Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

A welter of recent interviews, including Chen Kaige on The Promise and how he sees its place in Chinese cinema of his generation and the next; Jeff Feuerzeig on obsession in The Devil and Daniel Johnston; Wim Wenders on Don’t Come Knockin’ and the difference between stills and moving images; screenwriter Brian Nelson on the challenges of the cinematic two-hander in Hard Candy; Nicole Holofcener on money and light and Friends with Money; and a few notes about Art School Confidential.

Flying dollars: Chen Kaige and The Promise

Trailing a tussle over a U.S. edit that led its distribution to shift from the Weinstein Company to Warner Independent, Chen Kaige’s dreamy, oft-luscious The Promise (***) (Wu Gi) is the most expensive Chinese movie to date. (The Weinstein edit is the one WIP is releasing.)

Other Chinese directors, like the younger Jia Zhang-ke, have made inroads in international acceptance since the 55-year-old director’s movies like Farewell My Concubine (1993) and The Emperor and the Assassin (1999), and especially Ang Lee with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2002) and Zhang Yimou, Chen’s cinematographer on 1984’s Yellow Earth, with the bold, even gaudy double whammy of Hero (2002) and House of Flying Daggers (2004).

Cecilia Cheung stars as a royal concubine who forsook love as a child in a deal with a flying goddess; a slave (Dong-Kun Jang) with great talents overcomes his station to imitate and save the general who owns him, the Master of the Crimson Armor. While the battles for each character’s destinies aren’t especially coherent in terms of narrative or emotions, the CGI-heavy imagery haunts. (It was shot by Crouching Tiger’s Peter Pau.)

Talking to Chen recently, he asked if it’d be okay to adjourn to the hotel bar, since his suite was non-smoking. (His English is very good, but some of our conversational nuances seemed at cross-purposes.) I wondered if there was something intrinsically Chinese about all the images of flying in wuxia genre swordplay movies that I didn’t get, what it is about the desire to fly away. Amid curlicues of smoke, Chen said he was inspired by “some famous myths in Chinese history. For example, I remember from my childhood that there is a man who tried to be faster than the sun. He could run very fast, like the wind, but at the end of the day, he failed. And he dies. I think it’s a beautiful story because that shows the idea that how people want to be free. That was the original power of a newborn civilization, this kind of story showed great imagination. But it’s an old dream for almost everybody in different cultures, that people can fly. I think that we have a very similar, superficial understanding about freedom. Freedom means that you can live with yourself if you are a happy man.”

Stories like this have simplicity and vastness, I observe, where the first tellers make simple tales, but they were inventing the boundaries of the universe. “Yeah. Yeah. It’s true. But I was influenced by the European school when I was a film student, Godard, Truffaut, the Italians like Visconti. I think that film is for people to see, that the visual image is very important. I try as much as possible to reduce the dialogues, make the film tell the story itself.” Before sound was when cinema was universal in every culture. Chen nods. “I think that The Promise is a simple story, but I think it’s involved with some deep meanings with some interesting themes concerned with freedom and destiny. Silent films, I mean, I like Charlie Chaplin a lot. No dialogue but you understand it all.”

How conscious of how the film would be received in other cultures, wondered, or if after the sour experience of Killing Me Softly, 2002’s English-language sexual thriller with Heather Graham, does he consider himself as inescapably a Chinese filmmaker? “It’s been a question mark for a long time. How can I make [a film for] both a Chinese audience and a western audience? Will they receive the film in the same way? I don’t think I can do that. With the cultural difference between East and West, I cannot make everyone happy. But the only thing I knew that I could only follow my heart, to tell a story from my heart. That’s the priority instead of being influenced by different temptation, like getting awards or commercial success. I must tell you that I was strongly inspired by the current situation in China. I have a big worry that we’re paying too high a price for the economic reform. So we ignore that culture that we used to respect. We used some of the values we used to think were important. I hope that those characters [in The Promise] can be recognizable, not only in China. [The male lead] is a typical man who grabs everything in front of him, being greedy, hungry about fame, glory, success. At the same time, the princess is a cursed woman because she’s made wrong decisions, like giving up love in order to make her fortune through her life. I think this an important message to deliver in this film. Particularly, it’s very confused for Chinese people. What’s the most important thing? How do we want to identify ourselves? As Chinese? I’m afraid that one day we’ll say, okay, we have black hair, black eyes, and that’s it. Anything else more? We used to be very proud of the civilization we made in the past, but what kind of contribution culturally can we make today? That’s the question mark that always bothers me.”

Jeff Feuerzeig on Daniel Johnston’s songs of pain

Commercials director Jeff Feuerzeig was always fascinated with the prolific, eccentric musician Daniel Johnston, but after a 2000 show at the Knitting Factory in New York, he was struck by a presence beyond his prolific genius.

Drawing from a wealth of material from twenty years of Johnston’s output, including recordings, visual art, movies, videos and more, The Devil and Daniel Johnston (*** ½) is a compelling look into a troubled yet obstinately inexhaustible mind. “Daniel gave me the material to do that,” Feuerzeig told me recently about the narration that’s often drawn from Johnston’s own backlog of tapes. “What’s more fascinating or intimate than an audio diary? That’s what I had to work with. Boy! And the way he spoke, it was almost like he was writing a novel, a novel of his life.”

Like Capturing the Friedmans, these amazing finds adds to the aura of the accidental autobiography as drawn by so many contemporary audiovisual pack rats. “Great stuff, but Daniel is a little different from that. Obviously, the material is the same, it’s self-documentation, call it what it is. But Daniel is so conscious of it—he called it his greatest art form, one of the many things he did besides making films, making art, recording songs, making radio dramas. I mean, he did so many things, animation… He said to [lifelong friend] Dave Thornberry on one tape, “Dave, these tapes that we’re sending back and forth to each other, this is the greatest art form I’ve ever come up with, and let’s continue making tapes—when you get married and have a baby, you send me a tape, and when I do that, I’ll send you a tape. And when you die, I’ll send you a tape and we’ll send tapes back and forth from the grave. He really believes in the power of this. Remember Andy Warhol, when tape decks got portable, he became an obsessive taper. I think Daniel was very conscious of that, he drew Andy Warhol’s soup can, [as you see] in the film, in his early high school years. He was very aware of other people and that may have spoken to him, the idea of recording.”

Feuerzeig describes Johnston’s omnivorous consciousness as “a party in his head” all the time. Yet, he’s committed to himself in a way that very few people have ever been able to. “Obviously, there have been solitary artists who’ve done [similar things], it’s their entire existence. It’s no exaggeration that Daniel has done that. And he’s studied the history of art, he’s not an outsider artist. He went to art school! It was with great pleasure that I got to see the New York Times eat crow two weeks ago. They’ve covered Daniel in the last few years, it was two years ago in the Sunday magazine, he was the poster child for outsider art. Outsider music. It’s the furthest thing from the truth. He’s the ultimate insider! Now, because the Whitney [Museum] steps in and [Daniel’s] not at the CBGB Gallery any more, now the New York Times has to embellish what Daniel has always said, and my film certainly says, is that Daniel is a fine-artist. Just because you suffer from mental illness [or] manic depression certainly does not make you an outsider artist. That’s not a prerequisite. At all.”

Beyond the terror of portraying the sensitive mind that eludes its owner, there’s also the matter of unrequited love, with one figure, a woman he knew in college, a constant in Johnston’s music and life. “That’s what hooked me initially. Let’s face it, unrequited love. What a great theme. It touches everyone, it touched me. What’s better than an unrequited love song? It’s certainly better than a falling in love song. Daniel’s unrequited love songs are unique and different because they’re about one person. I love that she was a muse, or is a muse, and just gave him material to write about.”

Why? “It’s all about need and reaching. What is ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand’? I need. I want. What is Coltrane playing on ‘Love Supreme’ when he’s reaching for God? That is powerful, I tell you. I heard those unrequited love songs [of Johnston’s and I thought], man, if a guy ever loved a woman, this is a guy that did. They were really beautiful songs. He wrote other songs that were optimistic. There were songs that brought me to tears, songs so open about his mental illness that really took you inside that pain. What was his first album called? ‘Songs of Pain.’ And he did another album. ‘More Songs of Pain’! What more could you want from an artist?”

Wim Wenders and a few photographic moments

Howard Spence is getting long in the snaggle-tooth.

A cowboy actor past 60, Spence—written and embodied by a handsome, confounded Sam Shepard—stumbles off a film set and deep into the west in Wim Wenders’ Don’t Come Knocking (***). Like the earlier Wenders-Shepard collaboration, Paris, Texas, it’s partly a story about missing fathers, but this one’s more about the father’s anesthetized loss than that of the relatives he will meet on the road up ahead. Visiting his mother (Eva Marie-Saint) in Elko, Nevada, for the first time in almost 30 years, he discovers he may have a son in Butte, Montana, by way of a woman (Jessica Lange) whom he’d dallied with on a movie set. The colors and compositions are stunning throughout, and Wenders says no digital reprocessing was done; “it’s all the negative.” It’s hard to believe that the 60-year-old director’s cinematographer, the 39-year-old Franz Lustig, has never shot a feature on film before. Wenders’ trust in Lustig’s ability to tell his story pays off beautifully, as well as in doing justice to the city of Butte, Montana, which Wenders has visited repeatedly since first reading Dashiell Hammett’s knife-sharp detective novel “Red Harvest,” which was set there.

Like one of his masters, the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, Wenders sometimes combines two or three odd, static shots to create larger meanings, and many of the frames would make striking stills. Yet Wenders is adamant there’s a difference. “I take a lot of stills but the stills I take are never like any of the shots I do.”

Is that calculated or intuitive? Wenders looks up from a notepad where he’s been doodling rain clouds. “They’re very different mediums. I mean, I try to travel sometimes with a camera and a still camera and I gave that up. It was completely ruining me. I could not handle it. I didn’t know how to film; I didn’t know how to take pictures. I can only travel and take photographs, leave the video camera at home. Both? I can’t handle. In a strange way, the shots never resemble one another. The nature of the stills is different. Over the last twenty years, I’ve taken almost entirely landscape photographs.”

While landscape has character, it’s not a movie character. “Yes, you see, as much as all my films start with a sense of place, when you start shooting, your characters and your story, they end up pushing themselves into the foreground. A movie only works if you have characters. So, the initial desire, which always starts with a sense of a place, in a movie, has to count for second, second-choice. Your characters really take over. As much as Butte survived [as a city] because it’s really so strong and because of the situation [in the movie] that this man arrives in this city and hasn’t been there for thirty years, there’s a strong story of his past there. But normally, the fact that you have a story and a plot, it works against a sense of place, the desire to dedicate a film’s space to it. In photography, the beauty is that you just stand there. There’s nobody, there’s no plot, there’s no [film] camera, you can just listen to the landscape. You take the picture and it’s sort of an agreement between the landscape and you. You can never really do that [in a film]. Don’t Come Knocking, as far as I’m concerned, started with my desire to honor Hammett’s ‘Red Harvest.’ And I wrote this thing and I showed it to Sam. Not much survived. But it was more of a pretext to see Sam, anyway.”

The movie has a dizzy set piece involving the wreckage of an apartment on a city street, and the members of a potential extended family, a friendly dog and a gorgeous couch that Howard parks himself on, with a American flag ripping in the wind atop a nearby derrick. “We debated, wondering if we should take it down. It wasn’t there when we started shooting. We shot in other parts of the city and when we came to that location, there it was. I think it was some sort of holiday, what is the holiday, the American holiday in July or August? Independence Day. It had been erected [for that]. When my crew and I had gone for a tech scout, it wasn’t there. When we came back, it was there. It seemed difficult to get it down, and since it was there as found, we let it go. But then at night we even realized they had the American flag in bulbs. It was ragged and irregular, but there it was. Bricolage.” Wenders starts to erase one of the rain clouds. “It was a found object.”

Hard Candy’s Brian Gordon: the uses of disenchantment

Nineteen-year-old Ellen Page is the sophisticated core of the intellectual thriller Hard Candy (***), a claustrophobic battle of wills between Jeff, a 32-year-old fashion photographer (Patrick Wilson) and Haley, a 14-year-old he’s met via the internet and asks back to his minimalist bachelor pad for a few pictures.

Whether or not one admires Hard Candy, Page offers a study in variations, an exquisitely modulated, mature performance, and Wilson, best-known for his role in Angels in America, on stage and in Mike Nichols’ adaptation, is a sturdy foil to her in the unexpected conflicts that emerge in playwright Brian Nelson’s Misery-meets-Sleuth two-hander. Director David Slade brings a brightly colored, antsy visual style to the confined spaces as the brutal, relentless battle continues. (Slade cites Nic Roeg as his key influence.) Will Little Red Riding Hood wind up with blood on her hands? (Hard Candy may also be the first feature to have a digital colorist noted in its opening credits.)

“A guy who’s smooth at seducing adolescents,” Haley asks in a seductive voice, “What kind of pedophile are you?” Later, he insists with great conviction, “I’m not the monster you think I am.” (The unspoken riposte: Then what kind of monster are you, Mr. Wolf?)

One of the posters prepared by Lionsgate shows a girl in a red hoodie inside an enormous, toothy metal trap, and the press-kit calls it “an edge-of-your-seat psychotic thriller,” not psychological. “Yeah. Since writing this film, I’ve become a go-to guy for psychopaths,” laughs Nelson when we spoken recently. I asked him to expand on the appeal of a two-hander, as with Sleuth on stage or Misery in the movies and how stage and movies differ for this kind of story. “That’s an interesting question. The great pleasure of a two-hander is that you get to see the kind of bravura turn that you just do not get often get in films. Especially today when you’ll talk to a development executive who’ll say, ‘I want to know what the trailer is, I want to know what the set pieces are,’ before even hearing the pitch for the film. Whereas with a piece like this you get to delve into character and into strategies and really give your actors things they can pick up and run with. It is tricky, actually, because you have to vary your pitches, you can’t just be throwing fastballs. You’ve got to get change-ups and sliders in there as well. Even in a little way, changing things. Each room in Jeff’s house has a different vibe, a different persona, and especially in the way that David Slade shot it. Each room is, arguably, a different character in the piece.”

It also provides an actor the chance to shift our first impression of the character being played. “Arguably, too, not unlike Sleuth,” Nelson says, “each of them is playing more than one character. They both make deliberate decisions to transform themselves, and events transform them as well.”

When I saw the movie, several viewers were actively angry afterward. “People are going to react to this film. It’s interesting, men and women respond differently to this film, and they respond differently if they are parents. I am a parent, and y’know, if you have a daughter, something like this is your worst fear, in several different senses. In that first sequence in the café, that alone.” That Haley is openly, confidently flirtatious, like the grown-up she is not? “That in itself is a very unsettling thing to see and maybe scarier than what happens later. We try to talk about this sort of thing without spoilers, but what happens in the film itself is so grueling. There are always a couple of people who need to leave. It is a claustrophobic film and it is… I, I haven’t given a copy to my folks because I’m not sure if it’ll be too much for them. My dad has read it. On paper. We spoke to some audience members at an early screening with a real gender breakdown, where guys were like, ‘She should be caught!’ and the women were like, ‘This should be shown in sex-education classes.’ In a way, I hope, that’s the real strength of the film. It provokes a wide variety of response and in some ways, people are going to respond from what they bring to the film themselves.”

Is Hard Candy a “genre” film? “What’s interesting when you say ‘this genre’,’ it’s very, very hard to categorize this film. People want to put a little label on everything and say, this is a thriller, this is a horror film. They’re having a hard time figuring this out.”

How about “arty head-fuck”? Nelson laughs. “That’s a stab, trying to put a fair label, a fair genre label on this. I was reading an article in Variety where they were listing upcoming Lionsgate releases and it said, ‘specialty thriller Hard Candy.’ I like that.”

Nicole Holofcener on Money and Light
In Friends with Money

Consider the late poet-novelist Randall Jarrell’s definition of a novel: “A prose work of a certain length that has something wrong with it.”

That came to mind after the release of Nicole Holofcener’s third feature, Friends with Money (*** ½), with its striking flashes of rare emotional insight. Holofcener is especially good at varieties of depression among the four female leads in her bright, brightly colored Los Angeles fable, notably unmoneyed, rootless Olivia (Jennifer Aniston, star of a famous TV show that I never saw) and successful but unmoored clothing designer Jane (Frances McDormand), who may have once been a pistol of attitude but now is a howitzer of outrage. (Think Cynthia Rowley with artillery.) Some reviewers asked, "Why do we want to watch a lead character—Olivia—who’s depressed? That’s not a real movie!"

PRIDE: Beyond friends and money, you’ve got some keen observations about the marriages of the moneyed. That’s another level beyond how the friendships are affected.

HOLOFCENER: I’m not an authority—thankfully!—on the breakup of marriages. I think money is such a complicated issue and so many people have such strong feelings about it, depending on their upbringing, and that if we’re a mess about It’s bound to get into the marriage. We’re a mess about so many things – sex and kids –I mean, that’s enough. If you have intimate friendships money will come up especially when you hit your forties and if you’re gonna be rich ,you got rich by this time, and if you didn’t it doesn’t look like you’re going to. [laughter] I’m deep.

PRIDE: Your plot turn about what Olivia finds without seeming to know she’s finding it reminds me of an apparently Talmudic derived saying, “Any path will do if you don’t know where you’re going” and that seemed to be in what happens to her. Were you conscious of the balance in her character?

HOLOFCENER: I wasn’t. I didn’t really know what was going to happen to her until it happened. The reason she’s drawn to him is because he’s a loser like her. He says, “I’m not employed, do you want to go out?” and she says, “Sure.” That’s just sort of how I write, and I think intuitively I’m probably balancing out people. ‘Well you’ve got some of this, you’ve got to have some of that.’ But I’m not that conscious of it.

PRIDE: Are you cynical, more cynical into your forties?

HOLOFCENER: I’ve certainly gotten more cynical as I’ve aged. I think any intelligent person will get more cynical to some degree, and at the same time more forgiving. Yeah, we tell ourselves things to make us feel better: “Well, at least my rich friends are ugly or they never have sex,” and I actually have [a couple of] friends who happen to be wealthy and probably have the strongest marriage of anyone I know and I thought, “Isn’t that ironic in a cruel way? I’m going to share that cruelty with everyone else.” Sometimes it lands out that way and it hurts.

PRIDE: You use space and light in interesting ways In one of the wealthy couples’ kitchen, three characters are jammed in the kitchen, and you have them stepping around each other like it’s only a breakfast nook. But your exteriors, such as in Santa Monica around the Promenade, you showing just enough light and space to demonstrate where these characters would be. But you’re not showing off. There’s no Michael Mann establishing sunset shot. How conscious were you of that? There’s a lovely understated look for your modest budget.

HOLOFCENER: I didn’t have the time or the budget to show as much as I wanted to. That kitchen was smaller than I would have liked. We made sure it had all the accoutrements that these people would have. I like to speak in shorthand when I’m making a movie. You don’t have to show the outside of every house and you don’t have to say this is how big their house is. You’re just in it and if you notice that collection on the shelf, well, then, okay, you know they have this aesthetic sensibility. The one thing I was very conscious of was trying to show the size of Franny and Matt’s house because that’s the most expensive location we got on the movie and I wish we had time to show more. We didn’t have the time or the money to show what I wanted to show.

PRIDE: The city looks like the city and the actresses look their age, in a good way.

HOLOFCENER: there was discussion about how glamorous to make it look, and how “L.A.” to make it look and I felt that L.A. has been so glamorized. We’ve all seen those same shots in every TV show. I just wanted to cut to the chase of the characters, because we all know what the glamorous L.A. looks like, and also we know what the Short Cuts L.A. looks like. I live in L.A. but I don’t go, “Wow, look at the skyline.”

PRIDE: And the actresses?

HOLOFCENER: People say, “Oh, you’re so brave to let your actresses look like that,” and I was like, “Uh, that’s what they look like.” We did say, “Not that much make-up.” I wanted people to look natural. That’s what middle-aged women and men look like, what’re we gonna do?

Artists and models and Art School Confidential

Terry Zwigoff hadn’t seen his latest movie, Art School Confidential, for a few months between its completion and its Sundance debut, and he was gratified, he says, to realize what a weird little movie he and his colleagues had gotten away with making.

And this dark comedy from the director of Bad Santa is certainly one of the oddest ducks in the barnyard this spring: an acerb, low-key comedy about phoniness and self-righteousness and blindness to how the world perceives you. Stephen Colbert’s recent evisceration of the White House press corps, as well as President Bush sitting only a few feet away, partook of a similar jaw-dropping intolerance of phoniness. Some early reviews of Art School Confidential from Sundance 2006 seemed as miffed by the chilly diffidence of Zwigoff’s movie as D.C. reporters were by Colbert’s irony.

Which could be to the detriment of Art School’s potential for word-of-mouth: does Zwigoff’s second collaboration with Ghost World creator Dan Clowes skewer the very people who might be the ideal audience? Some people don’t find barbs tossed in the general direction of their carefully manicured self-image to be a form of acceptable entertainment.

Opening with a literal punch to the camera, Art School tells the story of the receiver of that bully’s punch, young suburban naïf Jerome Platz (submissive, cocoa-eyed Max Minghella), and his desire to become a “great artist” and meet an art model who can be a muse or at the very least, cool girls. (Picasso, meet Candide.) Arriving at the low-rent “Strathmore” art school, Jerome is surrounded by a vast range of art school clichés—and they’re clichés because they’re so goddam true—Jerome remains the innocent, unswayed, unbowed, but often confused. There’s an early montage intercutting a classmate of Jerome offering pick-up advice and Jerome’s actual encounters with archetypal art-school girls—derisively described as “art skanks”—that’s blunt, scary and admittedly hilarious. (A faster version of the scene is in the trailer.) My Name Is Earl's Ethan Suplee has fun as Jerome’s roommate, who applies artistic pretension to a slasher epic based on a series of unsolved stranglings at the school, as well as the epically straight-laced Jonah (Matt Keeslar), whose uncoolness may mask 360 degrees from un- to just plain cool.

There’s a quiet, coiled performance from John Malkovich as one of Jerome’s most frustrated professors, and what’s marvelous about Malkovich is that we’re seeing a John Malkovich performance, not Malkovich doing Malkovich. There are satisfactions to the silky insinuations of even his silliest turns, but to see him turn his gifts for physical performance to this frustrated artist-turned-teacher’s self-loathing is a treat. There’s a hardly sublimated strain of boy-desire to his Professor Sandiford, yet it’s so underplayed, it seems a sad fact rather than something the movie cares to say anything about.

The most memorable character, however, is a simple marvel of sullen humanity: Jim Broadbent as “Jimmy,” the local artist grown sour, living, as the most memorable characters in Zwigoff’s films do, in a soiled bathrobe while issuing pronouncements on the dearth of meaning in life and art. (His dump of an apartment is blatantly modeled after Charles Crumb’s room in the documentary of that family’s dysfunction.) With Jimmy, Zwigoff and Clowes are in finest, foulest form, showing no failure of nerve. Jimmy’s rude, brute bursts of comic disinhibition are comic misanthropy at its finest. “Do you want to be a great artist, young man? Then what kind of cocksucker are you?” is an approximation of Jimmy’s scathing invective, which Broadbent brings out in fullest comic dudgeon: self-loathing does not destroy self-awareness in this case of a man who lives for slivovitz and to disenchant innocents who still believe in things.

Zwigoff told me that his cut of Bad Santa, which debuted at Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival and will be on DVD later this year, is more about sadness than more nasty humor. The tonally inconsistent Art School Confidential is, as well, best at its moments that capture loneliness and melancholy displeasure.

May 17 , 2006

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