Tag: Interviews

“Training, practice, letting go”: An interview with Paul Eenhorn of LAND HO!

“Training, practice, letting go”: An interview with Paul Eenhorn of LAND HO!

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Australian-born,
Seattle-based actor Paul Eenhoorn has appeared in low-budget indie
films for years, but he came to national attention last year for his
performance in Chad Hartigan’s This Is Martin Bonner. As the
title character. Eenhoorn played a non-believer who works for a
faith-based charity that helps prisoners adjust to freedom upon release
from jail. The film has a low-key vibe reminiscent of ‘70s greats like
Monte Hellman and Jerry Schatzberg, more than contemporary indie films,
and Eenhoorn’s performance makes an impact without any showiness. He
makes an equally strong impression in Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz’s Land Ho!, a road movie about two sixtysomething friends who take a vacation in Iceland. Much lighter in tone than This Is Martin Bonner,
it contrasts the acting styles of Eenhoorn and Earl Lynn Nelson, a
real-life doctor who’s essentially playing his extroverted self.
Eenhoorn has had an unusual career trajectory, coming to prominence
only in his 60s after starting out as a musician in Perth, Australia. He discussed that path with me frankly. 
Steven Erickson: How did you meet Chad Hartigan and get cast in This Is Martin Bonner? 
Paul Eenhoorn:
I saw an ad on Actor’s Access. It’s a small casting site that runs
shoots going on in L.A. Vancouver and New York. I read a one-line
breakdown and flew down to L.A. to audition for him. I thought “This
sounds perfect.” It was my age group. I read for Chad, and then I went
down a second time and read with Richmond Arquette. It was serendipity,
being prepared. It was a nice confluence of events. It’s been a good two
years. 
SE: That was sort of your breakthrough in the U.S., I guess. 
PE:
At my age! Usually, breakout actors are 18. Actually, one of the
comments from Sundance was, “This guy is a very good actor and he’s in
his 60s.”
SE: How do you feel about that? 
PE:
I had all the talent when I was in my 20s. I didn’t have that many
opportunities, but I probably wasn’t the person I am now. I probably
would’ve ended up dying of a cocaine overdose or choking myself to death
in a hotel room. Everything comes in the right order in life, I think.
If you keep repeating the mistakes you’ve made…what’s the definition
of insanity? Doing the same things over and over again and expecting a
different result. I’ve always felt I had the talent. I’ve done a lot in
my life. I’ve written, been in bands, done live TV for a network in
Perth. I’m well-trained when it comes to being on a set, which gives you
freedom. 
SE: Did you start performing as a rock musician? 
PE: 
I did some stage when I was a kid, around 16 or so. I was living in
Melbourne and had a band. I was quite young. We weren’t very good. Then I
found a band in Perth. We played around for three years. We’re in the
“History of Rock’N’Roll,” a book about Perth music. It’s a thick
publication because Perth was a lot like Seattle. It kept producing
great musicians, but I missed the boat on that. It was fun. I still miss
music and singing. One day, I’m going to sing with a big band. My band
played covers and some originals. 
SE: Whose decision was it to use their music in This Is Martin Bonner? 
PE:
Chad. I had just got an MP3 off my old bassist. We just reconnected
after 30 years. He had an acetate, not even vinyl, track of a song we
recorded. Chad said, “Send it to me!” Sure enough, he put it in. It’s the
one scene I can’t watch. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s 40 years
since it was recorded, and it fucks with my brain. 
SE: Do you still like the music you made then? 
PE:
Hell yeah! I know all the words still. I’ve been writing music since I
was a teenager. I play keyboards. I’m not much of a player, but I can
write. That will come along. I’d like to do a musical. 
SE: To write one? 
PE:
I’ve got 200 songs that I’ve written, although not all recorded, going
back to the ‘70s. I’ve kept them all. A lot of stuff. 
SE: Do you think living in Seattle gives you an advantage over living in New York or L.A.? 
PE:
New York is too big. L.A. is just not me. I need water around me.
Washington State is soft and green. L.A. is hard and brown. You know
what I mean? 
SE: I’ve actually never been there. 
PE:
When you fly out of L.A., it’s desert. When you fly into Seattle, it’s
water and forest. It’s a totally different environment. L.A., to me,
feels a lot like Reno. Whenever I talk to people in L.A., they’re all
looking for a dream and have given up on it because life takes you in
other directions. It’s not a good game trying to fit into this society,
especially if you’re a fruitcake. You’ve got to find your own space. If
you’re lucky, you can. 
SE: At what point did you emigrate to the U.S.? 
PE:
15 years ago. I met my wife in Sydney, before she was my wife. She was
flying for United. We had a relationship for about three years. Then I
came here and got my green card. That wasn’t as hard as people make out.
I had to get married within a certain time. 
SE: How did your short Room 13 come about? 
PE: I was shooting a pilot for The Divine Marigolds,
which was shot in Seattle. It never aired, like most pilots. I thought
“What if a soldier got caught up in a sting with an undercover cop? He
thinks he’s seeing a hooker, but they’re actually arresting johns
soliciting prostitution.” There’s 22 minutes. There’s actually another
few minutes I would like back in the film. I had some input from Will
Chase, who’s a line producer in Seattle. It’s not easy. I learned
everything from filmmaking, as a director/writer/part-producer. I can be
proud of it as a first film. I learned what not to do. 
SE: What was that? 
PE:
Don’t let your producer on the set. Apart from that, don’t have a
gambling habit while you’re trying to raise money. Those sorts of
things. 
SE: Was the gambling habit yours or your producer’s? 
PE:
It was mine. I was really hooked. It was like a drug. That was about
four years ago. I went and saw a counselor and sorted that mess out.
I’ve been to some dark places. 
SE: Both Martin Bonner and Land Ho! are buddy movies of a sort. Are you attracted to that kind of narrative? 
PE: Yes, in different ways. Love, Actually, Notting Hill, Field of Dreams, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Marigold Hotel is
probably the closest. It’s about real people. They don’t blow things up
or have car chases. They actually sit  down and talk. The narrative is
there, and if it’s good enough, people don’t need all the extraneous
crap that the tentpoles include. I actually watched Wolverine the other night and I did enjoy it. But I don’t seek out action films. I seek out non-action  films. 
SE: I thought it was interesting that in Land Ho!, the characters have fairly mainstream taste in film. They would probably never go see a film like Land Ho!
PE: They might. I would see Philomena before I’d see the sixth version of Transformers, if that was my chance. Let’s see who wants to see Land Ho! I’ll be on-line checking. 
SE: You made the unusual step of prospecting for investors for new films starring yourself on Facebook. How did that work out? 
PE:
I got what I wanted in a week. I have not found a script. I was
disappointed in one script I received. I’ve got one person who’s writing
a script now. So I haven’t tapped that yet. When it’s time, I’ll set up
LLCs. It was not difficult at all. With Indieogogo, it took me a month
and a half to raise eight grand. Having a little bit of success helps
you raise money, but at the same time, I want something that’s got bona
fides and possible commercial success. I’m not an artist. You make
Kentucky Fried Chicken. You don’t go out and make something you don’t
want to, but you have to have a handle on the fact that you’re doing
this with other people’s money. 
SE: Well, This Is Martin Bonner was relatively marginal. I’ve seen Chad Hartigan’s tweet where he said he only made $1,500 from filmmaking. 
PE: Bonner got
distribution, so the executive producer got his money. It was a
critical success. The Cassavetes award at the Indie Spirits came with
some cash. I think he’s got a little bit more in his pocket since then.
I’ve seen the tweet you’re talking about, and I think it was posted
before then. 
SE: Did you have as much chemistry with Earl Lynn Nelson off-screen as your character did with him in Land Ho!? 
PE:
No. Because I needed alone time. I needed time to recuperate and get
back in my head. When I’m shooting, I’m not there to party. I’m there to
work. Part of that working is getting somewhere where it’s quiet and
where your distractions are just normal, everyday ones. Earl Lynn is
just that way all the time. I have a tendency to withdraw from everyone,
so I have time to recoup. We got to know each other better after the
film wrapped. 
SE:
I was curious about that, because other people have told me he’s pretty
much playing himself and his real-life personality is very similar to
what you see on-screen. 
PE:
It is.  The good thing with him is that if you put a camera on him, he
doesn’t change. A lot of people change when you do. I’m always reminded
of a scene in For the Love of the Game where Kevin Costner’s
pitching a perfect baseball game. There’s a scene where he shuts
everything out except the batter and the catcher. I tell people “When
you can shut everything out and the twenty people standing in the room
are no longer there, you will experience magic.” If you’re really there
as an actor, you know when you’ve got the scene down. You don’t need to
wait to hear “cut.” You have to forget that it’s cold and windy or that
you’re standing in Seattle for eight hours in the rain to get a scene.
Iceland is beautiful and rugged, but it’s better in the summer, and we
were there in the fall. 
SE: How has your minimalist approach to acting developed? 
PE:
Training, practice, letting go. You’ve seen selfies on Facebook. Your boobs are
in the profile, you’ve got a big smile. What
you’re trying to do as an actor is the opposite of that. Acting for film is not caring
that the camera’s there. You strip it down and go for truth and the
heart. You find that connection with the other people you’re working
with. Personally, I’m always where I need to be when I shoot film, so I
trust that. If I’m hyperactive and I’m in a great mood, then I trust
that, since the film obviously requires it. Colin [his character in Land Ho!] is rather subdued. You can’t have two Earl Lynns on one set, so you need a positive and negative interaction.

Steven Erickson is a writer and
filmmaker based in New York. He has published in newspapers and websites
across America, including The Village Voice, Gay City News, The Atlantic, Salon, indieWIRE, The Nashville Scene, Studio Daily and many others. His most recent film is the 2009 short Squawk.

CONCERNING VIOLENCE: An Interview with Goran Hugo Olsson

CONCERNING VIOLENCE: An Interview with Goran Olsson

null“You can keep saying that you want a really
cheap phone, or that you want to buy your fruit for almost no money, but to
then act surprised when Boko Haram is wreaking havoc is just… There are so many
people who have shown that this is the result of the current world order.”

Göran Hugo Olsson gesticulates impatiently,
seated at a lunch table in the offices of his production company Story. Sooty
glass walls facing a quiet Stockholm street are covered with posters from the
films they have produced, most notably the award-winning Black Power Mixtape, Olsson’s remarkable 2011 documentary about the
African-American freedom struggle between 1967 and 1975 as it was seen by
Swedish journalists. Thanks to footage from the vast Swedish public television
archives, the film featured a lot of material that had never before been shown
to an international audience, including an interview with Angela Davis in jail.
Contemporary cultural and political icons like Sonia Sanchez and Talib Kweli
commented on the events. Olsson now once again returns from the vaults with a
new documentary: Concerning Violence:
Nine Scenes from the Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defence, portraying the
African fight for independence.

With two found-footage documentaries under
his belt, Olsson is increasingly establishing himself as a master of the
archives. But his interest in the past is not merely historical. Concerning Violence takes its title from
the first chapter of the anti-colonization bible The Wretched of the Earth, written by Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born
psychiatrist and revolutionary, who died just months after the completion of
this his last work, only 36 years old and thus robbed of his chance to see the
end of the Algerian revolution he supported so fervently. Olsson has tried, he
says, to create a “Fanon for beginners,” a work he hopes will draw attention to
the parallels between the situation in the 1960’s and current oppressive
practices.

The result is a striking and surprisingly
accessible film in nine chapters that chart the evolution from colonialism’s
total destruction of the minds, bodies, and communities on which it descends,
to inevitable uprising, and ending, finally, in a call to reconstruction. I
sat down with Olsson and assistant director Sophie Vukovic to talk about violence,
the political responsibility of the artist, and how to turn a difficult book
into an arresting film.

OLSSON: After The Black Power Mixtape, I absolutely didn’t want to do another
archival film. But then I read Fanon’s book, and I was completely blown away.
It wasn’t a given that we would use found footage, but with contemporary images,
the film would have gotten dated much faster. And the discussions sparked by
the film would have become different, much more focused on whether
representations of current conflicts were accurate or not. With archive
material, it’s almost like a cartoon or an animation – the image of an oil rig,
for example, is just a symbol for raw material extraction. You can see that the
footage is old, but an oil rig still looks basically the same, which turns it
into something like animation. That makes it easier to get the message instead
of getting caught up in specifics.

There are other ways you anchor the images in a more general argument about
violence—obviously Fanon’s text, read in a voiceover by Lauryn Hill, is one way
of doing that. How did you get her on board?

VUKOVIC: Göran had heard that she was a fan of Fanon. She was in prison at the
time [for tax fraud], so we sent her a book with the manuscript and images from
the film. We couldn’t bind it, not even with strings, because that was
considered too dangerous. So we sent the loose pages in a package. And she was
really excited, she even wanted to do the music first but didn’t get out of
prison in time.

OLSSON: It worked out so well. It’s a difficult text, quite sprawling and
written in different narrative modes, so it’s hard to read – it took six
attempts before we got it right. First, she did an uptempo version, and it was
impossible to follow. She was like, “Göran, when I read this, it’s like a
revelation, it’s 400 years of oppression that are just swept away with these
words. And that gives me the same feeling that Charlie Parker and John Coltrane
had at the end of the 1950’s, when they found the African voices in music and
created bebop. It’s joyful, it’s festive, and that’s uptempo to me.” And I
said, that’s true, but people won’t follow. So finally she did a slower
version. I think she really adds authority to the text.

VUKOVIC: It also changes the way you think
of a voiceover in a documentary. In England for example, Kenneth Branagh is in
every documentary. But we are doing a number of different language versions,
and all are read by women.


OLSSON: It’s really easy to transpose Fanon’s argument onto other situations,
not just colonialism. But at the same time, it’s clearly written in a certain
time period, which you can see for example in the gender thing. Man is the
universal and Europe is “she”. We have tried to compensate for that in some
ways, but it’s built into his style of writing.


The problem with gender in Fanon is brought up in the foreword, written and
read by Gayatri Spivak…


OLSSON: Yes, that’s one of the reasons we brought her in, but her inclusion has
many functions. She’s a master of the preface, for example. And her reading
compensates for Sartre’s preface [to the first edition of The Wretched of the Earth, which has been criticized for
over-emphasizing the liberating aspects of violence]. She also criticizes the
text broadly, and the film itself. I don’t know a lot of other movies that
include this kind of explicit self-criticism… Haha. Of course it’s also a way
of defusing criticism, since you’re already doing it yourself.

Spivak mentions one scene that is particularly striking—a hospital scene,
where a young woman sits bare-chested atop an examination table, her right arm
completely blown off by a bomb. Her infant child is in the clip too, with his
leg cut off, and she is talking but there is no translation so we don’t know
what she is saying. It turns her into an anonymous symbol, which perhaps echoes
the way women are frequently turned into symbols for the motherland, for
example, in war. Spivak calls her the Black Madonna, which is in itself
universalizing…


OLSSON: That’s the only angst I have around this film. We tried so hard to find
out what she said but she speaks a very particular creole between a Guinean
dialect and Portuguese…


VUKOVIC: It took a really long time to find someone who could translate.


OLSSON: She’s talking about what happened, about the bomb. Had she protested
against being filmed we wouldn’t have included it. But I’ve had such horrible
angst over that clip. I can hardly even talk about it. It’s an awful image—you
can see that she was breastfeeding as the bomb went off, because her arm is cut
off right where the baby’s leg is cut off. You know, people might be upset that
we are showing this, and it is upsetting, it’s terrible. But on the other hand,
that’s what it’s like in war. It’s not a Western, it’s not Jean-Paul Belmondo
slowly collapsing on the street in Breathless.
It’s horrible. Horrible. But it’s just like when people are up in arms about
rape in war—rape is a part of war. There is no war without rape. And so, if
you’re going to show war, then you have to show rape.

VUKOVIC: We talked so much about this being a difficult and problematic image.
But like Göran says, it does show what war is like, and it also shows what war
is like for women, which is different than what it is like for men, of course.
But we also talked about how her gaze meets the camera head-on. And that makes
it really strong, because it turns the viewer’s attention back onto him or
herself.


OLSSON: It’s so fucking strong. It’s also that the child is completely silent.
They are both so calm. If the baby would have cried it would have been
difficult to watch, but now it’s unbearable.


Have audiences been upset?


OLSSON: I’m actually amazed by the positive response. For a film that doesn’t
just have a content that is politically and emotionally hardcore, but that also
has a form that is hardcore—people have been crying at screenings, and it’s
being showed in the cinema in 17 countries. I would never have imagined it.


VUKOVIC: Young people especially have been excited, because these things still
happen today, and there is a broad interest in being critical, and in thinking
about systemic oppression. Of course this film is about events that took place
in Africa in the 1960’s, but you can apply the same model of violence and
oppression on a huge number of different contexts.

Decolonization processes are, of course,
complicated affairs, something Fanon makes clear in his text. And it is not
necessarily clear that one should put one’s sympathies unequivocally on the side
of all the anti-colonialist movements portrayed in the film. The first chapter
shows the MPLA in Cabinda, 1974. Rifles slung across their shoulders, they
weave through a field of tall grass, leaves slapping across the camera lens
before the foliage closes behind the procession. The reporter says he’s never
seen a guerrilla movement that is so much like a fish in the water as this one.
The Portuguese pulled out of Angola that same year, but violence continued,
where the conflict was not between the colonized and the colonizers, but,
rather, between different anti-colonialist groups like the MPLA and FNLA.
Later, we see a young Robert Mugabe speaking about the future tolerance of his
party once independence has been reached. These examples can be read as a
testament to some of the finer points in Fanon’s text: first, that the
suppressed rage of the colonized can easily find an irrational outlet. Second,
that establishing a new regime is not necessarily going to change the
fundamental facts of the situation if the new government continues to be
extractive and violent. But, perhaps in a concession to the film medium, these
parts of the text are not included. What Olsson gives us is a clean outline of
the bare mechanics of oppression. Making the film has been an editing process
in multiple ways: not only in terms of the cutting and rearranging of the
archival film material, but also in working with the text. Olsson and Vukovic
have heavily reworked Fanon’s long and sprawling text, using a combination of
the French original, the two primary English translation, and one Swedish
version. Their edit ends with Fanon’s call for the African countries to choose
an alternative path—something better than the two options available in the Cold
War era. This includes a call for reparations to be paid by the colonizing
countries, which have built their wealth on the backs of Africans.


The discussion of reparations was recently sparked again in the U.S. with
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations.” The words in the film
are Fanon’s, of course, but is this something you agree with?

OLSSON: I think reparations are great, but I don’t think it’s the most
important issue. I mean, we could also just stop doing what we’re currently
doing before we give a compensation for what has been. The world needs to
decide: either we have a free trade system, where Lundin Oil [Swedish company
with the Swedish Foreign Minister on the Board of Directors] can own the
world’s largest copper mine in the Congo and bring in Sri Lankans as labourers.
But if we choose to operate on that system, we can’t have the only exception to
the rule be that people are not allowed to move from the south shore of the
Mediterranean Sea to the north. Either we close all borders completely, and
then we can’t extract the raw materials of the South. Or I can go there and
take whatever I can and they can come here and take whatever they want. But
that’s not the case today, it’s this weird mixed system that makes no sense.


Like The Black Power Mixtape, Concerning Violence is a highly
political film. Is it the role of the artist to be political?


OLSSON: We are filmmakers. What separates us from artists is that we have an
audience in mind all the time. We keep asking ourselves, is this boring? Do we
still have their attention? Artists don’t think that way. But fifty percent of
all of our decisions have their basis in things being too boring for the
viewer. That said, it’s not like someone calls you and asks whether you want to
start a debate. That’s something that just happens.


VUKOVIC: But we hope for this film to have a long life. We want it to exist in
schools, not just movie theatres.


OLSSON: Of course we want it to create a debate. I don’t have any illusions,
but if you live in this part of the world, the least you can do is to try to
understand what suffering and backlashes that come out of the current world
order. This film is part of that. We haven’t made it for those who live under
oppression, because of course they know what it’s like. We have made it for
people like ourselves. 

Kira Josefsson is a Swedish-born, New York-based writer and translator.

Peter Sarsgaard: On NIGHT MOVES, Marine Biology, and Blowing Up Dams

Peter Sarsgaard: On NIGHT MOVES, Marine Biology, and Blowing Up Dams

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When I think of Peter Sarsgaard, I think of An Education. I think of him breaking Carey Mulligan’s
heart, and then devastating others in Boys
Don’t Cry. I think of him as the creepy villain in Green Lantern, the slippery student in Kinsey, and Linda’s awful boyfriend in Lovelace. Common denominator: bad guys.

In Night Moves, directed
by Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy, Old
Joy) Sarsgaard stars opposite Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg as
environmentalists who plan to blow up a hydroelectric dam. Recently we discussed his own
personal activism, passions, past, and perhaps why he’s so drawn to play those
“evil” characters.

MA: Your father was
in the air force and your family traveled a lot when you were a child. Did this
ignite your inclination towards acting, to play different characters in
different environments? 

PS: I mean I don’t think it got me interested in acting. I
think it might be what makes it so that I can have the idea of the variety of
people in the world, different incomes. That helps. When you’re going to play
someone it’s interesting and nice to see experiences that aren’t like yours.
But there’s always the remarkable similarity of all people.

MA: What made you decide to become an actor? 

PS: I was at Washington University in St. Louis. I thought
of myself as an athlete and a writer.  I’d gotten concussions and injuries playing
soccer so I quit and I needed something to fill my time. I never daydreamed
about being an actor, although my interest in literature was in Shakespeare.  

MA: Was there ever a
different path you considered choosing, or still consider today?

PS: Marine Biologist.

MA: Why Marine
Biology?

PS: Because the oceans are pretty unexplored places and the
final frontier on our planet; also because they’re the source of life. There
are dramatic things happening to them at the moment, and they’re worth exploring.  

MA: You were raised
Roman Catholic. You’ve said that something that always fascinated you was the
concept that you’re supposed to love your enemy. Did this influence your work
with evil characters, John Lotter in Boys
Don’t Cry being one of them? How do you access that?

PS: “Evil characters” is not something I would ever have
thought of them as. It may have been my upbringing in Catholicism, may have
been me. It’s not helpful to think of anyone as evil. I’ve always looked at the
world as a place where people have done evil things. There are people in the world, for instance, that would describe Americans
as evil.

MA: Who’s the most
frightening person you’ve ever played?

PS: Who would I least want to hang out with? Probably John
Lotter. I guess I have a place of understanding for everyone I’ve
played.

MA: Who was the most
challenging?

PS: I always had a very hard time connecting to Chuck in
Lovelace. With John Lotter, it was understood thoroughly why he was doing what he’s
doing. Chuck was like a big baby, super destructive
and self-serving. 

MA: How did becoming a husband and then a father change your work as an actor?

PS: I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, my daughter is
desperate for me to do something she can watch. That’s not really up to me!

MA: You need to play
a Disney villain.

PS: I could segue into it by playing the voice of a bad guy,
maybe, and go from there! 

MA: Do you use your
family as emotional triggers in your work or try to steer clear of that type of
personalization in your method?

PS: It’s all personalization. There’s nothing else. It has
nothing to do with the people immediately around me. It’s more self-oriented
than that. I’ve done my best work when I’m away from my family. 

MA: What are your
methods, or does it depend on the film?

PS: It depends. If no one on the movie has met me before or knows
me, that’s the easiest. I don’t do a lot of things that don’t relate
to being the person. I will try to keep it going for my other actors. I want
them to do the least amount of pretending as possible.

MA: In Night Moves, the characters take an
environmental issue into their own hands, blowing up a hydroelectric dam. Is
there any issue you are this passionate about?

PS: The death penalty. My first movie was Dead Man Walking. I was around people
that really felt strongly about it, and they made me think about it. Usually the
way I think someone is radicalized is through a personal experience. The thing about environmental activism is that we are all having a personal experience
with our environment, whether we open our eyes or not. I think these people [in Night Moves] are not able to disassociate
as well as some people. A lot of us don’t hear the DefCon 5 alarm bell ringing
as loud as these people do.

MA: How has being a
working actor given you a platform for your political, environmental or social
activism? 

PS: When I did The
Killing, I did that part because I felt it explored the issue
in a way that was challenging. A lot of people, practically all the way through,
thought this person was supposed to die. I believe even the guilty should
not be killed. We can all agree that the 4% of people on death row that are innocent
is a big problem. That’s how I’ve used it.

MA: What was the most
interesting thing you learned working with Kelly Reichardt? What was it like on
set?

PA: It doesn’t feel like anything to be in Kelly’s movies.
There’s not that performance feeling, ever. You’re not opening on Broadway. Kelly
wants it to be easy, without a lot of fretting.
She values the way in which people don’t think about what they’re doing. In
life, people turn on the radio and end up singing to James Taylor on the way to
blow up a dam. It’s difficult to keep a thought like that in your mind.

MA: What’s an
aspiration you have in life apart from something in the arts?

PS: I would like to sail across the Atlantic. I would like
the experience of being that far away from land.

Meredith Alloway is a LA local and Texas native. She is currently Senior
Editor at TheScriptLab.com where she focuses on screenwriting education
and entertainment resources. She also launched her own interview show,
“All the Way with Alloway,” where she scoops the latest up and coming
industry insiders. She received her Playwriting and Theatre degree from
Southern Methodist University and continues to pursue her own writing
for film and stage.

Atom Egoyan Discusses Seeking Truth with DEVIL’S KNOT

Atom Egoyan Discusses Seeking Truth with DEVIL’S KNOT

nullThe case of the West Memphis Three has been dissected, inspected and interpreted for years. In 1994 three teenagers were tried and convicted of the murder of
three young boys in Memphis, Arkansas. They were accused of involving Satanic
ritual in the killing. During their life sentence in jail, their innocence was in
question. Musicians, activists and artists have raised the question for years: Who was really to blame in this modern day
witch-hunt?

The
Paradise Lost documentary trilogy explored the verdict, gaining
support when Metallica offered their music to the soundtrack. Amy Berg’s
documentary West of Memphis premiered with success at Sundance in 2012, produced by Peter Jackson. Novels have explored the case as well, such
as Blood of Innocents by Guy Reel and Devil’s Knot by
Mara Leveritt, the latter of which inspired Atom Egoyan’s film.

Egoyan,
known for his incredible The Sweet
Hereafter and breakout film Exotica, directs
this narrative adaptation. Reese Witherspoon came on board the project on early
to produce and star as Pam Hobbs, mother to one of the deceased children. Colin
Firth, Dane DeHaan, Mireille Enos, Stephen Moyer and Kevin Durand round out the cast.

I had a moment to speak with Egoyan, eager to
discover his own intention in revisiting the case. He reveals his personal
motivations for making the movie, how he handles actors, their boundaries and
his troubling search for justice.

MA: The West Memphis
Three were released from prison in 2011. Did you spend any time with them or immerse
yourself in study of the judicial system in preparation for the film? 

AE: I spent time with Jason [Baldwin] certainly. In
terms of preparing for the film, really it was a film that was concentrated on
what happened in that town 20 years ago. Looking at all the possible other
avenues that the court did not explore, to me, that was the intention.
I think what’s most
troubling about this case is that there were so many routes that were not
followed. The trial was
handicapped by a judge who clearly had an agenda. This was the most horrifying crime
scene imaginable. It was also supernatural because there wasn’t any
hard evidence. It’s as though
these evil perpetrators had to be created. The film is trying to show that you cannot use circumstantial evidence
unless all other avenues are completely exhausted. The film is presenting the
full spectrum.

MA: Both Devil’s Knot and The
Sweet Hereafter center on a tragedy that affects a community. What
fascinates you about exploring this ripple effect of mourning, sanity, and
blame? 

AE: I’m Armenian,
and April 24th was the 99th commemoration of the genocide. The perpetrator never
admitted the crime. I was raised with that, this question: how do you actually find
the truth of such a traumatic event? I’m obsessed
with that issue. I find it deeply upsetting when I see justice not being served.
How do we as human beings deal with the unknown? The West Memphis Three trial is a joke on so many different levels.
The documentary [West of Memphis] actually finds in its structure a person who should have
been followed. Even that is a dramatic solution that’s convenient. But there so many other elements of
drama and mystery. We’re still living with this ambiguity. That is so
troubling. I wanted to create this sense that it‘s unresolved.

MA: Many of your films have elements of the thriller
genre, withholding key information from the audience early on. You did so in this film and
also in Exotica. Tell me about this withholding and how you use it to build
tension.

AE: That’s a really good question because it’s a little
perverse,
the way it‘s
done in this film. The audience expects Colin Firth to come in as the knight in shining armor, Atticus Finch. He’s the
gentleman in the southern court. To see he’s excluded in the court
in one scene subverts our expectation. It has all the elements of a courtroom
thriller. It was also very unusual and I’m actually obsessed with the idea, because I’ve seen justice not
served, that the only justice is acknowledgement between two individuals. This happens between Reese and Colin in the forest at one point: something is fucked up and is deeply upsetting.
Sometimes that’s where
healing can maybe begin.

MA:
Reese Witherspoon really championed this film early on. What was
your relationship with her
on set, considering she also produced the project?

AE:
The thing that’s amazing about Reese in this movie is that she’s so generous. She’s part of
this fabric, and she was prepared to plunge into that and not look like a
Hollywood star. She was prepared to be this mom who lost her son. She was so concerned
that it be tonally right, that it not use any clichés.
Ultimately, the forest is a place
steeped in religion and belief. What happened in the forest
was so demonic. In absence of evidence, demons had to be
conjured in the courtroom.

MA:
Colin Firth is an incredible actor and Dane DeHaan has an incredibly
promising career ahead of him. What did you learn from working with both
actors, given they’re at opposite
ends of the spectrum when it comes to experience?

AE:
I have to admit that this whole
experience is overwhelming because I couldn’t believe the caliber of
actor drawn to this project. I was in awe of these actors. Dane was mind-blowingly great in
this role. Mireille is so great in this tiny role, I cast her in my next film. Kevin Durand, every one of these actors,
became really possessed. The film was unique this way, it existed in this pocket of consciousness. Chris Morgan’s interviews in that room are online. Dane got to reincarnate that character. He’s replicating what’s on that tape.

MA:
Many directors have pushed their actors to dangerous places. We recently
read the backlash from the actors in Blue
is the Warmest Colour.  Have you ever had a moment where you had to
pull an actor back
from that place? That, or push them forward, but with a watching eye?

AE:
Every actor has a different
temperament. Part of my job is to know what those boundaries are. The actor has
to know you’ll be there
at the other end, that you’re trying
to represent
them in the best light, who they are as they’re harnessing these roles. The methods vary
from actor to actor. With this film, all these great actors in the
courtroom were in this place
together. They got to share that with their fellow actors in this theatrical way.

Meredith Alloway is a LA local and Texas native. She is currently Senior
Editor at TheScriptLab.com where she focuses on screenwriting education
and entertainment resources. She also launched her own interview showm
“All the Way with Alloway,” where she scoops the latest up and coming
industry insiders. She received her Playwriting and Theatre degree from
Southern Methodist University and continues to pursue her own writing
for film and stage.

Waleed Zuaiter Discusses Producing and Starring In OMAR

Waleed Zuaiter Discusses Producing and Starring In OMAR

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Over
the past decade, actor Waleed Zuaiter has made a strong impression in
theater, film and TV roles such as an Iraqi translator screwed over by
the American military in George Packer’s play Betrayed (filmed and broadcast by PBS) and Saddam Hussein’s friend in the HBO/BBC mini-series House of Saddam.
Born in California to Palestinian parents, he grew up in Kuwait and
traveled around the U.S., the Middle East, and Europe as a youth. He has recently appeared on American movie screens in Palestinian director Hany
Abu-Assad’s Omar, in which he plays the crucial role of Israeli
Agent Rami. Rami, who seems to work for the Israeli equivalent of our
FBI, convinces the title character to snitch on his radical Palestinian
friends in order to get out of jail. In other hands, the part could have
become that of a caricatured tough guy, but Zuaiter brings out Rami’s complexity
and nuances. In addition to acting in Omar, Zuaiter also
produced the film. In fact, he played the  main role in bringing the
film into existence, setting up a production company along with his two
brothers to fund it.  Zuaiter is also appearing in the NBC series Revolution. He spoke to me recently by phone from his California home. 

Steven Erickson: How did you get involved with Omar? 
Waleed Zuaiter: Hany Abu-Assad is a friend. We were introduced by a mutual friend in L.A. shortly after he made Paradise Now.
We hit it off and always wanted to work together. Then, about three
years ago, he sent me the script and said he was interested in having me
play the role of Rami. It was one of the fastest scripts I’ve ever read. I read a lot
of scripts, but I’m not a quick reader by any means. This one I just
ripped through. It was 72 pages, one of the shortest feature-length
scripts I’ve ever read, but it felt very full and fleshed-out. I called
him up and said “I love the role,  but even more than the role, I love
the script. Where are you with financing?” He had some feelers out to
European financing, but nothing too firm. I said, “I’d love to help you
produce this film and raise money.” That’s how I came onboard as a
producer. 
SE: Given your Palestinian background, did you have any second thoughts about playing an Israeli? 
WZ:
I did. Very briefly. I just felt a sense of responsibility. I feel that
with every role I play, but especially with what the world would
consider the enemy of Palestinians. I’ve been in this business for a
while and have seen non-Arabs play Arab roles. Sometimes I’ve been
extremely impressed and sometimes I’ve thought, “I wish they’d done a
little more research or been a little more authentic.” My opinion has
changed over the years. Ultimately it comes down to the essence of the character. Hany
saw the essence of Rami in me. If this guy was living under different
circumstances, he probably wouldn’t have this job. That’s what I saw
when I read the script. Then it was up to me to make it authentic,
believable, grounded, and personal. I’ve always felt that apprehension at
the beginning was because, as a Palestinian playing an Israeli, I wanted
even Israelis to feel like the performance was real. I also feel that
one of the first steps to peace is stepping into your enemy’s shoes and
walking in their life, seeing things from their perspective. Looking at
it from the other side was very important to me. 
SE: 
I was surprised by the scene in which you speak in Hebrew. Did you have
any knowledge of the language before taking the role? 
WZ:
Absolutely none. I knew a couple words, like “shalom” and “l’chaim.” My
grandmother, who’s from Haifa, spoke Hebrew fluently. I remember
hearing her speaking it as a kid and I had no idea what she was saying.
That was one of the things I was very nervous about, heading to the
shoot. But I had the luxury as a producer of being involved in every
single detail of production for two to three years. I was physically
there for four months, and everyone spoke Hebrew. We also had a really
great dialect coach named Yoni Lucas. He works on all the big Israeli
films and even works with politicians. I went to his home two or three
times for several hours each time. We broke down every syllable. every
sound. That’s just the way I approach it when I’m learning new
languages. I needed to know what the stresses are for each word, how the
character would say it. I tested it on everybody: people who hadn’t
read the script, people who had, Israelis, Palestinians,
Russian-speaking Israelis. Everyone has a different opinion on how
something is said because of the immigrant community in Israel. Hany
didn’t necessarily want people to know where Rami is from. We wanted to keep it ambiguous, but one of the things we
did do, just as backstory, was deciding that Rami’s wife is Ashkenazi,
and there’s a little tension between them because he’s trying to be
Ashkenazi but he’s not. There’s a bit of elitism in Israel. The
equivalent here would be a husband who’s more urban and trying to be a
yuppie. 
SE: There was an interesting documentary called Forget Baghdad about Iraqi Jews living in Israel, and the discrimination they face. 
WZ: I had heard a lot about that from actors on House of Saddam.
The star of the mini-series, who played Saddam Hussein, is
Iraqi-Jewish. I played his best friend on it, and we became friends in
real life. There
were 4 or 5 other Iraqi-Jewish cast members. They were the ones who told
me that there’s some discrimination against them. The actor who played
Saddam refused to serve in the Israeli army because he refused to be an
occupier, but he’s very proud of being Israeli and being Jewish. I think
it’s because of those very qualities that he didn’t want to serve on
occupied land. I hope I’m not outing him here, but one of the ways you
can get out of the army is if you can prove you have some medical
handicap, so he convinced them he was crazy. I really respected that. 
SE: The film was made almost entirely with private Palestinian money,
right? Would it have been easier to go to Canal + or other European TV
channels? 
WZ:
From the beginning, I had the dream of doing a privately financed,
entirely Palestinian film. I even sent out emails to investors calling
it “a purely Palestinian film.” There were some bites, but ultimately it
was very hard. So I reached out to everybody. Hany had some interest
from Germany and France and a company in the Middle East. So we said,
“Let’s try to get at least half the financing from Palestine.” My
brothers were my anchor investors. They have a very good reputation in
the Palestinian business community. I knew with them onboard, it
would help raise money in Palestinian and Arab circles. What wound up
happening is this MIddle East company that was in for a quarter of the
budget dropped out in preproduction. We didn’t have a good meeting of
the minds. I had to replace $500,000 in preproduction and delay shooting
for a month and a half. There was a very good chance the movie wasn’t
going to happen. My brothers insisted
that we get the movie bonded, which means that all the money has to be
in at the same time, otherwise you can’t start spending. People had
been working since June or July, and we were supposed to start shooting
in August. I think it was October 21st
when we first started shooting. It was a very stressful time. I
remember being on the rooftop of Hany’s place. The production offices
were in the basement, and his mom lived on the floor above us. I was on the
rooftop, with very bad cell phone reception trying to make calls
everywhere with sirens and mosques around us. I went back to one
investor who doubled their investment and another investor who initially
refused us but came back and said yes and brought two more people
onboard. Hany and I also loaned out the bulk of our salaries. That’s how
we were able to raise the money. It just happened that 95%  of the
financing ended up being Palestinian. 5% came from Dubai, for
post-production funds. I went to everybody, especially when we were
fighting the calendar, and it just so happened that we wound up with
what I had originally imagined. 
SE: This may be a naive question, but does the whole West Bank look as scarred as it does in Omar? 
WZ: What do you mean by “scarred”? 
SE: Well, it often looks like a construction site. There’s a real irony to
the way all these billboards with positive messages are next to the
separation wall, which looks ugly and is often covered in graffiti. Did
Hany search out ugly locations or just depict them? 
WZ:
Some of the locations are actually much more beautiful than a lot of
the places in the film. It’s a combination of both. There are some
beautiful places in the West Bank, like Nablus. That’s where my father’s
from. Everything with the separation wall was actually filmed in East
Jerusalem. The graffiti you see on the wall is real. The billboard was a very artistic choice for Hany. He didn’t
want to use title cards or spoon-fed people  about the passage of time. I
was actually surprised when I went to Ramallah with my father, and it
seemed like a very progressive, very commercially active place. We
wanted to show that too. Because we were doing this almost entirely
Palestinian funded and made film, we wanted to show a vibrant
Palestinian culture. But there’s the irony of companies like Paltel
giving messages of hope and family and “living a normal life” juxtaposed with the actual circumstance of Omar, which is anything but that. We did it in green-screen. We shot those scenes in the
first week, with a blue screen, and then added the billboards. The last
one is this nice bright blue, which is a contrast with what Omar’s
wearing. It felt very new. 
SE: Do you plan to produce any more films, either in the U.S. or Middle East? 
WZ: That was probably the hardest, most stressful thing I’ve had to do in my
life. Because I made so many mistakes along the way, I learned a lot. I
ultimately came to the conclusion that I would like to produce
again. I just have to be extremely selective with what I produce. I’m
interested in the Middle East, but ultimately I’m just interested in
very good stories. 
SE: Looking over your resume, your ethnicity seems central to the
bulk of the film and TV roles you’ve played. Do you struggle with that,
feeling typecast, or have you made your peace with it? 
WZ:
I do feel fortunate because you have to make peace with it in
order to move beyond it. I have made peace it but a lot of people in the
industry have told me, “You can play anything, and you should be playing
anything. You’re very versatile.” When you have casting directors
telling you that, it gives you confidence. I kind of compare myself to
Tony Shalhoub, who’s a friend. I wanted him to direct a play I was
interested in here in L.A. We met up, and I said, “I’d like to try to
utilize you as a mentor of sorts, because I love how your career has
gone.” He’s less Arab than me, because he doesn’t speak the language and
he’s originally from Kansas or Kentucky. But both of his parents are
Lebanese. And I’d love to have a career like his, where he’s played
MIddle Eastern, Italian and Jewish characters. I was a little nervous
accepting the role of a terrorist on Homeland. What attracted me
to the role was that he was an unapologetically powerful presence. I
liked that. I hadn’t played a character like that before, where they’re
so powerful and not a victim. In another context, he could be Bernie
Madoff. It just so happens that he’s from Syria and he’s a terrorist
torturing Nicholas Brody. Acting and good storytelling is about power
shifts and struggles. One of the first acting classes I took said that
the three most popular themes are violence, sex or love, and power. As I
saw it, this guy had all three qualities in him. Rami’s role is similar
to that. I’ve come to peace with it, but it comes down to who I’m
working with and whether I’m going to be challenged. Also, when I did Homeland,
I was broke. That’s also the practical reason of why actors take
certain roles. Who knows? That may change in five years, but it’s how I
feel now. 
SE: Do you think American TV and movies are heading towards a greater
comfort level with Arabs, rather than just using you as the go-to guys
for “Terrorist #1”? 
WZ:
That’s a good question. I don’t know where TV’s heading in terms of
what types of roles are available for Middle Eastern people. My wife
noticed a couple of years ago that all these new shows had a token
Indian person. She wondered if it would be the same for Arabs. If
anything, it would show how Arabs are assimilating. It’s hard to tell
where that’s going. The Tv world is really exciting now. I’m an
optimist. You kind of have to be if you’re an actor to survive. I’m
looking for interesting, complex roles. They don’t have to be good guys.
Look at Shakespeare. He wrote some of the greatest villains. Giancarlo
Esposito on Breaking Bad is such a great, versatile actor played such a good bad guy. I see Rami like that. I watched four seasons of Breaking Bad
in the span of two weeks when I was in Nazareth when we were filming.
Hany didn’t have TV, just a monitor and an amazing collection of films. I
went through a lot of the films I wanted to see. I was looking for more
material. David Gerson, the producer we hired, had his iPad with him,
with Netflix on it. I had watched maybe the first season of Breaking Bad
with my wife before I left. I said “We’re hooked on the show. Let’s
wait and pick up where we left off.” Of course, I couldn’t keep my
promise. I was almost missing my wake-up calls because I was up till 2 AM watching it and I had to get up at 6 AM. Unintentionally, it was part of my preparation for my role because I learned so much about acting from that show. 
SE: Has Omar played Israel yet, and if so, what kind of reaction did it get? 
WZ: We had a premiere, January 7th
of this year, in Tel Aviv. It was very well-received. Hany was just
over last night, and he was talking about how all the Israeli papers had
mostly good things to say about it. The box office doesn’t reflect
that. I heard this from an Israeli paper that interviewed me: films
about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict don’t do well there. Although Bethlehem,
which is somewhat similar, did well. There’s been some mixed reactions
here and there,but we found some mixed reactions from Palestinian
papers. Most Palestinians loved the movie and felt that it told their
story, but some felt that it perpetuated the image of Palestinians as
violent. I can see where that perspective is coming from, but I think
that’s a surface reading.   

Steven Erickson is a writer and
filmmaker based in New York. He has published in newspapers and websites
across America, including The Village Voice, Gay City News, The Atlantic, Salon, indieWIRE, The Nashville Scene, Studio Daily and many others. His most recent film is the 2009 short Squawk.

Director Chiemi Karasawa on Elaine Stritch, Documentaries & Working With Spike Jonze

Director Chiemi Karasawa on Elaine Stritch, Documentaries & Working With Spike Jonze

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One of the great actresses of the cinema, television, and
theater was brought to light recently in the documentary Elaine Stritch: Just Shoot Me. Stritch has won three Primetime
Emmys and been nominated for a Tony five times. Most recently, she played the
hilarious Colleen Donaghy in 30 Rock. Additionally, she
starred on Broadway in multiple plays, including Stephen Sondheim’s Company. 

As director Chiemi Karasawa studied Stritch’s body of work. the idea to make a film about Elaine emerged. Countless actors are interviewed for the documentary, including Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey and James Gandolfini.
Through archival footage from performances and appearances alike, Stritch’s
unique and inspiring talent is showcased.

I had a chance to chat with Karasawa about her path from
script supervisor to documentary producer to director. From working alongside
Spike Jonze, to starting her own production company, to befriending Elaine
Stritch, an inspiring story exists within Karasawa herself.

Meredith Alloway: You first
worked with Stritch on Romance and Cigarettes! She
was in the cast and you were a script supervisor. Did you know her then? 

Chiemi Karasawa: No! That was maybe three years earlier. I do remember the
particular reverence that John Turturro [the director] had towards her.
I had the challenging job of being in charge of her lines and blocking and
continuity. She was a tornado of energy and performance! And she was so
spontaneous. I looked at him and said, ‘How would you like me to handle this?’
He said,  ‘It’s Elaine Stritch. You just
have to let her go.’

MA: Is there a particular
performance of Elaine’s that most impacted you as a filmmaker? 

CK: Having worked in the narrative film business for 15 years
and then getting into documentaries, it was the body of the work and the diversity of it. She is so unconventional
and has such a unique talent that nobody else has. Here is somebody that has
such a history behind her. She had such empathy watching herself 40 years ago.
She’s very complex and dynamic.

MA: There are some
incredible cameos in the film. How do you conduct interviews with acting icons
as well as Elaine, making the atmosphere comfortable and open? 

CK: I think the key to a lot of this success of the
accessibility of filmmaking I really have to hand over to Elaine. We never sat
her down for a formal interview; we never put up a light. As soon as she gets
past that stage of understanding who you are and she can like you, it’s all
access. She doesn’t think of herself as a star by any means. She considered
herself a working actor. She considers herself like anybody else. She kept
asking me why when I wanted to make
this film.  She and I gradually become
close friends. 

MA: Given that she’s
such an icon and you were initially blown away by her work, in what ways did
your image of her change after making the film? 

CK: First of all, I think going into it I had no idea what I
was in for. In the beginning I was so trepidatious. She scared the shit out of
me! She can be really prickly when you don’t know her. When you do know her, you
know you can’t take it personally. Now I see her as a dear friend. I recognize
the vulnerability behind her personality. That she really has such a dynamic
and modern sensibility. There’s something ageless about her that’s so
appealing. Off camera, I was going through so many of my own challenges in my
life and she would offer me so much counsel and conversation. She never
pretended to know everything. She can see so many different perspectives on
things and she’s a survivor. 

MA: You founded
Isotope Films in 2005 in order to produce non-fiction films. How has the
company’s journey been?

CK: I had been working in narrative film and TV for about 15
years as a script supervisor and I had an amazing career. I recognized that I
actually started out as a script supervisor as a stepping-stone to directing. You
have these key relationships with the actors and the DP. The crews were getting
younger and younger and I found myself giving a lot of advice. I started to
think maybe I should be doing this myself.
I recognized it was easier to turn the camera on real life, start
constructing a story, and raise money with that story. By sheer luck I fell into
making the film Billy the Kid with
Jennifer Venditti. We just started working together and that’s when it hit me.
You don’t need millions of dollars and fancy movie stars. Nonfiction filmmaking
has been much easier and more accessible. 

MA: Documentaries are
notorious for not making money and because of this, many filmmakers steer away
from the medium. How can a documentary filmmaker stay passionate about their
non-fiction story without spending too much money? 

CK: I think first off all you have to [want to] tell a story
a lot of people will want to see. That will facilitate investments. Also,
having the talent to bring those stories to life in the best way helps. You have to
have a talented editor. Editors are storytellers, they’re among the most important
elements of the team. The other thing is there are so many other avenues for
filmmaking now. People are making short web content sponsored by industries.
They’re looking for content. A lot of commercials are borrowing from the
non-fiction world. A lot of doc filmmakers are making commercials. People need
to explore all the other avenues of content and figure out how they can align
with corporations and people that have the money.

MA: You’ve been a
script supervisor on some incredible projects, from High Fidelity to Coffee and
Cigarettes. It’s a position that I think many aspiring writers
and filmmakers overlook. How did you get involved and what does the position
actually entail?

CK: It’s true with many positions below the line on a film
crew. I was exposed to it because I was an assistant to a producer. His film
went into production and I got taken to set many times and that’s when I first
saw the woman sitting next to the director and I thought that’s the job that I want. It’s a perfect vantage point. You’re watching
take after take. You’re engaging with all the key players. You’re on set every
moment the camera’s rolling. Your job is to pay attention to the take. It’s a complicated
job, but it you can master it, it’s the best place to watch a director
direct.

MA: Given Spike
Jonze just won the Oscar for Her, and
you’ve worked with him many times, I have to ask what was it like working with
him!

CK: I worked with him when he was coming out of the music
video world. It’s interesting because by the time I was working with Spike on Adaptation, we’d
already been working in commercial work for seven years. I had a lot more experience working with
directors before he directed his first film. I think he found it a relief for
me to be with him! He is not afraid of experimentation. He’s not afraid of the
first take. He’s not afraid to roll camera without a rehearsal. He exploits the
spontaneity of the situation, the authenticity of response.

MA: So you’ve done
narrative and documentary. What’s next? 

CK: Just because I spent so much of my career in the
narrative world, I really don’t see any boundary between fiction filmmaking and
nonfiction filmmaking. Right now I’m being commissioned to produce a screenplay
of a true story. That’s what I enjoy, bringing a story to the screen. I just
like storytelling, and the way it can change and affect people.

Meredith Alloway is a LA local and Texas native. She is currently Senior
Editor at TheScriptLab.com where she focuses on screenwriting education
and entertainment resources. She also launched her own interview showm
“All the Way with Alloway,” where she scoops the latest up and coming
industry insiders. She received her Playwriting and Theatre degree from
Southern Methodist University and continues to pursue her own writing
for film and stage.

Academy Award Nominated Screenwriter Craig Borten on DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

Academy Award Nominated Screenwriter Craig Borten on DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

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One of the most
talked about films of the season is Dallas
Buyers Club. This film has been in development for over a decade, as
star names have come and gone, and directors have been attached and then detached. But as
screenwriter Craig Borten puts it, “The film had so many champions along the
way.”

Writing duo
Borten and Melisa Wallack helmed the script based on real-life AIDS victim Ron
Woodroof, whom Matthew McConaughey plays superbly. In 1985 Texas, Woodroof
begins a grueling battle with the FDA to get the drugs patients need. At the
heart of the story is Ron’s relationship with a victim named Rayon,
played by Jared Leto. The two create their own business, the Dallas Buyers Club,
in order to distribute medication to others who suffer from the epidemic. Jennifer
Garner also stars as Eve, a supportive doctor.

The film has
garnered 6 Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor,
Supporting Actor and Best Original Screenplay.

I had a chance
to chat with Borten this week in LA. We discussed the inception of the project and the passion that kept it alive.

Meredith Alloway: The first time you met Matthew he
invited you over for lunch. Tell me about the salmon experience. 

Craig Borten: You know it
was just a little meet and greet. But when we went outside to have lunch it was just a tiny
little piece of salmon and a plate of greens and some water.

MA: He was already dieting?

CB: He was
already thin and in it. But for the next 6 hours we went through the screenplay. He had
notes from the cover page to the end page. He asked incredible questions about
the FDA and about AZT and AIDS . . . and he just was so invested and such a
passionate person. I didn’t feel like I was meeting with an actor, I was
meeting with a filmmaker. We had just lost all our money. He said, ‘We’re gonna
get ‘er done.’ I’m driving back on the PCH and the sun’s going down and I was
like I think he’s going to get it done. It
was a great moment, a great day.

MA: It sounds like the meeting you had
with Matthew mirrored the meeting you had in 1992 with Ron Woodroof. You saw
this passion. Did you find that those two were parallel?

CB: I think
there’s something incredible about people who have passion and they’re like, I’m going to do this. This is important to
me. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy not only for them, but also for
those around them. Leading by example in a sense. With Ron’s passion to live, the
endgame was awareness more than anything else, more than a cure or even drugs that
worked. For Matthew, it was I’m
going to get this film made. By virtue of losing the weight, it became Oh, he’s losing it for this film—this
film that has no money right now. But the perception is that it’s
already happening. His passion affected all of us to go out and make sure we got
this money. I think it was a pervasive feeling for everyone.

MA: A lot of your passion to write about
this comes from your dad surviving cancer. How did that fuel the project?

CB: One part of it is that I had two fathers, actually:
a father and a stepfather who both succumbed to cancer. Suppose someone says to you, ‘You’re
going to die. You have this long to live.’ What does that do to you? You go
through all these stages. That’s how I personally came up with this idea for the
beginning of the movie. I watched these two men go through it, and it’s a pretty
powerful thing to observe. As they were going through it and got more into
their acceptance stage, they became extremely reflective. What it could have been,
what they’d like it to be, and what they hope for. When I met with Ron Woodroof,
those same things came out of him. That was one part. The other part was
some of the ineffectiveness of the doctors in my own experience with
cancer.   Given the drugs available and
their pervasive attitude of this is it,
everyone gets a standard of you have 6 months to live, there was something
cold about it. There was a lack of self-empowerment: This
is our protocol, you can go by it, and that’s it. You feel helpless.

MA: Given that you were writing about
the pharmaceutical industry, which is a touchy subject, how was the research process? Were there any roadblocks, anyone that gave you resistance?

CB: As the years
went on, the landscape changed. AIDS changed, the drugs changed, along with the attitude
towards the disease. There were no roadblocks. We didn’t try to meet with any of the
more controversial figures. We didn’t need to. It was all in the public domain. Also, we weren’t doing a documentary.  

MA: I think the film blossoms into
something more than what you think it’s about. Ultimately it’s a friendship
story between Ron and Rayon. How did you cultivate that relationship?

CB: Rayon’s not
real. Eve is not real. They’re created to tell a point of view. We didn’t
even follow traditional three-act structure. Jean-Marc really wanted to
keep it a small movie about this unlikely friendship. The only thing that we
tried to stay true to was the personality of Ron Woodroof for those three
days. It’s based on stories that we heard. But the relationship itself we
created to make an emotional core, a journey that ultimately draws
people into the movie.

MA: You and Melisa went through therapy in
the process of writing this!

CB: I think that
writing partnerships are extremely challenging and incredibly intimate. You’re
spending large amounts of time with someone in a room. It’s gets heated, it’s
passionate. I always say this as a joke, and people think it’s funny, but it’s literally
like being in a relationship with a woman or a man but without sex. So it’s
even harder! There are, in fact, a lot of writing partners who
end up in therapy. If it’s worth it, you want to work through it. 

MA: You really fought for this script
for a long period of time and it’s comparable to the story you’re telling. In
the process of making the film what were the moments of hope that kept you
going?

CB: The film had
so many champions along the way. Robbie Brenner read the script 18 years ago
and she said this is an incredible
story. This would make an incredible character. This is a really great film. The
remaining people along the way said the same.

MA: So it was the people surrounding you.

CB: Yes, the
people who were moved by the film and the people who supported me as a writer,
and supported Melisa.  The incredible producers Robbie
Brenner, Rachel Winter, Jean-Marc Vallée… and Matthew. They helped pick each other
up as human beings. It’s such a beautiful thing.

MA: Melisa has said, ‘Ron’s unwillingness
to listen and follow protocol literally kept him alive.’  In what ways did your team’s unwillingness to
follow protocol keep the film and script alive?

CB: Hollywood means
going to war. You grow a backbone and you fight your battles, the important
ones. You just learn to be a fighter; I shouldn’t even just say Hollywood, I
just think in life. It’s not kids’ play, it’s business. Business is shrewd.
So you learn and you grow and fight for what’s important. Everyone in the film
is a fighter, very strong passionate people. I think our strength held it
together. Everyone. Matthew, Jared, Jennifer, Jean-Marc. I think you just fight
for your beliefs.

MA: Your next project is also about someone
who is a fighter: [Titan: The Life of] John D. Rockefeller.

CB: He’s an
anti-hero as well. People hated him, but people didn’t really know him. Nobody
can really say who he is. This story will let you inside this man who I
think was an incredible person. Possibly through his need for his father’s
validation, he learned to divide and conquer and to create wealth. It’s character driven, and Lasse Hallström, who’s one of my favorite directors,
is really interested in making a character driven film.

MA: He, like Ron, is a questionable hero, which fascinates our culture right now, as with Walter White. Do you think we relate more to Macbeths and Iagos more than
Othellos?

CB: Human beings are flawed, we’re not perfect people, and I
think that’s what makes us interesting. Really we’re flawed and we have many sides and
shades …and so in cable or smaller movies we’re able to really show those
sides. I think that’s why people are drawn to it. Walter White: look at this
journey, but it started because he was dying and he wanted to help his family.
For that, we’ll forgive him for everything and it’s relate-able.

MA: Oscar day! Is
there anyone you want to meet?

CB: I swear it’s not like that for me! At all these events
I’m meeting these people and it’s almost effortless! It’s really fluid. It’s
just been wonderful. But only because
you ask, I’d love to talk to Bono. He’s a humanitarian ultimately and their
music I’ve loved since I was a teenager and also he’s a big supporter of AIDS research.

Meredith Alloway is a LA local and Texas native. She is currently Senior
Editor at TheScriptLab.com where she focuses on screenwriting education
and entertainment resources. She also launched her own interview showm
“All the Way with Alloway,” where she scoops the latest up and coming
industry insiders. She received her Playwriting and Theatre degree from
Southern Methodist University and continues to pursue her own writing
for film and stage.

Gregarious and Kind, Dark and Mysterious: Greg Sestero on THE ROOM

Gregarious and Kind, Dark and Mysterious: Greg Sestero on THE ROOM

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There’s no
way to talk about The Room without talking
about irony. The theater 2003 release of the movie —funded mysteriously by its
writer/director/self-proclaimed vampire Tommy Wiseau—failed to outlast the
Hollywood billboard Wiseau purchased to advertise it. Given that The Room was considered cinematic
anti-matter, a piece of cinema so illogically conceived that Scott Foundas of Variety said it “prompts most of its viewers to ask for their
money back…before even 30 minutes have passed,” that was no surprise. What was a surprise was how The
Room rediscovered life in the late aughts as a new-millennium Rocky Horror. Prime ironists like David
Wain, David Cross and Patton Oswalt saluted the splendor
of its awfulness. Theaters began holding raucous midnight showings
packed with scene-quoting devotees who threw platsic silverware at the screen
and chanted its creators name wildly throughout the credits, proving that the
nation’s complex relationship to irony was—almost a decade after its proclaimed
cutural death—a pretty resilient thing.

Which makes
it all the more remarkable that The
Disaster Artist, cast member Greg Sestero’s memoir about his experience
making The Room and living with its
aftermath, is a work of shocking sincerity. Written with an assist from
journalist/Room enthusiast Tom Bissell,
Sestero’s smart, wicked, yet (somehow) moving book proves sneakily ambitious. Yes,
it chronicles the making of the worst movie ever, and how Sestero was
reluctantly cast as Mark, the traitorous best friend of the film’s hero. But it’s
also a tale of Sestero’s peculiar, enduring friendship with Wiseau, a ruthless
tell-all, a fluid critique on the nature of mass enthusiasm, and a work of
invesitigative journalism, positing what might be the closest anyone’s gotten
to the slippery origins of The Room’s
creator.

I talked
with Sestero about the making of “the making of The Room,” the legacy of irony, what he (and the film) owes to
Anthony Minghella, and how he forced himself to say one
of the worst lines of dialogue in cinema history.

Mike Scalise: You mentioned you’d been working on The Disaster Artist for four years. What
made you stick with it?

Greg Sestero: I really
felt strongly about the material. The stories about my experience were etched
in my memory. I told them to several people over the years, and they thought it
was such a unique and fascinating story. Then, in 2008, I got a call from Clark
Collis at Entertainment Weekly, who
had just experienced the movie and wanted to write an article about it. Once that article
ran in late 2008, The Room completely
took off. Needless to say, I was shocked. So I started to piece together how I wanted
to tell my story. I met Tom Bissell, who
wrote an incredible piece about the movie in Harper’s around that time, and we instantly clicked. We
came up with a narrative to tell about both the making of The Room and my unlikely friendship with Tommy.

MS: Part of your goal seemed to be to
clear the air about the nature of your involvement with The Room, and how important your previous friendship with Tommy
[Wiseau] was to that movie’s existence.

GS: The only
reason I ever ended up in the movie was to help him make it. Obviously when
you’re in your early twenties, you don’t think about your decisions and their
long term effects [laughs]. I decided
to take an acting class in San Francisco and ended up meeting this eccentric person
no one really gave a chance to, mostly because of his vampirish exterior and his
awkward social skills. But maybe because of both of us coming from a European
background, I could see something was interesting there. I’ve always been
fascinated by characters, and part of me wanted to help him at least accomplish
something he’d always wanted to do. But then there were times on set where he
would sabotage everything, yelling at people who were trying to help him
finally realize this goal of being a “movie star” or make this movie he’s
always wanted.

That’s part
of what got me through, I think: helping him complete this passion project. A
lot of the movie is about friendship, which is kind of weird [laughs]. In the
original script, everybody’s best friends. Michelle and Lisa are best friends,
Peter and Johnny are best friends. Its really kind of a fascinating study about
the life Tommy wanted to have.

MS: In the book you don’t shy away from
the many ways in which The Room was a
complete mess, from the script to the casting, filming, and editing. Those are
the funniest parts of the book, but you still remain so generous with regards
to your depiction of Tommy. How difficult was it to maintain that balance when
you wrote it?

GS: I know that
many of the book’s readers will have never seen the movie. So the only way to
do it was to be genuine and say, “this is really how it was” rather than
judging it. And to honor both sides of Tommy. The gregarious and kind coupled
with the dark and mysterious.

MS: Which is an acting credo as
well—don’t judge your character.

GS: I felt like
if I glamorized it, or protected it, or made it something that it wasn’t, that
wouldn’t be the right experience for people dying to find out what really
happened and people who are following the story.

MS: Like in that insane scene in the
book in which Tommy forced the cast to be silent for five straight minutes
(“for America”) while prepping for a day of shooting…

GS: Tommy’s
always got to do everything to the extreme—not ten seconds of silence, but five
minutes. Let’s not shoot with one camera, let’s shoot with two.

MS: Did you earn any sympathy for Tommy
when you tried with the book to add order to all the chaos?

GS: Absolutely.
I realized how hard it is to get something off the ground, and to get someone
to believe in what you’re trying to do, and for you, yourself, to take that
vision of what you want and make something that resembles it.

MS: I get two kinds of responses when I
bring up The Room: one is from the
type who I imagine shows up to the screenings, who see something valuable in
it, ironic or not. But there’s also the kind of person that responds to the
idea of The Room as a vanity
project—that Tommy’s an unchecked narcissist, out just to self-promote. But the
book makes the case that The Room
came from a far more complicated place.

GS: It
definitely does. Tommy had several motivations. One, I think, was to feel
understood. To feel accepted. No one was wiling to hire Tommy as an actor, so
he figured, “I will do it myself.”  It
was therapeutic for him to explore the ways in which he didn’t fit in, or to
explore aspects of human nature that he had a vendetta towards. We’ve all had
someone break our hearts, or have been fired from a job, or have been cheated.
For him, I think it was a way to show everyone he was mainstream.

One review called
it a vanity project gone horribly wrong, and there definitely is some truth in
that. But I think he made it with sincerity, and that’s what people respond to.
 Watching someone really put himself out
there, even if it’s an inept attempt.

MS: And as you detail in the book, Tommy
went to a really dark place during
the months he was writing it.

GS: I think in
some ways, he was trying to survive himself, tearing apart his psyche in a way
that he couldn’t even see. I don’t think it was to get fame, or girls, he was
just coming out of this dark place, and needed to feel accepted.

MS: You start each chapter with an
epilogue from either Billy Wilder’s Sunset
Boulevard, or Anthony Minghella’s film adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley. What do you think those films to say to
the experience of filming The Room,
watching The Room, watching people
watch The Room…

GS: Both films
deal with not only delusion, but—like I said—wanting to be accepted. Norma
Desmond sees herself as someone meant to be a star, and Joe Gillis’ tries to
guide her, and protect that delusion. Poor guy. So much of that movie paired up
with The Room in strange ways, all
the way down to where The Room premiered, which was at Schwab’s Pharmacy, where
Joe Gillis goes to get work.

With Tom Ripley,
again, it’s a character who wants to feel like he’s respected and important.
And he sees in Dickie Greenleaf a guy who he thinks has all that and pursues a
friendship. Tommy, I think, saw me as this all-American kid who made him feel
like he belonged.

MS: You talked a bit about how you
wanted to bring The Room to a new
audience, but you also debunk many of the myths that persist among the film’s
rabid, midnight-screening-attending, spoon-carrying fanbase.

GS: One of the
things I did was consult with some of the biggest Room fans out there to make sure they were getting what they
wanted. My goal was to give them correct information and make the movie a
deeper, richer experience. Those people are the original fans, and have seen
the movie so many times, so I took their feedback.

MS: I think they’ll be happy with the
long, anguished passages that depict the inner struggle you endured in order to
say the line “leave your stupid comments in your pocket.”

GS: That was a
definite challenge to say that line with a serious face. When people watch this
movie, they probably see a bunch of young actors who thought this movie would
be their big break. That’s obviously not the case, but I I’ve done the same
thing with certain movies. You wonder what actors were thinking when they had
to say certain lines in a movie.  They
almost become a figment of your imagination. If you remember this movie called Private Resort, which came out in 1985. .
.

MS: Oh, I remember Private Resort.

GS: I’d watch
it as a kid and make fun of the characters, and they weren’t real to me: just
these people on screen. Obviously with The
Room, I wasn’t on set thinking “I’m going to be Daniel Day Lewis” playing
Mark, but explaining how I even got involved in the movie shows how we all get
stuck in situations as actors—and this one ended up being one of the craziest.
Working on this movie, saying that dialogue, you’re almost surviving rather than acting. Saying that line—you just had to “get
it out” rather than “say it right.”

MS: Despite the quality of the end
product, through your involvement with The
Room you’ve actually gotten many opportunities to try your had at a ton of
different roles. You were a model before you were an actor. You acted in The
Room, but you were also a crew member. Now you’re an author. What do you want
to focus on next?

GS: In the end,
I’m grateful for the experience. I’m looking forward to going in a different
direction and do creative projects I believe in and am passionate about. 

Mike Scalise’s essays and
articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, The Paris Review, PopMatters, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter here.