Tag: Interview

Guy Maddin on “Brand Upon the Brain!”

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By R. Emmet Sweeney

IFC News

May 7th, 2007

Guy Maddin’s latest — silent — celluloid concoction can only be called an event. Already a hit on the festival circuit, “Brand Upon the Brain!” will descend upon theaters in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles in the coming months, escorted by an orchestra, a foley crew and a live (celebrity!) narrator. It’s another delirious genre mash-up from the Canadian filmmaker, one that tells the sordid tale of one “Guy Maddin,” a child raised in a lighthouse orphanage by his psychotically protective mother and catatonic father. He falls under the spell of a cross-dressing sleuth, who investigates those curious holes on the back of the orphans heads… As purely entertaining as any of his previous work, it’s also his most haunting, as youthful mythmaking is turned into chiaroscuro nightmare, and the adult “Guy’s” obsessive remembrance leads him into absolute loneliness.

How did your association start with the Seattle-based The Film Company, the production company for the project?

I got a call in the middle of the night, like one of Josef Stalin’s henchman calling and saying “We want you!” — but what they were calling about was something pretty wonderful. As it turns out, The Film Company is a kind of crazy, quixotic, utopian not-for-profit, the only not-for profit film studio in the world as far as anyone knows. They have this weird little manifesto whereby they refuse to accept submissions and scripts from other filmmakers, they just approach them with the green light already flashing. You have been approved to film your project, the only condition is the project can’t exist yet, you have to start thinking about it the minute you accept the invitation. They can detect if a script’s been sitting around in a drawer for a while, if it’s got other producers’ breath on it. As it turns out, I didn’t have anything kicking around, so I had to create something specifically for them. They said they’d supply everything, so I didn’t even ask what the budget was.

Did they give you a deadline?

I’m an impulsive decision maker with everything, but especially when I’m on set. If things feel right, they feel right within the first couple of seconds. The more I have a chance to think about things, the more hesitant, the more cowardly, everything becomes. They told me I’d be shooting in a month. And that meant since I work in a highly artificial manner which requires sets and props, I had to get a script in shape soon, immediately. Luckily I had a plane ride to Paris, a long plane ride, to daydream. I remember reading a New Yorker article about the teen detective genre and its origins. The origin of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.

I decided to make this movie as much of an autobiography as possible, but I needed some sort of fictional construct for it. I decided very quickly that my childhood would be the subject, specifically this central episode of my childhood where my mother and sister were conducting a vicious war over the speed with which my sister was growing pubic hairs. I thought that turning one of the main characters into a teen detective might just be the MacGuffin that Hitchcock always used. He’d always inject something that’s not quite true into something to make everything more true. Then it was a matter of things falling into place during that plane ride, and then as soon as I landed I went to my distributors in Paris and e-mailed my treatment to the Seattle people and they started building sets.

What was George Toles’ involvement in writing the screenplay?

Before I got on the plane he started suggesting some other fictional relationships. We share writing credits all the time but sometimes he writes way more than I do, sometimes I write more. We have a writing credit kind of like Lennon/McCartney. George is more than just a collaborator, he’s the guy whose voice I hear everything I read in. He taught me how to read. So when I’m reading a book, it’s George’s voice doing all the characters, so he’s a collaborator even when he’s not collaborating actively. He’d be a collaborator even if he got hit by a bus.

Where did you meet him originally? How did you start working together?

I met him when my first marriage broke up back in 1980. As is often the case, my marriage had killed off all my friendships, so I found myself in need of new friends. The one friend I had left from my pre-marriage days had become a friend of his (he’s a film and English lit and theatre professor at a university back in Winnipeg). I started hanging around his film classes and theater productions, and the next thing I knew I was submerged Elia Kazan-style in a world of plays and theater and books. Before that all I used to do was go out night-clubbing and listen to British Invasion music. Very scenester, but without any real heft, any literary or filmic history to back it up. I started listening to vintage music. And all of a sudden I became a voracious consumer of all things pop cultural of the 20th century. I met him at a time when I became explosively inquisitive about all of those cool things.

Can you tell me about your other collaborators, starting with your editor, John Gurdebeke?

We started working together on another auto-biographical piece called “Cowards Bend the Knee,” and we discovered this, kind of by accident, this kind of facsimile of human memory that we prefer to use rather than the conventional flashback. More synaptical, neurologically based. We discovered it by just fast-forwarding through the rushes while we were binning them — on the computer, when you fast forward through things, you not only see things faster, the images are more like the way a stone skips across water, it’ll touch down upon an image and then skip a whole bunch and not show them to you. Quite often you’d go speeding past something you’d want to see, and then I’d go “no, no John, back up”, and then he’ll back up, and he’ll go past it again. And then forward again, so you slowly go scratching back and forth, more like a DJ, over the image.

We discovered that this process was really fetishizing the moment. I said, “you know what, this is the way I really remember things.” If I want to relive a favorite moment, I can skip ahead too quickly, and then go no, no, slow down, I want to approach this in really delectable slowness. And then I’ll go back and walk back and forth on it until all the flavor is sucked out of it and then I’ll go racing off to the next episode. You can only present facsimiles of memories of real life, that’s art’s job. This is a cool facsimile, really neurological seeming. It’s as good as any, besides… the flashback’s been used so much. Why not tap into our nerves?

At what point during the process did you decide you were going to do a live performance?

I guess I’d always wanted to do it. Things kind of occurred to me during the nine days of shooting in Seattle, but often I would just quietly mention I wanted something and it would show up. And so one day I passive-aggressively mentioned “I’d really like a live music performance,” and then it was discussed. Then I started adding foley artists, a singer and a narrator, and then I realized we would have to make this into a live event. The narrator strikes some people as an impurity, as it’s a silent film, but I learned from reading Luis Buñuel’s autobiography “My Last Sigh” that it was very common to have explicators to help viewers new to editing…

In Japan they did it all the time…

Yeah, the Benshi, there’s one left, the last Benshi. She studied at the feet of the last Benshi master, she’s considered the last Benshi master. I was thinking of getting her, then I thought, no, no, there was too much exposition for intertitles to handle alone, so I decided to dump most of the expository duties on to the intertitles, and let the narrators handle the seasoning. Isabella Rossellini and the original narrator in Toronto have very musical voices, so you could rationalize them as a 12th musical instrument in the pit.

How did you start working with Isabella Rossellini?

I met her once in Central Park, actually — and I’m not a very forward person, especially with celebrities. But, we’re both dog lovers, as it turns out, and just as she was coming towards me, she stopped to pet a Labrador Retriever, and started a conversation with its owner. And I thought, that Lab’s cute enough, I’ll use that as an excuse, so I started petting it too. I looked down, and she was basically ignoring me, but she had allowed the dog to hold her hand in its mouth, and I thought, aw, I’ll put my hand in the dog’s mouth too. And pretty soon both of our hands were in this big drooling dog tongue, in intertwinement. Very slippery. Before we knew it, the dog and its owner were gone, and we were left with our hands hanging in the air, dog spit dripping off. By that time I had worked up the confidence to tell her I knew her ex-husband a bit, or that I didn’t really know him, but that he bought one of my films for his archives, “Tales from the Gimli Hospital,” and that I was a filmmaker making a film, and that I had a part screaming to be played by her, an amputee beer baroness. We discovered we both loved Lon Chaney and silent films. We became instant friends, and it has been that way from then on.

I already see in B&W when I’m looking through a movie camera, and all of a sudden if she moves her head a micro-millimeter, the decades will fall away and my knees will buckle and she’ll become Ingrid or Roberto. She’s a time-traveler and you really need to have your seat-belt fastened when you’re filming her. When she walks around, she brings her own nimbus with her, wherever she goes. It can be as superficial as a little pulsing flash of similarity to Ingrid, especially when she’s talking, but she doesn’t really look like Ingrid. I made a movie where she plays her mother, and you have no trouble telling them apart. Ironically she looks less like her when she’s playing her. The vocal impersonation is spot-on, because there are no two people who have that Scand-Italian accent like them.

Do you consider and “Brand Upon the Brain!” and “Cowards Bend the Knee” to be your most autobiographical films?

They’re literally autobiographical. I’d say this one is 96% true. That’s not a promotional strength in any way — because why should my life be interesting? — but I did have a very Grand Guignol, melodramatic childhood and it’s a pleasure, an almost unalloyed pleasure to get it out. Sometimes I feel almost completely crushed with guilt that I’ve betrayed my family, broken a commandment. At least, it seems I’ve dishonored my mother sometimes. But it would come off if I had the courage to show it to my family as some sort of fantasy, and most people don’t recognize themselves in their own depictions of themselves.

So you haven’t shown it to your family?

My brother, who’s not in the story, has seen it. He said it hurt a bit, because people he loves are in it. But there are people who watch it and say that it is their life too. And Geraldine Chaplin, who narrated it for me in Buenos Aires recently, said “this feels like my life and yet my parents were wonderful to me, and it just feels like an übermother and überfather.” She said somehow it was her autobiography as well. That was the biggest compliment to me. By being specifically about myself I was trying to capture the essence of the way we make sense of the world as children, the way we construct false models of the world that become myths to ourselves. It was really important to me for that to work, and for viewers to feel like it was their childhood, even though they didn’t grow up in a lighthouse or have an abusive mother.

Well, becoming aware of your own sexuality is something everyone goes through…

I was trying to reassure the mother of a 13-year-old boy last night that he probably wasn’t getting into trouble right now, he was probably just masturbating for the fourth time that night. She didn’t really want to hear it but then I finally had to say…that’s what you do if you’re normal. Would you rather your son not learn until he was 21, like a certain friend we both knew? And she was like, “no, I want my son to masturbate now.”

I think that’s an important lesson…

Well, here’s hoping he’s masturbating as we say these words.

Are you doing more of these autobiographical pieces, or will you move away from it for a while?

I might have to move away. I notice whenever I make a film that I kind of use up that subject or setting. It’s as good as therapy, I don’t think it does work through anything at all, but it just makes you tired of it. The act of filming and editing things turns it into so much footage that needs to be dealt with, and by the time you’ve finished the whole process, you’re tired of it. So whatever scars I have from childhood didn’t heal over, I just got bored of looking at them. I’m ready to move on.

I do feel like an adult now, it’s strange. I quit having these dreams I used to have about my father that just kept picking at me with unfinished business about his death. I quit having them right after making the movie. I suddenly quit saving things, I found it easy to throw out my old baseball cards, and records — I all of a sudden got rid of my past, and I was a notorious pack rat and collector. My apartment was like a museum, it looked like the Quay Brothers had filmed there. Not anymore. Now my apartment looks like an Ikea showroom.

I think “Brand Upon the Brain!” is the most emotionally involving of your films so far, maybe because of how autobiographical it is…

Well, it’s something I’ve been trying to work towards but there’s been so much artifice, so much perceived irony and distance in my early movies, I’ve finally figured a way of getting past that. For some people it’s probably still too irony-clogged, but I think that the two can co-exist. I’ve been devastated by Douglas Sirk movies, and most people are, if they’re being honest. They can co-exist, and I’m just stubbornly going to keep fucking trying to make people accept that. It’s taking us a while to recover from that dalliance with postmodernism where emotional involvement with art was considered verboten. But let’s face it, that’s why it exists. Bedtime stories are there to scare and enchant, and those are the stories that count. You don’t want to tell a story to a child to make him think about form. And we’re all children.

FINISHING THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND: AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER BOGDANOVICH AND FILIP JAN RYMSZA

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May 26, 2015

 Our story is about a special group of these, the richest, smartest, the chicest. The jet-set ones. Has to do with a kind of voyeurism. I’d call it emotional parasitism. It has to do with the mystique of the he-man. This picture is against he-men. – Orson Welles

The above quote is from Orson Welles in Spain (1966), a 10-minute short made by Albert and David Maysles in which Welles woos potential investors about a bullfighting movie called The Sacred Beasts. The main character was Ernest Hemingway manqué Jake Hannaford, and after Sacred Beasts went bust Welles transferred Hannaford whole into The Other Side of the Wind. It is a kaleidoscopic portrait of another kind of machismo, that of a swaggering 70s auteur, with Hannaford now a doomed director (played by John Huston), his downfall captured in a densely edited collage of 35mm, 16mm and 8mm film. Welles would shoot from 1970 – 1976, but like much of his late work, post-production was never completed due to a tangled series of economic calamities, from a producer absconding with money, Welles’ absent business sense, and Iranian investments locked up because of the overthrow of the Shah. The negative was locked in a French lab with competing rights claims from Welles’ partner and collaborator Oja Kodar, his daughter Beatrice Welles, and the Paris film company Les Films de l’Astrophore, run by Mehdi Boushehri (one of the original investors in the project).

For decades now there have been teases that the film, which was completely shot and partially edited by Welles, would see the light of a projector. Today we are closer than ever to that tantalizing goal, thanks to the efforts of producers Filip Jan Rymsza, Frank Marshall and Jens Koethner Kaul, who helped to negotiate an agreement between Kodar, Beatrice Welles and Bousherhi to gain access to the negative. Now the work begins of resurrecting a feature left for dead forty years ago. So Rymsza and the production team (including advisor Peter Bogdanovich, Welles’s friend and a co-star in the film) has started an IndieGogo campaign to raise $2 million to complete the production of The Other Side of the Wind  (you can donate here: www.orsonslastfilm.com). They have much left to do, including logging all of the Welles’ voluminous notes, organizing and scanning the negative, editing based on Welles’ instructions, color-correcting, and producing and mixing the music and effects.

Filip Jan Rymsza and Peter Bogdanovich took some time to talk to me about Welles, The Other Side of the Wind, and the ongoing IndieGogo campaign, getting into the atmosphere on the set, Welles’ famous prudery, and why they chose crowdfunding to get The Other Side of the Wind into the world.

Peter, could you describe what the atmosphere was like on the set, and Welles’ state of mind going into the feature?

PB: He was very buoyant. He called me, this was when I was playing a different role. I started out playing a cineaste, writing a book about John Huston’s character, and the trick was, he wanted me to be asking these pseudo-intellectual questions, some of which he made up, or I’d have to make up. He wanted me to do it like Jerry Lewis, with the voice. So I would ask questions like [imitating Jerry Lewis], “Do you believe that the cinema is a phallus?” [Joseph McBride claims to be the one who uttered this line in his book What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? – we’ll discover who’s right when the film comes out]. The first day of shooting he called and said, “What are you doing Thursday?” I said, I’m going to Texas to shoot The Last Picture Show”, a script that he had read, and what he referred to as “a dirty picture”. He asked if I could go and shoot with him on Thursday, so I said, “What are you shooting? – I’m shooting a dirty picture. You’re shooting a dirty picture so I’m shooting a dirty picture.” And that’s how he would refer to it, jokingly of course. And I went down to Texas for Last Picture Show. By the time we were shooting again on Other Side of the Wind, some months later, I was playing a different part. I ended up playing a leading role. The atmosphere on the set, there wasn’t very many people there…Orson was very jolly, very happy. He was always in very good humor when he was shooting.

I’m curious about the tone of the film. Is it a satire of the film business?

PB: That’s hard to say because I haven’t seen it – nobody’s seen the whole film. There is a satirical aspect to it. There is also a tragic element too. It begins with his death. At the beginning Huston’s character dies at the end of his 70th birthday celebration, in a car accident. You see pictures of the burnt-out Porsche he was driving. So it begins right away with tragedy. And it’s funny at times. But it’s not really a comedy at all. When Huston asked him what the movie was about, he said, “It’s about us, John. About a bastard director.”

Do you think there’s anything autobiographical in there?

PB: Oh yeah. I’m sure of it. He really wanted to play the part himself. But he felt Huston was more right for it. He said,  “I should play the part. It’s a goddamn good part. But he’s right for it, damn it.”

What was his relationship like with Huston?

PB: They were long-time friends. They both made their first feature the same year, 1941, and Orson was in a couple of films that Huston made. They were friendly. John was particularly impressed with Orson’s method of shooting, because it was so unorthodox. So unlike the big studio pictures that John used to make. John found it refreshing to have a small crew, changing the dialogue a little bit every day. What seemed like a haphazard form of shooting but it wasn’t, because Orson knew exactly what he wanted to do.

Peter, you mentioned the unorthodox style of the film. He’s using 8mm, 16mm, it seems ahead of its time. The editing seems very dense. Did he tell you what style he was going for?

PB: I remember him saying that the editing would take a while. The kind of thing you can shoot in eight weeks but takes eight years to cut. It ended up more so [laughs]. The conceit of the picture is that you’re seeing a kind of documentary of Huston’s last day on earth. It’s put together from all this footage that was supposedly shot on the day of his birthday by various people. Students, TV news, all these different kinds of media were invited. In the story, after he died, the documentary of that last day is put together. That’s what we’re seeing. Interspersed with that, during the party sequence (the bulk of the movie), they stop and they show clips from the movie the Huston character is making. They show it in the projection room, and eventually in a drive-in screen. Which are also very densely cut. Shot in 35mm, and very, I guess, arty and complicated. Orson cut most of that stuff already.

I was going to ask, of all of the challenges of this film, the greatest would have to be editing the rest of it together, considering the existing footage. Have you hired an editor?

FR: Yeah, we have. Alfonso Gonçalves, who has worked with quite a few interesting filmmakers. He’s involved with the Todd Haynes, they did Mildred Pierce together. He did Winter’s Bone, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Only Lovers Left Alive. Even though he’s had success he’s chosen to remain in art cinema. With each film, his editing takes on the character of the film, so he’s somebody who has amazing intuition, and was malleable. We were very excited by the prospect of working and collaborating with him.

We’ve done a lot of due diligence in terms of going back through the script, the notes. There were five feet of scripts, an enormous amount of data to process. All the way from the beginning, through the very long process, as Orson would re-write. To the cutting script, which had a lot of annotations in it. Orson sent it back and forth, a lot of times across the Atlantic – he had his editors doing some work in Paris. There is a wealth of information.

 Filip, how did you first get involved?

FR: Six years ago. It started here in Cannes. I was simply told without any sort of detail that the rights were available, and that was my entry point. That plus the script. That was enough to plant the seed, to pique my curiosity, and then for the next three years I was trying to find my bearings, figure out what it is that that meant, that the rights were available. That was the biggest challenge. It was a very complicated title. That was how the process began, finding a way to acquire the negative and be able to finish the film.

The negative was at a French lab that went bankrupt?

FR: That is correct. It was under court order, because the French operate under Napoleonic law. So moral rights were split in a way where it was up to me to bring all the parties together, and figure out a way to lift that court order. Everybody had to agree to a method by which to finish the film, but also to allow us to do so.

Who were all of the parties that you had to bring together?

FR: Three main parties. Mehdi Boucherie, Oja Kodar [Welles’ partner and collaborator], and Orson’s daughter, Beatrice, who is in charge of the estate.

How difficult was it to get them on the same page?

FR: It was a challenge. Everybody is motivated by something else. The commonality here is everyone eventually wanted the film done. The emphasis now has shifted to getting the film done.

Why did you decide to go the crowdfunding route with Indiegogo?

FR: They approached us back in December, and we started talking about it internally. Everybody decided this was very much in keeping with the way that Orson went about his films. And being able to retain control, something that he fought for his entire career. We just thought it would be a wonderful thing to bring the film to his fans, and secondarily, it’s a very expensive undertaking, which bucks the independent film model. It’s a film that’s expensive to finish, also we had to account for the rights, and it would be different if this was a restoration or re-release, but this is a new film, that will have a 2015 release. We needed the extra money to be able to finish it and bring it to distributors, and that way we could retain control.

What stage are you at now? Have you scanned the negative?

FR: No, it’s still in the future. We’re still doing a lot of organizing. Once you start scanning you really have to go into it knowing exactly what you’re looking at. What we’ve been doing is cataloguing, and putting together the negative in a strategic way, putting it into scenes, and separating the camera negative from the inter-negative. So once it goes into the scan we’ll know where everything is. We’re also very much relying on the IndieGogo campaign because this will help us accelerate this process. These funds are important for us to finish the film in a manner we think is fitting of such a great piece of art.

PB: It’s a great help that Orson left so many notes, so that post-production is already organized for us. Orson would change things every day.

How detailed are the notes, do they include instructions from shot to shot?

FR: Yeah. Some of them address specific scenes he was working on, certain things he wanted printed. Quite a bit talked about the Lilie Palmer scenes [she plays Zarah Valeska, a ranch owner], specific things that he wanted. Even if you look at some of the rushes, certain scenes he had already blown up. They are fairly extensive.

If you do not get the full amount requested in the IndieGogo campaign, are you still confident you will get the film released?

FR: Yeah, we’re confident, but we don’t want to take any urgency from the campaign. It is not an arbitrary amount that we landed on. It’s part of a bigger budget. The budget for this is much bigger than two million, but that’s what we thought we would need to do it quickly. If we fall short of the goal, obviously we’re still going to finish the film, but the process could drag out. Now somehow we’ll have to find, whatever the shortfall is, will still have to be accounted for.

Does the film push anything content-wise for Welles? I’ve read that he was prudish when it came to sexual matters.

PB: That’s true, Orson was. I think Oja Kodar, his partner and writer, who worked very closely with him, she being European (Hungarian and Croatian), she had a different kind of attitude about sexual stuff. She was more open and free about it. Orson was usually amused by her. I wouldn’t say embarrassed, but she knew how to make him blush, which was quite charming. He was reticent about sexual stuff, but he made an extraordinarily sexy sequence in The Other Side of the Wind, in the front seat of a car. Quite an amazing sequence. Let me put it this way, he overcame his reticence, and came up with a very powerful sex scene.

FR: It’s interesting on the note of authorship. He could do it maybe because he was wearing the mask of the John Huston director, so that was liberating. It was something that he saw as taboo, and in this regard, could justify it in that manner.

How much input to Oja have on the script?

PB: They worked together on it from the beginning.

Was there improvisation on the set?

PB: No, he was very specific about what he wanted us to say. Usually he would come up with a slightly revised version of what was in the script. He would go to the typewriter and re-type it, give it to us, and say, “This is what I want you to say”. There wasn’t a lot of ad-libbing.

Peter, considering how many formats Welles was using for this film, and the density of the editing – how do you think he would’ve adapted to using digital tools?

PB: I think he would be absolutely thrilled with the digital process. I don’t know if he would do it himself, like he did with film. He did all the editing himself on a flatbed. With the digital he would love it, because it’s so fast. He would have welcomed this technology with open arms.

FR: He was very playful, I was told, from the various editors that we talked to. He wanted to see a lot of things. He would have various editors cut the same sequence in different ways. There was a playfulness to it, and obviously in an online editing system, he would be able to do that, backtracking the clips and stuff, having to print all that – it certainly would have made his process much easier.

PB: Oh God, yes.

You are still aiming to get the film released for 2015?

FR: If we can get the money it becomes realistic. But if we don’t, then less so. We never operated with a delivery date in mind. We always thought it was a process. There are so many unknowns. We certainly didn’t realize we would be going through so many scripts, which we’ve been going through since November. We certainly didn’t realize that with the negative, there would be so much material. 1.6 tons. And a lot of it is already cut up into tiny pieces. A lot of it will have to be reconstituted. And it’s all mixed up. Initially it wasn’t really well catalogued. Everyone was working off of a handwritten inventory from 1974. So having to go back and create something for a digital workflow – put everything in an Excel spreadsheet and make things searchable – these things take a lot of time. At first I thought we could knock that out in a few weeks, and here we are now, having started in November, and still doing parts of it. It’s labor intensive. The more resources we have, the better and faster we can do it.

So you intend to have a full theatrical run once the film is ready?

FR: Absolutely. That’s why we’ve been going through this process, to bring on a like-minded distributor, somebody who saw a theatrical life. We just think there’s a wonderful marketing opportunity to something like this. It’s not an obvious film, but we feel there’s a way that this can be done. Our whole approach has been to do this in the manner it would have been released in ’76 or ’77. So we hope it’ll have a nice long theatrical life.

PB: It’s not dated. The material isn’t dated. It’s a period piece now, because it was shot in the ‘70s, but I don’t believe it’s dated in any way. It’s very modern. And it deals with egos, deception, betrayal, and all the things that Orson was interested in.