“THE INVADER” DIRECTOR NICOLAS PROVOST

A sort of Taxi Driver set within the world of European immigrant culture, Nicolas Provost’s The Invader is one of the most intriguing and seductive films currently on the festival circuit. It premiered in Venice before screening in Toronto (where the below interview was conducted) and now Rotterdam, and it marks the feature debut of Provost (pictured above), a Belgian video and installation artist whose work has always taken as its subject the way cinema orders images into narrative.

The story opens with the camera fixed on the vagina of a beautiful blonde woman, sunbathing nude on a Southern European beach. It pulls back, taking in the scene of vacation frolickers until we spy Amadou (Issaka Sawadogo), an immigrant from Africa literally washing up on shore. After a hallucinatory sequence that sends Amadou from the beach to the city (Brussells), the film proper begins. Amadou is now part of an illegal labor force contracted out for day labor jobs by an imperious mid-level crime boss. An altercation with the boss sends Amadou on the street, without a job, money or papers. Spying a beautiful blonde executive, played by the stunning Stefania Rocca, he uses his considerable charm, verbal dexterity and sexual persuasiveness to insinuate himself into her life. Soon, though, his own anxieties, his resentments and feelings of being out of place, send him on a path to self-destruction.

Provocative in its socio, sexual and racial politics, The Invader makes us watch as an initially honorable African man gradually implodes when the shiny images of Western culture are dangled before him. The film plays with our sympathies, and our stereotypes, and it does so with a sleekly absorbing visual style. In the below interview, I talk with Provost about his art background, his move to feature filmmaking, and the archetypes he evokes in this picture.

Filmmaker: Let me start with the obvious question: where did the idea of making this film come from?

Provost: Well, as a visual artist working with the phenomenon of cinema, the grammar of cinema, [making a feature] was bound to happen. Everything I do is … Read the rest

AN INNOVATIVE LAUNCH FOR “JOFFREY: MAVERICKS OF AMERICAN DANCE”

For the past four months, my company Hybrid Cinema has been working on the release of Bob Hercules’s new film Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance, about the history of the Joffrey ballet. I will be writing a number of posts outlining the unique path that I and my partner on this release, Sheri Candler, have taken to release this documentary about the history of the groundbreaking dance company, The Joffrey Ballet.

In my book Think Outside the Box Office and in subsequent blog posts, I have written about the advantages and challenges of launching a film after its world premiere festival screening. Many filmmakers have complained that they can never recapture the exposure they gain with their first festival. As a result there have been a number of attempts to launch a film in some fashion out of a premiere festival. Orly Ravid writes in Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul about BassAckwards, which launched via YouTube Rentals during Sundance 2009. IFC has been running its Festival Direct program to provide a promotional lift to its VOD releases for several years. For instance IFC will premiere films at SXSW and follows it up with screenings in a few cities while it premieres day-and-date on VOD with the festival. Tribeca has started using their festival as a launch for a number of films that they distribute on VOD.

The chief advantage of using a world premiere to launch a film’s release is to condense all of the publicity into one window, thereby conserving precious resources and taking full advantage of press garnered via the premiere. The approach also utilizes the promotional muscle that many festivals can muster to promote the release. The principal challenge is being prepared – having all of the necessary tools and distribution and marketing channels lined up to take advantage of the promotion. In general this has been beyond the abilities of most independent filmmakers, who are just scrambling to get their films finished in time for their first festival. Another challenge is the short window of time that films have to get everything … Read the rest

MICHAEL BARRY ON HIS CAREER IN FILM SOUND

Michael Barry has been a re-recording mixer for more than two decades, working on over 100 films. Some of the directors he has collaborated with include Tony Gilroy (Duplicity, Michael Clayton), Stephen Daldry (The Reader), David Koepp (Ghost Town, Secret Window), Robert Altman (Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion) and the Coen Brothers (The Big Lebowski, Fargo). In our interview he discusses his beginnings in sound, the job of the mixer, and the future of sound in film.

Filmmaker: When did you become interested in sound and film?

Barry: My mother studied piano at Juilliard. I grew up with her playing the Steinway in our house. She wanted me to practice but, well, you know. I did try later in life, and it just never took. I must have acquired some sort of listening expertise from my mother playing. She would comment that I could hear in-between the sound, which didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but later did. As a teenager, my friends were in a band, and I wanted to hang out with them and do all the things they were doing. Unfortunately I didn’t play an instrument so I ended up being the roadie and the sound guy. I just got into the nuances of how to balance different instruments and sounds. I never attended college and had to figure out a way to go to work. So I guess I got interested through osmosis.

Filmmaker: What kind of band were you a roadie for?

Barry: My good friends had a rock and roll band, and then later with Spyro Gyra.

Filmmaker: Do you feel like you have especially good hearing? Or is it all training?

Barry: I think a lot of it is training. I’m sure everyone can learn to listen in different ways, to educate themselves. You can tell the differences in the way it makes you feel, and I think good sound makes people feel a certain way.

Filmmaker: How did that get you into other kinds of … Read the rest

AN INTERVIEW WITH FREDERICK WISEMAN

The New Year can be as much a time to reflect as it can be to project into the future. Some see the act of looking back as an integral part of moving forward. But on a brisk afternoon in Cambridge the day before New Year’s Eve, Frederick Wiseman resists this notion. The legendary documentary filmmaker has been making roughly one film a year since 1967, only taking breaks when funding difficulties, or in this case critical recognition, require him to do so.

Tomorrow night Wiseman is receiving the Legacy Award at the annual Cinema Eye Honors for his debut film Titicut Follies, which observed the appalling conditions at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Though completed in 1967, the film was withheld from the general public until 1991 due to its alleged violation of the inmates’ privacy. More compromising for the prosecuting government of Massachusetts, however, was the abuse it revealed by Bridgewater’s administrators.

The stress of that litigation now shows in Wiseman’s face—or maybe it’s just the jet lag. We meet the day after he returned from skiing in Switzerland, concluding a year of touring festivals with his latest film, Crazy Horse, about the Parisian cabaret club. The documentary couldn’t be farther away in subject matter and tone from his first one. Yet it falls neatly in line with his last two, La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet and Boxing Gym, both dance films if you choose to characterize boxing as such. (Wiseman would) In Crazy Horse, Wiseman explores the professionalism and hard work underlying Paris’s legendary nude dance revue. Along the way, he explores the distinctions between art and commerce, as well as beauty and vulgarity.

January offers a rare opportunity to view Wiseman’s first film and his latest on the big screen. A Stranger Than Fiction screening of Titicut Follies will be held at the IFC Center on January 17th, followed by the opening of Crazy Horse at Film Forum on January 18th. The gap between those two films is substantial, but then, so is the gap between … Read the rest

EMIR KUSTURICA ON CITY BUILDING AND A NEW RENAISSANCE

Fresh off an Ecuadorian tour with his No Smoking Orchestra, the twice-awarded Palme d’Or director Emir Kusturica flew to Morocco for the closest thing he can get to downtime. As President of the Jury of the 11th annual Marrakech International Film Festival, Kusturica got to enjoy one of his favorite pastimes, absorbing a dozen or so independent films from around the world in a week. His second time at the festival, the auteur was honored with the Golden Star award in 2009 for his outstanding career.

While he spent most of the festival behind the scenes, apart from presenting a new Golden Star to another like-minded conspirator, Terry Gilliam, Kusturica granted us a rare interview at La Mamounia in a dark intimate conference room. He detailed what he’s up to when he’s not busy being a professional Jury President, and it’s a doozy. To call Kusturica a renaissance man is an understatement. It’s more like a “fuck your renaissance man. I’ll create my own renaissance” man. For starters, this coming January marks the 5th year of his annual Küstendorf Film and Music Festival in Mokra Gora, this year honoring directors Kim Ki-duk and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. As usual the fest will focus on young talent, with 20 student films from all over the world in competition.

He recently starred in and shot a 15-minute story about a Serbian Orthodox Monk, to be a part of Guillermo Arriaga’s larger film on religion, Words With Gods, which will come out next year. Then there’s the book he’s writing, “The Book of Stories,” a collection of stories that will be sure to grab you by the throat. And he just finished penning his next script, a film about the recent history of war in the Balkans. Stay tuned.

His hotly awaited Pancho Villa film is on, this time with a slightly truncated script. Benicio Del Toro, no stranger to playing Mexican revolutionaries, takes over the role from Arizona Dream star Johnny Depp, who dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. The new film focuses on the love story between a woman who … Read the rest

THE TERRY GILLIAM SCHOOL OF FILM: 10 LESSONS FOR DIRECTORS TODAY

“Billy Wilder once said that there are only two things aging directors can’t avoid…awards and haemorroids [sic]. I’ll stick with just the awards for the moment, please.” So says a recent Facebook post from the brain behind some of the greatest films of the last century, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail to Brazil to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Yes, Terry Gilliam has joined Facebook, as an experiment to promote his latest venture, the short film The Wholly Family, about Italian Pulcinella figurines coming to life inside a small boy’s imagination. (I highly recommend following his status updates). Fortunately for Gilliam, he’s on the awards path, recently honored with the Golden Star Award of the 11th Annual Marrakesh International Film Festival.

Wearing a Filipino-print shirt he purchased at his favorite craft shop in Los Angeles, and socks covered with cows sporting sunglasses, Gilliam showed up the night after his award ceremony to the Palais des Congrès to teach a Master Class to an audience full of Moroccan film students. When asked why he films, Gilliam responded with a long pause and then said into the microphone, “I suppose it’s the best job out there.” For Gilliam, film is the one medium that combines every art form he loves. I caught up with Gilliam for a short chat before his master class. Here, in his words from both our talk and the class, are the combined lessons, or anti-lessons, he has to offer from his long and rich career in the world’s greatest profession.

1. Growing up is for losers.

As a child, I always drew funny creatures, funny characters. But I think the trick is not to grow up, not to learn to be an adult. And if you can maintain the kind of imagination you all had when you were babies, you would all be wonderful filmmakers. But the world tries to make you grow up, to stop imagining, stop fantasizing, stop playing in your mind. And I’ve worked hard to not let the world educate me.

2. Film school is for fools.

Live … Read the rest

“EMPIRE OF DUST”: AN INTERVIEW WITH BRAM VAN PAESSCHEN

The vast wilderness of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a world away from the urban centers of China. Yet it is there that greater numbers of Chinese engineers are doing business. In the documentary Empire of Dust, featured in the “Panorama” section of this year’s International Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), director Bram Van Paesschen explores the fraught relationship between the Congolese and the Chinese, as shown through their efforts to build a road between two major cities in the DRC.

In 2007, China and Congo signed a massive resources-for-infrastructure deal with projected revenues of $40-$120 billion. China endeavors to take on a wide range of development projects (including roads, hospitals, schools and airports) to be paid for by Congo’s immense copper and cobalt reserves. Though a promising deal for the Congolese– the majority of whom live on less than $1.25 a day– the deal’s lack of transparency has made it the subject of scrutiny for human rights organizations. Empire of Dust examines the human aspect of this exchange.

Director Bram Van Paesschen zeroes in on two employees of the China Railway Engineering Company (CREC): Lao Yang, the company’s Head of Logistics; and Eddy, his Congolese translator. The two visit construction sites around the country, overseeing a project marred by cultural misunderstandings. To make matters more interesting, Van Paesschen hails from Belgium, who under King Leopold II subjected Congo to one of the most brutal colonizations in history. Empire of Dust is a day-by-day account of globalization at work, wryly observed with humorous interstitials from a Congolese radio DJ invented by Van Paesschen himself.

Filmmaker sat down with Bram Van Paesschen in Amsterdam to talk about the inspiration for Empire of Dust, the implications of the China-Congo deal, and the future of the DRC moving forward.

Filmmaker: Was it your country’s history in the Congo that sparked your fascination with the subject?

Van Paesschen: It was kind of an accident. I never had this interest in Africa in general. I was working for television, and after I made a successful documentary for … Read the rest

“UNRAVELED”: AN INTERVIEW WITH MARC SIMON

Putting a human face on the criminality of the financial crisis, Unraveled explores the downfall of Marc Dreier, a prominent Manhattan attorney who was arrested in 2009 for embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from hedge funds. The documentary places us in the “guilded prison” of Dreier’s upper East Side apartment during his 60-day house arrest. In that time, he is interviewed by none other than one of his victims, Marc Simon, who, in addition to being an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, formerly worked as a lawyer at Dreier’s law firm, Dreier L.L.P.

You wouldn’t know that from the film, however, as Simon refrains from including his personal commentary. Unraveled derives the bulk of its narration from Dreier himself. After 30 years as an attorney, Dreier was by all standards (except his own) successful: he had apartments in Los Angeles and New York, art by Marc Rothko and Andy Warhol, and multiple offices throughout the country. As he said in his court statement, however, “I was desperate for some measure of the success that I felt had eluded me.” Through photographs, broadcast footage and 3D animation, Simon grants us temporary reprieve from the apartment whose luxuries eventually become suffocating. Neither accepting nor rejecting Dreier’s confessions, Simon locates Dreier in a maze of his own myths.

Filmmaker sat down with Marc Simon in Amsterdam, where Unraveled played in the “Best of Fests” section of International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA). We discussed the genesis of his project, its creative challenges, and the dilemmas of our criminal justice system.

Filmmaker: Let’s start when you were working at Dreier L.L.P. and first found out about your boss’s arrest.

Simon: I can only say it was like a bomb went off. When we all heard that Marc Dreier was arrested in Toronto for criminal impersonation, we didn’t even know what that meant. Everyone was running, everyone was panicked, no one knew what was going on. But you knew that it wasn’t good. You just had a sense that this wasn’t going to be saved. It was done. Marc Dreier wasn’t … Read the rest

GORMAN BECHARD, “COLOR ME OBSESSED”

Gorman Bechard’s Color Me Obsessed is the rare music documentary that lavishes admiration not only onto its subject, rowdy Minneapolis cult rock band The Replacements, but on the band’s fans as well. The doc doesn’t feature a single song by The Replacements, nor does it feature interviews with any of the three surviving members. Instead, Bechard lets the fans tell the story. Over the course of the film, he interviews dozens of subjects: the musicians, misfits, and devotees whose formative years were sound-tracked by The Replacements. We hear conflicting opinions about nearly everything – favorite songs, band dynamics, the point at which things turned sour. And we hear story after story about how the band changed (and in some cases saved) people’s lives.

Formed in 1979 by drummer Chris Mars and brothers Bob and Tommy Stinson, The Replacements were soon joined by Paul Westerberg, a local janitor who overheard the group practicing and convinced them to let him enlist as lead singer. Over the next decade, The Replacements rose from bratty teen punks to Minneapolis cult icons, then signed to a major label, sabotaged their own careers every chance they got, and gradually disbanded. What they left behind was a catalog of passionate, timeless anthems (if you’ve never heard “Unsatisfied”, “Answering Machine”, or “Can’t Hardly Wait”, get thee to iTunes) and a legacy that Bechard attempts to reassemble piece by piece.

Color Me Obsessed has been playing film festivals for the better part of the year, and will be hitting DVD and VOD this March. Until then, Bechard is taking the film on the road, pairing screenings with live tribute concerts. The film premiered in New York last Wednesday with a screening and concert at the Bowery Electric that featured performances by Craig Finn, Tommy Ramone, Jesse Malin, and many more.

FILMMAKER: I noticed in the credits that the film is based on someone else’s idea. How did you get involved with this project?

BECHARD: It sort of fell into my lap. She (Hansi Oppenheimer) had started to make a movie … Read the rest

GERARD RAVEL AND THE SUPER 8 FESTIVAL THAT LAUNCHED J.J. ABRAMS

In Super 8, writer/director J.J. Abrams (pictured) tells the story of a group of adolescent filmmakers in a small Ohio town whose big dream is to get their film into the fictional Cleveland International Super 8 Film Festival. The film never shows us if their movie makes it — the kids are sidetracked by an alien invasion, after all — but in real life Abrams was part of a real life band of teen filmmakers showcased at a festival titled “The Best Teen Super 8mm Films of ’81.” Held at L.A.’s Nuart Theater in March 1982, it helped launch the career of not only Abrams (director of the Star Trek reboot, and creator of TV’s Alias, Lost, etc.), but a whole community of film and TV talent. Matt Reeves, who went on to co-create Felicity with Abrams and direct films such as Cloverfield, was there with his 28-minute Hitchockian thriller Stiletto. Larry Fong, the cinematographer for Lost and Super 8, screened his 15-minute spoof Toast Encounters of the Burnt Kind. The event also boasted films from less-heralded talents like screenwriter Mark Sanderson (I’ll Remember April, Silent Venom), who screened his film The Last Silent Swordsman, and the broader circle of filmmaking friends working with the participants included actor/writer Greg Grunberg (co-star of the TV series Heroes) and producers Bryan Burk (Star Trek, Super 8, Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol) and Lawrence Trilling (NBC’s Parenthood).

Perhaps most significantly, the festival introduced Abrams to future Super 8 producer Steven Spielberg, who after reading an article about it in the Los Angeles Times (titled The Beardless Wonders of Film Making) hired Abrams and Reeves to clean his old teenage 8mm films and repair the splices for $300.

The festival was the brainchild of Gerard Ravel, the 35-year-old host of the local public access show Word of Mouth who had previously toured the country screening surfing films at repertory cinemas and would later go on to found NSI Video, a leading distributor of skateboarding and surf videos. … Read the rest