, has written some awfully smart scripts for Ang Lee.

Pride: I'd even make a comparison between Francois and Ang Lee and Schamus, with Ozon looking through the viewfinder, they're all studying.

Sagnier: I don't know, but maybe in France the directors are [more powerful]. In America, you don't know who directed the movie, you just know who is acting in it. Whereas, in France, the work of the director is more important. People go and watch directors' movies. They don't just go to watch actors. So maybe are directors are more powerful [in France]. They have final cut, they're more powerful than producers. Producers are just, y'know, people who give money, sign the checks and shut up.

Pride: Above a certain budgetary level, things become less stylish, less author-driven. There's professionalism, a look, a kind of technically proficient cutting. It's fun to watch--

Sagnier: But nothing more. But do you think Ozon could make a career in America?

Pride: Would he want to? Is there any reason to? This film's mostly in English, it starts in London before going to the South of France, we get a sense of a larger Europe. That kind of authenticity of location really stands out against more homogenized, expensive, plot-driven American stories.

Sagnier: But my salary! [laughs] I don't mind. Doing things like that in France, I'm very wealthy. I don't need, y'know, I've got a small loft in Paris, in a very cheap neighborhood, but I'm fine. And I don't need to have like four houses in Beverly Hills and a jet when I'll be 25! That's not my goal in life.

Pride: Do you feel privileged to have this relationship with Francois? You mention him being enigmatic in some ways, but for your age--

Sagnier: Oh, that is such a luck. Y'know, the only person who has that kind of dream in France is Audrey Tautou with Jean-Pierre Jeunet. She's doing another movie with him. It's very rare. I couldn't have imagined that three years ago.

Sagnier: "It's because you're a big, fatty bitch" or some response like that. "Okay, thank you Francois." I don't know. Maybe because when he took me in, I wasn't experienced, so it was easy to mold me as a sculpture or something like that, so now he feels that in some way I belong to him.

Pride: If you answer questions like, why do you work with me, it's like asking a lover or an ex, why do you love me? There goes mystery.

Pride: I know a woman who asked a guy she'd broken up with, why'd you like me, and he had an immediate answer: "I like really small women with really powerful thighs."