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The Gronvall Files: BETWEEN TERENCE DAVIES AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA

Tuesday, April 10th, 2012

For a world-class filmmaker, Terence Davies keeps a fairly low profile; you’re not likely, for instance, to catch him chatting up Jay Leno on late-night TV (in part because the director/screenwriter dislikes travel and hardly ever watches television). He has channeled his energies into his work, from ruminative autobiographical features like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, about Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, to his masterly adaptation of the Edith Wharton classic The House of Mirth (starring Gillian Anderson in one of her best movie roles), followed by the acclaimed documentary Of Time and the City, about his native Liverpool. His latest film is an adaptation of the Terence Rattigan stage drama The Deep Blue Sea, set in postwar London and starring Rachel Weisz as a married aristocrat who attempts suicide after forsaking all for love with a former RAF fighter pilot. Last autumn at the Toronto International Film Festival, Chicago-based distributor Music Box Films snapped up the U.S. rights; it’s the indie powerhouse’s first English-language title, following its successful releases of the French thriller Tell No One and the Swedish adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels. The Deep Blue Sea recently previewed at the Gene Siskel Film Center’s annual European Union Film Festival, prior to theatrical release, and Davies, 66, made a rare appearance, regaling the packed house for close to an hour with his memories, insights, and movie lore. He was also generous enough to sit down with me beforehand, where we talked about the craft of adapting a stage play for the screen.

Andrea Gronvall:  The differences between Terence Rattigan’s play and your film of The Deep Blue Sea are striking. You’re faithful to the essence of the play, but you’ve given a back-story to the marriage of the Collyers–Hester (Rachel Weisz) and Sir William (Simon Russell Beale). There’s no hint of Judge Collyer’s mom at all in the play, but there she is in your film, played with icy malignancy by Barbara Jefford, and in a flash we can intuit so much more about the problems this couple faced.

Terence Davies:  I wanted to see Hester in a social position where she’s clearly considered not good enough for this woman’s son. And how a 50-year-old can still call his mother “Mummy”—that’s peculiar to the upper classes in England. We always said “Mum,” or “Marm,” or “Ma’am;” we never said “Mummy,” after we stopped being like, eight or nine. I wanted to open the play a little, so that it wasn’t all a question of people [characters] telling you things. When you can show things, as you can in proper cinema, you don’t really need much of the first act [of the play]; the first act has been collapsed into nine minutes. I said as soon as we set it from Hester’s point of view, all that goes; anything she’s not privy to, we can’t have.

AG:  There are other characters–some of whom you’ve reduced to essentially walk-ons in the movie—that in the play exist primarily to indicate different strata of society, and how oppressive England was in the postwar years. But in the play some of those characters appear annoyingly offhand in their dealings with Hester.

TD:  They’re not convincing, for one simple reason: he [Rattigan] never lived in a bed-sit in Ladbroke Grove after the war. So these people are caricatures; [in the play] Mrs. Elton is a caricature of a landlady. They weren’t like that at all, those women who had houses that they let out into flats. In the play, for instance, Mrs. Elton tells Hester, you’re behind in the rent, but it doesn’t really matter. That would never have happened. You didn’t pay your rent, you were out, because there were no tenant rights; those people relied on that income. So, that had to be changed; that had to be made truer, because I can remember when my sisters got married and moved into these awful rooms. I know what the Fifties were like because I grew up then.

AG:  In the play, the domestic setting is described as dingy; in your film, we indeed get the point that because she has chosen to be with her jobless lover Freddie (Tom Hiddleston), Hester has come down in the world. But as the movie progresses, I didn’t experience their apartment as drab; it took on a sort of dusky glow, and a certain richness, maybe because under your direction the production designer (James Merifield) and cinematographer (Florian Hoffmeister) convey a sense of lives that are fully lived. Is that effect deliberate, or was it my imagining?

TD:  No, the color palette was deliberately narrow, because at the end of the war, Britain was literally bankrupt. In homes you saw all that the people had, and they’d had it many years, and tried to keep it as well as they could. I was from a working-class background, and we had a front room which was called a parlor, and that was kept absolutely pristine. Coming home from school in September when it was dark, I’d go into the parlor, and the fire was lit, and a little plate of potato cakes had been toasted, with butter on them, and a cup of tea. But all of the fire was reflected in the surfaces—on wood, leatherette—so it made it look sumptuous to my eyes. It didn’t matter that we had nothing, and that the house was literally a slum—that [parlor] seemed so rich!

I remember being taken to see Young at Heart–I love Doris Day with all my heart—and those interiors were gorgeous. Which I know is absurd: these three girls, who never do any work, live in this fabulous place, and look fabulous all the time, and you think, how is that done? But I’d come home, and sit in the firelight, and think, oh, it’s just like Young at Heart. I’ve always been very aware of surfaces, ever since I was a child. It was just recreating that, with a limited palette.

AG:  I watched, thinking, okay, maybe I’m just bourgie, but I could live in that.

TD:  [Laughs] Well, even Rachel Weisz said, “This is a very sexy apartment.” I said, “I grew up then; believe me, it’s not sexy.”

AG:  We can sense the ghosts of England’s wartime past within the parts of the movie that are set in Hester’s apartment, but naturally we can sense them even more deeply in the flashbacks. The subway scene in The Deep Blue Sea is so eloquent, when Hester, on the train platform in the film’s present, peers into the blackness of the tunnel. And then dirt and debris suddenly seep onto the tracks from overhead; the camera pulls back, the background goes dark, the foreground lights up, and we see Londoners taking refuge in the Aldwych tube station during the Blitz, as Nazi bombs rain on the city. A man sings, and the tracking shot continues along the platform, where all sorts of people are holding themselves together. Why did you decide to do that then, at that point in the film, when Hester is again contemplating suicide?

TD:  Because what I do find extraordinary about life is that a very simple thing can alter a decision. After the phone call [to Freddie], Hester decides, he doesn’t love me, I’m going to kill myself. And while she’s waiting for the train to come, she remembers what it was like during the war, when London was bombed 72 nights in a row during the Blitz. And it’s that memory, and of someone singing—because they did sing down in the tube; people danced as well, would you believe?–that stops her from doing something dreadful.

Also, the influence is Brief Encounter, when she [the heroine, Celia Johnson] runs to the edge of the platform and says, “I couldn’t do it, Fred. I wish I could have said it was for you and the children, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have the courage, Fred.” What is extraordinary about human beings is that we have memory. Those people who suffer traumas where they can’t remember the past, it must be devastating, because we are the accumulation of our pasts. And if you can’t remember that, how can you possibly know what you are now? None of us really know who we are, but the past for me is not a foreign country. It’s alive, and with all the clues; if only we were intelligent or sensitive enough to unravel them, we might find happiness.

AG:  Hester is obviously a tragic heroine, yet she is also incredibly self-aware. But unlike protagonists nowadays who undergo psychotherapy in order to understand themselves and thereby change for the better, she understands herself, but doesn’t try to fix herself.

TD:  Yes, but in those days you wouldn’t have—especially in Britain, no one would have thought to go to a psychoanalyst, even if you could afford it. Hester’s very much like my mother; she’s a stoic. Not in the old Greek sense, but in the sense of, these are the cards I’ve been dealt with, let’s get on with it. I came from that era where you got on with things, where you didn’t give up. I was beaten up every day for four years at secondary school. I didn’t tell a soul; my mother found out by accident. You just didn’t tell anybody. Not like now, where not only do people want to go on [reality] television and cry, they get a franchise out of it! I mean, that would have been unthinkable in the Fifties. [Laughs]

And also [the very idea of] telling us everything—cinema doesn’t work like that. At the beginning of The Deep Blue Sea there’s a woman and two men. And what we ask is, what’s the relationship between them? And then the film says what the relationship is. It’s like dead simple! But simple things are always more powerful.

AG:  You’ve also improved on the play in terms of the character of Freddie. In the play he comes across as callow and self-absorbed and—

TD:  And stupid.

AG:  In the play, we learn one of the keys to Freddie’s troubles is an accident he had in Canada, In your film, we don’t really know why he’s fallen on such hard times. But that allows Tom Hiddleston more mystery to plumb; there’s more darkness to his character, who comes across as more unstable than in the play. In the play Freddie’s mostly a boor.

TD:  During the Battle of Britain, the average age of these young men was 22, and they were fighting eight soldiers a day. And when they saw a German aircraft, do you know how much response time they had? Eight seconds, or they were dead. And so part of the story is that Freddie’s horrified that he’s been through that, and Hester is going to throw her life away over the fact that he hasn’t remembered her birthday; he hasn’t done it deliberately, he’s just thoughtless. But when you’re in the thrall of love, to that depth, every single thing is important. Why are they late? They said they would come at four o’clock; they’ve come at six—why? You become obsessed with that, and that’s what’s destructive, the destructive side of love.

AG:  At the close of the film, when the camera pulls away from Hester looking out the window, moves up and out and along the street, and we see the devastation of bombed buildings at its end, did you mean to suggest in that shot that Hester will find a way to repair herself, just like London found a way to rebuild itself?

TD:  Not really, no. My intention was to say at the beginning of the film, we see this house: during this story, we’re going to concentrate on Hester, a tenant. And then at the end we come away and say, we’ve seen her story, but there are stories that we’ll never know. It’s for aesthetic symmetry; I love that. We see Hester’s story, and then we go back, and they get on with their lives.

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The Gronvall Files: JENNIFER WESTFELDT ON FRIENDS WITH KIDS

Saturday, March 10th, 2012

What’s a gifted actress to do when Hollywood continues to bypass projects featuring strong roles for women, in favor of cookie-cutter productions kowtowing to that coveted 18-35 male demographic? In the case of Jennifer Westfeldt, you fight back, writing and producing indie vehicles to star in. The darling of critics and art-house fans for her 2001 film Kissing Jessica Stein and her 2006 follow-up, Ira & Abby, Westfeldt now becomes a quadruple-hyphenate with her directorial debut, the new Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions release, Friends With Kids. The bicoastal filmmaker, who splits her time between New York and L.A. with significant other Jon Hamm, has delivered a beguiling romantic comedy about two long-time single best friends, Jason (Adam Scott of the NBC-TV hit Parks and Recreation) and Julie (Westfeldt), who quite happily don’t feel any physical attraction for each other. But their biological clocks are ticking and, seeing how having children has stressed the marriages of their close friends Ben (Hamm) and Missy (Kristen Wiig), and Leslie (Maya Rudolph) and Alex (Chris O’Dowd), Jason and Julie hit upon an idea. They’ll have sex to produce a child, but remain unwed until they each find the “right” person, meanwhile bringing up baby without any acrimony. Ah, but what’s that saying about “the best laid plans?” Westfeldt stopped over in Chicago recently to bask in the unseasonably warm temperatures and reflect on the hurdles to getting her boundary-pushing romcom made.

Andrea Gronvall: It cost less than $10 million to make Friends With Kids, but it doesn’t look or feel like a low-budget movie. How long did you have to shoot it?

Jennifer Westfeldt: We shot it in 24 and a half days, which is crazy, in the dead of winter, and then we had a couple of pick-up days in the summer. When you’re trying to get an indie film off the ground, there’s usually that one magic moment where the actors’ schedules align, and unfortunately, that happened to be in the worst winter in 40 years—not my plan!

AG:  How did Mike Nichols become involved as executive producer of the picture?

JW:  We had the great fortune to do a workshop of the screenplay the summer before we shot it, through a company called New York Stage and Film, which is sort of my creative home, this wonderful summer program held on the Vassar campus. Most of the New York playwrights work out all their material before it comes to New York; John Patrick Shanley has developed every single thing he’s ever done there. In the four-day-long weekend that we worked on it, we started with a cold table read with some screenwriting mentors. Mike was one of those, along with Tina Fey and various other people. And then we had a round-table discussion about the screenplay, and Mike was really taken with the script–so much so that he loaned his name to the project and became sort of a godfather.

AG:  As good as your first two films are, with Friends With Kids you’re kicking it up a notch, into more racy territory. Some writers have made comparisons to last year’s Bridesmaids, if only because your movie reunites four of that film’s cast members, and is also a comedy told from a woman’s point of view–with occasional raunchy language, Judd Apatow-style. But in your film, the explicit, blunt dialogue is not gratuitous. Particularly in the last scene, where it underscores the movie’s theme: which is that in order for a relationship to survive, desire has to be there.

JW:  Timing is everything, and my character, Julie, and Jason (Adam Scott), the two best friends in this film, have a very different trajectory. At the outset they’re on equal footing: they almost have a brother-sister relationship, where they can be honest to the point of crass with each other. In the final scene the language had to be that visceral to come back from the earlier scene of my [character’s] devastating birthday, [where she challenges] the way she and Jason have always thought about each other. A traditional ending with some declaration of love just wouldn’t work with this story. The film is trying to look at–from all the different characters’ perspectives–the evolving nature of love, of family, of passion, of attraction, and how these things shift and change as we get older and our priorities shift and change.

AG:  We certainly see that in the ebb and flow of Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd’s marriage, and the high point and later the nadir of Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm’s marriage. You’ve written some strong roles for your costars, not just for yourself. Let’s talk a little bit about that dinner scene in the Vermont lodge; it distinguishes your movie from the usual Hollywood romantic comedy. The fact that here there’s actual pain, and—

JW:  Consequences, yeah! I didn’t know that I’d get away with it—it’s 10% of the movie, that scene. I knew I was breaking a lot of traditional story-telling rules to suddenly have this 10-minute, real-time scene–which almost never happens in a movie. That really is the domain of theatre. But here these selfish singles have this idea about how to beat the system, and have it all. And, you know, you can’t have it all. There always are consequences. Anything worth having in life, there are going to be messy parts, high highs, and low lows—particularly if the rules change a little on one side, for one person.

And Jon’s character—as dark as he is in that scene, where he’s obviously in a lot of pain—is also the voice of the audience. He’s really the truth-teller, even though he doesn’t say it nicely. He’s saying what everyone’s been wondering, which is, did you think this through? How is this going to affect this child? That sentiment had to come out, in a way that involved a sort of emotional climax for all eight characters. I wanted to show how this choice Julie and Jason make ripples through their group of friends, how the dynamic starts shifting when everyone feels judged, and I felt like it all had to come to a head in that spot.

AG:  The two actors in smaller roles, Megan Fox and Edward Burns, give good support. What led you to cast them?

JW:  Megan I met through the casting process; her agent was very keen on this script and this part for her. I met with her and another producer, Jake Kasdan, and was so taken with how smart, and how funny, and how irreverent she was. Her character represents the free spirit, that person who can get on a plane to Europe—tomorrow, without even thinking about it—and stay there for two years. She knows she doesn’t want to have kids, and is fine with that choice.

Eddie Burns’s character, by contrast, is the one character in the film who is not struggling in any way with his identity as a parent. He is 100% okay with the compromises, the sacrifices involved with having kids, and he identifies as a father and as a parent, first and foremost.

AG: He’s mature.

JW: He’s a grownup, yes. Eddie is a tremendously appealing presence, obviously; he’s also a great dad himself. When I met him and [his wife] Christy [Turlington] and their family, I thought that’s exactly what I need in this role: someone who is that great at parenting, and that easy and charming with it.

AG: When you write for yourself, do you have notions of a persona in mind, or are you consciously trying to create a different character each time out?

JW:  Because I’m really an actor first, I think about each role I write as though I were the actor playing it; so, whether it’s a man or a woman, or old or young, I think about what would make sense, what would feel truthful to me in the part. I don’t how else to write. But I do want to say one last thing: it’s a really exciting time for women right now with the success that Kristen and Annie [Mumolo] have had with Bridesmaids, and Tina Fey with 30 Rock–but also Miranda July, Julie Delpy, Lena Dunham, and Rashida Jones. We just saw at Sundance there were five movies where women were writing for themselves. I hope to support other women doing that, and to continue to be in the company of all those gals; it’s really exciting to be a part of that wave.

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The Gronvall Files: PAUL WEITZ ON BEING FLYNN

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

Although the new Focus Features release Being Flynn is based on a true story—Nick Flynn’s acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City—director/screenwriter Paul Weitz says he sees it as “a fable about whether we’re fated to become our parents.” The story centers on a booze- and drug-addicted aspiring young writer, Nick Flynn (Paul Dano), whose path to sobriety is challenged when his long-absent father Jonathan Flynn (Robert De Niro), an alcoholic with profound delusions of grandeur about his own status as a writer, takes up residency in the homeless shelter where Nick works. Haunting both men is the memory of Jonathan’s wife and Nick’s mother, Jodi (Julianne Moore). The real-life Nick’s real-life wife Lili Taylor and Olivia Thirlby (Juno) costar. Paul Weitz (who with his brother Chris Weitz codirected American Pie and About A Boy, before going solo to helm indies like In Good Company and mainstream Hollywood fare such as Little Fockers, where he first worked with De Niro), touched down in Chicago recently to talk about his film, his stars, and his star-crossed characters.

Andrea Gronvall:  To experience the full emotional impact of the end of Being Flynn, the audience first has to go through all the dark stuff early on. You had to have been thinking, how do we do structure this adaptation without losing viewers?

Paul Weitz:  Something that I sometimes worry is a flaw in myself is that I can’t really extricate some sense of humor from a sense of tragedy. Anton Chekhov would write at the front of his plays “a comedy in four acts,” and then [Constantin] Stanislavski would direct them as flat-out tragedies, and Chekhov would be furious that he’s not getting laughs. In this case I know Nick Flynn feels that there’s humor in his book, even though to some degree the events are dire. I persuaded him to put his life on hold to be on the set all the time, and one great benefit of it was–aside from having somebody to tell me if something was fake or not—that he has such a distance and irony about his own experience that it was very liberating.

Nick’s a poet, and his memoir is structured in poetic fashion, weaving back and forth in time, and in styles. I took each story line—Robert De Niro’s, Paul Dano’s, and Julianne Moore’s—and chose to show the point at which they were in the most danger, then intercut between them, and had the transitions be all sound and visual. And so there’s sort of a fugue state in the movie.

AG:  No way that everything in Nick’s book could fit into the movie, but why did you decide not to include Nick’s brother in the film? And why did you decide not to show the enabling aspects of Jodi’s character? I’m thinking of this passage in Nick’s memoir:  “I drink to get drunk…. By the time I’m seventeen, my mother and I drink together sometimes, and sometimes she shows me the quote she keeps in her wallet–‘Never trust anyone who doesn’t drink.’”

PW:  His brother, Nick told me, was somewhat uncomfortable even being included in the book, and didn’t really want to be part of what was depicted on the screen. That [decision] also made Nick’s character and situation in the movie more extreme, in that the only person who could possibly untangle this web that’s allowing him to get through his life is his father, who he has such a problematic relationship with.

In terms of the quote that you mention, I wrote versions of the script that had that in it, but I had a relatively compact amount of time to express something about the character Julianne Moore was playing. The most you see of Julianne is in flashbacks to when Nick was 10 or 11 years old. There’s only one scene where you actually see Paul Dano with her; it’s always Liam Broggy who’s playing Nick as a young boy. I thought that it would give the wrong impression to take that dialogue and transplant it to where she’s talking to an 11-year-old kid; it would make her too culpable. Because the real contradiction is that she was somebody who brought light into Nick’s life, and then succumbed to her own depressions.

AG:  Let’s talk about technique. After seven years of preparation and 30 screenplay drafts you shot the picture in only 36 days. Maybe it was because of the rhythms you fell into during a fast-paced shoot, but your movie has no flab. I love how we meet the characters at the homeless shelter, where each looks into the camera and we get a quick synopsis of who they are, who they were, and who they’re going to be.

PW:  You’re introduced to the people who work in the shelter in an entertaining fashion. I was trying to recreate the feeling that Nick has in going in there: that far from being a grim place to work, it’s actually exciting. It’s loaded, and dangerous, and in a certain way fun, and his heart races as he gets in there.

AG:  And it gives him material.

PW:  It does give him material, and during the course of this scene he’s getting the material for writing his memoir, essentially. One has a tendency to think of the people working there as being largely saintly. Some people are religious; there’s a character who says, “I want to live my life the way Christ does–and I hate my rich parents.”

AG:  That got a big laugh at the screening I attended.

PW:  That’s good! And then you have people who might have lived there, and who’ve gotten themselves out of it and ended up working there. The character played by Wes Studi, the wonderful Native American actor, was based on a guy who was running the van program that would go out on the streets at night–a Native American guy who moved to Boston, and at the age of 15 or 16 was an alcoholic who was living in the shelter.

AG:  I also loved that quick montage showing the succession of Jodi’s boyfriends. How did you come up with that?

PW:  That was an early idea I had; I like doing things without CG. Basically, the scene’s a game of catch that the preteen Nick is playing with a bunch of different boyfriends that his mother had; that was how I was going to express the idea that she dated a lot of guys. I did it all in single takes, with actors who’d claimed they could play baseball. About half of them were lying. I would pan left with the camera to the little kid and he would pitch, and these guys would be lined up, hidden on the right side of the camera, and then run on and catch the ball and throw it back. And whenever one would drop the ball, the whole crew would groan. It was a really fun, sort of 1920s-style way of shooting.

AG:  Tell me about the powerful scene where Jonathan has his meltdown in the shelter’s changing room.

PW:  That’s when he’s staring into the mirror, yeah? It was one of those parts of the screenplay where it just says, “Jonathan rants.” Of course you can’t hand that to an actor, so I worked with Nick Flynn on the kind of repetitive things that Jonathan Flynn would say in real life. Here he is succumbing to his demons and his delusions; in particular, he is somehow being brought face-to-face with the love of his life, Nick’s mother. And so we handed De Niro a four-page stack of essentially non sequiturs–impossible, really, to memorize. I said to him before shooting, do you want me to tell you what small portion of it I believe will end up in the movie? He said, “No, just let me shoot it as written, and then use what you want. But I’ve really been working on this.” And then I shot it from both sides, because normally you’re quite keen not to. The first couple or three films I directed I was terrified of this idea of the line, which is–

AG:  It’s crossing the axis.

PW:  Yeah, you scramble the viewer’s head if you jump back and forth. In this case I was consciously crossing the line in shooting it from two directions. He’s staring at himself in this funhouse mirror–which is something that existed in the actual [Boston] shelter, Pine Street, that the movie is based on.

AG:  The Flynns are fascinating, but you have quite an interesting family yourself.

PW:  It’s eccentric, sort of minor Hollywood royalty. My mom [Susan Kohner] was an actress, whose I guess best known performance was in the film Imitation of Life, a really marvelous melodrama. And then my grandmother [Lupita Tovar] was a Mexican film star who came to Hollywood during the silent film era, and ended up doing the Spanish-language version of Dracula (1931), which was shot by Latino actors on the same stage sets as the American versions. The Americans would do their version, and then the Latin actors would come in the middle of the night to shoot theirs. My grandfather [Paul Kohner] was working at Universal and produced, and the story I was told was that it was kind of a scheme of his to keep my grandmother in the country, because she was going back to Mexico for lack of work here.

AG:  I don’t want to belabor that numerous writers have commented on your tendency to pick films about father-son relationships, but have you ever thought of doing a documentary about your dad, John Weitz?

PW:  It’s really interesting, because he was formed in the crucible of World War II: being a German Jew, a refugee, and then joining the American army and the OSS. He was an extremely macho fellow who was a fairly successful racecar driver, and a fashion designer, which is not usually regarded as a particularly macho profession. But it is similar to Being Flynn in that when you’re a fashion designer, you can’t help but be in the terrain of appearances: how you’re presenting yourself, and how important that is. In Being Flynn, Robert De Niro to all intents and purposes is really hitting the skids, but through the belief and image that he has of himself as a great writer, he’s able to survive and persevere and, weirdly in some ways, come out on top. I have, in retrospect, wondered what kept me attached to this story over the seven years that I was writing drafts of it. And I think that the relationship between what we seem to be, what we’re trying to project, and what we are, is like an animal chasing its tail, [that] I feel in my life and in this film.

AF:  It’s a weird balancing act, because Jonathan is definitely headed toward self-obliteration, and yet he also has a peculiar form of narcissism.

PW:  No question, and the truly bizarre thing is that there’s an in-built level of irony, in that the real Jonathan Flynn never saw his masterpiece–that he was writing over the course of decades on napkins and envelope–published. But now he’s played by Robert De Niro in a movie; so, on some level, Jonathan’s delusions of greatness have been shown to be accurate.

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The Gronvall Files: Asghar Farhadi, writer/director of A Separation

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

The Gronvall Files
Family Ties: An Interview with double-Oscar nominee Asghar Farhadi

A Separation, the gripping fifth feature by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, has been on a roll since last year’s film festival circuit, when it won Berlin’s top prize, the Golden Bear. Earlier this month it picked up a Best Foreign Language Film Golden Globe, and now it has been nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film.

A few years ago I reviewed one of the director’s previous films, Fireworks Wednesday, but as much as I admired that movie, it didn’t prepare me for the wallop A Separation packs. The movie begins in a Tehran divorce court, where Simin (the luminous Leila Hatami), yearning to pursue a new life abroad with her young daughter (Sarina Farhadi, a heart-tugging performer), seeks release from her dour husband Nader (the superb Peyman Moadi), who will not abandon his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father. Simin moves in with her parents, and Nader, in order to function in his job as a banker, is forced to hire an outsider to look after dad. The new, unskilled caretaker Hodjat ( Shahab Hosseini) harbors many fears, the biggest being what would happen if her hot-tempered, unemployed husband finds out that she took this job.

Before long, the desperate caretaker makes a horrific miscalculation when she leaves her charge tied to a bedpost; the furious Nader then compounds the tragedy. Immediately two families are embroiled in a struggle that cuts to the heart of social strife, while the viewer tries to discover which character is telling the truth, and which is lying. Recently the director, a film school graduate who also labored in theatre, radio, and television, stopped briefly in Chicago, where we conversed with the aid of his quick-witted Italian-Iranian translator.

Andrea Gronvall:  A Separation is a domestic drama, at least at first. Then it evolves into tragedy. As in many tragedies, the main characters are essentially good, well-intentioned people. But as in ancient Greek tragedies, here they each have a flaw that leads to downfall. In your work in the theatre, was tragedy one of your preferred modes?

Asghar Farhadi:  When I was working in theatre I was reading a lot of tragedies. But this kind of tragedy—if you want to compare it to the classic tragedies of the past—has one historic difference. In a classic tragedy, there is a war between good and evil, but in modern tragedies, the war is between good and good. In classic tragedies, you hope the bad guy dies, so you feel better. But in this modern tragedy, you don’t know which character you want to win, which one you want to lose, and you’re probably not going to feel good about either.

There’s also another difference between the classic tragedy and the modern tragedy. The weakness–the Achilles heel–of the classic tragic hero comes from within himself. For example, Hamlet doubts too much. King Lear is not very with it. Macbeth is too hungry for power. But for the characters of the modern tragedy, their weaknesses don’t come from within themselves; they come from the environment, the pressure that the environment puts on them.

AG:  You work very fast: it was ten months between when you started writing this screenplay, until the end of—or was it the start of–post-production?

AF:  Towards the middle of post-production. This time it was fast. But you started counting from the very moment I put my pen on the paper; this was brewing within me for a long time before. Not specifically this story, but just a combination of images, and feelings, and thoughts.

AG: So you start with the images. Then, when you sit down to write, do you have in mind the beats–you know, those points in the characters’ arcs that are going to get you from A to Z?  Or does it all begin with one particular character, and then branches out to incorporate other characters?

AF: When I have an image in mind, this image makes me keep returning to my past. I go into my memories, and I start selecting here and there, putting them together. Simultaneously with this process of assembling memories, the characters are being born. And at the same time, the story also starts developing. It’s very difficult for me to describe my process. I’m not really aware of what’s going on, really, as I’m thinking. Many things happen in an unconscious way.

AG:  You’re in the flow of it.

AF:  Yes, like a river.

AG:  Memories: that brings me to my next point. Alzheimer’s disease is key to narrative developments in A Separation, but I didn’t know that going in to screen your film. Generally, I try to read as little as possible about a film before I see it, in order that my perceptions of the movie aren’t filtered through someone else’s take.

AF:  This is the best way to watch a film.

AG:  So, as I was watching your film, I was profoundly struck by its accuracy and emotional honesty, by how well you captured what it’s like to have a parent who has Alzheimer’s, what the pressures are on a professional with a demanding job who’s also trying to do the right thing by his father, and what are often the differences in class between the professional and the caretaker he hires to look after the parent. After I saw the film, I read that your grandfather had Alzheimer’s. If it’s not too personal, could you please tell me how your parents coped? How did you cope? How old were you when you witnessed your grandfather in decline?

AF:  I have to go back a little [in time] for my description. When I was little, I didn’t love anybody like I loved my grandfather. He was my hero. He was very loved and revered, by everybody. He was always telling me a lot of stories. And I believe that the reason why I became a writer and a filmmaker is thanks to all those stories.

Then I had to move from the city where he was living to attend university in another city; for years I lived in this new city, and of course I saw him much less. I think that I was around 30 when I realized that he had become ill. When I would go visit him, of course he had the same frame, and yet he didn’t remember anything anymore, and he turned from that big hero he was to me into a much smaller person.

From the person who had had this incredible memory, who could tell me stories of all kinds and always surprise me with the endings, I now had a man in front of me who couldn’t even remember my name. This is a very painful disease. Before, I always thought that when people miss or lose their future, that’s very painful. But I also realize now that when people lose their past, that’s even more painful.

My grandfather had a few relatives who never allowed him to be taken to a home; they decided that they would take care of him. Every day one of his children was there. And then one day it happened that none of the kids could take care of him, so they hired a nurse, and this nurse tied him to the bed. A few days after this occurred he actually died. I had not thought about this for a while, but this came back to me.

AG: Your daughter Sarina Farhadi is lovely, and a very affecting actress. Is this her first film?

AF:  No, you saw her in Fireworks Wednesday [playing] the child, the daughter.

AG:  How old was she then?

AF:  Then, she was four.

AG:  She’s grown up!

AF:  This is the fourth film she’s in, but it’s also the biggest role she’s ever played.

AG:  Does she stand in for you, in a way, in A Separation? Does she portray aspects of your childhood?

AF:  No, my childhood was very different from the characterization in this film. When I was a child I was very noisy; I was not calm. [Laughing.]

AG:  Well, I can understand the attraction to the theatre, then. Fireworks Wednesday is also about deception and class conflicts. What keeps attracting you to these themes?

AF:  This fight between two different classes is not just at the level of economics. This is the conflict between a middle class that has more knowledge and is more directed towards modernity, and a lower class that is tied to the past and to traditions. It’s almost a conflict between new and old. In Fireworks Wednesday, that’s not the main theme, but here in A Separation, it is.

AG:  Well, you’re in very good hands with Sony Pictures Classics. When did your paths first cross?

AF:  It was in Berlin. Yes, and they actually love film. I think that Michael Barker loves the movie even more than I do.

AG:  Do you have any feelings at all about the possibility of winning an Oscar?

AF:   I try not to think about it.

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MOVIE LIFE IN THE POST-THEATRICAL AGE? AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR/WRITER/ACTOR EDWARD BURNS

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

The Gronvall Files

There’s a lot about Edward Burns that’s just so likeable—he’s sharp, talented, and industrious, but also easygoing, and a generous ensemble player. Since breaking out with his acclaimed 1995 writing/directing/acting debut, the low-budget indie The Brothers McMullen (shot over weekends so as not to interfere with his then day job as an Entertainment Tonight gofer), he has worked as an actor for other directors, including Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan), James Foley (Confidence), and Nancy Meyers (The Holiday), while enhancing his own profile as a filmmaker with art-house features like She’s the One and Sidewalks of New York. These days, however, he’s aiming for more eyeballs than can fit in the local cineplex. His latest film is Newlyweds, an edgy romantic comedy about a recently married Manhattan couple (Burns and Caitlin Fitzgerald) whose relationship is tested by some highly strung relatives. The film bowed on VOD at the end of December; on January 13th Tribeca Film begins a theatrical release with a limited run at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center. I spoke with Burns over the phone about his movie, his enthusiasm for the new technologies that are reshaping the business, and his upcoming stint in front of the camera, opposite Tyler Perry in I, Alex Cross.

Andrea Gronvall:  You shot your 2010 feature, Nice Guy Johnny, with the digital Red One; for Newlyweds you chose the smaller, lower-priced Canon 5D. What did you like about each camera?

Edward Burns:  When the Red came out, my DP [cinematographer William Rexer] and I both wanted to buy one. We thought we could afford it, and wanted to play with it to see what it could do. We first shot a web series [The Lynch Pin (2009)] with it, then made Nice Guy Johnny, a $25,000 small, run-and-gun movie. It’s amazing how it looks in a theater; Nice Guy Johnny played on huge screens at film festivals around the country, and really held up. Flash forward to Newlyweds. We’d heard a lot about the Canon 5D. So we went up to B& H Photo and bought one at 11 AM, headed over to this guy’s gym to do a camera test, and then dumped the footage into Final Cut Pro on my computer. We liked it so much, that shot ended up in the movie.

When I talk to aspiring filmmakers, I tell them that with these new technologies, the playing field has been completely leveled, depending on the scale of your project. If you’re making small comedies or small dramas, then get to it. We shot Newlyweds in just 12 days over the course of four months, and for only $9,000. After post-production, the total came to $120,000.

AG:  A lot of documentary filmmakers like the smaller cameras because of their relative unobtrusiveness. You adopted a pseudo-documentary style for Newlyweds. Sometimes viewers feel like they’re eavesdropping on your ensemble; at other times the characters directly address the camera, allowing for some neat solo riffs. How did you know that these actors—Caitlin Fitzgerald, Kerry Bishe¢, Max Baker, Marsha Dietlein Bennett, Dara Coleman, and Johnny Solo—would mesh so well?

EB:  With the exception of Caitlin, I had worked with everyone before. I wanted this to be a companion piece to Sidewalks of New York, but I thought, let’s go even further with that concept, and use a documentary-size crew, just three people. The actors would wear their own clothes and do their own makeup. We would film in real locations—apartments and public spaces like the gym, the recording studio, coffee shops, etc., which would remain open for business while we’re shooting. To do this, you have to know beforehand that the actors will be game. I brought all of them in after I’d written my second draft; I hadn’t even changed the characters’ names in the script to fictional ones—they were still “Marsha,” “Dara,” and so on. I sat the actors down, and walked them through their scenes. Like, this scene starts from A and gets to B, these are the beats, and then I’d encourage them to improvise. I gave direction when I needed something to change. Because all of them were allowed to have their own voices, it doesn’t feel like a scripted screenplay.

AG:  Six of your films have played the Tribeca Film Festival. Did your relationship with the festival influence your decision to have Tribeca Film distribute Newlyweds?

EB:  In 2010 we were at the festival again with Nice Guy Johnny and my lawyer John Sloss was beginning to field offers from buyers. Most of the deals being offered were of the “no advance partnership” variety, where the distributor only guarantees two screens, one in New York and one in L.A. I already knew from the past what it costs to roll out a film in a platform release, and how that kind of theatrical release can be a loss leader. So John tells me to imagine that tonight I’m going on Jimmy Fallon, where I tell everyone who lives in New York and L.A. to go out and see the movie, and everyone else watching the show in the rest of the country to try and remember to look for it. Then compare the size of audiences in New York and L.A. theaters with the number of viewers in 45 million homes across America who for $6 can see it on demand on TV. So we launched Nice Guy Johnny on VOD, and more people saw it then than would have if the movie had had a typical indie theatrical release.

AG:  And you also put Newlyweds on VOD. So why is Tribeca Film handling a theatrical release of the movie? Why put it in theaters at all?

EB:  My producer Aaron Lubin is from Chicago; he grew up on the city’s South Side. Then there’s another Chicago connection: I was in town to speak at the Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy, and met Adam Kempenaar [host of Filmspotting on WBEZ Radio], who has become a friend. And Adam was going on about how movies always open first in theaters in New York or L.A., and that when we opened our next film, we should open it in Chicago. So, here we are; we’re experimenting with Chicago. Our second theatrical experiment, a couple of weeks later, will be on Long Island, where I’m originally from. If we make money, or break even—if we don’t lose money–then we’ll decide what a third city might be. If we don’t do well in these first two runs, then we’ll know a theatrical release is dead.

AG: You’re still keeping busy as an actor for hire; I just watched you in Man on a Ledge. And you can be seen later this year in a high-profile movie, I, Alex Cross, alongside Tyler Perry, who plays James Patterson’s famous fictional detective. I’m looking forward to it, in part because it stars two independent filmmakers whose approaches to acting are probably very different. Without giving any spoilers, can you tell us something of what we can expect to see?

EB: First of all, it was great making it; the first scene we shot together is actually the last scene in the film. It’s where we reminisce about our childhood; our characters have been friends since they were young, and in that scene we had to summon up 35 years of history together. We hit it off right away. Tyler has become a really good friend of mine, and given me some incredible advice about my career. One day he told me that he had watched The Brothers McMullen again over the weekend, and wanted to know why I didn’t ever make a sequel. And what about She’s the One, my first commercial success? No sequel, either. He pointed out that in 15 years I hadn’t made another film about Irish-Americans, and told me, “You have to super-size your niche.” So, I’m doing it. After I finish my next film, Fitzgerald Family Christmas, I’ll make a sequel to The Brothers McMullen.

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The Gronvall Files: One Day, One Singular Director: An interview with Lone Scherfig

Friday, September 2nd, 2011

Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig enjoyed her international breakthrough in 2000 with Italian for Beginners, a Dogme 95 film that was both a critical and box office success. Her first English-language film, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (2002), was a quirky meditation on life, love, illness, and death, set in Edinburgh; audiences who were able to appreciate its nuance were rewarded by the director’s next film set in the U.K., An Education (2009), which garnered three Oscar nominations: Best Picture, Best Actress for leading lady Carey Mulligan, and Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay for novelist Nick Hornby. For her latest movie, One Day, she has teamed with another British novelist and screenwriter, David Nicholls, who had adapted his bestselling novel about two university graduates, the well-to-do but aimless Dexter (Jim Sturgess), and the poor but driven Emma (Anne Hathaway), whose long relationship unfolds in vignettes that begin on July 15th of each year. It’s a funny-sad romance, and the kind of intricate work we expect from Scherfig, but it’s also her most mainstream movie to date. I caught up with the director recently when she was in town to talk about this Focus Features release.

Andrea Gronvall:  The narratives of your films vary quite a bit, but the amount of attention you pay to tone in each movie sets you apart from a lot of other directors. Although well plotted, your movies are about a lot more than the mechanics of getting from A to B. The sensibility is a little melancholy, but with rich comic veins, which can also be dark. Are you consciously attracted to material with these facets?

Lone Scherfig:  Yes. When it’s not in the material, I can sometimes add this sort of bittersweet-ness. I’ve done a lot of craft-oriented work—for instance, directing TV series, where you don’t have very much influence on the script, or the cast. Affection for the characters makes me sometimes move things in a slightly different direction than [what’s] written. I think it’s about how you view other people, and what it is that you like about other people, and what fascinates you, that gives you your voice as a director, maybe. But I keep saying that I want to do something that’s much more genre-oriented and stylized, and eventually I think I will.

AG: Well, you certainly already understand genre. An Education is a coming-of-age film, part of a distinct genre. One Day is a love story, although Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself is a little harder to categorize.

LS: [Laughing] Yes!

AG: What you would call Italian for Beginners?

LS: That’s a Dogme film. Dogme became a genre in itself. One Day is a love story, and none of the other films have love as a major theme, how love plays out over a long time. Dexter (Jim Sturgess), who is technically the main character, has to learn what love is, and to find it, and to suffer for it. I think because of its structure, it also becomes about time, and how you spend your time, and the unnecessary detours you go through. In terms of directing, it’s the time issue that makes it the most challenging, to make all those time jumps work, and be interesting and pleasurable to watch–yet not overpower the emotion, or make the film monotonous, but add to the flow, and add to, when you get to the last chapter, the feeling of “Oh, wow! All those years passed and I didn’t notice.”

AG: I liked where the story traveled in less than a minute from July 15th in a given year to July 15th in the following, as though you were indicating, “Okay, here’s what happened this year—nothing big. Let’s go on to the next year.” It’s an unexpected shift.

LS: And it makes it still more unpredictable that you don’t know [going in] that the rhythm is syncopated. It’s really important to keep an element of surprise and unpredictability. We tried out different versions, and I still don’t know if we ended up with the best one. I need some time away from the film, then go back and see it, and learn from it.

AG: How does working with David Nicholls, who adapted his own novel, compare to working with Nick Hornby, who was adapting another writer’s work? I don’t know anything first-hand about their personalities, but I imagine they are quite different.

LS: They are. They are sometimes compared, because they both have this combination of something that’s humorous and moving. But they are totally different! David has an acting background and that makes him good at writing dialogue that tastes good for the actors, but Nick is very musical, so he can achieve the same thing in a different way. They both make it easy for the actors to make things ring true, but they just access it from different angles.

AG: Let’s get back to the concept of time in One Day. In An Education, your teenaged heroine had nothing but time ahead of her. But in One Day, when we see Emma (Anne Hathaway) on her bike early in the film, we don’t yet know how this scene is going to connect us to the various stages of her life, and her relationships with Dexter, and others. And the coda at the end throws new light on their first night out together as university graduates.

LS: Because David has decided to go for that one date every year–which turns out to be a much more important date than you realize [initially]–that makes him tell the stories about all the other moments in their lives. He says, I’m not showing the day the child is born, I’m showing the first night of babysitting; because of that, he’s forced to cover the other turning points, because you don’t see the highlights of their lives. It’s more than a gimmick; it’s an opportunity to zoom in on moments that are at first sight unimportant, but then become meaningful in a bigger context–especially since the characters don’t know about this mechanism. It’s not like Same Time, Next Year. It’s not an annual reunion; it is just a construct to select moments of their lives. So, that was almost the best part of directing this film: that I needed to take out the big toolbox in order to make this work. Sometimes it’s the sound, sometimes it’s the tracking, or a dissolve, or music, or whatever makes each little sequence in the film connect the best to the next one, without being too loud.

AG: A word or two about your supporting cast: it’s lovely to see Patricia Clarkson as Dexter’s mom. She’s one of America’s most versatile actresses. And Rafe Spall [son of actor Timothy Spall] is spot-on as Emma’s smitten coworker. Why did you choose him for the role of Ian, the standup comedian?

LS: We saw a lot of people, and I just thought he was the right combination: someone who is not a comedian, so he gets that Ian is layered, and not just gets all the jokes. But there are a lot of good jokes in One Day, and if you read the book, there are more.

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THE KIDS AREN’T ALL RIGHT: An Interview With Submarine Director Richard Ayoade

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

The Gronvall Files

British actor, writer, and director Richard Ayoade turns 34 this month, around the time that his feature directorial debut Submarine—a big hit in the U.K.–arrives on this side of the Atlantic. Based on the acclaimed novel by Joe Dunthorne, the movie is a whip-smart coming-of-age comedy set in Wales, about a very bright but morose 15-year-old student, Oliver Tate, whose determination to lose his virginity is matched only by his fixation on saving what he sees as his parents’ crumbling marriage.

Newcomer Craig Roberts glowers, stumbles, and wisecracks his way through elaborate ploys to seduce his misanthropic schoolmate, a pretty firebug named Jordana (Yasmin Paige), while barely disguising his contempt for and anxiety over his depressed dad (Noah Taylor), who seems oblivious to how much Oliver’s mom (Sally Hawkins) has perked up since her old flame (Paddy Considine) moved in next door. Misfit Oliver imagines himself the star and narrator of the movie of his life, and film fan Ayoade tosses in plenty of clever references to world cinema.

The writer-director cut his comedic chops performing in the Edinburgh Fringe (where he first met pal Hawkins years ago), graduated to TV stardom playing a computer geek on the very funny British series The IT Crowd, then segued to directing music videos. He recently helmed an episode of the NBC sitcom Community. The Weinstein Company launches Submarine on June 3; a promo tour brought the soft-spoken, modest Ayoade to Chicago on a recent grey, rainy morning. Over tea we talked about his movie, and quite a few others that he loves.

Andrea Gronvall: You’ve pulled off a neat balancing act. Submarine is funny and sad, angry and touching, and you’ve captured the voice of Oliver Tate, the hero of Joe Dunthorne’s novel. I know there’s no way you could fit most of the book in a film your length, but how faithful were you to the dialogue?

Richard Ayoade: It’s difficult to say. You get to a point where you’re not quite sure whether things are in the book or the film. You sort of digest the book, and, hopefully, know it very well; then you start to not worry too much about it because you might do a disservice to it. A lot of dialogue from a book does not directly translate, for some reason. Eric Rohmer is a very interesting example. You know, his [six] Moral Tales are all adapted from short stories that he’d written.

AG: I love Rohmer.

RA: Yeah, I think he’s amazing. And what he said was that very often the prose dialogue that he wrote wouldn’t translate to film; it just had a different register. But when he wrote something like, “They came in and said hello, and then talked a bit about the weather,” that could translate as dialogue. {As for adapting Submarine], there’s no description of Oliver in the book, and you don’t exactly know what his room’s like. And how people respond to him is entirely implied in the novel—you know, disparity between his testimony and what you imagine was the case.

Whereas in the film if he’s speaking to someone, you know what they think, and you know it before he does. You see their reactions.
There’s a juxtaposition between his sort of hubristic statements and what you’re seeing. But that’s happening straight away; there’s no way to pull your punches. I remember The Swimmer, which is quite an interesting adaptation, because you never quite have the same obliqueness that’s possible in prose. It’s very hard to not show too much in a film.

AG: The Swimmer, wasn’t that Burt Lancaster?

RA: Yeah, from a John Cheever short story. With prose, you can just describe a couple of things in a room to give you the impression of what it’s like. In the film, you see the whole room, and every bit of information in that room will be part of the narrative. You can’t get away from that, and it exists throughout the scene. You can throw it out of focus, or not emphasize it as much, but the surroundings exist.

AG: You accurately convey that sense of being at a breaking point that so many people reach at Oliver’s age. His obsession with his parents’ separating strikes me as a form of psychological projection, in a way.

RA: Right.

AG: He is at that age where it won’t be long before he’s the one separating from his parents. But this absolute obsession that he has is conveyed in the start of one of those almost throwaway comedic lines, “During one of my routine inspections of my parents’ bedroom….” He’s practically stalking them, even before we see any real signs of their breaking up.

RA: I think he’s trying to mount a preemptive strike against being from a broken home, so that if [eventually] he is from a broken home, he won’t be upset about it. That’s often what people do: they try to rehearse the worst-case scenario mentally. You sometimes wonder what exactly are his intentions. I think that for all of his ideas of wanting to be an adult and being taken seriously, he’s very much missed the privileges of being younger, of being a child, in a sense. One of the ironies of adolescence is that you want to grow up, but the adult world isn’t that attractive, either.

AG: Right. Holden Caulfield didn’t want to grow up to be one of the phonies. And in The 400 Blows, the Antoine Doinel character is so full of rage at his parents and society. This similar rage that Oliver feels in your film could easily tip him into becoming a monster, but that doesn’t happen.

RA: He’s so clearly out of his depth. He’s sort of pretending he knows pretty much about how things are because he’s seen films like The 400 Blows, or [has read] The Catcher in the Rye. He knows that he’s going to go through a period that is going to be troublesome–his first relationship with Jordana (Yasmin Paige)–that will be a transition.

AG: Do you feel he’s meaner in the book?

RA: In some respects, yes–if only because Craig Roberts is very sympathetic: his personal charisma alone is such that you can forgive him quite a lot. I was watching Tippi Hedren talking about Marnie recently, and she was saying, you know, “It would be very hard for an audience to believe that I would be resistant to Sean Connery.” Who was the writer who started that screenplay? Evan Hunter, and then another [Jay Presson Allen] finished it; she thought the audience would excuse Connery’s character of rape [Hunter objected]. That’s such a strange idea in films, that if you like the actor enough you’ll excuse all sorts of behavior. You don’t excuse his character, but he certainly holds your sympathy far longer than he ought to, ordinarily.

AG: Well, the character of Jordana helps deflect some of the disapproval we might feel about Oliver’s more extreme behaviors, because in some ways she’s a more flinty character than he is.

RA: They both have these very protective shells around them. Everyone has a persona; what they project to the world is not necessarily the same as what’s beneath the persona. That is very tricky to latch onto at that age, to know who you are. You have to let things occur to find out.

AG: Did you ever see George Roy Hill’s The World of Henry Orient, with Peter Sellers and Angela Lansbury?

RA: Yeah, it’s great.

AG: People are comparing Submarine to Wes Anderson, and of course your references in the movie to Salinger and Truffaut are overt. But there’s a certain tonal delicacy in The World of Henry Orient that’s also present in your film: this wonderful sense of adventure these two kids feel as they discover each other, that’s followed by betrayal.

RA: I do really like that film, and I suppose you never know what you may unconsciously take along. J.D. Salinger takes people at that age seriously, and realizes that they take themselves very seriously as well. The Graduate also does that so brilliantly, I think. For me, Flirting was an influence, perhaps because of Noah Taylor being in it. But genuinely, Taxi Driver was more so, because it’s so subjective, where someone has a kind of mythological view of himself—and it felt funny to have that aspect in a 15-year-old.

AG: You’ve stated elsewhere that there aren’t many coming-of-age films made in the U.K.

RA: Adolescence feels like quite an American construction. From Mark Twain on there’s this idea of American adolescence, in a way unlike English notions, which are more Victorian, in that there’s more of a direct split between childhood and being an adult. There’s no real equivalent to My So-Called Life–that sort of romantic, American, suburban adolescence—or The Outsiders, or Dawson’s Creek. I love Dawson’s Creek.

AG: Interesting! Why?

RA: Because I really like Kevin Williamson. I think certainly the first two Scream films are really well written, and The Faculty is brilliant. He’s just an incredibly exciting writer. I haven’t seen Scream 4, but I thought that the series Dawson’s Creek was epic. There was an awareness of the nature of films, and the making of them, that films are things that people look at a lot. People sort of view themselves in terms of films. You wouldn’t have a film like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in England. That sort of idea seems so, I don’t know, indulgent.

AG: If you were to act in a film by an American director, whom would you most like to work with? Who would you like to be directed by?

RA: Well, I don’t necessarily wish myself on him. Paul Thomas Anderson, but he would have to have fallen on real hard times to hire me.

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The Gronvall Files: Tops in His Division: An Interview with Win Win Director Tom McCarthy

Friday, April 1st, 2011

By Andrea Gronvall

Who says you can’t go home again? Actor/writer/director Tom McCarthy, inspired by his memories as a high school wrestler in his hometown of New Providence, New Jersey, collaborated with his close friend and former wrestling teammate Joe Tiboni, a lawyer and first-time screenwriter, to create the funny and heartwarming new indie feature Win Win.

Paul Giamatti stars as Mike Flaherty, a financially strapped New Providence eldercare lawyer who, needing extra cash, becomes the court-appointed guardian of one of his addled clients. When shortly afterwards the client’s teenage runaway grandson Kyle (amateur athlete Alex Shaffer in his movie debut) resurfaces, Mike and his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan) invite the kid to stay with them and their two young girls, not imagining that Kyle will turn out to be the star the high school wrestling team that Mike coaches so desperately needs. Under distributor Fox Searchlight’s expert guidance, the film tripled its gross in just its second weekend of release.
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The Gronvall Files: Richard Press and Philip Gefter: Partners Behind Documentary Bill Cunningham New York

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

By Andrea Gronvall

As a breed, film critics are generally sartorially challenged, but I’ll freely admit to enjoying Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the style coverage in The New York Times–particularly the “On the Street” column that’s photographed, written, and composed by the paper’s long-time fashion chronicler Bill Cunningham.

A colorful collage revealing trends Cunningham spots while bicycling around the city, the page nearly throbs as the reader’s eye is drawn by one well-placed shot to the next. Now the man who charts the tastes of Manhattan’s best–or most daringly–dressed is the subject of a new documentary from indie distributor Zeitgeist Films (another arbiter of taste), called—what else?–Bill Cunningham New York.
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The Gronvall Files: Good Company: A Conversation with The Company Men Director John Wells

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

As this year’s Sundance Film Festival unfolds, one of the films that made a splash there a year ago, The Company Men, John Wells’s feature directorial debut, is gathering steam in its commercial rollout. The acclaimed writer-producer behind TV hits like ER and The West Wing, as well as Southland (which found a new home on TNT after NBC jettisoned it for Jay Leno’s short-lived prime time experiment), was in Chicago recently to scout locations for Shameless, a new Showtime series starring William H. Macy, and to promote The Weinstein Company’s expansion of The Company Men on January 21st.

The film showcases a terrific ensemble, with Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Affleck, and Chris Cooper playing executives who lose their jobs at a shipping firm when boss Craig T. Nelson decides to streamline operations. Kevin Costner, in his best role in years, costars as a salt-of-the-earth carpenter who lends a hand to brother-in-law Affleck when the downsized exec most needs it. Wells and company have made a film that eloquently sums up much of what American workers have experienced in alarming numbers over the past few years. Relaxed and affable despite a grueling schedule, Wells proved equally eloquent in an early morning interview on a day when Chicago was as cold and grey as Park City.

Andrea Gronvall: It’s great that you launched The Company Men at Sundance last year, because it’s an excellent forum for serious films with something to say.

John Wells: Festivals have become even more important, what with the major studios basically out of the business with these kinds of films now—that’s a generalization, as occasionally a wonderful film like The Social Network will come through the studio system. But not often, and most studios can only point to maybe one every couple of years, not one every couple of months, which is what it used to be. So you really need the festivals if you’re going to get any kind of airing or distribution. But that has turned festivals more into marketplaces, where most were originally there just to show films that often nobody would see otherwise.

AG: There’s a current of social consciousness, and frequently, social activism, throughout your work—obviously in The West Wing, ER, and now The Company Men. Did growing up the son of a minister affect your worldview? Were your parents social activists?

JW: My mother’s a schoolteacher and a union activist and my father’s a minister in the Episcopal Church and very much a peace and justice advocate. So I grew up in an atmosphere [where] part of your responsibility as a citizen was to try to participate in the democracy in some way and work toward changes that you believed in. I come from a long line of Democrat activists and FDR supporters. I was born in Virginia, and grew up in Colorado–again, in a very progressive environment: in Denver those were the Pat Schroeder years.

AG: When you first began your research on The Company Men, you talked to about 300 downsized workers one-on-one. Did they consent to interviews on video, or on audiotape?

JW: It started [when] my brother-in-law lost his job, as many people have. He’s very accomplished academically; he had an MBA and a graduate level electrical engineering degree. His company was bought out by a foreign company and 5,000 people lost their jobs on the same day. He started telling me about his experiences, something I didn’t know that much about. So I went online to a bunch of the downsizing and unemployment chat rooms, saying I might be interested in writing about this if you have anecdotes. And I had a couple of thousand responses.

My researcher and I started culling the people who might be more compelling when you actually spoke to them, and then followed that up with phone calls. A lot of them I did, a lot of them my researcher did, and then there were a certain number of people that I interviewed in person because they lived locally, or lived someplace where I was going to work.

AG: One of the many things I like about The Company Men is how you convey the sense of shame Chris Cooper’s character feels; he’s harder hit by the loss of his job than the others. And then his sorrow, disbelief, rage—for him, losing his job is not so very far removed from losing a loved one.

JW: I found among all the people that I interviewed, that no matter how many other people were losing their jobs at the same time, and no matter how you process it intellectually — that it really was no personal responsibility of yours that led to your losing your job — that people always felt like they’d done something wrong, were trying to figure it out, and felt ashamed that they had lost their jobs. I think it’s a cultural thing, the way we so much connect our jobs to who we think we are.

AG: You’ve put your money where your mouth is by taking on the presidency of the WGA West, for a second time. Clearly you believe in labor rights. Where do you see the future of unions in this country? And where do you find the time to do everything you do: two TV series, directing a movie and promoting it, plus heading the Writers Guild of America?

JW: I work with and depend upon a lot of really wonderful, talented collaborators; many I’ve worked with for 20 years and more. So, that’s how I do all those things. I absolutely do believe in unionism and this notion that through collective action people can take care of each other, like in the Writers Guild. We’re basically all freelancers, and people don’t work for individual companies for long periods of time.

The health and pension benefits that are going to be provided when you’re moving from job to job through a multi-guild employer plan, the kind of protections for our work, and the credits and some things like that, are essential for writers to string together a real career. Otherwise, without those protections I think it’d be very difficult for people to raise families.

AG: Are you a news junkie?

JW: I don’t know if I’m a “junkie,” but I spend a tremendous amount of time actually reading the news. I get the New York Times and L.A. Times every day. I regularly read the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. I have lots of friends who send me various articles from all over the country, one of the advantages now of the Internet. I got into the [news] habit as a child—I was raised in a home in which Time Magazine was revered–but as a writer it’s been furthered by the kinds of television shows and things that I’ve written.

When we were doing The West Wing we got the exact same newspapers on our doorstep every day that come into the White House. A large part of the responsibility of the writers on each one of the shows — ER, and The West Wing, and now for what we do on Southland — is to be constantly reading different periodicals, and have researchers pull things.

One of the difficulties in The Company Men was that the economic situation was literally changing as we were shooting, so on a daily basis I was making changes to the script to try to keep it up to date because events were unfolding so quickly during the depths of the credit crisis.

AG: I like that you end the film on a note of hope, and I’m wondering if in all your research you came across a lot of real-life instances of downsized folks who were able to reinvent themselves.

JW: I never want to minimize the economic and emotional difficulty of going through these experiences, but I was really struck by the resiliency of the people that I talked to. It’s one of the great things, I think, of the American character; it is why the country has been successful over time, is that there’s a quality of picking yourself back up and figuring out what to do next. And everybody found other things to do.

My brother-in-law is a perfect example. He had a rough period; there was a huge contraction in his industry so there were lots of people with his exact resume who were out looking for jobs at the same time. And he ended up eventually, after some rough years, going back to school, and getting a law degree, and now is [using] his electrical engineering and business background as a patent attorney up in Silicon Valley. You find a way to get to the other side, and often discover who will actually come to your aid. Americans are a very individualistic and proud people, but we’ve moved away from a time not that long ago in which you were required to depend upon your community to simply survive.

We’ve moved away in the sense [that it’s expected] that everybody should be able to take care of themselves, no matter what the circumstances. And the reality is that in these situations, the first thing that you need to do is to gather your resources, your family and friends, and people who can support you, to pull through the more difficult times.

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A Conversation with Tamara Drewe Director Stephen Frears

Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

By Andrea Gronvall

This fall when so many films are about heavy subjects like dirty politics, wrongful imprisonment, death and near-death experiences, one independent comedy stands out as a welcome oasis. Tamara Drewe is the latest work by gifted British director Stephen Frears, whose notable movies include, but are by no means limited to, The Grifters, Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity, and The Queen.

Based on the graphic novel by Posy Simmonds (who was inspired by Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd), this entertaining movie is a satirical look at a picturesque English country village, where a pompous mystery writer (Roger Allam) holds court at the writers’ retreats he hosts on his estate, in between churning out bestsellers and cheating on his long suffering wife (Tamsin Greig).

The return of former neighbor Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton)—once a Plain Jane, but now a stunning London sophisticate–turns everyone upside down. Things get even more complicated when she hooks up with a rebounding rock star (Dominic Cooper), an event that turns a bored, rebellious, lovelorn teen (Jessica Barden) into a stalker. Fresh off the film festival circuit, Frears recently stopped in Chicago to chat up his movie, which Sony Pictures Classics is now rolling out across the country in a platform release.

Andrea Gronvall: Tamara Drewe is so much fun, as well as moving. You’ve struck an interesting tone.

Stephen Frears: Well, those are the things I thought when I read the script [by Moira Buffini].

AG: How long did it take you to shoot, and how long to edit?

SF: It took me nine weeks to shoot. [The edit took from] December to about March. We just got on with it.

AG: What was the budget?

SF: I don’t know the budget. I’d happily talk about it, but I don’t know it. I choose not to know about it.

AG: One less thing you have to worry about.

SF: No, it’s that I find the numbers so frightening. I just finally said, can’t we make this cheaper?

AG: Well, your movie doesn’t look cheap. It’s beautiful to gaze at.

SF: We shot it late in the year–in September, not in mid-summer. By September the sun was starting to get low in the sky, so that’s when it looks especially beautiful. And this [the story] had to cover all of the seasons, so you wanted a time of the year that gave you the most possibilities. We were incredibly lucky. We shot in the west of Dorset. I have a house in Dorset; I go out for about three days, then I have to get back to London. It is stunningly beautiful, but then you just start to get restless.

AG: So the “weekenders” angle in the movie is true to life?

SF: Yes, it’s about rich people who bought houses in the country, thereby pricing out the local people.

AG: Well, gentrification is happening in a lot of places. I used to attend the Telluride Film Festival, when the town had loads of charm. But since it became a vacation-home magnet for celebrities, it’s been very built up.

SF: I was in Telluride this summer. It’s lovely, but it has become gentrified.

AG: In a lot of movies these days women characters are one-dimensional; one is either a femme fatale, or a gun-toting action heroine, or merely a decorative sex object, or impossibly good.

SF: I understand your complaint.

AG: The women in Tamara Drewe share some of these aspects, but what I loved about the movie is that they’re all so flawed.

SF: So, that’s what women want—to be shown as flawed?

AG: It makes them more interesting. Here you give them space, to be good and to be bad. That’s a neat trick to pull off. How did you decide on that tone?

SF: It was always in the story, the tone. The truth is if I didn’t show women like that, the women around me would crucify me. I don’t really have a choice!

AG: Who are those women who would beat you up?

SF: My wife, my daughter, the casting director—I mean, they’re all women around me. They would trample me into the ground.

AG: I found the tone of your film to be slightly different than the book’s. It’s a bit more larky.

SF: It has high spirits.

AG: Yes! It reminded me of Cold Comfort Farm. It’s delightful that there are so many layers to this tranquil country village that one might not suspect at first. If this were a Hollywood film, the actress playing the title character would be in every scene, and we wouldn’t get as much layering.

SF: They don’t do ensemble films in Hollywood?

AG: Not often enough. With buddy pictures, the two male stars may split the screen time, but more and more often, there’s one main star supported by actors in minor roles who don’t have many lines.

SF: Oh, I knew this was an ensemble film. In fact, when they asked me if I would make it I said, “I can’t make it with famous people.”

AG: It meshes as an ensemble piece; it’s more than just a springboard for all these talented performers to come on and do their clever bits, and then exit. I’m guessing it was the screenwriter who decided to introduce the two mischief-making local teenage girls, Jody [Jessica Barden] and Casey [Charlotte Christie] earlier in the movie than they are in the book.

SF: We all said, can’t we have more of the young girls–they’re so wonderful—so we brought them forward.

AG: The movie really becomes a triangle about three women, three generations—Tamara, Jody, and Beth, the mystery writer’s wife, played by Tamsin Greig. Shifting the focus back and forth between them not only propels the narrative forward in a really engaging manner; it also leads to a deeper understanding of the characters because we see how they view each other.

SF: That’s interesting, but it wasn’t that self-conscious.

AG: But even if it wasn’t self-conscious, this switching focus creates sympathy for characters who might be a little too hard-edged, or self-serving. Did you see Tamara as a kind of anti-heroine?

SF: No, because I don’t think like that; I just saw her as a gorgeous girl appearing in the middle of a village, causing chaos.

AG: Gemma Arterton is definitely gorgeous. And your other casting decisions: you picked solid actors like Dominic Cooper—I didn’t even recognize him in the film. It was a surprise to see his name in the end credits.

SF: Where did you know him from?

AG: An Education, and a few smaller roles.

SF: Again, perhaps because I don’t see all these films—no, I had seen An Education. He’s jolly good. But I’ve never seen Mamma Mia!

AG: He could start a whole new trend here. If more guys realized what a little eyeliner could do for smoldering looks—

SF: He’s great. My cousin said, “You want Dominic Cooper,” and I said, “Oh, okay.”

AG: Why did she say that?

SF: I never asked her.

AG: You obviously enjoy long-standing relationships based on trust and faith. Okay, then, why Tamsin Greig?

SF: Because she’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Various friends started working with her and I was rather jealous. She’s a very, very witty, striking woman. She never stops working in England. And only when I met her did I agree to make the film.

AG: In this role she seems like she has the kind of heft of an Emma Thompson—someone of that caliber. And what about Roger Allam?

SF: Well, he’s the best actor in England.

AG: He deserves to be discovered here in the U.S., too.

SF: Well, that’s not my problem—don’t blame me! They’re very good actors. You make these [casting] decisions instinctively. You try to think about it, but then you work a lot out afterwards: “Oh, that’s why I did that.” A lot of it is just instinct.

AG: Tell me a little about your new project.

SF: I’m supposed to make a film in Las Vegas, about sports book gamblers.

AG: What is the allure of that for you?

SF: Lay the Favorite, Take the Dog is a rather good book [by Beth Raymer], and a good script by a friend of mine, a chap called D.V. DeVincentis, who wrote the screenplay for High Fidelity. I like Chicago; I made High Fidelity here.

AG: You captured a lot of what’s appealing about our city. You also recently were in Toronto with Tamara Drewe; how did you find the festival this year?

SF: It’s become just business. It wasn’t the fun it used to be.

AG: Is there any film festival you like?

SF: Telluride! Telluride was heaven: very familial—friendship and intellectual curiosity. It’s absolutely terrific.

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The Gronvall Files:Going the Distance from Fact to Fiction with Director Nanette Burstein

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010

Change is good, although it’s not always easy to reinvent oneself. But New York filmmaker Nanette Burstein, a Best Documentary Feature Oscar nominee for On the Ropes (which she co-directed with Brett Morgen), doesn’t miss a step in her transition from nonfiction film to narrative features.
(more…)

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The Gronvall Files, An Interview with Lisa Cholodenko, Director of The Kids Are All Right

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Family Matters : An Interview with Lisa Cholodenko, Director of The Kids Are All Right

We may only be halfway through the year, but one thing you can bet on: come the end of December, Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right will score among many 2010 Top Ten lists. The director made a huge splash on the indie scene in 1998 with her feature debut, High Art; after breaking into television directing episodes of Homicide: Life on the Streets and Six Feet Under, she eluded the sophomore jinx with her 2002 feature, Laurel Canyon. Her latest film, The Kids Are All Right, is her strongest yet, an astute, deeply moving comedy of manners, and a true joy: laid back but sly, it’s one of the best written—and acted—films in many a moon. (more…)

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Interview with Juan Jose Campanella: The Eyes Have It

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

This year’s Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film went to an Argentine romantic crime thriller that few people beyond Academy voters and film festival goers were lucky enough to have seen: The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de sus ojos), directed by Juan Jose Campanella, a filmmaker who calls both New York and Argentina home.

In America, he works a lot directing hit TV shows like House, 30 Rock, and the Law & Order franchise. In Argentina he directs movies: his previous film, 2001’s Son of the Bride (El hijo de la novia) earned him his first Academy Award nomination.

In his new movie, the director reunites with acclaimed actor Ricardo Darin, who plays Benjamin Esposito, a court investigator in Buenos Aires who in 1974 lands a case—the rape-murder of a beautiful young woman—that will haunt him for some 30 years. The film co-stars Soledad Villamil as Irene, his gorgeous upper-class boss with whom he is secretly in love, and Guillermo Francella, Argentina’s #1 box office star, as Sandoval, his hapless co-worker and best friend. I caught up with the director when he stopped briefly in Chicago en route back to Argentina, where he’s beginning work on his first animated film.

AG:  Congratulations on your Oscar. To win on only your second nomination, and so soon after your first—that had to be gratifying.

JJC:  Thank you very much. Sometimes I don’t register it, how rare it is that I only made four movies in Argentina, and two of those had been nominated for an Oscar. It’s very gratifying, yes, yes! I love the Academy!

AG: Did you expect to win?

JJC:  When we got nominated, I read the list of nominated movies, and I said, “Okay, I can sleep easily. There’s no way that we’ll win this. The White Ribbon has an enormous pedigree, The Prophet, too. The Milk of Sorrow won Berlin.” That was very relaxing, actually. I could concentrate on work—I was doing an episode of House at the moment. Then all the online people started saying to watch out for The Secret in Their Eyes, that [members] were liking it a lot in the Academy screenings, and there’s a big chance that there might be an upset–and they kept talking. And I became a nervous wreck, and I couldn’t sleep; I went, “No, oh my God, I wish I hadn’t heard that.” When you have no expectations, you overcome losing much faster. With Son of the Bride, it was only five minutes of sadness, and then we all looked at each other and said, “Guys, we’re all here, let’s have fun, it was great just getting here.” You never think that moment will finally happen after dreaming about it for many years, but we knew that we had chances.

AG:  You co-wrote the screenplay with Eduardo Sacheri, based on his novel, La Pregunta de sus ojos (The Question in Their Eyes). Why did you change the title?

JJC: One of the visual keys of the movie that I worked with was that the characters would never say what they were meaning, but their eyes would. It’s like two different movies going on:  what they say, and what their eyes say. It’s a love story, but it’s also about murder and memory, and it has some humorous moments. We thought that the original title didn’t convey all that the movie was about.

AG:  You certainly paid a lot of attention to details of the eyes:  glances, pauses, quicksilver changes.

JJC:  There are many shots where I had to find a way to frame the eyes so that you wouldn’t see anything else of the face. I really think that something very powerful happens when you don’t see the rest of the face.

AG:  That can be tricky for a director, because a lot of bad screen actors rely on acting mostly with their eyes.

JJC:  There is no trick. Actors just have to be thinking what their characters are thinking. They can’t be thinking what’s my next line, where do I have to stand, where’s my mark, or did he say “cut” yet, or not. They really have to be in the scene, like the characters are, and it just comes out through the eyes.

AG:  Let’s talk about the bravura set pieces in your film. Do you storyboard? Because that soccer sequence where the investigators chase their suspect through the stadium–

JJC:  We planned the hell out of that scene, because we had to make it for $50,000. It wasn’t really storyboarded by me; I went to the actual soccer stadium and took photos of what we would be seeing [on screen] every step along the shot. From there they made the animatics at the effects house in Argentina. I’m a geek myself and I’m surrounded by geeks—it’s geek world there. I think that we over-prepared; we knew we would have the helicopter for only one hour, so we had to make sure that we were coming from the right side. So we were almost like imagining with a compass, and creating in 3D the real stadium to show the helicopter pilot where he had to go. Then it was shot in three days, and we had only 200 extras there.

AG:  Wow! That’s very difficult to tell.

JJC:  You won’t be able to tell, even if you go frame by frame when you have the DVD. There were nine months of post-production:  fifteen guys in our in-house facility, which is not huge. It’s not Industrial Light and Magic, that’s for sure.

AG:  The breaking and entering scene early in the movie–where Esposito and Sandoval travel to a small town where the suspect’s mother lives and start snooping around her house to find clues–is very strategically placed. It combines dread, and tension, and also comic relief, setting up what’s to come. But it’s not in the novel.

JJC:  In the novel, the investigators don’t catch the guy; he is caught by chance. He goes to jail because he has an argument with a guard in a train, and [that news] gets to their office, so that’s how they get to him. In the movie I wanted them to catch the guy, so we created the breaking in, the [paper trail of] letters leading to the soccer stadium, the whole thing. The scene also shows something that these characters never did before. They are office workers, not characters who are motivated by a higher code [like those] we are used to in film noir, or the literary version of noir—Chandler and Hammett, and all—where it’s not as much about the case as it is about finding justice in the world, or whatever. These guys just care about this case. They are becoming personally involved in this case, which is not just one of the thousand cases a day that they get through their office. And this is the moment where they first start breaking the law, really, for the case, and that was basically the objective in the movie’s dramatic curve.

AG:  And it was the beginning of them putting themselves at risk in so many other ways.

JJC:  Exactly.

AG:  It’s part of how you use foreshadowing, and relates to an earlier scene that questions how much of the movie is Esposito’s memory, and how much is his imagination—I’m talking about the scene where he’s struggling with his novel and there’s a segue to three thugs breaking into his home. The scary elevator scene where the villain plays a cat-and-mouse game with Esposito and Irene also uses foreshadowing. In little more than an instant it made me flash on the desaparecidos [the tens of thousands of “the disappeared” victims of Argentina’s dictatorship in the late 1970s through early ‘80s].

JJC:  Yeah, it’s short; it’s only 45 seconds.

AG:  But it feels like it’s so much longer.

JJC:  Yes. It’s pregnant—it’s a pregnant pause!

AG:  Please tell a little about your background.

JJC:  I was born in Buenos Aires in ‘59, studied film there between ’79 and ’83, then came to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in grad film, and I studied there from ’83 to ’88. And I started my career here [in the U.S.], as an editor first, for a couple of years, and in 1990 I directed my first movie. And it wasn’t until ’99 that I went back to Argentina.

AG:  Were your parents supportive of you wanting to be a filmmaker, and what film school did you go to in Argentina?

JJC:  The film school I went to in ’79 was during the dictatorship, and I had amazing professors that would not be professors if it weren’t for their being blacklisted. So they had to teach. I mean, my writing teacher was Aida Bortnik, who was later herself nominated for an Oscar for the screenplay of The Official Story [which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1986]. My parents were hugely supportive of me. Not at the beginning—it took them I think a few months to accept that I was not going to be an engineer, [after going] to engineering school for four years. The night that I dropped out of that, my father supported tried to mediate between me and my mother, who was really very pissed. Very pissed. But after a short while, they became my biggest supporters, and I wouldn’t have done anything without them.

AG:  You know, a lot of movie critics and fans are snobs about television, but I think it’s great that you move back and forth between making movies and directing for TV. I’m a long-time follower of Law & Order, so I’ve seen a number of the episodes you’ve directed of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. I actually thought that Irene in The Secret of Their Eyes was having kind of an Olivia Benson good cop-bad cop moment when she was interrogating the perp.

JJC:  I’m telling you, and I don’t have any qualms saying it, I think that American TV right now is so much better than American movies. American movies have tended toward the glorification of visuals, and have disregarded scripts—[they] have no surprises, no twists, and almost no connection with real life. And in TV you can still see—you know, many episodes of SVU end unhappily, and there’s moral ambiguity among the characters. You can’t have a character even like Hugh Laurie’s Dr. Gregory House in movies nowadays. I really think that American TV is great. And every director does something between movies. Most choose to do commercials; I choose to do this. I choose to work with these great actors and great scripts.

Sony Pictures Classics opens The Secret in Their Eyes in New York and Los Angeles on April 16, after which it will begin a roll-out to other cities.

Andrea Gronvall
April 23, 2010

Andrea Gronvall is a regular contributor to the Chicago Reader, a frequent speaker for Harlan Jacobson’s Talk Cinema, and teaches film at the University of Chicago’s Graham School of General Studies.

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