All posts by Leigh Singer

17 May 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in Film Reviews Permalink

Son of Saul – Cannes 2015

Sticky Post By On May 17, 2015
Photo: Cannes Film Festival

SON OF SAUL (SAUL FIA)

Director: László Nemes
Stars: Géza Röhrig, Levente Molnár, Urs Rechn
* * * * * (out of 5)

It starts with one of the most powerful, singular opening scenes in recent cinema: an out-of-focus frame, into which staggers a wraith-like figure who we follow in continuous, cramped close-up, while the wider world of chaotic, industrial-scale horror around him – Jews rounded up, tricked, stripped and loaded into a gas oven to their deaths, then the screaming and hammering from inside the chamber walls – remains both thankfully blurred and muffled, yet nightmarishly vivid, while the man rapidly, mechanically starts sorting the discarded clothes and possessions.

If we should bear witness to the Unwatchable, then László Nemes’s searing feature debut imagines a brilliant, apposite treatment of both his protagonist Saul, an Auschwitz-Birkenau Hungarian Sonderkommando – the prisoners assigned to facilitate the Final Solution in the concentration camps – and the Holocaust. An intensely first-person story, for the next 100 minutes we scarcely leave Saul’s side. The bodies pulled from the oven, the blood and vomit scrubbed from the floors, the casual sadism of the Nazi guards and hostility of his fellow workers, all are subsumed to Saul’s mission: to retrieve the body of a boy he finds still briefly breathing amid the carnage, one he claims is his own son, find a rabbi and give him a proper Jewish burial. Even inside this pit of hell on Earth.

Nemes is a former protégé of Hungary’s reigning cinema giant Bela Tarr, but whereas Tarr could spend literally hours going from A to B, Son of Saul is a blur of continual motion, never stopping to orientate its audience. We become as absorbed and marooned in Saul’s world as he is. Bit by bit, as he races around bullying, bribing, begging to achieve his goal, a background picture jerkily emerges from the shallow focus imagery; whispers of an upcoming planned escape and a possible culling of the Sonderkommando. Saul will allow neither to distract him and at one point, his one-track mind obstructs the nascent uprising. “You failed the living for the dead,” someone sneers. But in the charnel house around them, who’s to say what those definitions really mean any more.

Technically this is a stunning achievement. One might pity the production designer, whose work isn’t overtly showcased on a film with such a restricted visual strategy – made even more claustrophobic by cinematographer Matyas Erdely shooting in the cropped, retro 4:3 aspect ratio many filmmakers now experiment with. But in fact the fleeting, patchwork glimpses of the camp and its environs actually register as strongly as any wide shot. The layered sound design bears an equally heavy load, the groaning machinery, rifle cracks or snippets of Yiddish, German or Hungarian that float up out of the maelstrom further immersing us in Saul’s nightmare.

If the film’s absolute commitment to its stripped-down aesthetic gradually becomes exhausting, a more allusive, poetic shift in style helps re-energize the film’s climax. From start to finish, however, Röhrig’s mostly silent performance is enthralling and the idea that this is a first-time feature simply remarkable. Whether you’ve watched documentary (Night and Fog, Shoah) or fiction (Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List), you’ve never seen this subject treated in this way, Nemes effectively forcing us to re-question a spectacle cinema of such horrors. A certain awards contender here at Cannes and throughout the year ahead, Son of Saul is harrowing, essential, liberating viewing.

16 May 2015
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The Sea of Trees – Cannes 2015

Sticky Post By On May 16, 2015
Photo: Cannes Film Festival

THE SEA OF TREES
Director: Gus Van Sant
Stars: Matthew McConaughey, Ken Watanabe, Naomi Watts
Rating: * ½ (out of 5)

If a Gus Van Sant movie collapses alone in the woods, does anybody hear it fall? Not if the vociferous booing of an incredulous Cannes press audience drowns it out, that’s for sure. The first bona fide write-off of this year’s festival, this hokey tale spins around an American professor (Matthew McConaughey) who resolves to kill himself in Japan’s Aokigahara Forest at the foot of Mt. Fuji – a popular suicide spot, apparently – until he meets a dishevelled, wounded native (Ken Watanabe) and the two lost souls try to find their way out.

With true red-white-and-blue condescension, Watanabe’s character is nothing but a prop for our hero’s struggles, as the narrative flits between the woods and McConaughey’s troubled marriage to Naomi Watts (yet again suffering onscreen like a red-eyed trouper). If the forest survival struggle plods on, the homefront storyline wallows in the cheapest melodramatic tactics to yank our heartstrings, until finally both strands are clamped together with the cloying contrivance and fortune-cookie mysticism of a bad Lifetime Movie.

You don’t have to be a Van Sant snob, priding his more ornery work (Last Days, in which he tackled suicide; or Gerry’s two men lost in the wild) over more audience-friendly fare like Good Will Hunting or Milk, to recognise The Sea of Trees as self-indulgent hackwork. From Mason Bates’s maudlin, button-pushing score to Christopher Sparling’s trite script, in which a man bemoans not really knowing his wife because he can’t identify her favourite colour or season (and the pay-off for this must be seen to be believed), this is like a fan-fiction Nicholas Sparks rip-off, shocking both from a filmmaker of Van Sant’s calibre and a Cannes competitor. McConaughey works hard but it’s a vanity project in all the wrong ways and, to paraphrase his trademark, al’wrong, al’wrong, al’wrong.

14 May 2015
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Our Little Sister – Cannes 2015

Sticky Post By On May 14, 2015

OUR LITTLE SISTER (UMIMACHI DIARY)
Director: Kore-eda Hirokazu
Stars: Ayase Haruka, Nagasawa Masami, Kaho, Hirose Suzu
* * * * (out of 5)

Not every viewer will go straight from the ballistic bravura of Mad Max: Fury Road to Kore-eda’s latest delicate domestic melodrama, and yet such a stark contrast is unnecessary to slip into and appreciate Our Little Sister’s warm, understated intimacy. Adapted from Akimi Yoshida’s manga comic series, it follows three twenty-something sisters, estranged from their mother yet still living together in the former family home, who effectively adopt their teenage half-sister when their mutual father dies.

The languid passing of time, often framed against seasonal events – plum gathering, summer fireworks – belies the cumulative emotional impact as each woman gradually reveals the emotional ramifications of parental abandonment (the sisters’ mother walked out when her husband had an affair) and their own conflicting dynamics in the improvised family structure. All four actresses are superb and Kore-eda’s subtle, shifting camerawork and an elegant piano-led score suggest the imperceptible changes at play.

There’s no sex, violence, profanity and barely an angry word is spoken, but for those attuned to Kore-eda’s gently insistent rhythms, still ample reward. Occasionally perhaps a little too sedate, and without the immediate emotional punch of After Life or Like Father, Like Son, this is still a kind, wise and utterly beguiling movie, one that moves into your heart and stays there.

14 May 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in Film Reviews Permalink

Tale of Tales – Cannes 2015 / IGN

Sticky Post By On May 14, 2015
Photo: Cannes Film Festival

TALE OF TALES
Director: Matteo Garrone
Stars: Salma Hayek, Vincent Cassel, Toby Jones
* * * 1/2 (out of 5)

So many recent cinematic fantasy tales are defanged to protect their mass appeal, that when a genuinely adult fable appears, the effect is disconcerting. Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales, based on three stories from 17th century Italian poet Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone, doesn’t just harken back to the seductive, dark power of original fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault or Hans Christian Andersen; it also reconnects to the movies’ not-so-distant past, where the likes of Neil Jordan’s Company of Wolves, or more recently, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, proudly get their freak on. “Happily ever after” is not the endgame here. And no kids’ fast food tie-ins are going to be inspired by Salma Hayek tucking into the giant, bloody heart of a sea monster.

The trio of barely overlapping parallel stories take in a queen’s desperate attempts to conceive a child – hence Hayek’s unhappy meal – and a pair of deluded kings, one libidinous monarch (Vincent Cassel) beguiled by the siren song of an elderly crone, the other (Toby Jones) more concerned with his pet giant flea than his own daughter. In each one, a heart’s desire is delivered with a painful sting. And while the stories themselves have a twist in the tail, the delivery is straight and true – there’s no Shrek-like self-awareness here. When Garrone ventures into the woods, unlike the Stephen Sondheim meta-musical and its recent movie adaptation, he isn’t goofing around (though of course Sondheim has serious stuff to say too).

It’s interesting too that Garrone’s focus often drifts to the women in his stories – Hayek’s warped maternal love in one, mirrored by the tragic repercussions on Jones’s daughter Violette (Bebe Cave) who is sacrificed in marriage to an ogre. And rather than home in on Cassel’s lechery in the third tale, the emotional potency comes from when one of the two elderly sisters is magicked into a lissome beauty (Stacy Martin) and how the obsession with youth destroys her abandoned sister (Shirely Henderson). Themes of metamorphosis and transformation recur, usually with fraught consequences.

A world away from his previous, more social-realist Cannes prizewinners Gomorrah and Reality, Garrone’s achievement here is to create fully formed fantasy kingdoms of fantastical monsters and magical curses. The largely practical effects and striking baroque locations from Tuscany to Sicily, give the film a tactile, substantive quality that many CGI-heavy lightweight fantasies lack. Visually it’s a sumptuous feast, from Dimitri Capuani’s production design to Massimo Cantini Parrini’s extravagantly lavish costumes. There’s also a touch of the Fellini grotesques in the background casting – and superb make-up on the more conventionally attractive leads.

The constant shuttling between tales certainly keeps the action moving, but occasionally the shift in tone, from bawdy gags to gory violence, jars. Hayek is in a tremulous psychodrama, while Cassel appears to have come straight from a stage pantomime – you expect a reciprocal chorus of, “Oh no she doesn’t!” after his every hammy line. Unsurprisingly it’s the tale and the actors most successfully blending the humour and horror that works best, Toby Jones and newcomer Bebe Cave emerging as perhaps surprise stars of the show.

If there’s one other drawback, it’s that modern audiences, so familiar with the contemporary tweaks and revisions overlaid on ancient fables, might get a little restless with the traditional, A to B to C tale telling. Though Garrone does tap into something primal, sometimes he also plods into the pedestrian, rarely achieving the true wonder of, say, Pan’s Labyrinth. The final image, though, is a stunner and pulls you back around to the idea that ultimately Tale of Tales is an admirable high-wire act of daring and imagination.

Verdict:

Grimm-like, grim and gorgeous, Tale of Tales is a fine reminder that fairy tales weren’t always only, you know, for kids. Splitting the film into three concurrent stories makes for uneven and sometimes predictable diversions but at its best, the film conjures up the true dark art of fables able to stand the test of time.

To read the original review at IGN.com click here: Tale of Tales IGN review

07 May 2015
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Spooks: The Greater Good review / IGN

Sticky Post By On May 7, 2015

SPY GAME OF THRONES.

“MI-5 – not 9-to-5” was the nifty tagline appended to BBC spy series Spooks when it emerged in 2002. It served notice that this wasn’t going to be a routine show, and, like the US’s 24, ushered in a rougher, more morally compromised type of post-911 spy drama.

Over 10 years the show, centred around the UK’s domestic security intelligence agency (as opposed to MI-6’s international branch), quickly gained a reputation for fast-paced, slick yet gritty storylines, populated by a revolving cast of conflicted characters who, in what became the show’s trademark, were regularly and unceremoniously bumped off – as established in its second-ever episode, when a supposed lead, played by a rising British TV actress, was thrust face-first into a deep-fat fryer.

Since then, numerous cast members including David Oyelowo (Selma’s Martin Luther King) and The Hobbit’s Richard Armitage met untimely, often gruesome ends. It became the series’ USP, one that, without giving away specifics, they gleefully continue in the movie adaptation. I guess every national institution should observe its traditions.

Spooks fans will no doubt be glad this isn’t a complete makeover that junks everything but the brand name. Series mainstay Harry Pearce (Peter Firth), Head of Counter-terrorism, returns, though he’s quickly blamed and forced to resign when major terrorist suspect Adem Qasim (Elyes Gabel) is sprung from MI-5 custody.

Harry disappears, so the agency calls in his former protégé Will Holloway (Kit Harington) to track him down. Harry decommissioned Will some three years prior, and also had a hand in the shady death of his father, another former MI-5 agent, which gives Will added motivation to find him. When he does, however, Harry reveals that someone within the agency deliberately freed Qasim and he needs Will’s help to prevent the traitor destroying MI-5 itself.

Armed with a neat if familiar set-up and its ruthless reputation, then, Spooks: The Greater Good looks to expand its cinematic horizons. Director Bharat Nalluri, who helmed the first and last-ever TV episodes (and was once touted to direct undercover thriller The Tourist) and his crew are clearly conscious of both their competitors and the pitfalls of TV shows failing to step up on the big screen. But, despite their best intentions, they’re faced with an immediate dilemma: if you can’t match the star power or bang-for-buck spectacle of Bond or Bourne, how do you get their audiences to defect over to you?

One solution might have been to delve deeper undercover, burrowing into character and ramping up the internal tensions: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy without the nicotine-stained ‘70s trappings. Yet Firth aside, and then mainly because of Harry’s world-weary history, everyone else isn’t so much a spook as a ghostly cipher. The supporting cast, Jennifer Ehle, Homeland’s David Harewood and returning TV alumni Tim McInnerny, Lara Pulver and Hugh Simon are all fine but given little with which to work. Good luck naming one trait about any of them outside their main narrative function.

Then there’s the leading man quandary. Harington is decent enough in Game of Thrones, bolstered by multiple plotlines and a standout ensemble cast. Here, having to shoulder the bulk of the streamlined action, he’s stymied by an identikit lead role (brooding rebel with daddy issues) that only encourages us to view him as this season’s good-looking, athletic young Brit, swept along by the success of the huge fantasy epic he’s a part of, but woefully exposed in the open. Call it The Bloom Identity. And while he’s probably a stronger actor than Orlando B., he needs a better showcase than this one.

Besides, Spooks the movie won’t relinquish its action credentials and while they’re spatially coherent and decently paced, the sequences simply aren’t as adrenalizing as its best modern rivals (say, Casino Royale’s parkour scene or The Bourne Supremacy’s car chase). When it embraces its own more modest London locations – hello Brixton! – and more intimate confrontations, a taut intensity suddenly shifts into focus.

“The closest thing I have to a friend is someone who thinks I ruined his life,” Harry laments at one point. And the theme of how pursuing the greater good causes untold personal collateral damage is resonant. But ultimately Spooks is stranded too often in no man’s land: not lavishly explosive enough to satisfy action junkies, too sketchily developed to engage those after a more emotional investment. Perhaps reconciling the two with this particular scale and resources is a mission impossible.

The Verdict

Competent, watchable and the slick/gritty aesthetics and ethically murky dilemmas from the TV series are honoured. But contrary to the original series tagline, this MI-5 is a bit too 9-to-5: far too routine and neither big nor smart enough to justify its big screen incarnation, particularly set against such fierce competition. It’s hard to picture the international audience for an ongoing franchise.
Spooks: The Greater Good on Movies

5.5

To read the original article on IGN.com click here: Spooks: The Greater Good review

06 May 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in Interviews Permalink

Céline Sciamma – Girlhood / Dazed & Confused

Sticky Post By On May 6, 2015

Why you want to be in a Paris girl gang.

Just three films into her feature filmmaking career and 34-year-old Céline Sciamma is the French ciné-poet of youthful angst. Her debut, Water Lilies (2007), showed the competitive nature and flowering insecurities among a teenage synchronized swimming team. Tomboy (2011) focused on 10-year-old Laure, who yearns to be a boy. And now Bande de Filles – or Girlhood as its known outside France – traces the journey of Marième, a black teenager from the infamous banlieues outside Paris, who falls in with a feisty gang of three fellow inner city teens and changes her clothes, her lifestyle, even her name, to find a place for herself within the group and without it.

Sciamma’s scripts (she was initially a writer, who had to be persuaded to direct Water Lilies) are characterised by how seemingly small fluctuations in a young person’s life can cause the most enormous emotional upheavals. Cast wholly with non-professionals, the vibrant, pulsing Girlhood is perhaps her finest work yet, displaying an added confidence in her filmmaking and tackling a more overtly demanding group of characters and more unforgiving environment.

So after Water Lilies and Tomboy have people referring to your ‘Teenage Trilogy’.

Céline Sciamma: Yeah, they have! I didn’t think about it, but people kept mentioning it and then because I’m done with [movies on] teenagers, it makes sense.

When we previously met after your debut feature Water Lilies, you said you’d had no plans to direct. Presumably that’s changed now.

Céline Sciamma: Definitely. But at the time I didn’t know if I was going to make a second film.

Because it was so hard? Or you didn’t enjoy it?

Céline Sciamma: No, I really enjoyed it actually. I guess I was just a little shy with my own desire; and also not knowing what the welcome was going to be, if people were going to look at me as a director.

So you’re more confident now?

Céline Sciamma: Oh yeah. And this film I really decided to go for it, not hide what I like and want to do. I strongly refuse the frontier of what’s supposed to be an arthouse film, supposed to be modest. I want a strong narrative, I want drama, I want entertainment.

I think this is your strongest film – do you agree?

Céline Sciamma: I think so. And it’s also opened new possibilities for me. I feel like now, I could make a horror movie, for instance. I still want to put a strong female character in the centre, I still want to talk about metamorphosis, but it could be in different genres. I don’t know yet but I’m excited.

“Spending time with those girls, I thought, my God, they’re so much better than me at that age: more alive, more inventive… I really admired them” – Céline Sciamma

The film’s original French title is Bande de Filles, but abroad, to be called Girlhood just after Boyhood came out…

Céline Sciamma: I picked the international title myself, which is not always the case. I didn’t know about Boyhood at the time but now I’m actually quite happy that both exist because we’re both looking at what youth is supposed to be today. Boyhood is about a middle-class white guy with average dreams, average ambition of being an artist. And the fact that the French Girlhood would be a young black girl from the suburbs of Paris…

It normalizes the characters as representing different aspects of youth.

Céline Sciamma: Yeah. I like that both can be compared.

What did you think of Boyhood?

Céline Sciamma: I liked it but I thought it was… kind of depressing. I find it hard on the female character. Ethan Hawke comes in and out over 12 years and he has a lot of evolution, great scenes. Whereas the mother always sticks with the alcoholic guy… (laughs) Why? And in the end she says, ‘Oh, it went so fast…’ Well, you waited a lot, you know?

Though isn’t that deliberate?

Céline Sciamma: Sure and it tells something about fatherhood and motherhood. I think Linklater knows what he’s doing. But people who came out saying, I cried so much – I didn’t. I saw it more as an experiment.

Your cast is largely non-professionals, from a different background and ethnicity to you – were you always confident you could connect with them?

Céline Sciamma: I wouldn’t have gone for it if I’d had any doubts. I grew up in the suburbs of Paris, spent the first 20 years of my life there – not in a hard suburb, but in a very mixed one. So for a middle-class white girl like me, I know the feeling of being at the periphery, of being so close to the centre but so far away. And actually one of my actresses comes from exactly the same city as me. And the lead actress, she’s from Paris. So it’s all more complicated than it looks.

Your lead actress, Karidja Touré, is amazing. How did you find her?

Céline Sciamma: It was the hardest part to cast. I auditioned 300 girls and actually there was only one option – her. We saw her at a funfair in Paris and offered her a casting. I was looking at her face in the camera and I could see she was immediately role-playing, trying on different personas. And that was the brief. So I thought, I can work with that girl. She’s hiding. And I like that.

What were your specific challenges of working with non-professionals vs. trained actors?

Céline Sciamma: Their own limits. But that’s part of the deal. And you don’t want to steal anything from them. But that’s where the mise-en-scene has to step up – it’s my problem, not theirs. They had several big scenes of improv, but they were really receptive, really committed and really wanted to work.

And presumably their natural energy is very infectious.

Céline Sciamma: It’s so energising. In the casting they have to choose you as much as you choose them. I’m the fifth of the group, you know? And I really lived it like that. That’s why I have to stop working with young people, otherwise I’m going to be stuck, because I enjoy it so much!

What’s your take on the reality of the suburbs having spent this time working and filming there? They’re still largely portrayed in the media as dangerous and troubled areas.

Céline Sciamma: Spending time with those girls, I thought, my God, they’re so much better than me at that age: more alive, more inventive… I don’t know maybe it’s another form of angst… but I really admired them. And at the same time, this is our future, our youth and look at the place we give them. And it’s even more terrible because they’re so great and have so much room to grow… It’s terrible when a country says its youth is a problem.

Girlhood is released in UK cinemas on May 8

To read the original article at Dazed Digital click here: Céline Sciamma – Girlhood

30 Apr 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in Features Permalink

10 Great Films with Little or No Dialogue / BFI

Sticky Post By On April 30, 2015

Winner of the best film award at last year’s BFI London Film Festival, the unique and uncompromising The Tribe joins a small but special body of films that involve hardly any dialogue, relying on the purely visual nature of cinema.

Despite the enormity of synchronised dialogue’s impact on the film industry, starting in features with 1927’s The Jazz Singer, there’s a school of thought which claims that the ‘talkies’ somehow compromised cinema’s essence; that the rapid dominance of the spoken word detracted from film’s unique visual potential, dragging it back towards the theatre or even pictorial literature. No serious cineaste would argue against sound’s importance in motion pictures, but there’s also some truth in the purists’ notion: if a picture’s worth a thousand words, is a cinema over-reliant on dialogue somehow devalued? Read more

26 Mar 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in Features Permalink

10 Great Modern Films Shot in Academy Ratio / BFI

Sticky Post By On March 26, 2015

With his quixotic adventure film Jauja, starring Viggo Mortensen, Lisandro Alonso is the latest filmmaker to ditch the conventional wide-screen format in order to resurrect the squarer ‘Academy’ ratio of earlier times. He’s in good company…

Martin Scorsese’s deft, tautological epithet, “cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out”, typically orbits discussions of subject matter or setting, camera placement or lighting. What’s perhaps considered less of a variable are the actual dimensions of the image: its aspect ratio, or ratio of the width of an image to its height.

Cinema’s early days were straightforward. A 35mm celluloid frame was four perforations high, creating an industry standard ratio of 4:3, or 1:1.33, often shortened to 1:33. When synchronised sound arrived in 1929, dimensions expanded slightly to allow for the optical soundtrack strip, creating a 1:37 aspect ratio. Both of these were folded into one official image size, known as the Academy ratio. Read more

23 Mar 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in Interviews Permalink

Damián Szifrón – Wild Tales / AnOther Magazine

Sticky Post By On March 23, 2015

Wild Tales director Damián Szifrón on Cannes, Disaster Comedies and the best movies ever made

Gatecrashing the upmarket Cannes Film Festival last year, like a rock star at a classical recital, came Argentine filmmaker Damián Szifrón’s Wild Tales. Amid the self-consciously highbrow, oh-so-serious Palme D’Or contenders, Wild Tales was a refreshing blast of foul air: a wickedly funny, audaciously brutal compendium of six revenge tales – from a sting-in-the-tale plane journey via an escalating road rage vendetta to the wedding reception from hell – packed into one defiantly disreputable feature.

Its very incongruity (you’re generally meant to respectfully admire Cannes competitors, not gleefully enjoy them) perhaps obscured Szifrón’s sophisticated filmmaking and resonant skewering of contemporary social injustice. But the film’s recent Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar nomination proved Cannes was no fluke. And the boyishly affable, smartly-minded and attired 39-year-old Szifrón (imagine a Latin-American Christopher Nolan) is now high on Hollywood’s wish list, having just signed up to direct a US thriller.

On Wild Tales’s blend of black comedy and violence…
“Our submission form for Cannes asked for “genre” and we were three hours discussing what to put. I think we settled on “disaster comedy”! It has a lot of humour, but when you see a comedy you feel a lot more comfortable – Buster Keaton or Ben Stiller, you know it’s going to end well, you’re safe. Not here. It’s also not performed as a comedy. I remember directing the actors in the road rage episode as if they were in a Michael Haneke film, but I was shooting it and talking to the rest of the crew as if I was making a Road Runner cartoon…”

On the film’s surprise Cannes inclusion…
“I’m not really a festival filmmaker and many of my favourite films, you won’t see in Cannes, you buy them on DVD. But when [festival director] Thierry Frémaux called and said he loved the film, I felt wow, a little change of direction in my life. I thought Cannes would be a very cold, snobbish place and that I wouldn’t be well received. But as soon as I read the reviews and tweets, I thought, OK, this is working.”

On the anthology film concept…
“For Wild Tales’s DNA, I go back to an anthology book from my childhood called Crime Tales. I loved the cover and the index with so many titles. Also Spielberg’s Amazing Stories and Alfred Hitchcock Presents… I was developing other screenplays and these new ideas started to come, so I tried to compress them. The result was these powerful stories, simple but very layered and I discovered they were all connected by the same themes. So without even noticing I had a new screenplay in my hands.”

On revenge…
“Revenge is here but more the pleasure of losing control or crossing the line – both for the characters, the audience – and the writer! And the ending, with the wedding story, goes to another place of compassion and rediscovering the other, getting conscious about the love that’s present in every hate story. I’m not a vengeful person, I feel too guilty, but as a writer I can exorcize lots of things that maybe regular people can’t. Otherwise I might be more like one of the characters in the film!”

On subconscious writing…
“I wrote these stories in a much freer way than usual. For years I immersed myself in writing a science-fiction film and huge ideas about the universe and intelligence. I discovered while dreaming you can influence the dream and those aspects of imagination. So now when I’m awake I try to write in that way, close my eyes, see the scenarios and wait to see what happens next.”

On working in Hollywood and the great ‘70s movies…
“Making a film outside Argentina would be interesting if it’s my movie. American movies from the ‘70s – Coppola’s The Godfather, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon and The Shining, Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon and Network, Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View and All the President’s Men – those movies are the best ever made. The dramas, the thrillers are intelligent and powerful, very grounded in real life and directors had a lot of freedom and support from the industry. If you make a film that way, it’s always going to be modern.”

Wild Tales is released in cinemas on March 27.

To read the original article at AnOther click here: Damián Szifrón on Cannes, Disaster Comedies & Revenge

03 Mar 2015
Sticky Post By Posted in Interviews Permalink

Desiree Akhavan – Appropriate Behaviour / AnOther Magazine

Sticky Post By On March 3, 2015

Desiree Akhavan: Not the New Lena Dunham

Filmmaker Desiree Akhavan on her acclaimed debut Appropriate Behaviour and all those Girls comparisons

Let’s get two things out of the way from the start: Desiree Akhavan is not Shirin, the endearingly self-sabotaging lead of her debut feature Appropriate Behaviour, even though she actually plays this “heightened version of my worst and best” and they share a specific Iranian-American, bisexual, New Yorker background; neither is she ‘the new Lena Dunham’, whose Girls show is regularly name-checked in any Akhavan profile, for sharing the same hip Brooklyn environs and a protagonist beset by thwarted artistic ambition and disastrous relationships.

What Akhavan, 30, is, is a bold new female, cinematic voice with her own fresh insider-outsider perspective. Building on the promise of cult web series The Slope – co-created with her ex-girlfriend Ingrid Jungermann, which landed them on Filmmaker magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film list – Appropriate Behaviour is a super-smart, often very raw (she does share Dunham’s lack of inhibition) and touching film, whose sense of humour remains gleefully inappropriate throughout.

On inhibitions off and on-screen…
“Photographs make me really paranoid; so does video and listening to my voice. I’m actually not very good at this [interview] stuff, so I’m trying to learn to handle this part of the job with grace and dignity, which I do not have yet. But watching footage of myself when we’re filming, I’m OK with. Or choreographing myself in a sex scene. It’s very much how I’m part of a larger vehicle, moving a project forward and you’re able to talk yourself into the perspective you need to create it.”

On her formative film influences…
“My brother is five years older than me and my parents weren’t precious or overprotective with us. My first film at the cinema was Amadeus. I saw Se7en at around 10 years old, It didn’t haunt me, I was really fascinated. I saw Trainspotting in the cinema then too and it had a real impact on me. I had a very dramatic inner life and when I saw films like Trainspotting, it was like, this speaks to me, this is life how I felt it! The drama of the snobby elementary school I went to and the kids being mean to me, was on a par to being a crackhead and losing your baby – those were the stakes and they were exactly the same…”

On being a “half-assed Iranian”…
“I was born and raised in New York. Being Iranian is a huge part of my identity in a way but I’m getting this whittled-down, third-hand information from my family. Even my language is limited and very old-fashioned. I have a film school friend who grew up in Tehran and when we speak Farsi, she’s like, ‘You sound like my fucking grandma!’ I can’t go back [to Iran] any more because it’s just too dangerous. When you’re openly gay and make work about it, it’s like painting a target on your forehead. So it’s a very funny place to come from – when something so dictates your life and yet you’re an outsider completely.”

On whether her work is her therapy…
“I’ve seen so many different therapists in my life and I’m a real advocate. My work is very personal and in some ways how I take power over situations in which I’ve felt disempowered, for sure. But that’s the extent of it. If the film were a way for me to work through some things, it would be highly masturbatory and only I would enjoy it. At the end of the day you’re thinking about creating a story.”

On appearing in the new series of ‘Girls’ and Lena Dunham comparisons…
“Lena’s character goes to graduate school and I play her classmate. I’m really excited about it. It’s just a really collaborative and relaxed set – something that’s entirely contingent on the people in charge. It makes sense to say [Appropriate Behaviour] is of the same world. But there’s inherently an implication of ‘This seat’s been taken.’ And I think Lena, in the very action of casting me, was saying, ‘No, there’s room.’ I think it’s a real testament to how little she breeds competition and how she doesn’t care about superficial bullshit like that. I don’t think she has to watch her back!”

Appropriate Behaviour is released on March 6.

To read the original article at AnOther Magazine, click here: Desiree Akhavan Appropriate Behaviour

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